Mercury Retrograde (23 page)

She sucked in her breath.
What? How?
“I'll be right there.”

She shoved the paperwork back at Mike and reached for her truck keys.

“Where are you going?”

“My father—­at the nursing home. I'll let you know later.” She left him behind to lock up and sprinted out to the Bronco.

Petra made record time to the nursing home, pushing the Bronco's engine until the old car roared like a proper dinosaur.

Could it be? Could her father be having a window of lucidity? And had she missed it, mucking about in the backcountry with snakes and undead guys?

She skidded through the doors of the nursing home, past the arrangements of silk flowers and a mop bucket surrounded with yellow caution placards. She skipped the front desk and rushed straight to her father's room.

The door stood open, and her father's wheelchair was sitting before the window, as it often was in the afternoons. A nurse was standing at the foot of his bed, taking notes.

“My dad . . .” Petra began, breathless.

The nurse intercepted Petra, leading her out into the hallway by her elbow. “Before you talk to him, you need to know some things. His lucidity comes and goes. He seems pretty with it, now . . . but he goes off on delusions, talking nonsense about snakes and the underworld and doves. The doctor wants to do some testing, some psychological testing and a brain scan. Would that be okay with you?”

“Yes, yes, of course. Can I see him now?”

“Sure. Just don't . . . don't expect too much, okay?” She patted Petra's arm. “He's not going to be the guy you knew when you last saw him.”

“I understand.” Anything more than staring out at the parking lot would be a gift. Even one word. Petra nodded and went in. She pulled up her usual chair beside her father's.

“Hi, Dad.”

His chin moved toward her—­the first time she'd seen his head really move in response to stimuli. His mouth turned upward, just a bit.

“Hi, sweetheart.” His voice was thin, like worn gauze.

He recognized her.
She leaned forward to give him a hug. He felt light and fragile as a bird in her arms.

“How do you feel?” she asked as she released him.

He squinted, as if he was focusing on something fuzzy. “The umbilicus. You remember?” It seemed to take him a great deal of effort to speak.

It had been true. All of it. She touched his cheek. “Yes, Dad. You and me and Sig and the raven.”

“You cleaned up.”

She looked down at her tank top and cargo pants. Not fancy, but at least, she wasn't covered in goo. Her hair was still damp as it hung against her freckled cheek. “Yeah. That was first on the order of business.”

“You brought me back.” His eyes shone. “The raven was a powerful thing. Much more than I thought.”

She grinned. Her chest felt like her heart could burst inside it.

“Listen . . .” He leaned forward, and his thin hand grasped hers. “You didn't just bring me. You brought something else.”

Nothing could dampen her joy. “What?”

“Stroud. You brought Stroud back through.”

 

P
etra's father lapsed into mumbling about wanting biscuits and gravy for breakfast. Moments later, he drifted off to sleep, leaving Petra to mull his words.

She wasn't certain what she thought. The idea of Stroud—­whether on the spirit plane or physical world—­invoked a visceral sense of terror in her. If he had returned somehow, some way . . . he would have it in for her. Revenge would be on his bucket list. She'd have to figure out how to deal with it. Later.

She returned home, to bed, finding that Sig had not budged a muscle. She locked the door, propping up a chair beneath the knob. She slept for the rest of the day with Sig's ass in her armpit, awakening only to the sound of her phone ringing.

“Damn it, Mike,” she groaned, pressing her face to the pillow. She hauled herself up to answer her cell.

“Hello.”

But it wasn't Mike. It was Maria. “You're back. Are you okay?”

“Yeah. I think so.”

“I'm so glad.”

But something was wrong; her friend's voice trembled. “Maria, what is it?”

“It's Frankie. He's in a trance at the Eye of the World. I can't wake him up.” A sob caught at the end of her words.

“I'll be right there.”

Petra dressed and headed out the door with a sleepy Sig in tow. They drove back to the reservation, with early evening light streaming over the land in a haze of orange. She parked in Maria's driveway and ran into the field that stretched between the house and the Eye of the World.

Two figures were huddled there in the falling light. Frankie was sitting on a rock, cross-­legged, with his hands in his lap, eyes closed. Maria had wrapped a blanket around him and was rubbing his shoulders.

Sig crept up to him and licked his hand. When he got no response, the coyote sat down, whined, and slapped his tail on the ground.

“What happened?” Petra panted.

“He said he was coming out here to meditate. I mean, that's usual for him. It was just a few hours, but he didn't come back for supper. He never misses supper when it's stuffed peppers, you know? So I went out looking for him, and . . . he's just in a trance. I can't get him out of it. I've tried splashing him with water, pinching him . . . nothing seems to work.” Maria eyed the turquoise pool. “I even took a drink of the sweetwater, to see if I could follow him, wherever he's gone. But nothing happened, and I don't know what else to do.”

Petra knelt by the water's edge. “Let me try it.” The water slipped down the back of her throat, tasting like tea and minerals. She expected that nothing would happen, as usual. But she had to make the attempt. She sat down on the ground at Frankie's feet, trying to ignore the chill of autumn radiating up through her ass. Sig took a slurp of the water and crawled into her lap, his legs sprawling over her knees.

“I think that maybe we should call somebody . . .” she began. But the word became slippery, and her words ran together with the orange of sunset. She sucked in her breath and tried to gather her equilibrium, but the world faded.

A
utumn's brilliance was replaced by a soft, pearly grey. A diffuse mist surrounded Petra; she couldn't identify a light source from where she stood, but a dim glow seemed to filter from somewhere above. Beneath her feet stretched silty mud the color of slate. It felt like a thin concrete that hadn't set, with a wash of water over it. She couldn't make out the horizon from here—­just the fog and the mud.

“Why is the spirit world always sticky?” she wanted to know. And she wasn't dressed for this nonsense—­she was wearing, of all things, a sleeveless white dress. The last time she'd worn a white dress had been at her baptism as a child. At least she was barefoot; that made the mud somewhat easier to deal with. It was actually lukewarm, and her toes splayed as they squished in it.

Sig was beside her. He nosed around the slop, his nose wrinkling. If he had an answer to her question, it wasn't a pleasant one.

“Frankie!” Petra called out into the grey.

There was no answer. But Sig found some light, sketchy tracks in the mud. They looked like a bird's—­three front toes and one back one, large, with a ten-­inch stride. These weren't raven tracks; these were the steps of a big wading bird.

They followed the tracks in the mud. Sig had a smear of mud on his nose, and the hem of Petra's dress was grey by the time they caught up with the bird: a blue heron, standing at the edge of the filthy water.

She squinted at the heron. “Frankie? Is that you?”

The bird cocked its head and answered in Frankie's voice: “Oh, it's you.”

“Were you expecting someone else? Maria tried, but couldn't get here.”

“No, it's fine.” He ruffled his feathers, as if convincing himself. “It's good that it's you, because, well. You're responsible for this.” He gestured toward the grey water, beyond a stand of scraggly reeds.

Petra sucked in her breath and took a step back. The basilisk lay in the water, motionless and curled in on itself, with its tail in its mouth. Sludge water lapped over its scales, dulling the iridescence of the ouroboros, still as a creature carved from granite.

“What the hell, Frankie?” She automatically reached for the guns at her waist, but there was no gun belt and no guns on her hips in this jaunt to the spirit world. Her hands came back empty.

Sig insinuated himself between Petra and the snake, hackles rising.

“Relax.” The heron whacked Sig on the back of the head with his wing. The coyote yelped and looked offended.

“What's wrong with it, Frankie?” She had given no thought to the basilisk's afterlife; she'd been fixated on stopping its rampage and getting its blood. It had not occurred to her to wonder what would happen . . . afterward.

“Well, it's stuck.” The heron folded his wings back. “Lascaris summoned her out of the spirit world a hundred and fifty years ago and poured her into a snake body. When she was killed in the physical world, she had nowhere to go. She's now here . . . in limbo. She's trapped, and she can't move on.”

Petra looked at it. “Move on to where?”

“She really belongs back at her home. She's not a creature of our world. When you bring a creature from the spirit world into ours, disaster follows.”

Petra felt an unexpected pang of sympathy. The basilisk was likely the only one of her kind. She wasn't evil—­she was a force of nature unleashed. She couldn't blame the basilisk for lashing out against humans, any more than she could blame a bear for an altercation with a human holding a box of donuts at the park. The snake was what she was, and she just didn't belong in Petra's world.

She took a deep breath. “So. How do we send her back? Preferably, without getting killed?”

“A good start would be getting her out of that mud.”

Petra regarded the snake with narrowed eyes. “That sounds like a colossally dangerous thing to do.”

“Hey, you did it. Can you live with yourself if you leave the last basilisk in spiritual limbo forever? I mean, I'd do it myself, but . . .” He shook his feathers like jazz hands. “No hands.”

She made a face. What Frankie said was true. Her father had been trapped in a limbo of his own for years. It seemed only right that she try to balance the scales.

She stepped into the gooey stream, and it soaked into her dress. About two feet of water stood on top of the heavy silt. She waded out to the basilisk.

Her heart hammered as she approached. Surely, the basilisk could sense her slogging in the mud with its preternatural senses, and was playing opossum? But the snake's body just rolled limply with the turbulence, floating like a pool noodle. Petra steeled herself and reached for the middle of the body. It felt warm and supple, but incredibly heavy. The serpent didn't react, and that gave her courage. Using all of her might, she dragged the snake backward in the mud with a sucking sound, stumbling against the weight. The basilisk gave no resistance as she hauled, the tail sliding free of her mouth. Petra slogged in the mud and water, hauling the serpent to where the heron stood. The tail and the body still remained in the water, but the head made it to the mud beside the heron. Petra rested her hands on her knees and panted. Sig trotted back and forth, growling at the snake and nosing at the scales.

“Okay, so now what?”

“We need to take the snake home.” Frankie pointed with his feathered wing beyond the mist. “Her temple is beyond the gate. Thataway.”

The mist had drained away around a rock arch about fifty feet up the muddy beach. It looked as if it could have been a naturally-­occurring structure, except for the carvings in the dark basalt. There were humanoid and serpentine figures writhing on it—­it dimly reminded Petra of Dante's Gate to Hell. But as she squinted, she thought the figures might be dancing. It was hard to tell in this half-­light. But it looked like there was tall grass beyond it, and she'd never pictured hell with grass.

“Blergh.” Petra reached for the limp snake. She was easily five hundred pounds of dead weight. With each clumsy attempt to get her hands around the slippery creature, Petra was convinced that she would awaken and tear Petra's head off. But the head just lay there, eyes open. As she looked closer, she saw a transparent film over each eye. Perhaps the basilisk was pretty thoroughly comatose. Petra hoped so.

“That's it,” Frankie said, fluttering before her. “Put your back into it, girl.”

“Frankie, shut the hell up.” She was tripping over the hem of her ridiculous dress and was in no mood to put up with his mansplaining. Heronsplaining. Whatever.

“I'm just trying to boost your morale,” he huffed.

She was unable to wrestle the snake from the water. She sank up to her knees in the mud, sliding backward with each effort to bring the limp body to shore.

“You can't give up,” Frankie told her.

“She's too heavy.” Petra gasped. She cast about, looking for materials she might use to build a sledge or get some leverage. All she could come up with were a few handfuls of reeds and some broken sticks.

“There has to be another way, Frankie.”

“Well. You
could
wake her up.”

Petra's eyes narrowed, and her pulse thudded in her throat. “Assuming that I thought that was a good idea . . . how do I do that?”

“Look in her mouth.”

She balked. “Um. She'll eat me.”

“Possibly,” Frankie admitted. “But can you live with yourself if you leave her this way?”

The snake, half-­dragged out of the water, looked like trash washed up on the beach. There was something incredibly sad about her limp and dirty form that caused a lump to form in Petra's throat. Such a rare and deadly creature—­reduced to this. She couldn't walk away, no matter how badly this was destined to play out.

Steeling herself, she knelt in the sludge before the snake's still head. She reached out to place her hand on the basilisk's nose, flinching. The snake didn't move, her lifeless gaze not shifting.

Petra jumped when Frankie landed in the shallow mud beside her.

“Jesus, Frankie.”

“Quit flirting with her and get in there!”

Petra grabbed the snake's jaws and pried them open at the snout. Such a creature had jaws that could crush her, but the mouth opened easily, like a suitcase. A forked tongue slid over sharp fangs, dangling coldly against Petra's wrist. The basilisk's mouth smelled like rotten cold cuts.

“I don't see anything, Frankie.”

“Keep looking.”

She peered into the dark maw. At the back of the snake's throat, she spied something that glistened. She braced the bottom jaw open with her knee and reached in with her right hand, feeling the cold damp of the basilisk's flesh around her arm.

After a moment of fumbling, she grasped something solid. She tugged it out, the snake's fangs scraping her arm on the way out. She landed on her ass in the mud, blinking.

In her hand, she held a bottle—­a beer bottle. It was identical to the one that she'd loaded in the potato cannon, full of lye. This one was capped, with liquid sloshing around inside it.

“Good work!” Frankie cheered. “Look!”

Sig snarled beside her, and Petra's head snapped up.

The snake was awakening. Scales began to move, muscles twitching, the spine undulating. The basilisk turned sleepily, as if still dreaming, her tail curling in the water. The transparent scale over her eyes flickered away, and the creature coiled up, lifting her head from the ground.

Oh, she was screwed. Petra scrambled up the filthy beach on all fours toward the arch, slipping and sliding in the muck. Sig pressed against her leg, growling.

Petra found her footing and ran toward the arch. She had no idea what was beyond that portal, except that the grass was likely to be surer footing than the mud. She lurched through the arch with Sig at her heels.

A dreadful hissing sounded behind her. The basilisk whipped through the mud, racing after her, far too fast to escape. Petra threw her arm around Sig to shield him.

The heron fluttered to Petra's side and whacked her hard with his wing. “Calm down, for Chrissakes.”

“Frankie!” she hissed.

The basilisk slid through the portal, past Petra, into the grass. It seemed to look beyond her, at something that made its eyes dilate in fascination. Petra could see no other prey, just grass and sky. Once through, the snake stopped, writhing, and collapsed to the ground. It seemed that her skin was too tight, and the green scales were splitting open.

“What's happening?” she whispered to Frankie.

“She's shedding the form she was forced to wear on Earth,” Frankie said. “You're about to see what she truly is.”

The snakeskin ruptured open, and something shining tore through the husk of the snake body. It was a lustrous green, the color of jadeite dishes, speckled in black. The creature turned and twisted free of the snakeskin on the ground beside it. The new shape was serpentine, still, but much larger—­it had a pair of clawed feet, and damp wings as large as parachutes unfurled in the mist, veined with gold.