Mercury Retrograde (24 page)

“Oh, my God,” Petra breathed.

The creature turned to face her. She still had golden eyes of the basilisk, the general shape, and the feathered crest. But she was so much more—­magnificent. She spread her wings and shook them, extending her face to the sky. The force of her wings pushed the mist away, sounding like the thunder of sails in a stiff wind.

There was nothing for Petra to do but cower before this amazing creature. The basilisk was as near a dragon as anything she'd ever seen in a picture book. Tears sprang to her eyes. To have the privilege to see such an awe-­inspiring sight . . . if she was devoured now, she knew that her life would have been worth it, to see this.

The basilisk faced her, toes digging into the long grasses, tail spiraling. She brought her massive head level to Petra's.

“I'm so sorry,” Petra said, mouth dry. She knew that these would be the last words she'd ever utter. There was no use explaining about anything, about fear and the Hanged Men and threats to the general public. There was no point in it.

The basilisk stared at her with her slitted golden eyes, so close that Petra could hear her breathing.

After many long minutes, there was a sound from the field. A cry—­a chorus of them.

The basilisk turned, and a reptilian expression of joy spread across her face.

Petra's gaze slid to the field. There were women in the field, women in white cloaks and tunics, running toward the basilisk. Behind them loomed a great stone temple, hewn of the same dark basalt as the arch. Cheering, the women came with open hands, dozens of them.

The basilisk bounded away, plunging into the field like a puppy. Petra sank to her shaking knees. As the basilisk ran to the women, Petra cringed, half-­expecting that there would be a massacre that would paint the tassels of the grasses red.

But, no. The basilisk knelt in the grass, opening her wings. The women clustered around her, embracing her. Her neck and tail curled around them, lovingly.

And Petra realized what the basilisk was. In this corner of the spirit world, the basilisk was a treasured goddess. She was precious and adored. The women pressed their hands and faces to her jadelike hide, crying and laughing.

“She's home,” Petra whispered.

The basilisk swam through the field, with the women in white. A warm breeze stirred the grass, and they walked together, the women singing, to the temple. Petra watched until the basilisk had climbed the temple steps and gone inside. There was a lump in her throat that she couldn't swallow around. Even Sig seemed reverent. He sat beside her, watching intently.

“You done good, kiddo,” Frankie said. He patted her with his wing.

“What now?” she managed to ask.

“You go back, back to your world and Maria. Tell her that I love her.” He took a ­couple of steps away and peered up over his long beak into the leaden sky.

“You're coming back with us, right? You can't stay in a trance. You've missed supper,” she said lamely.

“Sweetie, I've gotta fly,” he said. He turned back to Sig. “You take good care of this one, okay?”

Sig barked.

And Frankie flapped his wings, once, twice, then took off into the sky. He tucked his feet beneath him and soared up.

“Frankie!” she shouted.

But he didn't come back.

P
etra's eyes snapped open.

She was sitting on the cold ground, shivering. Sig had rolled off her lap onto the ground and turned his head up in alarm. The sun had drained out of the sky, leaving cold purple twilight in its wake.

There was the sound of sobbing. Maria. Her face was a mask of tears.

Petra looked up at Frankie. Maria was patting the old man's cheek. Frankie was sitting in his trance posture, unmoving. And he fell over, like a rag doll, his hat falling into the water.

“Frankie!” Maria screamed.

Petra crawled on all fours to him. She grasped his wrist for a pulse, then his throat. Sig nosed his chest, whining.

There was nothing.

“Frankie!” Petra shook him.

He didn't come back.

 

T
he paramedics said that Frankie died of a stroke.

“As far as ways to go, it was a peaceful death,” one of the medics told Petra as they loaded Frankie's body into the ambulance. He was a young man from Maria's tribe who had grown up three houses down. “We will take good care of him.”

Maria had fallen into a soft shock. The paramedics had wrapped her in blankets and offered her a ride back to the house, but she refused. She walked back with Petra, Petra's arm over her shoulder and Sig plodding on her other side. The stars had been scattered overhead in a brilliant jewel box of glitter, and the women and coyote slowly moved under the weight of all those stars. Maria kept pausing to look back, as if the ghost of Frankie would be standing beside the pool.

“I had . . . no idea he was at a risk for stroke,” Maria said. “I mean, sure, he was overweight and drank a lot, but I didn't think of it as an
immediate
risk. I should have made him go to the doctor more often.”

“Maria. You couldn't make him do anything.”

“But I'm—­I was—­his niece. I was responsible for him. I should have called the paramedics sooner. I assumed he was off . . . gallivanting in the clouds or whatever he does on the other side when he gets bored with life here.” She rubbed her drippy nose.

“You couldn't have known that this was the last time. You can't be everyone's social worker, especially in more than one plane of reality.”

“He was my last living relative.” She stared up at the stars.

“I'm so sorry,” Petra said, feeling helpless. There were no good words for this, nothing to say that would make anything better.

“Did you . . . did you see him in the spirit world?” she asked.

“I did.” Petra felt guilty, at that. Maria should have been the last one to see him, to speak to him in this plane or any other. “He said that he loves you, but that he had to fly.”

Maria smiled. “Was he . . . was he a man or a woman in the spirit world? I always hoped that he would have found the body he wanted.”

“He actually . . . he was a great blue heron. I think he would have slapped me with his wing if I'd been impertinent enough to peer at his tail feathers.”

Maria laughed through her tears. “I can see that, somehow. Damn it.” She dissolved into sobs again.

The house was dark. Petra turned the lights on as they entered. Pearl hopped down off the kitchen table, making a series of inquisitive
mrrps.
Sig lay down on the floor beside her and made whining noises. They seemed to hold a conversation as Petra ran a bath for Maria.

Maria said little else that evening. Petra tucked her into bed, intending to sleep on the couch. But Maria caught her hand and asked her to stay. She tucked herself into the other side of the bed and pulled up a quilt that smelled like lavender. Maria fell into a fitful sleep, while Petra stared at the ceiling for hours, listening to the clock tick in the next room.

Eventually, she dreamed, dreamed of walking with her father in the underworld. He was talking about wanting to go to a Waffle House, because there were apparently no waffle irons in the spirit world, and he missed them. There were only pancakes. When she asked him why, he said that he didn't know the reasoning, that it was just a rule. Mike walked by in her dream, hauling a wagon of confiscated waffle irons and writing tickets. Cal sneaked up to the wagon when Mike's back was turned and stole a waffle iron, and she tried to talk to him. But he just gave her a sad look and scurried away. She felt a deep pang of mourning for him, and wondered if anyone else in the world would notice he had gone missing, that his shy smile had vanished.

Maria drifted past her, wearing a white dress, calling for her uncle. There were no herons in this dream, only ducks. Maria sorted through the ducks, but none of them was blue. One of them spoke, telling her that Frankie had gone home. But Maria insisted that he was not home yet, that he had missed supper.

Petra searched for Gabe in her dream, but couldn't find him. Her father told her that it was completely inappropriate to date an undead man, unless he had a waffle iron and knew how to use it to make snake waffles.

Clearly, her subconscious was overwhelmed.

She awoke in the middle of the night, finding Maria still as a stone and snoring softly beside her. Sig and Pearl slept at the foot of the bed, nested together like spoons. She made no move to disturb them, just watched the elderly cat turn over and knead Sig's belly in her slumber.

Frankie was gone. Really, truly gone. Tears slid out of the corners of her eyes and trickled behind her ears onto the pillow. She had somehow expected that if Frankie were to pass away, it would be in some spectacular bar fight with six-­shooters or a car chase involving cops and a cliff. Something that would have made a great story. But he had slipped away so silently. Had he somehow known? Had he felt that stroke curdling in his body, and walked away to the spirit world to spend his last hours communing with the basilisk, to fix Petra's fuck-­up?

And she felt guilty that her father had returned to this world—­at least, some of the time—­just as Maria had lost her only living relative. Still, her father's return gave her a bright spot of hope. She'd come here, to Temperance, to search for him. And now, she had both his spirit and his body together. She could speak with him. She had so many questions she couldn't wait to have answered. So much she didn't know about all that time he had been absent from her life. And about his own alchemical experiments. Where had he gone? What had he seen? What secrets did he know that he could share with her?

She cried for Cal, too, feeling the pillow growing cold and soggy around her face. That poor kid didn't deserve anything that had happened to him. He'd been a victim from the start, despite his good intentions. She wished that she could have done something—­anything—­to help him. Clearly, she'd done the wrong thing by taking him to the hospital, and that had ignited a chain of events that had ultimately led to his death. He had trusted her, and she had failed. That knowledge settled heavily in her chest. Her best hadn't been good enough. She would carry that with her for the rest of her life, she knew.

And she thought of Gabe and the Hanged Men, her fingers brushing her lips as she remembered him kissing her. He was not human, sometimes not even close. But he
felt
. And he loved her. If the Hanged Men could survive, that would be enough. She would make sure that it was enough. They
had
to survive. She couldn't face the idea of Gabe rotting underground, passing from this world without so much as an acknowledgment from the world above.

Maria's neighbors had visited the back porch in the darkness before dawn. By the time Maria awoke, there were piles of offerings at her door: casseroles in insulated carriers, flowers, cards, even a beautiful pink agate as big as her fist with a note on it—­Frankie had apparently found it and given it to a little boy. The boy was all grown up now, and was giving it back. Frankie, for all his eccentricities, and for not being a blood member of the tribe, had been loved. By the time Maria was dressed and staring into her coffee, a knock sounded at the screen door. Petra answered it, seeing Mike on the other side.

“Hey. How is she?”

“Holding up, I think?”

“It's a shock.” He rubbed the back of his neck as she let him in.

“Yeah. I just . . . I thought he had a lot more mileage left in him. He was an old man, but he was tough as nails, you now?”

When Maria saw Mike, he wrapped his arms around her, and she sobbed into his jacket. He stroked her hair and held her hand as she told him what happened.

Petra busied herself washing dishes in the sink. It was the only concrete thing she could think to do to help. Pearl assisted by sitting on the countertop and supervising.

“You gotta watch over her, okay?” Petra said to the cat.

Pearl looked sad, patting at the bubbles. She would miss Frankie just as much as Maria would—­that much was clear.

Maria came to her and said, “You don't have to stay.”

“Are you sure?”

Maria nodded. “I'm okay, now. It's just . . . a lot, you know?”

“I'll come back later tonight, if you want. Should I pick up anything for you?”

“I'll have food coming out of my ears for the next few days. And I think Mike will stay with me.”

“Good.” Petra dried her hands and kissed her friend's cheek. She was heartened to see the two of them together. She'd never pried about their history. But they were both good ­people, and she hoped that they would figure out a way to be good for each other.

The roads were empty and still this early in the morning, and a thick mist clung to the ground, as though it were left over from her trip to the spirit world. The whole land seemed to sleep, to be holding its breath for some inkling of the future.

She steeled herself and headed toward the Rutherford Ranch.

If the Hanged Men were gone . . . Petra shuddered to imagine what she would find. In the chamber beneath the Lunaria, would Gabe and the others be hanging as corpses tangled in dead roots? Would that eerie light be forever gone? Would she never get the chance to fully understand Gabe, to explore the what-­might-­have-­beens?

There was no sign of life on the ranch. There were no lights on at the house or the barn on the high ground. A dense, pearly mist had gathered from the sky and hugged the lower land, obscuring the world beyond the barbed-­wire fence. She took the Bronco off the gravel road, through the fields. Her headlights reflected shadows of grass and the ghosts of fog before her, nearly useless.

She stopped where she thought the Lunaria was, but could see nothing before her. She hoped she had the right spot, but it seemed as if there were nothing there, as if the tree had been entirely erased from the land. The tree wasn't visible from the road, and she'd have to hunt for it even on a clear day. But this sense of obliteration chewed at her.

She hopped out of the truck and pulled out the Venificus Locus. She scraped some blood from a scratch on her elbow into the device and squinted at it with a flashlight. The bead of blood moved, sluggishly.

And she followed it. She whistled to Sig and plunged into the mist. The Locus led her to the burned spot in the center of the field. Sal's corpse was gone, but the tree remained, a broken hulk against the grey sky.

A lump rose in her throat. She didn't know what she'd been expecting. She'd been hoping that the basilisk's blood would have regenerated the tree, that it would rise from the field in full, leafed-­out glory . . .

But there
was
something there. She crept forward to see where the copper spear had been plunged into the roots. A tendril of green wood wrapped around the shaft of the spear, with dewy green leaves at the crest. The sapling had grown around it like a caduceus, tiny branches reaching up to the sky. It was only about five feet tall, but it was
alive
.

And the Hanged Men had to be alive, too. Hope swelled in her.

After about ten minutes of hunting, pacing, and swearing while she stared at the blackened ground, she found the door in the grass that led to the Lunaria's chamber. Lifting it open, she found a charred tangle of tree roots below her; it was as if the tree had moved during its burning, but it provided better footing for the descent. She climbed down and was able to convince Sig to jump into her arms.

Sal's body lay on the ground. It looked like someone didn't have time to dig a proper burial hole, and had just shoved him down the hatch to hide him. His neck was bent at an unnatural angle where he'd been hanged, and the severed rope trickled off into the darkness. She walked around him, sweeping the light ahead of her. The Lunaria's roots were still and black. None of the golden light dripped through their vessels, nothing of the shimmering biomass that she had known before showed itself. A single golden taproot from the sapling dripped down from the ceiling, like a stalactite, holding nothing.

The Hanged Men dangled from the dead rhizomes of the old tree, like empty fruit. She swept her light at their split and broken faces. The men always rotted at night in the Lunaria's embrace, but they'd also always regenerated by morning. But these decomposed faces were still, and the bodies were missing limbs, stubs of bone tangling in the roots. She forced herself to reach out and check for pulses, but there was nothing. No sign of life. The ripe smell of decay overwhelmed the soft scent of earth and the stench of burning.

There hadn't been enough magic in the blood to restore them. There was just the sapling of the tree, and nothing more . . . the realization of that finality suffused her chest and burned her eyes.

The Hanged Men were dead.

All these men, gone forever.

She searched among them for Gabe, staring at each of their decomposing faces, trying to identify teeth and jawbones as her stomach churned. She couldn't find him. That didn't mean he wasn't here—­maybe she didn't recognize him in this mass grave, under the soft blanket of decay. She ran from body to body, her heart in her mouth, sweeping the light back and forth, trying to imagine what each of these corpses would look like with a thick layer of flesh.

She finally stopped, crouched, and pressed the heel of her hand to her brow, sobbing. He was gone. All of them, all that mysterious magic of this wild land, gone.

Sig sidled up to her and licked her cheek. She threw her arm around him and cried into his ruff. He pressed his chest to her shoulder and whined.

It was over.

Gabe had given the blood of the basilisk to her—­and that blood might have saved them. She was acutely aware of the blood thudding in her temples and the hot tears on her skin. She was alive, painfully, horribly alive. All the men were gone. And Gabe . . . she would never have the chance to return to the Stella Camera with him. She had begun to hope for something more with him, and that hope shriveled violently in her chest like wadded-­up paper.