Dark Alchemy (24 page)
Authors: Laura Bickle
He drew breath to scream again, and out of his mouth came the raven's shriek. Luminescing blood dribbled down his lip.
She reached for her belt to fumble with a gun. Her sweat-Âslick hands shook so hard that it took two tries to pull the hammer back. She aimed the gun at a spot just between his eyebrows. If she had any bit of mercy or ethics about her, she should shoot him in the head until the raven stopped screaming. That would be the humane thing to do, wouldn't it? That had been what he'd done for Jeff.
But a bullet wouldn't kill him. Only wood could end his pain. “Damn it, damn it . . .” Her vision blurred to gold shadows and charred feathers. She couldn't leave him. Not like this, in pieces. But she couldn't end him either, this howling shadow that remained.
The bird in her arms continued fight against its denim straitjacket.
She stepped back, and the raven clawed loose of the prison of her arms. It flung itself at Gabe, clambering up the ruin of his chest with its talons, until he found the hole in his chest where the compass had been set. In a flutter of soot and feathers, it dove into that hole.
And then there was silence.
Gabe's face went slack, and his eyes shut. The sudden quiet . . . it terrified her more than the screaming.
She put the gun away and edged close to him, reached for his neck. She felt nothing. Not that she'd expected to feel the beat of a pulse, but she expected to feel that odd staticky hum of his. But the silence was unbroken.
With shaking fingers, she dug the sticky Locus out of her pocket. The Locus was unmoving.
No more magic.
She stared at Gabe, in pieces, for a long time. Only when the sunshine drained out of the hatch in the ceiling did she turn to leave. She jumped up to reach the cable, then hauled herself, fist over fist, up into the twilight middle world. Her arms ached, and stitches in her skin beneath the bandages split, oozing rusty red blood over her elbows and between her fingers.
She crouched at the edge of the hatch, staring down into the darkness. Sig sat beside her, solemn and steady as she dragged the door shut. The illusion of a perfect field was now complete.
“I'm sorry,” she said. She kissed her hand and pressed it to the earth.
She had the sense that Gabe hadn't wanted to live forever, that he had simply been trapped in a terrible machine he'd been unable to escape. There had been something human there.
Something she'd begun to love.
She pressed her hands to her face and sobbed.
P
etra smoothed the dress she'd borrowed from Maria as she walked through the automatic doors of the Phoenix Village Nursing Home. The place smelled of disinfectant and mashed potatoes, that unmistakable odor of civilized death.
She walked through a small, shabby lobby with plaid couches and a plastic flower arrangement that an elderly lady was trying to take apart. A young woman in a smock was trying to keep the old woman's hands occupied, carefully taking the flowers from her fingers and pushing a soft rag doll into them. Petra's borrowed heels clacked on the green checkerboard tile, and she wobbled up to the front desk.
“Hello. I'm here to see Joseph Dee,” Petra said.
The middle-Âaged woman in a nurse's uniform behind the front desk frowned at her clipboard. “I'm sorry, ma'am, but we don't have aâ”
Petra shook her head. “I'm sorry. I think he's listed in your system as John Doe Number Three.”
The nurse nodded. “We have plenty of John Does. Sign here.” She passed a sign-Âin sheet across the desk, and Petra scribbled her name.
“He's in room 113, hon.”
Petra swallowed and nodded. She sucked in a deep breath and walked past the desk down the hallway. Her fingers gnawed at the itchy bandages under her calico sleeves. She was excited to find her father, but also afraid. She wondered if he would look like he did in her hallucinations. On the phone, the facility administrator had said that John Doe Number Three was the right age and general physical description to be her father. But he hadn't spoken for years. His bills were paid every month, on time, but the administrator couldn't say by whoâÂthe payer's identity was shielded by a legal trust.
She paused before an open door with the number “113” stenciled on it. Steeling herself for disappointment, she knocked on the doorframe.
“Hello?” Her voice sounded very small, as if it belonged to a little girl.
A room with two beds in it had a television running at low volume. A man in a wheelchair sat facing the window, and Petra could only see the back of his head. The view was just of the parking lot, but she supposed that it was more exciting than the game show on the fizzling black and white television.
Petra forced herself to put one foot in front of the other until she was beside the wheelchair. She squatted and looked up at the man's face.
The man in the chair stared vacantly outside. His face was unfamiliar, saggy and lined. His hair had been shaved with clippers, probably to make him easy to wash. His fingers were gnarled and tangled in his lap, and he was dressed in a faded hospital gown with a blanket covering his lap. He seemed utterly foreign.
But this man had her father's eyes, opaque and distant. She recognized that look, the look that he had when thinking of distant places. She recognized the amber color from her dream.
“Dad?” she whispered.
The eyes didn't flicker, didn't move from their intense focus on a trash can just outside the window.
Petra reached out to touch his hand. “Dad? It's me. Petra.”
He didn't respond.
Her eyes filled with tears. Perhaps Stroud had told her the truth; that he'd lost himself to Alzheimer's a long time ago. She choked back a sob.
The old man's eyes turned to her. But they weren't looking at her. They stared at the pendant around her throat. Petra followed his gaze, unfastened the necklace. She pressed the pendant into his hand. “Dad, do you remember this?”
Her father stared at the glittering lion devouring the sun in his palm. His thumb slowly traced the arch of the lion's back. Then he reached out with his other hand and touched Petra's freckled cheek.
She smiled and blinked back tears. Some small part of him was in there. A flicker, some bit of that spirit that she'd encountered in the otherworld. “Yeah, Dad. It's me.”
It wasn't much, but it was a new start. Maybe she could grab onto it with both fists and pull it back through sheer force of will.
“S
ig. Stop that.”
Petra sidestepped a stream of urine issuing forth from the coyote onto a telephone pole. She was determined to remove the flyers she'd put up all over town, and Sig had taken this as an invitation to mark the entire town of Temperance as his territory, from the post office to the hardware store and every pole and parked car in between.
Sig ignored her and kept watering the dead tree.
“Jesus. You must have a bladder the size of a basketball.”
Sig snorted. He stopped pissing long enough to stand back and sniff at his handiwork.
Petra snatched her flyer from the telephone pole, tucking it under her arm with a stack of others destined for the recycling bin. She knew where her father wasâÂat least, she knew what space his physical body was occupying. She'd worry about where his mind was next, but she was pretty sure that her homemade signage wasn't gonna help with that.
A familiar pickup truck rumbled past her, then parked at the hardware store just up the street. The Hanged Men piled out of the back as a group, heading inside without discussion. She watched them, wondering. Who was directing them, now that Gabe was gone? Were they just doing what they always did on the farm, or had Sal tightened the reins on them?
The driver's side door of the truck opened, and Petra's heart fell into her stomach.
It was Gabe. He swung out on two legs, his body seeming as whole and normal as she remembered. Both hands were attached to flannel-Âcovered arms, and no wounded ravens nested in his chest. He looked down the street, gazed past her, and reached inside the truck for a white hat on the dashboard.
“Gabe!”
She dropped her stack of flyers in the middle of Sig's puddle and ran down the street to him.
She reached out to grasp his arms. “Gabe, you're alive!”
He looked at her blankly. When he did so, his head twitched a bit, like a bird's.
“Gabe. It's me. Petra.” His skin felt cold and unyielding under the flannel.
There was no recognition on his face. None. His eyes seemed to go through her, barely registering her presence.
She released him, stepping back. “Don't you know me?”
He said nothing, just looked at her with that infuriatingly empty gaze. He didn't blink. She'd seen that mechanical look before, in the rest of the Hanged Men. The ones that he'd called automatons.
A lump rose in her throat. “The Lunaria . . . it worked, didn't it? It made you whole, but . . . it didn't have enough power. It made you . . . like them.” She gestured at the men carrying bales of wire to the pickup.
He put the white hat on his head. This hat was new and crisp and completely unlike the old black one he used to own. He turned away from her, as if she was entirely irrelevant to his existence, to pick up a bale of fence wire. His arms jerked a bit as he loaded the bale into the truck. A puppet working with tangled strings.
He left her standing there, dumbfounded, as the Hanged Men loaded up their supplies. They moved around her as if she were no more than a lamppost, climbed back into the truck, and drove away.
She watched them go, unbelieving. Sig, ever the Good Dog, sat down beside her without offering to pee on anything new.
Petra looked up at the sky, blinking back tears, and spotted a raven perched on a telephone wire.
The raven peered down, staring her full in the face. It saw her . . . really saw her . . . and then winged off to join the Hanged Men and their trailing cloud of dust.
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Much gratitude to my wonderful editor, Rebecca Lucash. Thank you for your boundless enthusiasm, keen eye, and glowing encouragement. Under your wing, this story found its own darkly perfect ending. Thank you for making this book a reality!
Many thanks to my superhero agent, Becca Stumpf, who I am quite certain wears her cape and Wonder Woman boots twenty-Âfour/seven. Thank you for being in my corner with your magic bracelets.
Thank you to Marcella Burnard, for the late-Ânight reading, head-Âdesking, and moral support. Thanks also for the glow-Âin-Âthe-Âdark fairy dust and catnip, which are equally magical at my house.
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Laura Bickle
grew up in rural Ohio, reading entirely too many comic books out loud to her favorite Wonder Woman doll. After graduating with an MA in Sociology-ÂCriminology from Ohio State University and an MLIS in Library Science from the University of Wisconsin-ÂMilwaukee, she patrolled the stacks at the public library and worked with data systems in criminal justice. She now dreams up stories about the monsters under the stairs. Her work has been included in the ALA's Amelia Bloomer Project 2013 reading list and the State Library of Ohio's Choose to Read Ohio reading list for 2015â2016. More information about Laura's work can be found at www.laurabickle.com.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
D
ARK ALCHEMY.
Copyright © 2015 by Laura Bickle. All rights reserved under International and Pan-ÂAmerican Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-Âbook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-Âengineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperÂCollins e-Âbooks.
EPub Edition MARCH 2015 ISBN: 9780062389862
Print Edition ISBN: 9780062404923
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