Mercury Retrograde (22 page)

Damn it.
She'd made eye contact. Petra glanced away. But she felt no paralytic magic stealing over her.

Gabe walked to her and passed his hand over her face. Bel didn't react.

It looked as if that shelf in the cave had been decorated as a kind of altar. Guttering candles that must have been burning for hours spilled wax down the walls, and armfuls of wildflowers had been placed all along the surface. Bits of bone punctuated the nodding yellow toadflax stems. Bel had been carefully arranged among them, like some kind of treasured ornament. Had the snake done this? The snake couldn't build such an altar—­this was clearly the work of reverent human hands, but it must have been the basilisk that arranged her here. For the first time, it dawned upon Petra that the thing they were hunting was not simply a raging monster. It was something else—­something with intelligence, with sentimentality.

“Where's the snake . . .
oh
.”

Something with wrath.

A rill of movement swam below the surface of the mud, pushing up a cluster of air bubbles.

Shit. Shit. Shit.
Her potato cannon was useless under mud. She slung it over her shoulder and reached for her guns with her sweat-­slick hands, head pounding. Hopefully, the mud from her swim hadn't gummed up the mechanism . . .

Gabe held his copper spear over his head, eyes narrowed. He plunged the spear once, twice, into the soupy mess. The thing under the mud shrieked and flipped.

Petra aimed at a tail that slipped up over the edge of the mud and fired. In this enclosed space, the shot was deafening, and all sound receded to a roar and a distant ringing in her ears. She shot until the barrel clicked empty.

The basilisk rose out of the mud, jaws open. Petra imagined that it was hissing, but no sound came out of its mouth. Strings of vapor leaked from its jaws, and it spat acid at them.

She felt Gabe's hand on the back of her neck, and he plunged her down into the scalding mud. She sucked in her breath in shock, flailed, and released her grip on the potato cannon as the hot darkness enveloped her.

This must be hell, she realized as she descended. The heavy mud scalded her skin and suspended her movement. She couldn't move, couldn't breathe as the mud invaded the respirator. She could taste the iron in the silt as it pushed through her mask. Gabe's fingers wound in her shirt—­he was here, with her, too. She doubted that the monster's acid could penetrate this dense mud quickly, but Gabe didn't need air the way that she did.

When she was convinced she'd pass out, she was yanked up by her collar, gasping. The mud sucked the last of the fiberglass armor from her body. She stumbled back with her ass planted against the altar. Flowers stuck to the mud as she sucked in a breath.

Gabe was fighting the monster. He held the copper pipe spear over his head and had slammed it into the basilisk's right side. For an instant, Petra was reminded of the dozens of renderings she'd seen of St. George slaying the dragon—­she'd always had a twinge of empathy for that creature, as terrifying as it was.

But this was not going as well as it had for St. George. The basilisk thrashed and flung Gabe away, the spear still protruding from behind its feathered crown.

Petra spied the potato cannon floating on the top of the mud. She splashed into the slop, grabbing it. She prayed to whatever weird gods might be listening that the bottle of lye in the cannon's throat hadn't been damaged or fallen out.

The basilisk turned for her and opened its mouth to draw breath and spew venom. She pulled the ignitor, aimed at the basilisk's open mouth, and fired.

Orange flame flashed as the bottle launched and struck the basilisk's mouth. She lost track of the bottle, but it must have gone into its throat and shattered; the basilisk thrashed its head right and left, glass glittering in the mud. It began to foam at the mouth, a pale bubbling like sea foam on a clear afternoon.

Gabe crept up behind it and grabbed the spear. Using the pipe as a handle, he forced the head of the basilisk under the mud. Its tail lashed and thrashed, striking Petra in the leg and clearing the flowers off the altar, shattering the candles. Bel's body slid from the shelf into the mud, staring with unseeing eyes.

Gabe held the spear fast with two hands as the basilisk fought. After some minutes, it began to weaken, then became still.

Petra let out a shaking breath. Her head pounded, and all she could hear was the ringing of gunfire in her ears. But against her back, something stirred—­the ground. It shook and quavered, kicking the last of the carefully-­arranged bones of the altar to the mud. Pea gravel shivered down on her skull.

“We have to get out of here!” she screamed at Gabe.

The shockwave was moving, more than one. The ceiling slid and fractured as the brittle sandstone began breaking up.

Gabe jammed his foot in the snake's spine and yanked the spear free. He slogged to her side as the ceiling began to cave in.

Petra scrunched beneath the shelf that had been the basilisk's altar. Gabe flung himself in beside her, and his shoulder covered her head. Rock hailed down; she couldn't hear it, but she could feel it as it pounded Gabe's body.

She wanted to speak to him in this moment, to tell him that she was sorry for everything and that she loved him. She yelled it in his ear; she had no idea if he could hear her or if he would survive the roar of the rock to do anything with that knowledge and her shitty timing.

After an interminable time of hot blackness, the shaking stopped. Petra lifted her face against Gabe's chest. She shook him and pointed overhead.

“Look!”

A pinprick of light glistened overhead. A small one, but it was unmistakably light.

“Gabe.”

She shook him again, shook him hard. Silt slipped down his collar into her face, and she panicked for a moment, thinking him dead.

But his glowing eyes opened, and his gaze followed her finger to the light.

The light grew bigger, and a coyote nose pressed in. Sig. He pawed and clawed at the hole, but couldn't get much traction against the larger stones.

They scrabbled out of the pile of rubble, hand in hand. Gabe stood on the altar and jammed the dull end of the spear into the star of light in the ceiling of that little world. Sig backed away, and the crack opened, bringing more grey light and dust.

And blessedly cool air. Petra lifted her face to it, inhaling deeply. Her head pounded; she knew she was close to heat exhaustion, and this was the most wonderful thing she could recall feeling.

Gabe opened the fissure to about two feet, then a large piece of granite fell through, splashing into the mud. The cave crackled with a palpable vibration.

He laced his fingers together, and she stepped into them. He lifted her up to the hole in the ceiling. She grasped the ledge with aching, muddy fingers, and pulled herself through.

The air. She sucked it in, and her breath curled before her. Her whole body steamed in the early morning light. She was on the far side of the oxbow, within view of the encampment. Pale light had begun to filter in from the east, and the sky at the edge of the mountain was beginning to turn pink in a razor-­sharp line.

Gabe handed the spear through, and she took it carefully, placing it next to her on the cracked ground. She extended her hand down for him, and he clasped it. He climbed, and she hauled, until he was finally up on the rock outcropping. He fell heavily on the cracked clay. In this finer light, she could see bits of glowing blood smearing his cheek and hands.

She reached out to touch his cheek, frowning. He took her hand and kissed it. He murmured something against her palm, but she couldn't hear it.

Something tackled her, and she winced. Sig. He was washing the mud from her neck, and making horrible faces at the taste. The welder's blanket was still stuck to his collar, and he looked like a superhero dog as he rolled around in her lap.

He turned his head to the sky and barked. She could feel the bark in his chest, and she looked skyward. The helicopter from before. It swept in from the north, blades churning the canopy. It was closer this time, as if it had zeroed in. A searchlight swept from an open door, and red lights that she knew were sights from a gun.

She grabbed Gabe's sleeve and they stumbled to their feet. They ran back to the far edge of camp, where Bel's motorcycles stood in a bullet-­pocked row.

Gabe shouted in her ear, over the receding buzzing. “Can you ride one of these?”

“I can drive anything with wheels.”

She grabbed the nearest bike—­a beautiful Triumph Tiger. The keys dangled from the ignition. She straddled it, flipped the kill switch with her thumb, and turned the key in the ignition. The red start button was easy enough to find, and the bike roared to life. She jammed the spear behind the exhaust pipe. Gabe lifted Sig under his arm and climbed on the back behind her, one arm around her waist.

She knocked back the kickstand, twisted the throttle, and plunged into the woods. This Triumph was unlike the dirt bikes she'd ridden as a child and the street bike her college boyfriend rode. This one had the springiest shocks she'd ever felt, and the dirt paths felt like pavement under the tires. It wasn't a dual-­sport bike—­this was something else altogether, customized for whatever adventures those weird snake women had gotten up to. The clutch was smooth, and she accelerated through the gears quickly.

She glanced up at the sky. Dawn had begun to touch the tops of the trees, and a second helicopter had come to join the first. She kept close to the trees, in the thorny huckleberry underbrush that scraped against her muddy legs. Sig rested his head over her shoulder, thrilled to be moving, his tongue dangling in the breeze.

“The other Hanged Men—­do you think they got away?” She hoped so—­all of the ATVs were gone.

Gabe tapped her on the shoulder and pointed at the sky. Ravens were flying in a black mass south and east—­toward the Rutherford Ranch.

Petra circled back to where they'd left the trucks. They were all gone, which gave her hope that every last one had gotten out alive.

She'd reached paved road by the time the sun had crept over the horizon. At this hour, there was little traffic, and she hoped that no one would remark on two mud-­caked riders holding a dog that looked suspiciously like a coyote on a spotlessly-­clean, bullet-­pocked bike.

But there was something about being on the road, feeling the wind dry and crumble away the worst of the mud from her face. The air was cool and dew-­damp. It felt as if it was stripping away so much of the fear she'd felt in the last few days: the memory of the basilisk, fear for Gabe and the Hanged Men, even the dark bruises of the underworld still shadowing her face. There was only the roar of the air and the road, the arms around her and the scrape of a paw on her sleeve.

 

T
he road allowed her to forget, for all those miles. She felt that the world had been conquered, that all would be well.

But Petra wasn't prepared for what remained of the Lunaria. Gabe had told her that Sal had burned it, yet she hadn't realized what exactly that had meant.

Where the tree had once stood, an imposing elm at the heart of the field, there was now a black stain of charred grasses. At the center was a blackened timber with broken fingers reaching to the sky. It was as if it had been struck by lightning. A figure dangled from the lowest branch—­one she recognized. Sal Rutherford's body twisted in the lazy breeze. It was scorched on one side and crumpled like a paper bag. It made her queasy to look at it.

“Oh, Gabe,” she sighed, staring at it as she shut off the engine and they dismounted. Sal was dead. And the old bastard deserved it.

But the tree . . . she scanned it, searching for any sign of life. Sig made no effort to pee on it, which told her that it was bad. There was not a single leaf left on it.

Gabe walked to the burned edge of it with the spear in hand. He gazed at the sharpened edge of the spear, and plunged it as hard as he could into the ground, next to the trunk, deep within its roots. It stood there, like a shining weathervane, looking utterly futile.

She didn't know what to expect. Part of her hoped that the snake's blood would regenerate it immediately, that it would burst into a flurry of green leaves. But the tree remained still, not reacting in the slightest to the sacrifice that had been offered to it.

“What now?” she whispered.

Gabe looked at the ruined timber. “We'll go to ground. We'll wait, see what it can do.” He turned to look at her, and it seemed that she was seeing him in the most fragile state she'd ever seen him. He was pale, circles below his eyes, blood and mud smeared on every inch of skin. His hat had blown off long ago, and he looked like some kind of feral creature that needed to find a safe place to sleep and something to eat that didn't need to be chased.

She nodded and stepped up to him. She reached up to take his head in her hands. “I'll come back.”

“I know.” He bent to kiss her. “I hope to be here, in one piece.”

It was a bittersweet kiss. It seemed that all of their kisses were like that—­soft and full of a distant yearning she couldn't quantify. When it faded, he pressed his forehead to hers.

“Love you,” he said.

She released him, and he bent to open the door to the underworld of the Lunaria. Petra watched him go, until the ground had been sealed shut behind him, as if he'd never existed for the past hundred and fifty years.

Maybe for the last time.

G
abe climbed down into darkness, into the depths of the Lunaria's underground world.

Before, when he'd gone to ground, the roots would reach out to touch him, to acknowledge him in some way. It might be as small as a caress on the back of his neck as the roots lifted him to the ceiling, or as grand as an embrace.

But it was all wrong here, now. The roots were motionless, smelling of burn and gasoline that had sunk deep into the ground. Chill had seeped up from the earth. He touched the roots in greeting, but they were silent and fixed, unresponsive. They must have moved sometime during the burning, spilling out into the chamber, turning and twisting to avoid the fire. They were frozen now in a contortion of agony. Such pain. Gabe couldn't imagine the shriek the tree must have let out, howling underground with no one to hear it. He had long been used to the tree having a personality. Maybe he anthropomorphized it, but he saw the Lunaria, at turns, as playful, serious, and motherly. It could be possessive and controlling, but extraordinarily gentle and loving as it rebuilt the Hanged Men, time and time again, from nothing. It had been a constant, and now . . . now it was gone.

He reached into the rhizomes, climbing up into the mass of still wood. He wormed his way back into the thickest knots, wanting to feel the comfort of the now-­brittle roots. He was exhausted, and could go no farther. He leaned his head back in the tangle and closed his eyes. For good or ill, he would stay here. Around him, he was conscious of the other Hanged Men climbing into the dead tree, finding pockets in the stillness to sleep.

As he dozed, a dream bubbled up, from deep in his marrow. It was a fuzzy dream of his hopes and fears for the future, feeling out of focus and drained of color.

He dreamed he stood in the meadow with Petra, listening to the wind scrape through the sage and grass. Behind him, the bare Lunaria stood. It was covered not with leaves, but with the feathers of ravens, turning up like leaves before a rainstorm. The wind whipped roughly through the feathers, breaking the fine barbs and veins.

Rain was sweeping over the mountain, miles away. It slipped down the slope in a dark veil, obscuring the side of the mountain. It smelled like a deluge, a shadow that would send water coursing down into the little creeks and ditches in a flood when it arrived. There was still time before the rain reached them.

He took Petra's right hand, folded it to his chest, and slipped his other hand behind her neck. He kissed her. Her heart beat against his chest, and her skin was warm beneath his hands, warm as sunshine on earth in the summer. He wanted to trace every freckle on her body with his fingers, to learn what made her sigh and what made her laugh. She made him feel alive, as if the impossible were possible, as if he could be with her for an hour or a day.

Her hand slid from his chest, and he looked down at it, cradling it in his. There was a black stain on the palm, like oil. It pooled up in her palm and trickled down her fingers.

Her eyes were dark, dark and black like the smear on her hand.

And the rain came rushing down the mountain, across the field in a torrent. Through all that hissing wind and scouring rain, the stain remained on her hand and in her eyes, unable to be rinsed away.

He knew that what he wanted was impossible. It would not last.

He took her face in his hands and kissed her anyway.

Nothing ever did last. Not the tree, not the Hanged Men. But if he held on to it, perhaps this moment of his dream would usher him gently into the soft, rotting darkness of the Lunaria's death.

P
etra wanted nothing more than to stumble into a bath and a deep, dreamless sleep. But she had to get home. There was a fair amount of gas left in the Triumph, but she was stumped by figuring out how to get Sig on the bike. She drove the bike to the barn and poked around until she found a pair of crates to strap onto the sides. She convinced Sig to perch in one and put a counterbalancing sack of fertilizer in the other. It wasn't elegant, but it would get them home.

Still, she drove slowly on the way. Sig seemed content to huddle in the crate, and she was convinced that he would do just as well with a sidecar . . . if she ever had time to complete that project. She drove slowly in a driving rain that made them both miserable. It seeped through her scalp and clothes, sending mud draining away in runnels. The cold was sharp and brittle, and it was hard to steer on gravel when she was shivering.

At last, she made it home to the Airstream. She moved the bike underneath the tarp that covered the parts of the old bike she was working on. She'd figure out how to dispose of the Triumph later; just getting it out of casual view was enough for now.

She unlocked the door and stumbled inside. She filled Sig's dishes with water and dog food, got a bottle of water out of the fridge, and headed for the tiny bathtub. She hoped to hell that she didn't fuck up the plumbing with a cleanup of this magnitude, but this was going to be between her and whatever plumber had rigged the Airstream in the first place.

She wiped as much of the remaining sludge off her body as she could with towels, figuring the towels were going to be the Laundromat's problem. She peeled off her clothes, leaving a muddy pile on the floor. She took stock of her injuries—­scrapes and purpling bruises, mostly. The worst seemed to be an overall scalding from the mud; it looked like she had a bad sunburn. And there was one small spot on the inside of her left arm that looked like it could have been an acid splash, but she wasn't certain. Just one more part of her life that was told on the scars on her arms. There was Des's handprint around her right wrist, the marks where Stroud had bled her, and now a drop of acid from the basilisk.

By the time she'd taken stock, the tub was full, and she scrunched in to sink up to her chin in the lukewarm water. She closed her eyes and tried to slow her breathing, to let the adrenaline drain out of her system. She wanted nothing more than a nap after this. Maybe a good twelve-­hour one.

She shrieked as a coyote jumped into the tiny tub, splashing water all over the floor. Sig wasn't waiting his turn. After a ­couple of attempts to shove him out, Petra reached for the drain and the handheld shower to give him a proper lather and rinse.

After a good half hour, the both of them were clean and smelling of Maria's homemade rosewater shampoo. Petra eyed the sediment at the bottom of the tub, but it drained perfectly. Petra dressed the last clean clothes she had—­a tank top and cargo pants—­and fell onto her futon. Sig wiggled his wet hide into bed, and she was too tired to boot him off.

She'd had her eyes shut for a whole ten minutes when someone rapped at the door.

“Fuck.” She pressed her face to the pillow. Maybe she could just pretend she wasn't here.

The knocking began again, more insistent. Yep, that was a police knock.

Petra rolled out of bed and padded across the linoleum to answer it. Sig wisely stayed in bed and rolled over to the dry side he hadn't soaked with his wet fur.

She opened the door to find Mike on her doorstep. She looked past him—­there was another ranger in a Forestry Ser­vice Jeep, and her Bronco was parked in front of the trailer.

“Hey. Brought your truck back.”

“Thanks. I really appreciate it.”

“We were running out of parking spaces at the station.” He made a face.

“C'mon in. What's going on?”

Mike waved at his colleague, but the ranger was on the phone and paced to the edge of the gravel.

Mike came inside and parked himself on a kitchen chair.

“I thought you guys closed the park,” she said, digging in the fridge for a ­couple of cold bottles of iced tea.

“Yeah, well. The Feds are all over us. About everything. They want me to get a written statement from you. And this is your official interview.”

“Awesome.” She hadn't given a whole lot of thought to embellishing her story. She handed him a drink.

“I did get some of your personal effects back from the scene,” he said, putting her truck keys and her cell phone on the table. “They kept everything else.”

“Thanks. What do you think they'll want to know?”

Mike shrugged and unscrewed the cap from the iced tea. “I think they're gonna have their hands full, honestly. Shit really blew up last night.”

“What happened?”

“Among all the monster-­hunting crackpots that have descended upon the park for purposes of fame and fortune were some guys who ran a television show.
Mystery Trackers
or some such.”

“Haven't seen it.”

“Me, neither. But they all turned up dead.”

“Whoa. Did the snake get them?”

“No . . . that's where shit continues to slide down the slippery slope of weird. We think they were killed by a biker gang. A cult, really.”

“You have enough ­people out here to have cults?” Petra took a drink and tried to look blank, though her heart was racing.

“This isn't ours. This is a gang that the Feds had some limited intel on. The Sisters of Serpens. They're into some funky stuff—­black magic, murder, some racketeering. They apparently showed up here in search of the snake. Looks like they had one hell of a gunfight with parties unknown. The Feds will interrogate the ones who are left, but they're tough cookies. I don't think they'll get much.”

Petra nodded. “What about the snake?”

“They're looking.” He took a swig of his tea. “Listen, I know that you know more than you're saying about this.”

She frowned, but remained silent. She was a shitty liar, and they both knew it.

“But I think I know you well enough by now to know that, whatever you were up to . . . it was on the side of the angels, okay? So. I'll watch your back as much as I can with the Feds.”

She looked down at the table, took a deep breath. She wanted to tell him the truth. But she couldn't. “Thanks. It's complicated. But I promised someone I care about that I wouldn't get anyone else involved.”

“I can respect that. Just . . . can you tell me something, for my own peace of mind?”

“I'll sure try.”

“That snake . . . is it still a threat?”

She could see it in him, that needing to know. He needed to protect the ­people in the park, and that was entirely fair.

“I don't think you need to worry about the snake, ever again.”

She wound up sticking to her guns with respect to the official statement that she scribbled out on notebook paper. She said she'd fled when the snake had killed Phil and Meg had fallen. She reiterated that she'd gotten a nose full of the vapor, passed out on horseback, and apparently woke up at Sal's ranch. She didn't deviate, didn't elaborate. If any of the higher-­ups wanted more details, she'd come up with something better, later.

She jumped when her cell phone rang. She answered it as she scribbled: “Hello.”

“Ms. Dee?”

“Yes.”

“This is the Phoenix Village Nursing Home. We've been trying to reach you.”

Her pen stilled. “Is my father all right?”

“Yes . . . he's awake, and he's asking for you.”