by Laura Bickle
But it ran on human blood.
Gabe looked away. Petra knew that he would run the Locus if he could. But he was no longer human. Humans didn’t break apart into ravens. Humans didn’t sleep underneath the alchemical Tree of Life at night. Humans . . . Humans got married. She’d married him over the winter, when he’d been human. When he had blood and a pulse and slept beside her at night, snoring softly. There was no alchemy between them then, but it was magical just the same, and things had been good. At least, they had been for her.
Then, she’d been human, too. And she clung to the idea that she still was. She wasn’t really certain, though. Her consciousness had been moved from her failing old body to a new vessel—to a homunculus. It seemed to work like a perfected version of her old body, but she didn’t fully know what it meant to have taken it over. She hadn’t admitted it to anyone else, but the idea of leaving humanity behind scared her. She knew she should be grateful to be alive and to be healthy and whole, but she was terrified of what this transition meant. Would she wake up some evening with a relentless taste for human blood or something? Would she live a normal life span of eighty years or so and then rot quietly underground without waking? And if so, what did it mean for her afterlife—if there was a heaven, was she barred from it? Hell, she didn’t even know if she could donate her organs, if she was fortunate enough to die a mundane death. She looked real, felt real, but what was she, truly?
She’d been putting off this test, using the Locus. It would tell her for certain if she was still human—still Petra. She’d shut the artifact away in a kitchen drawer, buried it among plastic silverware and orphaned restaurant napkins, and hoped that she could go back to normal. Without knowing the truth for certain, she could go around dressed in this skin and pretend for as long as she wanted to that everything was fine. Maybe if she went on acting as if, she would someday believe it.
Gabe offered no comment. He just looked at her sidelong with a coldly assessing eye. What did he think—that she had become something other than human? At the very least, he had to think her a coward. And if that was the case . . .
“Fine.”
She ripped her glove off with her teeth, exposing her pale left hand where her wedding ring glinted. She spat out the glove and gnawed at a hangnail on her ring finger, looking at her impassive husband as she did so. He sure was ready to delve back into the world of magic, starved by being apart from it for a couple of seasons. He changed into birds each second he got, slept later and later beneath the Tree of Life.
He didn’t seem to understand that she wanted to be as far away from magic as possible.
She’d gambled more times than she cared to admit, won, and knew not to push her luck. And this—she didn’t really want to know. She had a right not to ask, didn’t she? To count her blessings and move on? She wanted to confront him with this, to yell at him that she was ordinary, because she had decided to be, dammit. And that this was the end of it. He could find his damn magic elsewhere.
Yet she still ripped off the hangnail and let her finger ooze out a nice fat droplet of blood. She held the Locus in her right hand and prepared to drop the blood into the groove surrounding its edge.
But she stopped. She stared at the blurry compass. The cardinal directions were circumscribed by inscrutable symbols. The directions were marked, and through them cut the seven rays of alchemy . . .
. . . seven rays. She looked at the black scorch marks surrounding her.
She closed her hand over her bleeding finger and dropped the compass into her pocket. She turned away, from the magic and from him. She rubbed her nose. She wouldn’t let him see her cry.
“Petra?” Gabe asked softly.
She shook her head. “I just . . . I don’t want to know.” The words burned on her tongue. She had always prided herself on her scientific curiosity, on wanting to know the truth. But not about this. “Not yet. Maybe not ever.”
There was silence, and she wondered what went through his head. If he thought she was weak, in denial . . .
There was a thud on the rock behind her as something landed in the crater, then footsteps. Arms circled her shoulders, and she smelled something burned. Gabe’s arms radiated cold beneath the flannel.
An ordinary-tasting tear slipped down her cheek and landed on her lip. Only humans could cry—right?
That would have to be enough for him—and her.
“We’ll find out some other way,” he said quietly. “It’s okay.”
But she knew that it really wasn’t.
Chapter 2
The Separation Process
“Did you find anything?”
Park ranger Mike Hollander leaned in the pickup window to peer at Petra. Gabe had obediently stopped his truck at a Park Service checkpoint; parts of Yellowstone had been cordoned off from visitors. From the West Entrance to the Northeast Entrance, only authorized personnel were permitted. Mike wasn’t too fond of anyone wandering into the fire zone, but he’d trusted the two of them to check out the crater, since the main fire was nearly five miles away from that point. Gabe had no intention of mentioning his extracurricular activities at the fire line.
Petra frowned. “As weird as it sounds, what we saw from the air a few days ago could be a meteorite impact crater. It’s cold now, but it meets all the geologic criteria. Under the right conditions, it could have sparked the fire. I need to do some more research. But this may not be a man-made problem created by campers who didn’t properly douse their campfires. It could be some kind of a celestial fluke.”
Mike looked skyward, as if imploring a sympathetic supernatural source for patience. “Do not tell me about weird. I just got a report that a naked guy was wandering around helping stranded motorists.”
Gabe was suddenly very interested in picking a piece of lint from the dashboard.
Petra raised an eyebrow. “Triple-A for the clothing-optional crowd?”
“I guess. Helos haven’t seen him, so I hope that he doesn’t get crispy.” Mike made a face. “No casualties yet, but I’m not sure it’s gonna stay that way. The Magpie is angry. And she’s hatching little magpies that are crawling all over the place.”
“The fire crews aren’t able to contain it?” Petra asked.
“They’re trying. But the wind is shifting constantly, and it’s been consistently strong wind. Rain isn’t coming for another week, according to the weather geeks. Normally, we’d expect something like this just to burn itself out and we’d keep people out of the way. Help the animals. But the fire crews say that this is different. The Magpie Fire is faster, hotter than what they’ve seen, and it’s jumping over creeks and roads without stopping. And little magpies keep flaring up in the most unexpected spots.”
“I know it’s supposed to be a normal part of the ecosystem, the fire—” Petra said.
“Yeah, well, this isn’t,” he answered shortly. And she could hear his exhaustion and frustration. “And if what you say about the meteorite pans out . . . that’s even less normal. Most fires around here are caused by dumb human activity. Sometimes lightning, but more often than not, someone didn’t put out a campfire correctly or chucked a cigarette butt into the brush.” Mike’s jaw had hardened. They both knew that the ex–military policeman had little patience for those who didn’t follow the rules in his jurisdiction, even if the offender was something as elemental and unpredictable as fire itself.
“I took pictures and grabbed some samples,” Petra said. “I’ll do some work on my end. But, right now, my money’s on a meteorite as your original ignition point. But there might not just be one meteorite to worry about. This could be an ongoing problem if there’s a meteor shower that’s still feeding the fire.” She glanced at Gabe.
Gabe nodded. “I saw a fireball in the sky about three hours ago. Didn’t look like any kind of lightning that I’ve ever seen, so it makes sense that it was another meteorite.” He wasn’t sure what to think about the event that had crisped his ravens. Not yet. But it didn’t hurt to advanc
e a mundane, if unlikely, explanation to Mike. Mike was a decent man and a good ally, but neither Gabe nor his wife trusted Mike with the magical secrets they knew about the backcountry. Mike had enough on his plate with ordinary problems.
But Gabe thought Mike was beginning to suspect that things were off, at least where Gabe and Petra were concerned. He looked at the two of them with an investigator’s stare. Gabe caught him looking at his left eye. He’d been blinded in that eye last winter, but he was now able to see. His limp was gone. Mike’s gaze roved casually over Gabe’s burned wrist and the back of his hand. That had been careless of him; it was too late now to pull down his sleeve.
Mike gestured at him with his chin. “You run into a flare-up? We thought that area was cool . . .”
“It was,” Gabe said evenly. “I just kicked over a pile of ash. Wind swept up, and there were still live embers.”
“You should get that looked at.”
“It’ll be okay.” And it would. By tomorrow morning, the shallow burn would have healed—a small miracle. Gabe would have to remember to bandage it for a few days to make sure that Mike wasn’t suspicious.
But Mike wasn’t just suspicious of him. As Mike discussed the new road closings with Petra, Gabe watched how Mike looked at her. He didn’t look at her in the way that men often looked at women, with a sense of covetousness. This was an objective evaluation. Less than six months ago, she’d been dying of leukemia. Now she inhabited a body that was smoothly perfect, as if she’d been hatched from an egg. Her accumulated scars were gone, and even the sun-freckles had vanished on her face. The soft lines at the corners of her eyes had been wiped away. Petra had tried to minimize the change; she’d cut her hair, let her friend Maria add a few freckles with henna on her face and body. For the first couple of months after she’d gained the body of the homunculus, she’d learned to add shadows under her eyes with makeup. But something was imperceptibly off. It was as if a soap opera had become real and a twin had taken over her life. Something uncanny. It was weird, and Mike had a nose for weird.
“. . . and your little buddy has been waiting for you,” Mike was saying. He turned to a Park Service Jeep parked beside them and popped open the door. A flurry of grey and gold fur bounded out and launched itself through Petra’s open window. Gabe wound up staring at the ass-end of a coyote, tail slapping his face while the canine’s front end slathered Petra’s face with slobber.
“Jesus, Sig, that’s cold!” Petra giggled and twisted away to grin at Mike. “I see you kept the AC cranked up for him. Thank you.”
Mike chuckled. “He howled piteously when you left. To distract the little guy, we unwisely put him in charge of guarding our cooler full of sandwiches.”
Gabe glanced at the Jeep. A piece of wet bread was stuck to the windshield, and a bit of lettuce draped over the steering wheel. “Sorry. We owe you—”
Mike waved him off. “I’ll catch up with you guys later. You can buy me a beer. Or three.” He glanced past them, at a rental Winnebago that had pulled up behind them, and gestured for it to pull over.
Gabe tipped his hat and put the truck into gear. He nosed the pickup past the barricades to the main road.
Petra sat with her arms around Sig. Sig had jammed his head under her chin and was leaning against her chest in adoration. Her fingers stroked his back. “I’m worried about him,” she said.
“His appetite is fine.” Sig leaned back to stare at Gabe and emitted a belch that smelled like salami.
“He’s gotten awfully clingy,” she observed, frowning. “Since . . . since . . .”
“Since you died,” Gabe finished.
“Yeah.” She looked out the window. “But I’m alive now.”
“He loves you,” Gabe said simply. And it was the only truth he knew about the situation. Or any other, really.
They rode in silence, through shadows drawn long by the setting sun. The sky was a red haze, and Gabe kept the windows up and the decrepit air-conditioning running. They rolled through the tiny town of Temperance’s single stoplight, and Gabe parked before the church. Well, it had once been a church, and Gabe had never fully forgotten that. The Compostela had been reincarnated as a bar in modern times. Usually well populated by the local denizens of Temperance, there were only two filthy cars sitting outside this evening.
Gabe popped the door and stepped out on the pavement. A thin layer of pale dust saturated everything, darkening the brilliant color of Compostela’s stained-glass windows. Ash from the fire had been blowing toward the tiny town for days. It swirled in eddies on the street, summoning up miniature dust devils.
Petra seemed to hesitate before climbing out with Sig. Sig inhaled some of the grey dust, smearing his nose with a pale smudge. She wiped it away with her sleeve and squared her shoulders before walking into the bar.
Dust motes drifted in orange sunshine inside. The interior of the Compostela felt cool as a cave and nearly as quiet; only three patrons sprawled in a booth made of church pews, playing cards. They glanced up as Petra, Sig, and Gabe passed, and quickly looked back down at their cards again. Gabe scanned the room, taking in the pieces of obsidian perched on top of the door and window frames. Bits of magic from the owner, no doubt, and recently installed.
Petra led Sig to a booth at the back, sinking into shadow and the thin striations of smoke that seemed to have settled into the place. Sig scuttled underneath the table, where he promptly found a stray French fry to gobble down. A canine normally wouldn’t be allowed in a bar—that likely violated all kinds of health regulations—but Temperance was, in its way, beyond the reach of most conventional law.
And Sig wasn’t a conventional “dog,” either.
Gabe slid into the booth opposite Petra. She plucked a menu from the basket at the end of the table, not making eye contact. Nothing had changed on the dog-eared, stained menus for years. He just waited for her to speak.
“Do you know anything about that naked guy roaming the backcountry?” She glanced up then, a smile quirking at the corner of her mouth.
Gabe gave a small shrug. “Maybe.”
She nodded. “Just maybe.”
Sig, having exhausted the crumbs below the table, flopped down on Gabe’s feet with a huff.
“It’ll be a story someone tells around a campfire. Then it’ll fade. I promise.” Gabe leaned back in his seat. “I’m more worried about what’s up there.” He pointed skyward.
Petra frowned, and she put the menu away. “You think it could be something . . . alchemical?”
“Maybe. In his day, Lascaris made a great many experiments. Not all of them were successful. Some were buried. This might be something that he buried.”
“Lascaris,” she said, wincing slightly at the name. “Have you seen any sign of him?”
Gabe pulled out the alchemist’s pocket watch and set it on the table. Its hands were frozen at noon. It stopped and started in fits, as if it were ticking away a pulse from some distant beast. Gabe did not dare wind it up, and simply watched it shudder to life and still again.
“I was sure he was dead. Dead in the fire that burned his house to the ground.” Gabe ran his thumb over the face. “Now I’m not so sure.” The watch had belonged to Lascaris, allowing him to keep track of the most powerful times to perform magic, noon and midnight. It had appeared in Gabe’s dreams, and then in reality, when one of his dark creations had recently found it. Deep in Gabe’s gut, it was a bad omen, if not something worse than that.
A shadow crossed the table. Gabe looked up. “Hello, Lev.”
The owner of the Compostela nodded coolly at them. “Haven’t seen you folks in a while.”
“Been busy.”
“Yeah. Those fires are gathering strength.” Lev’s storm-colored eyes flicked to the door and the hazy landscape beyond. “I don’t remember one quite this unpredictable. Not even in 1988, when the park turned into a postapocalyptic hellscape. How about you?”
Gabe’s mouth flattened. “Not since then. That was the worst I�
��ve ever seen.” And for Gabe, ever was a very long time. He could be frank with Lev. They weren’t friends, but they knew too many of each other’s secrets. Lev was longer-lived than Gabe, but he was still a relative newcomer to Temperance by Gabe’s reckoning.
Lev nodded. “I’ve been battening down the hatches.”
“Saw your obsidian over the door.”
“The fire won’t touch this place.” Lev said it with confidence. Gabe had no idea how far the old domovoi’s household magicks went, but he figured that the guy knew how to keep a house from harm.
Petra sank down farther into her seat as Lev placed two beers before them.
“How’s that body wearing?” Lev asked, with forced casualness.
Petra sucked in her breath. “Good. It’s good. I mean, it’s . . . perfect.” She lifted her hand before her and curled her fingers. Wonder still lighted her eyes. In the middle of the night, Gabe would sometimes wake to see her, sitting up in bed, staring at her hands.
Lev nodded. “I knew it would be,” he said quietly. His eyes had turned the dark color of a bruise. Gabe knew that he mourned the loss of the son he had intended to inhabit the homunculus he’d created. In a way, Petra was now his magical progeny, though neither of them were ready to admit it anytime soon.
“Lev.” Petra looked up at him. “I’m sorry,” she blurted. “I know you didn’t intend to save me, but I am thankful that—”
Lev cut her off with a dismissive gesture. “It’s done and over. We’re all good.” But this was something that would never be good, a debt that could not ever be repaid. Gabe knew about debts, and this one—this one was forever.
Despite that—or maybe because of that—Lev changed the subject, away from magic and back to something normal. There seemed to be a lot of that going around lately “The special tonight is the pulled pork sandwich with baked potato and slaw.”
“That sounds good,” Petra said. “I’d like that and an extra order of pork for the little guy.”