Phoenix Falling

by Laura Bickle

  He took a step back and lashed out with the whip. The air crackled silver, and he struck it three more times with increasing force before the enchantments grudgingly broke with a sound like rusted metal creaking. The fall of the whip caught a latch on the gate. He pulled with all his strength, and the gate opened.

  He stepped inside, feeling the raven’s gaze upon him. The atmosphere inside the fence was thick and oppressive, tasting of ozone. The silver filament around his waist stretched taut over the iron filigree of the fence.

  He hesitated. This felt wrong. But there were many wrong things in the spirit world, of course. If he gave in to fear, he might as well go home and resume his role as an old man with nothing more exciting to do than choose pie or pudding for dessert. He screwed up his courage and patted the protective charms that he kept in his pockets, bits of carbon quartz. The path led to the phoenix. He had to learn more.

  Something squeaked behind him. The gate. It swung shut and latched, though there was no wind to stir it.

  Joseph growled and faced the house with the black windows. Whatever was inside was expecting him.

  A salamander crawled over his foot. He stayed still, feeling the heat of its belly through his shoe leather. The salamander slipped away into the grass.

  Fire magic here, then. The salamander was an avatar of fire. Perhaps the phoenix was not far away and the raven had led him true . . .

  Ghostly figures moved toward the house, and the sky darkened. Joseph squinted at the translucent figures. These were old ghosts, little more than the land’s memory of a time past. They couldn’t harm him. He watched as they surrounded the house, hissing and chanting. They carried torches, burning bright with a foxfire-like light. They cast the torches at the house, and the house caught ghostly fire, the foxfire howling up the walls and forming cataracts on those black windows. The raven flew away, heading south and east.

  He knew now, what this house was. It belonged to the first Alchemist of Temperance. It was no surprise that the house cast a shadow here, in the spirit world. But what was Lascaris’s connection to the phoenix? Had he summoned the bird? Joseph reached into his pocket for a piece of carbon quartz and kissed it for protection. This was a dark place. Finding answers here could be hazardous.

  As if on cue, the house began to collapse, the black glass breaking. The fire roared through it, chewing through every timber and bit of plaster. The ghosts walked away, toward the town, and only smoldering rubble remained.

  Joseph approached the house warily, stepping through foxfire embers. The house was a charred mess, only the chimney still standing. His feet crunched on broken glass and bits of silverware. The second floor had collapsed onto the smoldering first. Both floors had fallen into the basement, where a large darkness yawned.

  Joseph twitched the whip. That darkness . . .

  . . . was lit up in a rush of orange flame. Joseph felt his eyebrows burning from the flash heat and threw his arm up over his face. He staggered back, away from a rush of searing light and crinkling char.

  He peeked up over his sleeve. A phoenix screamed, climbing into the sky. Its wingspan was that of an eagle’s, seven feet, dripping a great plumage of fire and sparks. Talons bright as lightning scraped the heavens, and obsidian-black eyes raked over the earth.

  Joseph fell to his knees in awe. It was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. The bird flapped its wings, once, twice, and rocketed into the darkening sky, leaving sparks filtering down like snow.

  His hot breath stuck in his throat. That creature was magnificent. It could not be stopped. It had not been born here, in the ashes of this house of magic, he realized, but it had been summoned here, by Lascaris. Its fire had purified this place, the house of the black windows.

  Something groaned in the depths of the house, a deep creak, like glass grating on stone.

  Letting the whip trail beside him, Joseph cautiously approached the yawning hole beyond the foundations, the one that reached into the basement. He stepped over the debris and peered in. Perhaps there would be a sign here of how the bird was summoned, a fragment of the magical recipe that would show him how the phoenix could be put back to sleep.

  It was a darkness like he had never seen. It sucked in all the available light, dimming the guttering embers.

  And the darkness moved.

  Instinctively, Joseph snapped the whip before him, a quicksilver flash in the darkness. The dark snagged the tail of the bullwhip with a hand-like appendage. Joseph quickly hauled it back, freeing the quicksilver from the darkness’s grip.

  He was torn for an instant between the competing desires to turn and run and to fight. This was not of the phoenix; this was something malevolent that had taken root here. It may have summoned the phoenix, but there was no fire nor light in it. Defeating it would not end the fires.

  But letting it live could lead to something worse . . .

  That moment’s hesitation gave the darkness an advantage. It reached upward, clawing around his ankle with a shocking cold that slammed up his leg and crackled along his spine like hoarfrost. It yanked him down, down into that freezing pit that had birthed the phoenix.

  He landed on his ass on cold earth, lashing out with the bright whip. But the dim glow of enchanted quicksilver seemed unable to snag purchase on anything solid here.

  Despite the weapon’s ineffectiveness, the fingers of darkness suddenly retreated, scuttling away.

  Heart hammering, Joseph made a fist with his left hand and pushed some of the light from his aura outward. When he opened it, a violet flame hung in the air, a sphere of flickering light that did its best to illuminate the pit around him.

  It was more than the remains of a cellar. Surrounding him, burned and blackened timbers crushed shelves and tables of gleaming black glass. A cold athanor lay at the opposite end of the shell of a chamber strewn with broken antlers, the stink of sulfur dust, and the glitter of gold. It wasn’t a basement.

  It was a laboratory.

  And with prickling dread, Joseph knew that the creator of this place was still present, that some echo of him was still here. He had not been purified in the phoenix’s fire.

  “Lascaris,” he said, taking a step forward. Beneath his foot, glass crunched. He realized that he’d fractured a mirror underfoot. As he removed his foot, a spiderweb pattern formed in the glass. This was no ordinary mirror—this was a containment vessel. He knew it as soon as he saw it—the kind of thing that kept souls imprisoned, or perhaps safe from a fire. And there were eyes in the glass . . .

  Laughter roared through the mirror and the ruined underground space, rattling fragments of glass and mirror on the ground. The cackling congealed in a corner of the basement. Night gathered thickly there, forming the shape of a man.

  Looking down at the broken mirror, Joseph realized that he’d released something terrible, something that had lurked in the shadow of Temperance for more than a century, waiting to be set loose. It may have been imprisoned in this house, in the fire, in the spirit world.

  But his interference had allowed it to go free.

  “Lascaris,” he breathed. He’d fallen into the trap too easily. Regardless of how Joseph incarnated in the spirit world, he was really just a stupid, stupid old man. He should never have come here. He had to get out, now.

  The black shape straightened, gazing upon Joseph with a gold-glittering glare.

  Joseph lashed out with the whip. It snarled around the ghostly shadow, crackling as it did so. Hope flared redly in him. Perhaps he could put down Lascaris once and for all, remove the curse that had damned Temperance for all these years . . .

  An insubstantial-seeming hand reached out and wrapped around the whip. It yanked on the whip with surprisingly solid force, causing Joseph to stumble. The binding of the bullwhip loosened, and the shadow stepped through.

  It grabbed Joseph with hands as cold as metal. Joseph squirmed and struggled, but was helpless in its grip. The shadow reached up to his face with long fingers and shoved them into his
mouth.

  Joseph tried to scream, but the blackness poured into his belly like cold lake water. The creature had him, he knew . . .

  . . . and then, suddenly, he was severed from his astral body, as if strings were cut. His consciousness poured into the ball of violet flame. The ball began to drift upward into the sky, like dandelion fluff on a summer’s day.

  With horror, he watched his astral body convulse and consume the shadow. It looked up at him with golden eyes, smiling. It climbed up, out of the pit, and followed the silver astral cord of memory back, back to the physical realm. It was bad enough that he’d let that monster free in the spirit world, but in the physical . . . What horrors could he wreak?

  Joseph drifted away, unmoored, toward a white light that he wasn’t ready to meet just yet.

  Petra, I’m sorry, he thought. You were my greatest work, and now I’m leaving you . . .

  And then the light suffused him.

  An old man in a nursing home opened his eyes. His hands were folded across his chest around a small black box with buttons and numbers on it. He relished the feeling of sunshine on his face through a window, the weight of a soft blanket on his body.

  A smile played at the corners of his mouth.

  Lascaris, the Alchemist of Temperance, was awake.

  Chapter 8

  Offerings

  “Where the hell do you think you’re going?”

  Nine paused, halfway out the door. The screen door of Maria’s house rested on her hip, and she tried to wipe a guilty look from her face. She shifted the pack on her back, hoping that the drape of her silver hair hid it.

  But nothing escaped Maria. Not in her house. She stood in the living room with her hands on her hips and Pearl winding around her ankles.

  Nine squinted at the grey and white cat, who was looking particularly smug. The cat had alerted Maria.

  Maria lifted her eyebrows at Nine. “Well?”

  There was no point lying. Nine’s voice was small. “I was going to the phoenix. To make offerings, to see if I could placate it somehow. And . . . to check on the pack.”

  “No.” Maria shook her head.

  Nine’s brow furrowed. Though she wore the human body of a young woman, Nine was an adult. Though she was a guest in Maria’s house, and she deferred to her in all things, she had a few hundred years on her hostess. She lifted her chin and opened her mouth to protest sharply, but Maria lifted her hand.

  “You’re not going anywhere alone,” she said quietly.

  Nine’s shoulders sagged, and she stepped back into the house, letting the door whistle shut. “You’re . . . coming with me?”

  Maria crossed the room and cupped Nine’s chin in her hands, forcing her to look at her. “You’re part of my pack now. Understand?”

  Nine nodded.

  Maria released her. “I’ll get ready. We can take the Blazer. It’ll be much faster than on foot. Would you feed Pearl?”

  She nodded. Nine had not learned to drive in her short time with modern humanity. Nine figured that it might take her a day or two on foot to get to the fire, but thought she might estimate badly, since wolves moved faster on four feet than she could ever hope to on two. A vehicle would clearly be the better bet, and she would wait for Maria as long as she took.

  Nine crossed to the kitchen and fished the cat food bag out of the cabinet. Pearl advanced on her and gave her a rusty meow. Nine sighed. “You don’t keep any secrets from her, do you?”

  Pearl mrrrped in agreement and sat down.

  Nine topped off the cat’s food and water dishes and added extra bowls. She didn’t know how long they’d be gone. She diligently scooped Pearl’s litter box in the bathroom and cracked open a can of wet cat food. Pearl looked up from her kibble and purred as the wolf-woman placed a dish of tuna-flavored mush in front of her.

  Funny how her mouth didn’t water, smelling that, while Pearl pressed herself, facedown, into the canned food. When Nine first arrived at Maria’s house, Maria had caught Nine licking the interior of the cat food can. Maria had reminded her guest that she now was in possession of an omnivorous digestive system that was very similar to that of a rat’s, and that a meat-only diet would land her in a world of hurt. Never mind that Pearl would get pissed with an interloper dipping into her food. After a couple of applications of the stink eye from both her hostess and her cat, Nine hadn’t done that in a long time. Slowly, she’d gotten accustomed to the idea of eating things that were not meat—bread, pasta, fruits, and vegetables. As a wolf, she would only chew at green things under the threat of starvation or if she had an upset belly. She’d progressed from picking at the contents of her plate with her fingers to licking her fork clean of chocolate cake. Her digestive system seemed to approve of the diversity, but doing so left behind a twinge of sadness. She was moving away from the habits of a wolf and becoming domesticated, she guessed.

  She grimaced at that. She’d had mixed feelings about the trappings of domestication, including clothing. On the one hand, she loved being able to layer soft fabric on her body for warmth. She remembered that from her childhood. Maria had gone out of her way to find her clothing that would be comfortable. She’d knitted sweaters for Nine from soft yarn, had brought no less than five pairs of flat-soled shoes home from the thrift store for her to try on. Nine had often been lulled to sleep by the sound of the sewing machine, to awaken in the morning to find a set of clothes sewn for her from materials that Maria called moleskin and velour. Maria found that the first fabric did not resemble real mole skin in any way, but it felt delightful, nevertheless.

  Maria had been good to her, better than Nine’s own human mother or any of her sisters. Still, Nine felt guilty for the ease with which she had slipped back into human life and the speed with which she was leaving her wolf ways behind.

  Maria returned to the kitchen, placing a backpack on the floor. Her hair had been braided away from her face, and she’d left her long skirt behind for pants and boots. She was busily shoving bullets into a gun.

  “That won’t work on the phoenix,” Nine said automatically.

  Maria shrugged. “There are things out there other than the phoenix. Just don’t tell Mike if he catches us.”

  Nine grinned. Mike, the forest man, was a good love match for Maria. She’d never seen him angry at Maria, but maybe it could happen if they went skulking into the fire, into the territory of Yellowstone that he guarded.

  Maria placed the gun in the backpack and went to the sink to fill a scuffed canteen with water. She settled it into the pack and turned to Nine. “What kind of offerings are you intending on making to the phoenix?”

  Nine opened her own bag to show her. “The offerings we made in the past didn’t have much effect,” she admitted. “So I didn’t bother with corn or tobacco or flowers or hides. I know that for any god to be placated, it has to be with something truly valuable and unusual. So . . . I packed what I had.” Shyly, she showed Maria a bag of glittering stones. “I am hoping that the phoenix is like a crow, and that it will like shiny things.”

  Maria picked one up and held it to the light. The sunlight shone through the facets, casting rainbows on the wall. “These are beautiful,” she said. “Quartz . . . and amethyst . . . and these look like parts of geodes. Petra would know for sure. Where did you find these?”

  “At the bottom of the Eye of the World.” Responding to Maria’s sharp glance, Nine shrugged. “I always liked to dive as a child. With the Eye, I just hold my breath and go as far down as I can. Sometimes, I come back with just dirt. Sometimes, I find these.”

  Maria put the stones back in the bag, and Nine zipped up her treasures. Maria pulled a chair up to the kitchen cabinets. She climbed up on the chair and opened the door of the topmost cabinet, carefully removing a bundle wrapped in a newspaper. She stepped down and carried the package to the kitchen table.

  “What’s that?” Nine peered over her shoulder.

  Maria unwrapped the yellowed newspaper carefully. Inside was a large sil
ver pitcher engraved with ornate designs.

  “This was my grandmother’s teapot,” Maria said. “It had been a wedding present.” She rubbed at a spot of tarnish with a cloth. “When I was a little girl, I thought it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. She would set tea for me in the summer afternoons, and I’d get to use the teapot. When she passed away, she hid it away for me. My father’s brothers descended on the house to pick it clean of anything that was worth any money, like picking over a turkey. They never found the teapot. But I found it. It was buried in the garden in a plastic bag.” Maria sighed and smiled, fingering a small dent near the spout that might have been made by a shovel. “She knew that I would be the only one who would ever dig in her garden.”

  “It’s really beautiful,” Nine said.

  “But that’s not the most valuable thing she left me,” Maria said. “There was something inside.” She reached into the belly of the teapot and pulled out a leather pouch. She opened the drawstring bag to withdraw a necklace.

  Nine’s breath caught in her throat. She had not seen anything so fine in many human lifetimes. The necklace was made of oblong bone beads and turquoise stone beads, strung together in four rows with a fine leather cording. The beads were smoothly polished, so much so that the reflection of the overhead light could be seen glistening in them. It was the kind of necklace that Nine had once seen warriors wear with breastplates made of the same shapes of bone hewn by knives over firelight.

  “It’s magnificent,” she whispered, her fingers hovering over it. She was afraid to touch it, not because it was fragile, but because it was so sacred to Maria.

  “It belonged to my great-great-grandfather. Each bead was carved from one of the tailbones of a buffalo that he killed. It’s the only thing I have from him, and it’s the most valuable thing I own,” Maria said. She handed it to Nine.

  Nine accepted it reverently, gazing at the cool beads in her palm. “You don’t mean to give this to the phoenix . . .” She knew how much it would cost Maria to lose such a treasure.