by Laura Bickle
She gave a short bark, a sharp sound of certainty. They followed, a low keen coming from the pack. She looked over her shoulder and counted noses. None were left behind. Heat washed over her, and she moved quickly, almost at a run, through the mouth of the gorge. The wolves followed, ears flattened.
Once through the mouth of the canyon, the fire was close, just yards away. She turned a hard left, remembering what she’d seen on the map. There had to be a safe place to take them.
There had to be.
Overhead, the fire had begun to rattle through the pine trees in sheets. She pulled the bandanna up over her nose and ran. The wolves kept pace with her. She paused when one of the wolves yipped in pain, having stepped on an ember. The wolf limped, trying to catch up with the others.
Nine stopped. Carefully, she picked the wolf up, one arm around the wolf’s backside and the other around her chest. This young one weighed about fifty pounds, about the same as Maria’s bags of birdseed, but birdseed didn’t squirm. Nine straightened her back and ran as quickly as she could, fur surging in a wave around her.
But the fire was fast. It was as if it chased them. As if it wanted to specifically consume this pack and the forest with it. She could hear pinecones crackling open and wood groaning. She focused on the path ahead. There was a river just beyond, according to the map. The land dipped, and she stumbled down a bank to a stream bed.
This far into drought, the river had all but dried up. Where the walls of the riverbed were easily fifteen feet tall, the water was just four feet of muddy creek at the bottom. Some wilting white cow parsnips nodded by the banks. Nine plunged into the water, the wolves pouring in around her. The wolf in her arms, discovering that it was just deep enough to swim, twisted away to paddle in the lukewarm water.
Nine looked back. The fire had licked the bank, jumping over the water to the opposite side in sparks. Nine sank up to her neck in the water. She turned to move upstream with the wolves, away from the fire. Ash coated the surface of the water, which was curiously thick with hundreds of tiny black toads that seemed to stare at the fire, as if entranced.
The pack moved slowly, even though the current wasn’t fast. Nine could feel the relief in them as they paddled away from the disaster. The fire, moving perpendicular to them, washed over the bank and continued its course, going south. Nine was grateful for this stream, as she had been for the creek that saved her life as a little girl.
But there was no time for rest. Nine urged them east, away from the fire roaring south behind them. The wolves took turns wading into the shallows and walking along the pebbled surface of the riverbed. Nine’s human clothes and pack felt heavy when she left the water, but she continued. The longer she walked, the more she was aware of the incline, how much the water pushed against her. Eventually, she and the wolves climbed out of the water. She paused to examine the paw of the wolf who’d stepped on an ember. The water had rinsed it free of debris. Nine found some ointment in Mike’s pack and applied it to the wound. She washed her bandanna and wrapped the paw loosely with the red fabric. The wolf was able to put a little weight on it, much to Nine’s relief. She wouldn’t have been able to carry the wolf for much longer.
They followed the creek shore as the incline grew. The air grew clearer as they climbed. Nine urged them forward until dark, when the bedraggled wolves began to stumble with their tongues hanging out of their mouths.
Nine stopped then, at the edge of the water. In the darkness, she could still see the orange line of fire on the horizon, many miles away. She would watch it tonight, but they’d continue east in the morning.
She dug into her bag for food. Mike, ever a practical man concerned with his protein consumption, had left several packets of jerky in his bag. Nine opened it and gave pieces of it to each member of the pack. She took none for herself. She had eaten today. They took the morsels gratefully; no one had the energy to hunt.
Nine lay down on a rock, within arm’s reach of the water. She pulled the crinkly metallic blanket out of the bag to cover herself. Perhaps they could sleep for a couple of hours before going on. To her surprise, she was quickly surrounded by fur. Wolf after wolf lay down beside her, on her, and her heart swelled. She was back in the pack, trusted, at the bottom of the wolf pile.
Tears dampened her cheek. She didn’t make any effort to brush them away; to do so might disturb the wolves. She intended to remain awake, to savor each sigh and grumbling belly and shared flea over the night, but she dozed. She dreamed, off and on, of cooler territory without fire, of the cool snow of winter.
She woke hours before the sun. Fire burned in a hot line behind them, from north to south. She whined softly to wake the pack. They tumbled out of the pile with yawns and growls. She consulted the map, inspired by her dream. There had to be a safe place for the wolves, and she thought she saw one illustrated on the map—Eagle Peak. The elevation was high enough that there should still be snow there, and the wolves would be safe from fire.
We have to go, she thought, but was afraid to use her human voice with them. She crawled to her feet and began to move east again, shifting northeast as they followed the water. The wolves loped behind her.
As they walked, the stream grew colder, and the source of it became apparent: mountains. Nine barked at them, and they followed the slow increase in incline, through fields and over other rivers, climbing up, up, up . . . Eventually, they cleared the smoke clinging to the ground, and Nine could take deep lungfuls of air. Stars could even be seen here, at this elevation.
After many hours, the cold ground underfoot was coated with snow. Brittle grasses gave way to supple mosses as the sun crept across the sky. One of the wolves even managed to catch a rabbit, and another snagged a weasel. Here on the mountain, the fire could not touch them. It would gain no footholds with the wet moss, rock, and snow. It was a relief to know that even something as powerful as the phoenix had a foe—the mountain—it couldn’t simply consume.
As the sun slipped over the horizon, lighting the smoke below a lurid orange, Nine sat down on a rock outcropping. Ghost leaned next to her. She yipped softly. She hoped that they understood; that this place was their new territory. That they would be safe here. They could follow the food down to the valley in the winter, and come back up in the summer.
The pack leader threw back his head and howled. The other wolves joined him, and so did Nine. Their tails swished in happiness. The wolf with the burned paw was walking on it, pressing it to the cool stone. Nine inspected it closely and rubbed on some more medicine from Mike’s kit. She would heal.
Nine rubbed tears that sprang to her eyes. The pack was safe. Ghost lay down beside her, licking her cheek, as the pack explored.
I wish I could stay with you, she thought. And she was tempted. If she stayed with them, she might be able to protect them from all kinds of danger, from fire and threats that walked on two legs.
But.
For all that protection she might be able to offer, she knew she could not keep up with them. They had four legs; she only had two. And if she stayed, she would freeze to death by September. She would become a burden to them, and she couldn’t bear that. If she were a wolf, she would have remained, happily, as the omega wolf of the pack, one with the pack. She ached for the memory of that time. Her mind and her heart warred in her chest.
She struggled with it, but she always seemed to come back to the fact she was now meant to watch them from afar. To visit them through the Eye of the World. And to intervene when she could, when map-reading and speaking to humans were necessary. The problem with that fact was that it felt hollow and sad to her, like being a voyeur in her own life.
The leader gazed at her wisely. Perhaps he understood more than she thought.
Eventually, Nine climbed to her feet. She had to go. She had no supplies, and she needed to at least let Maria know she was safe. Her hand slipped up to the precious bone necklace circling her throat. She had to return it.
Ghost laid his head down on his paws.
He made no move to follow her. Instead, he watched her descend the mountain, not looking away from her once.
Distantly, Nine heard howling. Through her tears, she smiled.
“I will come back,” she promised. And she meant it.
Chapter 13
Invisible Gold
The Alchemist of Temperance had intended to wait in his bed at the prison for the elderly for a few days, to collect information and become familiar with this rather frail body he’d been saddled with. He lay in bed for a while, testing his muscles and gazing up at the box on the wall that showed pictures of people. Fabulous bit of magic, that.
He knew he could wait. Perhaps get this body in better condition. He could be patient. He slept in this warm bed, gathering his strength. One of the women in white came for him after he woke. She talked to him as if he were a child, but she gave him chocolate pudding in a translucent dish and another pillow. He ate it and she left another for him. She patiently showed him how to work the box on the wall, which changed from a channel featuring men running around after balls to people playing music. He consumed the pudding greedily while he watched the box on the wall, discovering that the picture changed when he pressed the buttons.
She asked him when his daughter would be visiting, and his ears perked up. Joseph Dee had a daughter. He was certain that an alchemist like Joseph would have passed his knowledge on to her. He was resolved to wait for Joseph Dee’s daughter to come to him and find out what she knew. She might be useful to him, if even only as a guide to the outside world.
The world had changed much since he’d trod this earth with solid feet. He’d glimpsed bits and pieces from the spirit world, images he could scry in the bottom of a cup of tea or in the black glass of his house when the moon was ripe. He saw that people flew the skies in great metal birds, that they piloted strange craft on smooth roads, and that petticoats were no longer in fashion. Beyond that, though, he was lost.
But the box on the wall spoke to him of something more wondrous than short skirts and supersonic speeds. He leaned forward, spotted brow crinkling, as he saw a man talking about a great fire.
The man was gesturing to smoke, to fire consuming a forest behind him. He was saying: “. . . this is the largest fire in Yellowstone’s history. Meteorologists are discussing the role of the weather in this disaster. The hot, dry summer has certainly contributed, as have the strong winds. But there might be something more in the sky that’s keeping the fire going.”
The picture switched to a blurry night-sky scene. A falling star pierced the sky, a blaze of distant orange with an irregular shape.
“Our meteorological team has been sent footage of this rare form of ball lightning by a local photographer. Lightning is a natural contributor to forest fires, but this kind is unusual. Ball lightning forms when regular lightning becomes caught in what’s called a plasma bubble. You’d think that this would mean rain for us, but none of the weather systems has produced rain that has reached the ground, so . . .”
Lascaris was transfixed. That was no lightning.
That was a phoenix.
My phoenix.
It was back. After all this time, it had awoken without him. Maybe it had come at the behest of another alchemist—Joseph Dee’s daughter? Or perhaps it was operating on its own internal cycle. He pressed his hands together and rested his chin on his fingertips. He’d tried so desperately to conjure the phoenix long ago, to summon it out of the ether to merge with him in the most glorious conjunction process he could imagine. It would have brought him all he sought—immortal life, unimaginable power. He would be eternal and indestructible, the Great Work completed. But he’d had to rush it when the town of Temperance had arrived on his doorstep. He’d fouled it up and lost it all.
But now he had the opportunity again. He would not be thwarted this time. He would not be confined to a buried mirror for more than a century, then drifting at the margins of the spirit world when the broken mirror could not contain him. Nor would a prison for the elderly keep him. He would be free.
He knew that the phoenix would be attracted to magic. And the stronger, the better. He needed to get out of this place, to summon his power and send it up into the sky, like a signal flare, to draw the creature to him. Then, he could snare it and finally complete the Great Work.
And there was no time to waste.
He’d been sitting on the bed, putting on the shoes he found nearby, when a man in white had come for him, insisting cheerfully that it was time to take his pills. Lascaris shook his head, thinking that at least in the prison for old people, he would have the autonomy to refuse them.
The man in white tried to talk him into them, promising him pie. As if pie would convince him to lie back and be silent, in some medicated stupor! Again, Lascaris refused, but the man in white persisted. He sat beside Lascaris on the bed and tried to take Lascaris’s shoes off while muttering something soothing at a beeping black box he plucked from his belt.
Lascaris had no patience for this. He closed his eyes. He had no idea what alchemical powers might have followed him from the spirit world into this new body. But something surely must have come with him. He let his mind become blank and black, and the astrological symbol for Capricorn, the sign of the alchemical fermentation process, rose in his mind’s eye.
He reached out for the man in white and whispered: “Corrumpere.”
He felt the alchemical power flare darkly in him, racing through his marrow like a spark on a dynamite fuse. It slipped from his mind, through his chest, down his fingers, and into the back of the hand of the man in white.
The man in white snatched his hand away, as if he’d been burned. The man staggered back and sagged against the bed, sliding to the floor. His hand, smearing against the white linens, was black, spreading ooze as he fell. By the time his head hit the floor, he had liquefied into a puddle that smelled like vinegar. He’d been consumed in the most perfect fermentation process that Lascaris had ever seen, the Touch of Death.
Pleased, he climbed to his feet and stood over the puddle, transfixed. He possessed the Touch of Death, the alchemical process that dissolved everything. He knew, with every fiber of his being, that he was now ready to meet the phoenix in the next alchemical process, the purification by fire that would come from distillation. When death and fire came together, great magic would be released. It was heady, this tangible result of his accumulated knowledge.
But the man in white was gone. Someone would certainly want revenge for this. Lascaris grasped a wooden chair sitting beside the window. He swung it at the glass. On the first strike, it bounced off. On the second, the window shattered, spewing glass over him in strangely shaped flakes. While he’d have loved to stay and study the strange material, he knew time was short. He climbed through the window to find himself on a paved area where vehicles were parked.
He ran, away from the vehicles and the prison for old men. He ran through a forest, past a roadhouse that smelled of delicious food. His bones felt thin and creaky, but he went as fast as he dared. He skulked around the corner of a five-story building—five stories!—that seemed to house people. He avoided them and continued until he reached a house standing by itself in a field. His breath was ragged and his muscles ached. This body had clearly not seen such activity for many years. If he could find supplies, perhaps he could make himself an elixir that would fortify him for the hunt to find the phoenix.
The house looked abandoned, with no evidence of human activity around it. The curtains were drawn tight across every window, and weeds grew in the gravel around a dusty blue vehicle. The front step was crumbling, and the thin shingles on the roof were lifting.
He thought that perhaps he could break in, to rest for a moment and consider his options. Surely, there would be men looking for him. He needed to evade them long enough to figure out exactly where he was, and how to get to the phoenix.
He knocked on the door, arranging his reflection in the glass to seem meek and mild. Creaking sounded from
inside, and Lascaris felt a pang of anger that the place was not abandoned as he thought. Eventually, the door opened, and Lascaris found himself staring into the face of an elderly woman. She was shrunken with age, coming barely up to Lascaris’s chest. She peered at him through smudged eyeglasses. She was wearing a flower-printed dress and had long grey hair braided over her shoulder.
“Hello?” she creaked out.
“Hello,” Lascaris said. “I find myself lost. Might I come in?”
The old woman squinted at him. “I don’t much like visitors.”
“I don’t much like visiting.” He refused to budge.
The old woman huffed. “You can use the phone, but then you have to promise to leave.”
“All right. Thank you.” Lascaris had no idea what a phone was, but it sounded like it would get him across the threshold to relative safety.
The house was cold and quiet—surprisingly cold. The old woman minced across a ragged fluffy carpet to point to a box on the wall with a string dangling from it in coils. She pointed to it. “One call. No long distance.”
Lascaris stared at the turquoise box. He poked at it. Part of the box fell off and landed on the floor, tethered by the coiled string, and he jumped away from it as if it were a striking snake.
“Oh, Jesus Christ,” the old woman said. “You’re senile, aren’t you?”
He blinked at her. Maybe it was good that she thought that there was something wrong with him. He rubbed his forehead.
“Sit down,” she said, pulling out a chair for him before a painted yellow table covered in papers. She walked slowly over to the piece of the box on the floor and placed it back on its hook.
“Let me get ready. I’ll drive you to the police station.”
Lascaris perked up. He’d spied on this world enough from the picture box to understand what that meant. There was a vehicle that she could operate. This could be his ticket to freedom. “All right.”