by Laura Bickle
Gunshots sounded far behind him, and he turned. Petra. She had found Lascaris. At least that enemy was dispatched. Now he could focus on the phoenix. It flapped its wings over the field a dozen yards before him, burning like a sun. Its wings churned flame and eye-searing smoke, seeming the very root of chaos in Gabe’s world.
A deep rumble emanated from the earth. Gabe’s tearing vision flicked to the hill beneath the Lunaria, to the mouth of the underground river.
For the first time in centuries, he stood frozen in shock.
A black shape as big as a car splashed out of the maw of the underworld. It bellowed a roar that rattled Gabe’s teeth and shook sparks in the air, plunging into the field toward the phoenix. It took him a moment to register that the interloper was a toad, black and roiling like thunder.
And the toad was not alone. Dozens of white shapes stampeded from the river behind it. They were pale as bone with oozing black eyes, crested spines undulating in the half-light, and hooves pounding like war drums. The bones were partially covered in skins that resembled rotting leaves, the legs spattered in black ichor to the knee. Horns were lowered to the grass as they charged, jaws open in rictus grins. They were buffalo, Gabe realized. Or what remained of buffalo, reformed and reanimated in some deadly familiar alchemical process.
Whatever they were, they were heading right for him.
Gabe swore. He had to get out of the way or be trampled. He pocketed the mirror and ran as fast as he could through the burning grasses, perpendicular to their approach. He’d almost succeeded in getting clear of them when a buffalo clipped him and he bounced, hard, into a ditch. He dragged himself, gasping, to his feet, to find a wretched stench washing over him and a black eye staring at him—the eye of the black toad. The toad smelled of putrefied meat in a forgotten slaughterhouse in the summer, and its loose skin soughed audibly as it moved.
“What are you?” Gabe asked, though he was afraid to know.
“I am death,” the toad reassured him. It flicked its tongue out at him, and the black slime slipped down Gabe’s face. The toad burbled in laughter. “And you. You will belong to me when the phoenix is defeated. You will be one of my foot soldiers when this is through, when death rules this land.”
Gabe’s eyes narrowed. He had seen great evil before, many times. But this thing was beyond a facile explanation of evil. It was a living personification of the fermentation process, the spirit of rot and dismantling living things to their core. The phoenix might burn everything it touched with the purity of fire, but the toad would rule it in slow decomposition. Gabe’s fingers slid to his pocket, to the mirror.
The toad turned away, plunging after the buffalo. The phoenix descended from the sky, lighting in the field with a contentious shriek. Buffalo raced toward it. Like a toreador, the bird flicked its wings toward them, blackening bones that charged it, sizzling ichor, until the buffalo paled to ash and disintegrated. But there was a herd, and they kept coming. The reanimated buffalo made no sound as they assaulted the fire, splintering and stampeding toward the bird that flitted just out of reach, taunting them with the veil of its wings.
Gabe pulled out the mirror. Now that the embodiment of death was on the field, he should plunge in now, while the bird was distracted, and the glitter of the mirror might catch its eye.
The phoenix drew itself into the air with two powerful beats of its wings, out of reach of buffalo horns. But that didn’t deter the toad. It leaped up into the air and clamped its jaws down on the phoenix’s burning tail feathers, dragging it back down to earth and the hooves of the buffalo. The toad and the phoenix fizzled sharply as they wrestled, and the air shimmered with the smell of burned rubber.
Now was his chance. Gabe had taken two steps toward the fray when he heard a plaintive coyote howl, back from the direction of the tree and wrecked vehicles. The howl was full of eerie sorrow, as if it petitioned the heavens for mercy.
Sig. And Petra.
Heart hammering in his chest, Gabe turned and ran toward the howl.
Petra was not going to let this shiny new human body bleed out all over the foot of the Tree of Life. It would be the equivalent of totaling a brand-new sports car, and she had decided that she was not going to stand for it.
Petra crawled to her feet and stumbled away from the upturned SUV. Sig followed her, making piteous noises. She approached the tree, which she was quite certain was judging her on her lack of effectiveness, leaning on it for support. Her hand left a bloody print on the bark and the leaves overhead rattled at her. Some of the topmost branches of the tree had caught fire from sparks, and a couple had fallen down to the ground, where they burned in fiery puddles in the grass.
She sank to her knees and awkwardly ripped her shirtsleeve and collar away from the gunshot wound. She reached for one of the burning sticks. She blew on the guttering end of it, intensifying the flame.
Sig gave her a reproachful look.
“The blood’s gotta stop, buddy,” she told him. “If I pass out, we’re literal toast.”
She squeezed her eyes shut and jammed the end of the stick into the wound to cauterize it. The pain was brilliant, unlike anything she’d felt before. She forgot to scream, but nearly passed out and fell to her side on the ground. Sig busily washed her face with his tongue, whimpering.
“Oh shit,” she mumbled. “Oh shit.”
Sig’s tail slapped her ribs.
And she opened her eyes and said it again: “Oh shit.”
Lascaris had gotten to his feet. The front of his shirt was stained red, but the bastard was wiping blood—her blood—from the side of the wrecked SUV. And he knelt to draw on the ground with it.
She pressed her forehead to the ground. “Why will he not die, already?”
Sig growled, but Petra caught his collar. “No. You’re not to touch him, understand?” She rolled to her side to reach her second gun. It still had ammo.
Lascaris turned his face to her and shouted, “You think bullets would be my end? I’m to be immortal!” He chuckled, a horrible sound. “You, though . . . such a shame.”
Lascaris drew on the ground, muttering an incantation. One hand was lifted to the air as he did so, and a mad smile was plastered across his bloody face. He was summoning the phoenix.
A birdlike shriek sounded, and an orange glow spread overhead. The phoenix twisted and turned in the air, as if drawn by invisible wires, pulling it inexorably closer to Lascaris.
Shit. She was not going to let this happen.
She crawled forward. The tree was between her and where Lascaris was doing his stupid wizard happy dance. There had to be something she could do to disrupt it. Her gaze fell on a runnel of gasoline trickling toward the edge of Lascaris’s magic circle. A finger of it reached over the symbols, blotting out a symbol.
Petra lifted her gun and aimed at the gas tank. Her arm quaked, and she forced herself to stop breathing, but the gun still shook. She had to do this. Though this monster wore her father’s face, he was Gabe’s worst enemy, cause of unfathomable suffering to the man she loved. She may not survive this fight, but she needed to do this, not just for Temperance and the reservation, but for him. She needed to remove this evil from Gabe, this shadow that had darkened his steps for over a hundred years.
Sig slipped under her arm, and his rock-solid back steadied her.
“Good boy.”
She curled around him, shielding him with her body, and fired.
The shot entered just below the gas door. For a second, nothing happened, and despair welled up in Petra’s throat.
Then it went up like the Fourth of July.
She held Sig close as the explosion thundered over the ground.
And the Lunaria’s roots reached up and over Petra and Sig. She didn’t have the strength to fight them as they drew them down, down into the darkness of the tree’s realm.
Lascaris was gone. And so were Petra and Sig.
Gabe hoped that they’d had the chance to escape through the underground river, t
o cool tunnels that could never burn. Fire had claimed the wreckage of the SUV. A burning fairy ring of a magic circle surrounded a husk of a man’s body. That was surely Lascaris.
Petra had won . . . but at what cost? He paused when he saw the smear of red on the tree, soaking into the bark. His fingers lingered there, and he shouted for Petra.
But she didn’t answer.
Above, the phoenix screamed at the Lunaria, a battle cry that chilled Gabe down to his marrow. The tree’s enchantments to hide itself had been broken. And the bird swooped down to the tree.
Gabe thrust the mirror before him, turned skyward. But a sheet of fire pushed him back. He flung his arm over his face and advanced forward.
Above him, the phoenix and the tree were locked in mortal combat. The phoenix attempted to light on the tree, but the Lunaria’s branches twisted and turned to form a cage around it. The bird beat its wings against the cage. Leaves crisped, and Gabe smelled wood burning. The tree could not fight fire.
He shouted for the bird over the roar of the flames, but he was too insignificant to gain its attention.
The tree struck him, then, hit him hard. A branch slammed him back and sent him tumbling down the hillock toward the river. He landed on his ass in shallow water. Gabe gasped in fury, clutching the unbroken mirror to his chest. The tree was trying its damnedest to protect him, but it was his turn to protect it . . .
The remaining buffalo thundered up the hill to the tree, but the bird was undeterred. The Lunaria was burning; he could smell it.
He would not allow this. He gathered himself to his feet, wincing, and charged up the hill. The soles of his shoes were melting, sticking in the blackened grasses, and fire licked his sleeves. He knew he would not survive this.
But he was going to stuff this mirror down the phoenix’s throat, if it was the last thing he did.
Petra sucked in her breath in the rumbling darkness. She was too exhausted to fight, but she realized that she didn’t have to. Sig was curled up at her belly, and the tree’s roots held them in a cradle of tendrils belowground. The river muttered beneath them.
She pressed her filthy and bloody hand to a root.
“Thank you,” she said.
Above, the tree groaned, a death rattle of a sigh.
She laced her fingers in the roots, as if she were twining her fingers into the hand of a friend. Tears obscured her vision. “No. You have to fight. You have to live. You have to live for Gabe, for the ranch, for Temperance, for all of us.” They all needed her, in their fashion.
A tree root reached out and stroked her hair, tenderly, but in a gesture of sadness.
She gritted her teeth. There had to be a way . . .
Something splashed in the dark below her.
“Gabe?” she shouted out. It had to be him.
No answer.
She narrowed her eyes to stare into the dimness. “Who’s there?”
She could make out the shape of something large and black and burned swimming in the river below her. Steam hissed where water made contact with its flesh. And it stank. It reeked like burned hair, rotten fruit, and a compost pile gone wrong.
“It is I,” it said. “Pigin. The defeated God of Death.” The creature’s voice was bitter with fury. It paused in swimming, and Petra could see its shape now, vaguely amphibious, though her brain rejected the idea of a toad bigger than a couch. This had to be Nine’s Toad God.
“Wait . . . you’re fighting the phoenix?”
“Always. I have fought it with all the power of death at my disposal. All the bones I raised are now burned to cinders.”
“We can’t let it win,” Petra protested.
“The fight is already lost.” It began to splash away.
“Wait,” she said, thoughts churning. “You said bones. You need bones?”
Pigin paused and blinked at her with an eye the color of a rotten egg.
Petra leaned her face close to a gap in the roots, wrinkling her nose at the stench. “I can tell you where to find bones.”
Gabe had climbed the Lunaria. He felt his skin blistering and palms blackening. His shirt was on fire. Ash and embers rained down on him. He was within ten feet of the phoenix, but it was winning. Half of the Lunaria had burned away as the phoenix broke free of its cage.
He howled at the bird. It smacked Gabe with a burning wing and knocked him out of the tree. He landed, gasping, on the ground. He fumbled for the mirror, praying it was still unbroken.
He crawled to where Lascaris had created his summoning circle. Fire had burned the bloody edges of it, but perhaps he could restore it for long enough to get the phoenix to peer into the mirror. He traced the edge in the dirt, muttering to himself as he restored the symbols staining the ground. He was a piss-poor magician, but he’d seen enough of Lascaris’s works to try to force it to work. Sweat beaded from his brow and landed on the scorched ground as he frantically scribbled with a blackened stick into the earth. His hands were badly burned, and he struggled to hold the stick with both hands.
The phoenix screamed above him. Gabe looked up, to see silhouettes emerging from the darkness of the field to the south. Gabe squinted at them through tearing eyes. They marched in a broad and ragged line, pale bones shrouded in black rot. Eyes glowed like embers in their skulls as they moved across the field, to the phoenix.
Gabe knew them.
They were the Hanged Men.
The Lunaria shuddered in recognition, as if a sob racked through its sap. It keened, a soft, plaintive cry.
The Hanged Men circled the tree, silently staring up at the burning bird. The phoenix screamed at them with its shimmering, deafening voice, taunting them, as if it knew it was well out of reach. It could perch in the tree until it burned down to the roots.
The Hanged Men reached their hands up, as if to futilely grasp for the phoenix . . .
. . . but the men dissolved into birds. They were not ravens as Gabe knew them, but rotting pieces of black flesh rippling through the air on skeletal wings. Like rotted leaves in a maelstrom, they swarmed the phoenix.
The phoenix took wing, attempting to get away, surging up into the sky.
Gabe scribbled the last alchemical symbol in the ash, slapped his palm to the ground and howled: “Come to me!”
The phoenix paused, as if an unseen hand had tugged at its tail feathers. It strained upward, trying to resist the pull of the circle, shrieking.
The black birds, the thousands of them, congealed around it. The dead birds clotted and smothered the unearthly flame, like mud on a campfire. The phoenix screamed piteously, then fell out of the sky like a star.
The black toad thundered from the billowing smoke to where the phoenix struck ground. With two quick gulps, it swallowed the creature. It shook its head right and left, as if the bird burned its throat, but the phoenix stayed down. The toad closed its eyes, seeming to savor the victory.
The remaining birds of the Hanged Men fluttered back to the tree, where they perched like rotten leaves on burned branches.
A raindrop hit Gabe’s upturned face. Then another. The smoke gathered in the sky, turning to heavy rainclouds. Rain spangled his shoulders, and the coolness felt glorious on his injuries. And then the drops paused—only for a torrent of rain to wash down on the land, guttering the fire and pressing the ash into black mud.
The toad turned to Gabe with a satisfied expression on his face. “I triumph. Rot reigns in Temperance. Kneel before your true master, Death.”
Gabe limped toward the toad. He came to one creaking knee and held out his closed hands to the toad. “I welcome Death. I offer you a gift.”
He opened his hands and the toad peered into the mirror.
There was the sharp hiss of an indrawn breath, and then the toad collapsed. It melted, as if it were tar on a roof, liquefying into a stinking ooze that sank into the Lunaria’s roots. Rain pounded it down, and the roots seethed and sucked at it eagerly.
Gabe approached the Lunaria with the mirror. The mirror had tu
rned to black glass, black as a witch’s scrying mirror. A tree root reached up for the mirror. Gabe handed it to the root. More roots pulled up from the earth with a sucking sound and wrapped over and around the mirror, encasing it in a shell. And the encasement sank belowground, as safe as anything buried could be.
His attention was snagged by something flying in his peripheral vision. His brow wrinkled as he spied a small machine, a drone, buzzing about twelve yards distant. He had no idea how much it had seen or, worse, how much it had recorded. When he took a step toward it, it flew away, beating a hasty retreat across the field.
He wanted to change to ravens, to chase it down. Feathers began to twitch beneath his skin, but he pushed them down. He needed to find Petra first, to make sure she and Sig were safe.
Gabe turned to slide down the muddy embankment to the river. Ash flowed on the surface of the water like a filmy skin. Gabe waded upstream, beneath the tree, to a softly glowing light. His chest ached.
Lascaris was dead.
The phoenix was gone.
The God of Death was imprisoned.
And perhaps everyone he loved was gone as well.
The Lunaria opened its wooden cradle and gently deposited Petra and Sig on the bank of the underground river. A soft tendril of a root gently touched Petra’s wounded shoulder.
Petra stroked the tree root with her good hand. “I’ll be okay. I just need a doctor.” She was wobbly on her feet, but was reasonably certain she’d live.
And the tree had survived. She was glad for that, whatever else had transpired topside. It was silent now, save for the rushing of the water. She tangled her fingers in the roots and smiled. “Thank you for protecting us.”
A hand-like appendage reached from the mass of roots and opened spidery fingers. Inside the root-ball was a stone, a walnut-sized green one. Petra picked it up and squinted at it. It looked like a rough emerald. Whatever it was, it was a peace offering.