Witch Creek

by Laura Bickle

  While she was contemplating the man’s edibility, he snorted against the hat, waking himself up. He shifted to adjust the hat.

  “Oh, shit!” he exclaimed, spying Muirenn. He flopped against the far side of the boat, rocking it and splashing.

  Instinct kicked in. Muirenn lunged for him, grasping his shirt. He tried to beat her back, and he was strong. He’d dragged Muirenn half into the boat, swinging one arm like a windmill and bellowing. Blows landed against Muirenn’s side and face. It hurt, but it also made her feel alive. A smile crept over her face as she took everything in. It didn’t take long before she knew what she had to do.

  Air was his element. So she leaned sharply back, capsizing the small rowboat. She and the man spilled into the water. He made to swim away, flailing in the clumsy way that people did. She let him for a little bit . . . just because.

  Then Muirenn slithered to the bottom of the creek, came up from beneath him, and grabbed his boot. He struggled against the anchor, but that only made things easier as she pulled him down. Muirenn guessed that he might be just a bit stronger than her in the air, but even then, not by much. Besides, she was growing stronger with good nourishment, and in the water, he didn’t stand a chance.

  His fingers could just reach into the air and stirred it, but his head was beneath the waterline. He shouted, thrashing and spewing bubbles. Muirenn held his boot close to her chest, cradling it as if she were a still stone.

  Eventually, he convulsed, and stopped. Muirenn waited until he was well and truly still, though. She shook him a couple of times to test if he were playing opossum, but his arms just floated above him, limp and lifeless.

  Grinning wildly now, she pulled him down to the bottom. She began to take him apart. The flesh separated easily, bones popping out. Through the red haze, she could see that most of the flesh was pink and healthy-looking. It smelled fresh, too. She tasted a bit of rib meat, and it was savory and soft with fat. It was good, and she didn’t think it would make her sick.

  But the arms . . . she wasn’t sure of those. Too big a risk. She ripped them off and thought of casting them away. Perhaps someone would find them and come looking for her. She grimaced a bit at that.

  She hunted around, waiting for the water to rinse the body clean. She found a heavy rock in the middle of the creek, at least forty pounds. She jammed the ink-poisoned arms underneath the rock. A snapping turtle ambled forward, his interest piqued. He began to nibble on a finger, severing the digit neatly. A plump trout flashed by and took a bite of shredded flesh.

  Muirenn contemplated the turtle. The turtle might be delicious, but it would be a waste of energy to clean the meat out of that shell. As for the trout . . . she hadn’t been kidding: she’d had more than enough of fish.

  She let the scavengers be and grasped the body of the man by an exposed collarbone. She towed him back upstream, going slowly and carefully. Even waterlogged, the body still tried to float, and she wanted to attract no more attention than the trout and the turtle.

  She hauled it back, miles, to the broken gate at the Rutherford Ranch. She slipped into those cold, dark waters. This food would last a long time here, in the chill.

  Swimming until she found the formation of rocks that she’d used as her pathetic pantry over the years, Muirenn pushed a stone aside. The remains of two broken trout were there, and she shoved them to the back. Humming to herself, she tried to jam the body into the little cave. She had to do some creative folding—and break the body at the knees—but she was able to accomplish it. As a treat, she took a foot and chewed the sinew away from the toes. The nails were cartilaginous junk that she spat out; she reminded herself that she no longer had to eat offal.

  A ripple formed in the water above her, a splash and then a plunk.

  Muirenn put the foot back in the pantry. Still chewing, she slipped up to the surface to see.

  Owen stood on the bank, casting pebbles into the water. One skipped past her, and she flinched.

  “Oh. Sorry,” he said. “I don’t know how else to . . . summon you.”

  Muirenn swallowed her food and swam to the bank. “Is all well in your kingdom?”

  She noticed that he stood farther back from the water than usual, well out of her reach. His posture was wary.

  “I spoke to Gabriel about you.”

  Muirenn nodded. “I expected that you would. A wise king would always collect information from many sources.”

  “He said you nearly killed Lascaris. That you betrayed him. That you were once human, and that he changed you to . . . what you are now.”

  “That is true,” she said. “I hunted Lascaris down and had almost killed him. I had been his confidante, a fellow sorcerer. I learned many of his secrets.”

  Owen was a skeptical man. She knew that in order to gain his trust, what she told him would have to be very close to the truth.

  “Like what?”

  His avarice might outstrip his skepticism. She stirred her fingers in the silt beneath her and pulled up a pearl. “I learned how to transmute a great many elements. How to turn sand and water and moonlight into pearls. You have seen this.”

  “True. But why try to kill him?”

  “Lascaris had crossed a line. When I met him, he was conjuring gold from rocks, supporting the economy of Temperance. He was a man who loved luxury, who imported fine silks, perfumes, and beautiful works of art.” She made a self-deprecating shrug. “I was guilty of shallowness. I let myself be seduced by the beautiful things he gave me. I was the most finely dressed woman for hundreds of miles. I ate with real silverware from bone china plates. As a poor woman who had once been in an unhappy marriage in Ireland, I felt like a queen. Unlike the husband I fled, Lascaris seemed to have the power and wealth to protect me.”

  “You were seduced by pretty things and not by the power?”

  “The power, too. He had a fine laboratory, and created many innovative things in his glass apparatuses and crucibles. I saw him crush diamonds in his hands, create fire that never needed fuel. If he had the proper influence, Lascaris was a man who could have changed the world for the better.

  “But Lascaris had a cruel streak. He thought his power was license to do what he pleased. He began to experiment on humans, collecting people who would not be missed . . . prostitutes, itinerant workers. He would offer bounties for healthy men and women. Even children. What he would do to them . . .” She closed her eyes. “Most did not survive.”

  “And this offended you? Gabriel tells me you sang at his . . . uh, funeral.”

  “I sang. I was powerless to stop it. I sang him a lullaby. I sang for all the Hanged Men. It was the only small kindness I could offer them. That distraction, as Lascaris strung them up in the Tree of Life and broke their necks.” She lifted her chin. “You do not understand Lascaris’s power.

  “I watched. I waited. I waited for six full moons, to gather the power to challenge him. I laid a trap, tried to separate him from his alchemical tools. But I failed to realize that he was beyond the need for tools to do the alchemical work. He fled. I chased him for three days. I chased him around Heart Lake, and he figured out how to walk on water. I almost had him, nearly ran him under the hooves of my horse at Witch Creek . . . but he got the better of me. He drowned me.” She lifted her fingers to her gills. “And I became his experiment, like all the others. I awoke in a glass tank in his basement. Like a fish. I was bloody and beaten, bits of fish parts sewn onto my body. My legs had been ripped away. He broke all the teeth from my mouth, replaced them with the teeth of . . . of a shark.” Her fingers pressed her mouth.

  “He didn’t feed me. For his own enjoyment, he made me eat what remained of my legs.”

  Owen rocked back on his heels. “Jesus. I’m sorry.”

  She looked up at him. “He became bored of me. He fed me bits and pieces of his enemies, when he remembered. He eventually gave me over to the Hanged Men. He told them to lock me away in case he thought of any better use for me. Gabriel and the Hanged Men built t
his prison for me.” She gestured to the roof of the cave. “They chained me up and left me. Never offered me a scrap of food. They left me to starve.” She sank up to her nose in the water.

  “I’m sorry,” Owen said again. She had struck a chord of sympathy in him. She could see it in the way his eyes dilated. “What can I do? Can I bring you anything . . . like, uh, steak? Something?”

  “You have given me freedom.”

  “But . . . can I bring you something? I have no idea what you need, or . . .”

  “Yes,” she said, gesturing him nearer. “There is one small thing that you can do for me. And I will serve you well for it.”

  Owen leaned close to the water to listen.

  “You aren’t allowed to be alone. Not anymore. We can’t trust you not to do colossally stupid shit.”

  Maria paced behind Petra in her kitchen. Petra sat on the couch like a chastened child. Sig had stretched out in her lap, and Pearl was purring behind her neck, on the back of the couch. Nine sat on the floor before Petra, watching Maria and Petra argue, still as a stone. Petra idly wondered if this had been her response to the inevitable turf wars in the wolf pack—to sit and wait for the drama to shake out before wading through the shitty aftermath.

  “What were you thinking . . . skulking around Owen’s ranch? You were lucky that all that you encountered was a tree.”

  “It’s not like there’s a whole lot left for me to lose,” Petra said quietly. Her side ached from the stitches, and she really wanted to ask Maria for a soothing cup of chamomile tea, but she’d be damned if she’d ask in the middle of an argument.

  “And there could have been a whole lot less!”

  Fair enough.

  Maria continued, softer now. “We can help you . . . but you can’t just go running off half-cocked like that. You can’t help him if you get yourself killed.”

  At this, though, Petra threw up her hands. “I’ve done everything else! I’ve gone through all the proper channels. I’ve filed missing persons reports. I’ve asked Mike to run down any leads. I’ve asked everyone around town if they’ve seen him. You’ve asked folks on the reservation to look for him. I am out of legit ideas and almost out of time. So crazy is all I have left.”

  Maria leaned over the back of the couch, on her elbows. “You need to give yourself the gift of a good death. You need to be ready to go . . .” She looked away, blinking away tears.

  Everyone kept saying that, this thing about a “good death.” Petra had no idea what it really meant. Did it just mean stopping, letting death catch up with her? And what about Gabe? What did he deserve? But it hurt so much to see how Maria was taking all this. She reached up to give her friend a half hug and sniffed. “I know. I just . . .”

  And then they were bawling like little girls. Nine crawled up and pressed her cheek against Petra’s knees. Pearl’s purring against the back of Petra’s neck intensified, and Sig burrowed farther into her side.

  Surrounded by so much love, it was hard not to at least imagine what a “good death” would be like.

  She just wasn’t ready for that quite yet.

  After the sobbing subsided, Nine said, “Don’t worry. I will stay with her. I promise.”

  The young woman sat upright and alert at Petra’s feet, chewing at a hangnail on her right thumb.

  “You’re going to be my guard?” Petra said.

  Nine nodded solemnly. “I’ve been a guard dog before. I can do it.”

  “Okay,” Petra agreed. “I won’t go out of Nine’s sight. Unless it’s to go to the bathroom. I can go pee by myself, right?”

  Maria was mollified. “Okay.”

  She was appeased enough to make chamomile tea and peanut butter sandwiches, without asking. Petra devoured a sandwich and downed two cups of tea.

  “About that good death thing . . .” Maria began. “You should call your mother.”

  Petra groaned inwardly. Definitely not what she imagined. “You know, this good death business is a lot of really painful bullshit.” And she was back to not entirely buying into the concept of a good death. It was one thing to be with the people you loved and who loved you back. But a lot of it sounded like varying degrees of shitty.

  Nine poked at the tea bag in her cup. “There are two kinds of wolves. Death sorts them out. There’s the kind of wolf, when dying, who wants to be surrounded and soothed by the rest of the pack, who wants to feel their warmth around them. And then there’s the kind of wolf who walks out of the den to die on her own. I think you’re the latter.”

  Petra made a face. “You mean that crawling off into my cave is not an option?”

  “No,” Maria confirmed. “But once you get through the obligations, you can go soak in a bubble bath.”

  She went out on Maria’s porch to get some privacy, making a point to leave the keys to the truck behind on the kitchen counter, just so that Maria didn’t think she’d take off. She punched the last contact number she had for her mother into her cell phone. Last time she’d talked to her, her mother had been in Turkey on an archaeological dig.

  She waited for her cell phone to make a connection. It seemed to take forever, but the phone didn’t click over to voice mail. Finally, a sleepy female voice answered.

  “Hello?”

  “Hey. Mom. It’s Petra.”

  “It’s the middle of the night. What . . . um. Let me find my glasses. Okay.”

  “Sorry.” Petra winced. “Where are you?”

  “Malangangerr.”

  “Australia?”

  “Yes! Found some ax heads that are really interesting . . .” Her mom went on for a few minutes, obviously forgetting she’d just been woken up in the wee hours. Her mother had become an amateur archaeologist when Petra had gone to college. When Petra had left home, it had been as if her mother had been a balloon with her strings cut suddenly. She had sold their house and lived out of a suitcase for the next fifteen years.

  “So how’s it going with you?” her mom finally asked. Petra knew that her mom was a little sore about not being invited to her wedding. She thought they were past it. Her mom had sent her a lovely Turkish wooden bowl as a wedding present when she’d found out. But maybe not.

  “Well . . . I didn’t really want to tell you, because I thought I’d, uh, get over it. But I have leukemia.”

  There was a silence. Then, “Oh, honey.”

  “Yeah. It’s not going really well. I just wanted to call and . . . well. Say it, I guess.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me before? How long have you known?

  “Um . . . months.”

  “Honey!”

  “I know. I guess I thought that treatment would be successful.”

  “What are you doing? Chemo? Surgery?” Questions tumbled out, one after the other. Petra sat down on Maria’s porch swing and fielded them as best she could. No surgery. Too far along. Chemo and radiation were possibilities. She’d had enough chemo.

  “Well, it’ll get better. Everyone says it makes them sick, but—”

  “I quit it, Mom. My numbers weren’t getting any better, and the side effects were miserable.”

  “You have to go back in and do it.” The brittle edge of control was crackling all over her mom’s voice. Petra’s mom freaked when stuff happened that she couldn’t control. Or strangle. Which played no small part in why her marriage to Petra’s father failed. Petra’s dad needed a lot of strangling, and he just up and vanished one day. Petra had spent no small amount of time contemplating the correlation between those two things. Her parents had been equally difficult, just in different ways. Some days, she felt a pang of sympathy for her father for getting a wild hair up his ass to pursue an alchemical quest.

  This was one of those days.

  “No. I’m not going back to that, Mom. I’m just . . . making peace with things.”

  “That’s frankly ridiculous. Let me talk to your husband.”

  “Gabe’s not here.”

  “What do you mean, ‘not here’?”

&nb
sp; Petra rubbed her eyebrow. “Something happened to him. He’s disappeared.”

  “What! Just like your good-for-nothing father.” Petra heard huffing on the other end, and pictured her mother’s hands knotting together, as if they could choke the life out of him.

  “No. It’s not like that.” Petra held her head in her hand. “He was kidnapped.”

  “Kidnapped? What the hell was he involved in? Drugs? Guns? You had an uncle who did gunrunning for the IRA in the 1980s. Was it like that?”

  “No drugs, Mom. No guns. It’s complicated.”

  “So you’re all by yourself?”

  “No. I have people taking care of me. I just . . .” I just wanted to have a human conversation with you. To have a connection and feel acceptance.

  “I’m heading back,” her mother decided. “I can get to Queensland in maybe a week and get the next flight to the US from Brisbane.”

  “No. Mom. No.”

  “You need someone to talk some sense into you. You’re not thinking right. Cancer does that to your brain. Remember your cousin Sandy with breast cancer? She got so out of her mind on her meds that she was walking the dog naked at noon.”

  “Mom. I have that covered. I just want to talk with you right now, okay?”

  Her mom fell silent. That never happened.

  “Okay,” she said. “What would you like to talk about?”

  Petra looked up at the sky. “Do you remember when I was seven and you got me that giant dollhouse from that garage sale? That was the best dollhouse ever.” It had been a 1970s-vintage structure of plastic and cardboard with orange plastic columns and psychedelic polka-dotted plastic inflatable furniture. Even then, her mother had been excavating in flea markets and garage sales. There hadn’t been a lot of money then, but her mom always made it work. She could conjure treasure from dust.

  “Yes. It was, wasn’t it? You put Wonder Woman up on the balcony and told Ken that he wasn’t allowed in. Buck Rogers was allowed, though.”