Witch Creek

by Laura Bickle

  He remembered. He said nothing.

  The water churned, resolving into shapes and forms. An image came into focus. It was the Hanged Men, hauling Muirenn down the steps to her prison. She fought and gnashed her teeth, but the men carried her, above their heads, gripping her writhing form as if she were no more than troublesome cattle.

  “Lascaris!” the shadow-Mermaid bellowed. “You can’t even bother to do your dirty work yourself!”

  The image of Gabriel had hauled the chain out of the water, where it was anchored deeply in bedrock—anchored exactly where he was now. Another Hanged Man had to sit on her tail while he’d fitted the manacle at the joint above the fin. He remembered.

  She snarled at him. “I will see you dead.”

  Gabriel, in those days, was convinced he had seen everything, and that there were no greater horrors than those that he had already wrought or had been visited on him. He told her, sadly, “Of this, I have no doubt.”

  He picked her up, spitting, and carried her into the water.

  The image faded, and Gabe had the feeling that he had foretold his own demise.

  “Get it over with, then,” Gabe finally muttered through gritted teeth. “Have your dinner and your freedom.” He couldn’t grudge her this revenge. She had seen him hanged. He had imprisoned her. And she was pissed. It was a never-ending cycle of hate. One or the other of them had to be the victor.

  A blinding pain dug into his shoulder. Teeth. Gabe gasped as a chunk of flesh was ripped from his shoulder. Hot blood flowed down, over his chest.

  This was going to be a very bad way to die, taken apart, piece by piece, he realized. But even pain like this would not last forever. He steeled himself for the inevitable.

  There was a hissing, and then a spitting sound as Muirenn spat the chunk of flesh out against his face.

  “Gah,” she growled.

  A splash rattled against his body, and the currents slowly stilled. The underground river lapped up against Gabe’s throat. Instinctively, he pushed his ear to his wounded shoulder, trying to staunch the flow of blood.

  Muirenn might not want to eat him quickly, he thought. But she would surely find a worse way to kill him. Perhaps it would be bite by bite, over days or weeks. Or she’d just tear him to pieces and gobble him up in one sitting.

  Gabe leaned his head back against the stone and stared up at his chains. He tested them, scraping them against the soft sandstone. Grit rained into his eyes. They were just as strong as they had been when they were wrought.

  He swore under his breath. There had to be a way out that didn’t end in the Mermaid’s belly, but he couldn’t see it.

  He gazed morosely into the dark. He could let himself bleed to death. That might keep him from experiencing an unpleasant end as Muirenn’s chew toy. As far as deaths went, bleeding out was not the worst one imaginable. He would have made a choice, owned it, and thwarted the Mermaid’s plans. Objectively, this was not a bad deal and a relatively good death, given the options available to him. There was something to be said for dying on one’s own terms, regardless of how limited those terms were.

  But there was Petra.

  He knew that she was above, somewhere. She had to be searching for him, turning up every rock between here and Yellowstone. If there was even a slim chance that she could find him, or that he could escape, he owed it to her to hang on . . . even if it meant enduring whatever torture Muirenn had in store. He’d had one bad death before, when he was hanged from the Lunaria . . . How much more terrible could a second one be?

  He pressed his shoulder tightly to his ear, feeling the bleeding slow.

  Before him, the blackness of the water burbled and squirmed, revealing a new image: the Lunaria, in all its former glory.

  Gabe stared hard at it. This image was likely not of Muirenn’s doing, if she had already retreated. Maybe the water in this place was truly enchanted. He had suspected that there was something odd about it when he and the Hanged Men built this place. Lascaris had given them tools, to be certain—axes and shovels that cut through stone like butter. But it had always seemed to Gabe that the water came up from someplace unusual that he could not follow. He had tried, but the source slipped underneath a granite shelf that he was in no hurry to excavate. Part of him wondered if it originated from somewhere even deeper and more dangerous.

  Lascaris had warned them never to drink the water. Not that Gabe had any desire to do so. When he and the Hanged Men labored to create this magnificent prison, it had taken much work, even with Lacaris’s magical tools. Stone still had to be carted away. Even then, Gabe had been convinced that there were other monsters in the depths. As they dug, they found bones of large, fantastical creatures. They couldn’t bring those topside; they just cast them on the cavern’s beach. But there had been the rattling skeletons of wings, skulls with great smiling teeth, and tusks as tall as his waist.

  All those years ago, Gabe thought he saw things stirring in the water. But nothing had tried to take a bite out of him, or the other men, so he had warily worked to complete his task. Today, however, he couldn’t help that his mind’s eye still imagined the great beasts that had worked those skeletons, the shapes of things that no man had ever seen.

  The water did not show him bones and beasts and the building of the prison. Instead, the Lunaria stood before him now in that black mirror, the image of the tree spreading out its glowing canopy in the water. Tears sprung to his eyes. He missed it, the warmth, the life. Now, he was forever parted from it.

  His chest ached, seeing the tree. It ached as if a splinter of wood still remained at his core. He closed his eyes. And it was then that he could feel it, behind his lungs, stirring.

  A splinter . . . or a seed.

  Muirenn rinsed her mouth out with water. The Hanged Man, she’d been told, was an ordinary man now. Human. But he tasted inedible—like sour magic fermenting in the back of a pit. She could not risk eating him, and her hands balled into fists at the disappointment. That only lasted a moment, though—she would just have to find another way to deal with him. And in the meantime, he would be her prisoner while she decided. Perhaps she would be indecisive for a long time, and he could feel what she had felt, just a taste of it, over time. It might take her years. Decades to decide, and she could force some of that sympathy upon him. That, and minnows.

  Her disappointment was rapidly diminishing.

  Owen was waiting for her at the riverbank near the steps, haloed in shivering blue-white light. He sat on the bottom step, head in his hands.

  “What have I done?” he whispered. Likely, he was talking to his ghost, the hallucination that he’d given thought and form.

  “No,” he said, shaking his head vigorously. “She said she wanted to talk.

  “I have to trust her. She came back all the other times.”

  Muirenn made a deliberate splash, and Owen’s head snapped up. He rose to his feet and approached the water’s edge.

  “Where’s Gabriel?” he asked.

  “Downstream,” she said. “He and I have much to discuss.”

  Owen’s eyes narrowed. “You aren’t going to kill him, are you?”

  Not at the moment, so she could truthfully answer: “No.” Muirenn beckoned to Owen. “Let me see your hand.”

  Owen didn’t move.

  “I want to try to heal it,” she said. “As a gesture of goodwill. You have given me much, and I should return some of what has been given.”

  Owen crouched at the edge of the water. He stripped off his leather glove and extended his right hand, palm down, over the water.

  Muirenn approached his hand, craning her neck to look at it from every angle. The ring and little finger were missing. “What happened to it?” She expected to hear a story about how he’d shot them off or some such stupidity. Drinking games. A jealous woman. Something idiotic.

  Owen flinched a little. “A . . . creature. Ate it. For the ring I had on it. It was gold.”

  Less inane than she’d thought. Muire
nn nodded sagely. She reached for his hand.

  Owen jerked back.

  “You have to trust me. Please—let me help.”

  Owen took a deep breath and reextended his hand to her. She took it in both of hers. The blood flow was good; she could feel his pulse, warm and strong. She began to sing, a distant, distracted tune that pulled power from the unseen moon and from the current of the water and from the sand. It also pulled some of Owen’s hectic thoughts away, soothing him.

  If . . . when . . . she decided to take Owen’s ghost away from him, it would be an easy thing to do. A bit of hypnotic suggestion. Much easier than the work she was doing to make him trust her. Owen was a guarded man. Wrapping him around her finger took a great deal of energy, and there was only a small amount that she wished to spend on him today. She’d give him the fingers that he lost, and then he would be hers. Her puppet. She knew that she couldn’t escape this form, that the world was larger than the underground river and the surface waters. She would need Owen, happily serving her, in the world of earth.

  She reached down to the bottom, for river silt. She coated his hand in it, smearing it in layers. The silt was thick and chalky. She worked it around his hand, slowly sculpting fingers in the shape of a hand around his. As she worked it, it dried, hardening, a pearly sheen beginning to glow underneath the sand. It was soft nacre, vulnerable, and new.

  “Give me a piece of cloth,” she said.

  Owen fumbled in his pocket for a handkerchief and handed it to her. She tenderly bound up his hand tightly.

  “Do not unwrap it. Do not wash or disturb it for three days,” she instructed. “On the third, wash it in salt water.”

  Owen stared at his bundled right hand. “It tingles. What did you do to it?”

  “I kept my promise, Owen. I always keep my promises. All of them.”

  She smiled, sinking below the surface of the water.

  Chapter 11

  The Ancestral Tree

  “So, do you like, own this place?”

  Archer sat opposite Lev on a threadbare couch in the attic of the Compostela. Lev hadn’t realized how shabby it had gotten over the years, but he’d grown used to it. When he’d led Archer here, it hadn’t occurred to him how others might see it.

  Well, he had Wilma’s and Caleb’s considered opinions, formed by time and leaving the television turned on to HGTV for their viewing pleasure—at least until Wilma had figured out how to change it to HBO. But he disregarded them, as he did much of what the two of them had to say. Amazingly, tonight the ghosts had done him the rare courtesy of haunting the downstairs, where they were banging about and playing a game of turn-the-lights-above-the-bar-off-and-on. He knew they were listening. Hopefully, they’d stay out of sight and not scare Archer away with their incessant bitching.

  Lev had made the attic space of the Compostela into an apartment for himself many, many years ago. Still, it had taken him decades to make changes. They had come slowly as he’d become rooted in the place. When he’d taken over the church, the ceilings had been open all the way to the rafters. He had closed off half of it, liking the airy effect for the main floor. From the former apse back to the alley, however, he’d closed up the ceiling to create an attic. He had finished the walls with salvaged paneling; they had their own peculiar beauty. He had covered the floors over the reinforced joists with pine heartwood, gathered in odd times and different seasons; the boards didn’t match perfectly and were of varied widths and colors. It stayed warmer up here than it often did in the bar due to him rerouting a boiler pipe from the basement. At the end of a day in December, his apartment would often be sweltering enough to dry laundry in an hour, and he’d be tempted to open the small stained-glass window at the north end facing the alley for ventilation—which always turned out to be a very cold mistake. He’d put industrial ceiling fans at the roof peak to circulate air in the summer, and it had always stayed comfortable for him. He thought of it as his light-filled aerie on those rare occasions when he was feeling more poetic or the even rarer ones when he invited a woman in.

  Like his construction, his sense of decor was somewhat eclectic, but there was a theme: nothing up here was new. Lev found things that were freshly manufactured to be curiously blank and soulless. His walls were covered in bits of art and knickknacks he’d found at the local pawn shop or thrown out in the alley: saw blades that he fancied for the pattern of rust on the spokes, some elk antlers that had been carved with a pattern of leaves that reminded him of the art of scrimshaw, a watercolor of a paint horse. The painting had been done by Bridget, many years ago. If Archer recognized it, he hadn’t remarked on it.

  “Yeah,” Lev said, parking his feet on the coffee table that was made from a sawed-off tree trunk. “They were going to tear the place down. The last church congregation that had been here had dwindled to three members, and then the priest gave up. He packed up his bags and left town without his Bible.” Lev shrugged. “I felt like the place was beautiful, that it could use a new life.”

  “It’s cool,” Archer said. His eyes drifted around the walls, paused on the picture of the paint horse, and continued. “Did the priest live here, too?”

  “I don’t think the last one did,” Lev said. “And I think that contributed to the church’s downfall. In previous decades, a priest would have lived in a rectory, probably the space behind the bar where the cooler and storage now is. He should have been part of this church, literally . . .” He trailed off. “I don’t think it will ever be a church again.”

  “It’s nice as a bar.” Archer leaned forward. “So. Why did you come to Temperance?”

  “Temperance is a weird town. It’s a good place for getting away from things, for forgetting. Starting over. I had a lot of things to get away from.”

  Archer was clearly trying to be nonchalant, but everything about the young man showed subtle tension. He took a drink of the root beer Lev had offered him. Lev had gone back and forth on that—should he be the cool dad and offer the kid a beer? In the end, he had told Archer to get a drink from the fridge, and Archer had picked a root beer. Lev shrugged and poured himself a glass of milk.

  “Were you like, on the run from the law or something?” the young man joked.

  “Heh. Not in the way you think.”

  “Witness protection program? That was Mom’s best guess. That, or you owed the Mob back east some money.”

  Lev smiled. “You really want to know? Even if it’s completely bizarre?”

  “Yeah. I wouldn’t have come here if I didn’t.”

  Lev decided to come clean. “Long time ago, I had a family. In Czechoslovakia. They were killed by Nazis, and I . . . I couldn’t stop it.”

  “Nazis?” Archer’s brow wrinkled, and it was clear that he was trying to do the math in his head. “But how old are you? Were you a child?”

  “I’m old. Very old. And no, I wasn’t a child. I was as you see me now.”

  “I don’t understand. That’s imp—”

  “I know. At least, I know how it seems. I’m asking you to just listen, okay? Besides—you hear ghosts, and you’re saying something is impossible?” he asked with an amused look.

  “Yeah,” Archer said, chuckling weakly. “Sorry—go ahead.”

  “I’m very old . . . because I am one of a race of old magical ones. The Romans considered us minor household gods, the Lares. The Czech and Russians called us domovoi. To the English, we were hobs or brownies, and in the north, we were dísir. Regardless of our name, wherever we roamed, we were household guardian spirits.”

  Archer was silent. His gaze slipped once to the door, then returned. Lev figured that he was trying to determine how crazy the old bartender truly was.

  But Lev had decided to lay his cards on the table. If Archer fled, then he’d have a good story to tell his friends, his mother would roll her eyes at the adventure, and there would be no harm done. His son would live out his natural life, and then a lot more, and would eventually circle back around to Lev in another ei
ghty years. If he stayed, then there were many things Lev could look forward to teaching him.

  “So. You are . . . immortal?”

  “We age slowly enough that that’s pretty much true, for most intents and purposes. I looked to be around your age at the heyday of the Roman Empire. By the time it became the Byzantine Empire, it wasn’t nearly as fun. But that gives you the general idea. I expect that since you’re half human, you’ll age more quickly. How much so, I’m not certain. You have to understand, this having a kid business doesn’t just happen.”

  Archer looked at him. “So are you like the Highlander, then? You can’t be killed?”

  “Oh, I can be killed. Long life doesn’t really have anything to do with invincibility. It has much more to do with living intelligently. The dumbest domovoi could be dead tomorrow, if he took up skydiving or driving his car into a wall. There’s a reason we’re household spirits. Staying home generally causes one to stay out of trouble, avoid drama, and to live a lot longer.” Lev took a drink of his milk. “And those around you age and die.”

  “Like your family in Czechoslovakia?”

  Lev made a bitter face. He drained his glass and then wandered into the open kitchen for a refill. “They were my family because I was their guardian. I failed them miserably. I served their family for centuries. I lived in that house when it was built of mud and straw and fieldstone. I tended the hearth, and they grew in prosperity. They were good to me, and I was good to them. I watched generations be born and die under that roof. I showed them how to make offerings to the old gods, how to work with the moon and the sun to harvest both the fields and their own ambitions. Seeds were sown, and there was laughter in that house. I brought what minor luck and magic I could, and I always had a place to sleep by the fire.

  “One night, a knock came at the door. For a long time, we thought we were safe from national politics, as isolated as we were out in the countryside. We didn’t concern ourselves with the outside world—it was the world, and it was outside of us. I had seen empires rise and fall, and largely those events were of no consequence to the families I served, because we had the good sense to stay out of the way.