Witch Creek

by Laura Bickle

  She sat at the kitchen table and took apart the laser pointer. It unscrewed fairly easily, and she was able to pop the lens out with a pencil. Very carefully, she put the lens on the table and wrapped the gum around the edges of the lens. She affixed the laser pointer lens to the lens of her cell phone camera.

  She turned on the flashlight, balanced it on its end, and placed the saucer on top. The white plate lit up like a spotlight. Satisfied, Petra dumped the contents of the mason jar on the plate. The squished bug landed pretty close to the middle, and she pushed it to the exact center with her tweezers.

  The next part would be tricky. She grabbed a couple of Maria’s phone books and stacked them beside the flashlight. She balanced her cell phone on the edge of the phone books so that the lens was aimed at the bug. Then she turned on her cell phone’s video camera and peered at the screen.

  The height adjustment took some experimentation. By adding the user manual for Maria’s bread maker, she was able to get it at the perfect height. An enlarged image of the bug appeared on her screen.

  “Ta-da,” she whispered. “Instant microscope.”

  She peered at the bug. It truly was like nothing she’d seen before. It seemed like a nearly fully cooked embryo of something . . . it looked like its lungs might have been developed before Maria smote it on the kitchen floor. It had tiny eyes that were black, and insectile-seeming claws at the end of arm-like appendages.

  And it had a mouth, with teeth. The creature’s jaw had been crushed open, and Petra detected dozens of tiny teeth in the mouth.

  “Hell,” she muttered.

  The thing had come in an egg. Perhaps it wouldn’t have hatched without contact with liquid. But it was a hardy bastard . . . vinegar would kill pretty much anything else. And the fact that it had come in an egg meant that there were likely more of these things. Things that grew in eggs usually had many, many brothers and sisters.

  She had no idea what this little monster was, or what it might grow up to be. But she was very glad for Maria’s fast reflexes. It looked as if it might have been in the process of growing a bunch more legs. Long bristles advanced up and down its abdomen, reminding her of legs on a house centipede. It had no antennae, so perhaps it wasn’t in communication with a mother ship somewhere—hurray for good news. Its tail was curled tightly up in a corkscrew, but she thought she detected a barb at the end of it. Was that for climbing? Stinging?

  Whichever, she was glad it was dead. She put it back into the jar and screwed on the cap tightly. She knew it was dead, but she was proof that around here, dead didn’t often mean much.

  She reassembled Pearl’s toy, put the rest of the odds and ends away, and decided to climb back into bed.

  That little bit of science must have been enough to lull her to sleep. She was asleep the instant her head hit the pillow, a dreamless sleep with no creepy-crawlies emerging from mason jars.

  The sky was still grey, without even the smallest bit of pink tinting the horizon, when there was a banging at the door.

  Petra sat bolt upright, fighting her unwieldy tangle of hair and reaching for the gun belt hung on the bedpost. The cat slid under the bed as Maria rolled off it, grabbing a shotgun leaning in the corner. Sig jumped to the floor and growled.

  “Stay here,” Maria ordered. She stepped out onto the floor—barefoot, in her nightdress—and shut the bedroom door behind her.

  Petra heard other footsteps in the hallway. Nine, she presumed.

  Her heart hammered as she heard the door open.

  “What do you want?”

  “I have no quarrel with you.” It was the bartender’s voice, a low rumble like thunder. “Give me Petra Dee, and I’ll be gone.”

  “‘Give you’? You’re trespassing. Get out.”

  “You’ve got a funny definition of trespassing.”

  “And you’re involved in some really weird shit. Get out.”

  “Not until you give her up. I know she’s here. Her truck is outside.”

  “I think that you don’t have any understanding of whose turf you’re on.” The shotgun ratcheted back. “Leave us alone.”

  “I’m not leaving. Not without her.”

  This was going nowhere. Petra grabbed her guns and opened the door. Sig flowed out before her, growling and snarling.

  The bartender was standing just inside the door. He looked pissed—the kind of pissed that’s beyond a full night of red-eye crying, a carton of smokes, and a bottle of vodka. And he was holding a freaking sword. Maria had aimed her shotgun at him. Nine had picked up a bread knife, and Petra aimed her pistols at the bartender. It was very ridiculous, the three women in Maria’s flannel nightdresses, but costumery in a fight didn’t matter.

  “There’s a saying about bringing a knife to a gunfight,” Petra said.

  The bartender’s eyes widened as he looked at her. “You. You took what was intended for my son.”

  She glared at him and gestured at the body she wore. “What, this?”

  “That body.” He stabbed a finger toward her. “That homunculus. I created it for him.”

  “The body in your attic—that was your son’s body?”

  “Yes. And you took what was meant for him.” He lifted the sword.

  “Dude, I will not hesitate to fill you up with buckshot,” Maria said. “Do not test me.”

  “Look,” Petra said. “It was an accident. I was looking for the pendant you stole from me.”

  “You should have left well enough alone.”

  “Hey. You don’t get to go breaking into my house and then get pissy because I broke into your house, and repay the favor by getting pissier and breaking into Maria’s house.” Petra’s heart pounded in her chest over her tenuous reasoning. It pounded very well, she noticed, much more evenly than the old one.

  Sig was slinking across the floor toward the bartender, belly low, teeth bared.

  “I’m sorry your son is dead,” Petra continued. “But that is not my fault.” Usually, when shit went pear-shaped around Temperance, it was her fault. This one fucking time, she could categorically say that it wasn’t, and she was going to announce it as loudly as she could.

  Maria didn’t seem all that interested in any of that, though—just the fact that this sword-wielding bastard was trying to get into her house. “Listen—you need to get the hell out of here. Because unless you turn around and walk out that door, you aren’t walking out of this alive,” she said. “You just aren’t.”

  Nine had omitted the trash talking. She’d sidled noiselessly closer to the bartender with the bread knife in her hand, behind him.

  “It doesn’t matter,” the bartender said.

  And he ran forward, swinging the sword at Petra.

  She shouted and ducked. The dude was understandably pissed at her for fucking up his science experiment, but she really didn’t want to shoot him. Even more frightful was the thought of incurring Maria’s wrath if she missed and shot something important, like one of her needlepoint pillows.

  Sig had none of those qualms. He lunged, grasping the bartender by the arm. The man flailed right and left, trying to free his arm from the grip of the dog who remembered that he was a coyote. While this was going on, Nine slid behind him and pressed the bread knife to his throat.

  Despite all this, the bartender was still flailing, coyote attached to his sword arm and a bread knife at his neck. Runnels of red ran down into his collar.

  “Jesusfuckingchrist,” Maria murmured. With the butt of the shotgun, she struck at the man’s hand until the sword clattered on the floor. Petra hurried to kick it away, under the couch.

  “I do not want to pick buckshot out of my beautiful couch.” She shoved the shotgun up against his chest. “How about you sit the fuck down and we have a civil discussion? That, or you can leave—with your blood still inside your body. Entirely up to you.”

  He stood there for a moment, the knife at his neck and the coyote dangling motionless as a towel from his outstretched arm. He looked at the coyote
. Sig pulled back a lip and growled.

  He sighed and dropped his arm. Sig let go and hopped down on the floor, pleased with himself. He went over to Petra, sitting down, looking up at her.

  “Good boy,” she said quietly, scratching behind his ears.

  Sig’s tail wagged contentedly.

  The bartender sat heavily in one of Maria’s chairs, deflated. “It doesn’t matter. It’s all over, anyway.”

  Maria threw him a dish towel. “Do not bleed on my chair.”

  The bartender wrapped the towel around his neck and put his chewed arm in his lap. “This wasn’t what I had planned.”

  Petra moved opposite him, sitting down on the couch. Sig went to sit at her feet, but she kept her guns at her sides. “How about you tell me what you did have planned? I mean, what was the intended upside to the vat of goo you had in your attic?”

  He gazed down at the floor morosely. “My son had been killed. I knew I could save him, but the window of time was very short. Spirits only linger for three days around bodies. A very long time ago, I had seen a man make a homunculus.”

  “That’s the second time you’ve said that. What’s a homunculus?”

  “It’s a magical double, a creature created in a vessel, if you like. It has no mother, only a magician for a father. It grows behind glass, and it takes the shape of the magician if the magician . . . seeds it.”

  Petra wrinkled her nose. “Ugh.” She chose not to contemplate the idea of the bartender as her biological father.

  “Yeah, well. I clearly didn’t get to do that part.” He looked in distaste at Petra. “I had intended to put my son’s body in the vessel, to transfer his spirit to it. Until you managed to fuck it all up.”

  “Look. That was totally unintentional,” she said.

  He gave her a dim look. “I took the pendant because I needed an item of gold that had belonged to a magician. Your father was an alchemist. It fit the bill, and I didn’t have time to sift through shit I could order on the internet.”

  “You could have just asked. I would have lent it to you.”

  “Really? Just like that? Like we’re great friends, and you would willingly hand over that pendant to someone who’s basically a stranger?”

  Petra didn’t say anything.

  He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter—you weren’t exactly available to ask anyway, and time was critical.”

  “Can’t you just . . . cook up a new brew?”

  He shook his head. “My son’s spirit is gone. And I’ve expended almost all the magical energy I had on that one effort.”

  “So . . . are you an alchemist?” Christ, they were thick on the ground here.

  “No. I am not an alchemist. Merely . . . a minor guardian spirit. Come here to forget.” His gaze was distant.

  Petra felt a pang of sorrow for him. “Look, man . . . I’m sorry. Really sorry. If I had known, I wouldn’t have gone clomping around in your, uh, lair.”

  The bartender gazed at her with a limpid gaze. “At least it worked.”

  Petra looked down at her body. “Yeah. I guess so.”

  The bartender looked as if he were about to say something, then thought better of it.

  Petra resisted the urge to poke him with questions. This body . . . how durable was it? What exactly was it made of? Did it have a normal expiration date? Did she have to go and howl at the moon to maintain it? She wanted to know, but this wasn’t the time.

  Maria broke in: “I’m really sorry to hear about your son. Can you tell us what happened to him?”

  “He was killed. His throat was torn out by a predator. Not an ordinary predator. Something that has been here a very long time.” He seemed to weigh what to tell them. “I think that he was killed by a creature known as the Mermaid.”

  “She seems to be coming up a lot in conversation,” Petra said.

  “What?” he asked, looking at her sharply.

  “We suspect Sheriff Owen is somehow in league with her, that he is the one who has kidnapped Gabriel.”

  The bartender’s mouth turned. “Well, if the Mermaid has him, he’s as good as dead.”

  Chapter 19

  Walking Poison

  “Gabe. Wake up.”

  Gabe opened his eyes in the darkness. Above him shone a starry blue-white light. His eyes watered, and he tried to carefully fix his gaze on it, though he couldn’t turn his head. He was held fast by a cascade of tree roots, behind a wooden wall constricting ever tighter. There was barely enough room to squeeze out a breath.

  “Gabe. Are you alive in there?”

  The light came closer. Gabe squinted.

  “Okay, you’re alive.”

  The light retreated just a bit.

  Gabe blinked, wanting very badly to rub his eyes. It was Owen. He was perched beside him in a kayak, poking at Gabe’s prison with a pocketknife.

  “What the hell is this?” Owen asked. “Did she do this to you?”

  “No. She didn’t. This is . . . unexpected.” Gabe declined to elaborate. His voice was rusty and thin, and it took too much effort to speak. “What brings you here?”

  “I found Muirenn’s trophy stash.” He flipped the light a bit downstream to Muirenn’s pantry. It had grown in recent time. New bits of bone and gristle had been added to it. From this distance, it had begun to smell, like compost.

  “This surprises you?”

  Owen’s face was dark, and he rubbed his beard. “I wanted to believe her. I did. But the killings . . . there have been at least five that I can trace to her. Likely there are more.”

  Gabe said nothing. He’d already said all he could say about Muirenn.

  “But she has to be stopped,” Owen continued. “She’s going to bring the Feds down on here like flies on a carcass.”

  “Probably,” Gabe said. “Hopefully.” If he could have shrugged, he would have.

  “I can’t let that happen.”

  “How do you hope to accomplish this?”

  “I don’t know,” Owen confessed. “I was thinking . . . that you might have some ideas.”

  Gabe laughed. “I’m generally disinclined to help you right now,” he said. “You’ve amply demonstrated that I can’t trust you.”

  And he was guessing that Owen had been trusting Muirenn, allowing her to work her magic on him. It had not escaped Gabe’s notice that Owen was all of a sudden wearing a right-handed glove with fingers. Muirenn had been expending a great deal of energy on Owen. No wonder she’d been stocking up on food.

  “What if . . . what if I got you out of here? Would that be a good enough expression of goodwill?” Without waiting for an answer, Owen began to saw at the wood with his pocketknife. The wood groaned and bled golden sap. The sap congealed and hardened, a glittering resin tougher than before. Owen tried his knife on the resin, and the blade snapped.

  “Gah. Tell me how to get you out of here. What do I need? A saw? Fucking dynamite?”

  Gabe laughed again, hollowly this time. “I don’t think you can.”

  The light shone down his body. It was fully encased in tree roots. Only his face and hands remained barely visible.

  “Dammit,” Owen said. He leaned back in the plastic kayak, and the water sloshed. “I really screwed the pooch on this one, didn’t I?”

  “Yes. Yes, you did.”

  The two men sat in awkward silence for a moment.

  Gabe sighed. “The only way to kill a hunger like the Mermaid’s is to poison it.”

  Owen leaned forward to listen.

  “The Mermaid killed your son. Wouldn’t your anger be better placed in her direction?”

  Nine had been silent throughout the morning. She had listened to Lev rant and rave, Petra get defensive about her role in the failed resurrection of his son, and Maria threaten anyone who got blood on her furniture with eternal damnation. The cat had made an appearance. Pearl sauntered through the room, yawning, giving all four of them dirty looks before jumping up on the fridge to watch from a safe distance. But Nine finally spoke u
p, shocking the others to silence.

  Lev turned to her, blinking. “Well, of course. That wasn’t going to go unanswered in any reckoning.”

  “Wouldn’t we be better off figuring out where she is and kicking her tail? Not to mention that we might be able to see if she knows anything about Gabe’s whereabouts.” Maria was pacing the kitchen. The shotgun leaned against the refrigerator, within easy reach in case Lev got spunky again.

  “That would get my vote,” Petra said quietly. She looked at Lev. “How about it? Temporary truce?”

  “Truce.” Lev lifted a finger. “On one condition.”

  “Name it.”

  “I get to be the one who kills her. You owe me that.”

  Petra gazed at him with sympathy. Her heart ached for him, it truly did. She never had a child, but she knew what it was like to lose a loved one. To imagine that one would have the power to stop that, and then fail . . . it was too much to bear. “You can have her. I swear.”

  Lev nodded in satisfaction.

  “I mean, I reserve the right to rough her up before delivering her to you, if I find her first.”

  “Of course. But I have to be the one to kill her.”

  “Entirely.”

  “Great. Dibs on the Mermaid have been sorted out. But where do we find her?” Maria continued to pace the floor. Whenever she got close to the refrigerator, Pearl swatted at her hair.

  “Well . . . I have some maps. But I don’t entirely know what they mean.” Petra stood to go to the bedroom. She took her guns with her, awkwardly fitting the gun belt over her plaid nightdress. She hauled her sheaf of papers out from under the bureau and spread them on the coffee table before Lev. “Gabe drew these.”

  She refused to focus on whether or not Gabe was still alive. Lev had seemed to make a certain pronouncement otherwise. She had to hope. And if Gabe was gone . . .

  . . . well, Owen would be hers. Lev could make sushi, and she’d strangle Owen with her new, strong hands.