Nine of Stars

by Laura Bickle

  The sun moved behind the clouds overhead, a dull coin of white light behind them. He knew they were getting close to the pond on Petra’s maps, and the Locus agreed. There was more than idle gossip and stories about the presence of magic in this place; the Locus confirmed that there was something unnatural on the horizon.

  They followed the frozen Fawn Creek south and east, crossing over it easily, to where the pond lay in the embrace of the valley. It was a small pond, maybe fifty feet across. Four large stones, as tall as Gabe’s hip, perched on the perimeter of the water. To his eye, they lined up with the cardinal directions.

  There was something wrong about it—Gabe could see that it hadn’t frozen over entirely. Such a small body of still water should have been rock-hard in October. Instead, slush swirled lazily on the surface. Below the dark, mirrored skin of it, gold algae bloomed. Tracks converged around the perimeter of the pond—snow machines, men . . . and wolf tracks.

  Gabe hit the kill switch on his snowmobile and dismounted. He pulled the Locus from his pocket, and the clotted blood bubbled within.

  “This is where they found Mike,” Petra said, shivering. “It’s amazing that they found him, out here.”

  It seemed that Sig sensed the magic in this place. Petra had unclipped him from his harness, and he sniffed around the tracks.

  “Time to make a wish, see if Jack answers,” Gabe said. He crossed to the packs, rummaged through them for the pack containing the gold. He plucked a coin from a paper bag, shinier than the sun in this snow-washed place.

  “I should make it,” Petra said, covering his hands with hers. A wan smile spread on her face. He knew that it made sense. With her illness, death could be close at hand for her. If anyone was going to make a wish that could turn into a fatality, it should be her.

  But he wouldn’t let her. He took the coin and briskly crossed to the pond. He hadn’t made a wish since he was a child with a penny at a fountain. He held the coin in his fist and wished silently to himself.

  Let Petra’s cancer be cured. Whatever it takes.

  Then he skipped the coin across the water, once, twice, before it sank into the cloud of golden algae. Air bubbles flickered up from the depths, as if his message had been received. And then there was only the silence of winter around them, punctuated by the scrape of the wind.

  “What now?” she asked.

  “We should wait. See if he comes back to retrieve it. Hopefully, gold will prove to be more interesting to him than wolves.”

  Sig whined. He clearly didn’t think much of the idea. His ears were pushed forward and his eyes scanned the horizon, then fastened on the pond.

  The surface of the water churned. At first Gabe thought it was the wind, swirling around loose chunks of slush. But bubbles seethed from the interior, pushing through the gold algae.

  He reached for his rifle and pressed it to his shoulder. He aimed it at the water, sighting down to see a black mass rushing upward, breaking the surface in a hail of spattered slush. Crowned in antlers, the creature glittered with ice, launching itself up into the daylight like a whale breaching the surface of the ocean.

  Jack.

  Instinctively, Gabe blew out his breath and pulled the trigger. He fired once, twice, intending to put the creature back down in the water. His rifle jolted his shoulder with each shot, and he knew he’d hit the creature dead in its center of mass.

  But the shadow leapt up onto the bank, dripping, crouching. It was the shape of a man, with antlers crowning its head. It looked upon Gabe through the skull of a stag, pale and ferocious . . . and it stood up. In one hand, it gripped the golden coin Gabe had cast into the water. A fistful of bone-pale knives dripped from the other.

  Gabe ratcheted back the slide on his rifle and fired again. The creature didn’t flinch. It was as if the soaking pelts of its cloak simply sucked the bullets in.

  Petra was shooting at it, too, with no better results. She was shouting at Sig to get behind her.

  Gabe kept firing, backing away to the snowmobiles. He had known that Skinflint Jack was a fearsome creature, but he suspected that Jack could be hurt. He’d guessed wrong.

  Jack lowered his head and made a run at Gabe. Gabe dove away, but not before the darkness of Jack’s cloak slapped him in the side of the face. It was like being slapped by the abyss—cold, stunning hell. An antler caught Gabe in the shoulder and he tumbled, ass over teakettle, into a snowdrift.

  He rolled over in the snow, the shadow looming over him.

  “Hey, you! Cthulhu wannabe! Look what I got.”

  Jack turned. Petra was holding two glittering gold coins in her hand. She made sure that he’d seen her. He took two steps away from Gabe, toward her . . .

  . . . and she pitched the coins as far as she could, into the snowy waste. The pair of them shone like falling stars on the way down.

  Jack paused, seeming torn.

  But he growled and scuttled after the coins.

  Gabe climbed onto his snowmobile and cranked the engine. Petra and Sig had already climbed aboard theirs and gotten the engine going. He followed Petra to a hasty retreat up the valley. Behind him, he watched the dark figure in the snowfield sifting through the snow with his hands.

  That had been a disaster.

  But they sure as hell had managed to get Skinflint Jack’s attention, for good or ill.

  “Are you all right?”

  They stopped three miles upstream. As fast and fearsome as Jack appeared to be, Gabe guessed that he couldn’t move much faster than an actual stag beyond his pond. The pond might be a portal of some kind that could call Jack from wherever he roamed, but maybe Jack would be weaker away from it. At least, he hoped that much was true. He’d woefully underestimated Jack. He would not do it again.

  Gabe pressed his fingers to his collar and winced. “Nothing broken.”

  Petra shook her head. “We go back to Plan A then . . . lure him to Sepulcher Mountain?”

  “I think it’s our only option. Jack can’t be defeated by ordinary means. We’ll have to bind him, as your father suggested.”

  “He can be lured by the gold. At least we know that much.”

  “Gold and the wolves. We’ll have to get between Jack and the wolves, draw him away from them and to the mountain.”

  “We’ve got ten pieces left. Hopefully, we can tease him along with those bread crumbs.”

  Gabe glanced at the sky. It was close and leaden now, and he could see veils of snow dragging along the mountain slopes to their west. “I think the weather forecast was wrong. That storm that was supposed to go south is heading for us.”

  “Awesome.” Petra scanned the landscape with her binoculars. She paused. “Take a look.”

  Gabe took the binoculars from her. It was irritating not to be able to send a raven out to scout, but he swallowed his displeasure. After adjusting the lenses, he could make out a dark speck on the landscape, one that looked like a man-made structure.

  “Could be decent shelter. Let’s check it out.”

  The snowmobiles were noisy, and there was no way to approach with stealth in this broad daylight. They came in fast, swooping in sheets of snow, advancing on the broken-down skeleton of a cabin, half covered in snow. It was old; Gabe could see the scrapes of hand-hewn logs on the side and fractured chinking between them.

  Warily, he pulled up around the blind side of the cabin, along a wall with no windows. He killed the engine and lifted his rifle.

  After Petra shut off her engine, the silence was deafening. The sound rolled across the landscape, to the feet of distant mountains. Wind whistled around the corner of the building. In the west the horizon line had gone hazy and white. The storm was coming in; it would likely be there within the hour. Perhaps they were lucky to have found this place.

  Gabe aimed his rifle around the edge of the building. He stepped around the last corner of the cabin, wading through drifts up to his knees, and spied the door.

  The door was badly greyed and warped from weather, and
it was ajar. A drift of snow had piled up against it, flakes spilling inside. Gabe crept beneath the shuttered window, tried to peer inside. He could see nothing but darkness within. He slipped noiselessly to the door and kicked it open with a sound like a gunshot.

  Gabe ducked to the safety of the door frame and aimed his rifle inside. There was a flurry of sound and movement, and his finger flexed on the trigger. But it was a mass of pheasants, warbling as they fluttered up to the collapsed roof. A terrified rodent zinged across the floor and disappeared into the wall. Gabe scanned above the sight of his gun. Nothing else moved.

  He stepped into the room, conscious of Sig slinking around his knees and Petra’s shadow at his back. The cabin was a single room, as many were back in his day, the remains of a fireplace dominating one wall.

  But his attention was riveted by what had been left behind here: the skins.

  A wolf skin was stretched over the fireplace, hung on a complicated apparatus of sticks. Antlers and skulls lined the walls, drizzling cobwebs and stained with dust. Most of the skulls were wolves. As Petra shined her flashlight above them, he saw more wolf skins dangling from the rafters, like kites, stretched out and strung together.

  Sig looked up and whined.

  A gust of wind swept over the house, whistling through holes in the roof.

  Gabe peered out the door at the sky. The storm was moving faster than he’d anticipated, a white wall approaching them, now about a mile away.

  “Storm’s coming,” he said. “Let’s get the gear.”

  Petra’s brows drew together. “We’re staying here?”

  “We haven’t got much choice. Hopefully, it’ll blow over in a couple of hours and we can get back on the trail of the wolves.”

  “But . . . what if Skinflint Jack returns?”

  “If I had to guess . . . no one’s been here since the last snow.”

  “How fast can he move in the storm, without being summoned through the pond?”

  “Not sure. If Stan is right, the pond is a portal that physically summons him from wherever he is . . . but I don’t see anything like that here. I’m hoping that he’ll have to travel anyplace else on foot.”

  Sig grumbled his skepticism.

  “If he comes back . . . then we’ll have to figure out a way to fight him.”

  Time was running out. Owen could feel it.

  The wind was scraping in from the west, scouring away the snowmobile tracks before him. The guy at the snowmobile rental place had said it was too late in the day to rent to him one, but Owen flashed his badge. He’d been given a snowmobile in the end, and a halfhearted warning about the weather.

  Owen didn’t put much stock in it. The last couple of predicted storms had turned out to be little more than squalls, and he wasn’t impressed by the radar on his phone when he set out.

  Now, well . . . now might be something different. The radar blazed blue precipitation. He vowed to himself to catch Petra and Gabriel—they couldn’t be that far ahead—and then he’d call for an air pickup. He was determined, and he didn’t give a rat’s ass what it cost the bottom line of his departmental budget.

  That was assuming he could find his quarry before the storm hit. He could see it gathering in the distance, a white shroud drawn over the dark grey of the sky, stretching from the earth to the low-lying clouds.

  He considered turning around, but he could still make out the faint feathered tracks ahead of him. He hesitated, glancing down at his emergency pack. He didn’t have much in the way of supplies or provisions, just what he’d taken from the back of his own SUV. He kept survival gear there, in case he got stranded, but only enough for a few days.

  But he had to interrogate Gabriel. He had to know. Owen felt the obsession building hot behind his brow. They were going to disappear into this white wasteland, never to be found again, unless he stayed on the trail.

  Snowflakes spun through the air, spitting from the grey sky. The snow thickened, the wind whipping through the spaces between the flakes, which grew hard as pellets, bouncing against the windscreen and his goggles with an audible rattle.

  Ice. Fuck. He fumbled in his coat for his cell phone. Snow washed over him, in a whiteout blaze, and he couldn’t see or hear anything but the sound of the engine and the slide of the blades beneath him. He struggled to maintain control over the uneven terrain, but succeeded in beaching the snow machine in a drift.

  There was no point in trying to dislodge it. The storm was upon him, and he could see no more than two feet in front of his face. The world was cold, white, and blank.

  He had to find shelter. He stumbled in the stinging snow, jamming his hands in his pockets. There was a stand of lodgepole pine with fallen trees to his right; he could only make them out because they interrupted the snow in tree-shaped silhouettes.

  He shoved his way through a curtain of ice-covered pine branches and stumbled into that wind break, hunkering down. He could smell frozen sap as the curtain closed around him. The wind cut, and he took a deep breath.

  This thicket of browning pine branches was heavy enough that only frozen ground and pine needles were below him, and nearly all the light overhead blotted out. He shivered, but it was much better here, out of the wind.

  He dug in his pocket for his cell phone. Stabbing at the buttons, he was irritated to find that he had no signal. His radio crackled nothing but static. Maybe it was the storm or the distance from a base station; it was hard to tell. But he was alone out here, utterly alone.

  He closed his eyes, feeling the burn of the snow against them.

  “Owen,” a small voice said.

  He opened his eyes. Anna crouched beside him, staring up at him with concern. “Are you going to freeze to death?”

  “I . . . I hope not.” He already couldn’t feel his toes.

  “What are you going to do about it?”

  He stamped his feet on the pine-needle-strewn ground. The pine needles seemed dry enough. Maybe they’d feed a fire. But he might succeed in burning up his thicket shelter entirely.

  He clomped out to the snowmobile for his pack. There was a miscellaneous hodgepodge of junk in this bag, but maybe there was something he could use. He dragged it back to the shelter and began digging through it. There were two boxes of ammunition. He shook out the emergency blanket and wrapped it around his shoulders. There was a roll of toilet paper, a frozen bottle of water, a knife, a bottle of cherry vodka, and a bag of stale chocolate-covered raisins.

  With numb fingers, he scraped the pine needles up into a pile, hoping they were dry enough to burn. He reached up, arranging a hole in the canopy of pine branches to drain the smoke away.

  Muttering dark oaths, he flicked his lighter and brought it to the pine needles. It went out. He swore and tried again, mindful not to waste what little butane was left in it. He grumbled, arranged some toilet paper on the pine needles, and dug through his ammunition box for a bullet. With his pocketknife, he popped the bullet open and sprinkled a bit of gunpowder on the toilet paper tinder. The next try took, and Owen got down on his hands and knees to blow on the fire. The pine would burn fast, the needles already curling. But he could feel the blessing of warmth hot on his face and fogging his goggles.

  He reached up to pull some of the half-dried branches down, broke a couple over his knee to feed the fire. It was a puny fire, crackling and snapping, pushed by the drafts of wind leaking in around the pine boughs.

  “So you might live?” Anna asked with all the brightness of Tinker Bell. She was sitting across from him, on the other side of the fire, her hands clasped together almost prayerfully.

  “Depends. If it’s a short storm and if I can get the snowmobile righted, likely.” He was bullshitting her, and he knew it. There wasn’t much fuel. He’d planned this poorly. He fished a cigarette out of his pocket and lit it in the fire.

  She gave him a look of infinite skepticism.

  Why was he lying to a ghost? Trying to spare her feelings? “Look,” he said, “I might have fucked th
is up. Do you have somebody else to haunt, in case this goes to shit?”

  She turned away, and he thought she might disappear. Odd, how she seemed to have a vested interest in whether or not he lived. Maybe she was expecting him to solve the mystery of her death, so she could find some eternal peace. Owen had always assumed that was the case. Failing that, maybe she was counting on him finding a really good exorcist somewhere, or a shaman who could perform a soul retrieval and kick her soul upstairs.

  But he hadn’t done any of that. Not for want of trying. If he had to admit it to himself, he really wasn’t as good at his job as his father had been. If his father were still around, maybe he could have taught Owen about the things that mattered: like how to plant evidence without getting caught, how to get witnesses to keep silent on the right side of a shallow grave, and where the hell to dump the bodies of his enemies so they couldn’t be found.

  Owen huddled close to the fire, his arms wrapped around his knees, the cigarette drizzling ash from his mouth. His eyelids drooped. He really wasn’t feeling the cold anymore, just listening to the wind howl through the stand of trees.

  “Owen,” Anna said. “Owen, wake up.”

  He lifted his head to discover that his cigarette had gone out.

  “You can’t sleep out here. You won’t wake up.”

  In some respects, that might not be a bad thing. “Anna, I’m tired.”

  “Too bad. You need to stay awake. So tell me a story.”

  “Aren’t you too old for that kind of thing?”

  “Nobody ever did it. I think I deserve one, don’t you?”