Nine of Stars

by Laura Bickle

  “Uh. Thataway. Mush!” She pointed to the east.

  Wolf legs churned in the powder, and the sled began to move. It moved slowly at first, in a walking pace, and then Petra had to run to keep up.

  Her breath burned in her throat as they ran. Petra chucked her heavy pack and did her best to keep up. Owen lagged behind. Nine was nearly as fast as the wolves. But Sig set the pace, moving quickly, but not so fast as to lose the humans.

  They’d been moving for nearly an hour when Owen announced: “I got a signal.”

  The procession stopped and waited for him to catch up. Petra sat down on the snow, panting, next to Gabe. He was still breathing, unevenly. She didn’t feel the cold anymore, and had the urge to strip off her coat.

  “The rangers are coming,” he said. “They said to hold position at these coordinates.”

  “How long?” Petra demanded.

  “They’ve got the helo. It’ll be fifteen, twenty minutes. They’re already looking for you.”

  Petra knelt beside Gabe. She had no idea if he could hear her or not. “Hang on. Help’s coming.”

  She only hoped it wouldn’t be too late.

  “The men will be here soon.”

  Nine knelt in the snow among the wolves. They’d dropped the rope and come to stare at her with curiosity. With wariness. Did they not know that she was still one of them?

  She reached her hand out, willing it to change. The Stag was gone. It was time to go home, to the new range, with the pack. She concentrated until tears leaked from her eyes, but she couldn’t make the change come.

  Ghost stared at her with sympathy and more than a bit of pity.

  What to do now? She began to pull her gloves up, to prepare to follow the wolves. She couldn’t bring herself to transform now, but maybe it would happen in a few hours, a day or two. And all would be right again.

  Ghost continued to stare. He stepped up to her, whined, and licked her face.

  Her lip quivered. She knew that she couldn’t keep up with them, with her family.

  “Don’t leave me,” she said. “Please don’t leave me.”

  She reached out, her fingers brushing his ruff, but he shied away. Could they smell the corpse-dust on her, the spell of Harming that she’d cast on the mountain? It had been a reflexive impulse, as instinctive as spitting.

  Didn’t they remember? Had they forgotten what it was like to walk on two legs and cast magic in fire and dust? Would they shun her and leave her to . . . To what? Nine had not been alone in over a century.

  A black speck approached in the sky, with a humming noise. That noise grew to a tremendous, mechanical roar as the machine swept down to the snowfield. The blades on the top stirred up snow in veils.

  The pack turned to run. They ran, north and west, to the mountain and the new territory.

  Nine ran after them, away from the terrible noise. She ran as hard and as fast as she could, fists pumping and breath steaming, her too-long hair obscuring her vision.

  But the wolves were too fast. One paused to look back at her. The pup she’d saved.

  Men tackled her and took her down to the snow.

  She watched, crying, as the wolves retreated into the wilderness. In that moment, she knew what had happened. The pack had rejected humanity, had rejected magic. They simply wanted to live as they were, one with the world, unencumbered by that poison. She remembered it, and would be forgotten.

  She was alone.

  Chapter 20

  The Dream of Wings

  “You gonna tell me what happened?”

  Petra sat in the hospital hallway, her head on her knees. Her bandaged hands dangled in space. She felt oddly weightless, suspended in this strange interstitial place where things always fell apart.

  Mike Hollander sat down beside her, offered her a cup of coffee. She took it gratefully, drank it greedily.

  “Starting at the beginning? Well, I got married.”

  “So I hear. Congrats. I owe you a waffle iron or something.”

  “Heh. I wonder if Bear’s Gas ’n Go has a registry.”

  “Good thing that your husband’s insurance has kicked in. Dunno much about your judgment in anything else, but your timing is impeccable.”

  “Thanks for coming to get us,” she said.

  “Anytime. You keep my job interesting.” He took a swig of his coffee. His face was still beat to hell, and she could see bandages beyond the collar of his shirt. She was pretty sure he wasn’t supposed to be back at work with a busted rib, but chiding him about being Superman had never gained her any traction. “So. The sheriff says you don’t have to talk to me. That that whole thing was part of a local investigation.”

  “Oh, really?” Nice of him to get them off the hook. Petra’s mouth turned.

  “Well. He said that after he’d been tranquilized. Scuttlebutt has it that it took three times the normal amount of Haldol to put that guy into la-la land.” Mike poked at his coffee with a stirrer. “You guys went up there after Skinflint Jack, didn’t you?”

  She was tired of lying. “Yeah. Yeah, we did.”

  She expected a barrage of arguments about how monumentally stupid that was, but instead he said, quietly: “Did you get him?”

  “Yeah. We got him.” She glanced sidelong at Mike.

  Mike’s jaw hardened and he stared into the distance beyond the hallway. “Good.”

  Her brow wrinkled in surprise, and she was about to ask him more when a nurse walked down the hallway.

  “Ms. Dee?”

  “Yes.” Petra stood, feeling every bone in her body ache. “How is he?”

  The nurse reached out to touch her sleeve, her brown eyes liquid in sympathy. “Does Mr. Manget have any family that can make decisions for him? Or a living will?”

  Petra sucked in her breath. “That would be me. I’m his wife.”

  “Come with me, please.”

  The nurse led Petra down a green-tiled hallway, to the ICU. Gabe was in a room beside the nurse’s station. He lay in a bed with wires and tubes coming out of his arms, mouth, and nose. Petra stepped to his side and took his hand. It was cold and bruised purple.

  “I’m Dr. Burnard . . . hello, Ms. Dee.”

  “Hello, again.” Petra looked over the bed at the doctor. “How is he?”

  “Not good, I’m afraid.” Her fingernails drummed against her clipboard. “He’s suffered a collapsed lung, a broken leg and a broken wrist, a fractured pelvis, and a broken vertebrae.”

  “That sounds . . . manageable?” Painful as fuck, but manageable.

  “The primary issue is the head injury. There’s a whole lot of swelling and bleeding, and we need to take the pressure off.”

  “Why isn’t he in surgery?”

  “He will be, within hours. The surgeon is hung up on bad roads near Billings.” Dr. Burnard took a deep breath. “Forgive me, but I have to ask. It doesn’t look good. If we lose brain activity, what would you like for us to do?”

  Petra looked down at Gabe, broken and utterly mortal. She was a rational woman. As a rational woman, she had to accept the evidence of science. If Gabe’s brain activity disappeared . . . he just wasn’t in there. Not anymore.

  But. But. Her heart clenched. She wasn’t ready to let go of him. And damn it, part of the reason they got married was so that he could make these kinds of decisions for her. She hadn’t expected the tables to be turned. She’d expected to be lying to cops and judges, not uttering an irrevocable truth to a doctor. She pressed her hand over her mouth.

  “Can I have a few minutes with him alone to think about it?”

  “Yes. Absolutely. I’ll wait for you at the nurse’s station.”

  “Thank you.”

  The doctor moved from the room, and Petra closed the curtain. She touched Gabe’s face and kissed his hand. She laid her head on his shoulder and listened to the mechanical sounds of the machines moving air and fluid through him.

  “You are not allowed to die,” she told him. “You’re just . . . not. I won�
��t let you.”

  Deep in his chest, she thought she heard something move. Something that sounded like wings fluttering.

  She lifted her head to look at him. “Yes. You have to fight this,” she whispered at him furiously. “You may believe that you’re entirely ordinary now, but . . . you’re wrong. There’s got to still be something left in you that can fight. And you have to.”

  Her tears tapped down on the blanket, but he didn’t respond.

  Eventually, there was a knock at the door and Dr. Burnard came in.

  “Ms. Dee?”

  Petra looked up at her. “I want you to keep him alive. No matter what,” she said fiercely.

  And she meant it. Her definitions of life and unlife had unraveled in the time she’d spent in Temperance. Sometimes she barely knew what was real or not, under the broad sweep of this western sky. The world was a helluva lot bigger than she ever knew. She’d seen only a small fraction of it, and she’d had to develop a modicum of openness to the idea of the inexplicable.

  She asked to stay with Gabe until the surgeon arrived. She was his wife; they couldn’t refuse. She set up a chair beside him, dimmed the lights, and pulled the curtains around them to shield them from the views of passersby. When it felt like a warm cocoon, Petra dug into her pocket for her father’s wedding gift: the marbles.

  She had no idea if there was any juice left in them, if they just represented one round-trip ticket to the spirit world. But it was worth a try. She slipped the yellow cat’s-eye marble beneath his pillow and put the other behind her head in the chair. She wrapped her coat around her and closed her eyes. The numbing exhaustion she’d felt crept through her, deepened her breathing.

  She hoped that she could fall asleep without the irritating lullaby of his snoring, just this once.

  Gabriel dreamed of wings.

  At first he dreamed that he was flying. He was soaring above Sepulcher Mountain, feeling the cold sun on his wings and the wind as it slipped up through the hoodoos. He felt untouchable, this high.

  Funny. He’d never been able to fly this high, before. He glanced around, expecting to see other ravens.

  But there were none. It was just him, soaring. He felt stronger, more powerful, as he skimmed above the clouds. He was beyond the reach of pain, of the earth and all the tangled things that had conspired to keep him there. He drifted along the tatters of a cumulus cloud, feeling the moisture soak through the ribs of his feathers.

  His feathers . . . they were white.

  As he flew toward the sun, he wished that he could show Petra.

  She would find this glorious, all this light and all this sky.

  Maybe someday soon.

  He closed his eyes and felt the sunshine warm on his back. He felt free. He’d shed the dust of centuries to make this alchemical transformation. He could not have done it without Petra. He wished he could tell her, somehow. Give her a sign.

  He glanced down at the valley through which he flew. It looked familiar. Snowcapped mountains lifted in a wall in the sunshine. And there was a terrace carved in that wall, where a woman in white waited with a coyote.

  He tucked his wings and dove down, banking hard and lighting on the stone railing of the balcony.

  Petra was there, and his heart soared to see her. She wasn’t wearing a white wedding dress, as before. She was wearing a white sweater and pants. She squinted at him.

  “Gabe?”

  He ruffled his feathers and stuck his chest out a bit. “Like the new suit?”

  “It’s beautiful.” She reached out to touch him, to stroke the downy feathers of his neck. He leaned into her hand and squinted past her to the dining room. It was empty, with no furniture or fire in the grate. If she’d used the marbles to get them here, it was likely that magic was disintegrating.

  “Why are you a bird now?”

  “I think I changed. An alchemical transformation, if you like.” He shook out his wings and tucked them in. “It seems getting thrown off a mountain by Skinflint Jack kick-started my spiritual progress.” He peered down at Sig, who made a grab for one of his tail feathers. “I see you brought Man’s Best Friend along for the ride.”

  “I think he just goes where I go.” An expression of deep worry was in her eyes and mouth as she reached down to pet Sig.

  “Things not going so well back at the ranch?”

  “No. They’re not.” She sat down beside him on the balcony, her hands on her lap. “Your earthly body is pretty well fucked up. They’re going to do brain surgery on you in a couple hours. Whenever they can get the surgeon out here to start.”

  “That doesn’t sound good.” He paced beside her for a few moments and then stopped. “What would you like to do?”

  “There’s a choice?”

  “There’s always a choice in things.”

  “I told them to keep you alive. No matter what.” She looked at him levelly. “And I didn’t stop to consider if that was what you wanted. Not for one cold minute.”

  He laughed so hard his tail feathers shook.

  “What’s so funny?”

  He tipped his head. “That’s why I love you. You do what you want.”

  “But what do you want? It seems like you’ve got one foot halfway through the door to the spirit world.” Her lip quivered and her eyes shone. “I mean, you’re a bird. Have you moved on, and are you going to find the other Hanged Men, the ravens?”

  He reached forward to shush her with his wing. “This isn’t about the Hanged Men. This is about you and me.”

  She took a deep breath. “What do you want to do?”

  “Well, it’s pretty much a joint decision. I can go back there, try to ride out the surgery, and hope that I’m able use a spoon at the end of it. That’s the first road.”

  “Okay. But I believe that somewhere the idea of marriage—there’s something about me wiping soup from your chin in poor health.”

  “That’s kind of you. The other road is that I decide that my transformation is complete. That I go explore the spirit world. I seemed not to wind up in hell, which is a surprise.” He looked down at his taloned feet, which were notably not burning.

  “And I let you go,” she said quietly.

  “You don’t have to,” he said, just as quietly. “You could come with me.”

  Her brow wrinkled. “How does that work?”

  “You. Me. The coyote. We decide to move on together. All three of us take a jump off that balcony . . . change into eagles, and hit the skies.”

  She drummed her fingers against her lower lip. “I don’t know.” She looked over the balcony. “Falling off mountains is what got us into trouble in the first place.”

  She seemed steeped in thought, looking over the edge. “And I’m scared.”

  “Of this world?”

  “No. Of facing cancer in our world. Of losing you.”

  He brushed a feather across her brow. “You will never lose me. Not if it’s within my power.”

  She smiled, a sad, wan smile.

  She climbed up the balcony and stood on the wide railing, holding onto a pillar. She looked down, then back at Sig and then at him.

  She inched closer to the edge and took a deep breath.

  And then she vanished. She didn’t jump over the ledge; she simply faded, like ink dissipating in water.

  Gabe looked down. The coyote had disappeared, too.

  He sighed and gazed at the horizon.

  “Mrs. Manget?”

  Petra stirred, sucked in her breath. Bright overhead lights had been turned on, buzzing with fluorescence through her sleep-haze.

  “The surgeon is here now.”

  She moved, and the marble behind her collar fell to the floor. She reached down to grab it and had to dodge many pairs of feet as nurses and aides unhooked wires from Gabe to prepare him for travel to the operating room. The marble rolled to a floor drain and plinked away into darkness. Petra stood up and gazed at Gabe’s battered face, knowing how serene he’d been in the otherworld.
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  She wanted to say to him, Wait. Don’t come back.

  But they whisked him away, leaving her in a bright empty room with disconnected machines. She rubbed her face and stared down at her shoes.

  There were no more choices she could make. Gabe would have to decide for himself.

  She plodded down the hallway, past the ICU, and gazed at the vending machines. She made a couple of phone calls. One, to the insurance company. And second, to Maria, to check on Sig. Mike had taken Sig to stay with her, and she was certain he was happily asleep on her couch. She knew that she needed to call her father. She procrastinated with a couple of candy bars and watching television before dialing the number to the nursing home. She was told that he was out at physical therapy, and she left a message. She didn’t want to tell him what happened. Not now. She didn’t trust herself not to dissolve into tears. She was holding herself together with what felt like chewing gum and duct tape, and she didn’t want to lose her grip.

  Maria came to see her, and she disintegrated. Her friend held her while she blubbered and spewed incoherent snot-strings on her shoulder. Petra had never been a good crier—when she did, it was messy. She finally scrubbed her face with a handful of tissues and took a deep breath.

  “I’m okay. Really.”

  “No, you’re not. But that’s okay.”

  Once Petra had gotten herself together, they headed up to the patient care floors. She had no idea where Owen was being kept; she sure didn’t want to see him, even if he was zoned out on Haldol. But there was one person she did want to see. She paused before Room 211. The door was ajar, and she stuck her head in.

  “Hi.”

  Petra let herself into Nine’s room. The young woman was sitting on a bed in a hospital gown, with her arms around her knees.

  “How is Gabe?” she asked.

  Petra shook her head. “I—I don’t know. They’re working on him.” She felt drained of tears, hollow. She sat down on the bed beside Nine. “How are you?”

  Nine stared down at her toes. She wiggled them. “Confused.”

  “The doctors say that you’re well.”

  She gave a short bark of bitter laughter. “Well. They said I have worms. I have pills for that now.”