by Laura Bickle
“Phil!”
A woman in a hazmat suit stood at the edge of the darkening pine forest. Her back was turned to them, and she was struggling with a backpack.
“The snake.” Petra turned, aiming her guns at the darkness.
Gabe advanced toward the woman, the gun before him as he reached for a spear with his free hand. This was going really bad, really fast. He hadn’t figured on collateral damage. He hadn’t figured on Petra.
She ran beside him, plunging into the pine woods, with the coyote a blur on her heels. The sun had dipped behind the trees, casting them in shadow.
“Where’s Phil?” she demanded of the woman in the hazmat suit.
“He was just here!” The woman in the suit wrestled a yellow plastic gun out of the bag. It was longer than her arm and covered with warning stickers. “He fell, and I lost sight of him!”
“What the hell is that?” Petra demanded.
“Stun gun.”
“Christ.”
Gabe peered into the woods. Shadow passed over his face, and his boots pressed quietly into the soft earth. The pine needles had smothered the undergrowth here—there was no brush to speak of. He assumed that the man was wearing the same bright white suit as the woman, and he scanned the shadows. Nothing moved.
“Phil?” the woman called.
Overhead, something rustled.
A blur of white plastic dropped down on them. It was apparently Phil—or what was left of him. He dangled lifelessly, like a limp sock on a clothesline, from the mouth of the basilisk. It curled around the trunk of the pine tree, trying to wolf down one of Phil’s legs.
“Shit. I guess we know what it eats now.” Petra aimed up at the snake and fired. The muzzle flash lit up the half-darkness. The basilisk lashed back into the canopy, where it glowered with yellow eyes.
“No!” The woman in the suit shoved her back. “Don’t kill it!” She raised the yellow plastic gun and fired into the dark. Two darts zipped into the canopy, toward the creature’s eyes.
Electricity crackled, and the snake shrieked. The dart lines got tangled in the pine branches, and the woman in the suit wrestled with the gun.
The basilisk turned tail and flipped through the trees, flinging itself from tree trunk to trunk, tail churning like a whip. The supple pines bent, as if under the force of a gale force wind.
Gabe sprinted, trying to catch up with it. He unslung his rifle, taking a shot. He didn’t care if the serpent lived or died. He just needed its blood.
Branches broke. The snake crashed through the canopy, catching itself on the bottommost branches. It opened its jaws and hissed at Gabe. Its feather crest stood up, slitted eyes dilated. Venom spewed from its mouth.
Gabe rolled to the right, reaching for one of his spears. The snake landed on the forest floor with a soft thump and writhed after him. Gabe hurled the spear near the fast-moving snake’s right side. It bounced and skipped along its scaly surface, not making direct contact.
“Get away from him.”
Petra stood yards away from him as she shouted at the snake, pistols lifted. She shot at the basilisk, muzzles flashing in the gloom. The sun had dipped behind the mountains beyond the forest, and they were losing any advantage of light.
The snake dove into the thick bed of pine needles, freakishly fast, and turned.
“Run!” Gabe yelled at Petra.
The snake hissed, and a thin white vapor leaked from its mouth, like dry ice.
Petra saw it and stumbled back. She turned to run to the safety upwind in the grassland, where the coyote barked furiously.
Gabe fired at the snake. Getting the blood was meaningless, now. The basilisk retreated, sliding behind a rotted log and into deeper shadow as it circled back toward the woman in the plastic suit, who was now on all fours, retching into the pine needles.
Petra ran, got about twenty-five feet toward the meadow.
Gabe watched as she stopped, wobbled on her feet . . .
. . . and collapsed to the ground in a heap, her hat falling off her head like a feather from a shot bird.
Gabe scrambled to his feet. He charged to Petra, scooped her up, and ran for the field, upwind of the snake’s poison.
He looked back once, to see the snake striking at the woman on the ground. She couldn’t even draw enough breath to shriek. She was done for.
The coyote ran to meet Gabe, yipping and jumping.
“Petra.” Gabe shook her.
Her head lolled back in the crook of his elbow. In the twilight, he could see that her eyes were half-open, but bright red broken blood vessels had overtaken her left eye. A spidery violet bruise was forming beneath the freckles of her right cheek.
The basilisk had gotten to her.
He whistled for Rust. The horse hadn’t skidded completely to a stop before he had one foot in the stirrup. He swung into the saddle with his burden and jammed his heels into Rust’s sides, wheeling away.
There was only one thing that could stop magic, and that was more magic.
He galloped away across the meadow as the moon rose, the coyote a gold sun trailing behind him.
Cool night air swept through the grasslands as he rode. The bullfrogs and the last of the late-season cicadas sang, giving the impression of a land seething with life.
He’d been stupid. He hadn’t thought there was a possibility of collateral damage from confronting the basilisk in a remote area, but she’d been there. And she had the ability to dissolve his best-laid plans.
“What were you doing there?” he asked.
Her head bounced against his shoulder, and she didn’t answer him.
She was a scientist. Of course, she would have been interested in this marvel. And she had the Venificus Locus. He remembered it now, the feeling of it growing over in his chest in the Lunaria. If anyone would have been able to find this creature, it would have been her.
He should have known.
But he hadn’t—he could still feel the black spot around his memory, gingerly poking at it as it filled in with color. He hadn’t known. The Lunaria hadn’t been able to restore everything to his flesh and his consciousness, but some part of that memory had been locked away. Not destroyed, just partitioned.
And now that it was open, despair welled up in him. If he’d known . . .
The moon had risen to its zenith overhead, draining the color from the landscape. The grass and roads were silver ribbons in the dark, churning in the cold wind that had kicked up. He plunged through that colorless land, over roads and creeks, running the most direct path to any help.
Petra was still breathing by the time he reached the Lunaria.
He dismounted and propped her up against the base of the tree. She sat there with her chin on her chest, limp as a rag doll, as he pulled open the door in the sod to the chamber below.
The coyote came trotting up, sides heaving, his tongue lolling from his teeth. He remembered the coyote now . . . his name was Sig. The coyote walked up to Petra and washed her face with his tongue. Gabe thought he saw a finger twitch, but it might have just been a trick of the light, cast by the moon tangled in the Lunaria’s branches.
“Give her here, Sig.” He lifted her, but the coyote held on to her coattail. Maybe the coyote knew something of what he planned. Sig tugged and pulled, lips pulled back, eyes shining gold.
Winning the tug of war when the hem of Petra’s coat gave way, Gabe stumbled away from Sig to the mouth of the portal. He jumped down to the floor of the chamber in one motion, landing in a square of moonlight with the edges softened by disturbed dust. Shadows hung around him. One or two gold eyes opened, disturbed in their slumber.
He took two steps into the darkness. The Lunaria’s roots reached out for him, inviting him to sleep with the others. But the roots paused as they explored the burden in his arms. A root brushed her for
ehead, curious.
A thump and a yelp sounded behind him. Gabe turned to see the damn coyote staggering upright in the moonlight. Sig growled at Gabe, a deep bass note in the darkness chewed out by white teeth.
The Lunaria reached out for Petra with a tendril wrapping around her wrist, dangling in space.
Gabe stepped back, pulling her arm away from its grip. “No. You can’t have her.”
It was tempting, to give her to the tree. But the tree didn’t have enough power to undo this, not the right kind of magic. It would try, it would dig deep into her. It would remake what it found there, regenerate all it could.
But Petra needed an entirely different alchemical process that the tree could not provide. Not a regeneration, but a purification.
The coyote lunged at him, tearing into his sleeve. The teeth tore into his arm, harmlessly. There was no blood, no pain. He shook the coyote off and turned to the tunnels worming deeper into the earth.
Sig followed him with a low, thunderous growl emanating from the bottom of his chest. When Gabe glanced back, he could see the shining eyes a few yards away, tracking him. There was nothing to be done for it. The coyote wouldn’t trust him, and Gabe wasn’t entirely certain that he knew what he was doing.
“You think that I mean to work some darker magic than the tree on her,” he said to the coyote.
The growl increased to a snarl. Sig was a good guardian.
“You aren’t wrong. But it’s the last chance.”
A hospital would be unable to cure her in time—they wouldn’t even be able to identify the elements of the basilisk’s venom soon enough to concoct an antidote. Gabe suspected that, given enough time, some brilliant mind like hers would be able to distill an antivenom through exotic snake venom. Science did, after all, have a certain kind of persistence that ultimately could succeed, given enough brute force and sheer bullheadedness. But by then, she’d be a puddle of liquefied goo at the end of a respirator hose, and there wouldn’t be enough left of her to pour into a jar. Dread and certainty of that outcome welled in his chest.
The tunnel opened up into a chamber of sparkling darkness. This was Lascaris’s Star Chamber—the Stella Camera. Lined in crystalline salts, moonlight from the open well above shattered into shivering reflections. At the bottom of the chamber, a lake of black water reflected the sky above, still and heavy as an obsidian mirror.
Sig whined, looking up at the moon and down at the water.
Gabe knelt at the water’s edge and shifted Petra in his arms. Her pulse thumped weakly in her throat.
“Petra, can you hear me?”
She made no indication that she did. He stripped off her coat.
“The Stella Camera is a place of purification, a place of distillation. If there’s any magic that can stop the poison, this is it.”
He lifted her body and waded into the water. His coat floated behind him like black wings. The salts were heavy enough in this water that a body could float on it. It was warm from the underground spring feeding it from below, like bathwater.
The water soaked Petra’s clothes and hair, pulling it out of its pins like seaweed. When he was waist deep, he let go. She floated in the black pool, suspended. She had been here before, had loved it. Maybe she would remember.
He wasn’t sure what he expected to happen. He suspected that the basilisk was an embodiment of the second phase of alchemy, the dissolution process. The Stella Camera was a place that Lascaris had constructed to work the distillation process, to purify the soul. Was there enough magic left in it to drain the poison from Petra? Or was it like the Lunaria, weakened and faded beyond any use?
Her body drifted a bit away from him in the water. He reached out to take her pulse. In despair, he could feel that it hadn’t changed.
Perhaps . . . perhaps it was like the Lunaria, in that it would take time to work. Lascaris had used it once against poison, Gabe remembered, when a rival had slipped him strychnine. Lascaris had convulsed in the pool for hours before emerging, exhausted, but wrathful. On assignment from the Pinkerton Agency to spy on Lascaris, Gabe had watched. He had not intervened, as he had not yet been given an order to execute Lascaris. And truth be told . . . Gabe was curious about what Lascaris knew. As an investigator of the occult, Gabe had seen a great many things, but Lascaris was unique. And the alchemist had been tougher than he’d thought. Lascaris slept for three days, then murdered the culprit. The memory gave Gabe hope.
He touched her wet cheek with the back of his fingers. He bent and kissed her cold lips. They tasted of the soft salt of the pool and a tang of acid, bright as lemons.
“I will be back.”
He turned and waded back to the shore. The coyote watched him with narrowed eyes.
“Stay here and watch her,” Gabe said.
The coyote’s suspicious gaze followed him as he walked from the chamber. He stared out at his mistress floating in the black pond and lay down like a dog at the foot of a bed.
“Good dog.”
Gabe strode into the darkness.
If the Stella Camera couldn’t help, there was only one thing that he was certain would: the blood of the right side of the basilisk.
And he would wake all the Hanged Men to get it.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
UNDERTOW
Everything hurt.
Even places without nerves ached. Her toenails hurt, the joints in her body, the lining of her lungs . . . even the hair on her head ached like a bad case of road rash soaked in hydrogen peroxide.
She’d tried to hold her breath when she ran from the snake, running as fast as she’d ever run in her life, but she’d tripped on a rock and taken in a small, involuntary breath. That tiny bit of air burned, rushing into her lungs like fire. And then there was darkness.
She felt heavy in this darkness, like a stone at the bottom of the sea. She could hear the trickle of deep water filtering through stone and the echo of that drip. There was no wind, no sounds of animals or birds—just that hollow sound of water’s persistence.
Shivering, Petra opened her eyes. She was lying on cold ground, her fingers wound in Sig’s fur. He turned and licked her cheek with his warm tongue. He made a face and rubbed his tongue on the roof of his mouth, as if she tasted bad.
She struggled to sit and gather her bearings. It was dark all around her, dark in the way that only the world underground can be dark. A diffuse light emanated from a cavern roof overhead, shining with dim phosphorescence in stringy clusters. It reminded her of the Waitomo Glowworm Caves in New Zealand, starry filaments of chandeliers gleaming with a blue sheen above her.
As her eyes adjusted, she could make out what looked like streets—bricked streets worming away in the dark, coming together from five directions to form a single point. She ran her fingers over the brick. It felt old, centuries-old cracked clay, and it seemed that each one was carved with symbols. Her fingers felt oddly sticky, and they seemed to smear into the brick.
She bent closer to get a look. Her gold pendant spilled from her collar, scraping the brick. She squinted at triangles and stars—some of them she recognized from her research as alchemical symbols for earth, air, fire, and water. But the rest of the script was foreign to her.
“You shouldn’t be here.”
A voice echoed from over her right shoulder, and she jumped.
A man in a white cloak stood over her, carrying a lantern. He unshielded the lantern, letting its golden light spill over Petra and the bricks. He removed his hood, and Petra found herself staring into a familiar lined face.
“Dad?”
He knelt beside her, and she flung her arms around his neck. “I’ve been looking for you!”
He embraced her with bony fingers, then held her at arm’s length, frowning. His hazel eyes were clear and present, not cloudy and distant as they were in the nursing home. His buzzed-off hair ha
d grown past his shoulders and was tied back in a knot. He was not who he had been in the physical world, but he seemed so much more extant in this black here and now.
“Is that why you’re here—looking for me?” He looked at her as if she’d done something monumentally stupid, like that time she’d blown up the back side of the carport playing with her chemistry set when she was eleven.
“I . . .” she looked around at the converging dark paths. “I think I might have fucked up.”
“Yes. I think you might have fucked up, too.”
Sig sat on his rump, tongue lolling from his mouth. It seemed that he agreed.
Her dad reached out to pet Sig, and Sig allowed it, making an awful face of contentment as her father rubbed his golden ear.
“Where are we?” she asked.
“We’re at the Umbilicus Mundus—the navel of the world. It’s the gate to the underworld.”
“The underworld?”
“This is where all roads meet. You must have really been fucking up topside to get here.”
She made a face at her father. “It wasn’t on purpose!” She winced at the sound of her voice. It sounded like she was thirteen again.
“Clearly not.” Her father untied his cloak and wrapped it around her shoulders.
“Dad!” She flinched back.
Her father’s head and hands were flesh, but the rest of him wasn’t . . . he was bone. Pure white bone, bleached as if he’d been a corpse lying in the sun for hundreds of years.
Sig squinted at him and cocked his head.
“Yes, I’m naked.” He sighed.
“Ew. That’s just . . . bizarre.” She didn’t want to think about what it meant for her, psychologically, that she was clearly hallucinating her father as a skeleton. It disconcerted her almost as much as falling back into speaking to him as if he was her parent and she were a cranky teenager.
“I don’t always get to pick the form I get in the underworld. Not that you’re doing much better.” He gestured at her.
She looked down and bit back a retort. She was covered in goo. Black goo, like crude oil. When she rubbed her hands together, it seemed like her hands were smaller than before, as if some of her flesh had rubbed away with it.