by Laura Bickle
He wondered what very big snakes typically ate, but decided that he didn’t really want to know. He kept close to the bike.
Bel walked into the woods, her hands open at her sides, holding no weapons.
Maybe it wouldn’t go well for Bel. And that was the only possible way that Cal could imagine that things could go worse for him.
He sat on the ground, slapping at mosquitoes, as he waited with a handful of the others. The Sisters had built a fire, anticipating Bel’s return. Edging close to the flames, he tried to force some warmth into his body. He had nothing to distract him but the dead guy’s wallet, which had kindly been left behind in his jacket pocket. The guy’s name, according to his driver’s license, was Lewis Wayne Stewart. He was twenty years old and was from Idaho. Lewis had about five hundred dollars cash on him. Likely, he and his friends had been on vacation when they’d hit the wrong place at the wrong time.
He looked for a cell phone, but didn’t find one. There was no reason to believe that the Sisters hadn’t gone through Lewis’s stuff before they turned it over to him. Maybe they thought he could use the driver’s license as a base for a fake ID, but the whole thing was really squicking him out. Cal had no intention of taking on the name of a murdered dude. And he wanted out of this guy’s clothes as soon as possible. It was all just bad karma.
“Are you doing all right?”
The girl with the purple hair sat down beside him and offered him her canteen.
“Thanks.” He took a long draught and handed it back to her.
“Do you want a candy bar?” She fished a couple of chocolate bars out of her jacket pocket. They were the kind you got for two bucks when you donated to some kid’s sports team.
Cal still felt queasy, but he didn’t want to offend any of the Sisters. “Thanks.” He fiddled with the wrapper and watched her sidelong as she nibbled her bar. “I, uh, usually don’t take candy from strangers.”
She extended her hand to him, which was covered in a fingerless glove crocheted from silver yarn. “I’m Dallas.”
“I’m Cal. Is, uh, Dallas where you’re from? Or is that your real name?” Cal didn’t want to insult her by asking: Is that your stripper name or something?
“It’s the place that I met Bel. Everyone changes her name when she becomes a Sister.”
“So it’s kind of like being a nun?”
“Kind of.” She looked younger than the other women. Maybe it was the pale lavender hair. She had dark eyes and tawny skin. If he had met her on the street or in the Compostela, Cal would have been too bashful to speak to her—she was really hot. But it wasn’t like he could do anything about that.
“How did you, uh, join up? Is it like joining the military or something?”
“Bel says that everyone comes to the Sisters on their own path. I had run away from my parents. My stepdad was kind of an ass.”
“I can relate.”
“Dallas was the nearest big city, and I figured that if I could survive my mom beating the shit out of me as much as she did, I could make it there. It didn’t work out so well.” She looked at the chipped blue fingernail polish on her hands.
“Yeah. When I left my family, I tried to go to Billings. It wasn’t so good.” Cal wrapped his arms around his knees.
“I wound up with a pimp who took all my money. I didn’t have enough left over to eat and buy basic stuff. Like food and soap and things. It was pretty bad. One night, I saw Bel and the Sisters driving down the street. I thought they looked strong. Powerful. I really admired that.” She picked at a loose bit of yarn on her glove. “They parked their bikes and went to a diner to get some food. I was watching them. One of my regulars tried to steal a bike. I went into the diner and stopped by her table. My heart was going ninety miles an hour, and my knees were knocking. I told her that this guy was trying to steal the bike and pointed him out through the window.”
“Wow. That was really brave.” Cal understood that life. If she snitched on a regular, and the regular told her pimp—that was at least a hospital-worthy beating, and could have wound up with her dead in a ditch, depending on the pimp’s mood.
“I just wanted to do the right thing,” she said. “For once.”
“I get that.”
“It was probably the one best thing I’ve ever done. Bel thanked me. She sent the Sisters out to watch the bikes, and she fed me. She asked me where I was from and where I was going. And she told me that I was coming with her, that she’d never leave me behind. And I’ve been with Bel ever since.” She smiled. “I’ve always had a full belly and never had to turn a single trick. So . . . I feel safe.”
Cal felt queasy. The Sisters were capable of unmistakable brutality. But also a weird kind of compassion. He didn’t know what end of the spectrum he fell on, but he figured that being alive put him on Bel’s good side. For now.
Dallas stretched out beside him on the ground, offering him part of a blanket. Shyly, Cal accepted it. They stared up at the stars, and he began to feel a little more normal. He began to relax, and dozed. Every light sound disturbed him, whether it was a crackle of fire or a voice at too high of a pitch. He curled up in a ball and wanted to melt into the earth.
“What’s the most terrible thing you’ve ever done?”
Cal turned over, startled. Dallas was lying on her back and with her fingers behind her head. She wasn’t looking at him, just up at the darkness.
“Wow. Most . . . terrible?”
“Yeah. What’s the one thing you’ve done that you can’t forgive yourself for?”
Cal was silent, but Dallas went on: “The worst thing that I ever did was providing an alibi for my pimp. I knew that he had something to do with murdering one of the girls. She was around one day, acting squirrelly, then she wasn’t. We all knew that she was stealing from him. And I guess he found out. My pimp told me that I had to say I was with him when the cops came around. And I did.” Her lip quivered. “I betrayed her because I was scared. I know that he did something to her.”
“But if you’d told, he would have killed you, too.”
“Maybe. Maybe I coulda gotten police protection or something. I know that I can’t bring her back, but at least her mother would have known what happened.” Her voice dropped. “But I was too scared.”
“It wasn’t on you,” Cal said. He wormed a bit closer to her under the blanket so that their shoulders touched. “It wasn’t your fault.”
“Bel says that we all have darknesses thrust upon us. Many of those things are things that we have good intentions about. But we have to embrace our shadows.”
“And you’re having a hard time with it?” Nothing like murder to cause you to have a crisis of conscience.
“No. Not with any of the work I’ve done with Bel. Just what came before.”
There was a silence then, settling over the blanket.
It was a long time before Cal spoke: “I’ve done a whole lot of things. Really shitty things. But the worst thing that I ever did was covering for a friend. She’d been driving drunk and hit the guardrail on the freeway. Totaled the car, but neither one of us was hurt real bad or anything. I told the cops I was driving, because I was sober. So I got a ticket, and she got nothing. Later that weekend, she drove drunk again, wrapped her dad’s car around a telephone pole, and died. If I had told the truth to the cops, she would have been in jail and not out driving that night. So . . . yeah.” He blinked. “I know that I’m responsible for her death. But I can’t tell anybody.”
“You just did.” She reached under the blanket and squeezed his hand.
He blew out his breath. “Well, you’re kinder than most.”
“Bel can take that memory away from you, if you want.”
“What do you mean?”
“Through a course of hypnosis, she can close it right off from the rest of your brain.”
“She can
?” Cal didn’t like the idea of anyone putting their fingers in his head with a giant Sharpie and redacting things out.
“Sure. She took out years of memory from Irina.” She gestured with her chin to a tall, willowy woman gathering firewood. “Irina was sold as a child bride. She has peace now.”
Cal stared at the woman. A flower was braided in her hair behind her ear. There was an aura of serenity about her.
“So . . . why don’t you have Bel take that memory of Dallas from you?”
“I will. I’m not ready yet. I still feel like there’s something I need to do about that experience . . . maybe call up the detective on the case and give an anonymous tip. Once I work up the nerve to do that, then, yeah . . . I want Bel to close that door for me. We don’t have to carry our sins with us forever, you know. It’s okay to let go when it’s time.”
Cal mulled that. Bel could wipe out memories. What could she take from him? Could she take any of those dozens and dozens of miserable experiences from him that made him the raging wuss he was today? Could she make him a blank slate? Would he even want that?
And he realized the extent of her power over the Sisters. She had the power to bend their wills and memories, to calm the beasts within. She was much more dangerous than Stroud had been. All Stroud had to control his garden flowers was drugs. Bel had much, much more: She had the power of reshaping how they experienced their lives, from the inside out. She could take away pain and grant absolution. She could channel violence and command loyalty. She was the most dangerous person he’d ever known.
He pulled the blanket up to his chin and pretended to sleep.
The rest of the Sisters had returned by the time the moon had sunk overhead. Tria was in front of the processional of women, grinning. There were flowers wound in her hair and the hair of the other women—it was like they had just come from some kind of hippie love festival. Maybe this was their version of a victory march. He expected to see Bel with a snake draped over her shoulders like a boa, petting it and whispering at it. He craned his neck to see around the sparks and fire.
Fire glinted on scales and milky eyes.
Cal squealed and scuttled back.
But it was Bel. Bel was wearing the skin of a giant snake. Her gaze was distant, as if in a deep trance. The head of the snake fit over her head like a suit of armor, with the cloudy eye membranes perched on top. The silvery skin behind the head, translucent as mica, was about four feet wide. It flowed down her back like a wedding veil, where it dragged on the ground for yards.
“They killed the snake,” he gasped
“No,” Dallas said, laughing. “They found its shed skin. It’s a gift to the Priestess. It means that we have been accepted by the Great Serpent.”
Cal had no idea of how she was possibly able to make that kind of logical leap, but she grasped his hands and pulled him to his feet. “Rejoice with the Serpent!”
Someone pulled out a drum, and the Sisters began to dance around the fire. Cal waddled clumsily among them. Some knew the cha-cha, three were working on a line dance, and there was more than one belly dancer in the group. Bel was one of the belly dancers. As she moved, the fire played through the translucent snakeskin, giving it fire and volition of its own. Other women picked up the tail, and Cal had a weird memory of being in a school parade once upon a time.
Once upon a time . . . when the world wasn’t fucked.
Once upon a time when his chances of survival were greater than a mosquito in a bat cave.
Dallas grabbed his sleeve and drew him into the inner circle of the dance, showered in sparks and glitters of silver jewelry.
Once upon a time was over, so he might as well dance.
It was getting awfully crowded on the trail of the basilisk.
Gabe swore as he scanned the horizon. He’d brought as many of the Hanged Men as he could wake (and they had been more sluggish than usual; he blamed the winding-down of the Lunaria for that). They’d ridden on horseback to the remote location where he’d last seen the creature; he’d hoped that the snake would remain to feed upon Petra’s traveling companions. In a perfect world, the snake would be full and lumpy and sluggish . . . and easy to shoot.
But the field and the edge of the woods were crawling with ranger vehicles. The raven that he’d sent out to spy on them showed him that yellow tape was tangled in the bark of the pine trees, and radios crackled over the flash of red and blue light in the darkness. Men and women came in a steady stream, their hands covered in gloves and faces by gas masks. Some wore the same type of plastic suit that Petra’s traveling companions had been wearing.
“Damn.” Petra and her companions must have filed some kind of itinerary and missed a check-in.
“What now?” One of the Hanged Men, Mitchell, was alert enough to ask as he fidgeted with the reins. Mitchell was nearly as old as Gabe, and was one of the ones who still remembered how to speak.
Gabe was silent for a moment, thinking how best to manage this without being seen by the rangers. If the Hanged Men were discovered for what they were, then this mission was pointless. They had to stay hidden.
He checked to make sure that his pistol was loaded. “We make some noise. Just don’t shoot anybody.”
They left the horses at the sheltered edge of the clearing. Half of Gabe’s men fanned south with Mitchell, around the cordoned-off scene, while Gabe took the remaining handful north, creeping through the crickets and the grasses to outflank them.
Minutes later, gunshots sounded from the south.
The rangers shouted and swept spotlights into the darkness. A vehicle moved, shining headlights to the source of the distraction. Shadows ran away from the scene.
And Gabe and his men rushed in. They sprinted into the pine forest, ducking under the yellow tape. He hoped that if the basilisk had been driven off, then at least it had left a trail. Gabe’s men needed little light to see, but the moon was strong and clear, streaming through the branches above.
The basilisk had left something behind. A half-chewed, plastic-wrapped body lay on the ground, like leftovers on a picnic table. There was no sign of the one that had been dangling in the tree. Maybe the rangers had taken it down, or perhaps the snake was digesting it. Gabe sidestepped the blackened bits of pine needles and the yellow bark burned by acid.
He scanned the dark for any evidence of a trail. The rangers had left fluorescent plastic markers where bullet casings had fallen, scattered on the ground. One of the markers had been placed beside a pine tree—and it was stained with something other than acid. He could make out a crimson smear on the soft bark. It wasn’t Gabe’s blood—Gabe’s blood turned a phosphorescent gold, like a firefly, after dark. Petra hadn’t been bleeding, and the members of her traveling party were too far away for the blood to be splashed and smeared by the snake here. This had to be from the snake—likely grazed by a stray bullet. But there was no telling which side of the snake it had come from.
Gabe took out his knife and scraped the bark from the tree.
“Drop it and put your hands up!”
Gabe glanced up. A man in hip-wader boots, a forest ranger uniform, and plastic gloves was aiming his service gun and a flashlight at him. The guy looked familiar—he had seen him with Petra before. The name HOLLANDER was embroidered across his chest pocket.
Gabe’s fingers tightened around the piece of bark and the knife in his hand. He wasn’t giving it up.
“I said, drop the weapon. And that evidence, too.”
“I can’t.” Gabe stood.
The rest of the Hanged Men slipped around the trees, guns lifted. Gabe waved them back. In the moonlight, Gabe guessed that Hollander could only see silhouettes and perhaps the glint of moon on metal, but nothing more.
But Ranger Hollander turned, aiming his gun at the Hanged Men. “Drop it, gentlemen. You’re tampering with a crime scene.”
&n
bsp; Gabe didn’t want to have this confrontation. He stepped back. “I don’t want any trouble.”
“Then quit screwing around with my crime scene and drop the weapons.”
More rangers were closing in—flashlights bounced over the trees and swept over Gabe’s knees.
“Gun! Gun!” someone shouted.
And someone opened fire.
Gabe felt a bullet collide with his shoulder. The bullet wasn’t magical. It wasn’t wood. It passed through the material of his shirt, skipped along his skin, and deflected into the pine needles.
There was no point to this confrontation. Against mortal men with ordinary weapons, the Hanged Men would be immediately victorious. But the murder of rangers in a park would call more trouble down on his head than even the snake could manage.
Among the bright muzzle flashes and crazed sweeps of flashlight, Gabe and his men retreated, melting into the darkness. The rangers tried to pursue, but Gabe and his men didn’t need their light so see by, and they slunk away.
He had what he needed.
As he snagged his horse and rode away with the others, he was reminded that there were no such things as easy choices.
When Gabe was living, things had been easy. Choices were black and white then, living and dead, night and day. Since he’d been dead, everything had washed out to a curious shade of grey, and there were never any good answers.
He returned to the Lunaria with the blood of the basilisk—what little there was. The Hanged Men followed him, waiting silently for him to offer the blood to the Lunaria. The blood would either save them or kill them, depending on which side it had come from. He held their unlives in their hands, with this small piece of bark stained with magical blood.
Their judgment weighed on him, thick as shadows.
But the decision had already been made. Life over unlife.
Without comment, he let himself into the chamber below the Lunaria. As he descended, he felt the roots of the tree inquiring, tugging at his shirt. The tree could taste the magic, just as much as he and the rest of the men could. None of them could tell whether it was a destructive or a creative power—only the magnitude of it. It was thick magic, this little sliver, and the Lunaria was curious.