Mercury Retrograde

by Laura Bickle

  “And was that part of your work—­as a Pinkerton agent sent to investigate him?” He had spoken of this before, and she wondered if he still remembered as much.

  “I was more covert in my dealings with him. I worked myself into his social circle, and we became . . . well acquainted.”

  “You were his friend.”

  Gabe was silent for some time before he spoke again. “I was fascinated with him. He had a gift for connecting the impossible with the possible. He was so much more than the charlatans I’d seen before, the table-­tippers and the channelers of the dead. I did my best to disprove his work in my own mind, but I could not. He did amazing things, and I let myself be pulled into his orbit. He came to trust me, over time, and revealed many of his miracles to me.”

  Petra shuddered. “Strange company you kept.”

  “You were not the only one to think so. He also came under the scrutiny of the Church. A new priest had been sent to Temperance after the old one had died. Father Brennan was rumored to have studied as an exorcist, so you imagine that he might be . . . somewhat overly sensitive to such things. And Lascaris was never the type to successfully hold himself up as a morally righ­teous man. If you recall, Stroud traced his lineage back to a liaison with Lascaris and the town madam.”

  “So he was easy pickings?”

  “For a priest with a great deal of charisma, who could strike the fear of God into his congregation? He was certainly a target of interest. Father Brennan’s sermons became heavy on the ills of womanizing and merits of stoning sorcerers.” He shrugged. “I forget most of it; I was barely able to sit still for half a sermon in that time.

  “But Lascaris was convinced he had enemies. And he was not wrong. Aside from the skeptical investors I represented and the priest working on his own, there were some members of community who had witnessed strange things around his house. There was talk of ghost lights traveling up and down the roads, of women who he’d called on who had vanished. One of them was found later in a valley, with a cabbage where her head should have been.”

  “That’s . . . kinky?

  “I never did figure that one out,” he admitted. “Nor did I determine exactly why he had a patch of pumpkins that bled when they were cut. I suspected that he was growing a homunculus, but . . . with him, one never knew.”

  “Halloween at his house must have been something else.”

  “Many of the rumors that surrounded him were just idle gossip and ignorance. But Lascaris got poisoned taking Communion, and was concerned enough to call upon a guardian afterward. That little incident took a great deal of his energy to resolve—­he stayed here, at the Stella Camera, for many days, to purge it from his system.”

  “Which is why you brought me here.”

  Gabe nodded. In the telling of the story, she had pressed her head against his shoulder, and she could hear the buzz that passed for a pulse in his chest. His right hand tucked the blanket more tightly under her chin. “Yours was a much more serious poisoning than the ordinary strychnine Lascaris had been dealt by the priest. But I hoped that it would work against the basilisk’s poison.”

  “The basilisk. It’s a lot tougher than I imagined for a spirit-­world creature.” But it was here, and that gave her some distant hope that perhaps her father could eventually be drawn back.

  “Lascaris brought it through with a great deal of trouble. Anything that moves from the spirit world into ours must have a vessel to contain it. It can be as simple as a mirror, or as complicated as a fresh corpse. For this creature, Lascaris began with an ordinary rattlesnake. But the creature’s spirit was too large for such a small body. And it changed, evolved into what you saw today.”

  “So, it is a snake?”

  “It started out in this world in that shell, but it was never a simple snake. The basilisk and its ilk were said to have sprung from the blood of Medusa when Perseus decapitated her. I have no idea how far Lascaris had to travel into the spirit world to find such a creature in the first place. I saw it once at his house, sunning itself on his roof. Lascaris had a hard time convincing it to crawl down his chimney, away from casual passersby.”

  Petra didn’t want to imagine that creature curled up underneath the Airstream. Her trailer was perched on the land where Lascaris’s house had once stood. She hoped that it didn’t have a sentimental attachment to its old home.

  “Lascaris ultimately found it to be too difficult to control. They had a standoff one summer, at Turbid Lake. The earth shook, and the creeks ran backward for many hours, until Lascaris emerged alone from his ordeal three days later. He went into seclusion for a month. I don’t know if he was in mourning for the creature, or regenerating his energy.” He trailed off, his amber gaze settling on the dark glass of the salt pond.

  “And you pursue it now because it can save the tree?” She imagined the snake slithering around in these tunnels, and shivered.

  “The blood from the right side of the snake has the power of eternal life. And the left is poison of Medusa’s blood, living death.”

  “You want the blood for the tree.”

  “I think it can restore it, just like it restored you.”

  She blinked at him, remembering the taste of pine sap and copper on her tongue. She knew Gabe not to be especially prone to acts of altruism. He’d gone after the snake at great risk.

  “You got the blood . . . and you gave it to me?”

  He nodded and looked at her with his level amber gaze. “You’re more important.”

  “Gabe, I’m not . . .” There was nothing miraculous about her, not like the Hanged Men. She wasn’t magical or undead or a living avatar of the power of alchemy. She was ordinary, and she had no understanding of why he would risk such a thing—­his world and the other men in it—­for her.

  He reached for her cheek, and his touch on her jaw was like a feather.

  A smile played on his lips. “Well, to be fair, I didn’t know what side of the basilisk the blood had come from.”

  “Gabe, shut up.”

  “You’re worth it.”

  He cupped her face in his hands and kissed her. He tasted like sunshine with a rim of something metallic, something utterly fascinating. It warmed her, trickling down her throat to her chest, full of promise and a stillness of the certainty of time.

  She was so close.

  Bel could feel it.

  The knowledge hummed within her, singing along her spine and gathering behind her eyes like unshed tears. This moment. It was the culmination of everything she’d sought, the long journey and all the blood and all the interminable miles of road. She reached out with her senses, and they brushed up against the Great Mother. She was curled up here, waiting.

  Bel stood on the edge of a seething mudpot that had formed by Raven Creek, sinking to her ankles in silt. It burned even through the leather of her boots, pressing around her calves with scalding intensity as it mingled with cold creek water. The mud steamed around her, twisting in pale tendrils around the snakeskin she wore. Her breath made ghosts in the chill predawn air.

  Ahead, the mouth of a cave rose from the sea of mud, erupted from deep within the earth. The rock of it was sharp and new. Air, earth, fire, and water had gathered here, in this spot. Hot gases from the underworld sighed with the sound of a dragon inhaling, exhaling . . . And it paused, as if the earth itself were holding its breath, waiting with Bel.

  “Great Mother, Medusa. We have come to serve you.”

  She was conscious of the Sisters of Serpens behind her, gathered at the shore of this sea of earth and steam and bubbling water. She could sense the pulse of their fear, their weakness.

  She opened her arms, unfurling her hands in supplication. Her rings glittered in the light, and her heart hammered in anticipation.

  Something moved in the mud, back at the mouth of the cave.

  “Great Serpent, come to us, y
our faithful servants.”

  A pair of yellow eyes glowed in the dark and rushed forward. Bel sucked in her breath. Gasps sounded behind her, and she heard Cal whimper.

  The serpent skimmed forward, whipping over the surface of the mud. Her dark green body was easily thirty feet long, with a golden crest of feathers flaring above her eyes. She had taken the form of a basilisk in this plane of reality. The Great Mother reared up before Bel, looming easily four feet above her, in the posture of a cobra, regal and timeless. She was atavistic in her beauty, untouched by the civilizing influences of men. She pulsated pure id, beyond good and evil and any human constraints.

  She was.

  A smile split Bel’s face, and her heart sang. “Great Mother, you are magnificent. You honor me with your brilliant presence.” What had this magnificent serpent seen, in all her time on this Earth and in other planes? What did she know? What had she brought back?

  The basilisk lowered her head a foot, inspecting Bel. Her tongue flickered beyond her mouth, and Bel glimpsed her fangs, embedded in a head larger than a pumpkin.

  “We have brought you a sacrifice.”

  Footsteps slogged through mud behind them. The basilisk looked over Bel’s shoulder, twitching in alarm.

  Bel didn’t look back, but lifted her hands to the serpent, cupped as if she were offering it water in a bowl. “Please accept this offering.”

  The bravest of the Sisters slogged forward, carrying the large military duffel bags they’d tied to their bikes. They dumped the contents of the bags into the mud at Bel’s feet: three bodies, the three young men who had tortured the snake to death. They were curled in on themselves to fit the bags, sawed and twisted and broken. But they were meat.

  The Sisters retreated, but Bel remained, rooted in place. This was the most sublime moment of her life. Her body hummed so loudly with magic she was certain that the basilisk could hear it. It sang from her heels to the crown chakra at the top of her head, completing a circuit in the mud and steaming air.

  The snake peered at each body in turn, flipping at them with her tail, the way a cook might test pancakes with a spatula to see if they were done.

  Bel dared not move. She hoped that the Great Mother Goddess would find these acceptable. If not, she still had Cal. She glanced back at the bank. The boy was held fast in the grip of two of the Sisters. He wasn’t going anywhere. She’d cast him to the mud, without any hesitation, if the Mother preferred live food.

  The serpent lunged at Bel.

  Bel held her ground, expecting in that split second to fulfill her duty to the Great Serpent by becoming breakfast. But the basilisk sunk her teeth into the body floating at Bel’s feet, splashing hot mud against Bel’s jacket. The basilisk dragged the body away, back to the darkness of the cave. Waves of hot mud lapped at Bel’s boots in her wake.

  She grinned, elated. The Great Serpent had accepted the sacrifice. The Sisters of Serpens were now her servants, aligned with the will of this irresistible force of nature.

  And they would be unstoppable.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  THINGS WORTH FORGETTING

  Petra dozed against Gabe’s chest. She’d been conscious of Sig kicking her a few times in his sleep, but Gabe seemed to sleep less fitfully than the coyote did. Pressed against her ear, she listened to the hollow buzzing of his blood, like a radio tuned between stations. It was soothing, in its own odd kind of way. Once in a while, that steady pulse would be punctuated by something that sounded like the flutter of wings.

  She wondered how much longer he could last, how much longer the tree could. She felt such sorrow at the idea that he’d sacrificed the tree for her, and a marrow-­deep unworthiness. Yet, she also wondered what that meant for her. She could no longer taste the basilisk’s blood on her tongue, and she knew she had gotten barely enough of it to drive off the venom—­her father had said so. But she was pretty sure she’d be checking the bathroom mirror to make sure that she wasn’t sprouting scales anytime soon.

  And she wondered about Gabe. She took him at his word, that his fractured memory had returned, that the regeneration was occurring more slowly. Still, what was to keep him from forgetting her again in a few hours? From dissolving slowly from her sight and her world, like he had before? And what if he couldn’t remember the rest of the Hanged Men, forgot himself? Forgot how to pretend to breathe?

  She felt him shift a bit beneath her. She turned over, pressed her chin to his collar, and asked, “Could it happen again?”

  “Could what?” He kissed her temple.

  “Could you lose your memory again?”

  His mouth thinned. “I don’t know. If the tree dies . . . I would think that we’d all begin our processes of disintegration, somehow.”

  “We can’t let that happen,” she vowed. “We have to find the basilisk and get more of its blood.”

  “ ‘We’ are doing no such thing.” He tucked a tendril of hair behind her ear. “You are going to go home and recover from the venom. I’m going to gather the rest of the Hanged Men and find the snake.”

  “Nuh-­uh.” She pulled the Locus out of her pocket. “I can track the basilisk better than you can. Ravens or no. And that thing’s killing scientists, campers, and probably random picnickers by now. I’m going with you.”

  He blew out his breath in frustration and stared up at the ceiling.

  She settled back on his chest, placing the Locus on his collarbone. “I’m glad that’s settled.”

  “You are impossible.”

  “But I’m rational. You can’t argue with reason.”

  “I might take issue with that.”

  Daylight had begun to cast a pink glow inside the Stella Camera. A thin, pearly mist from above had sunk down over the pool, casting a weirdly reflective softness into the room.

  A shadow flew in. Petra started, and a raven landed beside them.

  It stared at Gabe hard and began to caw an alarm.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked, scrambling to catch the compass as Gabe sat up.

  “Something,” Gabe said, reaching for his gear. He turned his head away from her and opened his hand. A mass of feathers arose from his palm, forming a raven of its own. That raven took wing and flew up to the hole in the ceiling with the other.

  His gaze was distant, as if following something she couldn’t see. Petra started pulling on her waterlogged boots. They were crusty with salt, but hadn’t shrunk.

  “There are police at Sal’s doorstep,” Gabe said, frowning. “They’re looking for you.”

  “Why would . . .” Her brow creased. “Oh, shit.”

  She reached into her pile of wet clothes, into one of the dozen pockets of her cargo pants for the tracker Mike had given her. She held it in her palm. “Mike Hollander gave this to me before we went to track the snake. The water certainly killed it, but it likely tracked my location here.”

  Wordlessly, Gabe climbed to his feet and gave her a hand up. “We’d better concoct a convincing cover story.”

  With Sig plodding sleepily in their wake, they wound through the tunnels. Petra lost her sense of direction more than once, but Gabe’s sense was unerring. He gripped her sleeve as they walked through the darkness, and she followed the firefly-­like brightness of his eyes.

  They climbed to sunlight in a pasture, as Gabe pushed open a sod-­covered door in the ceiling of a tunnel. Horses grazed in the bright morning, and Sig was enchanted by the sight of them. Once lifted to the surface, he immediately lowered himself to his belly and began to skulk through the grass around the horses.

  “Sig, you’re going to get kicked,” Petra muttered as she and Gabe climbed out.

  But the stalkees ignored him. Gabe whistled, and a sorrel horse came to him, his mouth full of grass.

  “You remember Rust,” he said.

  “No?” Petra reached out to touch his speckled nose. Rust let
her, chewing thoughtfully.

  “He brought us here. He’s secretive and fast.”

  “Very good qualities for a horse in your company.”

  One of the Hanged Men approached, holding a saddle and bridle. He handed them to Gabe and did not make eye contact with Petra.

  She stared down at her sodden boots, feeling guilty as Gabe saddled Rust. And she wondered if the Hanged Men would ever mutiny against Gabe. She had the impression that they needed him to interface with Sal and the outside world, on some level. But she realized that she knew very little about them, as individuals.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  The Hanged Man had turned to go, but he stopped and looked back, startled. He tipped his hat at her and nodded. Maybe they weren’t used to being talked to.

  “Can you ride?” Gabe asked her.

  “I can drive anything with wheels. I don’t know anything about horses,” she admitted.

  “You won’t be on him long, and he’s a good horse. Pull right or left to turn, and back with the reins to stop. He’ll figure that out, so you don’t need to think about your feet.”

  “You’re not going up to Sal’s house with us?” Her brow creased.

  “No. Your friend Hollander and I already had a run-­in last night. I’m hoping he didn’t see me clearly, but it’s not wise to tempt the deductive skills of cops.”

  “Do I want to know about that?”

  “No. It’s better if you act surprised—­both to see him, and when he tells you about last night.”

  “I’m sure I will be.” She lifted an eyebrow, certain it was one helluva story. “I’ll see you at sunset, then?” She patted her pocket to make sure that Gabe hadn’t lifted the Locus from her. It wasn’t like he could work it, anyway . . . but she didn’t trust him not to try to put her on the “fragile items” shelf.