Dark Alchemy

by Laura Bickle

  She stretched out on the futon, watching the light drain from the day. The thin mattress smelled of tobacco smoke. The light seeped away from the field, sucking shadows toward the distant mountains. A rim of brilliant gold outlined the craggy, snow-­covered peaks until it faded like the corona of an eclipse, leaving violet sky behind. Crickets and cicadas chimed and buzzed in a soothing melody. Not like the sussurance of the waves, but a landlocked lullaby all its own.

  This place was all earth and dirt. She let the blackness of the new world fall over her as it fell over the land, hoping that it would obliterate her thoughts and grant her a dreamless sleep.

  Petra jolted upright. For a moment, she forgot where she was. Expecting a long drop from her bunk to the floor, she misstepped, turning her ankle as she scrambled out of the futon and the tangle of covers.

  Something was howling outside. She squinted through the window into the inkiness beyond, shivering. Cold had invaded the trailer.

  Was it a wolf? She’d never heard one before. This animal’s voice sounded higher pitched than the wolves she’d heard in movies, punctuated by yips and owl-­like hoots.

  A dog? It had to be a dog, she decided.

  She peered into the dark. Was it hurt? Worry gnawed at her.

  There would be no sleep while it was carrying on. She reached for her boots and a flashlight. As an afterthought, she reached for Hollander’s gun. She hoped that the dog wasn’t hurt badly enough that it would need to be put down. That would just be icing on the cake.

  Petra dragged the door open and stared out into the night. Night here was different than on the ocean. The ocean was black, capped with white waves, but the lights from the drilling platform and boats obliterated most of the stars.

  Here . . . here was different. Night held sway over everything else. The only light was the one in Petra’s hand and the glorious spill of the stars overhead. She sucked in her breath, taking in the white shadow of the Milky Way stretching from horizon to horizon.

  She stepped down, onto the ground. Her weight shifted beneath her, and she nearly tripped, craning her neck to see upward. She was too accustomed to the swell of the tides—­solid ground was screwing with her sense of balance. She spread her arms out for steadiness, staring up at the sky again.

  The Big Dipper shone overhead, and she could pick out the sickle of Leo low on the horizon. Her father had taught her about the stars when she was a little girl, before he disappeared. Her throat closed around the memory.

  The howl sounded again, to the east. Clutching the gun and the flashlight, Petra swept the beam across the field of spiky grasses and stones. She whistled, and the howl cut off, midnote.

  “Come here, puppy,” she called, feeling moronic. Her breath made ghosts in the air before her, and the chill cut through her tank top and cargo pants.

  The keening began again. Resolved, Petra clomped through the grasses and gravel to the source of the sound. She swatted away mosquitoes determined to make a meal of her, whistling for the dog.

  Twenty yards from the trailer, her whistle froze and fell flat in her mouth. A pair of shining gold eyes peered through the grass at her.

  Petra edged the flashlight to the eyes, raising the gun. The light outlined a small, reddish-­grey creature with big ears and a bushy tail. Not a dog, not a fox. Coyote.

  “Hey,” she called, wondering why the coyote wasn’t running from her. “You okay, little guy?”

  The coyote blinked, lifted his head, and sniffed in her general direction. He yipped conversationally, then presented his rump to her. He dug with his front paws in the sandy earth like a dog searching for a bone. Judging by the size of the hole, he’d been at it for a while.

  “Whatcha got there, little guy?” Petra tried to peer into the hole. It was about a foot and a half deep that she could see, but the coyote was enthusiastically kicking up enough dust to make her cough.

  The coyote ignored her, continuing to dig. Petra backed away, deciding to leave the coyote to his business. Perhaps it was den-­digging season, or he smelled a delicious vole. Whatever he was into, he didn’t want human involvement.

  Suddenly, the coyote broke off and scampered a ­couple of feet from the hole. He looked her straight in the eye and gave a soft, lilting whimper.

  “What? I don’t want your dinner. I had pretzels on the plane.”

  The coyote laid his forelegs down on the ground and yowled at Petra.

  Petra shined her flashlight down into the hole. Something metallic glinted in the dirt.

  “Oh. What did you find?”

  She looked back at the coyote, to find that he’d vanished like a puff of smoke in the sere landscape. She held her breath. She couldn’t hear him moving in the undergrowth. He was gone, swallowed into black.

  Petra laid down the gun and reached into the hole, hoping that there was nothing inside that would bite her. Snakes would be just perfect. Blackened wood crumbled under her touch. A tarnished metallic plate was jammed in the side of what looked like an old building beam, turned up at an odd angle. Petra dug into the flaking wood to free it.

  The metal was about the size of her palm, round and ornately engraved. She rubbed at it with her filthy hand, and her heart leapt into her mouth. It looked like a compass with numbers and the cardinal directions carved around the rim, and in the center was an image of a lion devouring the sun. Her fingers fluttered up to her necklace. No, it couldn’t be. Too damn weird.

  She stood up yelled for the coyote. “Hey, come back here!”

  Her voice startled the nearby crickets into silence.

  The metal cut into her palm, but the coyote didn’t answer her with as much as a yip.

  Chapter Two

  Temperance

  Petra woke at dawn and squinted at her diver’s watch. Six thirty. Light crept into the trailer, illuminating the strange medallion she’d left on the floor next to her bed after she’d staggered in the night before. She had wanted it close at hand, suspicious that it would dissolve in the morning like a muzzy dream. But it remained.

  She got up to rinse the worst of the grime off the medallion in the bathroom sink. Though pitted and scuffed from age, the compass gleamed soft and yellow. She could now see that its numbers were out of sequence between the cardinal directions, with seven rays emanating like the spokes of a wheel from the center, and there were Latin words she didn’t recognize surrounding the lion. The rays corresponded to none of the cardinal directions, seeming to fan out randomly to the edge. She scraped the edge of it against the glass of the bathroom window. The metal didn’t scratch the glass, though the window left a small mark on the rim of the artifact.

  Gold. The corner of Petra’s mouth turned upward. Though the old prospectors in this town had failed, she seemed to have struck it lucky in less than a day. She shook her head. No such thing as luck. If she believed in it, she’d have to believe that the only luck she’d ever attracted had been bad. And then she’d have to believe that there was a reason the men on the rig had called her “Jinx,” and it wasn’t just because of old superstitions about women at sea.

  She tucked the artifact into the trailer wall with her money, then turned her attention to the tiny bathtub. It was barely two-­thirds the size of a standard tub, with a handheld shower set. But a hot bath was a luxury. She’d made do with lukewarm four-­minute showers at sea, knowing that a dozen men were waiting in line for her to get the hell out so that they could take their turns.

  She unscrewed the tap, which spat brown water for a ­couple of seconds before grudgingly emitting a thin stream of hot water. Petra nodded in satisfaction. The Internet ad for the rental said that the unit had running water and electric heat. She didn’t need much else.

  Petra worked her hair free of the rubber band that held it out of her face and poked around the cabinets. She had a toothbrush and toothpaste, but she needed to buy soap. She found the dried-­up r
emains of lemon dish detergent and ran the water into the plastic bottle, letting the it float and spin in the bath as bubbles foamed. She peeled off her clothes. Freckles dotted the milky-­pale skin on her chest and legs that wasn’t sunburned. She scrunched into the bathtub, hissing as the hot water touched her skin. She fiddled with the shower sprayer, succeeding in blasting herself in the face before she managed to get a steady stream that she could use to rinse her hair.

  As she stood to allow the water to sluice down the drain, she imagined the last particles of salt being rinsed away. The last residue of the sea.

  Leaving wet footprints behind, she dug in her bag for her toothbrush and toothpaste. She let the water evaporate from her body as she brushed her teeth, adding towels to her list of things to buy when she made it to town. She stared out the window across the field. Town was about two miles away, a manageable trek on foot.

  Her hair still hanging wet over her shoulder, Petra dressed in a tank top, cargo pants, and her work boots. She didn’t carry a purse, and was at odds what to do with Hollander’s gun. She settled on jamming it into the hip pocket of her cargo pants. She had no idea if concealed carry was permitted here, but she was beginning to get the impression that there wasn’t much law enforcement around. Except for Hollander. And so far, she was on his good side.

  She pulled a white long-­sleeved linen shirt over her shoulders to hide her scars and a hat and sunglasses to keep from being further crisped by the sun. Keys in hand, she left the Airstream and struck off across the field to find the road.

  There was no sign of the coyote or the hole he’d dug. Petra squinted at the flat landscape. She knew that the hole was here, somewhere. She wondered what it was he’d found—­part of a house? What had been here before, this far from town?

  Her fingers brushed the amulet at her throat. She would find out.

  She headed south and west, toward the gravel road that Hollander had driven down the night before. In daylight, the Rockies were cool shadows in the distance, green pines and yellow aspen crowded at their feet. The sky glowed blue overhead, broad and wide as it had been above the sea. Bleached grasses rippled in the breeze, and if Petra closed her eyes, they almost sounded like waves. Almost.

  She’d been walking for fifteen minutes when the roar of an engine sounded behind her. She smelled dust and burning oil before it came, and she stepped off the road into the ditch. The car slowed behind her. Petra set her jaw and didn’t turn. If it was Hollander, come to check up on her, he could pick up the damn phone. She didn’t need to be hovered over like a tourist wandering too far off the marked trail.

  “Hey, baby.”

  She glanced behind her. A dirty red Chevy Monte Carlo tooled at her heels, keeping pace on the one-­lane road. The car was full of young men, thin and stringy as a pack of wolves. She turned back to the road before her, ignoring them.

  “Hey, I’m talking to you.”

  Petra didn’t answer, but her heart hammered in her throat. She stepped farther into the ditch, out of reach of the driver.

  “You wanna party? I’ve got some crank.”

  “No thanks.” Out of the corner of her eye, she caught sight of the driver’s pockmarked face. His decayed grin was missing a tooth.

  Great. Meth heads.

  “Leave her alone, Justin.” A sullen, goth-­looking kid in the passenger’s seat crossed his arms over his black jacket. Underneath spiked hair, a silver ankh earring gleamed. “We’ve gotta find Adam and Diana.”

  “In a fucking minute. I’m busy.” Justin the meth-­mouth leaned out the window. “You too good to party with us?”

  She shook her head and said nothing. Her gaze flicked to the field to the left of the road, and her fingertips brushed the flap on the pocket of her pants. She weighed her options. She could call for help on her cell phone, but she had no idea how long it would take for help to arrive in a place this remote—­she’d seen no police station in Temperance. She could draw on them, but she knew that she was too chicken to contemplate really pulling the trigger. The gun might frighten them off, assuming they weren’t armed themselves.

  “Justin, quit fucking around.” The goth kid punched the driver in the arm. “We don’t have time for this shit.”

  Justin shook the kid off. “We’ve been looking all night. Shut your yap.”

  Petra squinted ahead. Temperance was about a half mile up the road. She could cut through the field at an angle, where the car couldn’t follow her. That was the way the nature channel on TV always said to avoid alligators—­run at an angle. If she took off through the field, perhaps they wouldn’t follow. And if they did, they might be faster . . .

  “I don’t want any trouble.”

  Justin turned his attention toward Petra. “Too bad, Freckles. Trouble found you.”

  Petra heard crunching gravel as the tires stopped, the click of an opening car door.

  In that instant, her analysis of the situation drained away, and instinct kicked in.

  Run.

  Petra lunged into a run, slamming her heavy boots into the thick soil. She flew, laces snapping around her ankles, fists pumping in time with her steps. She kicked up clods of dirt as she surged through the grasses and leapt over rills in the land. Her breath burned shallowly in her lungs.

  Damn it. The land around the Rockies was almost eight thousand feet above sea level. Her breath was shorter at this altitude, whistling at the back of her throat. She looked back.

  The driver, Justin, was out of the car. Almost. The goth kid had leaned across the seats and grabbed onto the sleeve of his T-­shirt. Justin turned and slugged him hard enough that Petra could hear him squeak as he fell to the floorboards.

  Petra turned her gaze forward, swung left to avoid a low-­growing tree . . .

  . . . and jammed her right foot into a chuckhole.

  She pitched forward and landed hard, twisting her ankle as her elbows and knees scraped the gravel. Still tasting dirt, she flattened to the ground, scrambling for the gun in her cargo pocket. Hopefully, they wouldn’t be able to see her at this distance through the scrub . . .

  Justin stood at the shoulder of the road. The goth kid was leaning out of the open car door and spitting blood on the ground. The young men in the backseat howled in amusement.

  “Look at what you did, you ass clown. We lost her.”

  “We didn’t need her, anyway.” The goth kid wiped his mouth.

  “She mighta had money, you tool!”

  “Yeah, well, she’s gone now.”

  Justin shoved the goth kid back into the car. He turned back to the field and yelled. “We’ll see you again real soon, Freckles.”

  Petra gave him the middle finger, assured that he was too far away to see her or her gesture of contempt. The car engine started, and the Monte Carlo rumbled slowly down the road in a cloud of dust.

  Petra struggled to her feet. Her ankle pounded painfully against her tight bootlaces. She gingerly poked at it. Probably nothing broken. Just one of those annoying injuries that would hurt like hell for a few days.

  She blew out a shaking breath and limped the remaining distance to town.

  Temperance didn’t quite live up to its billing.

  At first, it seemed peaceful enough. Petra hobbled up to a convenience store and gas station. Bears carved from tree trunks flanked the entrance that announced that she’d arrived at Bear’s Gas ’n Go. She opened the door decorated with jangling cowbells.

  A lottery counter and cash register sat to her right, with aisles of overpriced convenience foods to her left. A few dusty tourist tchotckes were mixed in: T-­shirts, water pistols, sunglasses, postcards, magnets, and plush grizzly bears. Above the cash register, a huge stuffed black bear’s head and paws crawled out of the wall. Moose antlers hung above the dairy case full of ice cream.

  Petra’s stomach grumbled. She hadn’t eaten since a flight att
endant had slipped her extra pretzels on the plane yesterday. She noticed a diner counter stretched across the back of the store and a deli case full of potato salads, sandwich meats, and cheeses. Petra parked her butt on a red vinyl stool repaired with duct tape.

  A large man dressed in a flannel shirt and apron appeared behind the counter. His salt-­and-­pepper ponytail was tied away from his face, and his beard grew nearly white. He was built like a well-­fed former linebacker.

  “Good morning, young lady. What can I do you for?”

  Petra smiled. “You must be Bear.”

  “I am.” Bear’s blue eyes crinkled. “And you must be our new geologist.”

  “News travels fast here. I’m Petra Dee.”

  “Like they say, news and the dead travel fast.” Bear stuck a meaty paw over the glass counter. “Pleased to meet you, Petra.”

  “Likewise.” She eyed the stuffed bear over the cash register. “This is a great place you’ve got, here.”

  Bear chuckled. “That’s Daisy. She’s my good luck token. Scares away robbers and keeps the lottery tickets lucky. I’ve sold a state-­jackpot-­winning ticket here every year since I hung her over the register.”

  Petra laughed. “If I believed in luck, I’d have to start playing.”

  Bear grinned. “You’ve come to the right place for changing luck.” He slid a photocopied menu across the counter at her. “You look like you had to chase your breakfast.”

  Petra looked down at her dirty sleeves. “Um. Yeah. Ran into some guys who were a little too friendly. Tweakers.”

  Bear’s mouth thinned. “I know the guys you’re talking about. Red Monte Carlo?”