Dark Alchemy

by Laura Bickle

  “Sig, quit being a drama queen. If you’re going to act like a domesticated animal, you have to take the bad with the good. And, yeah, you’re getting a bath when we get back.”

  Sig cast her a dirty look with half-­slitted golden eyes, as if to say: I am not a domestic animal.

  Petra didn’t see Mike’s Jeep as she passed the ranger station, which was a good thing. Maybe he was doing something useful, like getting a judge out of bed. Besides which, she didn’t want him giving her grief about going back up on Specimen Ridge.

  This early in the morning, there was no sign of tourists. The trail to the ridge had been obstructed with an orange blockade and sign that said CLOSED FOR MAINTENANCE. She sidestepped it and retraced her footsteps from yesterday.

  She knew that there had to be a rational explanation for what had happened to that body. Was there something about the ground, some toxin or chemical stew in a mudpot that could cause petrification at an accelerated rate? Was this simply a victim of some odd medical illness? Petra remembered reading an article in a magazine about a biological mutation that caused excess skeletal bone growth. She couldn’t remember the name of it, but it was worth looking up. Mike had to have an Internet connection at the ranger station.

  And more data would yield her answer.

  She climbed up the ridge, chiseled away some more samples from the petrified trees for comparison. They came away in her hands as thin and brittle as mica. Hopefully, the bones of the trees could tell her about the bones of the body. She worked until she had dozens of samples from as many different trees as she could find. Sig slunk behind her, as if embarrassed that any other wildlife might spot him sporting a flea collar.

  She expected to need to use her GPS to identify the exact location of the body, but the National Guard had left behind enough markers. Tracks had made a muddy mess of the trail. Yellow caution tape surrounded the pine tree, cordoning off a hole about three feet deep.

  Petra began collecting soil samples from the perimeter. She didn’t see any evidence of a mudpot that could be stewing toxins, but that wasn’t to say that none existed. Mudpots were vents of geothermal pressure and gas that superheated water and earth around them, giving the effect of a witch’s bubbling cauldron. Yellowstone was most famous for the Artist Paint Pot and the Fountain Paint Pots. But mudpots, like waterfalls, were too numerous to be completely cataloged in a park measuring nearly three thousand five hundred square miles.

  She approached the hole cautiously, stepping in between the pine tree roots to get a better look. Curiosity had overwhelmed any sense of fear. ­People scared Petra—­they were volatile, unpredictable. But the natural world could always be explained. It behaved according to established laws that didn’t change. Petra could play by those rules.

  She poked around the bottom of the hole, filling her vials. The Guard must have been here for a good while with their shovels. Her eyes glittered in delight when she saw something white and shiny at the bottom of the hole—­a fragment of bone. She tucked it away in a sample bottle and climbed out, exhilarated. She’d make sense of this, one way or another.

  With a cranky coyote in tow, she clomped back down the ridge. Cranking the ignition on the Bronco, she drove back toward the ranger station. By this civilized hour, cars were in the parking lot—­including Mike’s Jeep. He was standing outside the station, talking into his cell phone, when Petra saw him.

  Mike clicked off his cell phone. “Been trying to reach you.”

  Petra shrugged. “Reception must be spotty.”

  He frowned at her. “Look, I’m not trying to be an asshole, here. But there are rules, and we’ve got to follow procedures.”

  Petra spread her hands, incredulous. “Mike. We found a body.”

  “Yeah, and if we want that body to stick to Sal Rutherford, we have to dot all our I’s and cross our T’s.” He put his hands on his gun belt, exasperated. “You don’t get it. This is like trying to take down Jesus Christ.”

  Petra shook her head, and she could feel heat rising behind her freckles. “You’re right. I don’t get it. I don’t get how meth heads and cattle barons run the Wild West. I don’t get how the local sheriff’s office doesn’t get their hands or their cars dirty. I don’t get how ­people just disappear. I don’t get it.”

  “Hey. I’m on your side. Honest,” Mike said quietly.

  She looked up at him, and there was such sincerity and hurt in his expression that she felt a pang of regret.

  She cast her eyes down. “I’m sorry. I know that this isn’t your fault. You’ve done nothing but try to help me.”

  “It’s okay. Really.” He awkwardly patted her shoulder, and his hand lingered an instant too long. “How about some coffee?”

  “Okay. But can I have some water for Sig?” The coyote leaned against her leg. Probably doing his damnedest to transmit the escaping plague of fleas onto her jeans, she thought sourly.

  A grin split Mike’s face as he looked at Sig. “Is that coyote wearing a flea collar?”

  “Yeah. And he’s not too happy ’bout it.”

  “You know, there are places we could get you a real dog.”

  Sig gave him a dirty look.

  “I’m happy with Sig, thankyouverymuch.” Petra opened the tailgate to the Bronco, and the coyote scrambled in for a nap.

  “You been out collecting samples?”

  “Yeah. Couldn’t sleep.” She didn’t tell him where she’d been collecting samples.

  Worry creased his tanned face. At least, it looked like worry and not suspicion. “You shouldn’t be out here by yourself. Especially with your knack for finding dead bodies.”

  “I have Sig. And the bear spray,” she said, then changed the subject. “Any news on the body on the ridge?”

  Mike frowned. “Not much. The working assumption is that it’s the body of the missing hiker. They apparently found a backpack somewhere in that mess that contained a wallet, a whole lotta money, and some drug paraphernalia.”

  “Money?”

  “Yeah. Like several thousand dollars. Who the hell knows what for.”

  “Do you have Internet in there?” Petra gestured with her chin at the ranger station.

  “Yup. This way.” Mike led her to a back office with a surprisingly new computer and laser printer. A screen saver of classic Pac-­Man chased pastel ghosts around the darkened monitor.

  “Nice. Very retro screen saver for a shiny new box.”

  “I think that was leftover money from a Homeland Security grant.” He grinned. “Gotta keep on top of things in the outside world.” He typed in his password, interrupting Pac-­Man’s hunt, and turned the chair over to Petra.

  Petra settled in and searched for “bone overgrowth disease,” which led her to the name of a specific syndrome.

  “Fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva, also called FOP,” she muttered. “Hey, look at this.” She pointed to the screen. “This disease causes body tissues to ossify when injured.”

  “Wow.” Mike gave a low whistle when she called up a picture of a badly distorted skeleton covered in uneven sheets of bone and cartilidge. “That’s sorta like what we saw.”

  Petra nodded in satisfaction. “Can you find out if the hiker had this disorder?”

  “I can make some calls.” Mike disappeared to the radio room, leaving Petra to her own devices.

  She rummaged through her box of goodies from USGS and set up her microscope. She found a few slide images on the Internet of FOP bone cross sections. She eagerly began to chip down the bone fragment she found to make a decent slide. After she’d clumsily made a thin enough slice, she slipped it on a prepared slide with an aqueous solution. Adjusting the magnification, she peered at the sample.

  She could see the same clumps and voids in bone cells in her sample as the one on the virtual slide on the Internet. She was no biologist, but this seemed to be leadin
g her in the right direction. Except . . .

  She rested her chin in her hand. FOP was a congenital disorder. ­People began experiencing symptoms as children. She’d encountered a grossly progressive case. How had someone that ill gotten up on the ridge in the first place? Bone growth in FOP patients was fast, but could it be that debilitatingly fast? A scan of the articles she’d searched suggested that wasn’t possible. Severely malformed bones like this took years to develop. There was no way that this guy was well enough to hike around Yellowstone for months while turning into a skeleton. And the odds of having two cases in a week . . . it defied rational explanation. She hated that.

  Mike returned to the small office. “I spoke with the hiker’s sister. He was twenty-­two, reportedly in good health, and no known medical conditions other than an appendectomy when he was twelve.”

  Petra leaned back in the chair. “So much for that idea.”

  “I also heard back from my friend about your unknown caller.”

  “Oh yeah?” At least that seemed to be moving quickly. “Did he get an address?”

  “You know anybody with an address in the middle of the Bermuda Triangle?”

  She stared up at him. “What?”

  “As near as he can determine, it bounced off a land-­bound cell tower and two satellites. And the signal came from the middle of the ocean. Which is just not possible.”

  Petra stared at the wall. “I don’t . . .” Could it be someone she used to work with, out on a boat or a drilling platform? But she knew of no drilling going on in that part of the world.

  “Could be a data error. This kind of shit happens. But I’m curious as hell to see if you get any more calls.” Mike took a swig of his coffee and looked at her microscope. “Whatcha looking at?”

  She didn’t want to tell him she’d been poking around the scene. “I’m getting started on the soil samples from yesterday.”

  “I’ll let you know if I hear anything else about that body.” Mike shook his head. “I hope they keep us in the loop.”

  “Yeah.” But Petra knew enough about bureaucracies to know that was highly unlikely.

  Mike handed her a yellow legal pad. “And humor my bureaucratic tendencies. When you get a minute, write out your statement from last night. Also any contact information you have for this Cal guy.”

  Which was nothing. She didn’t even have a last name. She scribbled down her recollection of the night’s events, along with the GPS coordinates for the body at the ranch. She felt as if maybe she should draw them a map with stick figures, too. As she wrote, she felt her writing grow angrier and less legible. She ripped the pages off the legal pad, signed them, and set them aside, blowing out her breath.

  Enough of bureaucracy. Time for science.

  She organized her soil samples and began to prepare and examine slides. She found bits of ash and the heavy metals that she’d anticipate in geothermic soils, even a fragment of amethyst in one of the samples. Then she switched gears and started to run slides of the petrified forest wood. The pattern of the wood looked as she expected it to—­bits of silicon and white quartz and carbonized organic compounds in shades of brown. She’d managed to get a bit of a calcified microfossil on one chip. The structure was strongly reminiscent of the bone cells in her sample.

  She drummed her fingers in frustration. Without the equipment here to do any kind of specialized analysis, she was at a dead end—­on this mystery, anyway. Petra rummaged through her sample sack for a bottle she’d prepared at the trailer. It contained a neatly cut-­out piece of the shirt she’d worn when Gabriel bled all over her the other day, a sample of the phosphorescent blood that contained gold.

  She moistened a swab in distilled water, pulled some of the stain off the fabric, and smeared a new slide. Slipping a slide cover into place, she peered through the microscope.

  Interesting.

  Petra remembered examining her own blood in biology class in college, large roundish blood cells interspersed with small fuzzy platelets. This looked nothing like that. The red blood cells she saw weren’t round—­they were spiky. Like viruses. But viruses were too small to be seen under a standard microscope. These were huge. And they showed no signs of degradation, as she’d expect plain blood cells to demonstrate.

  Petra shivered. Whatever it was, she hoped it wasn’t contagious. It sure as hell didn’t seem normal. She shut off the microscope, swept her slides into a box, and grabbed her jacket.

  It was time to see if Gabriel had some answers.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Old Scars

  The Rutherford ranch appeared less fearsome by daylight.

  Bucolic, even.

  Cattle meandered behind barbed wire fences in tall grass at the foot of the mountains. Petra guessed that they were Angus, nice walking steaks. They crowded into shady spots beneath lonely trees, thickening the shadow. A few interlopers had wandered into the fields; a ­couple of pronghorn had jumped the fence and were grazing greedily with the cattle. Petra saw no evidence of human caretaking for miles, just black specks of cows against the green and gold of the fields.

  Nor did she see any evidence of federal agents descending upon the farm and digging for bodies. She passed the area she and Cal had excavated the night before. It appeared undisturbed from her vantage point at the road: no crime scene tape, no guards.

  Sig hung his head out the window, barking at birds in the sky. The ravens cawed back to him.

  “You can’t catch birds,” Petra told him.

  He turned and fixed her with a bemused look.

  She thought for a moment. Gabriel always seemed to be in the company of ravens. She looked skyward and followed the birds.

  She wound around dirt roads for miles until she spied a structure in the distance. Her binoculars showed her a sprawling ranch house. It looked as if it had been rooted in the ground for many decades—­timber and stone, with a metal roof oxidized green from the rain. It reminded her of the lodge. Some distance away from it stood a barn that dwarfed the house, a ramshackle structure of rotting wood.

  Petra rolled up to the barn, parking the Bronco beside a beat-­up truck. She recognized it—­the pickup that Gabe had driven from the Compostela. She hopped down and Sig followed her, ears flattened. The shadow of the barn pressed cool against her skin.

  She screwed up her courage, walking into the barn with Sig at her side. Her heart hammered, remembering Mike’s warning.

  “Hello?” Her voice sounded cockier than she felt, though.

  Straw dust motes were suspended in thin ribbons of sunshine from the cracks in the walls and ceiling. The smells of rust and dust and manure had sunk deep into the structure. Farm equipment that she couldn’t identify was stacked in corners, parked within the structure, making a labyrinth of metal. Eerie silence hung here, interrupted only by the scrabbling of birds and mice in the hayloft. Behind the shafts of light lay darkness.

  “Hello?” she called.

  She spied a raven perched on the hood of a 1940s vintage tractor. Her skin prickled. The bird paced back and forth agitatedly, ruffling its feathers.

  Gabriel and his ravens. He had to be here.

  Behind the tractor, she spied a dim glow. Not the clear yellow gleam of sunshine nor the silvery blue hues of fluorescent light. This was a seething and familiar glow—­the glow of Gabriel’s blood. She followed it, walking behind the tractor.

  She gasped.

  A body lay sprawled, unmoving on the floor. Softly shining blood soaked the man’s flannel shirt. His elbows and knees were turned at unnatural angles.

  Petra knelt beside the body. Brushing aside straw, she stared at a battered but familiar face.

  “Gabriel?”

  His eyes were swollen nearly shut, and golden blood leaked from his lower lip and ears. She pressed her fingers to his throat. She felt a slow hum, like static on a radio. He was still
alive. Alive-­ish.

  She reached under his arms and hefted him up to a sitting position. Seeing the front of his shirt, she felt instantly queasy. Through prickles of straw, she could make out the lumps of contusions and broken bones. And—­oh, fuck—­he was missing a hand. She stared at his empty sleeve, where his arm just . . . ended.

  She struggled to her feet, hauling him with her. She was mindful not to try to touch his ribs, but there was no way to avoid manhandling his injuries. Oddly, he felt lighter than she thought he should, like he was a drained shell of a man.

  She half-­carried, half-­dragged him toward the barn door. His boots trailed in the straw. Ravens fluttered after them, casting flickering shadows.

  “I’ve got to get you out of here,” she huffed. He slid out of her arms when she reached the Bronco. She wrestled the door open, shoved him in the passenger seat. Sig leapt into the backseat, affronted by the stickiness and loss of his territory on the front seat.

  Petra scrambled over to the driver’s side, cranked the engine. The Bronco started up with a snort and growl, and she backed out onto the dirt road. A squad of noisy ravens followed like tin cans strung behind a bride and groom’s getaway car.

  Mike had been right. The ranch was more dangerous than she’d imagined. Her sticky fingers clutched the steering wheel.

  A shot cracked into the back of the Bronco, shattering a taillight. A raven splintered off from the rest of the flock with a shriek, spiraling toward the blue sky.

  “Sig, get down.”