by Laura Bickle
She chewed her lip. Maybe he had survived it, somehow, with the help of these ravens. But what could he have done to invite such an attack? Or did he have a talent for being in the wrong place at the wrong time?
And the ravens—she had no explanation. No explanation for what could cause him to heal and to regrow limbs before her eyes.
Sig pressed his cold nose against her face, and she put her arms around him. He, at least, was real.
Petra awoke to a pounding on the trailer door. She groaned and scrambled to her feet. She’d been sleeping on the floor—not well—and had developed a crick in her neck where Sig had jammed his foot in his sleep.
She peered at Gabriel. Still breathing. Good.
He talked in his sleep. Much of it made no sense. He muttered about Lascaris, about alchemy, trees, and ravens. His meanderings reminded Petra of Frankie’s cryptic predictions and her father’s old postcards. He’d finally stopped muttering after the moon had set, when it seemed that he slept deeply enough to ward off dreams and allow Petra some sleep of her own. Until now.
Petra padded to the door and peered through the glass. It was Maria Yellowrose, holding a shotgun. And she did not look happy.
Petra opened the door and tried to slide down the steps to talk with her outdoors, but Maria strong-armed her way into the trailer.
“What the fuck did you do?” Maria demanded.
“What are you talking about?” Petra tried to block her view of the rest of the trailer interior. It was still dark, and only dim predawn light filtered through the blinds.
“Sal Rutherford and his men came to my house, looking for you. I spent the night unconscious on my porch,” she snarled. Petra noticed that the left side of her face was covered in a brilliant magenta bruise. Her swollen lower lip quivered. “And they took Frankie.”
“What?” Petra’s hand flew to her mouth. “What happened?”
“Sal saw the Bronco at his ranch. Said you’d taken something of his.” Maria brandished the shotgun. “I don’t give a shit what it is, but I want it back to trade for Frankie’s life.”
Sig slithered between the two women, whining piteously at Maria. He was laying the “good dog” routine on thick, trying to make peace.
“Give me back what you stole from Rutherford.”
“I didn’t steal anything from him. I—” Petra pressed the heel of her hand to her brow. “Shit. You’re just gonna have to trust me. I didn’t steal from him. I found a body on his property. A fucked-up body that looked like it’d been doctored in a special-effects workshop.”
“I don’t trust you.” Maria shoved the barrel of the shotgun into Petra’s shoulder. “If you won’t tell me, you’re coming with me. And then Sal can get it out of you.” Her eyes were wide with fear, and Petra could see that it wasn’t a selfish fear, but fear for her uncle.
Something glowed in Petra’s periphery, and she saw Maria blanch and point the shotgun past Petra. “What the hell—?”
Gabriel sighed. “It’s not her fault. It’s mine.” He flipped on the kitchen light.
Maria seemed to take in his torn and battered appearance. And his shirtlessness. His chest was smooth and unharmed, but spattered in bits of blood. “What the hell happened to you? You look like you got your ass kicked playing paintball.”
“Sal wants me. Petra thought she was rescuing me.” Gabe gave her an annoyed sidelong glance.
“I need to get Frankie back.” Maria’s mouth was pressed into a hard slash. There was no way that she was going to budge.
“We’ll do a trade. I’m pretty certain that Sal will let Frankie go once he has me.” As if that ended the discussion, Gabriel searched the floor for the remains of his tattered shirt and began to shrug into it.
“But what will he do to you?” Petra asked softly. “Will he turn you into one of those calcinated bodies, like in the back field?”
Gabe looked at her neutrally, as if they were discussing whether to have a ham sandwich or chicken salad for lunch. He sat on the edge of the futon to put his boots on. “That’s not your concern.”
Maria lowered the shotgun uneasily. “All right.” She flicked her gaze at Petra. “I’m sorry, but I’m still pissed at you.” It seemed that she said it more to convince herself.
“You have a right to be.”
Maria looked down at the coyote. Sig sniffed her shoes, sat back on his haunches. He cocked his head, trying to be cute. Petra rolled her eyes. Flirt.
Gabriel stood, his balance wavering from foot to foot. “Let’s go get Frankie.”
A car crunched down the gravel road and stopped before the trailer. Maria squinted through the blinds. “You expecting company?”
“No.”
Petra shouldered up to the window, half-expecting it to be Mike’s Jeep. But it was a red Monte Carlo.
“Piss,” she muttered.
“Who is it?” Gabriel demanded. “Is it Sal?”
“No. Meth heads.” Petra hoped that Cal wasn’t in the car. A middle-aged man in a long black coat got out, holding a silver pistol. That must be the one Cal called “the Alchemist.” Stroud. A young man clambered out of the passenger seat, brandishing a machine gun. She recognized him: the kid who had tried to chase her along the road, Justin. And out climbed Cal, blinking in the daylight.
“Shit.” She sighed.
“You’re a popular girl. What do they want with you?” Maria peered through the blinds.
“They want an artifact I found.”
“Artifact?” Gabriel echoed.
“Yeah. Some kind of compass Sig dug up in the dirt.”
Maria ratcheted the shotgun. “We can stick ’em back in the dirt.”
“Wait.” Gabriel’s hand fell on her shoulder. “Stroud’s more dangerous than you think.”
Maria’s lip curled in a snarl. “What the hell do you want us to do, then?”
“Keep the door locked. And wait quietly.”
Before Petra could protest, Gabriel was at the far side of the trailer and had slipped noiselessly out the back window. She did as she was told, turning the flimsy lock on the door.
Maria growled. “That motherfucker better not be running. If he is, I promise that I will perforate his ass with birdshot.”
A knock rattled the front door, the silver gun barrel on the glass. Petra instinctively stepped away, fumbling to reach for her gun belt slung on the kitchen chair. Sig stood before her, teeth bared, head down in a fighting posture.
“Petra Dee. You know what I want.” The Alchemist’s voice leaked under the door. It sounded like the rustle of dry leaves, a man who had smoked everything on Earth.
Petra swallowed. Cal had apparently spilled his guts.
Maria shook her head, laid a finger to her lips. She lifted the shotgun to chest level. Her intention was clear: If the men came through the door, their asses were grass.
“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Stroud said.
He tried the door, found it locked. A bullet cracked through the lockset, showering sparks. Then the door burst open, and Stroud barreled in.
Maria pulled the trigger. The shotgun bucked upward in a deafening roar in the small space. Petra’s ears rang, but she didn’t know if it was from the thunder or the pounding of her heart as she watched Stroud fall backward from the steps onto the ground outside.
Petra squeaked. It burned her throat, but she couldn’t hear it.
Maria chucked the next shell into the chamber, advanced on the door. Sig was at her heels, and Petra drew up the rear with a pistol in each hand. She was in awe at the coldness with which Maria moved. No hesitation. No fear. Nothing like the terror that was uncoiling in Petra’s stomach.
Stroud lay sprawled on the ground, twitching. The pistol glittered beyond his reach. Maria carefully picked her way down the steps. There was no sign of Just
in. Petra followed, guns in her sweat-slick, quavering hands. Maria kicked Stroud over and gasped.
Cal started toward the trailer, but Petra trained one of the guns on him.
“Don’t move.” Her voice sounded a helluva lot more confident than she felt. Cal slowly raised his hands. He was unarmed.
“Get down,” she told him.
Cal obediently got on his knees in the dust, but his gaze was fixed on Stroud.
Stroud’s shredded coat was not red with blood. Instead, tiny drops of quicksilver retracted through the holes in the coat, sliding away from view like dozens of tiny fingers. His eyes remained closed. Petra could see the rise and fall of his chest, which seemed to be coated in some kind of liquid armor.
“What the fuck?” Maria murmured. She knelt to take his pulse.
“Drop it, bitches.” Justin’s voice oozed from the side of the car. He’d popped the driver’s side door open as a shield before his body, a gun braced on the open window like a detective on a bad cop show. It was a big gun—an MP-5 submachine gun. Petra hadn’t seen one of those outside the hands of military personnel. It looked like an absurd toy in the hands of the young man, like it should have an orange painted safety tip.
Petra was the only one remaining on her feet with guns. She kept one on Cal, who was cringing close to the dirt and aimed the other toward Justin. They were peashooters compared to the MP-5. But she thought that if she was in a cop show, she should bluff. “We’ve got three guns. You have one. How’s your math?”
His pupils were dilated. He was clearly hopped up on something. Awesome.
“I don’t think you’ve got the balls to blow me away, lady.”
Petra’s jaw twitched. He was right. But maybe he didn’t know it.
Sig slowly advanced on Justin. He was between them, skulking low and moving to the car. He emitted a throaty growl that sounded like a terrible engine winding up.
Justin aimed his gun toward Sig. “Call your fucking dog off.”
“Sig, come here!” Petra shouted. Panic welled in her voice.
She saw Justin’s finger flex on the trigger.
And she fired.
The shot shattered the side mirror, causing Justin to flinch. Satisfaction stung her. She glimpsed a blur moving from the corner of the trailer, rushing up behind Justin—Gabriel. He tackled Justin against the open car door, as Sig slithered under and began to tear into him with gusto.
Something scraped the dirt at her feet. Petra looked down to find that Stroud’s eyes were open, and he was pointing his pistol at Maria’s face. The shotgun lay two inches from her hand in the dust.
“What the fuck are you?” Petra growled. She’d had enough of things that didn’t bleed right, and she was tired of asking the question.
Stroud ignored her. “Give me the Veneficus Locus.” He opened his free hand.
“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.” She seemed to be saying that a lot lately, and it made her head hurt.
“Don’t be coy. I don’t have time for it. You found it here. Give it to me.”
Suddenly, the Alchemist was mauled in a furry mass of growling coyote flesh. Sig ripped at his arm and face. Stroud slapped at him, but the coyote had a good grip on his gun hand, chewing like a dog with a rawhide. Maria seized the opportunity to snatch up the shotgun. She stood on Stroud’s chest and pressed the barrel to his head.
“I will feed you to the coyote in tiny little pieces if you don’t drop it.”
Stroud reluctantly released his gun. Maria kicked it away.
Sig released Stroud’s sleeve. He started coughing, hacking against the dirt. He spit droplets of what looked like mercury on the ground, pawing at his mouth. The hair on his back stood on end. Petra threw her arms around the canine, rubbed his chest. The droplets rolled away from his spittle, climbed over rocks and rills to slide back under Stroud’s sleeve.
“What the fuck did you do to him?” she cried.
Stroud grunted. “Heavy metal poisoning’s a bitch.”
A gunshot echoed in the vicinity of the Monte Carlo. Justin was on the ground, looking like he’d gotten the shit kicked out of him. He fired at Gabriel, who stood over him, empty-handed.
Petra cried out.
The three-shot burst disturbed the collar on Gabe’s shirt, nothing more. Justin fired again, and Petra saw the bullets tear into Gabriel’s thigh. Without reacting, he reached down to scoop up Justin, lifted him in one hand. It was like watching Superman on a really pissed-off day. She watched in fascinated horror as Gabe slammed Justin down on the hood of the Monte Carlo. The car’s hood caved, and Justin sprawled like a limp fish.
During the whole fight, Cal had stayed on his knees before the car, hands on his head. “Can I move now?” he squeaked.
“No!” Petra yelled. “Absofuckinglutely not.”
Cal shrunk closer to the earth, as if he could make himself disappear into it.
Gabriel looked at Petra. “You want me to kill them?” he asked quietly.
“No! They’re just kids!”
Gabriel picked up Justin’s unconscious body and slung it down against the back tire of the car, as if he weighed nothing. Then he reached into the backseat and came up with a set of jumper cables. He pointed to Cal. “You. Get over here.”
“Uh . . . me?” he squeaked.
“Yes. Or I will beat you into unconsciousness like I did your friend. Your call.”
Cal scrambled up in a cloud of dust and obediently crawled beside Justin. Gabriel tied them together, back-to-back, with the jumper cables, then crossed the gravel to stare down at Stroud.
“Are you done with the Alchemist?” he asked Petra.
Stroud spit a glob of mercury at Gabriel’s face. Without waiting for Petra’s response, Gabriel hauled him to the car, reached into the ignition for the keys, and popped the trunk. He threw Stroud into the trunk as if the Alchemist were a bag of mulch.
“Whoa, what are you doing?” Petra squeaked.
Gabriel looked at her levelly. “This guy is dangerous. Trust me, this is the safest place for him.”
And he slammed the trunk shut.
Petra raided the tiny grill outside the trailer for a decent-sized charcoal briquette, crushed it up in water, and was forcing Sig to drink the mixture. He made terrible faces, but Petra kept cooing at him and promising him lunch meat.
“What’s the charcoal for?” Maria asked. She was impatient to be on the road to rescue Frankie, but her concern for the coyote was evident as she patted his flank.
“It looks like he got a snoutful of mercury. If he ingested it, that could be bad news. I’m trying to do some amateur preemptive chelation therapy by feeding him charcoal.” Petra poured some more of the mixture down Sig’s throat. Sig shook his head and drooled.
“Will he be okay?”
“I hope so. If he starts acting lethargic or vomiting, I’ll know that it didn’t work and that he actually swallowed some.”
Gabriel came back inside to lean against the kitchen counter. Petra avoided eye contact with him and concentrated on pouring water into Sig’s mouth.
Maria shook her head. “I don’t know how this is possible. How can a man take that much birdshot to the chest and still be walking around? How can you?” She looked directly at Gabriel, who was conspicuously fine after his run-in with multiple bullets.
Gabriel shrugged, said nothing.
Petra pressed him. “I’ve heard Stroud called ‘the Alchemist.’ I assumed that was because he was the local drug lord. But I’m getting the idea that it means something more. That silvery shit on his chest . . . I thought that was armor, but it’s mercury. And he bleeds it.”
Gabriel flicked a glance toward the car. “He’s a half-baked puffer. He can’t turn base metals into gold or craft an immortality procedure. Instead, he just spends his tim
e playing with mercury and crank. He’s dangerous, but only if you get in his way.” Gabriel stared at Petra. “So, what did you do to get in his way?”
“Nothing!” Petra protested.
Maria sat back on her heels. “He said he wanted the Veneficus Locus. Said you found it here.”
Petra dug into her pocket. “I think he wants this.”
She held the compass in the flat of her hand. It just looked like a pretty sundial that needed to be cleaned up. Maria looked at it and shrugged.
Gabriel was across the room in two quick steps. He cocked his head to one side, studying it with his cold amber eyes, but made no move to touch it. “Where did you find this?”
“Out here. Sig was digging and led me to it.” She gestured nonspecifically to the field.
“Do you know what it is?”
“My Latin sucks, but a locus is a locator, right?”
The corner of Gabriel’s mouth turned up. “It’s a magic locator. Sort of a dowsing rod for magic. The symbols around it are invocations for purity and direction. The seven rays symbolize the seven alchemical processes of transformation. The scripts indicate their associated planets and metals.”
Petra’s eyebrow quirked up. “Show me. How does it work?”
“All magic has a cost to use. This thing runs on blood.”
“Excuse me?”
“See that groove circumscribing the interior of the compass?”
Petra peered at the smooth circle that ran around the directional points and Latin words. “Yeah?”
“Put a drop of your blood in the groove.”
Petra made a face. He was impassive when he said it, but she refused to take this shit seriously. She snatched a piece of paper from the kitchen table, ran it across her fingertip. Wincing, she waited for a fat red drop to well up from the paper cut. She squeezed it into the gold compass, then wrapped her wounded finger in a paper towel. She held the compass in her free hand.
“Okay, now what?”
“Orient it to true north.”
Petra turned the compass so that the sundial faced north. The blood swished a bit in the track. She stared at it. “Now what?”