by Laura Bickle
“Do I miss what?”
Petra struggled to put what she wanted to in words. “Do you miss being alive? Do you miss the woman in the locket?”
He paused. “Not as much as I used to. I think that the . . . fervor . . . for life dims over time. Like I said, some of the Hanged Men are little more than automatons.”
“The ones that came later?”
“Yes. I doubt that they can do much more than tell the difference between day and night. When to go to ground, and when to wake. I wonder . . .” His amber gaze clouded, and his voice trailed off.
“You wonder?” she prompted.
“I wonder if, when the magic drains completely out of the tree, that’s also my future.”
“Becoming an automaton?”
“Sometimes, I think that it would be a great relief. To no longer miss the life I once had. To no longer miss Jelena.”
“She was your wife?”
He nodded.
“She must have grieved for you.” Petra thought about his hair, carefully plaited in the brooch.
“She did. And I let her.”
“What do you mean?” Her brow wrinkled in puzzlement.
Petra thought she detected residue of old pain in his voice. “She came looking for me after I was hanged, with Pinkerton’s men. But I hid.”
“Why?”
Gabe’s mouth turned down. “I had no right to ask her to remain married to a corpse, to ask her to sleep alone while I rotted beneath the earth.”
“But if she loved you—”
“Jelena was fragile.” Abruptly, he turned away. “And my vows were until death. We’re not human. Not anymore. There’s no use pretending.”
Petra stared at his back. “Seems awfully angsty to me.”
“You’re a scientist.” The tunnel opened, and he paused to look over his shoulder. “But your scientist’s mind might enjoy this.”
Petra stared into the soft, shining darkness.
“Oh, my God,” she breathed. “It’s gorgeous.”
The tunnel opened into a massive cavern, covered in crystal. Crystal particulates crunched underfoot, growing along the walls and reaching up into the ceiling. The ceiling was pierced with a hole through which moonlight streamed, illuminating a black mirror of water at the bottom. The full moon’s reflection shivered on the surface, split and shattered by water that dripped from the skylight above, as if the heavens met the earth here. The crystal picked up the soft glow, reflecting and refracting that light into the darkest corners of the cave. The chamber was mostly in shadow, but she could still make out Gabriel’s silhouette amid the sparkle of the rock.
She knelt, picked up a handful of broken crystal on the ground. She studied it in the beam of her flashlight. Quartz in such quantities was geologically improbable for this locale. Still, she expected it to be quartz, but the crystals were shaped all wrong. Frowning, she licked her palm.
“It’s potassium nitrate,” she said. “Saltpeter. But it’s impossible for it to grow in such huge formations.”
“Lascaris made it,” Gabriel said. “Once upon a time, it was an old well. As near as I can suspect, he was working the conjunction process, trying to separate out elements. He called it his ‘star chamber’—his Camera Stellata.”
Sig wandered to the edge of the water, snuffled at it. Petra skimmed her hand over the surface, and the salt stung her scraped palms.
Sig splashed into the pool, and she recoiled from the spray. He paddled out into the water, leaving slivers of moon reflection in his wake.
“At least I won’t have to wash him,” she muttered. And the salt would probably kill off most of his fleas.
“The water. It’s heavy. You can float on it.” Gabriel stood in the half darkness, eyes shining. This was the first thing she’d seen him take genuine pleasure in.
“Like the Dead Sea?” Petra let the soft water run through her fingers. It smelled like the ocean.
“Yes. So much of it’s dissolved into the rainwater that it’s become heavier than a body.”
“I want to try it.” She meant it, in a bold and reckless way that sat uneasily with her.
Gabriel grinned, his teeth white in the gloom. “I won’t watch.”
Petra clicked her flashlight off. Only the moon was visible on the water, and its sparking reflection in the crystal, shifting as the water lapped at the bank.
She chose not to imagine if Gabriel had some kind of preternatural night vision. But she couldn’t see the glow of his eyes, and assumed that they were either closed or he had his back turned. Petra had never been shy about nudity in the service of scientific inquiry, anyway.
At least, that’s what she told herself.
She slipped out of her clothes and left them in the fine salt gravel at the edge of the pool. The salt prickled against her toes and stuck to the soles of her feet as she waded in. The black water slipped around her body, feeling luxuriously soft against her skin.
She sighed and leaned back, feeling the water lick her cheek. She floated with darkness all around her.
She’d felt this way sometimes on the rig at night, when she’d stood at the railing with Des, watching the gulls bob sleepily on the surface of the water. She’d failed to realize how fragile that sense of peace was. How fragile Des was.
She closed her eyes and let the water wash over her, rinse the tears from her face. She spread her fingers out and let her body sink up to her chin into the black. The water blotted out light and sound, life and feeling. So tempting. So tempting, to stay here, in the numb dark.
Gabriel’s voice seemed to echo from the ceiling. She couldn’t fix on his exact position. “It’s amazing, isn’t it?”
“It’s just like the ocean.” She tried to clear the memory and the tears from her voice.
“Is that where you came from? You smelled like salt when I first met you.”
Petra’s brow wrinkled, and she was suddenly self-conscious. “Yes. I used to work on an oil rig.”
Sig paddled in a circle around her, splashing in the black. She reached out and grasped his tail. He snorted and swam out of her grip.
“Temperance is a long way from the ocean.”
Petra looked up at the moon. “I made a mistake that blew up an oil rig. Killed three people.” Somehow, in the darkness, it seemed easier to confess. “I loved one of them.”
She thought she heard a sigh in the black. “Love isn’t forever.”
Petra stared up at the blurry moon. Of all people, he would understand that much. “No. It isn’t.”
Gabe led Petra back through the warren of tunnels. She followed in silence, seeming to be mulling over all he’d told her.
And he was still unsure he’d done the right thing in telling her, but it was done.
Maybe he’d been too long underground, and human conversation was too much of a novelty. Maybe he was simply too old and numb and didn’t care about keeping secrets anymore.
Or maybe it was the way that her hair smelled like salt as it dried.
Gabe rubbed his eyes. He’d been too long without companionship of any substantive type. Especially women. And he talked too much. As soon as he returned her to the surface, he was certain she’d bring back the federal agents. Sal would come back, burn the Lunaria, and that would be the end of things. A suitable ending, all things considered.
So maybe it didn’t really matter much what he did, anyway. He’d had enough time, not done much with it. Maybe he should just let it all go.
He paused before a tunnel that split off in a fork. He pointed to the left. “That’s the way back to the barn. I’ll send someone to let you out.”
“You’re not coming?”
He shook his head. “I need to check on Jeff.” He closed his eyes. “I need to see if he’s going to survive.”
She laced her han
ds behind her back. “I want to come with you.”
He blinked at her. Hadn’t she seen enough rotting flesh? He’d tried to soften that horror by showing her the Star Chamber, to show her that bit of his own secret wonder. But he had no desire to take her back to the Lunaria. “I don’t think—”
“I want to go,” she said firmly.
He shook his head. “If I have to put Jeff out of his misery, you don’t want to see that.”
She swallowed. “Yeah. I do.”
She was entirely unlike Jelena. Though he knew better than to think that she felt anything else for him but the fascination of a scientist examining a bug at the end of a pin.
But she stood before him, freckled and disheveled with clothes streaked in mud . . . and utterly luminous. And for a moment, Gabe allowed himself to believe that she perhaps wanted something more from him than answers, than the unraveling of secrets and mysteries. He was more than a hundred and fifty years old. He deserved at least one illusion.
“All right,” he said, and turned right down the tunnel, back to the Lunaria.
Light filled the chamber, and Petra shielded her eyes from the glare with her hand. “Why is it so bright? Are they burning?”
“It’s dawn. They’re waking up.”
The golden glow sunk into the bodies, flowing from the roots. He could hear flesh fizzling, bones crackling, and the hiss of air in lungs. The bodies were suffused in cocoons of light that shone bright as a summer’s day.
The Hanged Men dropped like angels from the ceiling, one by one, detaching themselves from that light source as delicately as dandelion fluff.
When the glow faded, they stood as whole and perfect as if they’d just been made, except for the terrible scars around their necks. They were nude. Clothes could not have survived that terrible rotting.
Petra looked away, a delicate flush spreading behind her freckles, as the Hanged Men hunted for bundles of clothes tucked away in the tree roots and stashed along the floor. Gabe’s gaze roved among the roots, searching for Jeff.
And found him.
The Lunaria hadn’t entirely released him. He dangled like a half-split milkweed pod trailing its contents along the floor, leaking strings of light from one arm. His head was bent back at a broken angle. His fingers twitched and jerked in the blackness. Roots reached down to comfort him, to pet him. He made a low keening noise that made Sig back up and growl.
Gabe reached up, took his head in his hands, pried open the eyelids. Jeff’s eyes were unevenly dilated, one iris entirely black in the socket and tearing gold.
“Is he—?” Petra asked.
Gabe’s mouth was dry. “The Lunaria isn’t strong enough to restore him. Maybe it could have, years ago, but now . . .” It was no use thinking of what could have been.
“We should take him to a hospital. Maybe someone can fix him.”
He shook his head. “They won’t be able to.”
“We have to try.”
“And I told you that we might have to put him down.”
Color rose in her cheeks. “You say that as if he’s a—a lame horse.”
“I say that because he’s not alive. Not anymore. And there’s no use trying to preserve it, condemn what’s left to a half-life of pain.” Gabe found a broken piece of tree root on the floor of the chamber. He snapped it in half, revealing a sharp, jagged edge.
Petra watched him with round eyes as he advanced on Jeff. He put his hand over Jeff’s eyes. Petra looked away.
And Gabe slammed the makeshift stake up under Jeff’s rib cage.
Jeff’s keening stopped, as if someone had shut off a switch deep within his chest. Cold light ran up over Gabe’s knuckles, soaked his sleeve. Golden fluid gushed out from behind Jeff’s ruined chest, tapping out on the floor like rain.
Slowly, the Lunaria released him. The tree roots set him down gently on the floor of the chamber, with reverence. Its roots slithered away, the fingers of a lover reluctant to leave her beloved’s bed.
The glowing light faded, leaving the body dark on the floor. Whatever remained of Jeff was well and truly dead.
“We’ll bury him. It won’t be much, but I’ll see that he gets a nice view.” Gabe stared down at the body. Petra’s coyote sniffed it and backed away.
Petra stepped beside him. He could hear her shallow breathing in this enclosed space, like a rabbit in a trap. Tentatively, she put her warm hand on his elbow. “I think . . . I think I’m ready to go.”
Gabe nodded, led her away from the body without comment. The tree roots parted above him to yield a trapdoor. He pushed it open, revealing the pale light of true dawn, not the artificial light of the world below. He knelt and laced his fingers together before her. Petra stepped into his grip, fingers lingering on his shoulder.
Gabriel tossed her up as if she weighed no more than a stone. Petra landed on her hands and knees on the grass outside the passage.
He reached for the coyote, who looked at him suspiciously. Petra whistled from above. Sig consented to being picked up and handed through the opening.
Gabriel startled her when he leapt up through the opening to land on the grass beside her. He hadn’t meant to alarm her with his unusual strength and speed, but there was no point hiding from her now. She spun around in the pink light of dawn, her salt-brittle hair lashing her face.
She was beautiful.
Gabriel put his hands in his pockets, put his head down.
“Are you immune to it?” she asked.
“To what?” There were so many ways he could answer that. Immune to loneliness? Time? Despair? The way she bit her lip?
“To life. You took Jeff’s so quickly . . .” She stifled a shudder; he could see it in the way she wrapped her arms around herself. “I keep fucking up. I keep bringing chaos and disaster behind me. I’m responsible for the death of the man I loved.” She wiped her nose, and her breath shook.
“No.” He reached out, shoved her hair away from her face, turned her chin to face him. “You have the most precious gift the universe can bestow. You have life. Real life. Not some simulacrum of it. Do you have any idea how much that’s worth? Jeff had none of that. He was just a shell.”
“You don’t understand. It’s been more than a hundred years since you were human.” Her brown eyes were leaden.
“You don’t think I thought about ending it? I did. Many times.”
“What stopped you?” Curiosity crawled into her voice.
“I wasn’t the only one. There were other Hanged Men. They needed me.”
“I’m not as strong-willed as you.”
“You don’t have to be. You just have to be what you are—a scientist. And keep on being that.”
He had no idea what she’d do when she left; she could keep his secrets or spill them to the entire world. He willingly gave her that power over him and the Hanged Men, to do with as she wished.
She gave him a wan smile and walked away. Walked into the rose-gold dawn and Gabe’s uncertainty.
But that bit of uncertainty made him feel alive.
Chapter Nineteen
The Athanor
Stroud was in a bad way.
Cal stood in the Alchemist’s basement, clutching a bottle of rubbing alcohol. Stroud lay on one of his experiment tables, surrounded by jars and stained rags. He was propped half-up with a pair of mildewy bed pillows, shirtless, digging at the wound in his lower right ribs with a pair of forceps that Cal had just sterilized in the furnace. A gooseneck clip-on lamp illuminated his work in a hot circle of light, with a rearview mirror from a car allowing Stroud to get a better view of the wound. Not that this was the only one. Bits of birdshot peppered Stroud’s arms, but Cal wasn’t mentioning those. Stroud’s creepy mercury intermittently spat out bits of it onto the floor. What remained of it in Stroud’s flesh was not worth picking at now.
Cal didn’t want to touch him. Blood made him dizzy.
But he did as he was told.
“Can you see the bullet?” Stroud hissed.
Cal knelt and squinted. “Yeah. I think so. But it’s hard to tell, on account of the blood.”
The forceps fell out of Stroud’s grip and clattered to the floor. Cal rushed to scoop them up and sterilize them again in the fire. When he brought them back, the tips glowed red. He offered the cool handles to Stroud.
Stroud shook his head. A runnel of mercury dripped down his pale lip. “You do it.”
Cal swallowed. “I’m not a doctor.”
“Play one on TV. I can’t see the damn thing.”
Cal screwed up his resolve. On one hand, he was flattered to be the only one Stroud would allow to tend to him, despite his many fuck-ups over the past week. On the other hand, if he fucked this up, Stroud would kill him. That was, if Stroud survived. If not, the others would.
It was a no-win. Cal grasped the handles of the forceps and stared into the wound. He mopped at it with a rag, stalling for time. The wound itself was really small, about the size of a dime, but the blood kept obscuring the surface. A bit of mercury kept welling up to gnaw at it, but it wasn’t strong enough to push it out.
Stroud was losing a lot of blood. Cal flicked a glance to the trash can full of soaked cloth. He wouldn’t be able to stay conscious much longer.
“Just do it.”
Cal put the flat of his hand gingerly on Stroud’s belly, trying to keep the mouth of the wound from moving when the Alchemist breathed. He touched the tongs to the wound, and Stroud hissed, clutching the edge of the table.
“Do it!”
Cal reached in. He could see something shiny inside, dug into it hard with the tongs. The thing was slippery, twisted, twitching.