by Laura Bickle
Stroud screamed as Cal worked. Cal finally succeeded in getting the tips of the forceps around the bullet and yanked it out.
He staggered back, holding a warped piece of metal stuck to a piece of flesh in the grip of the instrument. Nauseated, he dropped the forceps and the bullet to the floor. His hands shook.
“Good.” A silver tear leaked from Stroud’s eye. “Now heat that bottle of mercury in the athanor.”
Cal looked at him blankly.
“In the furnace,” he said gently, eyes glazed. “It’s called an athanor. The crucible where all purity is forged.” He pressed a rag to his leaking side. He began to babble: “Paracelsus said, ‘By the element of fire all that is imperfect is destroyed and taken away . . .’ ”
Cal grabbed the pair of tongs, grateful to have something to do that didn’t involve gore. He fitted them around the neck of the mason jar of mercury, held it over the flame.
“Heat it until it boils.”
Cal concentrated very hard on not dropping the jar. “Are . . . are you going to be okay, now?”
Stroud took a slug out of a vodka bottle. Cal noticed that Stroud never used drugs. And he wondered why, but never would ask.
“I think so.” Stroud’s gaze fixed him, then wobbled. “Thank you.”
Cal squirmed. “It was nothing.”
The Alchemist stared up at the ceiling. “Justin tells me that you found a body. On the Rutherford ranch.”
Cal swallowed. “Yeah. I think . . . I think it was Emmett. It was wearing his watch.”
“How did you find it?”
Shit. Shit. Shit. There was no use lying to him, even in his drunk and weakened and sort of poetic state. The Alchemist always found out. “I asked Petra to help me. I figured that if she was a geologist, she could find where that body the guy in the bar was talking about . . .” He trailed off, stared into the steaming jar.
Silence hung between them.
Shit.
“I thought I’d try to use her, you know?” Cal concentrated on not dropping the jar. “I didn’t realize . . .”
“You may have opened a door that I can use,” Stroud said finally. Sweat prickled on the back of Cal’s neck. That didn’t sound good.
“She said that she was looking for her father. Maybe that’s why she’s with Rutherford’s guys.” That sounded good. Like he had been out spying for Stroud and bringing back useful information. Still on the home team and shit.
Stroud shook his head. “They wouldn’t know. I know.”
Cal looked over his shoulder. “You do?”
“Our paths crossed many years ago. He and I had . . . similar goals.” Stroud’s gaze was distant and misty, as if he was remembering something. Or getting really drunk. Cal couldn’t tell.
“He was an alchemist?”
“Yes. I worked with him for a time.”
Cal noticed that the mercury in the jar was bubbling. He drew it away from the flame with the tongs and walked slowly to Stroud, careful not to spill any.
“Set it here.” Stroud pointed to a vacant spot on the table.
“Was he like you? I mean, was he good?”
Stroud smiled. “He was good. Still is.” Stroud pulled on a welder’s glove and grasped the jar. He poised the jar over the wound, drizzled hot mercury into it. He cried out and growled, the welder’s glove shaking. Drops of mercury slid off the table and rolled away on the floor. Mercury pooled within the wound, turning black as it roiled.
Stroud set the jar aside and lay back on the table, panting. Cal got him a cool cloth from a bucket and wiped his brow.
“You okay?”
“Yes.”
But he didn’t look okay. Veins of mercury crept out from the wound, black under his skin. It was as if a living thing dug beneath his flesh, worming under the surface.
“I want you to do something for me, Cal,” he said. He grasped Cal’s collar, drew him close. The old man’s breath smelled like sour vodka and metal.
“Sure. Anything.”
“I want you to find Petra. Tell her that I know where her father is. I’ll trade the artifact for the information. Bring her here, and we’ll make the trade.”
Cal licked his lips. There was no defying the Alchemist. “Yessir.”
“Good man.” Stroud reached up to ruffle Cal’s hair. “I can always count on you. You’re my number one foot soldier.”
Cal suppressed a shudder as a cataract of mercury slid over Stroud’s eye.
Petra sat next to Mike at Bear’s deli, picking at her sandwich and thinking about how much to tell him as he conducted his fishing expedition.
“So, you gonna tell me how Stroud wound up in the trunk of his car?” Mike asked around mouthfuls of pastrami sandwich.
“I told you. That wasn’t my call.” Petra looked behind the counter. Bear was feeding Sig leftover bits of meat from butcher paper in a major health code violation and cooing to the coyote in a voice that seemed entirely inappropriate for such a big man. Sig wriggled in pleasure, staring up at Bear adoringly. Petra was beginning to think that Sig would go home with him.
“Whose idea was it?”
“It was Gabe’s. He said Stroud was dangerous. And I kind of agreed with that assessment.”
Mike sipped his coffee. “The deputy he attacked was babbling about a man in silver armor. The ER thought that Stroud might have choked the oxygen from his brain and caused one hell of a hallucination.”
“Maybe,” she said uncertainly. “But Stroud didn’t look normal. He was leaking what looked like mercury. And Gabe . . .” She trailed off.
“You gonna tell me what one of Sal’s men was doing at your place?” Mike turned his coffee cup around to inspect the Styrofoam.
“I asked him for help finding my father.” Petra didn’t like lying outright; half-truths were easier. She intended on telling Mike a version of events that was similar to what she told the sheriff’s deputies: She was minding her own business when Stroud and the boys showed up looking for trouble for no good reason. The sheriff’s office seemed to accept that Stroud’s people were in the wrong and wanted little from her except a statement. Mike wouldn’t be shaken off so easily, but she’d try. She changed the subject. “How’s Justin?”
Mike shook his head. “Justin, the weasel, stayed long enough to demand about a gallon of green Jell-O, then split. He went out the damned window when his assigned county guard was reading the paper in the hallway.”
“What about Stroud?”
“None of the hospitals within two hours’ drive have reported any gunshot wounds. Between getting hit by Maria and the deputy, he’s in a world of hurt. I don’t look for him to survive beyond . . .”
He looked past her, through the window to the street, and began to slide off the stool.
“What’s wrong?”
Mike gestured with his chin. “There’s Justin.”
Petra followed Mike’s line of sight, saw Justin crossing the street and slinking into the Compostela.
“Stay here,” Mike said. He was on his feet and banging through the door of the deli. The cowbell rattled like an alarm.
Petra was right behind him, whistling for Sig. “Not a chance.”
She rushed across the street to the ornate door of the Compostela. She tugged it open, reaching for the gun at her right hip. The bar denizens had fallen silent as a congregation at mass, turning their gazes toward Mike charging across the polished floor.
“The tweaker,” he demanded of a woman stacking glasses behind the bar. “Where is he?”
The waitress lifted her hands. “I don’t want any trouble in here.”
Mike slapped his hands on the bar. “He’s wanted for attempted burglary and assault with a deadly weapon. You tryin’ to get in my way?”
The waitress pointed to the men’s room. “In there.”
Mike
straight-armed into the men’s room, and the door struck the wall with a sound like a gunshot. Fluorescent light flickered overhead, illuminating Justin leaning over a sink with a glass pipe.
“Drop it,” Mike ordered.
Justin sucked air from the pipe, held it in his lungs, and released it in a curling ghost of smoke that passed over his black eye.
Petra wrinkled her nose as the smoke drifted in her direction. It was unlike anything she’d ever smelled before: acrid and sweet at the same time. Like drain cleaner and roses.
Mike snatched the pipe from Justin, who was suddenly unsteady on his feet. “What’s this? Meth?”
Justin’s hands balled into fists, and his eyes were dilated so black that she couldn’t tell the true color of his eyes. He shook his head. “Elixir.” The corners of his split lip turned upward in an expression of sublime love. He slid from his perch on the edge of the sink and oozed down to the floor.
“Great,” Mike mumbled, shaking the contents of the pipe. White crystals and a rim of liquid lay in the bottom, producing a Jack-Frost pattern on the interior. “A brand new drug.”
“Well, it doesn’t seem to be making him violent, at least.” In her few interactions with Justin, she’d known him to be fueled entirely by testosterone. Whatever the Elixir was, it was making him pretty damn agreeable.
The young man sat half-upright on the broken tile floor, looking at his battered hands in his lap.
Mike bent down. “Where’d you get this?”
“From the Alchemist.” Justin looked up at him in an expression of utter peace and contentment. Petra had only seen that look on the faces of certain orders of nuns. He lifted his hands, stared at them in fascination. Maybe he was having a hallucination or was contemplating why his left pinky finger was turned in the wrong direction and an ugly shade of purple.
Maybe not.
His fingers splayed open, stretched, twisted. A splinter of bone pierced the skin on the back of his hand, dripping a runnel of blood down his wrist. His fingers turned back, freezing into claws.
“Jesus Christ,” Mike whispered, reaching for his radio.
Justin’s preternatural calm broke. “What’s happening to me?” he whispered.
The paleness crept up his arms, like venom. Petra could see his skin stretching, hardening, breaking. Blood leaked to his elbows. His radius and ulna turned backward, and he began to scream.
“ . . . Need the squad at the Compostela, right now,” Mike was shouting into his radio.
Petra held Justin’s shoulders, horrified as the calcination began to crackle under the sleeves of his T-shirt, bending and twisting redly under the cotton. It was like there was some terrible beast inside him, struggling to get out.
“Just breathe,” she told him, because that was the most important thing, and she didn’t know what else to tell him. He needed to keep doing that. “Breathe.”
Justin twisted out of her grip, scrambled to his feet, and ran out of the men’s room.
“Stop him!” Mike yelled.
Petra and Mike chased him through the bar, the patrons stunned to silence by his screams. Justin bounced off a pew like a pinball, crashed into a table, shattering glassware. He ran through the dimness of the bar, instinctively heading like a moth to the light of the outside.
The glare of noon momentarily blinded Petra. She focused on Justin, stumbling in the middle of the street.
His right leg collapsed under him like rotten wood. Petra could see the bones driven up under his kneecap, ripping apart denim and flesh. He limped forward, keening, as Petra caught up to him.
She recoiled as she saw his face. His cheekbone had grown up over his eye, blinding him on one side. His skin had hardened and stretched to ghoulish proportions, bone breaking through his jaw. He collapsed in Petra’s arms, and she could feel his ribs moving and crackling like ice as she held him.
“Just breathe,” she told him, straining to feel the flex of hardening muscle under his chest.
She was conscious of Mike’s cool shadow falling over her, but she strained to listen. Justin had fallen silent, just a thin whistle emanating from his ruined mouth.
“Just breathe,” she pleaded. “Breathe.”
He tried. Petra could feel the creak of his muscles laboring. But his ribs opened up like a flower, pulling apart flesh, and crystallized in her hands.
Petra stood in the shadow of the Compostela, watching as the volunteer firefighters took turns staring at Justin’s body. They’d put a sheet over him to keep onlookers from gawking, waiting for the Feds, who were reportedly sending people from the DEA and CDC. Nobody really wanted to touch him, but everyone wanted to see. Bar patrons crowded the window, peering out and muttering.
Petra rubbed her hands against her jeans. She’d washed them three times, on the off chance that Justin was contagious, but Mike was suspecting the drugs. He paced the perimeter of yellow caution tape that blocked off this side of the street, talking intently on his phone.
“I can’t believe that he’s gone. Not like that.”
Petra turned to see Cal standing beside her, hands jammed into his pockets and jingling his wallet chain.
“Hey, asshole,” she greeted him.
“Hey,” he muttered. “You, uh . . . gonna have me arrested?”
“Why shouldn’t I?” She glanced around for Mike, but he had his back turned to her a half block away, quietly speaking into his cell phone and rubbing the back of his neck. He had “administrative nightmare” written all over him.
“Look, I just wanna talk.”
“About you and Stroud and Justin showing up at my house wired for sound?”
“No, I . . . fuck. I didn’t want that. But Stroud, he made me.” The dejected line in Cal’s shoulders was convincing. “You got no idea of what he can make people do.”
She grabbed him by the arm and hauled him around the corner of the building, out of sight.
“The drugs. Did they do that to Justin?” she demanded.
Cal shook his head helplessly. He seemed just as at confused as she was. “We’ve all smoked the Elixir a bunch of times. It never did that.”
“Why on Earth would you do that anyway?” Petra blurted.
Cal looked up at her. “It’s hard to explain. The Elixir isn’t like anything else. It makes you . . . peaceful. Very Zen. Stroud says it’s the closest thing to immortality that humans can experience.”
Petra gazed at the sheet-shrouded ghost lying on the pavement. “Yeah, well. You might want to stop. Just sayin’.”
“I never did it all that much. Never really had the money. But Justin likes—liked—it a lot.” Cal stared down at his scuffed boots. “He always had money for it, anyway.”
Petra frowned. Maybe it was the cumulative effect. Or a bad batch. That would also explain the hiker with the drug paraphernalia. And the bodies on Rutherford’s farm. If those were also Stroud’s people . . .
“Listen, you’ve gotta warn people,” Petra said. “This isn’t the first. You recognized the watch on Sal’s ranch.”
“Yeah.”
“And I have to tell you something.” Petra blew out her breath. “There was a man and woman found on Rutherford’s ranch, too.”
Cal’s heavily kohled gaze flicked up. “Found . . . like that?”
“Yeah. I can’t say for sure it was your friends, but . . .” Petra struggled for words. “I’m sorry.”
“Did you see them yourself?” His voice crackled, and he cleared his throat.
“No. Gabe—one of Sal’s men—told me. But I believe him.”
“Shit.” Cal rubbed his nose with his knuckle and looked away, blinking. He looked as if she’d struck him. His gaze eventually turned back to her. “Hey, thanks for that. Really.”
She wished that she didn’t have to be the bearer of bad news. This kid, despi
te his transgressions, just seemed like he was perpetually in the wrong place at the wrong time, and Petra could sympathize with that.
“I do have some info for you.” Cal seemed to steel himself. “About your dad.”
Petra’s heart stopped. “You do?”
“Stroud knew him, says he knows where he is.”
The hair prickled on the back of Petra’s neck. “Stroud. The Alchemist.”
“Yeah. He says he’ll trade you the information for the artifact. And then he’ll leave you alone.”
Petra’s eyes narrowed. “Why does he want it?”
“Stroud’s into all kinds of weird shit. Magic. He wants anything to do with Lascaris. He’s kinda obsessed that way.”
Petra reached into her pocket, weighed the Locus in her hand. “I want to talk to him. But only on neutral turf.”
Cal shook his head. “Stroud’s in a bad way after he got shot. He can’t even get up to take a piss by himself.”
Petra’s brow’s drew together. “He’s dying?”
“I dunno.” Cal looked away. “I took the cop’s bullet out, but he looks bad. Real bad. He’s still full of birdshot from that chick at your trailer. I dunno how long he’s gonna last.”
She bit her lip. Her heart swelled and pounded in her chest. What if Stroud knew? What if the Alchemist could give her an address, a phone number, any clue to her father? A fistful of gold would be a small price to pay.
“Okay,” she said finally. She glanced down the street. Mike was still turned away, talking to one of the paramedics.
Her phone rang. She reached for it, and her heart twitched when she saw UNKNOWN NUMBER on the display.
“Hello?”
The voice at the other end sounded very far and very much like her father: “Don’t go.”
“Who is this?” she demanded, feeling her eyes grow hot. “Who are you?”
“Don’t go,” he said again. “Please.”
“Then you have to tell me where you are.”
“I’m not anywhere . . . not anywhere you can find me.”
And the call disconnected.
Petra gulped down a mouthful of air. She needed to find out, needed to know. And the disembodied voice at the end of the line wasn’t telling her.