Phoenix Falling

by Laura Bickle

  Dedication

  To my husband, Jason, who has consigned himself to the destiny of having the moon forever parked on his chest and the sun lolling on his feet, both purring their heads off.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1: Murmuration

  Chapter 2: The Separation Process

  Chapter 3: The Dream Beyond the Body

  Chapter 4: The Dark Side of the Mirror

  Chapter 5: Off to See the Wizard

  Chapter 6: The Rattler Spills His Guts

  Chapter 7: Waking the Dead

  Chapter 8: Offerings

  Chapter 9: The Lunaria’s Grasp

  Chapter 10: Seeing Ghosts

  Chapter 11: The Amateur Occultist’s Guide to Backyard Alchemy

  Chapter 12: The Father, Sun, and Ghost

  Chapter 13: Invisible Gold

  Chapter 14: One Wish

  Chapter 15: The White Witch’s Internet Parlor

  Chapter 16: Call and Answer

  Chapter 17: Unkindness

  Chapter 18: The Well of Souls

  Chapter 19: The Touch of Death

  Chapter 20: The Ruin of Temperance

  Chapter 21: Showdown at the Tree of Life

  Chapter 22: Ever After

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise for the Wildlands Series

  By Laura Bickle

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter 1

  Murmuration

  The world was on fire.

  The ravens knew it. Heat slipped through their glossy feathers, so much more blistering than the usual wrathful scorch of summer. They flew north, over the burning forest. The acrid taste of smoke was bitter in the backs of throats. Still, they charged toward the fire, dozens and dozens of them. Their heartbeats thundered through their light bones as they flew.

  They did not fly as ravens usually flew. They flew as unquiet starlings did, in a tight, seething cloud over the charred trees. They turned right, left, in a curling formation, determined that none of their number should be left behind in the smoke and char. A hundred black eyes peered through dust and ash at the blackened timbers standing straight, like black fingers reaching through the ruined land.

  They flew farther, toward the line of brightest heat and the light, twisting, turning. The sound of feathers flapping was deafening, churning over the crackle of fire as they banked and turned. The birds moved with one mind, their hearts hammering in singular thunder, wings fanning the smoke and the fire, sparks slipping in the spaces between them.

  They were legion.

  Movement glittered in the corner of one raven’s eye. It cawed an alarm, a raucous cry soon echoed in the shrieks of its fellows. The ravens spiraled down, down, into a patch of lodgepole pine, a tightening vortex of black that pulled together at the last instant. Feathers collided into flesh, falling into a black hole that seemed to turn inside itself in a flurry of cawing . . .

  . . . and coalesced into the shape of a dark-haired man. A man with one heartbeat.

  Gabriel covered his nose with his hand against the smoke that had begun to drift his way. He could feel the fire approaching this part of the forest; the heat was intense on his naked skin. He wasn’t much for casual nudity, but modesty was the least of anyone’s worries. The fire was sweeping north and would be here within minutes.

  He ran to the east, the pine needles prickling the soles of his feet. He could hear the crackle of the blaze in the distance and the crashes of pinecones, opened by the heat, landing on the forest floor. The pinecones were adapted to fire—in some ways, they needed it now; they’d seed and grow a new forest.

  But warm-blooded creatures were not so fortunate.

  He climbed over a rise to see what had snagged his attention from far above: a pickup truck stuck in a ditch, its back wheel spewing loose dirt. A woman sat in the bed of the truck with her arms wrapped around a blanket-shrouded lump, and he realized they were animal wranglers. The man in the cab was gunning the engine, trying to get the truck moving, but it was going nowhere.

  Gabriel climbed down the slope to the truck. The woman in the back of the truck turned her head and looked at him in horror. The man in the cab let up on the gas and fumbled in the glove box, likely for a gun.

  Gabe lifted his hands. “I’m here to help.” He paused by the driver’s side window.

  “What are you doing out here?” the man in the pickup asked. The unspoken question was: What the hell are you doing out here stark naked?

  “Swimming.” That was plausible. Much more plausible than: I flew here in a cloud of ravens. Like one does when the roads are closed. Instead, he said: “The fire’s about five minutes southwest of here, coming fast. Your only way out is that way.” He pointed east.

  The man in the truck popped the door open.

  Gabriel shook his head again, pushing the door gently closed. “You can’t outrun it on foot. Let me work on that tire.”

  The man nodded. Gabe could see his eyes in the rearview mirror, the fear and distrust evident.

  Gabe walked to the back of the truck, where the wheel was stuck. The woman watched him with frightened eyes. Her burden squirmed, and a blanket fell away from the face of a fawn. It was young, likely not more than a day old. Late in the season for such a creature to be born. Late and unlucky. Gabe knew plenty about bad luck.

  Gabe inspected the tire. The tire itself was intact; it had just sunk into a rut dug deeper by the attempts to move it out. He motioned for the driver to hit the gas. Gabe pushed on the back bumper with all his might. The engine howled, and the woman covered the deer with her body. Heat shimmered behind Gabe, and he struggled to keep his sweaty hands on the bumper. Dust and dirt kicked up, coating him in a film of yellow clay, small rocks tearing tiny cuts into his legs. Sparks began to rain down from the sky.

  He felt the tire tread grasping, gave the truck a final shove . . .

  . . . and the pickup lurched forward twenty feet, narrowly missing a tree before the driver wrestled the truck under control. Gabe landed facedown in the dirt.

  He picked himself up, wincing as embers landed on his back.

  “Get in!” the driver shouted, motioning for him to jump in.

  Gabe shook his head. “I’ve got a ride.”

  The man paused, his eyes wide in the rearview mirror, this time fear mixed with gratitude. The woman looked at Gabe then and gave him a tight-lipped nod.

  The truck sped away, east, bumping over the cracked dirt.

  Gabe looked behind him, at the fire licking over the crest of the slope.

  He inhaled, summoning all his will into his body. When he exhaled, he shattered into hundreds of ravens, exploding like ink in water. The ravens rushed up, up into the black layer of smoke, then through to the hazy shade of white.

  They climbed higher, higher, in a thick murmuration, seeking cooler air above. The birds began a slow turn, skimming east to look for more stragglers, be they man or beast. The birds had herded some Canada geese away from a shallow creek an hour ago; he hoped they hadn’t tried to return, but they were notoriously stupid.

  A brilliant light, bright and hot as a meteor, sliced down through the sky, through the heart of the murmuration of ravens like a blazing sword. It came from above the fire, not spit up like a flare from the ground below. Gabe sent the birds scattering in all directions, like rings from a stone cast in water. Still, he wasn’t fast enough, and he smelled charred feathers.

  The murmuration turned away and dove to the earth, toward ground untouched by the fire. Gabe could taste ash and feel sparks lighting feathers as the air fed the fire. They flew down as quickly as they could.

 
The birds skidded to land in a cawing mass of confusion, beside his truck parked in a field. Gabe drew all the burning pieces of his consciousness to himself, reforming his body . . .

  . . . and he realized that his arm was on fire.

  Gabe swore and reached into the open truck window for his hat. He beat out the flames, feeling his arm hair disintegrating as he did so. His flesh was pink, but not yet blistering.

  He reached into the truck for his clothes—jeans, flannel shirt, boots—and dressed quickly. He frowned at the soot on his hat but parked it on his head anyway. He realized then that he was missing part of an eyebrow and rubbed at it with his palm. It itched.

  When he was reasonably satisfied there was no serious harm done, he looked back to the sky. Smoke churned over a line of trees. In the distance, he saw the animal rescuers in the pickup heading safely east, toward the main road.

  There was no sign of the streak of fire that had come from above. His first guess was that it was a meteorite, and that it had little to do with the fire already blazing out of control on the ground. And it might be exactly that—a meteorite. Or it might have been an unlucky goose that caught fire, or a bit of hot debris from a helicopter hauling water. It could be any number of ordinary things that produced a freakish result.

  But this wasn’t an ordinary place, and there were no coincidences here. This was Yellowstone National Park, in the backyard of Temperance, Wyoming. An alchemist once prowled this land, centuries ago, eventually founding the town. And while Lascaris was long dead, Gabe knew some of his magic still survived, just beneath the dull senses of the humans who lived and worked in the backcountry. He’d seen things over his unnaturally long life that curdled his blood and froze his marrow. And he was part of it, too.

  Gabe knew he could bank on the extraordinary gaining a toehold in the ordinary here, in this darkly enchanted land.

  “That sure isn’t normal.”

  Petra Dee Manget rocked back on her heels. She stared into the hole in the ground yawning open before her, as if the earth were frozen in midscream. A deep dusting of ash that had precipitated from the fire covered the ground. It had been dubbed the Magpie Fire, as it had first been noticed near a creek of the same name. Nearby ash and lodgepole pine trees had been flattened, like black matchsticks, in a circular pattern around this crater. The small vegetation immediately surrounding the hole had been vaporized entirely. The wildfire that had been sweeping through Yellowstone for the last week had long since passed through this place, leaving behind dust and silt. The ground still felt warm to touch. Petra didn’t know if she imagined that it was more than ordinary summer heat, but it radiated through the soles of her boots, as if she stood on the skin of some sleeping, living thing.

  She adjusted the respirator mask over her face. She wasn’t keen to inhale more of this ash than she had to. She’d been recently given the gift of a new set of lungs—and pretty much everything else in her body—and she was determined not to ruin them prematurely.

  Initially, she had thought this was a sinkhole. Or maybe a shallow paint pot, a brilliantly colored acidic hot spring that had the water and noxious fluids boiled off in the fire as it passed through. This may have predated the fire—something flammable under pressure that was set off by a spark that may have ignited this whole nightmare. She’d originally spied this anomaly from the air days ago, when she’d been helping the Park Service decide where to dig firebreaks to curb the blaze. The fire was long since gone in this area. Now, though, there was no harm in digging at the edges of what remained. She really wasn’t supposed to be here, and she knew it. But if this was the now-cold ignition point of the fire that had begun last week, perhaps she could loop in the investigators with the Park Service, and they might be able to keep this from happening again . . .

  Maybe. She peered into the hole. It was about nine feet wide from edge to edge, with slightly irregular borders. Yellowstone National Park was a playground for geologists like her, and she considered that it might be a new geologic feature forming. Maybe there was a hot spring, mud pot, or buildup of flammable gases at this site that had blown a hole that deep and wide?

  Only one way to find out.

  Petra tied a rope around a burned tree stump. The skin of the pine was blistered and black, but it felt solid enough underneath to hold her weight. Loosening the rope slowly, she climbed down into the hole, her gloves digging for earth beneath the ash.

  She swept away ash with her fingers, revealing charred black dirt. Beneath it was solid basalt. Runnels had formed in it, as if it had liquefied and refrozen. It still felt hot to the touch, like the handle of a cast-iron cooking pot. The heat wasn’t her imagination, nor the work of the distant sun trying to burn through the haze. Her filthy brow wrinkled. That was odd. A gas dispersal event would probably have leaked around such heavy stone, rather than gone right through it. And most gas dispersal events would have been unlikely to get this hot.

  She slipped off her backpack and dug for her tool set. With a small shovel, she scraped at the bottom of the crater. She frowned as she cleared away a yellow dust that she could smell even through her respirator. It smelled like rotten eggs . . . It was sulfur; she would bet a hot twenty-dollar bill on it. But if it was, it should have burned up in the conflagration. She scraped away a sample into a collection jar to confirm later.

  She continued to dig, and her shovel blade rang against black stone. More basalt, still warm and frozen in smooth eddies around deep fractures with dull edges. It would take great heat, at least a thousand degrees, to cause basalt to melt. Forest fires could burn several hundred degrees hotter, but a fast-moving fire wouldn’t have enough sustained time to cause this degree of melting, and not all the trees surrounding the hole were obliterated by the heat. A dynamite blast would be too short-lived to produce this kind of molten effect.

  As always, geologists feared what would happen if the super volcano beneath Yellowstone were to awaken. She hoped against hope that this was not a sign of that dreaded scenario coming to pass. If it happened, they were all toast. Not just her and the Park Service trying to manage this fire, but everyone, everywhere. Humanity would go the way of the dinosaurs if and when Yellowstone ever woke up. She scratched the point of the shovel against the stone, leaving behind a bright white mark. It didn’t make much sense, unless . . .

  . . . she moved to the edges of the crater. With her hands, she brushed away ash, revealing blast marks. Her heart hammered. Maybe . . . Maybe a meteorite had hit here.

  A big one.

  She smiled. Such a find was a geologist’s pot of gold. It would explain the intense heat and these scorch marks . . . She ran her hand across a now cold stream of liquefied basalt, streaking up like the ray of a black sun. A meteorite could get up to three thousand degrees Fahrenheit, streaking through the earth’s atmosphere. It would be a short event, but intense enough to cause this kind of damage. And the fallen trees . . . They reminded her of the pictures she’d seen of the Tunguska event in Siberia.

  She sucked in her breath and began to look at the burn pattern more closely. It was regular, though, almost too regular to be explained by a meteorite strike. As she worked her way around the crater, she found a black tentacle of a blast mark every three feet or so. They were nearly all the same depth and size, reaching up over her head. It looked almost man-made. Almost.

  She stood back, turning on her heel and surveying the crater. If she were an artist, she might say she was at the center of a carefully constructed mandala. There was no sign of melted meteorite materials—moissanite, or anything else foreign to the area—just this crypt with the seven black rays extending from the heart of it. The meteorite in Tunguska exploded before it hit ground. Maybe the same had happened here, but on a much-smaller scale.

  “Did you find anything?”

  Petra looked up. Gabe squatted at the edge of the crater and peered down.

  “You look . . . crispy.” Her husband’s left eyebrow was gone, and his hat was covered in soot.
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  “It’s warm out,” he said noncommittally.

  “This,” she said, sketching the circle of the crater around her. “This is not normal. It might be a meteorite impact. A miniature version of Tunguska or something.”

  Gabe cocked his head like an inquisitive bird. “Tunguska?”

  “Yeah. In Siberia, around 1908, a meteoroid vaporized in the atmosphere. It had the effect of an atmospheric nuclear detonation. But tremors were noted, and there was no crater, like there is here. It was thought that the meteoroid experienced an ‘air burst,’ and the meteoroid didn’t hit the ground. There was just a scorch mark on the earth, with the trees fallen around it. Maybe this was a much-smaller meteorite that did actually hit ground. There haven’t been any reports of seismic disturbances . . .” She was thinking aloud now, talking herself into the idea.

  Gabe’s eyes narrowed fractionally. She saw that the pupils were still in the shape of a bird’s, small black dots in amber. He’d been in the sky. “Could be.”

  Petra blew a strand of sweaty strawberry blond hair out of her face. “What did you see up there?”

  “Something burning in the sky. Almost hit some of my ravens.”

  Petra clapped ash from her gloved hands in a puff. “It’s the right time of year for the Perseids meteor shower. I can check to see if sky watchers have been reporting more activity than usual. Not that they can see much through the smoke haze.” That meteor shower could generate up to a hundred meteors an hour under peak viewing conditions. Any meteoroids striking the ground were improbable, though. But that was the most rational explanation she could come up with.

  Gabe frowned. He dug into his pocket and chucked an object down into the hole. Petra caught it. It was a gold compass, as big as her palm, and she grimaced to see it.

  “We should ask the Locus. Just to be sure,” he said.

  She blew out her breath, disturbing ash. The Venificus Locus was a magic detector, inscribed with alchemical symbols and forged by Lascaris long ago. It couldn’t tell her what kind of magic it sensed, whether it was good or bad, but it could tell her if something supernatural was afoot. It was useful.