by Laura Bickle
“I’m sorry,” Nine said.
Mike crossed to his vehicle and began taking a bag out of the back. He plunked it on the hood of the vehicle and spread out a map on the surface. “They were here.” He pointed to an area about two miles away. “But the fire’s now here.” He pointed. “Near Lewis Lake, heading south to the canyon.”
Nine froze. Lewis Canyon was where she’d last seen the pack in the Eye of the World. “It’s going across the creek?”
Mike was staring at his phone. “Yeah. I see it. It’s gotten bigger and faster. We have to get those people out of there.” He turned to Maria. “I’m gonna need to ask you to haul some of these crispy guys. I can’t get ’em all in the Jeep, and the helo is occupied.”
“No problem.”
Nine stared at the map. The canyon was south of her current position, through a pine forest. She carefully folded up the map and placed it back in Mike’s pack. Above, a black plume of smoke was approaching. There was no choice.
“Thanks, Nine,” Mike said. “You can put it in the Jeep. Maria, do you have any water on you? Those guys will be needing . . .”
Nine walked to the other side of Mike’s vehicle with the bag in hand. Mike was talking into his radio again, and Maria was moving things around in her vehicle to make room for the firefighters.
Nine took a step back, then another.
Then, she turned and ran.
Chapter 9
The Lunaria’s Grasp
The last Hanged Man of Temperance could not be bothered to carry a fucking cell phone, a fact that infuriated Petra Dee to no end. She’d waited for him all day yesterday to return to the trailer, and he hadn’t. He’d spent two nights at the tree, without even emerging to say “boo.”
She’d driven to the Rutherford Ranch just before sunrise, wanting to speak with him about what her father and Nine had revealed. She took the back way in, past empty fields and through cut barbed-wire fences. The cattle had been moved closer to the barn and main house since the fires began, so this far out in the back forty seemed weirdly lifeless—fields with striations of smoke lingering over them and no animals.
She had no desire to run into Owen, knowing full well that she was trespassing on his land. But for many months, by Gabe’s reporting, Owen had ventured no farther than his own driveway. Owen may have had a few too many brushes with the supernatural entities that populated the ranch, perhaps. Maybe he figured that giving his right hand up to them was enough of a sacrifice, and was better focused on managing his more visible law enforcement empire aboveground—and hopefully aboveboard.
She drove to the Lunaria, standing alone on its hillock, as the sky began to lighten on the horizon. Her heart lifted when she saw Gabe’s truck parked there, then twisted a bit in a pang of jealousy for the tree.
He returned to this tree every night. Rarely, her. She knew her feelings were petty and probably childish. The tree was a thing, after all—maybe. It gave her husband life, and she was grateful for that. And Gabe’s relationship with the tree had existed for so long it felt like an ex-wife was hanging around. And if history was any predictor, that tree was going to be around long after Petra was gone. Petra prided herself on being an adult and rolling with the punches on pretty much every emotional curveball that was thrown her way, but this jealousy still flowered within her. She was ashamed of it, to be certain. Maybe there was a way to make peace with it, and she knew she needed to. But she had no idea how. How were things like this usually done? Should she bring a casserole and a bottle of wine to the tree?
She parked the Bronco beside Gabe’s pickup. Sig peered out the window at the Lunaria and growled.
“Yeah. I feel that way, too,” she said.
She popped open the door and the coyote scrambled out. He stretched, flattening his ears and yawning, then trotted up to the tree and peed on it.
Petra chortled. She strapped on her gun belt, just in case Sig had a point. And there was no telling when Owen might pop up in his own backyard.
She walked down to the creek, where it pierced the side of the hill and tangled in tree roots. Roots had wound around the gate leading to the underworld beneath the tree. She stood on the bank of the stream and rapped sharply on the iron gate with her keys, ringing against the metal like a bell.
“Gabe? You sleeping in? I need to talk to you.”
There was no response but the trickle of water. Petra peered through the gaps in the rusty gate.
“Gabe,” she called again, drawing her keys noisily across the bars, like a jailer. But only the gurgling water answered her.
“Dammit,” she muttered. She tugged at the gate, but it was held shut by ropy tree roots. She pulled as hard as she could, but the gate remained shut fast.
She considered digging through her hodgepodge of geology tools in back of the Bronco for a handsaw, but decided that would be rude. Maybe the Lunaria was cranky because of Sig. Maybe it—and Gabe—were taking a luxurious afternoon nap. Gabe had some burns to heal, after all. When he was hurt, he spent more time underground.
She could wait. He’d have to come up for air sometime. He always did, she reminded herself.
It’s just . . . She missed him. She missed having him in her life, and the tree was a necessary evil that took him away from her.
She climbed back up the hill and sat beneath the rustling shade of the tree, far beyond where Sig had anointed it. The oak leaves created a hypnotic, soft susurrance, and she soon stretched out on her back below it, watching the patterns the leaves made on the sky.
“I know you love him,” she said to the tree. “I love him, too. Thank you for healing him, for taking care of him.”
It humbled her to say it aloud, to express gratitude to this living thing that had watched over her husband all this time. Perhaps it was Petra who was the interloper, and she was the one who needed to make good with the tree. She took her water bottle out of the pocket of her cargo pants and poured some water at the base of the tree, rinsing away Sig’s territorial marking.
In the meadow of white geranium and grass beyond, Sig had gone hunting. She turned her head to watch him from time to time. He’d remain still as stone and then pounce like a fox on something, looking at his paws with surprise at some hapless mole he’d caught. Eventually, he tired of the game and trotted back to her side. He lay down with his head on her belly. Petra wrinkled her nose at him; his breath smelled like garbage, and she told him so.
Sig gave her a toothy grin and gazed up at the leaves, his ears pressed back. She stroked his neck and followed his look. This tree. Was it the Tree of Life or the root of all evil in Temperance? Could it be both? Did it really matter? It was power, and maybe such things didn’t always need to have human morality assigned to them. Maybe she needed to think of the tree as simply another part of Gabe, and that would allow her to move past the anxious sense of grasping she felt. Maybe Gabe was simply returning to a part of himself at night, and that was the way things simply were.
Lulled by the whispering of the leaves above and the warmth of the ground against her back, Petra drifted off to sleep. She dreamed that she was stuck in this odd twilight world of aboveground, with the sun struggling to burn through the layer of haze that shrouded the land. It was as if the world above were just one step away from a dreamworld, and it was easy to fall into it.
She dreamed that she’d brought the tree an offering, trying to make peace with it. She offered it a golden pocket watch. She knew it was valuable, somehow, but couldn’t remember how, only that it would be familiar to the tree, and that the tree valued it. She placed it on the ground beside her. The tree’s roots reached up from the ground, splitting it, and curved around the watch like spindly fingers. The roots covered it and drew it down into the earth, into the inscrutable mass of light and darkness at its heart.
Petra smiled. The tree had accepted her offering. She sat back, her hands braced behind her and her fingers tangled in the grass. Perhaps this could be a new beginning for them. Perhaps the tree
would realize that she and it had the same goal: to protect Gabe. Perhaps . . .
Something tickled around her wrist. At first, she thought it was a bug and twitched to flick it away. But her wrist was held fast to the ground. She turned to pull it free, but her ankle was snagged in something. With horror, she realized that she was trapped by tree roots. They lashed around her tightly, around her wrists and waist, and began to pull her down, down into the soft earth.
She screamed, a scream that was quickly stuffed full of dirt. She glimpsed Sig, ears flattened and snarling at the tree. He attacked the roots and began to dig, howling that eerie howl that only belongs to coyotes.
But the Lunaria hauled her down, wriggling and kicking, into the lightless earth below. Dirt pressed against her, forcing the breath from her lungs. Sig’s howls grew more distant, and she was buried in that underworld that belonged to the Lunaria and nothing living. There was nothing human here, nothing warm and with human feeling.
Petra jerked awake in a moment of terror.
That dream . . .
It was as fresh in her mouth as the taste of dirt. She coughed and passed her hands over her eyes, sucking in air, forcing herself to open her eyes to light and the world above that she knew stretched from horizon to horizon.
There was light, but not the sunlight filtered through smoke that she expected. Instead, a weird yellow light dripped sinuously through darkness. A cocoon of tree roots surrounded her; she was hanging like fruit above a rushing body of water that whispered like the voices of men. With her hands, she ripped at the roots surrounding her, futilely. They twitched and pressed tighter against her assault. Through gaps in the tendrils, she could see only darkness and striations of light, the tree’s underworld.
She forced herself to slow her breathing and scrubbed her hands across her filthy face. There had to be a way out.
“Gabe!” she shouted into the darkness. “Wake up, dammit!”
There was no answer. Maybe the tree had him trapped as well, or he was still caught in his slumbering stupor. Whichever, it was clear that there was no help coming.
“What do you want from me?” she growled at the tree.
The inarticulate whispering crested, then subsided. Whatever it was, it wasn’t going to tell her. And she wasn’t sure she really wanted to find out the answer.
She wriggled her fingers along her waist, to her gun belt. The two antique pistols were twisted against her hips, heavy as thought and memory. She got one free and awkwardly pulled the trigger. The flash momentarily blinded her, and a bullet lanced into the darkness somewhere around her right foot. She felt splinters somewhere around her shin and a root flinch away. She knew that in an ordinary fight between bullets and wood, wood would win. But the Lunaria was more than just wood; it felt pain, and she could use that to her advantage.
The whispering crested, louder than the gun report. The roots snaked tighter around her, and she kept pulling the trigger until the chamber clicked empty. There was space around her feet—she kicked and wriggled and struggled until she worked herself loose down through the hole at the bottom of the cage.
She dropped into the dark, sprawling along the gravel of the riverbank on her knees and skinned hands. She reached for the second gun, holding it before her as she climbed to her feet. Liquid light had splattered over her and the ground, like firefly guts. She’d hit something, perhaps some important arterial conduit of the tree.
She should find Gabe and get the hell out. Maybe the tree had him caged, as well, and that’s why he wasn’t answering her . . .
“Gabe!” she shouted into the half-lit darkness. She scanned above her, at the glowing biomass, for some sign of him. She knew he decomposed and regenerated—there had to be a man-shaped chrysalis or something here, right?
The roots were reaching for her; one reached out and licked at a scrape on her cheek. She batted it away and began to back toward a pinpoint of white light downstream . . . She knew that the gate was downstream. She heard Sig’s distant barking, a beacon.
She shot at a root that was reaching for her knee. The bullet bounced off stone, and she squeaked in alarm at the ricochet. She had five bullets left. If she stayed, the tree was going to snatch her up again. She had to find some way to buy time while she looked for Gabe.
She rifled through the pockets of her cargo pants. She found an unbroken plastic vial of sulfur from the crater. Keeping the gun lifted, she knelt to the gravel and sifted through it with her left hand. Her geologist’s fingers found what she sought nearly immediately—flint. She grabbed two chunks of it and rubbed them against her shirt to dry them.
Serpentine roots approached her, making a hissing sound against the stone. She shot at them again, and they skittered away. Four shots left.
She found a broken piece of root on the ground, splintered and inert. It felt dry enough. She dipped the end in her vial, pulled it out, and capped the vial tightly, wrinkling her nose at the rotten-egg smell. Striking the pieces of flint together, she prayed for a spark. She knew that under normal conditions, she’d have a helluva time starting a fire with just rock. But sulfur—this sulfur was dry and flammable.
In her peripheral vision, she could see the roots curling around her, forming a perimeter to trap her. She had to work quickly. Filthy sweat dripping from her brow, she kept striking the rocks together, trying to get a spark to light on the sulfur stick . . .
It lit. She snatched up the stick, glowing with a blue sulfuric flame. She held the torch high, illuminating the ceiling of the chamber. The roots shrank back from the torchlight, rustling. The monster tree had been burned before; she was banking on it being as afraid of fire as Frankenstein’s monster.
“Gabe,” she snarled, heart hammering. She was running out of time, and she knew it. “Where the hell are you?”
She swept the torch around her, trying to pick out a man-shaped shadow in the teeming light and roots. But they pushed down from the ceiling, obscuring her view, dripping liquid sunshine to the gravel.
She turned on her heel, and saw that the white light of her exit had been blocked by a seething wall of bramble-like wood.
She was out of options. She would have to come back for Gabe. She’d siphon gasoline out of the Bronco and come back here to burn that fucking tree to a shriveled twig to get it to give him up. The tree provided him life, but she had to get him out of it. Somehow. Maybe he could make nice with what was left.
She advanced on the barrier of roots. They twitched and seethed at her approach.
With her thumb, she removed the cap on the vial of sulfur. She flung the contents on the wall of roots and thrust her torch at it. It erupted in blue flame.
The whispering roots shrieked, parting and writhing. She plunged through the opening with her arms flung over her face, running for true daylight for all she was worth.
She slogged through the water and quickly slammed up against the gate. Sig stood up to his back in water on the other side, barking furiously. The gate was, as before, wound fast in the tree’s grip. She jammed what was left of her guttering torch at the roots winding around the latch. The flame caused the roots to shrink back, but others curled in their place. The wind coming in from outside was threatening to douse her torch.
Behind her . . . She glanced back. The malevolent tendrils were skimming across the surface of the underground river like water snakes.
Shit. Shit. Shit.
She shot back at them, emptying the last of her bullets. She reached into her pocket for her knife and began to saw at the roots holding the gate, desperately, but the roots were coming for her, far too quickly.
They wrapped around her waist, and she pitched backward in the water, dropping her torch. Her fingers wound around the gate, and she held on to it as hard as she could. Rust flaked into her hands, and her grip was slipping.
“Stop.”
Gabe’s voice. She twisted her head back to see him standing on the bank. He was coated in the luminescent yellow slime of the tree, glowing in t
he unearthly artificial light.
The roots paused, but did not slacken their grip.
“Let her go,” he insisted, looking up at the ceiling, where the tree grew above. He was holding a pistol, and aimed it at Petra. The roots whispered among themselves.
“Gabe, what the hell?” The tree . . . The tree must have changed him. Turned him against her.
Gabe gazed at her coldly and continued to speak to the tree. “If you take her, you’ll take a corpse that even you cannot repair. And I will never return to you again. You will be alone. Forever.” He waded into the water, aiming at Petra.
The tree whispered. Whether it murmured to itself or to him, Petra couldn’t tell. Her heart hammered in her chest.
Gabe paused before Petra, the gun a mere foot from her face. He pulled the hammer back on the gun and said: “This, I swear to you.”
Petra’s heart clotted in her throat. He would kill her. He would. She could see it, that cold deadness in his eyes.
The grip of the tree slackened around her waist and around the gate. Petra sank to her feet in the water. She pushed through the gate, out into the sunlight. With shaking arms, she grabbed Sig and hauled herself to shore. All she could think of was getting away. Away from that tree and the awful underworld it had created. Away from Gabe.
She stumbled toward the Bronco and shoved the soaked coyote inside through the window. He scrambled into the backseat, whimpering. She turned to cross the bumper to get in on the driver’s side, but something caught her elbow.
She turned. It was Gabe. She tried to shake him off, but he held fast.
“Get away from me,” she hissed.
He let her go, and she crossed to the driver’s side and got in, fastening her seat belt. With shaking hands, she cranked the ignition and put the Bronco in reverse.
The passenger-side door opened. Gabe climbed in and slammed the door.
“Get out,” she snarled.
