Phoenix Falling

by Laura Bickle

  He caught her hand before she pulled away and drew her to his lap. He kissed her, and he tasted of sunshine. In that sunshine, she forgot how he had pointed a gun at her, and how she had tried to splatter him across her dashboard. She forgot about the Lunaria, Lascaris’s legacy, and the entanglements of eternal life.

  She forgot about how screwed up this part of the world was. She just remembered that he was who he was, and she was who she was, in just this moment.

  She kissed him back, falling deeply into it. No matter what he did, no matter what he was, she loved him. And she knew that he loved her back, tree or no.

  She shifted in his lap, moving to put her arms around his neck, and accidentally kicked the kitchen trash can. The can fell over with a bang, and its contents rattled out.

  She swore against his lips and slid away to pick it up. If she left it, Sig would be in the trash after salami wrappers immediately.

  She realized that Gabe had frozen, his hands remaining on her hips. He was staring at the trash on the floor.

  “What is it?” she murmured.

  He leaned over and picked up a glittering bit of trash—a piece of the mirror she’d found in the field. He turned it over in his fingers. “Where did you find this?”

  “Out back.” Her brow furrowed. “You don’t think . . . ?”

  He gazed into the mirror shard as if it were a crystal ball. “This. This belonged to Lascaris.”

  She scoffed. “You can’t know that.”

  “I—I can.”

  “But how can you be sure? I mean, it’s more likely just to be junk that someone left out there recently. I mean . . . Occam’s razor, and all.” At least, that’s what she wanted to believe.

  “It feels . . . it feels like his work. I can’t explain it.”

  The trouble was, she felt it, too.

  Petra took the shard of glass from him and placed it on the table. She reluctantly climbed from his lap and began picking the pieces from the trash. Gabe began putting the rest of the garbage away, and soon they had six good-sized shards on the kitchen table. Strangely, the pieces didn’t fit together in any coherent way, no matter how they pushed them together.

  “You think this is one of his magic mirrors? The ones he used to steal souls?” She picked up one and stared at it. There was only the barest suggestion of silvering on the back of it. It could have just been dirt.

  Gabe took the pieces to the sink and washed them. He stared into the bottom of the stainless-steel sink at the shards, as if consulting an oracle. “Yes. Will you show me where you found these?”

  She led him out back and sketched an area with her finger on the ground. “Around here.” Sig, disinterested, wandered away to hunt in the dry grass.

  Gabe looked at her with consternation on his face. “Can I borrow a shovel?”

  Petra went to the Bronco and retrieved a large shovel, suitable for digging out trenches, and a small one, useful for small specimens. Gabe took the small one from her and began digging in the dirt.

  She stood back. Usually, she was the one doing the digging. Her, or Sig. She glanced in his direction and grimaced. The coyote was rolling in something on the ground. Whatever it was, she was betting it was stinky and that he’d need a bath. She was reminded that coyotes weren’t too far removed from dogs in the evolutionary chain. There was a lot of good in that, like loyalty and snuggles. But also, some annoying aspects, like eating trash and rolling in dead things.

  Gabe had found a couple more pieces of glass. He reminded her of an aunt who owned a century-old farmhouse, back in her childhood. There was a spot in the backyard where the previous owners had burned their trash. Her aunt had loved excavating it for old glass bottles, coins, nails, and the detritus of prior generations. One time, Petra had found a rusted bottle cap for lemon soda that dated from the 1950s. She wore it on a string around her neck until her mother had found it. Convinced that Petra would get tetanus, her mom threw it away, much to her daughter’s everlasting regret.

  Gabe sifted the dirt to reveal two mirror fragments, which he handed up to Petra. He seemed intent on his work, lost in reverie. He dug until nothing else came up. They gathered the shards and the stinky Sig and returned to the house.

  Whatever Sig had found, it was foul. He was very pleased with himself, smiling, tongue lolling, tail flapping. Petra shoveled him into the small bathtub and used a full bottle of shampoo on him to get the stink mostly out. She poured a box of baking soda on him with the last lather, and that seemed to do the trick. She towel-dried him and set him free. Sig seemed crushed that he no longer was wearing eau de morte, and crawled into her futon to dampen her sheets in retaliation.

  In the meantime, Gabe had put the pieces of glass together in a pie plate Maria had left behind, this time the new ones completing the puzzle—or, mostly. What he came up with was a round shape, missing a few small pieces that were probably dust now. It was about five inches across, a smallish mirror by modern standards. Much of the silver had been scraped from the back of the pieces, and it still looked like carefully arranged junk to her.

  He exhaled. “That’s one of Lascaris’s mirrors, all right.”

  “If it contained something, it’s gone now.” Petra touched the sharp edges.

  “Lascaris’s mirrors didn’t stay empty long. I wonder . . .” He gazed out the kitchen window at the roiling sky.

  “What?”

  “I wonder if . . . that might have been how he survived his house burning down.”

  Petra’s brow wrinkled. “You think he put himself in the mirror?”

  “I wouldn’t put him above it. If the mirror broke . . . then his spirit escaped. That might be why the Mermaid insisted that he’d returned. Muirenn was very good at scrying. With all her witchcraft, she might have been able to see an untethered spirit.”

  “Well. I guess if he’s a spirit without a body, then he can’t do us much damage. He’d be confined to the spirit world, right? Or, at worst, a ghost?”

  “Theoretically.” Yet Gabe traced the fractured mirror with his finger, wearing a thoughtful expression.

  “What are you thinking?” Petra asked, sitting opposite him.

  “I think Lascaris’s magic is still in here. If there were a way to restore it . . . we might have a possibility of trapping the phoenix with it.”

  Petra chewed on her lower lip. “What does that mean for the phoenix?”

  “As I understand it, spirits that go in are in a kind of limbo. It doesn’t hurt, but it’s not pleasant.”

  “I really don’t much like that idea.”

  “I don’t either. But it’s one being versus a lot of people. It’s only a matter of time until people start getting killed by it. It’s a hard calculus.” Gabe sat back in his chair, gaze not moving from his dim and fractured reflection in the glass. “But it doesn’t matter, anyway. I don’t think it can be put back together.”

  “Well. Maybe it can.” Petra squinted at it, then at her watch. “We have an hour until the hardware store closes.”

  The hardware store in Temperance was never busy, but it seemed to generate enough traffic to remain stocked. The teenage girl behind the counter glanced up from her paperback book at Petra and Gabe when they arrived. Sig walked up to the clerk and wagged his tail. A smile cracked across the young woman’s face, and she bent down to rub his ears.

  “We’re out of fire extinguishers,” she announced.

  “Thanks,” Petra said, and she moved to the back of the store. They passed aisles of rolled chicken and barbed wire, cans of paint, grilling tools, and cabinet pulls. She picked up a welding torch kit and welding gloves and dropped them in a cart. She picked up the biggest tank of MAPP gas they had in stock, mindful to keep the tank vertical.

  The clerk set her book aside to ring them up. She glanced at the torch. “You doing some welding?”

  “Sort of,” Petra said.

  “You got goggles?”

  “They’re not in the kit?”

  “Nope.” The clerk
stepped out from behind the counter and vanished down an aisle. She returned with two pairs of black-glass goggles. “They’re eight bucks apiece.”

  “I’ll take three. Thank you.”

  The clerk nodded. “Safety first and all that.”

  She bagged up the kit and goggles for them. Gabe picked up the tank, and they left the hardware store. Gabe put the tank in the back of the Bronco, and Petra walked next door to the Compostela. The sign said OPEN, and she reluctantly pushed the door open.

  The bar was empty. Lev was stacking glasses behind it, and turned when she came in, with Sig and Gabe trailing behind her.

  “You’re the first customers today,” he said amicably.

  “Actually,” Petra said, “I’ve come to ask you for a favor.”

  Lev paused and raised an eyebrow.

  Petra swallowed her guilt. She hated asking him for help, but she had no choice in it. “You, um, have a pizza oven, right?” The Compostela made wonderful pizzas. Petra assumed that Lev had a setup back in the kitchen, somewhere.

  “I do. A wood-fired oven I built with salvaged bricks.” His eyes narrowed. “What do you have in mind?”

  “Well, Gabe and I have come into possession of some pieces of a magic mirror that we need to restore. I think I could do it, but I’d need a place to crank up some heat and leave it for a day or so.”

  “How hot do you need to get it?” Lev asked. “I haven’t gotten the pizza oven much above eight hundred fifty degrees.”

  “Well, I picked up some MAPP gas. And I was wondering if I could give that a shot? I’d need to get it up to about a thousand and fifty. And . . . take over the oven for about a day.” She winced at saying it.

  Lev shrugged. “It’s not like there’s a mob of customers out there clamoring for pizza.” He gestured for Petra to follow him behind the bar to the kitchen.

  Petra didn’t know what she expected from the Compostela’s kitchen, but she figured it would resemble the kitchen of the greasy-spoon restaurant where she’d waitressed when she was in college. That her feet would stick to the floor and for the light fixtures to be coated in a yellow film of grease.

  Shockingly, though, the kitchen was perfectly tidy. Stainless-steel countertops were free of crumbs, and the stove hood looked spotlessly clean. The floor was covered with a cushiony rubber surface that could be hosed down to a floor drain. The lighting was bright and clear, and there weren’t even fingerprints on the refrigerator.

  Gabe emitted a low whistle.

  “Wow, Lev. This is a nice setup,” she said.

  “I live upstairs. If the restaurant picks up critters, then I have them, too.” He grimaced.

  Sig whined softly.

  “Not you, little buddy. You’re a good critter,” Lev amended, reaching down to pat Sig’s head. He hooked a thumb at the corner. “See if that will work for you.”

  A pile of bricks had been mortared together in the back of the kitchen, with a metal chimney that exited through the ceiling. An iron metal door covered the oven compartment, while a cavity below was charred from burning wood. It had been recently swept clean.

  “That,” Gabe said, touching the brick surface, “is a thing of beauty.”

  “Wow, Lev,” Petra said, opening the door. “You made this?”

  “I’ve had time for various home improvement projects,” Lev said with a faint smile. “I got bitten by the wood-fired pizza bug a few years ago. I was pretty lucky that I found some bricks from a farmhouse that was getting demolished, and I hauled the chimney bricks from there. I used some heat-resistant concrete mix on the interior, and it works well. I think it will stand up to the temperatures you’re looking for.”

  Petra nodded. She was relieved to know that. She would have felt even worse if her debt to Lev grew beyond stealing his homunculus to burning down his home and business.

  “So show me this thing we’re cooking,” he said, cracking his knuckles.

  Gabe went to the Bronco and returned with an aluminum pie pan with the mirror shards carefully arranged inside. Lev peered at it. “So that’s a magic mirror? Will it tell you who the fairest one of all is?”

  “No. It’s a containment spell that Lascaris created, once upon a time.” Gabe filled in Lev about their hope to catch the phoenix as Petra carried the gas canister in and placed it beside the fuel cavity of the oven.

  “Interesting,” Lev said, poking at the mirror. “So you’re hoping to remelt the pieces in the oven? Do you think that will work for a magical repair?”

  “It should,” Gabe said. “I never saw Lascaris repair a broken mirror before. But, the spell is still in the components. If it’s fused back together, I don’t see why it shouldn’t work.”

  “We need to reslump and anneal it, essentially. I don’t think that wood will get hot enough to do this, and I don’t want to waste all your fuel. Is it okay with you if we try MAPP gas and mix it with oxygen?” Petra hoped that Lev would be cool with treating his oven like an alchemist’s lab.

  “What’s in the MAPP?” Lev asked. “I assume it’s like acetylene?”

  “Yeah. It’s mostly propylene with a little propane in it. To get technical, methylacetylene-propadiene propane isn’t really sold anymore, but this is a good substitute. Mostly, people use it for welding.”

  “If there’s some left over, I’m calling dibs. I want it to use for some killer crème brûlée.” Lev was rubbing his chin, clearly considering the dessert applications for the apparatus.

  “It’s all yours. Dessert your immortal heart out with it.”

  Lev nodded and looked critically at the pie plate containing the pieces. “If you’re wanting high heat, that pan won’t work. Hang on.”

  He went digging in a stack of pans on a shelf and came back with a steel pan about five inches around. “I was experimenting with some personal-sized cakes, but they never really caught on.”

  Gabe carefully arranged the fragments in the bottom of the pan. Petra didn’t know what Gabe saw in these pieces that seemed to give him the creepy-crawlies. Of course, it would have been simpler to take out the Venificus Locus and know for certain that there was magical juice still in them. Assuming that she was human and that it wouldn’t just reject her blood . . .

  . . . no. Her hand balled into a fist. No. She didn’t need to know that right now. She just needed to focus on the job at hand. Sig looked at her sidelong from the floor. She looked away.

  “That’s perfect,” Petra said. Then, she frowned. “We’ve been staring at these fragments, and nobody’s gotten sucked into a hellish limbo. If we restore this, if the magic is still intact, then . . .”

  “Then if we take it out of the oven, if we look at it directly, we’re screwed,” Gabe confirmed.

  Petra drummed her fingers on her lower lip. “That’s . . . not good.”

  Gabe shrugged. “Worst case . . . one of us could simply break the mirror again.”

  Lev rummaged around in his kitchen for a moment, then returned with a stainless-steel pot. He held it by the handle and turned the back to Petra. It had been polished to a sheen like a mirror. “So. That Perseus guy peered through his shield at Medusa, and she couldn’t turn him to stone. A nice Viking pan might do the same?”

  “I like it,” Petra said, grinning at her reflection in the pan. “That will be perfect.”

  Lev nodded. “Let’s get cooking, kids.”

  Petra headed back to the truck and returned with the goggles, the torch kit, and the rest of the gear. She opened the case for the torch kit and began reading the instructions to connect the hose and nozzle to the tank. There was a mixing valve in the torch handle that should cause a flame to spring out. She arranged the torch in the fuel area of the pizza oven, threading it through the spot where the wood usually was kept and holding it in place with a couple of bricks, careful not to constrict the hose. She placed the pan with the mirror shards in the pizza-cooking upper chamber and sat back on her heels. Theoretically, this should work. Theoretically.

  She grab
bed her goggles and tossed a pair to Gabe. “Ready?”

  “As much as I’ll ever be to see a piece of Lascaris’s magic resurrected.”

  She took that as a yes. She donned her gloves. Carefully, she cranked open the valves on the tank just a bit. She held her breath and checked the psi on the MAPP gas, then held the striker to the torch. A tiny, smoky flame emerged. She slowly eased open the valve on the tank, and the soot cleared around a flame half as long as her hand. Carefully, she backed away. She hoped that the air would mix properly with the gas and that the flame would maintain its color.

  “I hope this works,” she said softy.

  “Me, too,” Gabe said beside her.

  “How long does it cook?” Lev asked. “You said about a day.”

  Petra peered at the pizza oven’s remote thermometer. “Well, we want to raise the temperature by about sixty degrees an hour or so until we get to a thousand and fifty. It should stay at a thousand and fifty for an hour. And then, we shut it off. We have to leave the door closed for about a day. No peeking and letting the heat out, or it will be ruined.”

  “Sounds like a touchy recipe,” Lev said.

  “If it’s okay with you,” Petra said, “we could watch it in shifts. We can stay out of the way. And maybe start a tab?”

  “That works for me,” Lev agreed. “I have to admit, I’m curious to see how this turns out.”

  Petra grinned. “So am I.” She turned to contemplate Lev’s considerable selection of beer.

  Gabe frowned. “I’m not convinced that piecing together Lascaris’s old projects is a good idea. But I don’t have a better idea.”

  Lev paused and stared at the floor drain. Something tiny and black crawled through the mesh. At first, Petra thought it was a roach, but it turned out to be a toad the size of a nickel.

  Lev crossed the floor in two quick steps. He crushed the toad beneath the heel of his boot.

  Petra let out a strangled cry. “Lev!”

  He grabbed a hose and rinsed the remains of the toad down the drain. “I don’t let bad energy in my house.”