Phoenix Falling

by Laura Bickle

  Gabe frowned. “In alchemy, toads symbolize death.”

  “Exactly. Not in my house.” Lev rummaged in a mason jar full of black stones and deposited a chunk of obsidian the size of his thumb next to the floor drain grate. “And stay out,” he said to the drain.

  It seemed as if the water beneath the drain burbled more loudly as he did so.

  Petra’s brow wrinkled. “Nine said that a black toad spoke to her. And that a Toad God had tried to fight the phoenix.”

  “Well, that one’s not talking, anymore.” Lev nodded to himself.

  “Is there some way that we could contact this . . . this Toad God?” Petra asked Gabe. “Could it be sending some kind of emissary to contact people?”

  Gabe frowned. “One spoke to Nine at the Eye of the World. Maybe there, she could get in touch with it.”

  Lev shook his head. “You guys do not want to mess with that kind of energy, whatever it is. It’s bad, and you gotta leave it alone.”

  Petra was about to respond when her back pocket rang. She reached for her phone and answered it. “Hello?”

  “Ms. Manget?” The voice on the other end of the line was unfamiliar.

  “Yes?”

  “This is Dr. Vaughn from the nursing home. I’m afraid that something has happened to your father.”

  Chapter 12

  The Father, Sun, and Ghost

  Petra hit the ground running before the Bronco’s engine had stopped ticking. Keys in hand, she barreled through the parking lot to the nursing home and straight-armed the door open. She rushed up to the front desk and breathlessly told the receptionist: “Dr. Vaughn called me about my father . . .”

  “Yes. We’re expecting you. Please come with me.”

  She was aware of Gabe’s cool shadow behind her and Sig’s claws clicking on the tile as the receptionist led them down the hallway. Petra noted that none of the residents were out and about, and she guessed that the place was on lockdown. She paused before the partially open door to her father’s room and put her hand over her mouth.

  The window glass was broken out, furniture cast haphazardly. A sulfurous-smelling black goo splashed across the bed linens and dripped to a puddle on the floor, over a nurse’s uniform and shoes. There was no sign of her father. Sig took two steps toward the room and whined. Petra grabbed his collar and moved him back underneath the yellow tape that blocked the doorway.

  Gabe gripped her shoulder in sympathy. She turned away to follow the receptionist down the hall to Dr. Vaughn’s office.

  They were ushered inside and offered coffee or tea, both of which Petra and Gabe declined. The receptionist left to locate Dr. Vaughn. Gabe pulled his chair closer to Petra and held her hand. Sig lay down on her feet, and she could feel his heart fluttering through the tops of her shoes.

  I will not cry, she thought. I will not cry.

  Dr. Vaughn came into the office and shut the door behind her. This must have been her day off and she’d been called in; she was wearing yoga pants and a hip-length T-shirt, hair tied back in a ponytail. She extended her hand to Petra first, then Gabe. Rings still glittered on her hands.

  “Thank you both for coming,” she said, sliding behind her desk.

  Petra leaned forward. “What happened?”

  “We aren’t entirely certain, but I’ll tell you what we’ve learned so far. We thought your father was napping, and a nurse came to his room to give him his afternoon medication. Instead, Joseph was awake, and he was very agitated. The nurse radioed for backup and stated this. Sounds of yelling could be heard. Before an orderly could arrive, there was apparently a physical confrontation.”

  Petra winced. “Physical confrontation” sounded like a sanitized version of something awful. “Are they all right?”

  “The orderly arrived to find the nurse missing. There was . . . something . . . on the floor that we haven’t yet identified. The window was broken, and your father was gone, too. Our outdoor security camera caught him crossing the parking lot alone.”

  “Oh my God,” Petra breathed. Gabe’s grip on her hand tightened.

  “We called the county sheriff’s office, and they’re looking for him. This is a truly unacceptable outcome, and we’re sorry for all the pain this has caused.” The doctor folded her hands before her.

  “How long ago did this happen?”

  “About two hours ago. The police are sure that he couldn’t have gotten far, especially in his condition.”

  But he’s up walking about . . . Petra squeezed her eyes shut. Jesus. If she’d only gone ahead and let them monitor him, to study him as they wanted, this might have been prevented—whatever this was. Based on what she’d glimpsed in her father’s room, it was a mess. That much, she was certain.

  “I want to help look for him,” she insisted.

  Dr. Vaughn sighed. “He’s demonstrated that he can be very dangerous, and I would not want you to get hurt, too. I think we should leave this to the professionals. Once he’s been recovered, it would be good for you to see him under controlled circumstances. A familiar face would be very helpful for him at that time. But for now . . . I think you should stand by for more information.”

  Petra shook her head. She couldn’t just do nothing. She let Gabe and Sig lead her from the nursing home out to the Bronco. Sig sat down beside the truck tire and gazed up at her.

  “What do you think happened in there?” Petra asked Gabe.

  Gabe looked away, and he seemed reluctant to speak. “I think there’s some magic afoot. If I were a betting man . . . it looks like someone came up against the wrong side of a fermentation process.”

  “What? How can that happen?” Her brow wrinkled.

  “Your father was an accomplished alchemist. If he got into an altercation with someone . . . I’m pretty sure he was the one using the magic. It looks to me like the nurse was disincorporated.”

  She sucked in her breath. “The nurse is dead?”

  “I think so. The remains of the process were on his clothes.”

  She shook her head. “No. No. My father would not have done that.” She couldn’t process the idea that her father would have killed an innocent man. Could not.

  “Petra.” Gabe’s voice was soft but insistent. “Your father’s Alzheimer’s may have overtaken him. We must be careful.”

  “He can’t have gone far,” Petra said. “And we have to find him before Owen’s men do.” She reached into the Bronco for her gun belt, ammo, and a hat. The shadows were drawing long over the parking lot, and she needed to find her father before night fell. In the dark, he’d get even more lost and more terrified.

  Gabe rested his hand on her arm. “Don’t go spoiling for a fight with Owen’s men.”

  She shook his hand off. “He’s my father, Gabe. I can’t leave him to the wolves.”

  Gabe nodded. “Then we should be smart about it. Careful.” He took her jacket from the backseat and put it over her shoulders to cover the gun belt.

  Petra sighed. He was right. She needed to slow her roll. She dug in the backseat for her backpack, dumped the geology tools from it, and stuffed a couple of water bottles and Sig’s leash in it. “Well, he’s presumably on foot.”

  “In two hours, a healthy man could walk five miles, maybe six. Your father will be slower than that, for certain,” Gabe said. He pulled a map from the glove box and spread it on the hot hood. He found the nursing home on it and scribbled a circle around it. “Owen’s men will be looking in this area . . . probably along these roads.”

  Petra stared at the map. That was a lot of ground to cover, and the area would be growing larger by the minute. She mentally crossed off the areas near the roads, where Owen’s men would be lurking. What had her father been thinking? She stared at the broken window, visible from the parking lot. Where would he have fled to? There was little of interest here to the old man. The nearest civilization was at least a few miles down the road. There was a burger joint there, but . . .

  Sig whined. Petra looked down at him. �
�Hey, buddy. Do you think you could track your grandpa?”

  Sig cocked his head, looking at her like she was fucking stupid.

  Petra squatted down to his level. “You know what he smells like, right? Like . . . peppermint candy and butterscotch and yellow gravy? If you find him, I promise to get you the juiciest cheeseburger you’ve ever seen . . .”

  Sig turned around and trotted away, nose to the ground. Petra’s mouth gaped in amazement.

  “Holy shit. Sig is doing what I told him to. I think. This never happens.”

  He trotted over to the ground near the broken window, sniffing around the Dumpster. He moved on, going around the side of the building.

  “I’ll start searching from the air,” Gabe said.

  Petra nodded. “I’ll leave your clothes in the truck and the windows down.”

  Gabe glanced around to make sure no one was looking. Petra held her breath. No matter how many times she saw this, she was always dumbstruck. He stepped around a shaded corner of the building, out of the line of sight of the security camera perched near the door. And then he melted away. Black feathers split from flesh, twisting and exploding from skin and bone. Dozens of birds escaped his empty clothing, climbing up into the sky. Petra approached the empty clothing, plucking the flannel shirt away from a raven who’d gotten stuck in a sleeve. The bird cawed at her and flounced away, as if irritated by human trappings.

  Petra dumped the clothes in the backseat of the Bronco. She moved the Bronco away from the camera and cranked the windows down. Gabe should be able to get back and get dressed with a minimum of fuss.

  Petra scrambled to catch up with Sig, who was advancing into the woods behind the building, pausing once in a while to sniff at the ground. He moved on, trotting away, winding his way around the summer shade. Petra followed as closely as she dared, calling softly for her father. She felt like she did when she was six, playing hide-and-seek, and couldn’t find her dad. Turned out that time, he’d fallen asleep in the bed of his pickup truck with a six-pack, well out of her view. But in the meantime, she’d convinced herself that something awful had happened to him. This felt the exact same way.

  Sig emerged from the bit of woods into a fast-food parking lot. He drifted around the parked cars, and Petra stopped him to click his leash on his collar. He looked at her reproachfully.

  “It’s not that I don’t trust you in traffic,” she said. “It’s everyone else I don’t trust.”

  She walked up to the drive-through to ask the young man at the register if they’d seen an old man here alone. The young man shook his head, and she turned her attention back to Sig. The coyote was looking at the horizon, straining against the leash. She gave him a lot of slack and let him go, nose to the ground and tail twitching.

  He circled through the lawn of an apartment complex. He sniffed each of the cars carefully, then veered away to an artificial pond. He snooted around the shore of the lake, and Petra’s heart stopped. What if her father had drowned?

  Above her, ravens spotted the sky. They spun outward in a search grid, orderly, silent. The sun was approaching the horizon, and they were black specks in the orange. If one of them saw something, she was certain that they would begin calling and that she could follow.

  But Sig moved on. He trotted away, toward a dilapidated-looking house with tall grass growing through the gravel driveway. The white wooden siding was stained green with mold, and the shutters were loose and faded. It looked like it was probably slated for demolition.

  Sig trotted up to the front step and circled the perimeter of the house, collar jingling. He orbited the house once, twice, then sat in the driveway, looking befuddled.

  Petra looked at the broken doorbell with exposed wires and decided not to chance it. She knocked on the front door, hoping that whoever lived here might have some information about her father. She knocked and knocked, but no one answered.

  She opened the mailbox and lifted out a sheaf of mail. Some of it was postmarked a month ago. “Nobody’s been here in a long while.”

  A raven lit on the sagging gutter. Petra looked up at it. “Did you see anything?”

  The raven twitched its head from right to left, a corvid negative.

  Her heart sank. She asked the coyote, “Sig, do you know where my dad is?”

  Sig looked up at her and whined, thumping his tail on the ground. He’d lost the scent.

  And she knew, deep on some level, that she’d lost her father.

  She didn’t know what the phoenix wanted, or much of anything else for certain. But she did know that the pack needed her. And that she could help them.

  Nine disappeared into the forest on the far side of the road. She hoped that Mike and Maria wouldn’t try to find her. If they did, though, then so be it. All that she knew was that she had to save the pack. There was no other choice.

  She pulled her bandanna up around her nose, jerked Mike’s goggles over her eyes, and ran as fast as she could.

  The pines seemed to know the fire was approaching. Sap oozed from the curling needles and pinecones dropped from the heat. It sounded like hail. She knew that fire was part of the pines’ life cycle, that fire cleared out the undergrowth to allow light to nourish seeds in the now-rich soil. But not fire like this. This was unnatural. It wasn’t allowed to burn itself out. It was created by the phoenix, new flashpoints generated wherever it lit. It wouldn’t end until the phoenix was stopped.

  But stopping the phoenix was beyond her power. Still, she could help the pack; that much, she knew. The air grew thick and hazy, but she kept moving south. Forward, forward. She was moving through vast striations of choking smoke. This way was unburned, close to the front of the fire line, so very close. It was like being submerged in a hot river. In her mind, she was eight years old again, helplessly struggling against the inexorable fire and the light in the sky.

  The ground plateaued. To her right, she could see flames about a quarter mile away, moving steadily south. She was close to the gorge she’d seen in the Eye of the World. She followed the ridge until it dropped into a canyon. This was where she’d last seen the pack. They would have thought they were safe in that shade and the darkness of the gorge, but they would be trapped here, trapped without someone to lead them to safety.

  She threw back her head and howled. Her smoke-abraded throat, unconstrained by human inhibitions, still released a sound that was very much like a wolf howl. She howled once again, then twice.

  A distant howl answered her. She scrambled down the edge of the gorge, down a steep slide of gravel. The rock chewed into her blistered arm through the bandage, rending the skin bloody and weeping. She barely felt it—she was so close. She clambered gracelessly to the bottom of the gorge and howled again.

  A wolf peered at her from behind a tree. Ghost. He was wary. He’d been expecting a wolf, and here was a woman. He pulled his lips back from his teeth and growled, the hair lifting along his spine.

  Nine gave a small howl and a whimper, then a whine.

  He cocked his head, looking at her.

  Nine yipped at him. This was what she would say to him if she were still wearing fur. It’s me, Nine. And there’s danger.

  The wolf perhaps heard something familiar in her voice. He gave a low woof, then turned to walk away.

  She thought at first that he might mean to run away, but he paused, looking over his shoulder. He meant her to follow. She scrambled after him.

  A little way distant, she saw the pack, and her heart leaped into her sooty throat. They were huddled at the back of the gorge, a mass of grey fur and frightened eyes. The walls were too high to climb here, and this area was shaded by dense pine. Under any other circumstances, this would be a safe place—a great den—but not now. Now they were cornered against a wall of rock and the fire was closing fast.

  The pack gazed at her with narrowed eyes. A growl emanated from a furry throat, and then a whimper. The wolves knew to fear anything that walked on two legs; creatures that walked on two legs meant terri
ble danger.

  Nine lifted her hands and yipped softly. It was a sound she’d not made since she left the pack. She dropped to her knees, to their level, and groaned with a canine rasp.

  The leader of the pack stood beside her. He yipped to the pack, making a show of turning his back to her. They looked at him skeptically, tails thumping in the dirt.

  One of the youngest wolves sidled out from behind the legs of the others, tail tucked between her legs. She approached Nine warily, then lay down, gazing up at her with eyebrows twitching, ears flattening.

  They knew her. Somehow, they knew her.

  Nine whined happily, fighting the urge to reach out and touch them. Much as she wanted to, she could not afford to spook them now. Slowly, she pulled the map out of the bag and spread it on the ground. In her peripheral vision, she was conscious of the wolves circling her cautiously. One or two noses reached toward her and shied away. She smelled funny; she knew it. She smelled of human food and soaps and gasoline and gods knew what else.

  Judging by their position, there was one way out. Nine put the map back in the bag, allowing her fingers to brush its contents. There was water, a shiny blanket marked FIRE BLANKET, and some beef jerky.

  She poured the water out on a flat stone and backed away from it. The wolves had been down here without water for a long time. The wolves nosed toward the water and slurped noisily at it.

  Nine glanced up at the sky. The sky was blackening and the smoke thickening. Fire crackled in the distance.

  She whined, a sharp whistle. The wolves licking the rock dry paused, ears up. Nine slowly rose and walked away, back toward the mouth of the gorge. She turned and whined again.

  Ghost trotted after her. She held her breath. The others slid into line behind him, clustering tightly. They were unsure. She didn’t blame them. She was, too.

  She began to walk faster, toward the opening of the dead-end gorge. She could see the fire now, crackling through the pine trees. It leaped from bough to bough, running as fast as mad squirrels in the branches overhead. The wolves, doubting, pressed close. Her fingertips brushed the coarse fur of a wolf’s back. A low rumble emanated. They wanted to go back, away from the fire.