Phoenix Falling

by Laura Bickle

  Owen forced himself to take a breath. Anything Lascaris touched was dangerous, dangerous as hell. “He made offerings to you.”

  “He did. He gave me what I desired, and I granted him many favors in return. I even taught him how to raise the dead from their graves.”

  Owen shuddered.

  “Now, tell me what you want from me. Perhaps I may grant you a great favor.”

  Owen shook his head to clear the story from it. “Robin said he made an . . . offering to you. A little girl. Her name was Anna. Is that true?”

  A snort echoed from below. “Little morsel, sweet and screaming. I let her. But just two bites, and she was silent.”

  Owen’s fingers tightened on the sandstone edge of the well. “You are what Robin said, then. A monster.”

  “Robin got what Robin wanted. He was told the terms of the bargain.” Black eyes looked up at him from the inky pool below. “He gave, so I gave. But this I will give you for free. Solving the crime will bring you no peace of mind, nor rid you of the ghost. Only Robin’s death will.”

  Owen sucked in his breath. “Robin deserves the electric chair.”

  “Ah. And will you see that he gets it?”

  Owen didn’t answer. Robin was going to remain locked up in the mental hospital, likely for as long as he lived. And so Owen would be haunted that long.

  Both of them would.

  “Bring me the little bird, and I’ll devour him. The ghost haunting you will depart.”

  Owen’s fingers slowly crept to his holster. “She’ll go to heaven? To the afterlife she deserves?”

  “I swear.”

  Owen looked away in frustration, looked back, snatched his gun from his holster, and fired into the well.

  Gunfire flashed white and echoed in that pit. Owen fired all six shots. He peered into the dark. Chips of stone crumbled into the water. He shone his light into it. No body of a Toad God came floating up. He reloaded, just in case.

  Grunting in frustration, he stalked back to the SUV. Anna watched him from the passenger seat with round eyes, not moving to step out.

  “What are you doing?” she squeaked as he opened the tailgate and hauled out a piece of equipment that resembled what might happen if a giant weed whacker mated with an octopus. He dragged out two two-by-fours and laid them over the center of the well, parallel to each other, resting on the sandstone.

  “I’m gonna dredge that sonofabitch,” he muttered. He dragged the heavy hunk of metal and plastic over to the well. He pulled the pump up over the two pieces of wood, wrestled the first five-inch-diameter hose down the well, then aimed the ejection hose toward the creek bed. He got the damn engine started after three pulls on the rip cord. The machine hiccupped, then made the unholy noise of a power generator.

  Owen stood back, glowering. They’d dredged the well after Anna’s body was found. Nothing had come up then but Anna’s bones. But they had never found the bottom of the well. They’d gone as far as they could with the hoses and even sent an unlucky diver down who swore off dive duty ever after, but they never hit bottom. The diver had posited that the well was connected to an underground water system of some kind, something that reached into the water table and maybe beyond. Then, Owen remembered that the ground had been wet, and that there had been a lot of rain. The well had been full almost to the sandstone rim. Now, with the water so much lower, maybe he’d eventually be able to find the body of that toad. He’d brought the machine along, thinking that he’d have a hard time finding Pigin and that he’d have to literally flush the giant toad out. Now he hoped to find the creature’s corpse.

  As water coursed out of the well to the creek, Owen paced. Eventually, he sat on the edge of the well with his head in his hands, feeling the vibration of the pump in his ass and his dental fillings. He had to do whatever he could to get Anna to move on. For both of them, that was the only way. A man couldn’t live haunted, he reasoned.

  He gazed toward the ejection hose. Foul-smelling muck was coming out, the color of refrigerator mold. The engine seemed to labor and skip, as if it were a cat struggling to cough up a hair ball. The machine groaned, and it began spitting out pieces of solid debris. Owen advanced on the hose, expecting to find some gravel and a sign that the bottom was near.

  But it wasn’t gravel. Owen poked into the muck with a stick and dragged away some solid pieces that were too soft to be stone. He dumped some fresh water from a water bottle over them.

  “Shit,” he swore.

  They were bones. Pieces of them, anyway. Owen had been around the block enough to recognize an adult finger bone when he saw one. There was a fragment of a larger bone, maybe the ball of a hip joint, and an unmistakably human jawbone with most of the teeth intact. His first thought was that these belonged to Gennie or Lascaris’s experiments. But those would have likely been found the last time the well was dredged. These had to have been deposited into the well afterward. And while he was no forensic scientist, it looked like a modern mercury filling in one of the back teeth in the jawbone. Those surely weren’t available in Lascaris’s time.

  “Shit. Shit. Shit.” This place was now more than the setting for settling his own scores. It was now a crime scene. He’d bet his last dollar that these bones were human, and it seemed that Pigin had been collecting sacrifices for some time. How many missing-persons cases on the books could be solved by reexamining this site?

  Owen picked through the debris, gathering all he could and depositing them unceremoniously in a plastic evidence bag. He’d have to get the lab involved, and he’d have to do some DNA testing, then do some official interrogating of Robin that his informal nosing about might have fucked up majorly. Had Robin been dumping more people, over time, into the well, at Pigin’s request? How on earth was he going explain why he was out here in the first place?

  How on earth am I going to spin this . . .

  The engine seized with a deafening crack, and then there was ringing silence. Owen went back to the machine and tried to start it again, but the rip cord was stuck. Groaning, he pulled the pump down and took the extraction hose off. Something had gotten jammed there—something pale white and splintered that he couldn’t remove with his hands or the multi-tool he kept in his pocket.

  “Shit.”

  Laughter bubbled up from the bottom of the well. Owen spun and shone his flashlight down.

  A huge, blistered toad sat in the bottom of the well, floating in that disgustingly opaque water.

  “Where did all those bones come from?” Owen demanded, shouting a bit louder than he might have intended to, on account of the ringing in his ears.

  “They were offerings. People want things. I give them to them. And sometimes they don’t want them anymore.” The toad flicked its tongue out.

  “Did Robin do this?”

  The toad began to chew its arm thoughtfully, the way a dog with eczema might. He gobbled down some of his own flesh, tearing at it as it split apart. He opened his mouth, and on his tongue was a deformed bullet. He spat out a tarry glob of goo that rang on the stone walls.

  “You might overestimate Robin’s resourcefulness. And his stomach.”

  Owen aimed his gun into the hole, but Pigin merely snorted at him. “You can’t hurt me with your toys, lawman.”

  Owen faltered, and he put his gun away.

  “Now,” Pigin said. “My offer still stands. Bring me Robin, and you will free the girl.”

  “Why should I believe you?”

  The toad just stared at him. “I assume that you’ve tried everything else to get rid of your ghost, yes? Prayer, exorcism, maybe drink and various substances to keep her at bay?”

  Owen looked away.

  “And none of it worked. And now you’ve solved the crime. And still she sits, in your vehicle, as vivid as she was years ago. She hasn’t faded in the slightest.”

  Owen pinched the bridge of his nose. “So I feed you Robin . . . and then what? You keep doing what you do?”

  “I have been here long before
you, lawman. I’ll be here long after you rot. I am decay, the moist underside of all things. You would do well to remember this, lawman—all things rot.”

  The toad swam away then, seeming to disappear in the darkness. Water seemed to trickle back in, and the water level crept higher.

  Owen rubbed the back of his neck with his good hand.

  No matter what he did, it was all going to hell.

  Chapter 14

  One Wish

  She had failed.

  She felt it, deep in the hollowness of her chest, a leaden certainty that was determined to crawl up her throat and pour out in tears.

  “I’ve lost him,” Petra said. Her fingers were gripped so tightly around the steering wheel that she had lost all feeling in them.

  They’d been driving around all evening, and the light was fading. Gabe had finally asked her to stop at a fast-food place and got her a drink. She’d slurped it down mindlessly, but had remembered that she needed to feed Sig. The coyote got his cheeseburger, and was chewing it thoughtfully on the seat of the car. He’d taken apart the sandwich and removed the lettuce and tomato, only interested in the meat, cheese, and a bit of the bread.

  Gabe shook his head. “He will turn up. Your father is a resourceful man.”

  “No.” She shook her head hard. “You don’t know what he’s like when he disappears. When he last disappeared, I was sixteen. I had left for school, my mom had gone off to work, and my dad went to work like he did every day. It was a freaking Wednesday. Who runs away on a Wednesday?

  “Anyway. I came home from school, and the house was empty. It was so quiet. I sat down on the couch and read. My mom came home. We made dinner. We waited for my dad. It got dark, and he didn’t show up. My mom tried calling his coworkers. No one had seen him that day. We called the cops to see if he was in a ditch somewhere. Called the local hospitals. Not a sign of him.

  “At first, my mom was pissed. She thought he was having an affair. And he was like that. He was never really present, you know? Always thinking about something else. Mom had threatened to divorce him more than once.

  “She filed a missing-persons report when the police said that it had been long enough to count him as gone—I think it was a couple of days. They eventually found his car two states away at a gas station parking lot. There was no sign of foul play. He had just disappeared like that. No note of explanation, no nothing.

  “My mom and I went on, I guess. She got really pissed and sold everything he owned, even the recovered car. I kept this gift from him, because I hid it from her.” She fingered the gold pendant at her throat, the lion devouring the sun. “It was all I had of him. Maybe all I ever will.

  “I searched for him, off and on, for years. I finally got a lead that he was seen in Temperance. I found him in the nursing home, and I learned that he’d been pursuing an alchemical solution for his Alzheimer’s. That he’d gotten mixed up with a shitty crowd and had gotten hexed and wound up tucked away in a corner where he couldn’t hurt anyone. I was so glad to find him . . . even gladder when he recognized me. I thought that we could build a relationship, get back some of what was lost.”

  She stared down at the pendant. “If he’s running again, he may not be found until he’s ready to be. Or he may have met serious trouble. Or his Alzheimer’s may have—”

  Gabe leaned over to give her a hug. Her ruminations died against his shirt. Her dad was a runner, any chance he got. She knew that, a truth that resonated deep in her bones. It just didn’t make it any easier to deal with a second time around.

  Her cell phone rang, and she snatched it up, thinking it was news about her dad. “Hello?”

  “Hey, Petra. It’s Mike.”

  “Mike? Is everything okay? Is the fire—?”

  “Not great. But I’m okay. Been trying to reach you for hours. The nearest cell tower got cooked by the fire, and I had to find a sat phone to call you. And Maria’s okay, too.”

  “She’s with you? What happened?”

  There was a frustrated sigh on the other end of the line. “Apparently, Nine and Maria went around the barricades and decided to do some kind of numbskulled thing with fire. Nine said she wanted to make an offering to it or something.”

  Petra held her breath. She wanted to ask: Was she successful? But she kept her mouth shut.

  “We got distracted trying to help evacuate some firefighters, and Nine took off. We don’t know where she is.”

  Petra pressed the heel of her hand to her temple. “It’s going around. My dad escaped from the nursing home and a nurse is missing.” She didn’t say presumed dead. “We’ve been looking for him.

  “But what about Nine . . . Wait.” Petra paused. “This will make no sense, but you’ll have to trust me on this.”

  “Things rarely make sense when you’re involved. Just sayin’.”

  “There’s a radio tracker on at least one wolf in the Nine Stars pack, right?”

  “Yeah. I think so. I can contact the biologist who monitors that stuff. Why?”

  “I think Nine will be with them, wherever they are.”

  “Hopefully, they won’t be crispy. Things are getting bad here. Real bad.” Mike never admitted when things were getting shitty, so they must be beyond shitty and descending into fucktacular.

  “What can I do to help?” she said.

  “You’ve already been a big help with the tip on Nine’s possible whereabouts. If you can, I think you should touch base with Maria. She may be able to round up some folks from the reservation who can help look for your dad, too.”

  “I will. Thanks.” She would speak with Maria, after she checked in with Lev. She’d left Lev babysitting the mirror in his oven with some hastily scribbled instructions. Hopefully, he hadn’t gotten too curious and was tempted to peek and let out all the air in the oven. She told herself that the man had built a homunculus. He could handle a little melted glass.

  Mike gave Petra his sat phone number. “And Petra?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You and Gabe and Sig keep tabs on each other. Nobody else gets to go missing, okay?”

  “I promise. Scout’s honor. Be careful out there with the fire, will you?”

  There was soft, resigned laughter. “Honestly . . . we’re gonna have to fall back again. If we don’t get a change in wind or rain, this thing’s gonna get outside of the park, and then it’ll be hell.”

  Mike hung up, and Petra stared at her phone. Things just kept getting worse.

  She turned to Gabe, but he was staring into his palm with narrowed eyes.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  Gabe opened his hand to show her Lascaris’s pocket watch. The hands were moving, and it was keeping the current time.

  Her brow wrinkled. “What does it mean?”

  Gabe’s expression was hard. “If I were a betting man, I’d bet that Lascaris has returned.”

  The fire was gathering strength. She could see it, in that red line roiling like a snake on the dark horizon. She could hear it, in the distant roar like thunder, and smell the acrid burning from miles away.

  Nine stayed upwind of the fire, keeping north and moving east. She hoped to walk around the fire, threading through the valleys of this region, going east, and then find her way back to the reservation. Traveling as crows fly, she could move more directly than Maria’s original route, which had made a near-complete circle around the park. Nine had a good sense of direction and a map in her pocket; she was certain she could find her way back home in a day or so.

  Her mouth turned upward at that. Funny how she thought of Maria’s house as home now. She glanced back at the distant mountain. Maybe she had two of them, and that was all right, for now. Until she figured out how to get back to the pack for good.

  The farther away she moved, the more leaden she felt at leaving the pack. She wanted to stay, to sleep in that pile of fur and cold noses for the rest of her life. Perhaps she could go back if she provisioned properly. Maybe someday. Hope flared in her. She
had enough accumulated knowledge, enough resourcefulness to survive anywhere. She knew that she couldn’t physically keep up with the pack as a woman. But perhaps it would be enough just to live in their home territory, to see them once in a while from a distance and know that they were safe.

  She nodded to herself. It would take some planning. But she could do it. She could gather her equipment and be settled there before winter set in. Maria would understand. The dogs she worked with in her volunteer job at the animal shelter would understand. So would Petra and her husband, the Raven King. They all would. Maria would be furious at her taking off into the fire, but Nine knew that she wouldn’t stay angry. Maria understood that Nine was always part of her pack. Try as she might to deny it, Maria knew Nine didn’t belong there, amongst humans.

  Resolved, she walked through forests and fields, over dry creek beds. She skirted the edges of some angry mud pots spewing steam. She saw no other humans and few animals as she made her way. She consulted her map, and knew that she was moving beyond the bounds of the park. She crossed two empty roads and moved to lower land, to a dense forest. She would have to cross this, two more roads, and then it would be a straight shot to the road leading to the reservation from there.

  She drank the last bit of melted snow from the canteen in her pack, and she found herself in the thickest part of the forest. It seemed that no light could penetrate here. The leaves did not whisper and shudder in the breeze as forest trees usually did, that aural shimmering of summer. This place was still. Dead.

  She crossed a dry creek bed, a chill trickling down her sweaty spine. This place was haunted. She could feel it. Something was here, and she wanted no part of it. She quickened her pace, hoping to escape the notice of whatever dark spirit inhabited this forest.

  A black toad, the size of an apple, skittered across her path. Against her every instinct to flee, Nine followed it through the thick underbrush. A toad had brought a message to her before, warning her about the phoenix. Perhaps this toad had something to do with the Toad God. She followed the toad until she lost it in the dark vegetation.