Phoenix Falling

by Laura Bickle

  He had more than twenty DVDs of kids’ films by now. There were animated ones about dragons, ponies, and fairies. There was a good collection of nature videos, too. Owen screened those first to make sure that there were no horrifying moments of cute critters getting eaten. Anna liked otters and penguins the best. At some point, he intended to take her on a trip to a zoo that had them for real, but he hadn’t seemed to find the time. He felt guilty about that.

  He found the princess DVD and put it into the player. Anna crawled forward on the throw rug and got within two feet of the television, her head planted in her fists. Owen never bothered to nag her about ruining her vision by sitting too close. He guessed it didn’t really matter.

  Owen retreated to his office. Once Sal’s office, it was overtaken by faux leather book wallpaper and hunting trophies. Owen’s laptop computer was open on the desk, and he booted it up, gnawing on the burned cardboard pizza. He started googling “curses.”

  It was as if the internet threw up every superstition known to man. Owen sifted through pages of information on how to hire a witch or exorcist to get his mojo clear, which candles to burn, and how to get right with Jesus. There were pages of holy water to buy and instructions on how to burn sage. He sat back in the chair. On impulse, he checked the balance of his PayPal account. He had one hundred eighty-five dollars and thirty-two cents. Enough for a consultation with a so-called white witch available 24–7. He rubbed his mustache. The witch was in West Virginia, about as far away from Wyoming as one could get. And anonymity was guaranteed.

  What the hell. It wasn’t any weirder than consulting a priest, right? Wasn’t like a priest was gonna answer his call after hours. Owen punched some buttons, cleared out his PayPal account, and waited for the witch to call him.

  In the meantime, he went to the kitchen and rooted around until he found some dried-out sage leaves that were little more than skeletons. He put them in an ashtray and lit them with his lighter. He walked around the house with the burning sage, fanning the smoke toward himself.

  Anna looked up at him. “Really?”

  “Hey, it can’t hurt.”

  But, of course, it did hurt. He sneezed, spewing a sage leaf onto the carpet. It immediately caught fire, and Owen stomped it out. When he was finished, a black mark remained on the rug. He had no idea how much Sal had paid for the rug, but it looked old and expensive.

  Anna glanced at him with narrowed eyes. He took the ashtray back to the kitchen and ran water into it. The way things were going, it was not improbable that he could manage to set the house on fire.

  He heard chiming from his computer. Someone was calling him. He skidded back into his office to accept a call from the white witch.

  An image of a forty-something woman with long blond hair greeted him. Owen’s knee-jerk reaction was that she was pretty cute. Her eyes were bright blue, and she wore a tank top with a crystal pendant glittering at her throat. A cat walked across her desk and peered into the camera at Owen.

  “Hey,” Owen said, trying to sound casual. Or as casual as a man could be who might have been hexed by a bloodthirsty Toad God.

  “Hi,” the woman said. “I’m Nora. And this is Percival. I got your message that you were having some issues with bad luck.”

  “You’re the witch?”

  She laughed. “You were expecting Elvira?”

  “Yeah. I guess. I’m not really into this stuff.”

  Nora leaned forward, toward the camera. “Most people aren’t. Tell me about your run of luck.”

  “Well, I think I might have picked up a curse,” he blurted. This was feeling more awkward when he said it aloud. “I ran into . . . something . . . in the woods. And bad luck has followed me home.”

  “You ran into something?”

  “Yeah. I’m not sure what it was. But it was filthy, it stank, and it spoke.”

  Nora thoughtfully shuffled a deck of cards, while Percival showed his ass to the camera. “Please ignore Percival’s expressiveness.”

  “No offense taken.”

  “Okay. Did this entity ask you for something?”

  “It did. But I’d rather not say.” Owen felt ridiculous. He didn’t want to have this on video somewhere.

  Nora nodded. She shuffled the cards again and spread them out before her. She frowned at them. Percival batted at them. “Owen, I think you have a problem,” she said.

  “I have several. But this thing . . . I don’t know if it’s real. Or if I’m crazy. And if it is real, I don’t know what to do about it.”

  “You’re not crazy.” Nora lifted up a card showing two naked people. “The spirit you met offered you a choice. Neither option will serve you well.” She showed him a card with the Grim Reaper on it, turned upside down, and another one depicting lightning striking a tower. She gazed at the other cards, picking up one that depicted a heart pierced by three swords and then one showing a woman sitting up in bed with swords hanging over her. “He has, indeed, placed a curse on you. One that will be difficult to remove.”

  Owen was feeling like this conversation was going downhill. “Let me guess—it’s gonna cost me a lot to remove it.”

  She looked up at him. “No. There is nothing I can do to clear it, Owen.” She leaned forward. “This is in your hands. I suspect the thing you have met is not human, nor was it ever. You have fallen into its web, and it is more powerful than you are.”

  “Great. What do I do?” It suggested to him that she might be on the up-and-up if she didn’t want his money.

  “You have some scores to settle. Settle those. Do your reckoning.” She lifted a card that was illustrated with an angel blowing a trumpet and one that showed a woman on a throne holding a sword and scales. Percival chewed on the corner of the card depicting the throned woman. “That’s the only way through for you. Create justice. Does this make sense?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “It does.”

  “Good luck, Owen,” she said, and then ended the call.

  Owen frowned at the empty screen. He felt like this had been a colossal waste of money. He’d gotten what . . . fifteen minutes with a GoogleWitch confirming his own fears, and no solution? He felt like a chump, and he was more than a little embarrassed by it.

  He ought to ask Gabriel. Gabriel knew magic, and likely knew exactly what kind of monster this was. But Owen couldn’t ask him. Owen had betrayed Gabriel in a most spectacular way, handing him over to an old adversary to torture. It had been a total moral failure on Owen’s part, and he realized it fully, well after the fact. He wanted to believe that he’d been ensorcelled, but that was only part of it. He had been driven by an irresistible will to power, and it cost him his hand. Since then, he’d left Gabriel and the Tree of Life alone. He knew that Gabe would sooner spit on him than help him.

  And there was no way of making that situation right. Owen had contemplated it. But what could he do for an immortal man? What could he do to make right what generations of Rutherfords had made wrong?

  Owen was not living right. He knew that it was as simple as that. He’d taken some steps to rectify this that he’d told no one about, not even his mother. But he knew that there was nothing he could really do to balance the scales in his life.

  His email dinged, and Owen opened it. It was a refund of his money from Nora, the GoogleWitch. A note on the transaction said: “Do the right thing.”

  He might not ever be able to make things right for Gabe; maybe there was something he could do for Anna.

  He came back into the living room and stretched out on the rug beside Anna, copying her posture of lying on his belly with head in hands. This was Anna’s favorite part of the movie, with lots of singing and dancing and a friendly dragon that finally found his voice. Eventually, the dragon flew away with the princess, leaving the asshat prince in the dust, and the credits rolled.

  “I like a happy ending,” Anna said.

  “I do, too,” Owen said. “Which is why I want one for you.”

  She rested her head on her arm
s and looked at him. “You think that if I went into the light, I would be happy?”

  “Yeah. I do. I don’t see how you could be happy here, with all this unfinished business.”

  She made a face. “I’m happier now than I was with my parents.”

  “I’m sorry,” Owen said. That hurt him. To think that a little girl would rather be following a jerk like him around than at home with her own parents—that was bad.

  “Don’t be,” she said. “I love my mom and dad, and all. My mom was really nice, but she was always working. She tried hard, I know. But she was so tired. My dad . . . my dad really wasn’t all there, you know?”

  Owen nodded, tight-lipped. He’d resolved never to speak badly of Anna’s parents to her. By his own estimation, her father was a drugged-out loser of the worst kind. Her mother was well-meaning, but had failed to protect her child, instead placing her marriage ahead of her daughter’s welfare. Anna had never asked what happened to her parents, and Owen had never told her that they’d died in a murder-suicide.

  “I worry that they might be waiting for me . . . after,” she said in a very small voice.

  She must have sensed they were dead. Shit. “Anna. Nobody will hurt you. If your parents are in heaven, then they are sober and whole and will care for you the way they should have. If they’re not there, then there will be other people who will take care of you. Other kids to play with. People who will give you ice cream and watch princess movies with you.” He said it so fervently that he honestly believed it, even if only for a moment.

  “You promise?” she said.

  “I promise,” he said.

  She sighed and put her chin on the carpet. “I’m gonna miss you, Owen.”

  “I will miss you, too,” he said. “But trust me on this, okay?”

  She nodded. “I trust you.”

  It was the only time anyone had ever said that to Owen, and it was like a punch to the gut. Owen knew that he was not a good man. But maybe he could do one good thing.

  “You said you had family around here?”

  Molly sounded skeptical. The old woman peered over the wheel of the vehicle, staring into the shifting pools of light cast by the headlamps on the road. Her mouth turned down, and it seemed as if she was gnawing on something that bothered her.

  The old woman hadn’t stopped yammering to Lascaris in the whole time she’d been driving. And she drove very, very quickly—almost twenty-five miles an hour! The whole time Lascaris watched as she operated the horseless carriage, how her feet pressed the pedals and her hands pulled the wheel. While she drove, she droned endlessly about her grandchildren, her late husband, and the developers who were trying to buy her land. Her grandchildren lived on the East Coast. Her late husband had been a letter carrier. And the developers who wanted to buy her land wanted to build a truck stop. Lascaris gleaned that this was something like a way station in his former life. Which Molly wasn’t necessarily opposed to, but she felt they could come up a bit in price.

  “I’d have to move my whole operation someplace else. And good internet service is really a bitch to find in these parts,” she grumbled.

  Lascaris had no idea what she was talking about. He simply nodded politely as she nattered on. He gazed outside at the black night and the stripe of orange on the horizon, like the seething of a forge. The phoenix was out there; he could feel it. He and the phoenix were destined for each other. The phoenix would recognize the magic in him, no matter what fragile shell he wore right now. They would become one, fused, and the Great Work of alchemy would finally be complete. He would have immortality and all the power he needed to protect it.

  “I guess I could go to satellite, but that’s an arm and a leg. I don’t know about the reliability, either. I hear it goes down every time it rains. I guess I could do a few tests, but I’m not optimistic. Cryptocurrency mining requires one hundred percent uptime and massive bandwidth for the farm.”

  “This cryptocurrency mining and the farm . . . what exactly are you mining?”

  “Nothing visible. Cryptocurrency is essentially a currency that isn’t backed by a government or bank, that is traded for goods and services among individuals.”

  “Like gold.” Lascaris knew quite a bit about gold.

  “Yes. Like gold, only there isn’t a physical aspect to it. There are digital records of currency changing hands from person to person. Blocks of data are added to a blockchain by solving mathematical equations, which is what I do with mining.”

  Lascaris’s brow wrinkled. “It sounds like conjuring something from nothing.” Also a subject that he knew something about. He’d spent years conjuring gold from rocks and supporting the economy of Temperance from those magical transactions.

  She laughed. “Kind of. My kids think that I’m defrauding the government. I’m not, but they still think I’m shady because I’m not dealing with paper money. But they sure like those vacations to theme parks.”

  “Everyone likes what gold buys.”

  “Yep. Well, my one daughter-in-law sure doesn’t. She sent my checks back when she found out. She’s on her high horse about how cryptocurrencies aid and abet human trafficking, since the money is pretty anonymous.”

  Lascaris glanced at her.

  “Well, she’s vegan, too. She has an overdeveloped conscience.”

  Lascaris sympathized with the old woman with her loudly patterned clothing and her sharklike false teeth. Innovators always were accused of moral failings, and sometimes it did take some imagination to conjure gold from stones. In another era, if he had more time, he probably would have regarded her with amusement and not impatience. He might even have asked her to teach him the magic that turned air into money.

  Molly muttered a curse, and began to slow the carriage, peering ahead at flashing lights on the road. “Looks like this is the end of the line.”

  Lascaris squinted ahead. Black carriages festooned with blue and red lights blocked their path. A red carriage that had been driving ahead of them turned around when it reached the lights and came back the way they’d come.

  Molly stopped before the lit-up carriages. A man dressed in black with a shiny badge and a black hat leaned down to the window, and Molly rolled it down. Lascaris felt his gut twisting. This man had the mien of a lawman, and that was the same, no matter what century he found himself in.

  “Is there a problem, Officer?” Molly’s voice had gone very quiet and fragile sounding. Her posture had slumped forward, and she seemed to generate an illusion of fragility.

  “I’m sorry, ma’am,” the lawman said. “But this road is closed on account of the fire. We’ll have to have you turn around and go back the way you came.”

  Molly pursed her lips and glanced at Lascaris. “Sorry, fella.”

  Lascaris sucked in his breath.

  Molly spoke to the lawman and gestured to her passenger. “I think this guy got lost from the nursing home. Said they were mean to him and wanted to go home to his daughter. Can you gentlemen call her for him, please?”

  A bright light shone into Lascaris’s face, and he could see nothing.

  “Sir, I’m going to need you to step out of the vehicle,” the lawman said, his voice ringing with authority and a bit of alarm.

  Lascaris sighed. This wasn’t going to go easy, was it?

  Lascaris scooted over to the driver’s side, beside Molly. He reached over her for the door latch and opened the door. The lawman was shouting.

  Lascaris laid the Touch of Death on Molly.

  She began to decompose before Lascaris shoved her from the car. Muck splashed onto the black road, and a set of fake teeth bounced across the yellow stripe.

  The lawman yelled and fired, cracking the glass on the front of the carriage. Another came running from his own vehicle.

  Lascaris grabbed the wheel and stomped on the right pedal. The carriage lurched forward in a gallop, gained a bit of speed, and smashed into the lit-up carriages parked nose-to-nose on the road. Metal shrieked, and Molly’s big blu
e vehicle rammed through the blockade, sending the two black carriages skidding to the edge of the road.

  Lascaris grinned. He stomped on the right pedal, as hard as he could. To his delight, the carriage surged forward with terrifying speed. Bullets zinged past him but didn’t strike him.

  This was, indeed, the end of the line for Molly and her invisible mine. But it was only the beginning of the road for the Alchemist of Temperance.

  Chapter 16

  Call and Answer

  Nine had returned, and the nest was full again.

  Maria had sent Nine to the bathroom immediately to bathe, declaring that she smelled like wet dog. While Gabe threw her clothes in the washing machine, Petra began making sandwiches and Maria set to brewing tea. Relief was palpable in the line of her friend’s shoulders as she filled the teakettle.

  “She’s back,” Maria whispered. “I was so afraid she wouldn’t come back.”

  Petra hugged her friend. “She’s okay. She’s okay.”

  Maria sniffled and said: “Shit. We should call Mike.”

  “I’ll do it.” She turned over the making of sandwiches to Gabe. Sig immediately moved his attention away from Petra, and both Pearl and the coyote sat on the kitchen floor, gazing up at her husband with rapt adoration.

  She dialed Mike’s sat phone on Maria’s landline. It took several rings for him to pick up, and she was afraid that she might be disturbing what little sleep the man could grab in the back of his Jeep.

  “This is Hollander,” he finally said.

  “It’s Petra. I wanted to let you know that Nine is here. At Maria’s.”

  Mike blew out a staticky breath on the other end. “At least something’s going right. Is she okay?”

  “Yeah. She’s fine. Just bumps and scrapes.”

  “What the hell was she doing? We tracked the wolves and sent the helo out over their position on Eagle Peak, but didn’t see her.”

  “Don’t know what she was up to.” That was the truth, at least. “But she’s safe.”