Phoenix Falling

by Laura Bickle

  She watched the sun rise. Not long after, a pickup rolled up. Gabe’s truck. He parked, climbed out, and walked toward her.

  He looked really good, as if he’d been freshly showered, shaved, and had slept for two weeks. Petra felt a bit of envy at that. She wondered what it was like, sleeping under the tree. Was it as restorative and dreamless as it looked?

  “Good morning, sunshine,” she murmured over her coffee. “There’s coffee inside.”

  Gabe kissed the top of her head and sat down in the swing beside her. “I didn’t see any sign of your father last night.”

  She hid her disappointment with a deep slurp. “I have something to tell you. And you’re going to be mad.”

  He lifted an eyebrow. “Oh?”

  She continued. “I went to the Eye of the World last night.” She told him what she’d seen in the Eye, and about her conversation with the toad.

  Gabe listened without comment.

  “So I traded the watch for an answer,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  Gabe was silent, staring out at the sky. It was some time before he spoke. “It’s done. I can’t say I’d have done any different, in your shoes.”

  He was a good man. She reached for his hand and squeezed it. “Thank you. Thank you for understanding this.”

  He kissed the top of her hand. “There’s only one way to go. Forward.”

  “Do you mean that? With everything—with the conflict we’ve had? With our marriage, the tree, and everything else?”

  “As they say, time moves in only one direction. Even if the Great Work were completed tomorrow and the Philosopher’s Stone dropped out of the sky, it could not turn back time. We go forward.”

  She nodded, and she smiled. “Forward, then.”

  They sat in silence for some minutes, watching the morning wash over the land.

  “I guess we go see to the mirror?” she said at last.

  “Yeah. Hopefully, it worked.”

  “I trust Lev not to have touched it. I just hope . . . I hope I didn’t fuck it up.”

  She went inside to get dressed. She set the coffee maker to brew another batch in an hour, hoping that Maria and Nine would sleep in. She gathered her things and put Pearl inside. She led Sig to the pickup, where Gabe waited.

  “Let’s check on that mirror.”

  “There’s no way we can look at it directly?” Lev asked.

  “Not unless you want to spend the rest of your unnatural life behind glass.” Gabe gave him a look.

  Lev shrugged. “I’m not dying to spend time in limbo. But I would love to know what spells went into that.”

  Gabe glanced at him and raised an eyebrow.

  “What? You never know when it might come in handy.”

  Gabe didn’t reply immediately. He glanced at Petra, and it seemed he was thinking of the homunculus. “After this is over, I’ll write down what I remember for you.”

  Lev nodded. “Thanks. I think that some of this knowledge should stick around in good hands. In case you guys aren’t around sometime and a phoenix shows up.”

  Petra was sure that wasn’t the only reason, but she owed Lev. They both did. And if the cost of a brand-new body and rent on his pizza oven was an old spell, she was good with it.

  She screwed up her courage and put on her welding gloves. Armed with Lev’s shiny Viking pot, she turned the makeshift mirror to face the door of the pizza oven. Petra opened the door. The handle still felt warm, but it should have had plenty of time to cool. They’d been very patient, and she was certain that Lev looked after it as well as a bird with an egg.

  She held her breath. Looking through the reflection in the pan, she carefully inserted a pizza paddle into the oven. She slid it under the mirror and pulled the paddle out. Sweating, she lowered the mirror to the hearth.

  Peering through the pan, the mirror looked whole, a lumpy bit of glass that was roughly circular. She slowly grasped it with the welder’s gloves and turned it out on the paddle. It was a whole piece of glass, intact. But what was worrisome was that the silver was gone from the back of the mirror. The heat had bubbled it away, and only a few flakes remained.

  “It’s back together,” she said. “But it looks like the silver boiled off.” She’d been afraid this would happen.

  “It won’t work without the silver,” Gabe said.

  “Wait,” she said. “I can fix it. Let me get some stuff.” She put the pan down on top of the glass, covering it, and headed out to the Bronco. In moments, she was back with a box of gear from the Bronco.

  “What’s all this?” Gabe asked.

  “Stuff we can use to resilver the mirror.” She spread out the bottles and equipment on a stainless-steel counter. “This is silver nitrate,” she said, pointing at the small bottle. “Geologists use it to test for iodine, chlorine, and bromine. And that’s ammonia and lye drain cleaner.”

  Gabe looked at the accumulated stuff appraisingly. “This should be interesting.”

  Petra grinned. “Always.” Then her expression clouded. “Do you think it will work?”

  “I do not doubt that your science will work. I just hope that there’s enough magic left in the glass for the mirror to retain its properties.”

  “I guess we’ll find out,” Lev said. He was sitting on a stool, eating a bag of chips. Sig sat below him and gave him a baleful look. Lev dropped a chip into his mouth, and he made a face like it was a bad-tasting communion wafer.

  Petra didn’t speculate. All she could do was the science, and the magic would have to take care of itself. She adjusted the rubber gloves and stared into the cookware mirror. She uncovered the small slab of glass. Working slowly, she cleaned the back of the glass with the drain cleaner, careful to get every speck of dirt removed and wiped it with a damp paper towel. The glass still held heat, and she was careful not to break it with an abrupt temperature change. She placed the glass on a piece of Lev’s parchment paper, conscious to keep it level as possible.

  She then measured out a gram of the silver nitrate and added it to ten drops of water. She mixed this in a plastic cup, then added a gram of the lye drain cleaner. Silver oxide began to form as she stirred with a plastic spoon. Carefully, she dropped ammonia in until the silver oxide disappeared. She measured four grams of sugar into the solution—it would act as an aldehyde in this process. She stirred until it all dissolved in the cup, then poured it over the back of the mirror.

  The glass was still hot, and the silvering agent took immediately, clouding to an opaque off-white color.

  She glanced back at the men. Lev had abandoned his bag of chips and was taking notes on a dog-eared pad of paper. Maybe he really was going to build a magic mirror . . . But she couldn’t think about it now.

  “It’s done,” she said. With care, she turned the piece of glass over and peered at it through the Viking pan’s shiny surface.

  It was a mirror again. Through warped glass, a shiny silver surface shone. Petra could see a warped reflection of her hand when she passed it between the pan and the mirror, reminding her of something she might see in a fun house. It wasn’t perfect—a bit of dirt in one of the crevices she’d missed had turned black in the reaction—but it was hopefully close enough for alchemical work.

  “I do believe that you were an alchemist in a previous life,” Gabe said, and she snorted at that.

  “It looks all right,” she said. “But the primary question is . . . does it work?”

  They were both silent. Gabe wrapped the mirror in a bandanna, careful not to mar the fragile silvering. Petra cleaned up her tools. As she did so, her thoughts churned.

  She had to know if it worked. If it was still magic. And there was only one way.

  The Locus.

  She closed her eyes. She had to stop being selfish. She had to find the truth and deal with it, sooner or later. If she was no longer human, then she’d have to figure out what she was, and move forward from it.

  Gabe stepped up behind her and kissed the top of her head while she was
hed her hands. She knew, no matter what she was, that she was beloved by her husband and her coyote. That should be enough. If she was no longer human, that would be a terrible loss. But she would survive it.

  She dried her hands on a dish towel and went out to the truck. She pulled the Venificus Locus out of the glove box. She carried it back to the kitchen and asked Lev for a paring knife.

  “What for?” he asked, handing her a spotless stainless-steel blade.

  “We can tell if it’s magic for certain with a tool that Lascaris left behind. The Venificus Locus.” She showed him the golden compass.

  “How does it do that?” he asked, staring at it in curiosity.

  “It drinks blood.”

  “Mmm. Go stand over the sink when you do that, okay?”

  Petra went to the sink, as she was told. Gabe put the wrapped mirror down on the counter and moved away, not wanting to interfere with the Locus’s prognostications.

  Petra hesitated. Aside from a hangnail the flesh of her fingertips was perfectly unmarked. She hadn’t suffered so much as a bad paper cut since she’d taken on this new body. Sighing, she poked the index finger of her left hand. A red drop of blood welled up, and she dropped it into the groove circumscribing the outer ring of the Locus.

  The Locus must have been thirsty. It seemed to suck in the blood, and she added two more drops. The drops flattened, forming a ring around the groove. Petra’s breathing quickened. What did that mean? Did that mean that her blood was contaminated, that she no longer was as human as she felt?

  The blood gathered itself into a drop, like mercury. The drop swung around the groove and pointed in the direction of Gabe. Another split off and followed Lev around the room as he unloaded the dishwasher. There seemed to be a dull residue left in the groove, as if there was some lingering magic around this place. But the main thing Petra was thinking about was that the Locus had accepted her blood.

  It would only run on plain human blood.

  She was human.

  Her heart lifted and dropped, as if it had fallen down a roller coaster. The mirror wasn’t magic, but neither was she.

  But then the ring of blood belched. A thick drop was summoned up, and the drop raced around the track, having tasted something of magic. It hesitated in front of her, and Petra closed her eyes. Shit, maybe she had been wrong.

  When she opened them again, the drop had scuttled away. It was pointing toward the mirror on the kitchen counter.

  She let out a shaky breath.

  “Well?” Gabe said softly.

  “The mirror is magic. But I’m not.”

  She broke out into a smile, relief washing over her. She had never thought she’d relish such knowledge like this—the knowledge of being utterly ordinary.

  Gabe crossed to her and hugged her. She laughed in relief at this weight being removed from her. She stood on her tiptoes to kiss him, feeling optimistic for the first time in months.

  “Where are you going to look for the phoenix?” Lev wanted to know, rubbing a plate with a dish towel.

  “Nine said it lurks on the leading edge of the fire line,” Petra said, forcing herself to get back down to business. She pulled up a map on her phone with a weak signal and fiddled with it. “According to the news, it’s creeping along fastest near Bridger Lake, just south of the park.”

  Gabe nodded. “Then we’ll start there.”

  “Good luck getting around those roadblocks,” Lev said. “I’ve had National Guard soldiers in and out of here, and from what they’ve said, civilians aren’t gonna be able to get there by road. They’re keeping five miles ahead of the fire and advancing forward.”

  Petra frowned, staring at the waves on the topographical map. The land got a little rough around there. Off-roading would be problematic.

  “I have an idea,” Gabe said.

  “You have a helicopter stashed away somewhere?”

  “No. Something better.”

  Chapter 18

  The Well of Souls

  Getting Robin sprung from the mental hospital took some doing.

  Unsurprisingly, Robin’s doctor wasn’t convinced that it was in the general public’s best interest to let Robin go roaming around free. Owen had to promise her that taking Robin out for an afternoon would be in the best interests of solving Anna’s murder, and that he wasn’t falling for a line of Robin’s bullshit. Owen swore up and down that he would keep Robin trussed up in a belly chain and that Robin wouldn’t leave his sight, even to piss. Robin’s lawyer really didn’t give a fuck, either way. Owen got an order from his favorite judge—he’d let more than a few DUIs slide for that man—and still the whole thing was shady as hell and not within a stone’s throw of legal. But it came to pass that Owen was able to take Robin out on a field trip.

  Robin seemed amused at the idea. They’d let him dress in civilian clothes for the outing—a T-shirt, sweatpants, and sneakers without the laces. Owen had seen the kind of havoc that a very determined guy could get up to with a shoelace—he’d nearly lost a deputy in visitation hours to an inmate who’d been slipped a pack and decided to strangle him. The silver belly chain at Robin’s waist kept his handcuffed hands within sight at the level of his navel. Leg chains clinked as he walked. Robin seemed to move placidly along between the orderlies, but nobody was in a hurry to remove the spit hood that covered the lower half of his face.

  “He wasn’t wearing a mask when I last saw him,” Owen observed.

  The doctor frowned at him. “Robin discovered that he has a five-foot spitting range when he was served soup that he disliked last night. You’ve been warned.”

  Owen signed a stack of liability waivers when they brought Robin out. They gave him the keys to his chains and opened the front doors for him. Owen led Robin slowly out into the light.

  Robin blinked and turned his round face up to the sky. It occurred to Owen that they probably didn’t let him out for exercise. Pity mixed with the revulsion at that same pity—this was the man who killed Anna, after all.

  “This way,” Owen said, leading him to the SUV. He kept his left hand in the chain around Robin’s waist. He shoveled Robin into the back, behind the cage, belted him in, and climbed into the driver’s seat.

  Anna was sitting in the passenger seat. She turned around to stare at Robin.

  Robin gazed back at her, like he saw her.

  Anna crept close, pressing her face up against the cage and lacing her fingers in it. “You. It was you.” Realization stole over her face, and it seemed that she glowed brighter with the remembering, or the rage.

  Robin said nothing.

  Her fingers tightened. “You put me in the well, and left me to die.”

  Robin stared forward woodenly.

  “You murdered me!” she screamed at him, the howl of a decades-old little girl frozen in time. Owen’s heart twisted in his chest to hear it, and he began to regret this, this traumatizing of her. “You took me away and you killed me!” Tears glittered on her cheeks. “You fed me to that monster. He chewed me up alive.”

  Robin remained stoic, refusing to speak. Or perhaps he couldn’t hear her.

  “It’s going to be okay, Anna,” Owen said.

  Anna turned to him. She flung herself into his lap and threw her arms around his neck, sniffling. Owen stroked her hair that smelled like algae.

  “Where are we going?” Robin said from the back, sounding glibly casual.

  Owen put the key in the ignition. “We’re going to see Pigin. You’re going to help me kill him.”

  He couldn’t tell for sure, but it seemed that Robin was smiling behind the pale blue of his spit hood.

  “I dredged the well. I found bones. We already had Anna’s skeleton. Do you know anything about those bones?”

  Robin’s expression darkened. “No. I just know about the little girl. Doesn’t surprise me that Pigin convinced other people to kill for him, though.”

  Owen didn’t believe him. “We got a couple of DNA matches so far on missing persons. Forty-ye
ar-old Prudence Ann Jardiner, missing from the Black Sun Roadhouse eleven years ago. Did you know her?”

  Robin shook his head. “No.”

  “A young man on a hunting trip. Otto Pershing. Was wearing camo overalls and an orange safety cap when he went missing seventeen years ago. Sound familiar?”

  “No.”

  Owen rubbed his mustache. “Seems like Pigin has been busy. I’d like to know who else has been feeding him . . . and what they’re getting in return.”

  Anna sat next to Owen for the ride, turning back to stare at Robin every few minutes. Owen could feel her shaking, and he thought she might disappear into the ether any moment. But she didn’t. She hung in there, jammed under Owen’s armpit and glaring venom at Robin.

  “How do you intend for us to go about killing Pigin?” Robin asked.

  “Well, I gave it a try the last time I was at the well. I shot at him, but it didn’t seem to do any damage. I thought I’d try again, but I need some help. And you’re the only person on the planet who would believe me enough to help send a giant Toad God to hell.”

  Owen glanced up at the rearview mirror. Robin’s eyes were crinkling as if he were smiling. Or smirking.

  Owen pulled off the road a half mile from the well. He stopped the SUV and glanced over at Anna. He kissed her on the forehead and said: “Be brave.”

  She nodded sharply.

  He got out of the SUV and crossed to the back. Behind the seats where Robin was belted in, he’d loaded up a locked plastic footlocker. He opened the footlocker and picked up a small parcel, unwrapping it carefully.

  “Whatcha got there?” Robin twisted around to watch.

  “Dynamite,” he said, fiddling with the blasting cap. He settled on duct-taping it to the package of dynamite. He stripped the wire from the fuse with his teeth and inspected the spool before securing the fuse with tape, too, for good measure. He’d gotten the dynamite from Sal’s stash of weird shit he kept in the barn. Owen had no idea if it worked or not, but it looked dry and intact. And if dynamite couldn’t kill the Toad God, there wasn’t much else he knew of that would. At the very least, it would close that miserable well and hopefully end the stream of grisly offerings to that rotting creature.