Witch Creek

by Laura Bickle

  Dedication

  For Jason, wrangler of cats and mermaids.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1: The Forgetting Place

  Chapter 2: The Loss of the Raven King

  Chapter 3: Waiting and Other Exquisite Tortures

  Chapter 4: The Ghost Land and Ever After

  Chapter 5: The Door

  Chapter 6: Letters from the Past

  Chapter 7: Below

  Chapter 8: Above

  Chapter 9: The Shallows

  Chapter 10: Stupid Oaths and Other Dumb Ideas

  Chapter 11: The Ancestral Tree

  Chapter 12: Red Rain

  Chapter 13: Here and Gone

  Chapter 14: The Madness Season

  Chapter 15: The Pearl

  Chapter 16: Behind Glass

  Chapter 17: Facing the Lion

  Chapter 18: The Elaborate Burial of Petra Dee

  Chapter 19: Walking Poison

  Chapter 20: Witch Creek

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise for the Novels of Laura Bickle

  By Laura Bickle

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter 1

  The Forgetting Place

  What’s gone was never forgotten.

  Not really.

  Some things were best buried. Ignored. Set aside in some dark corner of the mind. These sharp things should be bundled carefully in the cushion of ragged memory and tucked away for some later date, like leftovers in a refrigerator. Petra Dee told herself that this was for the best. She had far more immediate matters on her mind, starting with trying not to throw up.

  Again.

  She stared up at the dark ceiling of the hospital room, trying to breathe deeply and force the bile back down. A dim light emanated from the open bathroom door at her left, illuminating her feet encased in plastic massage booties to increase the blood circulation in her feet. Right now, the sensation was making her seasick, adding to her nausea. She lurched forward to pull them off, and her stomach sloshed.

  She reached for the plug of her IV pole and yanked it out of the wall, even as bile burned up her esophagus. She snatched the pole and dragged it to the bathroom, one hand over her mouth.

  She made it in enough time. Almost. Yellow fluid leaked between her fingers before she let go, retching into the toilet bowl. Good thing she’d left on the bathroom light. Not that she had much choice; she was either hurling or shitting every hour on the hour for the last three days.

  Chemo was a bitch.

  With her clean hand, she grabbed what was left of her hair to keep it out of the way. Some of it still stuck to her cheek as she threw up. When her stomach quieted, she flushed the toilet and washed her hands, mindful to keep her right arm—the one with the IV attached—lower than her heart so it didn’t start beeping and summoning the nursing staff. As bad as she felt, she was determined not to have some poor patient assistant come running to wipe her extremely sore ass or ask her if she needed anything, like more ice chips.

  She sure as hell needed things, but ice chips weren’t one of them. She needed sleep.

  She needed chemo to be over.

  Petra splashed some water on her face and reached for her toothbrush. She was almost out of toothpaste. She’d have to ask the nurse for more the next time she checked on her, which was pretty much every two hours. That, and toilet paper and . . . she glanced around the little tiled bathroom. Maybe more washcloths. One could never have too many washcloths.

  She wrapped her fingers around the IV pole and walked it back to her bedside, hating how much she needed to lean on it. She plugged it back in, then climbed back into bed before pulling the cotton blanket up to her neck. Her fingers chewed on the hem of it.

  Outside, a soft spring rain pattered against the window. The silhouettes of tree branches moved in the parking lot light, their new green leaves twitching in the rain. Petra hadn’t been outside in weeks. It seemed like the season had changed without her even knowing it, the world outside her little white room prying off winter’s last hold and spring finally settling in.

  It wasn’t just the weather, though. Everything in the world was moving beyond this still capsule of her corner room. This late at night, after shift change and before the phlebotomist came in to take her blood at 4:00 a.m., strange things invariably happened. Fights. Fires, sometimes, in the utility room. There was an old man in the next room who everyone was waiting on to die, but the Reaper hadn’t come to collect him just yet. Instead, it was a constant litany of sobbing and shrieking through the walls, some of it from his relatives, but just as much from him. He was a pitch-perfect asshole to the staff during the day, but at night . . . the fear set in. He’d cry. He’d howl. Last night, he’d gone off the rails—or over the rails of his bed, as it were—and security had to tie him down. He was fighting Death, but it was going to come for him anyway.

  Just like it felt as if Death was coming for her.

  Petra cringed in her bed, staring at her closed door. She had never felt this afraid before. And she’d had a lot to fear since she’d come to the tiny town of Temperance, Wyoming, nine months ago. She’d been held prisoner by a drug-dealing alchemist. She’d fought a basilisk and the gang of biker women who worshipped it as a goddess. She’d battled a hundred-fifty-year-old ghost bent on wiping out Yellowstone’s wolves. And the undead . . .

  She squeezed her eyes shut. She would not think of him.

  Would.

  Not.

  But in the dark hours, in the silence surrounding her, she couldn’t help it. Gabriel, the man she loved, had stared down death in all its guises. He’d been hanged from the Alchemical Tree of Life nearly two centuries ago, and been resurrected to serve the land’s masters. He’d been taken apart again and again by time and night and circumstance, and always rose to greet the dawn. Even when the magic of the tree, the Lunaria, had drained away and left him an ordinary man, he’d faced death and come out the other side. Half-blind and lame, certainly, but he had survived.

  Or so she had thought. He had vanished at the end of winter, right before she was to go to her first chemotherapy session.

  Her hand with the IV balled into a fist. He would not have left her. Not if he could have helped it. He’d been a wanted man, sure, but . . .

  The IV pole shrieked, and she stabbed the reset button. It quieted down, and Petra snorted back a sob and a string of drool. Dammit—he was supposed to be facing this with her. They’d been married. Sure, a marriage of convenience for many reasons, but wasn’t he supposed to be here? Even if just to be her friend? Just to . . . just to brush what remained of her hair and maybe hold her hand once in a while?

  She sucked in a breath. She’d looked for him. She’d gone to the Rutherford Ranch, the site of the Alchemical Tree of Life, and found nothing. She’d filed a missing persons report, even threatened the sheriff, who surely wanted him dead. Nothing. It was as if he’d never existed. As if she’d just imagined him. She was supposed to assume he was dead, that he’d walked off the edge of a flat Earth and been eaten by dragons. Gabe had confronted many kinds of death, most stranger and more violent than that.

  But Gabe had never faced death like this. Sterile as saline water. With machines and lack-of-sleep hallucinations. The sheer . . . helplessness of it all. Maybe it was best that he wasn’t here.

  She closed her eyes.

  She didn’t believe that for a second.

  “Where are you?” she whispered over lips that felt gummy and tasted like wintergreen toothpaste.

  Her father had forbidden her from trying to enter the spirit world while she was undergoing treatment. She ignored him. She’d been trying hard
to get there to look for Gabe, thinking that if he were dead, at least she’d know for certain. But she couldn’t get in, no matter how hard she tried. She’d asked for her father’s help. He was an alchemist—he could open the door. She had begged him.

  Her father had looked as if he was ready to cry.

  “You might not come back,” he’d said, reaching out to touch her thin hand. “You have to hang on to this world.”

  And she had come to admit that he might be right. Chemo wasn’t going well. She’d gotten badly dehydrated this last round, and they’d had to stop. Her kidneys had started to shut down, and there was worry about infection and what her liver was—or, more to the point, wasn’t—doing.

  She couldn’t help it, though—she felt the veil close at hand. She wasn’t sure how to explain it, just that she felt . . . a stillness nearby. There was no fear in that place, just a background white noise like the hum of a refrigerator that was constant in wakefulness and in sleep.

  She exhaled and drifted away. Sleep slid through her fingers and tangled around her wedding ring, which she now wore around her index finger so that it’d still fit on her withered digits. She dreamed disjointed dreams of disembodied needles that poked through her parchment-like skin to find no blood. A raven came screaming through her hospital room, flinging itself against the glass of the window. Petra scrambled to open the window to let the poor thing out, to discover that it didn’t open.

  The bird slammed itself again and again against the glass, needing out. Petra reached for the visitor’s chair at the foot of the bed, struggling to slam it against the glass. It tangled with her IV line and ripped it out. The glass cracked, and a pane fell to the floor in a staccato crash. Blood gushed out of her arm, and the raven clawed its way into the world outside.

  Petra instinctively brought her hand to her arm to stanch the bleeding. When she looked down, a feather had stuck to the blood. She plucked it up and smoothed its ruffled vanes. Somewhere beyond the glass, she could hear the raven cawing . . .

  . . . and the cawing became the agitated beep of her IV pole.

  She opened her eyes.

  She’d turned over onto her left side in her sleep, and she’d actually torn out her IV. Blood trickled down into her palm. She gazed at it dispassionately. It looked like ordinary blood—red and healthy. No trace of leukemia.

  A nurse opened the door and rushed in. She saw what had happened and immediately reached into a drawer for a handful of gauze to press against the inside of Petra’s elbow. She muttered soothing things as she assessed the damage.

  “That vein’s pretty well blown out, sweetie. It’s okay, though. We can put the IV in the other arm. I’ll go get a kit.” She reached forward to smooth the hair from Petra’s brow. “What else can I do for you?”

  Petra sucked in her breath. “I want out of here.”

  There was no escaping this place.

  He had known darkness, to be certain. He’d flown in the blackness of moonless skies, slept wrapped in the tendrils of the Alchemical Tree of Life. He’d faced his demons and peered into the motivations of his own evil acts, always finding himself sorely lacking. He was guilty of murder, of the crime of indifference, of things that had ultimately caused the undoing of all he held dear.

  But there was no darkness like underground. Underground was beyond the reach of light, sound, warmth . . . even the touch of life. Sensations bled together and faded away, leaving him suspended, in pieces, in this place.

  He’d started out running. Gabe had always fled to the underworld beneath the Rutherford Ranch when he needed to retreat, to heal and regenerate. But that had been when he was a supernatural creature, not an ordinary man. Once upon a time, this warren of tunnels winding miles into darkness had been his kingdom. Lit by the Alchemical Tree of Life, the Lunaria, and by his own preternatural senses, he’d been able to see unerringly in the dark, master of all the shades of black under the dripping earth.

  No more. As an ordinary man, he was blind. Literally blinded in one eye, and lame in one leg, he’d stumbled into the dark, fleeing the new heir to the Rutherford Ranch, Sheriff Owen Rutherford. Owen had followed him beneath the tree to the winter earth, bringing with him a new order. Gabe could taste it, the bitterness telling his tongue of how the land had turned away from him to serve a new master. It even smelled wrong; instead of the softness of rich loam, the world underground now smelled like freshly cut metal, cold and sharp.

  The land had never rejected him before. Not ever. It had always been his safe place to fall, through generations of Rutherfords. But the magic of the Lunaria had been drained. And Gabe had allowed the Hanged Men to kill its last ruler, Sal Rutherford. Owen surely wanted him to suffer for that, despite all his lip service he’d given about wanting to uncover the ranch’s secrets. Revenge was an atavistic state, much more so than curiosity. And the land had shifted, recognizing Owen’s authority and plunging Gabe into the black.

  Gabe limped down a tunnel, grip tight on his pistol. He knew most of these by heart, by the counts of steps as he ran, his breath ragged in his throat. But the tunnels had clearly shifted, too. He tripped more than once on a jutting rock, slammed into a wall that wasn’t there just months before, and yet was forced to plunge ahead, his arm before him, scraping in the mud of the tunnel walls. Parts must have caved in; he turned left, then right, careening into the black.

  Behind him, a flashlight beam bounced off the ice-slick walls with cold blue halogen light.

  “You won’t get away from me.” Owen’s voice was gaining. As was Owen. “You can’t.”

  Maybe not. But he was sure as hell going to try. Underground was a big place, miles and miles unwinding beneath the placid fields above. Owen was still too new to know exactly how big, and how many bodies were buried here—of men and things much more terrifying than men.

  Gunfire exploded in the close space, and Gabe instinctively ducked. White muzzle-flashes illuminated staccato bits of darkness, dirt spraying into his face. He pivoted to return fire, ears roaring. He couldn’t see or hear if he hit anything. He bet not, though, since the star-like distant flashlight advanced upon him, washing over his face.

  He flung his arm up, lunging away . . .

  . . . and he fell.

  The ground beneath him sloughed away, splintering like rotten barn wood. In that ringing silence, he slammed down, down at least twelve feet, landing hard on ground that drove the breath from his lungs.

  He rolled over, wincing. He realized immediately that he’d lost his gun. He scrabbled for it, fingers rolling around in smooth, damp gravel. A veil of cold velvet moisture fell over his face. The gun had to be here, somewhere. He cast about, searching as the roar of gunfire receded in his ears. It was replaced by the rush of water, and he stumbled back, up to his ankles in water. His hands sought an escape in the blackness. He hoped to feel the movement of an air current against his face, one that would suggest a passageway from where he might get free of Owen.

  But his fingers found only mud walls . . . all around him. Cold silt ran between his fingers. He’d fallen into a sinkhole, and he was trapped.

  Owen’s light shone down from above, a searing glare that caused Gabe to shield his eyes with a grubby hand.

  “You’re coming with me.”

  “No,” he said. “You’re gonna have to shoot me.”

  Owen blew out a breath that sounded like exasperation. “Jesus Christ.”

  Lightning struck. A blue-white light arced out from above and slammed into Gabe’s chest. He felt a shout freeze in his throat and his heart stop as he toppled over, his face crashing into the shockingly cold water.

  Darkness fell over him in a sizzling shower of sparks.

  They couldn’t do anything to stop her from leaving. Not really.

  The nurses made her wait until the doctor wrote her discharge order the next day. They’d pumped her full of antinausea medications in the meantime, double what she’d been given. Her oncologist, to put it mildly, had not been pleased at Pe
tra’s decision to leave.

  “An interruption will greatly reduce your chances of survival,” he said bluntly.

  “My chances of survival are not great to begin with.” Petra sat up in bed, her back aching against the rubber mattress stretched over an uncomfortable adjustable frame. “You said that it had spread to my lymph nodes. Which is why we can’t do surgery. So . . .”

  “Radiation might still be an option,” he suggested.

  “We talked about this. You’d have to irradiate half my body. I’d lose my thyroid and a whole lot of other stuff that I’d kind of like to keep.” Her voice was raspy, burned from too much bile.

  “You need to decide if you can commit to this. It isn’t easy, under even the best of situations. And your blood work hasn’t improved yet, but it still could.” His gaze was direct, but tired. Petra couldn’t imagine doing what this guy did for a living, parceling out hope to dying people and trying to corral them into coloring within the lines. Petra had never been any good at coloring within the lines.

  “I need to think.” She’d pulled her legs up against her chest and looped her arms around her knees, a gesture that was both self-protective and one that soothed the cramping in her gut. The decision to undergo chemo had been so clear to her months ago. There really had been no other choice. But now, the reality was not squaring with what she’d expected. She was having a really bad trip in chemo-land. Much worse than anyone had anticipated.

  And it sure seemed like a waste . . .

  “I need to step back and decide.”

  “Decide . . . what?” The doctor’s brow wrinkled. “We can try a new cocktail of drugs. If there’s some more information or tests that I can run for you . . .”

  She blew out her breath. “I need to decide whether I want to die like this, in a hospital, barfing into a plastic dish or shitting myself to death. Or whether I want to do it at home with a cup of coffee in hand watching a sunset.”

  The doctor blinked. Probably people weren’t that blunt with him. “That’s a fair assessment. From what I’ve seen of the progression of your disease, I can’t say for certain that chemo is going to work for you. Even if we do make some progress, your projected five-year survival rate is much lower than the average.”