by Laura Bickle
But Petra knew this place by heart.
She thought about waiting until dark to return to it. She didn’t put it past Owen to have put up all manner of cameras, surveillance equipment, and even booby traps to guard it. He knew it was there. And he knew she knew, too. But what she was counting on was that he didn’t think she’d be brazen enough to walk through the front door to hell in broad daylight.
“Where are we going?” Nine asked.
Petra’s old Bronco bounced over the ruts in the field of the Rutherford Ranch’s back forty. The fields were beginning to green, and cows spotted the distance. There was still snow on the mountains, but enough had run off to make the ground soggy in the lowlands. The Bronco’s tires kept wanting to get caught in mud and spin. Petra picked a longer route than she might have otherwise, sticking with higher ground. To foil any attempts that Owen might have made installing remote surveillance, Petra even cut through a couple of barbed-wire fences and peeled them back, like scabs on fresh skin.
“We’re going to the Tree of Life,” Petra said. “What Gabe called the Lunaria.” She sucked on an ice chip as she spoke to ease her flopping stomach. “It’s hard to explain, but there used to be a lot of men like Gabe. They were more than human. More raven than man, actually. And they could split up parts of themselves into ravens. Weird supernatural stuff. And they were bulletproof.”
It sounded nuts, her saying it like this, but she went on, anyway: “They were immortal. The Lunaria gave them that. But they had to return to the tree . . . underneath it, every night. They slept, rotted, regenerated . . . it was bizarre.”
“Sounds romantic,” Maria muttered from the passenger seat, where she fed shells into a shotgun.
“Yeah, well. It’s not like I was sleeping with him then.”
“Since he is immortal . . . why does he bother with all this?” Nine’s gesture encompassed the world beyond the Bronco. Beside her in the back seat, Sig yawned.
“Because he’s not. Not anymore. Sal Rutherford—the asshole who owned this ranch before he willed it to his cousin, Sheriff Owen—burned the tree. Without the Lunaria, their power was gone. And they—” Petra hesitated, but decided that the time was too short for secrets “—they killed Sal.”
Maria paused in fiddling with the shells, but didn’t remark at first. Petra knew she suspected, but she’d never said it aloud before.
“Sal was a man who needed killing,” Maria said quietly.
Nine seemed undisturbed by the discussion of killing and revenge. Instead, she asked, “And these men . . . where are they? Why aren’t they helping to find the Raven King?”
Petra swallowed. “They died. All but Gabe. He was stripped of his powers, though. And now he’s gone.”
“If he’s here, we’ll find him,” Maria said reassuringly.
But Petra wasn’t so sure. The Rutherford Ranch was vast topside, extending from a state road on one horizon to the mountains on the other. What spread out underground might be an even larger empire of byzantine tunnels, hidden chambers, and bizarre secrets. All she could do was hope.
Petra glanced down at her GPS. “We’re almost there.”
She slowed as they tooled through a green field, coasted to a stop in the center. This was where the gate to the underworld lay.
“Oh, no,” Petra said. “Oh, no. No.”
She popped the door and jumped out, sinking to her ankles in the cold mud.
Underneath a leadening sky, huge piles of fresh earth had been turned. It was as if a mole the size of a Greyhound bus had been tunneling through the once-placid field.
Where the tree had once been was now a giant bank of earth, piled taller than her head.
“No,” she whispered. “The door was here.”
She jammed her fists into the mud and climbed up, smearing mud on her black leggings and coat. The freshly turned earth slid under her, but she was determined. She scaled it, clawing into the earth with fingers and heels, dragging herself up over the crest of the hillock. Sig scrambled up beside her, with more grace than she could muster, even on a good day.
“That fucker.” Owen had been busy.
Dirt had been piled up in a circle, surrounding a small flat space. At the center of the flat space was a withered sapling tree. Beyond this man-made hill was another one, a straight one, fifty feet beyond.
She slipped down the mud to the sapling. This was all that remained of the Tree of Life—this sapling, struggling from the burned roots of the original tree. It was in much worse shape than the last time she’d seen it. Back then, she’d had hope that the tree had life to it, that it would survive. But now, the green leaf buds that extended from its brittle branches were a sickly shade of chartreuse, unfurled and warped.
All that despite the fact that someone had been caring for it. She knelt at it, touching the small trunk. There were fresh tree fertilizer stakes here. Her fingers brushed three of them, pounded into the soft earth. And the earth had been dressed with a fresh layer of bitter-smelling compost.
Owen. He knew what it was. If he was trying to save it . . . it was for his own power, his own purposes.
Sig trotted over to the Tree of Life and pissed on it.
“Yeah,” Petra said, her vision blurry. “That’s what I think, too.”
“I don’t see a door,” Maria called down from below.
Petra stood with her back to the tree and counted off nine paces. The third pace landed her knee-deep in mud, and the ninth almost at the crest of the hillock of dirt.
“It was here,” Petra said with narrowed eyes, pointing down at her feet. “It was a door in the earth, here . . . about six feet under. That rat bastard buried it.”
Maria lifted her chin, hands on her hips, and looked up at her.
“It’s only six feet. Six feet is just the depth of a man’s grave.”
As a geologist, Petra always had shovels in the back of the truck. And she was committed enough to dig down to the door with a toothpick and her bare hands. But there were faster ways to get to the bottom of this earthwork.
Petra rooted around in the back of the Bronco and came up with twenty-five feet of half-rusted chain and a tarp. She chucked them on the ground and stared at them.
“What are you thinking?” Maria asked.
Petra squinted and pointed to a spot a hundred feet away, where a pile of rusted metal leaned against a fence post and ruined section of barbed wire. “I’m thinking I want that torn-up section of cattle gate.”
“Done.”
Petra grabbed a pickax from the back of the truck and walked to the cattle gate. It wouldn’t deter much cattle-wandering, now. The tubular steel was bent on one corner and torn from one post, likely by a pissed-off cow. The thing was ancient and dissolving in rust.
But it was exactly what she needed. Maria tried to take the pickax from her, but Petra shook her head. She really wanted to destroy something. With two satisfyingly quick strikes of the pickax, she’d severed the last two hinges holding the gate to the remaining rotted post. Nine and Maria caught the gate, and the three of them carried it back to the Bronco.
Petra directed them to put it behind the wall of dirt, on the tree side, about halfway down the soft yellow clay. Petra threw the blue tarp over it, roughly tying the edges to the gate frame so dirt wouldn’t slip out behind it.
“Okay,” she said. Her heart hammered, and she felt a little light-headed. This was more activity than she’d had in weeks. And it felt really good, oddly enough. “Small amount of digging.”
Using the pickax, shovel, and a metal pan that Petra had in the truck, the women dug two narrow trenches perpendicular to the edges of the bank. Sig, ever thrilled to have the chance to dig, threw himself into a trench so deeply that only his tail appeared above the surface.
“Now what?” Nine asked, surveying the odd arrangement. All of them were covered in mud up to their necks.
“Now we attach the chain.”
Maria hopped into the Bronco, started it up, and turned it
around so that its back end faced the hill. Petra hooked one end of the chain around the trailer hitch and ran the other end through one trench, wove it into the metal cattle gate, drew it back through the second trench and to the trailer hitch.
Petra nodded. “Yeah. The ground is soft enough that we should be able to scrape it right away. It may take a couple of passes, but the clay should stick to the tarp on the gate.”
Nine glanced at her, stepping away from the jerry-rigged contraption. “You think?”
“Well . . . I hope.” Petra grabbed Sig and moved clear with the wriggling coyote in her arms. He was slippery, and it was like holding an unhappy pig—he wanted to get back to the business of digging, his favorite pastime. She gave the signal for Maria to hit the gas.
The Bronco’s engine grunted, and the chain snapped taut with a rusty ringing sound, bringing the gate tight to the back of the dirt pile. The truck groaned, then howled, the front passenger tire spinning in the dirt.
Slowly, with a sucking sound, the dirt began to move. The top three feet of the hill came down in a mudslide, dislodging the gate. The gate banged into the back of the Bronco, and the truck lurched forward twenty feet, dragging empty chain and the gate behind it.
Petra gave a whoop of joy. The top of the hill had been smeared off, like cow shit from a shoe. Just a few feet to go.
Maria backed up, and Nine and Petra arranged the gate behind the last bit of the hill, mashing the chain deep inside the mud. That run was less successful, unevenly scraping off a couple more feet before a chain snapped, nearly hitting Nine in the face and ringing against the brown hide of the Bronco with a sound like a cathedral bell.
Petra waded into the slop with a shovel. It had been enough.
At a feverish pace, she worked at scraping the mud away until she could see brown, ruined grass. This was the spot. She knew it.
She dropped to her knees, combing her fingers through the grass. There was a brass ring here, hidden, that would open the hatch to the underworld. After some minutes of searching, she found it. Her slippery fingers curled around it, and she pulled.
Nothing happened.
She pulled as hard as she could, but her fingers slipped off, and she landed on her ass in the mud.
“Dammit,” she breathed. She’d grown weaker than she imagined in the hospital, and it made her angry. She crawled back to the door on all fours and wedged the shovel under the edge of the door as a lever. She leaned on it as hard as she could. It didn’t budge.
“Let us try,” Nine said, and all three women pushed on the shovel handle. The blade of the shovel worked open a square seam in the earth, but the door would not move.
“Oh, hell,” Petra said. She was cold, wet, and filthy before, but now she was truly pissed. She scrambled back for her pickax and whaled away at the door. It didn’t matter if she broke it; Owen would know someone had been here one way or the other, and he would guess it was her. So she might as well get out some frustration in the meantime.
Chunks of turf split away, and Petra slung them over her shoulder. She would hit the dead, black air of the chamber beneath any moment. She could anticipate dropping into that space beneath the tree where the Hanged Men slept, finally getting this mission underway . . .
“What the hell!” she exclaimed, then sat back on her heels, rubbing her brow.
The turf door had come up in pieces. But what lay below it . . . tree roots tangled into a thick mat. They laced in and back on each other, roots as thick as her wrist, forming an impenetrable basket-weave of wood.
Sig sat down beside Petra’s feet and whimpered.
“What is that?” Maria whispered.
Petra looked back at the sapling. “The tree,” she said, stunned realization falling over her. “The tree . . . has sealed itself off.”
“You mean . . . the tree has volition?”
“Of a sort, yes. And . . . it’s not letting us into the underworld.”
“What does that mean?”
Nine stood quietly beside the sapling, regarding it. When she spoke, it was with a hollow voice. “It means that we’re in even more hostile territory than we thought.”
Petra stood up. She swung the pickax, once, twice, contemplating breaking into the roots. Maybe she could do it, maybe she could break through that fortress of wood into the chamber she knew had to exist below . . .
Nine’s cool hands were on her wrists. “You’ll kill the tree. Just so you know.”
Petra paused, her heart thundering and her breath scraping her throat. If Gabe was alive, somehow, he might need that tree. She blinked back tears as rain began to speckle her face.
Sig clambered to the topmost part of the hill. His ears were pressed forward, and he began to bark so loudly his collar jangled around his neck.
“Let’s get out of here,” Maria said. “A truck turned down that road—maybe two miles away.”
Petra grabbed her tools and clambered through the mud. The women chucked the tools in the back of the truck and unhooked the ruined chain. They piled into the Bronco, and Petra cranked the engine. Sig stood with his feet on the dashboard and peered into the gloom, his nose smearing the windshield.
Choking back the bitter bile of anger, Petra put the truck into gear and hit the gas. The vehicle jounced over the ruts of the field, and she deliberately headed in the opposite direction of the nearest truck, heading for a parallel road that ran north of the ranch.
The gate to hell might be closed, but this sure wasn’t going to be the end of things.
Or her.
“Tell me about how this all began.”
Gabe looked up from the battered writing desk. His pencil stilled.
Owen stood underneath the naked light bulb of the basement, pacing. He’d been gone for a long time. Long enough for Gabe to investigate the exact nature of his restraint. The chain was heavy iron, forged a long time ago, but all the links were strong and firm. He’d wandered around the full circumference allowed by his leash, and found little within reach that might assist in his escape: a handful of lint, two crusty dead spiders, and a nail he’d dug out of one of the ceiling joists by standing on the desk. The nail held the most promise, but he’d bent it badly scratching at the lock on the shackle around his ankle. He hoped it wouldn’t break. At the very least, he might be able to use it as a weapon if Owen got close.
But he never did. Owen seemed to have measured off exactly what Gabe’s reach was, and stayed beyond it. When he came to collect the pages Gabe scribbled, Owen would have Gabe push them across the floor to him. On another day, Gabe might have found those kinds of precautions to be flattering. Today, he was just tired. Tired of sleeping on the floor, eating peanut butter sandwiches, and pissing into a bucket.
And wary of spewing forth the ranch’s secrets. Gabe had served many masters as a Hanged Man. Some had been better than Owen, some worse. For all that time, he had served unquestioningly, offering up to the ruler of this realm whatever he asked.
But now . . . now, he was no longer a Hanged Man. His loyalty had shifted. The Lunaria was gone. The rest of the Hanged Men were gone. Maybe it was time that the enchantment of the ranch died with them.
He had begun writing the story of Sal’s death. That much, Owen already knew. He had taken his time writing and handed the pages to Owen as he filled them:
There was once a tree.
And a man who owned the land on which the tree grew. But he didn’t really own the tree. No one did. The tree had been there for hundreds of years, far beyond the memory of white men who came to Temperance.
The men who lived there before told a tale of the tree, which had been told to them by a tribe of Sioux who had traveled through the area. They said that they had camped here for a fortnight, looking for good hunting. One of their young men was nearly seduced by a sorceress, and the despairing young man lay on the earth. An oak tree grew through his body and reached to the sky. The man was one with the tree, tangled in its roots, pinned to the earth. The tribe’s medicine men
and women tried to extract him, but to no avail.
In desperation, the young man’s sister cried out to the Great Spirit in the sky, promising marriage to anyone who could rescue her brother.
A storm swept in, and a tall man arrived, striding across the plain. This man was surrounded by a peculiar glow. The stranger announced that he was Thunder and Lightning. He had struck down the sorceress on his way to the camp. When he arrived at the camp, he threw a lightning bolt at the tree, releasing the young man. The young woman was brought up to the sky in a clap of thunder.
The tree didn’t die, though. It survived. It grew out of ash, growing larger and stronger. In later centuries, it was used as a hangman’s tree. And then it came to the attention of the alchemist who founded Temperance in the 1850s. Lascaris believed it to be the Tree of Life, and the men he hanged from it were granted eternal life . . . of a sort. They were doomed to rot beneath the tree at night and roam about during the day. They could transmute their bodies into murders of ravens, and were able to recover from all harm except that inflicted upon them by wood. And they were loyal to him.
These Hanged Men served Lascaris from that time, until the Alchemist’s untimely death. The landowners, the Rutherfords, inherited the Hanged Men. They then served generations of Rutherfords.
Until Sal Rutherford. The last ruler of the realm. He punished the Hanged Men for rebelling against him by burning the tree. I watched the men hang Sal from the last ruined branch. I did nothing to stop them. He deserved it.
The Hanged Men went under the Lunaria for the last time. None of them woke up, except for me. I don’t know entirely why—perhaps it’s because I was made first. I was the oldest, and I had more of its power than the others.
What I do know is that they are gone now. And Sal is gone.
And the tree is gone.
Gabe put the pencil down and scrutinized Owen. The sheriff was rubbing the stubble on his cheek. He’d muttered to himself as he came down the stairs, talking to his “ghost,” Anna. Gabe knew that Anna was nothing more than the reflection of his own madness. Gabe was still working on a way to use that, to determine if Anna was perhaps a reflection of Owen’s ego or his stilted conscience.
