Witch Creek

by Laura Bickle

  “Yeah. I was thinking about that the other day. I never saw another one like it.”

  “Neither did I. I think it was just meant to be yours.”

  They chatted for a while longer, about the maple tree in the backyard and the chemistry set that Petra had in the basement that evaporated away. They talked about the road trip they’d taken to a Star Trek convention because Petra had wanted to meet Mr. Spock.

  “We did have a good time, didn’t we?” Petra’s mom said.

  “Yeah. We did,” Petra agreed.

  “Sweetie. Hang in there. I’ll be there as soon as I can.” Static was beginning to creep into the connection.

  “Okay, Mom,” Petra said. “I love you.”

  “I love you, too.”

  Petra ended the call and stared at the phone in her lap. She thought she’d be gone before her mother arrived, and she honestly cringed at the thought of having to manage her mother’s emotional reactions on top of her own.

  Yet, she really wanted to have her mom’s arms wrapped around her, too.

  “I guess I’d better figure out how I want to do this dying business,” she said to Sig, who had sneaked out and lay at her feet. He looked up at her, his canine eyebrows working.

  There were things to consider: How to make sure Sig was cared for. Burial or cremation. What to do with her stuff, what little she had. She supposed she’d have to go download some forms from the internet. What did she need? Living will? Trust? DNR order? About all she had organized was Maria’s promise to care for Sig and the organ donor symbol on her driver’s license. Not that anyone would want her diseased organs. Gah. Thinking about it, she decided that what she had should go to Maria for Nine’s care and to the nursing home for her father. She had a life insurance policy that was in Gabe’s name. If Gabe never returned, then . . .

  Maria stepped out on the porch, holding her briefcase. She was dressed in work clothes—a voluminous skirt, a blouse with a cardigan—and had her hair neatly gathered on her nape. “I got called in to work. Shockingly, there are folks in bigger trouble than you.”

  “Go social work ’em over,” Petra said. “Nine won’t let me out of her sight.”

  “Good.”

  “When you get back, can we do some paperwork?” Maria would know how to handle this. She was a social worker, already initiated into the arcane arts of paperwork.

  Maria nodded. “Yes. That would be a load off your mind, I’m sure.”

  “Thank you.”

  Maria headed out to her green Explorer, cranked the engine, and backed out the gravel drive, past the Bronco, to the road. Petra waved cheerfully. She figured that Maria had hidden her keys or taken them with her.

  Good thing she had an extra set.

  Petra stepped back into the house. Nine was sitting on the couch with Sig, and it seemed that they were deep in conversation.

  Nine looked up. “How is your mother?”

  “Preparing to descend upon me with both feet.” Petra grimaced and flopped down on the couch. “I’ll have to get some paperwork together to get my shit in order before she gets here and goes all control-freaky over stuff. I guess that’s included in everyone’s idea of a ‘good death.’” Petra made air quotes around the words. “I think that Maria wants me to meditate and achieve some enlightenment before I take a dirt nap.” Petra sure didn’t feel enlightened or ready for anything. She sank back into the velvet couch.

  Nine shrugged. “A good death is different for the wolves who want to be surrounded by the pack. When a social wolf is ill, the other wolves surround it. They try to care for it as best they can. The wolf’s mate and children all come and sleep around the sick wolf to try to draw off the sickness. We also eat a lot of grass.”

  “Yeah. I can sure eat grass. But my mate isn’t coming back.” There. She said it. It felt hopeless and summoned tears to her eyes. She was feeling sorry for herself and was tempted to wallow in grief. “I guess I’d better get started on that solitary wolf business of finding a cave to die in.”

  Nine turned to face her. “No. You need your mate to be with you to have a good death. You do whatever you need to do to find him. Only then can you have a good death.”

  Petra looked at her, surprised. “Are you with me for some batshit crazy stuff, Nine?”

  She sighed. “I am with you for the batshit crazy stuff. As long as we follow Maria’s rule, and you stay within my sight.”

  “I’m counting on it.”

  Chapter 10

  Stupid Oaths and Other Dumb Ideas

  Walking up to Owen’s front door might not have been the brightest idea on the best of days.

  But these were not the best of days, Petra reminded herself. These were the last of hers, and she was going to use them to make war on Owen.

  At least it wasn’t broad daylight, she consoled herself. She’d waited until the sun had set, and she expected Owen to be home, doing whatever corrupt lawmen did in their spare time at home . . . reading The Art of War? Smoking cigars? Clipping the tags from a collection of worthless Beanie Babies?

  She stormed up Owen’s front steps, the hand-hewn logs of the front porch planed and polished smooth under her feet. She planted the butt of her pistol into the doorbell with a video camera embedded inside, shattering the expensive plastic. It didn’t matter if Owen saw her. Having a record of Nine would be more problematic, even if she was out of his jurisdictional reach on the reservation. Nine had no fingerprints on file, no driver’s license or identification, but it still couldn’t be that hard to find a young woman with a head full of silvery hair on the reservation.

  Nine slid from behind Petra, and the women kicked the door in unison. Once, twice . . . three times. The antique door cracked open. The expensive lockset remained in place, the panels splintered around it.

  Petra stepped over the mess into Owen’s entryway, pistols lifted. Nine and Sig slipped in behind her, fanning out to her right and left. No alarms echoed. Petra scanned the slate entryway and the staircase of logs winding up to an antler chandelier.

  “Owen,” she shouted. “Get down here.”

  There was no answer.

  Her eyes narrowed. He should be home. His vehicles were here. Most likely, he was holed up in a back room with a gun, waiting for her to come to him. Maybe he’d even had enough time to barricade himself into a safe room and was summoning his deputies. By her estimation, the deputies were at least a half hour away.

  That was fine with her.

  She and Nine swept the first floor—the kitchen, the living room, a bathroom, the study. The whole place was decorated in over-the-top faux rustic stuff. The only real things were the log walls that Petra guessed were original to the house and the trophies of elk, bear, and bison that gazed down on them from the walls. Even the books in the study were fake, fancy stamped wallpaper.

  She caught Nine’s eye across the living room. Nine shook her head. Petra gestured with her gun up the stairs.

  Petra went first. The log steps were creaky, and she winced at that. After the first step, she moved closer to the wall, Sig on her heels.

  She kicked in the doors to the bedrooms upstairs and the bathrooms. No one was there. She even looked in the closets. In the master bedroom, Owen’s bed was unmade and rumpled. His walk-in closet was full of his uniforms, a gun safe bolted to the floor. For grins, Petra tugged on the handle. Locked. She wondered what the hell he kept in there.

  She scanned the bedroom once more and paused. In a tray on his bedside table sat coins, keys, rings, and other glittery odds and ends. And among them . . . a pearl.

  Petra picked it up. It was like the pearl she’d found in the truck—that curious blue sheen. Her eyes narrowed. The pearl meant something . . . just what, she wasn’t certain. But she’d find out, even if she had to lie in wait for Owen to return and get it at the business end of a pistol.

  Nine popped her head into the room. She gestured for Petra to follow. Petra dropped the pearl back into the tray and stepped noiselessly over the c
arpeted floor, down the steps to the first floor.

  Sig was clawing at a door that Petra assumed led to the kitchen pantry, but there was a lock on it. Nine pulled Sig aside. Petra shielded her face and shot at it.

  The bullet bounced against the lockset and the fancy marble floor of the kitchen, fracturing a tile. The lockset broke, and luckily none of them were hit with the ricochet or shrapnel.

  Never does that in the movies, Petra thought.

  Ears ringing, she opened the door.

  This definitely wasn’t a pantry. It was a set of stairs, going down to a basement. She felt around for a light switch. She flipped it, and plain wooden stairs were illuminated below . . . by a naked bulb at the bottom of the stairs.

  Like the light in the spirit world. Her heart thumped hard behind her ribs. This was the place where Gabe was. She knew it.

  She plunged down the stairs, guns extended before her. Sig clambered down behind her.

  “Gabe?” she whispered. “Are you here?”

  This place was more a cellar than a basement. It had been clearly dug out beneath the original house, centuries ago. The ceiling was low, and rickety wooden shelves lined the sandstone walls. The floor was plain dirt, pounded to a smooth sheen over time under the tracks of the owners.

  As she turned a corner, Petra spotted a battered, unoccupied desk. Sig went immediately to it, his nose pressed to the floor, and whined. Petra stepped over a chain snaking across the floor. One end was buried in a floor drain. The other end was an open shackle.

  Papers were stacked on the desk. Petra immediately recognized Gabe’s handwriting, scrawled across dozens and dozens of pages. There were scribblings of maps, sketches of people . . . all on the same notebook paper used for the curt letter she’d found in her mailbox. She skimmed them. It was a history.

  A history of the magic of Temperance.

  “Shit,” she breathed. Gabe had been here, and he was alive. At least he had been recently. Disappointment and hope warred within her.

  She scooped up all the papers and jammed them into her jacket pockets.

  She whistled softly for Sig and rushed up the stairs.

  Owen was responsible—she now had proof. And she would wring the truth out of him, even if it killed one of them. If she was lucky, maybe it would be both.

  That might fit the definition of a “good death.”

  “Where are we going?”

  Gabe already knew the answer. He just wanted to force Owen to acknowledge it. A man like Owen wanted to believe that he was on the side of the angels, serving truth and justice. He’d do anything to turn away from any information to the contrary, to preserve his own image. And with no other options in terms of resistance, Gabe had no choice other than picking at the scabs in Owen’s self-concept.

  Owen was silent for a moment. He’d been chatty on the way down, but not with Gabe. He’d been carrying on conversations with himself, with the ghost he imagined, muttering about black water and the afterlife. The way down had been foreign to Gabe. He had known many of the rabbit holes that led to the underground of the property, but Owen had marched him to a broken-down grain crib on the north side of the ranch that hadn’t been used in many years. Gabe had actually needed to dig deep into his memory to even come up with the last time he’d been here—it had been decades. Those years showed in the dilapidated state of the structure. The concrete floor had ruptured, opening a seam into the earth that was full of mud and gravel. This must have been a place that the Mermaid told Owen about.

  Owen marched Gabe ahead of him, and it was almost impossible not to feel the gun aimed at the back of his head, even though he couldn’t see it. And despite the fact that Gabe’s hands were bound, he would ordinarily have made an attempt to fight and run, gun or not. But the implicit threat wasn’t the gun—not to Gabe, that was. After all this time, he just didn’t fear death. No, the threat that hung over him wasn’t his own mortality, but the knowledge that if he didn’t cooperate, he had no illusions about Owen going after Petra. Then again, he might, anyway. The calculus of resisting lay heavily on him.

  “The Mermaid wants to see you,” Owen answered him, finally.

  “The Mermaid wants to kill me.” Gabe wanted Owen to face it, to own it.

  “She says she just wants to talk.”

  “And you believed her.”

  “She hasn’t given me any reason not to.”

  Gabe shook his head. “You’re on a slippery slope, Owen. Once she has you, she won’t let you go.”

  Owen said nothing, just shoved him forward, down the dark passageway.

  It had been many, many years since Gabe had been in the Mermaid’s domain. To be honest, he had hoped that she’d simply wasted away. There certainly wasn’t much to sustain her in her prison. But deep down, he knew better. So he’d avoided the tunnels that he knew led to her realm. Sometimes, he had heard the echoes of her singing, and as he thought about it now, he suspected that there was some hypnotic magic in her voice, and that the more Owen listened to her, the more entranced he became. The Hanged Men called her the Mermaid, but she was just as easily the Siren. No matter what she was called, she was dangerous. Gabe knew that. Even weakened, she was formidable. And more than that, she was patient. She had overcome the impulsivity that had caused her to run afoul of Lascaris in life, and an opponent capable of evolution was the most dangerous kind.

  Gabe descended the steps to meet his fate. Grey mist made the treads damp and slippery. Despite his lame leg and impaired vision, Gabe knew these steps better than Owen did—he and the Hanged Men had hewn them out of sandstone and set them. They’d settled over the years, but their contours were still familiar. He could smell the black river from here.

  Behind him, he heard Owen stumble. He sensed the opportunity, spun back, and rammed the man with his shoulder. He connected, and Owen’s flashlight bounced away. A shot rang out, and the muzzle-flash glittered in the darkness, enough to show Owen sliding down the steps past him. Gabe kicked him the rest of the way down and turned to ascend to freedom.

  A hand clasped around his boot, tripping him. Gabe landed with his chin on a step, tasting blood. He felt himself being pulled down, and rather than letting Owen control this struggle, he kicked out into the black even as they tumbled down the steps. He landed in the soft crunch of pea gravel, rolling in the dark to his side. He got his cuffed hands below his ass and flopped and folded his body until he got the cuffs behind his knees. He wriggled the cuffs behind his legs and cleared his boots. At least with the cuffs in front of him, he could swing properly . . .

  There was a splash behind him, and a cold hand grabbed his shirt, hauling him back. He swung, connecting with flesh and scale. He knew he was a goner in the water, knew that he was as good as dead. And that meant Petra . . .

  Sinewy arms tangled in his handcuffs and yanked him down into the shallows. He dug in his heels, staggering, but she was too strong. A muscular tail slashed at his good knee, and he fell in the water. Before he could take a good, deep breath, he was towed into the cool blackness of the water. It lapped over his cheek, and he gurgled for air. He swallowed a mixture of air and water, fighting to keep his head above the surface.

  Owen must have regained his posture and his flashlight. A silhouette on the bank stood in a blue-white halogen glow.

  “I’ve done as you asked,” Owen panted. “I brought him to you.”

  Cold fingers slipped over Gabe’s cheek, and a musical chuckle rained down his cold spine. “You have. You brought me the last of my enemies. Such a shame that there is only this one left.”

  “What are you going to do with him?”

  The fingers traced his temple. “Gabriel and I are going to talk. We have much to discuss.” The arm around his neck pulled him into deeper water.

  He grimaced as the water closed over his head.

  The water was cold, but not enough to induce hypothermia. That was the least of his concerns, though, and he fought to push his head above water—fought against being
pulled down by that fearsome undertow. His head broke the surface, and he gasped. Mist and rain swirled around him. Fragmented images surfaced in the dark: the Lunaria, the shadows of the Hanged Men. Whether these were from his memory or Muirenn’s, he didn’t know. He closed his eyes against them to focus on fighting back.

  The Mermaid had hold of his handcuffs and was towing him with his arms over his head. She moved with the speed and ferocity of a shark, pulling him away from Owen’s light and into the black downstream. She hummed softly to herself; Gabe thought he detected some fragments of the melody of the lullaby she’d sung to the Hanged Men when they were killed.

  “I have waited a long time for this,” she said.

  She crushed him up against a stand of rocks. She worked loose a rusted chain, one that Gabe recognized. This was the one the Hanged Men had used to bind her here, a century and a half before. He could still see the arcane symbols that Lascaris had required them to etch into it, even as rusted as they were now.

  “You know this, don’t you?” she demanded, hissing, the chain rattling in front of his face. “This was my leash. You bound me here with this, while you built the gates to keep others from finding me.”

  “You always had a sense of poetic irony,” Gabe murmured dryly. He wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of showing any fear. “Actually, Lascaris had ordered that the chain be only fifty feet. It wasn’t as if we had no sympathy for you.”

  “Screw your sympathy!” she snarled at him. She threaded the chain through his handcuffs, tied them to a bracket on a rock that Gabe remembered. That chain had been enchanted by Lascaris, long ago. It could only be unlocked by the will of the landowner, the ruler of the Rutherford Ranch. Gabe was pretty sure Owen wasn’t going to be inclined to help him.

  He turned his head. He smelled something, like rotting meat.

  Muirenn chuckled. Of course she could see in the dark—she’d had many decades of practice. “You kept me from food for many years, Gabriel. I will never, never be without it again. When we last met, I promised you that I would see you dead. Do you remember?”