Witch Creek

by Laura Bickle

  “He’s a thief!” Raina Sue pointed to him.

  Ordinarily, Lev just ignored ghosts. But when they got agitated, really agitated, sometimes they could draw attention from the outside world. If they got wound up enough, sometimes they could knock over objects or mess with electricity. New ghosts, the kind that passed right on to the light, usually didn’t have the power to do these sorts of poltergeist tricks. But there were some traumatic deaths here, and Raina Sue was stirring the pot.

  Sure enough, the fluorescent lights overhead started to flicker. Then a bottle of chemicals on the counter fell over, the cap breaking, and the room began to fill with a scent of something like formaldehyde.

  Enough. He needed to escape attention. He lifted his right hand into the shape of the Horned Hand, pulling his two middle fingers down, as if he were at a Metallica concert. He turned to the nearest ghost, the woman with the half-done makeup. He flicked her on the forehead as if she were a misbehaving dog.

  The ghost dissipated, like smoke.

  He lifted his hand to Raina. “Back off.”

  Raina made a face and backpedaled, eyes wide and earrings jingling. She didn’t know that the Horned Hand wasn’t a permanent fix. The woman with the makeup would re-collect herself in a matter of hours. But these were naive ghosts; they didn’t know that. And they didn’t need to know that. For all they knew, Lev was a powerful necromancer who could send them on a freight train straight to the circles of hell.

  Keeping the Horned Hand up as warning, Lev glanced about for a way to escape. He covered his face with his other sleeve to shield against the fumes. Funeral homes always had a back door, wide enough to accommodate coffin trucks and large vehicles, and he spotted it quickly enough. Lev wheeled the can to the doors at the opposite end of the room, pushed it outside on a concrete loading dock.

  “Stay here,” he told the ghost of Archer.

  He shut the door behind him and turned back to the morgue. He’d let the funeral home employees figure out how to turn on the venting system to clear the chemicals out; there certainly wasn’t anyone living there. He held his breath as he came back through the morgue without the can, glaring at the ghosts giving him the stink eye, threatening them with his flicking fingers.

  He threaded his way back to the main hallway. He started coughing and covered his face with his elbow. The air out here was fresh, clearing the chemical stink from his lungs. A funeral employee outside the men’s room asked, “Are you all right, sir? Is there anything I can get for you?”

  “No thank you,” Lev said. “I’m just . . . stunned.”

  “There’s water over here . . .”

  Lev took the water and felt forced to drift through the line to see the old lady, Raina Sue. He nodded and made small talk about how peaceful she looked and how Harrington’s had done a lovely job with her makeup. He thought he saw her peeping through the wall at him. He lifted his right hand and she receded.

  He drifted out the front door and walked slowly to his truck, heart hammering. He started it, pulled it around to the side of the building, and nonchalantly loaded the trash can in.

  “It’s gonna be okay,” he muttered to the bin.

  He cranked the engine and had to remind himself to go slow on the way out, not to attract attention. It was agonizing as he drove down the freshly blacktopped drive, surrounded by pedestals with fern baskets. When he got to the highway, he hit the gas.

  He didn’t have much time.

  A spirit could only linger around the body for so long before it escaped for good.

  Spirit and matter were pretty much subjective categories.

  At least, that was the way Gabe saw it now, suspended in darkness. It seemed that there was a somewhat arbitrary line drawn between them that didn’t always make sense in his world. Weird things precipitated from spirit, and matter had a way of spontaneously dissolving.

  He was pretty sure he was disincorporating now. His awareness had lost its center point within his skull, and it began to wander. Not far enough to reach Petra, wherever she was, but far enough that the disorientation was overwhelming. He was going to die here, for good, as his consciousness bled out, diluted, and dissolved into the water.

  Something glimmered in the blackness, moving within his chest. He tried to squint, but wasn’t sure if it was a hallucination. Perhaps he was sliding back into the spirit world. The movement within his chest glittered gold under his shirt, and he felt it squirming behind his lung, clawing through the skin in his back. He felt a brush against his shoulder, a thread, like a root. He snapped to full alertness as the pain chewed into his body. Hot blood trickled down his shoulder.

  He sucked in his breath as a lance of pain pierced the back of his neck. Rock cracked behind it. A tiny, spidery root dug its way beneath his scalp, boring into the back of his skull.

  This was not the spirit world at all; he was submerged in the underground river, and something was chewing out of his body, seeking earth beyond.

  The Lunaria. He knew that touch anywhere. He dimly wondered how it had gotten this far, how it had traversed these many miles. He had no doubt, though—this was unmistakably its influence, that feeling of liquid sunshine. But this was not the tender, loving touch of the tree that he’d known for decades. This was angry, insistent, excruciating.

  He glanced down. A root blossomed out of his chest, slipping through a rib, questing. He realized then that the tree had not traversed this distance to chew on him. It was part of him. It was from him. He had carried the seed of it inside his body. And now it was reestablishing itself, taking root here. Perhaps the original was failing, and this was its last-ditch effort to survive. Perhaps Lascaris’s influence from the spirit world had either poisoned that one or inspired this new growth.

  Whatever the reason, he had no way of knowing if the tree meant him good or ill.

  The root burned into the back of his brain, reaching for the retina of his blind left eye.

  Ill. He was guessing ill.

  Petra stared at the pearl on Maria’s kitchen table. She rolled it back and forth between her thumbs, inspecting its perfect glimmer. It was large, very large—as big as a gumball. And the color was unusual—that blue sheen, almost an aqua. She’d seen black pearls that were a peacock, iridescent blue, but never anything like this.

  It was likely worth a fortune, she thought as she looked at it. If it was the real deal.

  “What is that?” Nine asked, bringing a bowl of cereal to the table. She’d been poking at it with a spoon for the last fifteen minutes as it grew soggy, as if she couldn’t decide if it was really food or not.

  “I found it in Gabriel’s pickup. I think whoever took him left it there. It’s a pearl. Typically, they’re formed when there’s an injury to the inside of a mollusk. Aragonite forms, and then the pearl forms of layers of calcium carbonate. I mean, if it’s real. It could be cultured. Somebody could have stuck a bead in a mollusk and pulled it out after a while, and there might only be a few layers of nacre on it. I guess dye could account for its color, but . . .”

  Nine’s eyes had glazed over, and she absently scratched behind her ear. She pushed her cereal across the table, where Sig sat in a chair. He stuck his face in the milk and began to slurp noisily.

  “You could always take it to a jeweler. They might be able to tell. I mean, once their eyes stopped bugging out of their heads.” Maria was making a salad at the counter. Petra wasn’t hungry in the slightest, but had promised to eat a salad for Maria in exchange for the chance to use Maria’s washer and dryer.

  “It would likely be sent out to be X-rayed,” Petra said. “That could take weeks.” She pushed the pearl back and forth across the table. Sig watched, his nose wriggling back and forth as he tracked the pearl’s movement. He eventually grew tired of it and turned his attention back to slurping cereal milk. He took his fill and jumped down. Pearl, the cat, hopped up on the table and began to lap up the rest. The coyote stretched out at Petra’s feet and belched.

  Maria
set the salad and a bottle of homemade salad dressing before Petra.

  “Thanks.”

  It should have looked delicious—spinach and green lettuce with tomato, hard-boiled egg, avocado, and carrots. But Petra felt indifferent to it. She drizzled the salad dressing on the leaves but paused, staring at the bottle. An idea tickled in the back of her head.

  “Vinegar,” she said.

  “There’s vinegar, red wine, some oregano . . .”

  Petra dropped the pearl in her palm, held it over the salad, and poured the vinegar all over it.

  “What on earth are you doing?” Maria clearly thought she’d lost her mind.

  “Calcium carbonate dissolves in vinegar.” She held the pearl in her hand, in the warm dressing. “There was a legend about that . . . that Cleopatra, operating on a dare from Mark Antony at one of her fancy dinner parties, dissolved one of her pearl earrings in a goblet of vinegar and drank it.”

  “You mean to tell me that you’re dissolving a pearl worth a fortune on my kitchen table?”

  “Yeah. Kind of?” It sounded immensely stupid. No one in the room was Cleopatra. That pearl could do a whole lotta good for a whole lotta people. She stared at it, hesitating. The vinegar would take hours to work . . . she could rinse if off right now and make it part of her bequest to Maria. For some reason, though, she hesitated.

  “What would you hope to accomplish by doing that?”

  “I, uh, I want to see what’s at the middle. Like . . . a Tootsie Pop. How many licks does it take . . .”

  She shook her head. “It’s your pearl.”

  But Maria did bring her a coffee cup half-full of red wine vinegar. Petra transferred the pearl to the coffee cup.

  “What are you going to do if it dissolves into nothing?”

  “Feel really stupid. Likely, there’s nothing there. Aragonite at the middle of the pearl would probably dissolve in the vinegar, too. But . . . that’s an awfully big pearl. I just . . . I have a hunch.” She shrugged. “That’s all I have to go on, as lame as it sounds.”

  “I am not judging the lame-sounding things that go on in my house.”

  She glanced at the clock. “Visiting hours at my dad’s nursing home are soon. I’m gonna head down there and check with him.”

  Maria nodded. “I’ll drive you.”

  “I can go by myself. Really.” She was feeling helpless.

  “You passed out. You have no business driving.”

  Petra glanced across the table at Nine, who shrugged. Nine must have told her about her last visit to the Eye of the World. Probably not the whole truth . . . “passed out” sounded a lot more benign than “nearly drowned yourself.”

  Petra didn’t tell her that she’d driven to Owen’s house to toss the joint. And she knew that Nine hadn’t imparted that little adventure, because Maria would have shit a brick at that. Maybe it was better if Maria drove—there likely wasn’t an APB out on Maria’s vehicle.

  “Okay. Thanks.”

  Petra went to the bedroom to find her boots. She shoved the maps into the purse she’d begun carrying. Not having pockets was a bitch, but she had to admit that the purse was more helpful for concealing papers.

  Still, she was on edge when they left the reservation. She’d left Sig behind with Nine on purpose; if Owen’s men were out looking for her, she didn’t want them to go all batshit and shoot a “wild” animal. Owen was a sneaky man, and she was certain he was plotting to get back at her for invading his little castle on a hill.

  To her surprise, the drive to the nursing home was uneventful. There were no cops waiting in ambush in the parking lot. She walked right in, checked in at the front desk, and the receptionist didn’t punch the red emergency button under the desk. Maria picked through the glossy magazines in the lobby, while Petra headed back to her father’s room.

  She knocked on the open door frame. “Hey, Dad.”

  Her dad was sitting up in bed, fiddling with the television remote. He had it aimed in the wrong direction, and it seemed to be changing the channel in the next room, which was stirring up a flurry of cursing from his neighbor.

  He brightened when he saw her. “Hi, Petra.”

  She closed the door behind her, crossed the room, and leaned in to give him a hug.

  “How are you feeling?”

  “Better,” she lied.

  He gave her a skeptical look and patted her thin cheek. Good. He was lucid tonight.

  “Did you talk to your mother?”

  She sat on the edge of his bed. “Yes.”

  “Good. You should see her.”

  “Dad. I won’t tell her where you are if you don’t want me to.”

  His eyes darted right and left, as if he was contemplating escape. “It doesn’t matter. You just . . . see your mom and do what you need to do.”

  She shifted the subject. They were adults. She was not in charge of their relationship. “I wanted to ask you some questions about alchemy.”

  His head snapped around. “You’re not screwing around with alchemy, are you?” He shook his finger in her face. “I told you that there are no magical ways to cure cancer. Just like there aren’t any to cure Alzheimer’s. You’ll just wind up locked away in the spirit world. As much as it pains me to say . . . you have to let nature take its course.”

  Petra flinched. “Dad. I’m not looking into alchemy to cure myself. I’m trying to find Gabe. He’s missing. Remember?”

  His eyes clouded. “Yes. He’s gone. You were looking for him.”

  “Right. I found some things that might be clues. These maps he drew . . .” She pulled them out of her purse. “I don’t know what they mean.”

  He took the pages from her with palsied hands. “These are the roads to ruin. Spirit tracks. The symbols are alchemical symbols. This is the sun . . . the moon . . . lead . . . and silver.”

  “I got some of that. I just can’t translate them to actual geography. I think they are maps of the world underneath the Rutherford Ranch. But I can’t orient them, or tell what they lead to. Or even if they’re still valid. That place changes from minute to minute.”

  “What do you remember about the ranch? Any landmarks?”

  “There’s the ranch house. A barn and some outbuildings. Mountains to the west, and the Lunaria in the back forty.”

  He turned the maps back and forth. Petra dug into her bag for a pencil and gave it to him. He began to scribble on the maps, and she didn’t stop him.

  “Mountains are earth. These symbols”—he pointed to some symbols that looked like an upside-down triangle with a horizon line drawn through it—“might be the mountain. The water symbols . . . those might be rivers. I’m betting that your Lunaria is the sun . . . there’s only one on each map.”

  Petra nodded excitedly. With Nine’s divination of true north, it began to make some sense. If she oriented the mountains to the west, there was a sun in the center of each. The Lunaria was the center of this world. The lines radiated outward from that, but she didn’t know what they led to.

  He paged through them. “There’s no telling scale or how far these run. But that might be a starting point.”

  “Yes! Thank you. Also . . . I found something that Gabe’s abductor dropped. A pearl.”

  “A pearl?”

  “Do pearls have any meaning in alchemy?”

  He rubbed the stubble on his chin. “I suppose a pearl could symbolize the full moon, the ripeness of light. The moon governs water, intuition, things hidden.”

  “I keep coming back to water. When Owen and Gabe and Nine and I were on the Sepulcher Mountain this winter, he was muttering about a mermaid. I wasn’t sure what to make of it.”

  He seemed to think. “There was a myth of a mermaid, Melusine. She had the two tails, the tails of a serpent, and symbolized duality. She’s been immortalized on the coffee cups of those fancy coffees.

  “Anyway. Melusine was both human and Other . . . a man pursued her mercilessly. She agreed to be married to him, on the condition that he not
watch her bathing. Her husband didn’t adhere to the bargain and saw what she was. She devoured him and took off, living happily ever after.”

  “That is . . . really bizarre.”

  He shrugged. “Alchemy isn’t clean or neat.”

  “Clearly. But I need to find this mermaid.”

  “My initial thought is to follow the moon and the water. But my more considered opinion is that you should rest.”

  She leaned forward and kissed her father on his forehead. “I will, Dad.”

  I will, she promised herself, when Gabe is found.

  Chapter 16

  Behind Glass

  Lev took the body back to the Compostela. He parked in the alley and hauled the trash can inside. Wrestling the can up the stairs was unwieldy and difficult, and he winced at every bounce and creak on the stairs.

  Unfortunately, Wilma and Father Caleb were awake.

  “What are you doing?” Father Caleb demanded. “Hauling bricks? Are you finally going to finish that backsplash? Exposed brick would really be lovely . . .”

  Lev ignored them, focusing his energy on maneuvering the trash can upstairs and dragging it through the living room to the bathroom.

  Wilma flitted beside him. “What the hell are you . . . oh.”

  She had peered into the trash can and disappeared. She’d been around the block long enough to know that she wanted no part of this nonsense.

  Father Caleb was oblivious, nattering on about the backsplash and something he’d seen in a magazine. Lev knew that their world was small, and that they got excited over little things.

  “Not now, Caleb,” he snapped.

  The ghost of the priest sputtered.

  Lev turned the trash can on its side and pulled the sheet away. He wrestled his son’s body out, struggling to get a grip on the awkwardly slippery bag as he kicked at the can on the bathroom floor. Eventually, he got the bag on the floor and unzipped it.

  “Lev. What have you done?”

  Lev got the body into the bathtub. It was in really bad shape. It looked as if his son had been attacked by an animal. Most of the blood had drained away. Fortunately, the coroner had not begun cutting the body or putting embalming fluid into it. That would have made his work much, much more difficult. Not that this road was easy. It couldn’t be. Magic always had a cost, and the price for what he was thinking was very high.