by Laura Bickle
“Where did you get those?” Lev fingered through the pages.
Petra exchanged a guilty glance with Nine. “I might have possibly, just once, broken into Owen’s house to look for Gabe. He was there at some point before we arrived, but had been moved. These were left behind.”
Lev scanned the maps. “Many of these waterways are underground. When I first came here, many years ago, I explored the land on foot. I walked from one end of Yellowstone to another. It took months. I remember . . . at the eastern edge of the park, I followed a creek to private land, to the Rutherford Ranch. That was before I knew that I could get my ass kicked for even breathing near that land.”
“You lived to learn otherwise, obviously.”
“Through sheer luck. I thought about heading back into the park, but I heard singing. I followed a small river to a point where it flowed out from underneath a hill. I found a gate embedded in rock at the bottom of hill, with the river flowing through it.
“There was a woman there. I saw her arms, pale and grasping, extending from the gate. She was calling to me, and I wanted to set her free.
“But there was a gunshot. Sal’s men . . . Gabriel’s gang. They stopped me. They told me to forget what I’d seen.
“I didn’t want to leave—she was clearly imprisoned against her will. But one of the men shone a light into the darkness.
“I saw that there wasn’t a woman there. It was a creature that had the outline of a woman. But it had black eyes and serrated teeth, hissing at me like a snake. What I saw wasn’t human, and I knew I wanted nothing to do with it. In my gut, I thought she might be some kind of a rusalka.”
“What’s a rusalka?” Petra wanted to know.
“The rusalki are Eastern European water nymphs. Depending on who’s doing the telling, they are the spirits of women who were drowned. They would exist as water spirits, seducing men and drowning them, until they were avenged. Others say that they are simply forces of nature who provide rain to crops.” He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. Whatever she was, I wanted to get away. I backed away, hands up. The men let me go, though they could just as easily have shot me and fed me to her.” Lev lapsed into silence.
“Do you remember where that was?” Petra pushed at that silence.
“About . . . here.” Lev grabbed a pencil and sketched the border of what Petra guessed to be Sal’s land, at the foot of the mountain. A thread of jagged water, marked by an alchemical symbol that looked like an inverted triangle, crossed the border. Lev pointed to it. “But if she’s loose, killing people . . . she’s not imprisoned there anymore.”
Maria rifled through a stack of phone books and came back with a tourist map of Yellowstone National Park. “Mike says that there have been killings . . . here. And here. Downstream from the place Lev remembers. She’s staying in the same area, venturing no more than a couple of miles away.”
“It’s a place to start,” Petra said. She glanced around the room. “Are we all in?”
There were solemn nods and a coyote yip. The cat yawned and hopped down off the refrigerator to go to the back bedroom.
“Great. Let’s go fishing.”
Muirenn had returned with treasure.
She had thought that it might be difficult to find prey. Signs that said danger—no swimming had cropped up downstream. Some of the roads in the distance, leading to the water, were cordoned off or blocked with orange sawhorses. Someone was keeping people away from the park.
Well, most of them.
She had found a group of teenagers swimming in the river. They had tied a rope to the lower limbs of a cottonwood tree. They took turns grasping the rope from the bank, swinging into space with whoops and yells, and landing in the water with great crashes.
You could always count on teenagers to defy rules and do something stupid.
She watched them from the deep water, waiting until the smallest boy launched himself into the water. He was probably a good three years younger than the others, maybe one’s little brother that they were forced to babysit. Once he broke the surface of the water, she slid into action. She smashed his head on an underwear rock, plucked him from the bottom, and sped upstream as quickly as she could. By the time the teenagers realized that he hadn’t surfaced and began looking for him, she was a half mile away, and the boy was a flopping rag at her side.
She would savor this. She would take him back to her pantry with the rest of the meat, reminding herself to chew slowly, to not wolf down her food. Still, she couldn’t help but to nibble on the boy as she swam. He was the tenderest and most nourishing thing she’d had to eat yet, the flesh soft as veal.
She was humming happily to herself when she returned to the cave. She installed her leftovers in the pantry. It was getting crowded; she’d have to clean it out or expand the space to accommodate the river bounty.
Beside her stash of food, Gabriel hung motionless. She frowned at this. The tree roots had covered his body. All she could make out now was the profile of his face in the damp wood, like some kind of sleeping Green Man carving. She poked his cheek, and he didn’t move. Condensed water dripped from the brow.
She sighed. Maybe the land had a deeper quarrel with him than she did. But she deserved to see him suffer, not be pressed away in the grip of a half-conscious tree. Her next task would be figuring out how to get him out of there. If she couldn’t eat him for dinner, she was determined at least to play with him a bit.
A light shone above the black water ahead, far upstream. Muirenn sighed in irritation. Owen was back. What in hell did he want now? Weren’t there enough things going on aboveground for him to interfere in? And he presumably had work to do. She had, after all, given him his hand back to keep him busy. Wasn’t that enough?
Grumbling deep in her throat, she skimmed through the water to the light.
“Owen.” She did her best to lift the corners of her mouth in a smile. “You’ve returned.”
He held the light before him, blinding her. She held her hand up to the light to shade her sensitive eyes.
“I’m back. And I brought you a gift.”
He held something in his hands. A rope, she realized, through the blinding light. The rope was tied around a giant plastic barrel. Owen yanked the rope, and the liquid contents of the barrel poured into the river in a thunderous splash.
She ducked into the water to swim away, but she surfaced and screamed. The blue liquid seeped into the water, scalding her gills and flesh. She flipped and howled. The liquid crackled over her skin, forming blue crystals inside her gills and in her skin and hair.
She knew what it was the instant she tasted it. “Blue vitriol,” she gasped.
“Copper sulfide,” Owen said. He was standing on the bank, aiming a pistol at her. “Gabe said that you wouldn’t like it.”
She turned to flee, and a gunshot disrupted the water before her. She shrieked and dove under the water, hoping to escape the bullets and the chemical. But the chemical was sinking deeply in . . . it scalded her eyes and her lungs.
She tried her best to swim away, but bullets plowed into the water around her, splashing sand up into her face.
She surfaced, turned, and hissed at Owen: “You don’t know what you’ve brought down on your head.”
“I’m just righting a wrong.”
“You’re just an idiot who couldn’t accept the good thing he had. And now you’re going to pay for it.”
“From you?” He chuckled.
“From them.”
He turned around frantically, and she had some satisfaction in how wide his eyes became.
The riverbank and the shallows, studded with pearls, began to seethe. Her children, tiny and toothed, broke through their eggs as the blue vitriol chewed into their shells. Like crayfish, they scuttled up the bank and swarmed Owen.
“Gah!” He swung and slapped at the creatures. His flashlight spun crazily, the beam bouncing against the fog clinging to the cavern’s ceiling.
Muirenn seized this chance to
escape, to head for the gate and cleaner water. Once these chemicals had dissipated, perhaps she could find a new hiding place . . . perhaps. But her priority was getting away from that traitor. She winced, feeling hot blood at her side. She fingered a hole at the bottom of her ribs. Owen must have grazed her. She felt slow, slow and weakened. But she could recover. She had survived much worse.
She paused at Gabriel’s grave in the roots of trees.
She had no idea if he could hear her or not. But she put her face very close to his and whispered, “It’s a good thing you’re dead and in hell, Hanged Man. If you weren’t, I’d chase you there.”
Petra had no idea how to chase a mermaid.
She didn’t know what she was expecting, really. She’d had a mermaid action figure as a little girl. That mermaid had green-blue hair, a shiny blue tail made of glittery fabric, and she swam with Petra in the bathtub. When she wasn’t in the bathtub, she lived in the soap dish until a dog finally ate her. Petra rescued her from the dog, but the doll bore scars on her arm and face ever after. Petra didn’t love her any less, but she learned a very valuable lesson about dogs and irresistible hair.
Which was a lesson that she seemed to be relearning now. Petra, Maria, Lev, Nine, and Sig had piled into the Bronco. They were hauling ass to the nearest road access to the Mermaid’s lair, which Petra decided was likely going to be a lot more treacherous than a plastic soap dish. Petra drove and Lev rode shotgun on the passenger’s side. The women in the back counted out ammunition and divided it among themselves, while bullets rolled around on the bench seat. Beside Petra, Sig perched, chewing on the ends of her hair. She hadn’t had time to cut it and had pulled it back with rubber bands. Sig had the end of the ponytail in his paws and was chewing at it vigorously. His eyes were slitted in bliss, as if she’d been reincarnated as the best chew toy ever. Petra decided that she didn’t really care; it was getting cut the instant she had ten free minutes. Maybe she’d ask Maria to braid it and give it to Sig.
Lev sat beside her, his sword balanced between the seat and the door. He gazed outside the window, his face an unreadable mask.
“So. Bullets will stop the Mermaid?”
“I don’t see why not. Iron bars were able to hold her. I mean, most magical things are not entirely invulnerable. But I only met her once.”
Petra felt like a dumb-ass for a brief second, but pushed forward. “This coming from the guy who can violate the boundaries of life and death at will.”
He gave her a dark look. “Don’t push it.”
“Hey. I had to ask. I don’t know much about magic and its rules.”
She stared at the road ahead, weaving the Bronco carefully around painted sawhorses that had been set up by Mike’s colleagues to keep people out of the area.
She hadn’t pushed Lev about what flavor of supernatural he was. He said he was a guardian spirit. And while she had other things on her mind, she couldn’t help her curiosity. What all did that entail? She’d never seen him guard anything more fearsome than the keg in the back of the bar until she’d wandered into his attic. She was pretty sure she just didn’t want to know.
Yet, she really kind of did.
“Turn here,” he ordered, pointing to a break at the side of the road between the steel berms.
Petra dutifully pulled the truck off the road. The branches of lodgepole pine scraped the sides of the truck, stones pounded the undercarriage, and she was pretty sure that she was going to drop an axle. She went as far as she could, bouncing to a halt in a clearing before a stream.
“This is the stream that comes from the underground river,” he said, popping open a door.
The group piled out. The women bristled with guns. Petra flung her coyote-spit-damp hair over her shoulder and considered asking Nine to lend her a knife. Lev unloaded one thing he’d found in Maria’s basement that Petra thought made sense: a fishing net. It was old and moldy, but it was made of strong polyester rope. Lev slung it over his shoulder and shut the tailgate.
“The plan is to follow the water upstream, hope we run into her. As far as we know, she hasn’t killed this far west before. Theoretically, she should be upstream.”
Lev advanced down to the bank, and the others followed. They walked east along the creek for several yards until he approached a downed tree. He walked over the tree to the opposite shore. He cast one corner of the net back to their side. Nine caught it, and they spread it out. The weights came to rest on the bottom of the stream, and they walked against the current, dredging it. The net was designed for large fish, the size of trout, as the spaces between the ropes were as large as Petra’s hand. Frogs bounced out of their way, and a groundhog watched disapprovingly from a nearby field.
“With any luck, we’ll get her tangled up and caught quick,” Maria said. “You know, before it gets full of debris and frogs and shit.”
“When do we ever have any luck?” Petra observed.
“Well. Okay.”
They slowly moved upstream, weaving through cattails and soft, marshy land at the foot of the mountain. It was slow going, but they were determined to be quiet. Even Sig was silent as he paused to chase a duck. Unsuccessful, he just huffed at Petra as he returned to her side. They had to flip out the bottom of the net a couple of times to release a couple of hapless turtles and an idiot groundhog who was determined to gnaw on the ropes. Sig kept snapping at him, but he was not impressed.
The creek became more shallow and flattened. It snaked through fields and forest, and in a couple of miles, it emptied out in a wide runnel on a grass plain.
Lev pointed.
The creek seemed to drain away to nothingness. But as they approached, Petra could see the water breaking into a gap in sandstone. It slipped into the shadow of a shelf cave, shrouded by weeds.
And there was a gate there, true to Lev’s word, nearly obscured by the weeds. It was old metal, the plain rails speckled with tarnish and rust at the weld marks. But the gate had been broken. The door lay open, pressed by the weight of the water against the opening of a tunnel.
Petra squinted and reached for her flashlight. It looked like there was enough foot-purchase on a shelf for them to proceed inside, single file.
She motioned to Maria to follow her. She mouthed to Lev, We’ll flush her out to you.
Lev nodded. He tightened his grip on the net. Nine crouched in the grass on the other side of the creek, doing the same. It looked like a good trap from here, a solid plan.
“Stay with them,” she told Sig. She knew he could swim, but she wanted him as far beyond harm’s hungry reach as she could get him.
Sig growled in response but dutifully parked his ass on the bank beside Nine, slapping his tail on the cattails.
Petra stepped into hollow darkness. The outside light fell away rapidly, and she focused on minding her footing. The rock was slippery, and she knew full well that she and Maria were within reach of anything that might be lurking in the water. So she minced along, holding a flashlight in one hand and a pistol in the other.
Maria had more sense. She clutched her shotgun close, and had switched on a dimmer flashlight that dangled from a carabiner on the belt loop of her jeans. There was no getting around announcing their arrival with light in the monster’s lair.
Petra’s eyes began to adjust to the cave. She realized that this place was not entirely dark. In the far distance, she could make out a small star of light that bobbed and wove like a firefly. Someone else was down here. Quickly, she doused her light and motioned for Maria to do the same. They remained motionless, clinging to the wall, listening.
Petra thought she heard splashing. And a howl. Reflexively, she moved forward to get to the thin strip of beach that surrounded this side of the underground river. They’d have more room to maneuver on the beach. A veil of moisture clung to her face, like sea spray.
And then there were the gunshots.
Petra raced toward that bright light. Her feet crunched along the sand, and she was forced to turn on her lig
ht to avoid breaking an ankle on the jagged rocks. The blue-white light ahead of her bounced around, and there was shrieking. A woman’s shriek. And the shriek was coming toward them, like the whistle on a train.
Petra planted her feet in the sand and rock. Maria’s light gleamed beside hers, in enough time to catch a dark bluish shape streaking past them toward the entrance.
Petra shot at it. The roar of Maria’s shotgun was behind her, but the shape vanished.
“She’s heading your way!” she shouted downstream.
She hoped to hell that Lev and Nine and Sig were ready for her.
Chapter 20
Witch Creek
Petra turned toward the distant, star-like light that bobbed and jagged in the distance, like a lantern being shaken. But her attention was snagged by another, dimmer light: a faint gold shine on the opposite side of the river.
She swept her flashlight over it. It seemed to be a wall of tree roots, ancient and unyielding, something that had been here for hundreds of years. She moved to dismiss it, but the gold glow dripping down the surface bothered her. It reminded her of the hostile Lunaria, miles distant. And there was something about it . . . something that was vaguely man-shaped.
She ripped off her gun belt and handed it to Maria. No point in ruining perfectly good guns.
“What the fuck are you doing?”
“I’m not sure, but . . . I think that has something to do with Gabe. Cover me?”
“I have a choice?”
She stripped off her jacket and boots and waded into the water. A neon green kayak floated past her. She considered trying to catch it, but let it go. Maybe Lev and Nine could snag it.
The water was cool, but not frigid. She was conscious that the Mermaid could turn back at any moment, and she’d be drowned, chewed, or worse. But she kept her eyes on the mass of roots on the opposite bank. The water felt odd, slippery, and her damned hair kept trying to drag her down. As she approached the mass of roots, she saw blue crystals beginning to form on the wood at the waterline. Her skin stung, like she was swimming in bleach. She struggled to keep her head above the waterline.
