Nine of Stars

by Laura Bickle

  “I don’t know for sure if this one was being watched,” Mike said. “I’ll have to get this back to the station and see if it matches a description of any that were being studied.”

  “Would it be microchipped? Like for dogs and cats?”

  “Yeah. If a wolf has been trapped here before for scientific purposes, it should have one. It’s likely that a chip would have been lost in the skinning. But I’m guessing this one will be relatively easy to identify. This coat is unique.” His hand brushed the soft fur, and a line of sadness had settled over his shoulders.

  Petra sat with him a moment, blinking back tears. It was a terrible waste. And she couldn’t fathom the reason. “If it wasn’t poachers or ranchers . . . who could have done this?”

  Mike turned the carcass around. Where the eyes should have been, there were blank holes, and Petra and Mike were staring into knots of twigs. “If I had to guess? One sick motherfucker.”

  Petra sat back on her heels. Mike rarely swore. “I know you’ll get him,” she said.

  “Yeah.” He stood up and brushed the snow from his pants, his eyes distant. “I’m gonna.”

  The rangers bundled the wolf’s skin and wooden skeleton in a plastic tarp for evidence. Mike took pictures of the tree and the surrounding area. Fresh snow had fallen and there were no footprints but their own. Petra returned with the rangers back to the Tower Falls Ranger Station, writing out her statement in the warmth of the conference room, with one hand wrapped around a cup of hot chocolate. Sig lay at her feet, his tail tickling the back of her socks. But no matter how precise her lettering was, she couldn’t shake the image of the wolf’s sightless eyes from her mind.

  She glanced down at Sig. “I should get you chipped, too. Just in case.”

  He looked up at her, his eyebrows twitching.

  “It won’t hurt. Just a needle. I promise.”

  He hadn’t been fond of the battery of shots and worming medicine he’d been given when it became clear that he was going to be a companion animal, sleeping in her bed and eating cold cuts from her fridge. She couldn’t really call him a pet—there was still that streak of wildness in him that she’d seen today, when he went running across the snow to the strange display of the wolf. He had a nose for the invisible, that was certain, and a curiosity that matched her own.

  But today’s scene had been weird. The question that bugged her was . . . how weird? Was it just some sicko looking to reproduce an art project he’d seen on Pinterest? Or was there more to it?

  “We got a tentative ID on the wolf.” Mike leaned in the doorway.

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “He’s wolf A26, from a pack called Nine Stars.”

  “That’s a very . . . nonpoetic name for a wolf belonging to a poetic pack.”

  “It’s an old pack—the eggheads have been tracking them off and on since the 1970s. That was the name the Arapaho gave them, and the researchers kept that. A26 was caught in 2000—he’s been around for a while. He’s one of only three wolves in that pack that have ever been tagged. The first one ditched her radio collar, so they’ve been chipping them as a backup.”

  “This sucks. What will you do now?”

  “We’ll comb through A26’s fur and remains for evidence. Look for baits, poison, and traps in the area, consult with the wolf researchers to see if they have any insight. I’ll put out my feelers and see if there’s any chatter about a weirdo with a thing for wolves, see if anyone’s selling anything similar on the Internet. I’ll check with other parks to see if they’ve seen anything like this.”

  “What will happen to A26?” Petra had always been scrupulous about burying pets that died. She had buried every goldfish she’d ever owned, and it bothered her to imagine that the white wolf was going to stay in an evidence bag forever. It bordered on superstition, but still . . . it bothered her.

  “Until we’re done processing him and close the case, he’ll be chilling in our freezer. I promise we’ll take good care of him.”

  “I know you will.”

  The phone rang up front, and Mike retreated to answer it. Petra sat at the conference table and stared down at Sig.

  “This is weird, isn’t it?” she asked him.

  Sig huffed.

  “How weird?” She spiraled a pen through her fingers. A year ago she might have been able to look at this situation as a regrettable crime scene. Something that an unhinged mind might have created, under the influence of mental illness or drugs. But since she’d come to Temperance she’d encountered magic that defied all explanation . . .

  The pen stilled. What if this was magic, some ruined bit of leftover ritual, or a threat? The wolf had been deconstructed and reconstructed with an incredible amount of care and deliberation, as if there were some unseen purpose. Was it crazy for her to think there could be something unearthly here?

  Maybe.

  But it would be crazy not to find out for sure. Wouldn’t it?

  She headed for the door. Sig lifted one eyebrow and followed her. She glanced left and right down the hallway; Mike was still on the phone.

  Mike said that the wolf was in the freezer. She paused beside the break room. No way the carcass could fit into the top freezer compartment of the refrigerator here, jammed around the rangers’ stock of rocky road ice cream. She turned right into the utility room, flipping on the light and closing the door behind Sig’s fluffy tail.

  This room was cold, and she wished she’d taken her coat with her. Metal utility racks held boxes of file folders, evidence bags, and bits of random equipment. Fire suits and axes hung on pegs, while the shelves contained a rack of antlers, canoe paddles, life jackets, first aid kits, bottled water—all the bits and pieces of the many duties of a ranger. She stepped around a stack of coloring books, and sucked in her breath, startled, at a lump of fur in the corner of the floor.

  Is that a . . .

  It was a bear. Just not a live one. She reached down and held it up. It was an empty Smokey the Bear suit, made of fake fur and green felt. Petra chortled to herself, imagining Mike or one of the other rangers having to don it for safety talks.

  She turned the corner around a battered file cabinet to find a freezer chest pressed up against the wall, the compressor humming.

  Taking a deep breath, she opened the lid. There were frost-covered plastic and paper bags here, some suggestions of wings and antlers. Everything was neatly labeled and stacked. She looked past them, peeling back a piece of tarp, down at the face of the wolf skin, stretched by sticks. Sig stood up on his hind legs to peer in at the hapless creature.

  “Are you magic?” she muttered at it.

  Only one way to be certain. She dug into a pocket of her pants for an artifact Sig had found for her months before: the Venificus Locus. The golden compass, surrounded by alchemical symbols, glittered in her hand. Gabe had told her it was a magic locator, created by Temperance’s first alchemist, Lascaris. It wasn’t a terribly precise tool—it could tell her whether magic was present, and in what direction. Depending on its agitation, she could sometimes get a sense of how powerful it was. But it couldn’t tell her whether what it sensed was good or evil, or where it had come from.

  And the worst bit about the gruesome little device was that it ran on blood. Petra reached into her other pocket for her pocketknife, unfolded the blade, and poked it at her palm. Her fingers were growing calluses from consulting the device; she’d even tried it on Gabe, at his request. The Locus had confirmed there was nothing magical about Gabe now, that he was ordinary. He’d worn a wooden expression when she told him, but she knew that the knowledge of his ordinariness ached.

  Petra hoped the same for the wolf. A bead of blood welled up, and she dribbled it into a groove circumscribing the edge of the compass. The blood droplet seemed to pause a moment in that track, as if considering. The Locus ran on ordinary, nonmagical blood. Distantly, she wondered if there would be a time when her own blood would become too fucked-up to run it, on chemo and such.

  She hel
d her breath, focusing on the compass. If there was no magic here, the blood would simply soak into the gold. And she would have evidence of the continuing sickness of the garden-variety criminals of humankind.

  But the blood droplet wobbled, holding tension, and began to slide around the circle of the compass. She held the compass at arm’s length, over the wolf’s skin. The blood paused, then raced around it as if circling a Help Wanted ad in a newspaper.

  “Fuck,” she growled.

  Sig’s ears perked up, and he turned his head toward the door. Petra jammed the compass into the front pocket of her hoodie as the door opened.

  “What are you doing in here?” Mike stood in the doorway, looking in puzzlement between her and the coyote and the open freezer door.

  Petra looked him in the eye. “I wanted . . . to see the wolf. I feel bad for him.” That was true. She was terrible at lying, so it was best if she stuck close to the truth.

  Mike crossed his arms over his chest. “Yeah. I know. But you can’t be in here, poking around evidence.”

  “Okay. I’m sorry.” Inside her hoodie pocket, she closed her fingers over the cut in her palm to staunch the bleeding before it got all over the fleece. “I shouldn’t have done that.”

  Mike crossed the floor and closed the freezer lid. “I know you mean well, and it’s hard for civilians to see this stuff.”

  She looked down, and her gaze fell on the Smokey the Bear costume. “Almost as hard as it is seeing the body of the dead Smokey the Bear in here. You guys got Hoffa’s body back here, too?”

  Mike snorted. “Stick around for the fire safety program in spring. You are now officially in the pool to draw lots for who gets to wear the costume and pose with the ankle-biters.”

  “Awesome.” She rolled her eyes and followed him out of the room.

  “Look,” he said, serious now. “I know that seeing that wolf is gonna stick with you for a long time. You wouldn’t be a decent human being if it didn’t. But we’re gonna do everything we can to find the culprit.”

  “I know,” she said, feeling her brow wrinkle at his determination. “Just be extra careful with this one, okay?”

  He nodded and snapped off a Boy Scout salute. “Scout’s honor.”

  “That’s the best I can ask for. But . . .” She opened her mouth to say more, to utter a warning . . .

  But the other ranger on duty, Sam, was yelling from the hallway: “Heads up, Mike—we got a call about some stranded skiers drunk driving a snow tank down near the Canyon. They hit a bridge and managed to set the tank on fire. Some rocket scientist brought marshmallows, and there are bears circling. Bears that are not hibernating.”

  Mike shut his eyes and slapped his forehead. “Jesus. I know exactly the morons that are involved in this.” He wheeled and sprinted from the room, yelling: “Lock up behind you, will ya, Petra?”

  “Sure. Uh . . . good luck, guys,” she said lamely. “Go get ’em.”

  There was the clink and rummage of equipment and the squawk of radios before the slam of doors. “Fucking bastards.”

  A DUI with a snow tank and bears sounded decidedly unsupernatural. And the Canyon was south of here, far away from the area that Petra had found the wolf skin. The current situation with the skiers sounded much more urgent, and would likely keep Mike tied up for a while. Given the amount of paperwork involved, it could be for days. Which was a good thing. It gave her time to figure out what to do.

  Her fingers tightened around the blood-slick Locus, and she could feel the droplets of blood burbling against her palm, like hydrogen peroxide on a wound.

  Whatever had killed the wolf was magic. Not to be fucked with. She wanted to tell Mike, to warn him there was something weird out there. But there was no way she could go down that rabbit hole of crazy with him and make him believe, not without jeopardizing Gabe and his secrets. Not yet, anyway.

  Chapter 5

  The Alchemist in His Natural Habitat

  The alchemist of Phoenix Village had set up a small lab to explore his art: bits of tin foil, straws, six packets of salt, a stone with a hole in the middle, a book of matches, a mirror, and various pills scavenged from the floor. Only a few of those pills were covered in lint, and he had recently found a roll of copper pennies to add to his collection. He usually kept his laboratory in his bedside drawer, but whenever it was discovered, the night nurses cleaned out the contraband, and he had to start all over again.

  Petra had heard all about these great injustices—first, from the staff, and then from him. She listened and made sympathetic noises to both parties but refused to take a side.

  He was ranting about this today, rolling around the floor between the bathroom and the empty nightstand in his wheelchair, when his daughter came to his room.

  “. . . And it’s not like those things are easy to find. Especially that stone!” He shook his fist at the ceiling, to whatever gods might be listening, but it was probably just the duty nurse doing the rounds on the second floor who stomped down a couple of times on the ceiling to get him to quiet down.

  “Hey, Dad,” Petra said. She stood in the doorway, her coat folded over her arm, shifting her weight from foot to foot. She wasn’t sure if he was having a lucid moment or not. Those were hit or miss. About half the time she visited him, he was in the here-and-now. The rest of the time, he’d be muttering about some strange event in the past that involved gnomes stealing his slippers.

  Her father’s face broke into a craggy smile. “Hello, darling!” He cocked his head, taking in her face. “What’s wrong?”

  She sighed. Good. He was mostly with it today. She closed the door behind her and went to sit at the edge of his bed. He wheeled up beside her. “It’s late for you to be here.”

  Petra glanced at his alarm clock. It was six-thirty, already long dark. Visiting hours were over by seven, so she decided to cut to the chase: “Dad, I need to ask you about something weird I saw today at work. I wondered if . . . it could be related to his work. Lascaris.”

  She told him about the wolf she found and how the Locus reacted to it. He nodded vigorously, running his fingers over his stubbly scalp. They’d shaved his head when he’d been in a catatonic state. Now that he had bouts of lucidity, he’d insisted that they stop, and he rubbed his own plush grey scalp as if it could make his brain work better. He seemed to soak in all the details, asking about the direction of the sun and what kind of sticks were used. She wasn’t able to answer all of his questions, but he sat back in his chair, deep in thought, scratching a spindly knee through his sweatpants.

  “It sounds like some kind of separation process,” he said at last. “A shell with its guts removed and stuffed with something else. All magic is an attempt to control something else—whether it’s other people, luck, spirits, or the weather. And it sure sounds like someone is trying to control your wolves through magical means. Whoever made it is literally trying to get underneath its skin, to separate the shell from the body.”

  “I don’t understand,” she said, brow wrinkling.

  “And it’s probably a good thing that you don’t.” He reached out to take her hand. “Now. How are you holding up?”

  She blinked at him. It was like . . . it was like he knew. “What do you know, Dad?”

  He covered her hand with his other one. “I know that you’re not well. I see it.”

  She squinted at her reflection in the highly waxed floor. To her eye, she looked no different. Tired, maybe. But not sick.

  She told him, just the bare-bones facts: “I went to the doctor. There was some weirdness in my blood last time I was in the ER. They ran some tests and, well . . . it’s leukemia. I’m going to see a specialist next week to see what the treatment options are.”

  He listened attentively without moving, processing what she was saying with glistening eyes. “I’m sorry, dear.”

  Her lip quivered. “Yeah, well . . .” She looked away. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “I’ll tell you what not to do,” he sai
d. “Don’t go chasing alchemical cures, like I did, feathers of phoenixes and elixirs of eternal life. Go to the damn doctor. Put your faith in science. You’ll be all right.”

  He pulled her down into a hug, and she sobbed like a child.

  “You’re gonna get through this,” he murmured against her hair. “You will.”

  She leaned back, wiping at the snot dripping from her nose. “How do you know?”

  He smiled at her, a full brilliant smile. “Because you’re my daughter.”

  He sat in darkness after the sun had set red on the horizon. The stars prickled out in sharp shards, bright overhead. He used to be able to see very well in the dark, like an owl. Now . . . things just grew fuzzy and indistinct, and he would stub his toe on the edge of the futon when he went to bed.

  Gabe sat at Petra’s kitchen table, staring through the window. He expected her home any time, and he knew that they had to talk. The crumpled-up wanted poster was burning a hole in his pocket. He wondered how to make her understand that he didn’t want to leave her, that he wanted to find a way they could be together without her getting arrested for aiding and abetting a known felon.

  Now that Sal was gone, now that Gabe’s tie to the Lunaria was broken . . . he felt a curious light-headed freedom. It was possible that he could flee Temperance, for the first time in a hundred fifty years. Maybe Petra could come with him, and they could begin again on an ordinary life someplace else, someplace without magic and ravens and the threat of immortality. In the old days of the Wild West, that would have been possible. Now . . . he was unsure. Cellular signals and wires tracked people through ephemeral data and invisible networks in an ever-shrinking world. Was it still possible to disappear in this day and age?

  The lights of Petra’s truck came down the gravel road, washing over the trailer windows. He watched her get out, Sig bounding in the snow. Seeing no trailer lights on, she automatically went to the back field to look for him.