by Laura Bickle
As he groped around, he felt something—a seam in the dead turf. It was straight, as if carved in the ground. And then the chill of metal—a ring.
He pulled, attempting to free it from the frozen ground, but it wouldn’t give. Grumbling at it, he braced his foot on the ground and hauled with all his might. The ground gave way, a crack popping the frozen turf up a single inch.
“Farris, get me a tire iron,” Owen panted.
Farris scurried away to the back of his SUV, returning with the tire iron. Owen wedged it into the gap and stomped down hard. The turf gave way around a perfectly symmetrical hole big enough for a man to crawl through.
“What is it?” Farris murmured.
“It’s a door.” Owen stood over it, cold chills bristling down his spine.
“To what?”
Owen didn’t answer. He’d seen some weird shit, growing up around the Rutherford Ranch. His momma had always accused him of having an active imagination, with his never-ending cast of invisible friends. Come to think of it, there had never been a time when he wasn’t muttering about ghosts and odd creatures slithering about in the tall grass. That worried him now a lot more than it did back then.
He remembered when he was about eight, going to the ranch to visit Sal and his family. He’d never enjoyed playing with Sal very much, and pretty much avoided him whenever possible. Sal was the kind of kid who pulled the legs off frogs just for kicks, and would hit anyone in the junk when they weren’t looking. Owen thought of him as something of a spoiled prince, given free rein over a vast kingdom.
On this particular occasion, Sal had pissed Owen off by putting a dead snake in his sneaker. Owen had beat Sal bloody, and Sal had gone running back to the house. Well, about as fast as the kid could run. Sal had been a pudgy kid. He liked to throw his weight around, but he really wasn’t much more than dough. But Owen knew he was in deep trouble this time, and had taken off into the fields to get away from his cousin and whatever punishment was awaiting him.
He’d run as far as he could, into the summer grass that came up almost to his chest. He fantasized for a brief moment about what it would be like to hide in this grass, to build a fort and live among the cows and the ravens that always seemed to mass over the land in swarms, like flies.
He crouched in the grass, making a nest. No one could see him here. He could be out here forever, and no one would ever find him. This world of sunshine and grass and sky would be far preferable to dealing with Sal’s petulant wrath and the anger of his aunt and uncle, who treated Sal like he was the heir to the universe, a young King Arthur wielding a Popsicle stick.
Maybe he was. Owen remembered peering through the grass walls of his hideout into the valley below, at all the vast land and green and gold. He felt a pang of jealousy, but then he saw it.
Something weird.
A man walked along a beaten-down path in the grass along a barbed-wire fence. He looked odd—like he had no arms. The sleeves of his plaid shirt hung at his sides like wet laundry, and he trudged along, looking up at the sky. Ravens swarmed overhead in a seething mass, cawing.
And then Owen saw them dive toward the man.
Owen gasped and clapped his hand over his mouth. The ravens were about to attack that poor crippled man, were going to tear him apart. He crawled forward out of his nest, terrified but compelled to watch.
The ravens slammed into the man, a dozen of them, one after the other, whacking into his body from the front and back. The man stumbled in the flurry of feathers, turning like a scarecrow in a storm as they assaulted him. But that was the funny thing—they didn’t bounce off with chunks of meat in their beaks. They just . . . disappeared.
The man staggered upright, surrounded by a miasma of dust and a few feathers. With a start, Owen realized that his arms had grown back. They’d grown right down past his sleeves, with pale hands that opened and closed.
Owen squeaked.
As if he heard him, the man in the field turned toward Owen with a black and distant gaze.
Owen scuttled backward in the grass, clawing through the stems, and scrambled to his feet. Keeping his head down, he ran as fast as he could back toward the house. His aunt and uncle’s punishment were nothing compared to . . . to that. Whatever that was.
He’d come around the edge of the barn, fists and legs pumping, and got caught in a tangle of arms. He fought for a moment, then recognized his mother’s perfume. Dior.
“Owen, where have you been?” She knelt and smoothed his sweaty hair back from his eyes. “I’ve been looking for you.”
Winded, he blurted out what he’d seen: the man with the ravens who’d grown his arms back, right in front of him.
His mother grasped his shoulders and forced him to look at her. “Owen. Your imagination has gone wild again.”
“But it was real! I swear!”
“You’re exhausted. It’s time to go home.” She rose and took him by the hand.
Owen stomped along, frustrated. “But what about . . .” He remembered Sal now, his bloody nose and the shiner he’d given him. Surely some gawdawful punishment awaited him.
“What about Sal?” He kicked a pebble along the gravel path.
“Don’t worry about Sal. Sal has enough on his plate.” His mother’s gaze was distant, contemplative.
“Sal’s a brat. He says that all this is his.” Resentment churned in him.
“Yes,” she agreed readily. “But he will have challenges that you will not have to face.” She seemed so certain of that, then.
“It still sucks.”
She laughed then, a small dark laugh. “You have no idea what you’ve been spared.” She kissed the top of his head and took him home.
His parents never took him back to the ranch after that. He saw Sal and his family at holidays, and they always came to Owen’s house.
Owen wondered about that for many years after. His mother had gotten into several arguments with his father, hushed whispers long after he’d gone to bed, about whether he should be allowed to go to the ranch unsupervised. His father hadn’t been raised on the ranch, hadn’t stood any chance of inheriting it. He was the youngest son, and had become county sheriff, like his father before him. Owen’s mother seemed to think that was entirely enough adventure for the household.
“He has to be told someday,” his father hissed.
“But not today,” she insisted. “Not today.”
And it seemed like “today” never came. Owen’s father died of a stroke many years ago, and his mother had nothing to say. Not then.
Not today.
But today, there was a hole in the ground. A gaping mystery. Did it lead to a moonshiner’s cellar? Some stash of Gold Rush treasure? A Cold War era bomb shelter?
Owen stared into the darkness. He plucked the flashlight from his belt and shone it inside. He spied a mass of tree roots, gnarled and charred and twisted. He reached down and shoved at them with his flashlight. They seemed sturdy enough to contemplate climbing.
“I’m going down to take a look,” he said.
“Are you sure, Sheriff?” Farris looked dubious.
“I’ll squawk if I find anything. Maybe we’ll hit it lucky and it’ll be full of rum.”
Owen stepped down into the dark, clinging to the roots, shining his flashlight before him. His light caught a spiral of tendril-like shapes, and he focused on not losing his footing. He finally could make out a dirt floor below, and jumped down to the frozen earth.
It was then that the smell hit him: the unmistakable smell of death. Winter could damp it down, slow it, but it always crept up from somewhere. Nothing ever dies pretty.
“Ugh.” He pressed the sleeve of his coat over his nose and swept his light around. It stilled on a figure on the floor, about a yard away. It looked as if someone had flung the body down the hatch, and made no effort to move it. He could make out decomposing flannel, a rope around the corpse’s neck, and a face blackened with rot. He knew better than to touch it, but it sure looked like i
t could be Sal. There was the glint of a gold ring on his right hand that Owen recognized as his grandfather’s.
“Everything going okay down there?” Farris called down.
“Stand by. I’m gonna need a body bag.”
He turned the light around and scanned what seemed to be a chamber carved into the earth. Dark tree roots curled around the perimeter, like Medusa’s hair. The beam stilled, and Owen squinted.
“Fuck.”
There were more corpses strung up in the tree roots. Bits of white tooth and bone and hair were interwoven into the twisted roots. He couldn’t tell how long the bodies had been here—maybe as long as Sal, maybe more. Maybe these were the ranch hands he hadn’t been able to find. And that was weird as hell—the sheriff’s office hadn’t received any missing persons reports on these guys. It was like they had no family or friends—and they were all down here, rotting away. Nobody had cared enough to report them gone.
Owen looked down at Sal with mixed feelings. Sal was a fucking bastard. Honestly, Owen wasn’t sorry his cousin was dead. But a murder was a murder, and family was family, and he had to do something about it.
And it was looking very possible that he had a serial killer on his hands.
He shone his light up to the hatch.
“I think we’re gonna need a lot more body bags.”
“You can’t stay here. They’ll find you.”
Petra clutched the wheel of the Bronco in her gloved hands. Gabe sat in the passenger’s side, with Sig between them on the bench seat. Sig looked pleased to be out and about in the wintry bluster, bouncing around and snooting on the windshield, but Gabe sat low, the collar of his coat turned up and hat pulled down over his eyes. He’d always been very good at being invisible, but Petra wondered how much of that had been due to supernatural influences.
“Eventually, they will,” he agreed. “So where are we going?”
“The safest place I can think of at the moment is the reservation. Owen hasn’t got any authority there.” She drummed her fingers on the wheel, impatient at getting stuck behind a slow pickup. “And I have reasonable confidence that if the reservation police pick you up, they won’t beat you to death and leave you in a ditch for revenge.”
“Good point,” he agreed. “But have you given any further thought to my suggestion?”
Her mouth twisted. “About getting married?”
“Yes.”
She chewed her lip. “It would be convenient.” Her stomach flopped back and forward as she thought about the possibility.
Gabe frowned. “That is, more or less, how it was done in my day.”
“Mail-order brides?” Of course. She felt her cheeks burning a bit. Gabe was not one given to grand, romantic gestures. Perhaps this was simply a business arrangement to him.
“More than one man never laid eyes on his bride until she stepped off the train,” he admitted. “It wasn’t very romantic.”
“How did it come to be with you and your wife, then? Did she step off a train?”
His wife from long ago. Petra tried not to pry about that relationship. She felt no pangs of jealousy. There was no use having enmity for dead lovers, especially ones who had been dust for over a hundred years.
“Jelena was the daughter of one of Pinkerton’s clients. We met at the theatre after exchanging letters for some months. I think it was the Invisible Prince that we saw.”
“So no arranged marriage for you?”
“I wouldn’t say that it wasn’t arranged. Our meeting was, but affection grew from there. Jelena was under some . . . unusual circumstances. She was looking for an arrangement that would permit her to dodge some of the social requirements of the time.”
“You can imagine how my imagination runs wild with that.”
“Jelena’s love, first and foremost, was her music. She was a pianist and a composer, a learned woman who knew her own mind. I respected that. She wanted to be able to continue her work without interference from a husband and children. I could offer that.”
“Pinkerton agents didn’t stay home much?”
“No. I was always on a train to somewhere, and we were content with the time that we had together.”
“Did you love her?”
“I did.”
“This idea of marriage you suggest—it’s not what I had in mind whenever I thought of marriage.”
“No?”
“No,” she confessed. “You could say it wasn’t ever really on my bucket list . . .” She trailed off, and it took her a few moments to come back to herself. “Anyway, I’m coming to realize that life isn’t exactly what I’d planned. And it may be a helluva lot shorter than what I thought.”
He reached across the seat to touch her shoulder. “No matter what happens, I’m not leaving you.”
“Even if I do my best to drive you away?”
“You’re stuck.”
Snowplowing stopped abruptly at the edge of the reservation land, as if the plow had simply vanished into thin air. Petra relied on the four-wheel drive and a rough estimation of where the road might lie between mailbox posts to get them to Maria’s house. The wood-sided cottage was tucked into drifts of snow, the front walk and porch freshly shoveled. Maria’s green Explorer was parked in the drive. Petra parked the Bronco beside it and Sig immediately slipped out, running up the steps of the cottage.
Gabe took his time, trudging after Petra. She rapped sharply on the frame of the storm door, and the front door opened behind it. A grey and white cat stretched up to peer through the glass at Sig, who slobbered at her. In disgust, she dropped down to all fours and trotted away.
A silhouette behind her laughed. “Pearl’s not the welcome wagon today.”
“Hi, Maria. I hope this isn’t a bad time.”
“Not at all. Come in.”
Maria, drying her hands with a dish towel, bumped the door open with her hip. She was dressed in a long-sleeved velveteen tunic, with leggings and colorful knitted socks to the knee.
Petra took her boots off just inside the door. Maria’s house was full of bright yellow paint, quilts, and the smell of bread baking.
“How have you been?” Petra asked, pulling up a chair at the kitchen table.
“Work’s been busy.” Maria put a pot of coffee on. “Seems like cabin fever hits everyone this time of year. Saw fifteen clients yesterday. My favorite was a family fighting over the contents of a grandfather’s estate. The estate consisted of a bowling ball, a bonsai tree, and an iguana.”
“An iguana?”
“Yeah. He’s ten years old. His name is Seth. At least we got the custody of the iguana figured out. He now belongs to the eight-year-old granddaughter, who was really the only sane person in the room.”
“No rest for the weary in social work,” she said.
“Eh. You have your own stuff going on,” Maria said. “I heard from Mike about that weird wolf thing you found at the park.”
Gabe was on the floor, rubbing Sig’s belly with one hand and Pearl’s with the other. “What weird wolf thing?”
“Oh, yeah.” Petra rubbed her temple. “We haven’t talked about it yet. I found a wolf skin in a tree while out working yesterday—and it was weirdly staged. Stretched over an armature of sticks, like it was meant to be seen.”
Gabe went still. “Where was that?”
“Near Mammoth Springs.” She described the site in detail. “I used the Locus on the wolf’s remains, and it registered the presence of magic of some sort.”
“Horrible,” Maria said.
“I’ve seen something like that before,” Gabe said. Both Sig and Pearl lay on their backs on the floor and turned their heads toward him, annoyed that he’d stopped petting them. He climbed to his feet and pulled out a chair at the table. When he sat, his thumb traced the stubble on his chin, as if he was caught in the depths of his deep memory.
“There was a man, back in 1861. He came to be known as Skinflint Jack, the Jack of Harts.”
Chapter 7
&nbs
p; The Legend of Skinflint Jack
“Jack Raleigh was fleeing from the law in the late 1850s. He’d been wanted for bank robbery in Boston, but had slipped through the fingers of law enforcement and traveled west. Rumor had it that he’d been robbed himself on a stagecoach and arrived in Temperance penniless and pissed about the lack of honor among thieves. But still, he found a wife and had a couple of children, and made his living as a trapper.
“Jack was a man interested in a quick buck, but the backcountry is a harsh place to try and make a living. He was a cheap man, willing to gnaw the fat off any skin he took. He’d pick up odd jobs, sometimes working as hired muscle for rich men, like Lascaris. I was working as a Pinkerton agent at the time, and I briefly considered arresting Jack and collecting the reward still on his head from Boston. But that would have blown my cover in my investigation of Lascaris.
“Jack left his wife and children to go on a trapping expedition in the winter of 1861 and returned to find them dead. He blamed the incident on wolves, and swore revenge by any means necessary. The townsfolk didn’t believe him, and a warrant was issued for his arrest. The bodies were said to be found missing their bones, the skins left behind . . . and wolves do not kill like that. We all knew he would have sold them to Lascaris for a dollar and a half-blind mule.
“Jack skulked back to Lascaris, to see what might be done for his situation. Instead, Lascaris began experimenting upon the hapless fellow. No one would miss Jack Raleigh if he was gone, and no one would believe any tales he told.
“Lascaris had been experimenting with the union of opposites, which is often represented in ancient texts by the Stag and the Unicorn. He’d been gathering bits of horn from local hunters and had sent away for what were purported to be unicorn horns, at great sums. I examined them, and concluded that they were nothing more than narwhal and goat horns. But I kept silent, curious to see what he would make of them.
“Lascaris promised Jack power. He invited him down to his lab, where Jack, being a greedy soul, realized that gold was being made. There was gold dust in the alchemist’s athanor, gold nuggets in his glass beakers. He attempted to steal it when Lascaris’s back was turned, but the alchemist caught him. As Lascaris told the tale, there was a great fight that ended with spilled potions, broken glass, and Skinflint Jack impaled on a set of antlers.
