Nine of Stars

by Laura Bickle

  By the time Anna led him back to the chamber with the tree, only a dim grey light filtered down from the hatch above. Exhausted, Owen clambered up the tree roots to the hatch. Once outside in the crisp falling darkness, he slammed the door behind him and plodded to his SUV. Trembling, he turned over the engine and cranked up the heat.

  “Thank you, Anna,” he said. “You saved my life.”

  She sat in the passenger seat beside him, staring out the window. She flushed and squirmed. “It wasn’t anything. But . . . what was all that?”

  Owen squinted through the frost that had accumulated on the windshield. “I have no earthly fucking idea.”

  Petra rushed after Maria into the hospital, leaving slush in her wake as she ran down the green-tiled halls. Her coat flapped open, zipper scraping the walls as she ping-ponged along behind Maria. They’d left the man in the wanted poster and the coyote behind in the truck, not wanting to court an argument with hospital security.

  Maria skidded to a stop before a glass-walled room. “Oh, God. Mike.” Petra could see nothing beyond her except for a sheet covering the shape of a pair of human feet.

  A woman in a white coat with a stethoscope draped around her neck stopped them at the door. “Are you family?”

  “No . . . I’m Maria Yellowrose. I was called. Mike must still have me as his emergency contact in his phone.” She gestured at Petra. “This is Petra. She works with Mike.”

  “I’m Dr. Burnard. Mike was brought in about an hour ago.”

  “What happened?” Maria pressed her palms against the glass door.

  “He was in some kind of accident or a bad fight. Blunt force trauma to the head and body, a fractured rib. He’s got a bad concussion and we’re watching him for swelling. It was lucky he was found when he was—he’s got some bad frostbite on his extremities.”

  A ranger strode down the hall, his hand in his gun belt. It was the same ranger Petra recognized from the bat rescue. Sam.

  “Maria?”

  “Sam? How did this happen?”

  Ranger Sam gave Maria a quick hug. “I’m glad you’re here, and I know Mike would be, too.”

  “What happened to him? Was he at work?”

  “Yeah. Mike had gone out on patrol, looking for wolf poachers. He was following the radio tags of one of the pack members. He radioed in that he saw some suspicious activity and gave his position a half mile north of Fawn Creek. I tried to radio him back, and he didn’t answer. We combed the area to find him and finally were able to get a ping off his cell phone. He was beat up really bad. So I’m guessing there was more than one guy, and he got jumped.” Sam looked away. “I should have been there.”

  Maria shook her head. “I told him to stop being a fucking cowboy and running around on his own.” She turned to the doctor. “Can I see him?”

  “Yes,” the doctor said. “He’s in and out of consciousness. He’s pretty agitated, and we’ve given him a light sedative to keep him calm—just don’t stress him further.”

  “Gotcha.” Maria opened the door to Mike’s room. Petra slipped in behind her, and tried to stifle a gasp.

  Mike lay in a hospital bed, surrounded by tubes and wires. His swollen face was black and blue, and his head had been shaved in a spot where stitches crossed his scalp. Bandages circled his ribs, and his fingers were covered loosely with gauze. He seemed much smaller than she was used to seeing him, shriveled somehow.

  “Mike?” Maria whispered, coming close to the bed. “It’s Maria.”

  The eye that wasn’t swollen shut opened, but he didn’t move his head. “Hey, gorgeous,” he slurred. “How ya been?”

  “Better than you.” She leaned against the side of his bed and touched his shoulder. “How are you?”

  “Been better.” His cracked lips broke into a grin. “But I’ll take all the sympathy I can get. And soup. Will you make me some soup?”

  “Jesus. I was afraid you were brain-damaged.”

  “No such luck on the drain bamage.”

  Petra felt like an intruder, hovering at the foot of his bed. “Mike, you look like hell.”

  “I feel like it. But I guess this’ll earn me some time off. Maybe I can go bowling.”

  “You can go bowling all you want,” Petra said.

  “What the hell happened?” Maria demanded. “Sam said you were in a fight, that you got jumped by poachers. What the hell were you thinking, chasing after a bunch of criminals on your own?” Anger had tightened her posture, and Petra suspected that if the poachers didn’t finish him off, Maria might. There was history there. At the very least, she was going to make him suffer for a very long time.

  Mike’s gaze flickered to the door, at the silhouette of Ranger Sam through the door. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  “Try us.” Maria pulled a chair up to his bedside.

  Mike’s good eye rolled up to the ceiling, and he was stubbornly silent for some minutes.

  “Mike. You have to tell us.” Petra hoped the sedative would make him chatty. She wondered if she could flag Dr. Burnard down to give him some more.

  He huffed, then winced, his hand fluttering to his chest. “I fobbed off most of the investigation of the skiers with the burning tank on Sam. So, I thought I’d check in on the Nine Stars pack.”

  “I told you that was a shitty idea, Mike.” Maria regarded him with narrowed eyes.

  “Yeah. Well. Savor this moment. You were right.”

  Maria huffed at him, but said nothing.

  “I thought I would take a head count of the wolves, see if it squared with what our biologists said there should be. One of them has a radio tag with half-dead batteries, so I took a tracker up to the terrace area to look. I got a hit south and west of there, and I kept going. Took me about ten klicks off the trail.

  “I saw two of the wolves, ones that I thought might be from the pack . . . but there was something there with them.” His mouth pressed shut in a hard line, and it seemed he was debating what to say next.

  “Go on,” Maria prodded.

  “Promise not to tell Sam?”

  “We won’t tell Sam.”

  “I dunno what it was,” he confessed. “I saw antlers and a big dark fur coat . . . weird silver eyes. I fired two warning shots, but it didn’t faze the guy. He rushed me, and it was like . . . like being locked in a closet. Dark. Cold. I guess he must have hit me on the head or something. I felt like I was falling, then getting the shit beat outta me.” He lifted one of his hands to his shoulder, where there were bruise marks from what could have been antler points. If he hadn’t been wearing a coat and a bulletproof vest, they could easily have gored him.

  “And then I blacked out.” His gaze flickered to the door. “Good thing Sam came looking for me or I’d be a goner. Somebody buy that man a coffee, okay?”

  “You just focus on getting better.” Maria leaned over and kissed the single unbruised part of his face, the right side of his jaw.

  Petra slid out of the room and leaned against the wall in the hallway. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. She rubbed her brow.

  “Hey.” Maria emerged from the room and touched her elbow. “You all right?”

  “Yeah, I just . . .” Guilt flooded her. “If I had told Mike that the wolf carcass was magic, maybe I could have prevented this . . .”

  “No.” Maria fiercely gripped her shoulder. “No. You do not get to make this your fault. Neither does Sam. Mike is a cowboy and he’ll go after anything in a black hat. I told him there was something hinky about those wolves, about the shapeshifting. He didn’t believe me, and that was his choice.”

  Petra’s hands balled into fists.

  Mike might not have any more choices.

  But she sure as hell did, and she was going to take Skinflint Jack to the grave.

  Chapter 9

  The Chemical Wedding Night

  The wedding party didn’t get back to the reservation until well after midnight. A front had swept in, and snow was beginning to fall. Maria offered her house up t
o Petra and Gabe and Sig, but Petra refused, citing a curiosity to check out the honeymoon suite at the reservation motel. The Internet touted the presence of a massive hot tub and chilled champagne, and she said she wanted to see if they lived up to the billing.

  In truth, Gabe knew that Petra didn’t want to expose her friend to more trouble than she already had. He understood that. Trouble was following them around, and he was feeling like an albatross. Maybe he would have felt different as a fugitive if he was still one of the Hanged Men, powerful and invulnerable. Now . . . now, he felt like a mouse scurrying from hole to hole, hiding from the cat. He couldn’t even go into the hospital to support Petra and her friend. Instead, he was stuck in the parking lot in the Bronco, keeping Sig wrapped in his blanket and running the heat intermittently. He’d whiled away the time reading the maps in Petra’s glove box.

  She’d tucked the amaryllis blossom from their impromptu wedding behind the rearview mirror. The cold hadn’t seemed to wilt it, but Gabe wondered if he should press it in one of her map books for safekeeping. Maybe when it wilted.

  The motel was a newish log structure down the street from the casino. The parking lot was freshly plowed, and there was a moose head in the lobby. He could see it looming over the front desk from the parking lot as Petra went in to get the keys. They drove around the back side of the hotel, parked behind a plowed pile of snow for cover, and went up to the room.

  Sig nosed through the door first. The room had carpet, and Sig flung himself on the floor, rolling around like a dog in fresh spring grass. He made an awful face of delight as the door closed behind them.

  “I don’t think he’s ever been around carpet before,” Petra said, shrugging out of her coat.

  “I think he approves.”

  “They were out of champagne.” She sighed, sitting down on the edge of the bed to remove her boots.

  “No matter.” Gabe fished around in the minibar for drinks in little glass bottles and passed her one.

  “Shall we toast?” Petra lifted her bottle. “To matrimony?”

  “To the chemical wedding of alchemy, the union of opposites, and the secret of immortal life.”

  “Perfect.”

  The wine was sweet, like syrup on a dessert. Gabe studied the bottle.

  “Did you give that toast at your last wedding?”

  “Hnh. No.”

  “What was it like?”

  “I think it would be poor form to discuss such a thing on our wedding night.”

  Petra laughed. “Probably. Tell me about the chemical wedding of alchemy, then.” She tucked her leg up underneath her, as if she was expecting him to tell her one of his stories from the dimly lit alchemical past.

  “The chemical wedding is the idea in alchemy that Sol and Luna are joined and transcend physical reality. It’s a critical stage in accomplishing the Great Work, a repeating cycle of dissolutions and coagulations in which purification occurs.”

  “Sounds . . . romantic. Sort of.”

  “Alchemy, as practiced, is rarely a terribly romantic art. But the chemical wedding is said to be the union of creativity and wisdom, in which the soul is released.”

  She swirled her drink in the bottle, her gaze distant. “It does make for a pretty toast, though.”

  Gabe stood and kissed the top of her head. “I’ll go run you a bath.”

  The honeymoon suite had a hot tub larger than a cattle trough, opposite an electric glass fireplace, and it took forever to fill. Gabe fished around in the minibar for another drink and fiddled with the wall switches until he found the one that turned on the electric fireplace. It looked a little cheesy to him, but he supposed that the maid probably didn’t want to spend time scrubbing wood ash out of the plush carpet.

  His wedding to Jelena had been something of a production by old-fashioned standards. Her wealthy father, thrilled to finally have her married off, put on the fête of the season at his home for all the family. By modern standards, it would have been a very small and ordinary wedding, but at the time, newly tailored clothes and orange blossoms were considered extravagant finery. White wedding dresses and floor-length veils had just come into vogue for the wealthy classes, and Brussels lace was all the rage.

  Jelena had been lovely, and extended her cheek for a chaste peck at the end of the ceremony. Gabe couldn’t remember many of the details of the wedding itself, which was held in the morning, or the wedding breakfast afterward, but he remembered heading out to the train station three days later for an assignment from Pinkerton. Jelena had seen him to the train station, and there had been a twinge of relief in her eyes as she waved him goodbye. He didn’t take it personally; he thought it likely she was relieved that the pomp and circumstance were over, and that she could get back to her day-to-day life. He felt some of the same, truth be told. He had a great deal of admiration for Jelena, and a kind of affection, to be sure. He’d always been told that love was a kind of golden mean between lust and friendship, though his relationship with Jelena had definitely been closer to friendship.

  But Jelena was not Petra. Petra was fire and life and logic, and she was an ongoing puzzle to him.

  By the time the tub was filled, Petra had fallen asleep on the bed. She was stretched out, facing the ceiling, snoring softly. Sig lay beside her on his back, his head in the crook of her arm.

  She was lovely, especially in her unguarded sleep. It seemed to Gabe that perhaps she was a bit paler beneath her freckles than usual. Maybe he was looking for signs of illness, for some glimpse of the invisible.

  She was extraordinary in every way, and it seemed monumentally unfair to him that he’d been granted a century and a half of life, when she might not wring a full lifetime out of her stint on earth. He would give anything to change that. If the Lunaria still had any power, he would have offered her up to it without hesitation, brought her to twilight immortality. He would have let the tree devour her and remake her in whatever image it chose, and he’d have loved the result without the tiniest bit of doubt or reservation. The tree, in its heyday, would have loved her just as much as he did. And Petra would have been quite formidable undead, if she’d been able to siphon off enough of the tree’s magic . . . Gabe had no doubt that she would have learned to adapt more quickly than his men had.

  She wouldn’t want that . . . If it had been possible, he’d have dragged her to the tree, kicking and screaming, even if it meant that she would leave him forever. A world with her in it, and pissed, was far superior to one without her. Now that he was human, he found that he missed the tree in a way that he never had as a Hanged Man. But the tree was gone, and they were stuck with their own clumsy devices in the real world, with medicine and science and hope.

  He knelt beside the bed and pushed the hair away from her face. She was so dear to him, and he hoped she knew that. She deserved more—a real modern wedding, a man who had a job and a home and had his shit together enough to be able to navigate the future of her illness. She deserved more than him. She deserved more life, period.

  And that was one more thing that he couldn’t give her.

  He turned the lights down and went to hang up her coat. The marbles in her pocket clinked against her keys, and he dug them out to inspect them. Maybe these were her father’s idea of luck.

  He slid the white marble under her pillow and the gold one under his. He poured himself another drink and regarded Sig, whose tongue had lolled out of his mouth and stuck to the duvet. Maybe they had the right idea.

  When he climbed into bed, he felt the magic hit him the instant his head hit the pillow. He had the feeling of passing through a veil, falling a fathomless distance.

  Well, damn. His new father-in-law still had the alchemical juice.

  He’d need to have a discussion with the old man about meddling . . . after he climbed out of the spirit world.

  Whiteness surrounded her.

  Petra could feel it before she opened her eyes—that brightness pressing down on her eyelids and filling her brain with a muz
zy lightness. It wasn’t the cold brightness of harsh winter—this was something else, something finer.

  She opened her eyes. She was lying on a skiff of snow that had coated her skirts. Skirts—she looked down and noticed that she was wearing a white velvet dress, with a white velvet cloak.

  “Huh.” She sat upright, blinking. When she woke up dressed in odd clothes that she never would have chosen for herself, whether it was a dress or a suit of goo, it was usually a signal that she’d dropped into the spirit world.

  She pulled her cloak around her shoulders. The hem of it brushed aside to reveal Sig, who was dozing, tangled in her skirts.

  “Hey, bud.” She reached out to shake him awake. He blinked at her and yawned with a squeak.

  She looked up. She was on a path surrounded by ice-frosted birch trees forming a cathedral of ice about her. When she held her breath, she could hear the crackle of sun in the branches. She wrinkled her brow. She didn’t feel cold, and her breath didn’t steam before her.

  She stood and reached for one of the tree branches. It wasn’t ice—it was leaded glass. She took a piece of it and turned it over in her fingers. The glass wasn’t modern—this looked like hand-blown glass, with waves and ridges in it.

  “Interesting.”

  She hadn’t been in the spirit world in months. The last time she’d been here, she’d gone to the spring behind Maria’s house, a pool of blue water the locals called the Eye of the World. She was miles distant from the Eye, and struggled to figure out how she’d gotten here. She’d only been able to travel to the spirit world before with the help of the Eye of the World or when she’d been in serious physical trauma . . . And it had never looked like this. Did the spirit world have seasons, too, just like the physical world?

  Her brow wrinkled. The last thing she remembered in the physical world was stretching out on the motel room bed . . .

  “Did I croak in my sleep?” she blurted to Sig, who was busy chewing a paw.

  He huffed at her. She took that as a negative. But she had no idea what she was doing here, or what she had to do to get out.