Nine of Stars

by Laura Bickle

  A path of swept snow extended before her. Maybe she was meant to follow.

  She balled her hands in her awkward skirts and began to hike. Fortunately, the spirit world had seen fit to give her flat-soled boots, which was something to be appreciated. The spirit world could be capricious as hell, and she was thankful not to be saddled with stupid footwear.

  Her cloak scraped the snow as she advanced down the path. Sig plodded nonchalantly in her wake, pausing to sniff at the trees and water them. Petra was pretty sure she hadn’t died in her sleep—was there piss in the afterlife? Could be . . .

  She stopped short. The snow was seething in front of her. It seemed to drop away into a pool of dry ice, vaguely body-shaped. The snow solidified in a black stain, the shadow of a man.

  Cautiously, Petra crept forward. She reached down to shake the man’s shoulder. There was no response.

  She turned him over, and her heart clattered behind her ribs.

  It was Gabe.

  She had never seen him in the spirit world. She knew that things and people took on all kinds of odd shapes and forms, but she recognized him at once. He looked similar, but he was dressed in an old-fashioned black suit. His hands and face were pale and slack in unconsciousness.

  But something about his skin had changed. It was lined in a pattern, on his cheek, on the backs of his hands, on his throat. She deciphered the pattern—it was feathers. But it didn’t look like a tattoo—it looked as if the feathers were pressing up from beneath his skin. She reached for a pulse and found none.

  “Shitshitshit,” she swore. Maybe he’d gotten stuck in some epic shit zone of an alchemical transformation. He wasn’t breathing, and that couldn’t be good.

  She shook him again, harder this time, but he didn’t awaken. She flopped him onto his back, laced her hands over his heart and thumped on him sixteen times. She tipped his chin back and forced air into his mouth. She had no idea if CPR worked in the spirit world, but she was sure going to find out.

  She counted two breaths, then felt his lips move against hers. His hand reached up to tangle in her hair, and he kissed her.

  She broke it off. “Gabe, what . . .”

  A smile played on his lips. He looked at her, then over her shoulder. Under her hands, she could feel that he still had no pulse. The shadow of a feather moved beneath his cheek, as if pushed by an unseen breeze.

  “What the hell? Were you playing opossum?” If he said yes, she was going to slug him, so help her God.

  “No.” He raised his hands in mock surrender. “I haven’t been to the spirit world since I became a Hanged Man . . . it’s apparently a lot tougher than your father thought to bring me back and forth.”

  “What do you mean?” She sat back beside him on the snow-dusted ground. “What’s he got to do with this?”

  Gabe grinned. “Remember the marbles he gave you?”

  “The ones I was supposed to put under our pillows . . . Oh. You did?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why did . . . Oh.” It began to dawn on her. The white dress. The cathedral of glass.

  “This is your father’s wedding gift to us.”

  A lump rose in her throat. Her father had nothing to give to her. No contribution to a lavish wedding—not that she would have accepted it, anyway. But this was something he could do—open a gate to an experience that might be of their own making.

  “And you are lovely in the spirit world, by the by,” Gabe said, touching her hair. She realized there were flowers braided into it. Amaryllis. Sig leaned in close to her and pulled one free. She snatched it from him before he ate it, dimly recalling that amaryllis flowers were poisonous to dogs. She had no idea what effect they had on spirit-coyotes.

  “And you.” She turned back to Gabe and pressed her hand to his cheek. “But you’re different, here.” And it wasn’t just his skin. His eyes were still amber, but the irises were larger, like a bird’s.

  He shrugged and looked down at his hands. “I suspect we’re changing all the time, in the spirit world. At least I didn’t appear as a turtle or a weasel. That would have been decidedly unromantic.”

  “Dad would have found it funny,” she admitted.

  Gabe climbed to his feet and offered her his elbow. “Shall we find what else your father has built for us this evening?”

  “I shudder to imagine it.”

  They wound their way through the cathedral forest, down the snow path. It was silent here, feeling shielded and muffled by the snow. The path stopped at stone steps that led up the edge of a mountain to a terrace.

  She climbed the steps, mindful not to trip on her skirts by keeping them clutched in her left hand. Sig bounded ahead of them, and she heard a happy yip in the distance.

  The terrace opened up to a fantastic view of mountains at twilight. Petra had no idea where in the world this could be. If it had come from her father’s mind—he’d been everywhere. She suspected these were the Dolomites, but she couldn’t be certain. Her dad didn’t seem to have fussed much with the architecture—the terrace grew out of the side of the mountain, and there was a lit structure glowing behind it, as organic as a cave.

  The doors to the terrace were flung open to a dining room with a table set for two. Well, three . . . Sig had hopped up on a chair and planted his face in a soup tureen. Petra plucked it from the table and set it down on the stone floor. Sig was content to slurp noisily from it.

  “Your father has interesting taste,” Gabe said as he took her cloak. She thought she’d be cold here, but a fire blazed with warmth at the other end of the small room, tended to by no one.

  She glanced down at her exposed arms. She’d expected to see the scars there from her waking life, but they were gone. Her skin was freckled and milky . . . but beneath it, she could see the suggestion of her veins. Instead of blue, they were a dark violet, like faded ink on a map. She wondered if that was some sign of her leukemia, here, in the spirit world. If the spirit world showed everyone as they truly were, whether divine or decaying . . .

  Gabe bent to tenderly kiss her shoulder on one of the inky veins. “Don’t think about it,” he whispered.

  She turned her attention to the rest of the table and laughed out loud.

  All the courses were laid out: soup, a pheasant, fresh baked bread with apple butter, vegetables . . . and a bowl of Froot Loops in the center, poured into a silver bowl.

  “That was my favorite, as a little girl,” Petra said as she took a seat. She pondered the food for a moment. Persephone had gotten in a big heap of trouble for eating a pomegranate in the spirit world and had ended up stuck with Hades for half the year. But this was a gift from her father. She knew, in her heart of hearts, that he wouldn’t want her trapped in the spirit world, no matter how prettily gilded the cage. This had to be safe.

  “That looks . . . inedible.” Gabe eyed the Froot Loops with suspicion.

  “Try it.”

  He gingerly took a spoonful. “Not bad.”

  “See. I knew you were the one for me.”

  Gabe’s eyes roved over the pheasant, and she thought she saw a flicker of sentimentality on his face. “The rest of it . . . it’s what might have been served in my era.”

  “Then we should have at it . . . though I’m certain Sig will want to try, too.”

  The dinner was perfect. Petra had never given thought to eating in the spirit world; she’d usually been too busy running from predators and trying not to wind up in the Underworld to appreciate its more pleasant sensory delights. Everything here was thought out down to the smallest detail—the lemon oil sheen on the table, the height of the chairs. There was even a half-open door that led to a darkened bedroom with a four-poster bed and the flicker of fire in a grate.

  “Ohmygawd,” she murmured around a mouthful of bird. “This is amazingly real butter.”

  Gabe grinned. “And an excellent brine.”

  They meandered through the courses. On the sideboard, a cake had been left for them—chocolate, Petra’s favori
te. They took their dessert to the terrace to gaze at the mountains, leaning on the stone railing. The air swept up in drafts from the valley below, chasing crumbs from her plate.

  She felt alive. Which was patently ridiculous, since this wasn’t a real place.

  “How did he do this?” she murmured.

  “Some alchemists created pocket universes by accident . . . I suspect your father is rather skilled at this. Given the tools he has at hand in our world, I suspect that he’s figured out some way to stash a magical tool set in the spirit world, somewhere.”

  She gazed out at the snow trickling from a far-off mountain peak and licked the frosting from her fork. “Could we stay here?” she said suddenly.

  “Probably not,” he admitted, after seeming to think it through. “This is likely a time-limited construct. Unless it’s constantly fed energy, it won’t last. I can’t see where your father has an ongoing energy source at the nursing home, unless he’s tapping into the life force of every other resident on the floor.”

  “Nah. That’s not his shtick.”

  “But we have it for tonight.” Gabe set his plate down and pushed a piece of hair back behind her ear. “Let’s not worry about the future.”

  She leaned forward and kissed him. She wanted to feel his arms around her, his curious skin against hers. Her fingers traced the outlines of feathers beneath his skin, and she sank into his hot mouth.

  This little kingdom wasn’t forever, but it was theirs for tonight.

  Everything was his, now.

  Owen stood in Sal’s living room, a tumbler of bourbon in one hand and a bottle of Ambien in the other. The lights were turned off, and he looked out through the glass at the white landscape and black sky spreading below him. He thought it odd as hell that Sal had never put up blinds or curtains in his massive house on a hill; he didn’t like the idea of oppressive night converging on him or the thought that he could be spied upon. Especially since he didn’t know what was in that night. Likely, something pretty awful.

  “Are you going to live here, now?”

  Anna swung her legs on the edge of Sal’s cowhide couch. She was looking around, at the antler chandelier dripping with crystals, the travertine floors, the trophies of elk and bear and antelope mounted on the walls. Maybe she was trying to decide if it was a place she was willing to haunt.

  “Maybe,” he said. He didn’t have any great attachment to his own house in the county seat. He’d moved there five years ago and still hadn’t finished unpacking. It was a new building in a cookie-cutter gated community on the touristy side of town, which was inhabited entirely by skiers in the winter and was a ghost town in the summer, with wilting hyssop planted near the mailboxes. His mother had known the realtor, and it seemed the thing to do at the time.

  “It’s kind of ugly,” Anna said, peering up at the stuffed head of a warthog on the wall. The warthog’s lip was pulled back in a permanent grimace. Owen wondered if the taxidermist had done that specifically for Sal’s benefit.

  The house was pretty hideous, to Owen’s taste. It wouldn’t have been his first choice in places to frequent. He’d been told that other houses had stood here, over time. But Sal had the previous house nearly torn down to the foundations and built a new structure of faux-rustic timber and electric lights on top. Which was something of a shame; Owen remembered the old house, which had been quite grand in its own right, but it was quieter. A lodge that faded into the hillside, with scarred floors and a few inoperable gaslights still peppering the ceilings.

  “Yeah. It is kind of ugly.” There was a chandelier in the bathroom, for chrissakes, right above the toilet. “But it’s kind of interesting, too.”

  “You mean the tunnels,” Anna said.

  “Yeah. The tunnels are interesting. Also terrifying.”

  “I don’t like being underground,” Anna declared again, shuddering.

  “I know. I don’t think those men we found liked it much, either.”

  “But you still want to go back down there.”

  “Yes.” He wondered now—what was here, what Sal had known, and what he hadn’t. He hadn’t yet broken the passwords on Sal’s computer, to see if his cousin had kept any records of what went on here. That would come in time.

  But he was conflicted, even as he rinsed the grime and blood off his body in Sal’s palatial marble shower. He wanted to get to the bottom of it. But he wanted to do it himself. He didn’t want to share this with his deputies. He didn’t know what he was dealing with, and it felt as if he was on the cusp of some great mystery, some secret that was his and his alone.

  He slugged a couple of Ambien down with a chaser of bourbon and stared at the gash in his arm. It looked like he’d gone a round with a bear. And that giant pearl in his pocket that was likely worth a small fortune—those were real. Real and entirely inexplicable.

  But Sal was dead. And fifteen other people, give or take a leg or two. He wouldn’t know for sure until the coroner got back to him, but he was pretty sure that Sal had been killed straightforwardly, hanged. The others . . . he didn’t see how it was possible to embed a man in a tree. The crime scene folks had peeled part of a kidney from a fist made of roots. They’d even found ribs wound underneath a skin of bark. It just wasn’t possible. But they were dead, and he wanted to know how.

  He had a pretty damn good idea who the killer was. His deputies were looking for Gabriel, and they would find him, sooner or later. Owen just wanted an hour in a room alone with him, video camera off. Not to beat a confession out of him, or even to know why he did it. He wanted to know the how of it.

  Owen’s cell phone rang and he bent down to the lacquered coffee table to pick it up. “This is Owen.”

  “Sorry to bother you so late, Sheriff. But you told us to call when we got some prints back.”

  “Yes. Whatcha got?”

  “We found some partial prints on some of the stone surfaces down there. Some really old prints. Some partial archival matches to crime scenes back from Prohibition, even. No names on those, just hits on the archive database that some data nerd is working on. Those guys are long dead.”

  “I wonder if this wasn’t some rum runner’s tunnel.”

  “Could be, Sheriff. Especially since we did get another hit, a print belonging to a Pinkerton agent from the 1900s.”

  “Wow. That is old.”

  “FBI says that the Pinkertons were experimenting with fingerprinting back then and printed some of their agents. It’s more of an historical oddity than anything else.”

  “You got a record number on that?”

  “Yeah. FBI should be faxing what they have to your location as they dig through their files. Looks like a bunch of dead leads so far, but maybe the coroner will have something interesting for us.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Good night.”

  Owen wandered to Sal’s office. It was entirely paneled in mahogany, covered with books that Owen was certain he’d never read. Some of them weren’t even real—one whole bookcase was actually just papered in textured wallpaper that looked like book spines. A fax machine was buzzing away in the corner, spewing out thermal pages.

  Owen picked the pages off the floor, thumbing through the blurry photocopies of archival records. He’d always been curious about law enforcement history, and the Pinkertons were a particular source of interest to him. He paged through the blurry prints and the archivist’s notes on the Pinkertons’ handwritten files. If nothing else, this would be educational. When he was a schoolboy, he’d read about Pinkerton and his agents foiling an assassination plot against Abraham Lincoln, about how the agency eventually grew to an army of private police. Over time, he’d picked up a collection of badges that he kept in a frame in his office, next to his American flag decorated with gold fringe and a picture of him shaking hands with the governor at a fund-raiser. The badges gave people who visited his office something to look at while he sized them up.

  He picked up a page off the floor and squinted at a photocopy of
an old Pinkerton Investigative Services ID card. The agent’s name was Gabriel Manget and he had worked for Pinkerton in “Special Cases.” Owen sat down hard. The description was nearly identical to the sketch of Gabriel his men had been papering Temperance with: a six-foot man, 185 pounds, black hair and brown eyes. The ID card was too early for a photograph, but it was a strange coincidence. Maybe this guy was a great-great-grandfather of the Gabriel he was looking for now?

  In Owen’s study of the organization, “Special Officers” had often been hired on the spot to chase outlaws and break strikes—some were shadier than others. He wondered if Gabriel had been one of these men, or if he was involved in something else. The elegantly inked notes accompanying the file listed places that Agent Manget had presumably been sent to on assignment: Boston, Paris, Savannah . . . He scanned the list and his finger stopped on the last entry: Temperance. There were no notes on what he’d been doing there, no dates or indication what his mission might have been.

  “Did you find anything?” Anna drifted into the room and began running her fingers down the spines of the faux books.

  “Yeah.” He sat back in Sal’s chair and poured himself another drink. “Things just got real interesting.”

  Chapter 10

  Relics

  Petra awoke, staring at a popcorn ceiling and listening to the hum of the electric fireplace. She was back at the motel, with a view of the Dumpster in the parking lot and not the Dolomites. Sig had fallen asleep curled around her head, like a fluffy hat. She took inventory and realized that she was still in her street clothes, with a blanket tucked up around her chin.

  She rolled over to reach for Gabe, but he was gone.

  She reached under the pillows and fished around. She came up with two marbles.

  “Hell of a gift, Dad,” she muttered.

  She sat up, running her fingers through her hair. A pang of worry lanced through her. Where was Gabe? He’d made it back from the spirit world okay . . . right? She climbed out of bed and walked to the window. The Bronco was still there, covered in a couple of inches of snow. At least that would serve to hide the license plates from any suspicious passersby.