Nine of Stars

by Laura Bickle

  “You sound like a proper group of hooligans.”

  “We were. Once, when I was twelve, our oldest brother had dared the rest of us to come look at something he’d found in the tunnels. He said he’d found liquor, which was of immediate interest. We let ourselves in through the tunnel that ran through the graveyard and followed it to where he’d seen the crate of bottles.

  “There was no crate, but we found something else. A pale woman, dressed in black from neck to toe. Her eyes, too, were black, and her hands were like the claws of a bird. She slipped through the dark like an eel. When she opened her mouth, it was with a terrible shriek that sounded like glass breaking.

  “We ran from her. My older brothers were much faster than I was. I struggled to keep up, but I lost track of Henry, my little brother. We were nearly to the graveyard by the time I gave a thought to him. I turned back to find him and saw the woman of the tunnels. She was standing over him, with his heart in her hands.”

  “Gah,” Petra said, involuntarily.

  “She was eating it. I knew at once that he was dead. And I fled.” Gabe was silent for some time, rubbing beeswax into metal in even strokes. “When I returned to the house, my brothers had already alerted the constable to look for him. Henry’s body was never found, though his shoes were found perched on the top of a gravestone in the cemetery.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “It is my greatest regret,” he said. “I didn’t wait for him. I didn’t save him. I let him be devoured by that . . . revenant. I had told my brothers and the constable what happened. My brothers believed me. The constable thought I was mad, thought that I had something to do with it. I spent two weeks in an asylum before my father returned to town and got me out.”

  Petra remained silent. I’m sorry seemed inadequate here. She simply listened, waiting for him to continue.

  “In that time, I saw true madness. I also saw many who had witnessed terrible things and could not overcome the shock. It made me realize that the perimeters around an individual’s reality are more fluid than I thought. And that there were things in the world that could not be explained.”

  “And you went to work for Pinkerton . . . to avenge your brother?”

  “On some level, yes. So did the rest of my brothers, in their fashion. One became a priest. The other became a sheriff in Arkansas. We all chased our own demons, in our way.

  “My parents did not speak of Henry ever again. I never knew if they believed me, but I know that they blamed the rest of us for what had happened. There was a palpable distance that grew. There were many meals after that eaten in silence, and all his belongings were removed from the house and burned.

  “As an adult, I went back down to the tunnels, armed with holy water and silver knives. I wanted to see if that revenant was still there. There had been stories of a woman in black who appeared at the bottom of wells and wandered the churchyards, who stole stillborn infants from the cemetery and left empty graves behind.”

  “Did you find her?”

  “No. I searched for her for many months, but I found no trace of her. All I found was a scrap of rotted black lace in a crypt and a huge nest of stolen rosary beads. I never solved that case.”

  “It wasn’t your fault. You have to know that. You were a child.”

  “It was a long time ago,” he said.

  But she knew that time erased nothing.

  Chapter 15

  Waking Up

  She dreamed of an ache in the marrow of her bones, so much deeper than frost.

  In her dreams, Petra had dropped into Skinflint Jack’s hand-dug cellar, his underground ossuary. It was cold and silent there, and her breath made ghosts in the darkness. Light emanated from the bodies on the bed, from beneath their parchment-thin skin, moving like drifting fireflies underneath the surface. The bodies sat upright, heads turned toward her with empty gazes.

  Petra would have run away, but she was pinned to the wall. Bones laced over her body like shackles, splitting through the skin of the dirt to wrap around her wrists, ribs, and legs. She tried to turn her head, but it was enclosed in a helmet, the Stag’s skull, and she blinked through the eye sockets of the Stag.

  What had he seen? What had he done? She struggled against the weight of the bones, torn between wanting to know and wanting not to know.

  Jack’s wife stood, walking across the floor to Petra in a dress of black lace. Bits of her skin fluttered to the floor, disturbed by Gabe’s autopsy efforts. In her hands, she held the Star of Antimony, gleaming in the shifting low light.

  “What happened to you?” Petra asked, her tears blurring her gaze. The tears slid down her cheek, underneath the skull-mask.

  The woman didn’t answer; only gazed at Petra with those empty, vacant eye sockets.

  And Petra realized that her mouth had been sewn shut.

  “It’s all right.”

  Petra awoke with a start, her fingers wound in Gabe’s coat. She blinked, orienting herself to the main floor of the cabin, with a fire snapping in the grate. She was covered in rough Army-surplus blankets from their packs, with Sig draped across her legs. The fire had warmed the room to a decent temperature. Sig wasn’t curled up in a tight ball. Instead, he was half stretched out with his feet tucked beneath him.

  “You were dreaming,” Gabe said, pushing a piece of her hair behind her ear.

  She looked away. He seemed worried, and she couldn’t stand that, the idea that he felt the need to guard over her sleep. But when she looked away, all she saw were the wolf skins. In the flickering firelight it seemed that they moved and danced above them, the darkness pressed close. It had to be an illusion—she knew that the pheasants they’d frightened earlier slept up there. It had to be.

  She pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around her knees. “I’m okay. Really. I was just dreaming of the basement . . .” She forced herself not to shudder.

  He made a noncommittal noise and reached forward to stir the fire. She saw that the Kentucky rifle had been cleaned and reassembled, leaning against the wall like a prop from a Western film.

  “You fixed it?”

  “Yeah. I think so.”

  “What made you think I was dreaming, anyway?”

  “You snore when you dream. And sometimes you talk in your sleep.”

  She flushed, and chided herself. Why should she be embarrassed? She’d been listening to him snore for weeks. And . . . Jeez. They were married, for God’s sake.

  That reminded her. She stripped off her gloves and dug into her pocket. “Oh, hey. I almost forgot. I got us something at the pawnshop.” She held her hand out with the rings. “I have no idea if these will fit, but . . . I thought . . .”

  It had seemed like a good idea when she’d bought them, but she felt sort of dumb now. Sentimental.

  Gabe took the rings from her, holding them up to the light. “They’re beautiful.” He took hers and slid it on her finger.

  Clumsily, she took his and slid it on his ring finger. It fit, miraculously enough.

  At her feet, Sig yawned loudly. Human rituals, unless they involved dining, held no interest for him.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “I thought we should look legit.” She glanced back at the fire, feeling the metal warming to her hand. Aside from her father’s pendant, she never wore jewelry. She expected this to feel heavy and annoying, but the edges of the ring had been polished smooth with time, like the borders of a river stone.

  “We are legit.” He said it, matter-of-factly, as if it was as evident as day or night.

  “Are we?” She rested her chin on her knees, staring at the popping embers. It looked like the back of a chair was disintegrating in the fire now, or maybe those were rails from a crib. When Skinflint Jack got back, he was sure gonna be pissed about them dismantling his house and desecrating his ossuary. They had to be gone by then.

  “Of course.” He seemed startled. “It may have been a very long time since I’ve worn a ring, but
I think I remember how it goes. Priest, paper . . . done.”

  “I mean . . . what about the future? What about if we go someplace else, and Sheriff Owen eventually gives up? What if I get through treatment okay? What then—do we stay married?”

  He gave a small shrug, and she thought she felt him pull away from her a bit. “It only changes if you want it to change. Once you’re well . . . you can tell me to go away. I’ll abide by your wishes. And you can keep custody of Sig.”

  “I didn’t mean that. I just meant . . . you’re human now. You have a whole lifetime to lead, and I don’t want you to feel shackled to me. Trapped. Or anything.” She was tired and rambling, but she let herself.

  He reached up to push her hair from her shoulder, a familiar gesture. “I will be happily married to you for as long as I can have you. I know not to tempt fate beyond that.” His hand slipped up to her cheek and he kissed her, silencing the roil of doubts and worry thundering in her skull.

  Petra eventually fell back asleep, and Gabe dozed beside her. He glanced down at the ring on his left hand. It seemed to mean something different for him than it did to her. In his day, a marriage with affection was a rarity, and something to be savored. They had that, even love. He knew she found him attractive—she was the most enthusiastic lover he’d ever had. In his time, women had a tendency to lay like logs and count dust motes on the ceiling. He thought he pleased her as well—his back still bore scratches from her fingernails.

  He laid down and stared at the shadows churning among the wolf-kites on the ceiling. He noticed that women in recent decades seemed to want something of romance, but he knew that Petra wasn’t given to such things. On the hotel television, he’d seen a commercial of a man selling soap who was shirtless on a horse. If he’d asked her to marry him shirtless on horseback, she’d have laughed at him outright or gone running away until he’d managed to find the rest of his laundry and his dignity.

  Maybe this was fear of the future that he saw in her. And he could understand that. He feared it, too. He feared the idea of her treatment, what little she’d said about it. It would involve scalpels and poisons of various kinds, finding the endurance to outlast the cancer in her marrow and wherever else it had wandered. He knew no answer to that, other than surrendering to modern technology. Alchemy was not an art that dabbled in healing. It transformed, razing from the ground up.

  But all his imaginings about that were moot. There was no magical solution. Gabe knew death on an instinctive level, and he knew that it had clotted in her shadow. It would take a great deal of science to make it let go of her. He’d had little use for leeches in his former life, even his own father, but he accepted that times had changed since then. Magic was dimming out of the world—not just his world, but the world at large. He could not depend on magic to save her, not anymore. Science could produce things that even alchemy could not; perhaps it could preserve her if he gave it enough faith.

  Besides, he’d made a wish. In Jack’s pond. That had to count for something, didn’t it? He was quite certain that Jack would want him dead now . . . and that would satisfy the bargain. As would Jack’s own death.

  The wind howled overhead for hours and eventually died. The windows were covered in snow, but blue light began to lighten almost imperceptibly behind the crystalline crust.

  Sig sensed it. He rolled over, stretched, and yawned with a whine, arching his back and pulling back his ears. The movement woke Petra, who rubbed at her eyes with her palm.

  “Did the storm stop?”

  “I think so.”

  Her gaze grazed the macabre ceiling. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “We could stay. Wait for Jack to return. He’ll come back, eventually.”

  She shook her head. “No. He’s hunting wolves. And Sheriff Owen is hunting us. I want to keep moving.”

  It took little time to gather their belongings. Petra tied up their bedrolls and blankets, while Sig inspected her pockets for the presence of beef jerky. Gabe set about sweeping snow into the firebox to kill the embers. He took the time to carefully load the Kentucky rifle with powder, one of Petra’s bullets, a cloth circle he’d cut from a scrap of fabric, and the ramrod. He loaded some powder in the pan and covered it with a sock to avoid accidental ignition. It had been a long time since he’d used a weapon like this—he estimated that it would take him a good three minutes to reload. Best to be ready.

  Gabe took one last glance around the place. There wasn’t anything else here that they could pragmatically use—just bits of iron and rotting wood and the materials they’d used to cast bullets. He hid those, not wanting to tip off Jack in case he returned.

  But there were the things they might need, things to trap Skinflint Jack. He reached for the bag he’d left by the fireplace, the things he’d hauled up from the ossuary. The sack clinked as he knotted it shut.

  Petra tugged the door open, and a drift of snow flooded in, up to their knees. She made a face.

  “You reconsidering moving on?” he asked, slinging the pack over his shoulder.

  “No. Not at all.” She slogged into the snow, Sig padding behind her.

  Gabe was about to tug the door shut against the snow drift, but decided against it.

  If Jack came back before they caught up with him, he wanted to leave a challenge for him. He wanted Jack to know they had been there. That they were hunting him. That they knew what he was.

  Dawn had not yet burned through the cloud cover. The world was perfectly silent, wrapped in snow that gleamed violet under the sky’s shadow. They dug the remaining snowmobile out and dusted snow from the engine exhaust. Gabe estimated that nearly two feet of snow had fallen, on top of the snow that had already been there. The fresh snow was dense and wet, pierced by only a few rabbit and fox tracks in the broad expanse.

  Gabe swished some blood into the Venificus Locus as the engine warmed. The blood drop circled agitatedly in the groove circumscribing the rim. It clearly was focused on Skinflint Jack’s house . . . hopefully, as they gained distance from it, it would be able to home in on Jack himself, or the wolves he was hunting.

  Petra climbed up behind him on the snowmobile, and Sig clambered up between his knees like the figurehead on a ship. He noticed that Petra had wrapped Sig’s ears with a scarf tied around his neck, and he smiled. With a quick wrench on the throttle, Gabe plunged into the frigid predawn.

  He mulled strategy in his head. Jack had been human once; he had a human intelligence, motivated by emotion. It would be critical to get ahead of him, somehow, to lay a trail that might lead him to Sepulcher Mountain, for the ritual that Petra’s father had suggested. He hadn’t admitted it to Petra, but he wasn’t certain how this was going to come together. In his time as a Pinkerton agent, he’d researched the dark arts and rubbed elbows with necromancers and summoners. But he’d typically been an observer, not a practitioner.

  If all else failed . . . He glanced back at the gun lashed to the snowmobile packs. If all else failed, perhaps they could destroy the Jack of Harts with brute force. Or, at least, maybe they could hobble him long enough to get the wolves out of his way.

  The world had gone white, a screaming white that burned through Owen’s eyelids and seared into his brain with blistering fingers.

  “Owen.”

  A voice cut through the white noise, a hiss over the static that suffused every cell of his body.

  “Owen. Owen, wake up.”

  He cracked his eyes open, and the light became more blinding. He thought he’d given himself a bad case of snow blindness, but he fixed on Anna’s face, peering at him.

  “Owen. Get up. Get up, or you’re going to die.”

  He looked past her, at the fire. It had blackened the side of the pine tree, red embers glowing. He coughed and rubbed his face with numb fingers. His gloves came away with black soot. Smoke had blackened his clothing and his exposed skin.

  “Get up, Owen.”

  He struggled to get his legs under him. They felt swollen. Not parti
cularly cold, just unwieldy. It took him three tries to crouch, then grasp the overhead pine branches. Snow had formed a crust over it, an igloo of ice where the fire had melted and it froze again. Above the fire, water dripped from a hole the hot smoke had burned into it.

  He pulled the branches apart, snow sliding down over the remnants of the fire. He dug with his hands, panic rising in his throat. He was buried. Buried alive, in ice and sticks and pine sap.

  “Lemme out,” he panted, his hands slamming into the frozen sheets. They’d melded with the branches, forming an unbreakable wall.

  “Lemme out.” He kicked at the walls, doubling up his fists.

  “Lemme out!”

  The snow was heavy. He made a dent, and thick chunks of it slid down from above. He could feel himself hyperventilating. How much oxygen was in here, anyway, that hadn’t been eaten up by the fire?

  “Lemme out!” he howled, then whimpered.

  Anna was standing at the far side of the shelter, cowering from his rage. He didn’t care. He was going to fucking die in here with a ghost, and wind up haunting this godforsaken hillside with her. He’d have forever to apologize.

  If she was even real in the first place. Maybe he imagined her. He discarded that thought immediately. Anna was real. He was real, too. The weird shit underneath Sal’s ranch was real. He had to find the answer to it. He would not die like this. Would not.

  He took off his belt and began to hack at the ice with the buckle. Slivers of ice spewed back at him, cutting his face. He shouted as he swung, the belt biting into his prison in a wrathful rhythm.

  “Let.

  “Me.

  “Out.”

  This fucking storm. It shouldn’t have been here. It had come to test him, to try to stop him. Damn it. He wouldn’t let it. He was going to uncover all the Rutherford Ranch’s secrets. He would not be defeated. Not by something as stupid as fucking snow.

  His belt buckle chipped away at air, and a thin trickle of grey light slid in. Owen jammed his fist into it, feeling the ice chew into the knuckles of his glove. He began to strike it with both fists, howling and screaming. His screams echoed tightly in this space, sounding like Friday night at the jail under a full moon.