Nine of Stars

by Laura Bickle

  “There was a monster . . .”

  “A leftover alchemical experiment. She was meant to be an oracle and, well . . . the process disintegrated. Lascaris sent her to the river.”

  “Lascaris? The town founder?”

  “Yes. This goes deeper than you can imagine. But. We should get moving.”

  “Where are we going?” Owen leaned forward to wash his face in the water. Petra wrinkled her nose. He smelled like pine pitch and fire, like he’d been locked in a burning barn.

  “Sepulcher Mountain. To capture Skinflint Jack.”

  Owen looked back at them. “I’m in. But you have to tell me everything.”

  “Later. As promised.”

  Owen had done a nice job of fucking up their machine. But there were still usable parts. She siphoned as much gas as she could off into empty water bottles. She pulled the headlight reflector, bulb, and battery out. Wrapping the connections with duct tape, she could make a pretty decent lantern that would run forever on that big a battery. With a screwdriver, she ripped the hood off the defunct machine, flipped it over, and set about stringing it up with rope to make a sled to haul their supplies. As she worked, the air was cold in her wet hair, and her teeth chattered.

  Sig came to lay down in the snow beside her, looking up at her with a soft expression.

  “Strange alliances, huh, Sig?” She jammed her finger on a sharp edge of metal and swore. “I feel like everybody knows what’s going on but me.”

  Sig solemnly stood to lick her face.

  “I trust you. And if you trust the wolves, I trust them, too.”

  Sig sat back, his gold ear flipping backward. In the chill, the interior was pale pink. Petra reached out and turned it back over. She didn’t want him to get frostbite.

  “That guy . . . I do not trust that guy.”

  Sig whined. She took that as agreement.

  “We should watch him. You, me, and everyone with four feet.” She shook her head. She suspected Gabe was too easily trusting of anyone with the last name Rutherford, since that was all he’d known, that intergenerational line of ass-hats. But this dude was crazy. And crazy did not make good deals.

  “Off the record, if the wolves decide they’re hungry enough to snack on him, I won’t try very hard to stop them.”

  One of the wolves sidled up to watch her work. The grey one. She sat in the snow about two yards distant, watching.

  “Hello,” Petra said. She didn’t make direct eye contact, not wanting to be perceived as a threat.

  The wolf didn’t run away. She thumped her fluffy tail in the snow and whimpered.

  “We’ll get moving soon, sweetie,” Petra said. It was hard not to treat the wolf as an animal, when she suspected there was a centuries-old sentient creature in there, wearing a fluffy suit. “The plan is to lure Jack to Sepulcher Mountain in a day. If we can nail him there during the solstice, he’ll be kicked out to the spirit world. And you guys can go on your merry way.”

  But the wolf continued to stare at her, as if there was a weighty question Petra wasn’t answering. And she had no idea what it was.

  Nine liked the woman Coyote had brought with him. She seemed gentle, and she kept fishing pieces of dry food from her pockets to feed the pack. The woman clearly loved Coyote—Nine had seen how she had thrown herself over Coyote to protect him from the Burnt Man’s gun. She was a good servant for Coyote; Nine could see that he had chosen well.

  Nine didn’t have a strong feeling, one way or the other, about the woman’s mate. He seemed much older than he looked. He had the bearing of a chief, of some kind of deposed king. He smelled like a raven, which made no sense whatsoever to her, unless he was some kind of Skinwalker. He didn’t do anything threatening, but Nine didn’t like his proximity to the man who smelled like burning.

  They finally got their little caravan together. Coyote’s serving woman rode the Burnt Man’s snowmobile with the jerry-rigged sled holding their supplies behind it. The two men walked on foot with the wolves and with Coyote. The Burnt Man walked ahead of Raven King, and the Raven King kept a gun on him at all times. Still, Nine remained ready to take him out at the knee if he made a threatening move.

  She could feel magic in the air, the magic of time and stars. The solstice was coming. She’d felt the nights dragging longer and longer, felt the sun’s track growing shorter and shorter during the day, sweeping lower on the horizon. In some distant memory, she recalled that her people had celebrated this time of year, calling the sun back from his self-imposed exile in darkness. She didn’t remember many of the details, other than the dancing. She had enjoyed the dancing by the fire, feeling the exhilaration of crisp, cold air. She was part of nature, a small fragment working through the wheel of the year in ancient cycles.

  She had not felt that way for a very long time. She felt . . . somehow apart from this. When she encountered wolves from other packs, she was conscious that they were different. They were true descendants of Wolf. She knew, deep down, that she and the others only wore the cloak of Wolf. Many of them had likely forgotten, had become Wolf in spirit as well as body over the generations, like the pups. But Nine wasn’t certain. She could still remember fragments of her old life, though she didn’t know if it was truly her own life, or if it was some part of a collective memory diluted by generations of wild wolf blood.

  She had felt magic like this, in the distant past, when her father was still alive. Her father had been a Magic Man, fearsome and funny. She forgot his name; it had been so long ago. But she remembered that she had loved him dearly as a little girl, the way he could talk to turtles and wasps. He could become any creature he liked, as long as he had its skin to wear. Once, she’d seen him become a dragonfly when he put a pair of iridescent wings on his eyebrows, just to amuse her. He walked the Witchery Way, but she never thought of him as evil. He just was.

  He had given her a gift, once. It was a small bag of corpse dust, ground bones and bits of obsidian and crushed sage. She was fascinated by it, opening the bag and peering inside to watch the light glint on the obsidian fragments. She knew there was power in it; she just didn’t know how much. She wore it in a bag strung around her neck, close to her heart.

  She understood the power of it one day when one of her sisters snatched the bag from her neck, accusing her of being her father’s favorite. Nine, in her childish venom, had wished her dead at the top of her lungs.

  And her sister dropped dead, a victim of the Harming. She fell over in her tracks, spilling the Harming, which scattered away to the ground, where it should have gone in the first place.

  Nine was devastated. She would not eat or tell anyone what happened. But her father knew. He sat her on his knee and told her that she was a very precocious girl, but that she should perhaps be a bit older to use such tools. There was an odd tone of pride in his voice that she couldn’t understand.

  If she just had a bit of that corpse dust now, just a pinch of the Harming . . .

  She shook her head. There was no point in such thinking. There was no point in thinking at all. They were moving toward the mountain, and that knowledge swelled in her heart as correct. If they defeated the Stag, all this could be their new territory. It could mean the future of the pack. They could hunt this land and all within it. It could be theirs.

  The sky cleared out overhead and the stars bristled through. The road of stars overhead mirrored the unseen road before them. As above, so below. The mountain reached from one plane to another, from earth to heaven. Even from this distance, Nine could tell that it hummed with power. She felt that hum in her throat, wanting to vibrate out as a howl. She kept silent, not wanting to give their position away to the Stag.

  But the Stag found them anyway.

  They’d made camp in the foothills at the base of the mountain. The Coyote’s Seneschal—the woman—had started a fire in a hollowed-out tree stump, splashed with a bit of gasoline and a spark from the machine battery. The wind screamed across the valley, and they did their best to use
that machine as a windbreak. The wolves huddled together in a pile. Coyote was welcomed into the pile, as was his servant and her mate, the Raven King. The Raven King did not stay long, preferring to keep watch.

  The Burnt Man was not welcome in this den. Ghost snarled at him as he tried to approach. Instead, he huddled close to the fire in blankets, talking to himself. He was clearly quite mad. Nine had hoped that Coyote’s Seneschal and the Raven King would give up on him and let the pack eat him. Nine was certain the rest of the pack was thinking about it. One was either in or out in wolf culture. Us or them. Even at Nine’s status, at the bottom of the hierarchy, she was in. The humans didn’t even want this man in their own hierarchy, but they feared him. He reminded her of a male wolf that had tried to tag along with the pack several years ago. He tried to join, but Ghost ran him off. Fortunately, that hadn’t resulted in bloodshed. But this, she sensed, would be different.

  Nine curled tightly against the Coyote Seneschal’s leg, beneath a blanket. Coyote was already there, but he shared. She’d nearly drifted off to sleep, in a haze of warmth in the arms of her new protectors, when the Raven King whispered, “Something’s coming.”

  He had kept watch, pacing above them on a snow-covered hillock. He held a gun, scanning the dark horizon.

  The woman climbed out of the tangle of grey and black limbs. “What is it?”

  “I think it’s our target.”

  Then the wind shifted. Nine could smell him. The Stag. She scrambled upright, whimpering. The others churned awake, stirring tails and ears and the edges of blankets. The Seneschal grabbed her guns, and the Burnt Man clawed to his feet.

  “What is it?” he demanded. “What’s coming?”

  “Shut up, Owen,” the Seneschal said.

  A shadow crossed the ice field, blacker than the sky surrounding it, stark against the snow. It came at terrible speed, fast and silent as an owl, moving downwind.

  “Skinflint Jack. Jack of Harts.” The Raven King shouted across the expanse, his rifle lifted to his shoulder. “Stop where you are.”

  The shadow hesitated for a moment, perhaps startled at being named. Nine knew that names had power; in a distant memory, she recalled a great shaman being turned to dust at the mention of his true secret name. But the Stag was not summoned to dust; he swept toward them, cloak flaring behind. A whine escaped Nine’s bared teeth.

  The Raven King fired. Nine flinched at the muzzle flash and the report’s echo across the field. The bullet struck the Stag’s antlers, shattering the right stem with a loud crack. He turned his head and howled at them, an unearthly howl like the roar of wind through a crevasse in January.

  And he advanced, as unstoppable as that wind.

  “Damn it,” the Raven King swore. He reached for the powder horn at his side.

  “That hurt him, at least,” the Seneschal said.

  The wolves were on their feet, surrounding the Raven King on the hillock, keening. The Seneschal had lifted her guns, eyes wide with fear. Even Coyote, tangled in the Seneschal’s legs, laid his ears back. The Burnt Man stood behind them, frozen in terror.

  Ghost bayed, a short, sharp bark of retreat. The wolves turned then, moving toward a frozen river that meandered to the north. Nine followed them, but paused to look back to make sure the humans and Coyote were coming. Ghost nipped her in the flank. His responsibility was the pack, not the humans.

  “Follow them,” the Raven King shouted to the Seneschal. “Across the river.”

  “Not without you.”

  “I’m right behind you.”

  They began to retreat, to move downhill, behind the wolves, toward the river.

  But the Burnt Man remained rooted in place.

  “Owen, come on.”

  He turned slowly, to follow the others. But not fast enough to catch up with them. The Stag swept up like the west wind and engulfed him.

  Owen saw the darkness coming, and was transfixed.

  He had never seen anything like it, this shadow that skimmed over the snow, wearing the skull and antlers of a stag. It was a man, but it wasn’t. Instinctively, he knew it was some elemental force of nature, some bit of wind and darkness granted form.

  “Owen. You have to run.” Anna tugged at his sleeve.

  He couldn’t speak. He couldn’t run. He was fascinated by this tatter of black flag and fur, moving toward him. It seemed that the temperature dropped several degrees, and he could feel the frost on his face crackling as it came.

  “Run!” Anna shrieked at him.

  He had no desire to run, no wish to fight. It swept into him, over him, a wall of darkness that muffled Anna’s shrieks and the howls of wolves.

  All he heard was the drone of the wind. It hissed in his ears and through his body, like steam. And he was falling. With the sensation of falling from an impossibly tall height, his stomach pitched into his throat and he screamed.

  Annihilation surrounded him like a thick cloak. This was deeper than any drunk, blackout haze he’d craved when he wanted to shut out the world. He was dead. He knew it. He felt the darkness hollowing him out, like an awl. He could feel his cells disassociating, the cold oblivion sinking through him. His breath clotted and his neurons stopped firing.

  He landed against the ground with a white crack, and that was the last thing he remembered.

  Chapter 18

  That Old Black Magic I Forgot Once Upon a Time

  Nine struggled to keep up with the pack as they crossed the river. It wasn’t much of a river, less than twelve feet wide, but the surface was slippery under the skin of snow. She turned back to see the Stag dropping the Burnt Man to the ground like an empty shell and gliding to the bank of the river. From this distance, Nine couldn’t tell if he was alive or not.

  “What’s the plan?” the Seneschal yelled. She’d picked up Coyote and was sliding across the ice with him under her arm.

  “Reloading,” the Raven King muttered, fishing bits of metal and cloth from his pocket. The powder horn was balanced in the crook of his arm.

  The Stag put a cloven hoof on the ice, with a sound like thunder.

  A cracking sounded from deep underneath the surface of the ice. The Seneschal put the coyote down and gave him a shove. “This is hot spring water. It’s not completely frozen.”

  The Raven King backed away as the Stag stomped out onto the ice. His cloven hooves made deep indentations that quickly filled with water. He had to be heavier than even the humans.

  Ghost had lagged behind with the Raven King. He barked and snarled at the Stag, trying to distract the monster from a pup who was dancing on crackling ice. The pup howled and yipped for its mother like a newborn. The ice split beneath it and its back half fell into the water.

  Nine turned back, plunged into the water after the pup. She grabbed his ruff in her jaws. With all her strength, she backed up and drew the pup’s paws onto the firmer ice. The pup scrambled, slipping. Nine put her head under his rump and shoved as hard as she could, sending him scooting across the ice toward the rest of the pack . . .

  . . . but the ice broke beneath her. It splintered up against her belly like a blow, and she fell, fell into cold darkness.

  “No!”

  Shock enveloped Nine. Her only thought was for the pack, the need to save the pup. The pup was so much more valuable than she was; he had to survive. He couldn’t die, like Sage had. She wouldn’t let him.

  But she knew, on a deep level, that this was the end for her. She had lagged behind for too far and too long. She was too thin and too weak to keep up, and the water would claim her. She felt her body slipping away like a milkweed pod, and she was suspended for a moment in that limbo of cold water. She knew instinctively that she was between worlds, suspended between life and death. She had no more energy to fight, and she surrendered to the water. She was without bones and form, and thought herself more ghost than corporeal, in that moment. Something slipped from her, and it felt like a skin, sloughing away.

  Something grasped the back of her nec
k with a clumsy grip and pulled. Her head broke the surface of the water, and she gasped. It was the Seneschal. She’d wrapped her elbow around Nine’s neck, was clumsily flopping on the ice as she tried to draw Nine up over the shifting lip of ice. She jammed her boot into a jagged crack in the ice and got enough leverage to haul Nine over into her lap, legs flailing.

  Nine lay against the ice, gasping. She had no strength.

  The Seneschal stared at her. “Oh, shit.”

  Nine whined. She made to get up, but her feet slid beneath her. And then she realized that her feet were no longer feet. They were hands, like the Seneschal’s.

  The Seneschal grabbed her hands and pulled. She pulled until they reached the opposite bank, and Coyote and the wolves grasped the Seneschal’s pant leg and coat in their jaws. Nine rolled into the snow beside the pup she’d rescued, feeling cold noses pressing against her gooseflesh.

  Through slitted eyes, Nine looked back at the river.

  Ghost and the Raven King were battling the Stag. The Raven King was swinging his gun at the Stag like a club. The Seneschal clawed herself upright and shot the ice at the foot of the Stag, fracturing the fragile surface. The Stag plunged into the river, antlers churning. The man and Ghost tried to flee to the bank. Beneath the ice, Nine could see a dark shadow swirling and the pale silhouette of an antler as it tracked them. She howled an alarm.

  The Stag burst forth in a hail of ice, up from the depths. The wolves yipped and cowered around her. Nine lowered her head, shivering, baring her teeth.

  “Hey!” the Raven King said, pulling something from his pocket. It was metallic and shiny, in the shape of a star. Nine had never seen anything like it. It shone as bright as the moon.

  The Stag paused, one cloven hoof on an ice floe, tipping its antlered head. Its expression was inscrutable. It could be confusion. It could be wrath.