Nine of Stars

by Laura Bickle

  “You know this. The Star of Antimony.” The Raven King turned it in his fingers so it captured the light in its metallic facets.

  The Stag made a piteous noise and reached for it. It must be a great treasure for him.

  The Raven King tossed it in the river.

  The Stag howled and plunged in after it. His shadow slid under the ice, churning downstream like a salmon in pursuit of a mate.

  The Raven King turned back. “That might keep him busy, but . . .” He made eye contact with Nine.

  “Where did she come from?”

  The Seneschal was wrapping her coat around Nine. “One of the wolves fell in and . . . she came back up.” Her voice sounded helpless.

  The Raven King crouched before her. “Can you stand?”

  Nine nodded. She thought so.

  “Good. We have to move. Now.”

  “What about Owen?” the Seneschal asked, looking across the river.

  The Raven King pressed the heel of his hand to his head. “Goddamn it.” He stood to go back for the Burnt Man. Coyote grasped his pant leg in his teeth, snarling.

  “He might already be dead,” Petra said.

  “No. Look.”

  The Burnt Man stood at the far bank. His expression was blank and dazed.

  “Owen! Get over here. This train’s leaving town now.”

  The Burnt Man stared down at the ice. He went upstream several yards and minced his way across. When he reached the bank, the Seneschal grabbed his collar. “C’mon, man . . .”

  But she stopped speaking to him. His eyes were blank, the pupils dilated completely black. She let go of him and backed away.

  Nine wrapped her arms around herself and cried into the collar of her borrowed coat. She felt both naked and hobbled, unable to smell or hear or use her senses.

  Something terrible had been lost, and she was just beginning to understand.

  “What happened to you?”

  Petra paused in buttoning her extra shirt up to the woman’s neck. The woman she’d fished out of the water when the wolf went in seemed to be in shock. She appeared to be in her mid-twenties, with bronze skin and incongruently silvery hair sweeping past her shoulders. Her dark eyes passed vacantly over Petra. She’d said nothing since they fled from the river, speechlessly watching the sun rise and the wolves mill about her.

  Petra had put her on the back of the snowmobile. Gabe had run upriver to retrieve it from the campsite, though it had gotten water in the engine from the crossing. She’d flinched against the sound of the machine, but had held on tightly until they’d made it to a safe distance, her fingers digging into Petra’s ribs. The engine had begun to miss, and Petra wasn’t sure that she trusted it much further.

  Petra dug her hip-waders out of her pack and knelt to put them over the woman’s feet. She offered no resistance; she was like dressing a rag doll. “These are the only other boots I have, but maybe they’ll work . . .”

  “I can’t remember the last time I wore clothes.”

  Petra looked up, startled. The other woman’s voice was thin, low, like rain trickling on tin.

  “What’s your name?”

  The wolf-woman’s brow wrinkled. “Nine.”

  “Nine,” she echoed.

  “The ninth wolf.” Nine’s gaze drifted over to the pack, huddled in a knot yards away. They took turns keening over the wet pup and grooming it.

  “I’m Petra. That’s Gabe, and that’s . . . Owen.” Petra glanced over at the two men. Owen was sitting on the ground with his head in his hands, talking to himself. Gabe dug through the packs on the snowmobile, giving Owen some serious side-eye. Petra stifled a shudder and turned her attention back to Nine.

  “What happened at the river?”

  “I don’t know.” Nine looked down at her hands.

  “Can you . . . change from wolf to person?”

  “Not for a long time. I forgot . . . I forgot how to do it. And then it just happened.” Fear lit in her eyes as she gazed at the wolves. “I’m afraid . . . I don’t know how to change back.”

  Petra put her hand on her shoulder. “You’re gonna be okay. We’ll figure something out.”

  Petra wasn’t sure how, but she had to.

  She left the young woman with Sig, who nestled between her feet and trudged across to the snowmobile to speak with Gabe.

  “She’s talking,” Petra told him. “And she knows English, which is amazing.”

  “Yeah, well. Owen’s talking, too.” He inclined his head. “To his ghost, I’m assuming.”

  Petra listened as she popped the hood to the snowmobile.

  “. . . Blackness. It was all blackness. I can’t . . .” Owen rubbed his face. “The nothingness. It was all around me, inside me. Is that what it’s like, being dead? It can’t be. I mean . . . you’re here, right? This can’t be all there is.”

  Petra peered at the engine, fingering the frayed timing belt and looking at the water sloshing about in the housing. It didn’t look good. But she was determined to run it as far as she could before it died.

  “Owen’s ghost . . .” she murmured to Gabe. “Are there such things? Human ghosts?” She wasn’t sure what was real anymore and what wasn’t, but she was pretty certain her grip on reality was stronger than Owen’s.

  “There are,” Gabe confirmed. “But he doesn’t have one.”

  “How do you know?”

  He pulled the Locus out of his pocket and stripped off his glove. He plucked at a scab on his palm and dripped blood into the device. The blood boiled in it, splitting off into tiny droplets, crowding to the left, where the wolves and Nine sat.

  “Ghosts are their own kind of magic. It’s a weak magic, most of the time, but a magic, nonetheless. But the Locus doesn’t register anything around him.”

  The truth of it crawled up her spine. Given all the strange things she’d seen, the existence of a ghost seemed like a minor element. If there were alchemists and mermaids and undead ranch hands, surely ghosts were par for the course in Temperance. She didn’t question the assumption, and that rankled her. It was as if she was losing her grip on reality. But not as badly as Owen.

  “Owen is insane.” Completely and utterly batshit.

  “Sure looks that way.”

  Owen had tasted hell, and it tasted like a bottomless void.

  He sat in the snow, rocking back and forth. He had always felt darkness, evil as a force outside of him. It was external. Something to be fought against. But now, he felt it inside his body. The antlered beast had passed through him, like a wind through a curtain, and part of that numb darkness remained behind.

  “How do I get rid of it?” he demanded of Anna.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “How can you not know?”

  “I’ve never seen anything that dark before. Not even at the bottom of the well.”

  He groaned. He feared it, like he’d feared nothing else. Owen had never been particularly afraid of death before. He just assumed that it was One of Those Things that happened, but he’d been pretty firm in his belief in an afterlife of some sort. He’d heard a lot of talk about heaven and hell in church as a child. As sheriff, he wanted to believe there was something more terrible waiting for wrongdoers than simply blanking out of existence, because that was too fucking easy and so monumentally unfair that it offended his sensibilities. Meeting Anna had confirmed it—there was something else out there. Life after death.

  But this creature—as it swept through him, he’d felt a nothingness that was unlike anything he’d ever imagined. It was cold and endless, and evil unlike anything he’d ever known. It had shocked him, like no crime scene ever had.

  If he had been a better man, Owen suspected that the evil would have found nothing to cling to. But the darkness had snagged on the rough edges of his character, tearing away pieces that curled and festered under his skin.

  This evil—it was a part of him now. He was certain of it.

  She was no longer a part of them. Not like she r
emembered.

  Nine followed in the pack’s footsteps as they climbed through the foothills of Sepulcher Mountain in the bitterly cold afternoon sunshine. That part was the same as it always had been, being the last. They wove around her knees and surged past her, but they did not chirp and yip at her, as they always did among themselves. It was as if a veil had been drawn between them. She poked at the barrier, letting her fingers brush ears and ruffs, but they shied away. They knew her, but they did not. She assumed that she smelled different, and it wasn’t just Petra’s coat.

  She paused in her ascent and closed her eyes, willing her limbs to shorten and fur to cover her naked-feeling human flesh that wanted to freeze at the barest touch of wind. But it didn’t happen, no matter how hard she clenched her fists and willed it to.

  She wondered if, tonight, she would dream she was a wolf.

  The Raven King—Gabriel, she reminded herself—seemed to know where they were going. He carried a golden compass that smelled of magic. It smelled of metallic, man-made magic, not the wild, natural scent of the pack. She gave it a wide berth. It felt familiar to her, a memory that tickled at the edge of her consciousness.

  She avoided it and the machine that Petra drove. It had developed a sound that Nine could best describe as a mechanical hiccup. Over the roughening terrain, the gear on the sled she’d made of the parts of the old machine bounced and banged.

  Finally, a deafening crack sounded from the engine and it fell quiet. Nine rubbed her ears at the sudden silence, and all heads turned to it. The Seneschal swore colorfully and popped the hood. Black smoke leaked from the engine.

  “It’s dead,” she announced, waving at the smoke with a glove. “I think the drive shaft’s busted.”

  “We don’t have much farther to go,” Gabe said, pointing. “This is the mountain.”

  The mountain took up half the twilight sky, like a sleeping giant. It had its own special gravity, Nine had to admit. It was as if it had black roots deep in the earth and reached up to the sky with slumbering white fingers. She threw back her head to take it in.

  “Why does the mountain matter?” Owen asked. This was the longest sentence Nine had heard him utter since his encounter with the Stag.

  “My father is an alchemist,” Petra said. “He thinks that this is a place where we can bind Skinflint Jack.”

  “It’s magic,” Nine blurted. “Can’t you feel it?”

  Gabe nodded. “It was named by an Army man in 1871 because it looked like a crypt. But he got the notion from Lascaris more than twenty years before. This was one of the places that Lascaris buried his faulty experiments.”

  “Who is Lascaris?” Nine asked.

  “An older alchemist,” Petra said. “We think he gave Skinflint Jack his power. He roamed around here a century and a half ago, looking for the secret to eternal life.” She knelt to clean snow from Coyote’s paws.

  Nine closed her eyes, feeling the chill of the mountain’s shadow on her naked eyelids. “I remember. A man long ago. He was sitting in a field, surrounded by the antlers of deer on the ground, pieces of what must have been a glorious hunt. He smelled like that—” She pointed to the golden compass.

  “We watched him,” she continued. “At first, we were curious to see if there was any meat left for us. But it was just him, in that circle of bone. And then . . . the ground shifted. It split open, and white deer grew beneath those antlers, clawing out of the ground. I remember their dark eyes and my mouth watering at the sight of them. Such beautiful flesh.

  “But something went wrong. The deer tried to come up from the ground, but they couldn’t. They sank, struggling, back beneath the dirt, leaving only the antlers behind.” Nine shrugged. “It didn’t smell right. We left.”

  Gabe nodded. “That sounds like him. The fleeing hart symbolizes fleeting evanescence, the union of the spirit and the body in the chemical wedding. The deer is the soul. The alchemist tries to capture it and fix it into physical form . . . which is what I suspect he did with Skinflint Jack, after a fashion.”

  “Are we climbing that?” Owen was looking up at the mountain. Nine watched him with narrowed eyes. Maybe it was a good thing he was coming back to himself. Maybe not.

  “Yeah.” Petra scanned it with her binoculars. “We’re looking for a point at which the sun will rise and illuminate Jack in the solstice. The exact time of the solstice is in a few hours.”

  “There.” Nine pointed to a crag at the edge of the peak that stood upright. Her gut pulled her toward it. She’d never seen this one before, but it reminded her of dozens of other earth-clocks her people had set up over time, before they’d become wolves.

  “The Sepulcher itself,” Gabe said. “Looks as good a place as any to set up. Let’s divide the gear and get moving.”

  Nine looked behind them, at the darkening snow. The Coyote came to her and leaned on her leg. She reached down to touch his brow.

  The Stag was out there, somewhere. She could feel it. He was coming, and he would not grant any of them an easy death.

  Chapter 19

  On the Witchery Way to Sepulcher Mountain

  It would not have been an easy climb up Sepulcher Mountain, even in the best of weather.

  They were forced to leave much of their gear behind with the machine, but Petra was determined to haul all she could. She’d filled her pack with as many supplies as she could carry, and brought a pickaxe to use as climbing leverage.

  Approaching from the south, the trail ascended in a series of switchbacks. But ice had worked itself around snow and rock, making footing treacherous. She slid more times than anyone saw. Petra urged Gabe to watch Owen closely. Owen seemed to be charging on ahead with a restless energy. She didn’t like it, and the wolves didn’t like it, either. They surged around him in a circle, some growling deep in their throats. She had seen his soot-blackened feet and fingers. Perhaps he was beyond feeling pain beneath his injuries. But madness was excellent fuel.

  Petra walked at the back, keeping pace with short-legged Sig and Nine. Nine was determined, and had good stamina, but the young woman seemed not to remember how to walk well. Petra stayed at her elbow, with Sig bringing up the rear.

  “Your father was a Magic Man?” she asked Petra.

  “Yes. He was lost to me for a long time. I just found him a few months ago.”

  “My father was one, too. A shaman.”

  “I assumed that all of you were . . . shamans?” Petra felt an instinctive empathy for Nine, but she tempered it. She knew nothing of Nine or her magic.

  “No.” Nine laughed. “Only my father. He was very, very old. And had many, many children. He was quite wise—it was said he could speak any language of any tribe by listening through an elk’s horn. He had a cloak made of feathers and could turn into an owl. He could wear the skin of a bear and become a bear. Once, for fun, he wore a crown of turkey feathers and became a turkey.”

  “It sounds like he had a sense of humor.”

  “At some times. But not at others. He was exiled from his tribe for killing one of his wives who was with another man’s child. He ground her bones up into the Harming . . . it’s a powerful magic, a corpse poison. The chief cast him out.

  “Some of his wives and children left with him. He was a skilled follower of the Witchery Way. Winter had fallen upon us, and he taught us how to wear the skins of wolves, to survive. He told us that someday we would find our land to the north, if we kept following the stars.” She shook her head, as if chasing memories from it. “I was small. I don’t remember all of it. Just that wolf fur was warmer than human skin.”

  Petra glanced at the wolf pack ahead of them. “Is he still with you?” she asked quietly. She had a hard time trusting sorcerers she wasn’t related to.

  “No. He died many, many years ago. A man shot him. He changed back then. I remember seeing him lying on the ground, an old man bleeding red on the snow. The hunter, he panicked. I think he dragged him away to bury him without telling anyone.”

  “I�
��m sorry.” Petra realized she seemed to be saying that a lot lately. She’d arrived at the conclusion that, no matter how charmed she thought the lives of witches and wizards were from her childhood stories . . . everyone had problems. Dead, undead, human, wolf . . . didn’t matter. Everyone was fucked in their own special way.

  “He taught us many things,” Nine went on. “How to hunt. How to find shelter. How to listen to the voices of men. Good things. And also many terrible things. How to kill, up close and from a far distance with the Harming. But he didn’t teach us how to change back,” she added, blinking back tears. They spilled from the corner of one eye, and she rubbed them away with the palm of her hand.

  Petra wrapped her arm around the other woman. She wanted to tell her that it would be okay. But she wasn’t certain if it would be. It sure wasn’t looking good. They had limited supplies, little time, and it was getting colder the higher they climbed.

  One thing that they needed little of was light. The snow was bright, and the moon had risen, full and bright as a lantern overhead. The moon’s gleam shimmered off the blanket of snow in a soft aura. Petra hadn’t bothered using her flashlight since it rose. Sepulcher Mountain would have felt surreal on an ordinary summer night, but in winter, it stood completely apart from the surrounding land in an otherworldly glow.

  They approached the summit as the moon crept high in the sky. Up close, she could make out a magnificent hoodoo at the peak. She’d seen hoodoos before—spindles of sedimentary rock that had been worn away in unusual spires. This one was massive, like a hand pointing upward, with fingers pressed together.

  “This is the spot?” Owen panted, bracing his hands on his knees.

  “I’d say so.”

  Nine had gone to the hoodoo and pressed her hands to the stone. “It’s beautiful,” she murmured, and it seemed she was listening to something deep in the rock. The wolves milled around her, pacing, seeming alert and full of energy.

  “Let’s get the trap set up.” Gabe was already digging in the packs, and came up with the trap Petra had found at the pawnshop. He chucked it on the ground next to the hoodoo, where it landed with a clang and a rattle.