by Laura Bickle
The cop retreated, and Petra slipped in the doors to the lobby. Whatever they were here for, she sure as hell hoped they wouldn’t find Cal. He’d make one hell of a story: “Local Teen Cursed with Living Mercury, Clings to Life.”
She made her way to the admitting desk, through a lobby that looked like a box of human misery had been upended on the green tile floor. A family huddled together, weeping, while an angry man shouted into a cell phone. An old man sat in the corner with his hands covering his face, while a little girl knelt on the floor, trying to reach up inside the Coke machine. A look of utter concentration had spread across her face, her tongue protruding from her lips.
Petra spoke to the nurse behind the Plexiglass-shrouded desk. “I brought the emo kid in. He’s got heavy metal poisoning.”
The nurse nodded. “Please come with me. I need to get some information.” He led Petra through a pair of double doors back to the bowels of the hospital.
“The doctor wants to speak to you,” he said, pulling aside a pink-patterned curtain.
Cal lay in a hospital bed, looking like an overcooked vegetable. They’d cut his shirt off, and his skin held a greyish cast as it stretched over his ribs. A nurse was starting an IV, muttering about the needle tracks in his arm, while another stuck heart rate monitor leads on his chest. His eyes remained closed, and an oxygen mask covered his face.
“I’m Dr. Burnard,” a woman in scrubs with a stethoscope slung around her neck said, nodding at Petra. “Are you a relative?”
“No . . . I don’t know him very well, at all,” Petra admitted. “He just showed up at my trailer, in a bad way.”
“What did he say?”
“That he’d been poisoned with mercury. I saw it—it covered the sclera of his eyes and was moving . . . under his skin.”
The doctor squinted at her. “How do you know it was mercury?”
“I’m a geologist. I know mercury.”
“How much of it did you see?”
“Visible on him at the time? I’d guess about twenty fluid ounces.”
The doctor turned and told the nurse: “Let’s get some blood to confirm. See if we have some Demercaprol on hand, or if we need to get it from the university.”
“Did you touch him? Skin on skin?”
“Yeah, I brought him here.”
The doctor hooked a thumb at her and nodded at a nurse. “Check her and scrub her down.”
“Hey, wait a minute . . .” Petra protested. A nurse grabbed her arm with a latex-covered hand and led her away to the second floor, while an aide trailed with a clipboard.
“Is he gonna be okay?” Petra asked, though she knew that there was likely no good answer to that question.
The nurse beside her said: “We’ll do everything we can do for him. And for you, if you got contaminated.” She pushed Petra into a tiny exam room and yanked out a red bag with a biohazard symbol on it. “You’ll need to put your clothes in here.”
The aide with a clipboard clicked a ballpoint pen. “The young man you brought in. What’s his name?”
“Cal. His name is Cal.”
“Last name?”
“I don’t know.”
“Age?”
“Sixteen, maybe?”
“Address?”
“I don’t think he has one.”
“What’s your relationship with him?” she glanced over the clipboard.
“He’s a . . . friend.”
“Any family or legal guardian?”
“I think he’s on his own.”
“Do you know if he has insurance?”
“Probably not.”
“Any known medical conditions? Allergies?”
“None that I know of, but . . . I don’t really know.”
“Is he taking any medicines? Legal or illegal drugs?”
“I don’t know about medicines, but he used to occasionally smoke meth. And that drug that killed a couple of people last month. Elixir.”
The aide frowned and scribbled.
Petra sighed. She didn’t know enough about Cal. Not enough to help him. Maybe not even enough to keep him alive.
People in scrubs poked and prodded and quizzed her about her own identity and medical history, which she was able to answer adequately enough. Another nurse herded her into a room with a shower and brought her a hospital gown and socks to change into.
Petra scrubbed her skin until it was raw. She wasn’t worried so much about mercury itself—she could watch herself closely for symptoms, and would likely have refused to be clucked over if it had been an ordinary chemical spill. She told herself that it was reasonable to worry about the magic underneath it. While the hospital staff were scrupulous about gloves, she had not been. A phlebotomist came by to take her blood, saying that they’d test for heavy metal poisoning and get back with her.
They let Petra keep her keys, wallet, and cell phone in a zipper plastic bag. She sat in the smaller waiting room for the second floor with the bag in her lap, waiting for news of Cal and her own blood work. The television overhead was tuned to a local station, and she glanced up to the screen to see the same blond newscaster she’d seen at the ER entrance. The reporter stood outside, with the parking lot behind her. Petra could make out the Bronco in the background and Sig’s face in the back window. Drawn by the lights of the camera, he seemed intent on photobombing the shot, licking the back glass. Petra rested her head in her hands, rubbing her temples.
“ . . . report that they saw a giant snake after the rest of their party went missing. Steven Moore was at the scene.” The woman shoved the microphone at a young man standing uncertainly beside her. He sported an expensive-looking down jacket and an impressive amount of facial hair that he couldn’t seem to stop playing with.
“We were, uh, partying by the creek when Tamara heard a noise. At first, we thought it was maybe a beaver or something. I heard hissing, but . . . yeah. Beavers don’t hiss. I don’t think. Anyway. Ed shined a light down on it, and it wasn’t no beaver. It was big . . . like the Loch Ness Monster. Had to be at least thirty feet long and as big around as a barrel. Yellow eyes, it had yellow eyes. It disappeared into the water. Tamara got some video on her phone.”
The television image changed to dark, blurry footage of . . . something. Petra leaned forward and squinted at it. Something writhed sinuously in the water while a woman shrieked in the background.
It could be a log twisting in a fast current. Maybe. But it had some curve to it. And she could make out two yellow points that could be eyes, under the right conditions. The eyelike lights vanished as the camera was dropped.
The reporter returned to the front and center of the screen. “Two members of Steven’s group were found ill beside the bank of the creek, suffering respiratory distress, and one is still missing. They were taken to Park Community Hospital. No news is available yet on their conditions.” The reporter looked a bit irritated at that, her crimson mouth turning downward. Petra guessed that since she was reporting from the parking lot, she’d gotten her ass booted out of the hospital. “The missing person is Amber Taylor. She’s nineteen years old, blond hair with blue eyes, five feet five inches, and 130 pounds. She was last seen at the west side of Pelican Creek, east of Sulphur Hills. Amber is wearing jeans and a white hooded sweatshirt.”
Petra’s brow wrinkled. That was less than five miles from where the dead campers had been found. She wanted to believe that it was a coincidence.
A picture of an attractive young woman flashed on the screen. She looked like a girl next door, with bits of pink chalk in her hair and flashing a peace sign to the camera.
“If you’ve seen Amber, please call the county Sheriff’s Office or Park Police. Stay tuned to Channel 4 for more updates on this breaking news.”
Petra leaned back in her chair. She wasn’t inclined to believe in anything
she couldn’t touch and measure. In all likelihood, the snake was as real as Bigfoot, and the illnesses had been brought on by whatever they’d been smoking or drinking.
Still. She wondered.
And shuddered.
There was dead, and then there was really dead.
Gabe flipped on the overhead light at the hospital morgue. The fluorescent lights buzzed to life in the chill, illuminating a small basement room covered with glossy olive-colored tile and battered stainless steel tables. He remembered an earlier time when bodies were dressed and carried downstairs, around coffin corners cut into the stairwells. They were taken to the parlor of a house to be laid out until they started to reek or the last relatives had shuffled through—whichever happened first—but times had changed. Not that he could remember the exact year he’d last seen it. But it had been awhile.
He reached to the counter for a pair of latex gloves. He glanced at a body on a table, tugging open the zipper of the body bag to reveal the wizened face of an old man, peaceful in repose. Gabe guessed that the corpse was probably half his own true age. After a moment’s hesitation, Gabe zipped him back up. Not what he was looking for.
He crossed the room to a wall of stainless steel cabinets with six doors. He opened one, pulling out a drawer containing a nude body decorated with a toe tag. Wrong body—a middle-aged woman missing a leg from the knee down.
Third try was a charm. He yanked out a drawer that crinkled with plastic. Shrouded in a bag, the body was wrapped within several layers of plastic tarp. Gabe dug into the plastic. The coroner clearly hadn’t gotten to these bodies yet . . . or was planning on shipping them away to the state lab.
It didn’t smell right. Dead bodies had a particular unforgettable smell about them, soft and final. This smelled acidic. Dead, but chemical. Gabe stared into the bloated face of the man his raven had seen at the campsite. The corpse’s eyes were blood red, open. Gabe pulled back the eyelid. Dark liquid had begun pooling at the back of the cavity, and the eye wobbled like gelatin. The nose and mouth were bright red inside.
The body’s skin was soft, leaving dents where Gabe’s fingers prodded. He traced a tire tread pattern that had eaten through the corpse’s shirt into the flesh. It had a rough texture, like abraded road rash. He poked the ribs, where bones should be, but could feel nothing solid beneath the skin. That small amount of pressure yielded a black, viscous fluid that pressed out of the corpse’s mouth.
Gabe’s mouth thinned. If the coroner didn’t do something with these bodies soon, he suspected that any usable evidence would liquefy. No one would ever know what really happened to them. Not that it would be a bad thing.
The woman and the child looked to be in a slower state of decomposition than the man. The woman’s fingernails had fallen off, and the child’s teeth were loose in her palate. The interiors of their noses and mouths were the same vivid crimson. Gabe guessed that the poison had been inhaled by those two, and that the man had come into direct contact with it. That could explain why he was turning into sludge a bit faster than the others.
Gabe wrapped the bodies back up and closed the drawers. Stripping off his gloves and discarding them, he glanced through the files in a wire basket on the desk. Very preliminary notes. They’d been identified as the Carrollton family: Rob, Sue, and their girl, Melanie.
Gabe closed the folder and dropped it back in the basket. The raven he’d sent had tasted magic at the scene of the crime, and his observations here had confirmed it.
Something murderous was loose.
He slipped back into the hallway and took the freight elevators to the patient floors. He limped by the nurses’ station, pretending to be reading a sign while he eavesdropped.
“Have you seen that guy’s throat in three? It looks like that carnie who got admitted last spring.”
“Finn the Fire-breather?”
“Yeah. It’s like he inhaled a tank of napalm or something.”
“Is he one of the giant snake guys?”
The nurse snorted. “Oh, the tox panels came back on that. Looks like a winning bingo card.”
Gabe frowned. There was no way that he could sneak in to see them—new patients were always tightly observed. And uniformed police milled about the halls. Perhaps he could try tomorrow.
He made his way to the bank of main elevators to leave, but paused.
In the waiting area near the floor nurses’ desk, a motionless figure lay curled up in a chair. Dark blond hair had fallen over her freckled face, and her arms were crossed over a hospital gown. Her eyes were closed, and by her breathing, she seemed to be asleep.
His heart hammered.
What was she doing here?
A bright shard of memory bubbled up in the back of his brain, sharp and blistering as a bullet.
No. He couldn’t remember that. She’d hurt him, hurt him badly. It wasn’t safe to go near her. Deep in his undead bones, he knew that she would kill him.
Gabe noiselessly stepped beside her. He reached out to touch her hair, but stopped an inch above her temple. Fear and fascination twisted in his gut. He forced himself to stop, to take a step back, and walk away.
CHAPTER FOUR
WEST OF THE MOON
“The beginning is the end. The end is the beginning.”
Voices rose in a hypnotic chant, through flickering firelight and smoke scented with white sage. Darkness enfolded a circle of shadows gathered around a bonfire. The shadows turned in the light, seething, seeming less substantial than the fire.
“In the mouth of the serpent lies the tail of time.”
Fire picked out faces surrounding the flames, eyes closed, lifted to the ash and stars in the sky above. All thirteen were women, dressed in dusty motorcycle leathers. Sparks glistened, intermingling with bits of ash drifting to settle on the shoulders of their jackets. The women pressed their hands toward the fire. Flame reflected in the chrome of motorcycles clustered just beyond them in the desert. It was an eclectic collection of bikes: a handful of ex-military KLR650 bikes in matte paint, a Triumph Tiger 800, a BMW F800GS, a pair of S13 Suzuki DR-Z400S motorcycles, and a couple of Yamahas that had begun life as more dirt bike than street bike, but had been customized for the road. There was good metal there, and fine coin in all of them to make them road and dirt machines that chewed up the landscape. But they’d been carefully painted with low-key finishes to draw as little attention to themselves as possible. Someone who knew bikes would be impressed; a casual onlooker would walk on by. And that was what they intended: to be invisible on the street and the forest.
“As above, so below.”
“As within, so without.”
The fire burned swiftly, the blue of gasoline at its core, acrid when the wind pushed the smoke just right. Tangled in bits of a broken pallet, scrap wood, and scrub brush was something that hissed like fat. A human skull popped off the stem of its neck and sizzled in the heart of the fire, flames rimming an eye socket. This was a fine sacrifice that had fallen into their laps. The man had attempted to attack one of the women at a gas station restroom. She’d broken his hand, and the others had fallen on him like a swarm of bees. He was dead before the toilet had finished flushing. A worthless human being, but a fine sacrifice.
Belinda lifted her hands to the sky. Her arms, bared by a tank top, were covered with massive tattoos of snakes spiraling from her shoulders to her hands. The tail of each snake wrapped around her throat, with the body of a snake curling around the length of each arm, like a black caduceus. The heads of the snakes were inked into the thin skin on the backs of her hands, and her silver-ringed fingers flashed like fangs. The heat of the fire pressed close against her skin, summoning a sheen of sweat that glistened on the ink.
Bel’s voice lifted above the others, beseeching the dark sky above and the still ground below: “The Sisters of Serpens ask for the blessing of the Great Serpent, the
Great Mother of all things hidden, in all her guises.” As she spoke, long silver earrings brushed her shoulders, and wisps of long dark hair worked free of a ponytail at the nape of her neck. She closed her eyes, feeling the sear of the fire on her eyelids and the palms of her hands as she reached up. Her boots pressed deep into the dust, and she felt her soul taking root in the land. Her fingers tickled the stars, and the power of night formed a complete circuit, flowing between her hands, down her spine, into her feet. The warm energy of the fire uncoiled along the base of her spine, crackling along her vertebrae. She was conscious of the shadows of her sisters around her. They were paler shadows than the long, dark shadow she cast, but still stronger than any ordinary man or woman; their black auras radiated night.
“I summon thee, with all thy names: Medusa, Ariadne, Astarte, Python, Wadjet, Renenutet, Tanit, Manasa, Melusine, Ishtar . . .”
She sucked in her breath and closed her eyes. Her head lashed backward on her neck, lifting her chin to the sky. Power buzzed between her shoulder blades, vital and alive, as the kundalini energy of an ancient and powerful goddess snapped her awake. Behind her eyes, red shadows seethed and boiled.
“Priestess?”
One of her sisters called for her, but they dared not touch her. Bel shivered, and the energy cascaded down her arms like snow shaken from a coat. Her eyes opened, falling upon her followers. A joyous smile filled her face, and she lowered her hands, shaking, to the level of her shoulders.
Bel found her voice, deep behind her ribs. “She is here. She’s calling. The Great Serpent has awakened.”
Something deep within the bonfire collapsed, sending a twisting finger of fire roaring toward the sky. A bystander might have thought it a log breaking, or a pocket of gasoline immolating the last bit of marrow in the bones of the body that burned within it. The bones had gone black, splintering open in the heat. But Bel knew it for what it really was: magic.
