by Laura Bickle
The bartender appeared before him, a tall, thin, blond guy with a glass. The glass was full of water. Cal snatched it and drained it greedily.
“You’re not looking good, man.” The bartender’s gaze seemed to dismantle him, piece by piece.
Cal peered over the rim at him. “I’m not good,” he confessed. “I’m pretty fucked up.” He wobbled on his barstool.
The bartender nodded. “Are you looking to leave town?”
“I think . . .” Cal began, but his attention was arrested by a commotion at the front door.
The door opened, and a group of women filed in. They definitely weren’t locals—they were dressed neck to toe in motorcycle leathers dusted in a grey, ashy grime that didn’t correspond to any dirt that Cal knew around here.
Still, they were hot. In an Amazon, don’t-fuck-with-me-I’ll-cut-your-balls-off sort of way. They were tall and short, different bodies and skin, but all of ’em looked totally badass. Cal couldn’t decide if he had the beginnings of a hard-on or if he should just cross his legs. He decided to cross his legs.
The bartender stiffened. Cal watched him reach beneath the bar. From his vantage point, Cal spied a shotgun behind a stack of bar mop towels.
“Who are they?” Cal asked.
The bartender didn’t take his eyes away. “Trouble.”
Awesome. Cal slugged down the rest of his water and planned his escape.
But the women were fascinating to watch. Whispers followed them as they clomped in on their grubby boots, heading to empty tables in the back.
“Hey, sweetheart . . .” one of the patrons in a booth slurred and spread his legs suggestively. “You ride?”
The woman in the lead, a striking brunette, fixed him with a withering gaze. He shrank back, as if he’d been burned. His companions chortled.
“Talk about resting bitch face.”
One of his braver companions reached out for the woman as she passed, making a ham-handed grope for her ass.
The bartender swore under his breath.
The blond woman behind the brunette caught a finger on the offending hand and bent it back at an unnatural angle. He yelped.
“Back off.”
The women filed in a line to the back of the bar. They seemed to take up a lot more space than they should, shadows curling around them and amplifying something weirdly slithery and loose in their posture.
Two of the women seated themselves at the empty spots at the poker tables, gesturing for cards with fingerless gloves. They plunked down cash that looked real enough. The dealers shrugged and dealt them in. Stranger money was just as good as local money.
The tall brunette, the one who seemed to be the leader, walked up to the bar beside Cal.
“Some beers, please,” she asked the bartender.
She gazed into his eyes. There was something odd about how she did it, unblinking.
“None of that in here. No magic tricks, or you’re out.”
She lifted an eyebrow. “You’re perceptive.”
“It’s my job. If you’re in here, you play fair. And that goes for your girls.”
“All right.”
The bartender wiped his hands with a towel stacked beside the shotgun. He nodded and reached for glasses.
She turned to Cal, and he looked away. But he felt those kohl-smudged green eyes on him, taking inventory. He hadn’t felt that kind of gravity in anyone’s gaze since . . . since Stroud.
He glanced down at his hands on the bar. Silvery liquid mingled with the condensation from his glass on the lacquered top of the bar. He put his hands in his lap, smearing the liquid on the bar top away with his elbows. Furtively, he glanced back, and knew that she saw. Her eyes dilated, and she gestured to his hands with her chin.
“Did you do that to yourself?” Her voice was soft, kindly.
The question took him off guard. He stammered. “I. Uh. Not really. I don’t . . .”
She reached out for him. Her hands were covered in ink. He ducked and flinched. But she reached out to cup his face in her hands, the way a mother would hold a child.
Her green eyes glowed at him. “I can help you.”
His lip quivered. He wanted someone to say that, and to mean it. Her hands were cold but soothing, like a cool washcloth on his face. It felt hypnotic. He felt soft and buzzy, the way one felt with a fresh shower, a full belly, and clean sheets.
A hand slapped down on the bar behind her, attached to a six-foot, flannel-covered man.
“Hey, those broads with you are cheating at the poker table . . .”
She released Cal and turned in one swift movement, planting an elbow in the man’s gut. As he doubled over, her riding boot snapped up and cracked him in the head. The guy slid to the floor of the bar.
Cal shrank back against the bar. All around him, the fight was on. The women had surrounded one of the poker tables and flipped it, spewing cards and glassware onto the floor. Some guy was getting his ass handed to him by a blonde with a pool cue.
The bartender was having none of it. He’d reached for his shotgun and ratcheted it back.
“Out of here,” he shouted.
The woman with the ink wheeled to stare at him. The shotgun was leveled at her chest.
She raised her hands, and it seemed that something passed between them. Understanding, recognition—Cal couldn’t tell. But the guy froze. Sweat trickled down the bartender’s temple, and it seemed that he was trying awfully hard to pull that trigger, but something stopped him.
The woman reached for the collar of Cal’s jacket. He squeaked as she hauled him off the barstool and dragged him out the door, ducking under flying fists and soggy slices of pizza. She hauled him to a line of motorcycles parked across the street that were growling to life. Women jumped on the bikes, turning over the engines.
The woman in black thrust a helmet into Cal’s hands. “Put it on.”
Cal complied, and he scrambled onto the back of the bike, tucking his feet around chrome and soft-sided canvas luggage. He dimly realized that this was one helluva bike—a Triumph Tiger.
The Triumph roared to life, and Cal wrapped his arms around the woman’s waist and clung to her for dear life.
In thunder and wind, they tore down the street into the darkness.
Heading west.
CHAPTER FIVE
MAKING TRACKS
These chicks were weird.
Cal had attended his fair share of half-assed Black Masses and séances. He could only remember maybe two that he hadn’t fallen asleep during. Most of those had been run by folks who’d had way too much to drink or people who were selling things like curses that could drop your ex dead in her tracks or spells that could make you an overnight singing sensation. Cal had seen the real deal with Stroud’s alchemical lab, with the salamander that lived in the grate and the old books with spidery writing. He knew real magic when he tripped over it.
And he’d fallen in it this time, majorly.
The women had fled into the darkness after the brawl at the Compostela, not stopping until the moon climbed high overhead and Cal’s ass was sore from his perch on the motorcycle. He expected chicks on expensive bikes would find a motel or crash at somebody’s house, but they turned off the main road and jounced along into the wilderness until the rider of the bike he clung to waved for the group to stop. Cal had had a dirt bike once upon a time, but these gals had the right knobby tires and expensive shocks to handle off-roading with that much chrome and gear.
They stopped in a clearing and shut off the engines. There was no light, no sound but the receding roar of engines in his ears. Cal felt queasy, and nearly fell off the bike. Someone caught him, and he was lowered to the dew-slick ground.
“It’s okay.” It was a girl, a girl with purple hair. If he were feeling better, he would have
thought she was hot and tried to hit on her. Things being as they were, it was all he could do not to hurl in her lap. She must have sensed it, and turned away.
The ground was spinning the way it did when he drank. Overhead, he saw Hercules—he remembered Hercules from science class—spinning around and around in fuzzy streaks. What did Hercules chase in the sky? Was it Draco or Hydra? He couldn’t remember. That line of stars over there, maybe . . .
Cool hands pressed against his face, and the stars were blotted out by the woman from the bar. Fire flickered behind her. Her arms were bare, and the tattoos of snakes writhed on her arms. He flinched away, tried to shrink into the ground.
“It’s okay.” She held him fast. Her hands were cold as water on his face.
“Who are you?” he croaked.
“I’m Bel,” she said. “I need you to look at me.”
He tried to focus on her eyes, but the snakes . . . oh, God, the snakes were going to get him. The ground swam, green eyes swam above him, and those snakes were on his face, on his throat. He felt the mercury boiling within, crawling under his skin. Jesus Christ, he could feel it churning between his ribs, lashing out . . .
“Get away!” he shouted. The mercury dribbled down his cheeks. He could feel it unwinding in his fingers, reaching out over her wrists.
“Get away, please!” he whimpered. He didn’t want to hurt anyone.
“Be still,” she said in a serene and even voice. The ink and the mercury and the stars blurred in his vision, and he felt the other women around him, holding him down. Her lips were working around an incantation as her nails chewed into his wrists and her knee jammed into his chest.
“As within, so without. Still.”
The mercury reached out, out to slap her across the face, to fling her across the campsite like it had the security guard.
But it fell, fell like water from a garden hose when someone shut off the spigot. It slapped down into his lap and crawled through his pants under his skin. It retreated into his marrow, and it was . . . it was still.
Cal took a shaking breath against her sharp knee.
She got off him, and he felt hands release his shoulders and legs. One of them was the purple-haired girl. She grinned at him.
“What happened?” He only knew that the stars had stopped spinning above him.
Bel knelt beside him, and she brushed sweaty hair from his forehead. It was a tender gesture—the last woman who’d done that for him had been his mother. He blinked up, not understanding, watching the tattoos on her skin move over her muscles.
“The mercury in you is still. For now,” she said.
“How did you do that?”
She smiled and pressed her middle finger to his forehead. “I can teach you. Take a deep breath.”
He filled his lungs with air. He still felt the liquid metal in a shell around his lungs, but he could actually feel the air in his chest.
“Imagine the metal in your bones, quiet. Feel it sinking toward the back of your spine.”
He could feel it, feel it become leaden. His eyes drifted closed.
“Be still.”
Cal’s consciousness faded.
He was pretty sure that he slept, but he heard snatches of voices, whispers of fire. The girl with the purple hair wrapped him tightly in a blanket near the flames and propped his head up on a saddlebag. He could smell the warm, oiled leather, and it was soothing. Sparks popped and hissed. She poured a dribble of water down his throat. The voices surrounding him were fuzzy and clear. Sometimes, they sounded like chanting. Sometimes, it was simple conversation:
“Priestess . . . will he survive?”
“It’s up to him.” Bel sat on the ground beside him, sharpening a knife on a flint.
“What will you do with him?”
“He can’t be allowed to wander free,” Bel answered.
“What is he?” A blond woman squatted beside him, staring into his face. “Is he a warlock? Some kind of sorcerer?”
“I don’t think so. I think . . . he is simply unlucky.” Bel shrugged.
A smile feathered across Cal’s face. That pretty much summed up the entirety of his existence.
Unlucky.
Tracking a magical creature came with its own set of hazards.
A raven perched high in a lodgepole pine, scanning the forest of Yellowstone. Cold dew had condensed on its wings as it waited for sun to illuminate the path before it. In the gold of morning, a serpentine track could be seen in the grass below, a trail of yellowed grass that switched back and forth, heading inexorably west.
The bird cawed softly.
Another bird came to join it, then another. The birds perched on the scruffy pine tree, dozens of them, flocking from miles distant to gossip about what they’d seen. They swarmed the tree, bouncing from branch to branch, as if waiting. Black eyes had gone into the sky and seen their quarry, reporting back in a flurry of feathers.
At the edge of the woods, Gabe squinted into the daylight of the field, shading his eyes from the sun with one hand. His other sleeve hung empty, and his chest and right cheek appeared deeply sunken. Behind him ranged six of the other Hanged Men. They, too, were missing limbs and chunks of flesh. They limped slowly, their clothes hanging at odd angles, like scarecrows after a harsh rain.
Gabe looked up at the tree and nodded. Birds slipped from the branches and slammed into him and the other Hanged Men like black hail, feathers melding into flesh and flannel. He felt the totality of what the birds had seen, felt their light bones meshing with his own. Above, the birds were all gone, save one confused mourning dove who took wing, warbling in terror.
He took a deep breath from whole lungs, flexing his right hand. Glancing back at the rest of his men, he saw that their silhouettes were now complete. Human-looking. Gabe had taken the most passably human of the lot on this mission, hoping to avoid detection from any hikers or passersby. There were far too many people in the park, clogging up the roads and huffing along the trails like winded buffalo. The ranch hands had been successful in avoiding them so far.
They walked through Pelican Valley, along the edge of Raven Creek. It was a place where broad sweeps of grasslands met evergreen forest and swept up to foothills of mountains. Autumn’s breath had been felt here—the once-green grass was now golden and brittle, and grazing buffalo were growing thicker, shaggier coats. Pronghorn had begun to move to gentler climes, and the elk were in rutting season, trumpeting to challengers. A grizzly bear crossed the creek with two cubs, slow and sluggish and not seeming to pay the Hanged Men much mind. The lowland had split in a few places, and steam hissed from the cracks in the earth. Gabe had felt the earth tremor here, and the land struck him as unsettled, simmering.
The Hanged Men looked very small in comparison to this vast land. But they had weapons. A knife was holstered in Gabe’s belt, a rifle slung over his shoulder. The others held guns beneath their jackets, waiting for the order from him.
He jerked his chin silently at the path in the grassland. This way.
The Hanged Men waded into the sun-dappled grass. Gabe narrowed his eyes. He heard no tick of insects or scurry of startled rodents. They were close.
Hearing a sizzling sound, he glanced down. His pant leg had brushed against a few blades of the desiccated grass. The acid had begun chewing into the denim, creeping through the fibers like a cigarette smoldering in a couch. He could feel a stinging where it had soaked into his flesh, like he’d waded into a nest of yellow jackets. This magic was powerful enough to hurt them. The basilisk was close. Very close.
He shrugged the rifle strap off his shoulder and stared through the scope of the rifle at the land before him. The tassels of the grasses moved, pushed by the wind in waves. Gabe squinted at the grass. Some of it moved against the rill of the breeze, moving forward . . .
He gestured to the others. Gu
n barrels swept the range, sunlight glittering on metal. He disliked this spot in the field. It felt open. Too open.
Gabe’s finger twitched on the trigger.
A hissing churn of scales and fangs rose up from the grass. In that instant, he saw his adversary for what it really was, in all its magnificence.
A basilisk. Dark green scales covered a thirty-foot-long body, easily as thick around as a tree trunk. Yellow eyes glared down at him as it reared up, exposing recurved fangs in a leer, forked tongue flashing between its teeth and hissing. At the crest of its head, scales rose in a crown-like pattern over a plume of yellow feathers, lifting like the hood of a cobra.
Glorious. Likely, this was the only creature like it left in the world, the last dragon. It was said to be born of the blood of the Gorgon Medusa. If it were any other creature, he would have let it be, admiring it from a distance. But he needed this creature, needed its blood for the Lunaria. Not from the left-hand side—that was poison, a gift from the venomous Gorgons. But the right—that was the blood that granted eternal life.
He remembered this from Lascaris’s time. The basilisk had been awake then, until Lascaris had put it to sleep. It was now awake— awake and wrathful.
Gabe fired.
The basilisk jerked left with impossible speed as bullets pinged into the grass. A stream of venom spewed from its mouth, like water from a garden hose. Gabe reflexively threw his arm over his face, but he could feel the poison hissing into his hat, his clothes, even eating away at the stock of his gun.
The poison chewed into his skin, fizzling into muscle. He growled and tried to aim his gun, but his trigger finger dissolved against the steel. Around him, he could hear the howls of the Hanged Men, melting like witches in the basilisk’s venom.
He made a choice, then, between their unlife and death—to retreat.
Feathers exploded under his shirt, and he poured what remained of his flesh and consciousness into the bodies of ravens. The ravens charged upward into the sky, screaming, to be joined by the birds of the other Hanged Men. Broken feathers drifted down as the birds merged into a retreating flock of ravens, leaving behind empty clothing and melting guns.
