by Laura Bickle
The earth groaned once more, and she jumped when a hand landed on her wrist.
“Gabe!”
He was covered in mud, except for his hat. But she would recognize those luminescent eyes anywhere.
“Where are the others?”
He slogged to the cave-in and pressed his hand to the wall of rubble. “I hope they’re on the other side.”
The pile of stone creaked and sighed, and it was impossible to hear anything beyond it—to Petra’s ordinary ear, anyway. Bits of gravel plinked down on the mud, and she couldn’t discern anything else.
Unless there was a hole at the other end, they were buried. Buried with the snake. And the only way to go was forward.
Petra floundered in the mud. It had soaked her fiberglass armor, and the pink protective layer was coming off in pieces. There wasn’t anything to be done for it—between the snake, the cave-in, and the heat, things weren’t looking real good for her successful emergence into the upper world.
Gabe was at her elbow, seeming to navigate the mud more successfully. Maybe his time in the underworld of the Lunaria had made him more impervious to this kind of hell. And he had so much more to lose—not just his unlife, but the unlife of all the others.
“Look,” he whispered, peering into the darkness with his glowing eyes.
She squinted, not seeing anything, and pushed the visor of her helmet up. They had reached the back corner of the cave, and the flashlight beam picked out the silhouette of Bel.
She was propped up against the back wall of the cave, sitting upright on a stone shelf, like a doll. Her black eyes were open and her hands lay bare in her lap. Petra couldn’t tell if she was breathing, but she sure wasn’t blinking.
Damn it. She’d made eye contact. Petra glanced away. But she felt no paralytic magic stealing over her.
Gabe walked to her and passed his hand over her face. Bel didn’t react.
It looked as if that shelf in the cave had been decorated as a kind of altar. Guttering candles that must have been burning for hours spilled wax down the walls, and armfuls of wildflowers had been placed all along the surface. Bits of bone punctuated the nodding yellow toadflax stems. Bel had been carefully arranged among them, like some kind of treasured ornament. Had the snake done this? The snake couldn’t build such an altar—this was clearly the work of reverent human hands, but it must have been the basilisk that arranged her here. For the first time, it dawned upon Petra that the thing they were hunting was not simply a raging monster. It was something else—something with intelligence, with sentimentality.
“Where’s the snake . . . oh.”
Something with wrath.
A rill of movement swam below the surface of the mud, pushing up a cluster of air bubbles.
Shit. Shit. Shit. Her potato cannon was useless under mud. She slung it over her shoulder and reached for her guns with her sweat-slick hands, head pounding. Hopefully, the mud from her swim hadn’t gummed up the mechanism . . .
Gabe held his copper spear over his head, eyes narrowed. He plunged the spear once, twice, into the soupy mess. The thing under the mud shrieked and flipped.
Petra aimed at a tail that slipped up over the edge of the mud and fired. In this enclosed space, the shot was deafening, and all sound receded to a roar and a distant ringing in her ears. She shot until the barrel clicked empty.
The basilisk rose out of the mud, jaws open. Petra imagined that it was hissing, but no sound came out of its mouth. Strings of vapor leaked from its jaws, and it spat acid at them.
She felt Gabe’s hand on the back of her neck, and he plunged her down into the scalding mud. She sucked in her breath in shock, flailed, and released her grip on the potato cannon as the hot darkness enveloped her.
This must be hell, she realized as she descended. The heavy mud scalded her skin and suspended her movement. She couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe as the mud invaded the respirator. She could taste the iron in the silt as it pushed through her mask. Gabe’s fingers wound in her shirt—he was here, with her, too. She doubted that the monster’s acid could penetrate this dense mud quickly, but Gabe didn’t need air the way that she did.
When she was convinced she’d pass out, she was yanked up by her collar, gasping. The mud sucked the last of the fiberglass armor from her body. She stumbled back with her ass planted against the altar. Flowers stuck to the mud as she sucked in a breath.
Gabe was fighting the monster. He held the copper pipe spear over his head and had slammed it into the basilisk’s right side. For an instant, Petra was reminded of the dozens of renderings she’d seen of St. George slaying the dragon—she’d always had a twinge of empathy for that creature, as terrifying as it was.
But this was not going as well as it had for St. George. The basilisk thrashed and flung Gabe away, the spear still protruding from behind its feathered crown.
Petra spied the potato cannon floating on the top of the mud. She splashed into the slop, grabbing it. She prayed to whatever weird gods might be listening that the bottle of lye in the cannon’s throat hadn’t been damaged or fallen out.
The basilisk turned for her and opened its mouth to draw breath and spew venom. She pulled the ignitor, aimed at the basilisk’s open mouth, and fired.
Orange flame flashed as the bottle launched and struck the basilisk’s mouth. She lost track of the bottle, but it must have gone into its throat and shattered; the basilisk thrashed its head right and left, glass glittering in the mud. It began to foam at the mouth, a pale bubbling like sea foam on a clear afternoon.
Gabe crept up behind it and grabbed the spear. Using the pipe as a handle, he forced the head of the basilisk under the mud. Its tail lashed and thrashed, striking Petra in the leg and clearing the flowers off the altar, shattering the candles. Bel’s body slid from the shelf into the mud, staring with unseeing eyes.
Gabe held the spear fast with two hands as the basilisk fought. After some minutes, it began to weaken, then became still.
Petra let out a shaking breath. Her head pounded, and all she could hear was the ringing of gunfire in her ears. But against her back, something stirred—the ground. It shook and quavered, kicking the last of the carefully-arranged bones of the altar to the mud. Pea gravel shivered down on her skull.
“We have to get out of here!” she screamed at Gabe.
The shockwave was moving, more than one. The ceiling slid and fractured as the brittle sandstone began breaking up.
Gabe jammed his foot in the snake’s spine and yanked the spear free. He slogged to her side as the ceiling began to cave in.
Petra scrunched beneath the shelf that had been the basilisk’s altar. Gabe flung himself in beside her, and his shoulder covered her head. Rock hailed down; she couldn’t hear it, but she could feel it as it pounded Gabe’s body.
She wanted to speak to him in this moment, to tell him that she was sorry for everything and that she loved him. She yelled it in his ear; she had no idea if he could hear her or if he would survive the roar of the rock to do anything with that knowledge and her shitty timing.
After an interminable time of hot blackness, the shaking stopped. Petra lifted her face against Gabe’s chest. She shook him and pointed overhead.
“Look!”
A pinprick of light glistened overhead. A small one, but it was unmistakably light.
“Gabe.”
She shook him again, shook him hard. Silt slipped down his collar into her face, and she panicked for a moment, thinking him dead.
But his glowing eyes opened, and his gaze followed her finger to the light.
The light grew bigger, and a coyote nose pressed in. Sig. He pawed and clawed at the hole, but couldn’t get much traction against the larger stones.
They scrabbled out of the pile of rubble, hand in hand. Gabe stood on the altar and jammed the dull end of the spear into
the star of light in the ceiling of that little world. Sig backed away, and the crack opened, bringing more grey light and dust.
And blessedly cool air. Petra lifted her face to it, inhaling deeply. Her head pounded; she knew she was close to heat exhaustion, and this was the most wonderful thing she could recall feeling.
Gabe opened the fissure to about two feet, then a large piece of granite fell through, splashing into the mud. The cave crackled with a palpable vibration.
He laced his fingers together, and she stepped into them. He lifted her up to the hole in the ceiling. She grasped the ledge with aching, muddy fingers, and pulled herself through.
The air. She sucked it in, and her breath curled before her. Her whole body steamed in the early morning light. She was on the far side of the oxbow, within view of the encampment. Pale light had begun to filter in from the east, and the sky at the edge of the mountain was beginning to turn pink in a razor-sharp line.
Gabe handed the spear through, and she took it carefully, placing it next to her on the cracked ground. She extended her hand down for him, and he clasped it. He climbed, and she hauled, until he was finally up on the rock outcropping. He fell heavily on the cracked clay. In this finer light, she could see bits of glowing blood smearing his cheek and hands.
She reached out to touch his cheek, frowning. He took her hand and kissed it. He murmured something against her palm, but she couldn’t hear it.
Something tackled her, and she winced. Sig. He was washing the mud from her neck, and making horrible faces at the taste. The welder’s blanket was still stuck to his collar, and he looked like a superhero dog as he rolled around in her lap.
He turned his head to the sky and barked. She could feel the bark in his chest, and she looked skyward. The helicopter from before. It swept in from the north, blades churning the canopy. It was closer this time, as if it had zeroed in. A searchlight swept from an open door, and red lights that she knew were sights from a gun.
She grabbed Gabe’s sleeve and they stumbled to their feet. They ran back to the far edge of camp, where Bel’s motorcycles stood in a bullet-pocked row.
Gabe shouted in her ear, over the receding buzzing. “Can you ride one of these?”
“I can drive anything with wheels.”
She grabbed the nearest bike—a beautiful Triumph Tiger. The keys dangled from the ignition. She straddled it, flipped the kill switch with her thumb, and turned the key in the ignition. The red start button was easy enough to find, and the bike roared to life. She jammed the spear behind the exhaust pipe. Gabe lifted Sig under his arm and climbed on the back behind her, one arm around her waist.
She knocked back the kickstand, twisted the throttle, and plunged into the woods. This Triumph was unlike the dirt bikes she’d ridden as a child and the street bike her college boyfriend rode. This one had the springiest shocks she’d ever felt, and the dirt paths felt like pavement under the tires. It wasn’t a dual-sport bike—this was something else altogether, customized for whatever adventures those weird snake women had gotten up to. The clutch was smooth, and she accelerated through the gears quickly.
She glanced up at the sky. Dawn had begun to touch the tops of the trees, and a second helicopter had come to join the first. She kept close to the trees, in the thorny huckleberry underbrush that scraped against her muddy legs. Sig rested his head over her shoulder, thrilled to be moving, his tongue dangling in the breeze.
“The other Hanged Men—do you think they got away?” She hoped so—all of the ATVs were gone.
Gabe tapped her on the shoulder and pointedat the sky. Ravens were flying in a black mass south and east—toward the Rutherford Ranch.
Petra circled back to where they’d left the trucks. They were all gone, which gave her hope that every last one had gotten out alive.
She’d reached paved road by the time the sun had crept over the horizon. At this hour, there was little traffic, and she hoped that no one would remark on two mud-caked riders holding a dog that looked suspiciously like a coyote on a spotlessly-clean, bullet-pocked bike.
But there was something about being on the road, feeling the wind dry and crumble away the worst of the mud from her face. The air was cool and dew-damp. It felt as if it was stripping away so much of the fear she’d felt in the last few days: the memory of the basilisk, fear for Gabe and the Hanged Men, even the dark bruises of the underworld still shadowing her face. There was only the roar of the air and the road, the arms around her and the scrape of a paw on her sleeve.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
REMAINS
The road allowed her to forget, for all those miles. She felt that the world had been conquered, that all would be well.
But Petra wasn’t prepared for what remained of the Lunaria. Gabe had told her that Sal had burned it, yet she hadn’t realized what exactly that had meant.
Where the tree had once stood, an imposing elm at the heart of the field, there was now a black stain of charred grasses. At the center was a blackened timber with broken fingers reaching to the sky. It was as if it had been struck by lightning. A figure dangled from the lowest branch—one she recognized. Sal Rutherford’s body twisted in the lazy breeze. It was scorched on one side and crumpled like a paper bag. It made her queasy to look at it.
“Oh, Gabe,” she sighed, staring at it as she shut off the engine and they dismounted. Sal was dead. And the old bastard deserved it.
But the tree . . . she scanned it, searching for any sign of life. Sig made no effort to pee on it, which told her that it was bad. There was not a single leaf left on it.
Gabe walked to the burned edge of it with the spear in hand. He gazed at the sharpened edge of the spear, and plunged it as hard as he could into the ground, next to the trunk, deep within its roots. It stood there, like a shining weathervane, looking utterly futile.
She didn’t know what to expect. Part of her hoped that the snake’s blood would regenerate it immediately, that it would burst into a flurry of green leaves. But the tree remained still, not reacting in the slightest to the sacrifice that had been offered to it.
“What now?” she whispered.
Gabe looked at the ruined timber. “We’ll go to ground. We’ll wait, see what it can do.” He turned to look at her, and it seemed that she was seeing him in the most fragile state she’d ever seen him. He was pale, circles below his eyes, blood and mud smeared on every inch of skin. His hat had blown off long ago, and he looked like some kind of feral creature that needed to find a safe place to sleep and something to eat that didn’t need to be chased.
She nodded and stepped up to him. She reached up to take his head in her hands. “I’ll come back.”
“I know.” He bent to kiss her. “I hope to be here, in one piece.”
It was a bittersweet kiss. It seemed that all of their kisses were like that—soft and full of a distant yearning she couldn’t quantify. When it faded, he pressed his forehead to hers.
“Love you,” he said.
She released him, and he bent to open the door to the underworld of the Lunaria. Petra watched him go, until the ground had been sealed shut behind him, as if he’d never existed for the past hundred and fifty years.
Maybe for the last time.
Gabe climbed down into darkness, into the depths of the Lunaria’s underground world.
Before, when he’d gone to ground, the roots would reach out to touch him, to acknowledge him in some way. It might be as small as a caress on the back of his neck as the roots lifted him to the ceiling, or as grand as an embrace.
But it was all wrong here, now. The roots were motionless, smelling of burn and gasoline that had sunk deep into the ground. Chill had seeped up from the earth. He touched the roots in greeting, but they were silent and fixed, unresponsive. They must have moved sometime during the burning, spilling out into the chamber, turning and twisting to avoid the
fire. They were frozen now in a contortion of agony. Such pain. Gabe couldn’t imagine the shriek the tree must have let out, howling underground with no one to hear it. He had long been used to the tree having a personality. Maybe he anthropomorphized it, but he saw the Lunaria, at turns, as playful, serious, and motherly. It could be possessive and controlling, but extraordinarily gentle and loving as it rebuilt the Hanged Men, time and time again, from nothing. It had been a constant, and now . . . now it was gone.
He reached into the rhizomes, climbing up into the mass of still wood. He wormed his way back into the thickest knots, wanting to feel the comfort of the now-brittle roots. He was exhausted, and could go no farther. He leaned his head back in the tangle and closed his eyes. For good or ill, he would stay here. Around him, he was conscious of the other Hanged Men climbing into the dead tree, finding pockets in the stillness to sleep.
As he dozed, a dream bubbled up, from deep in his marrow. It was a fuzzy dream of his hopes and fears for the future, feeling out of focus and drained of color.
He dreamed he stood in the meadow with Petra, listening to the wind scrape through the sage and grass. Behind him, the bare Lunaria stood. It was covered not with leaves, but with the feathers of ravens, turning up like leaves before a rainstorm. The wind whipped roughly through the feathers, breaking the fine barbs and veins.
Rain was sweeping over the mountain, miles away. It slipped down the slope in a dark veil, obscuring the side of the mountain. It smelled like a deluge, a shadow that would send water coursing down into the little creeks and ditches in a flood when it arrived. There was still time before the rain reached them.
He took Petra’s right hand, folded it to his chest, and slipped his other hand behind her neck. He kissed her. Her heart beat against his chest, and her skin was warm beneath his hands, warm as sunshine on earth in the summer. He wanted to trace every freckle on her body with his fingers, to learn what made her sigh and what made her laugh. She made him feel alive, as if the impossible were possible, as if he could be with her for an hour or a day.
