by Laura Bickle
She cried for Cal, too, feeling the pillow growing cold and soggy around her face. That poor kid didn’t deserve anything that had happened to him. He’d been a victim from the start, despite his good intentions. She wished that she could have done something—anything—to help him. Clearly, she’d done the wrong thing by taking him to the hospital, and that had ignited a chain of events that had ultimately led to his death. He had trusted her, and she had failed. That knowledge settled heavily in her chest. Her best hadn’t been good enough. She would carry that with her for the rest of her life, she knew.
And she thought of Gabe and the Hanged Men, her fingers brushing her lips as she remembered him kissing her. He was not human, sometimes not even close. But he felt. And he loved her. If the Hanged Men could survive, that would be enough. She would make sure that it was enough. They had to survive. She couldn’t face the idea of Gabe rotting underground, passing from this world without so much as an acknowledgment from the world above.
Maria’s neighbors had visited the back porch in the darkness before dawn. By the time Maria awoke, there were piles of offerings at her door: casseroles in insulated carriers, flowers, cards, even a beautiful pink agate as big as her fist with a note on it—Frankie had apparently found it and given it to a little boy. The boy was all grown up now, and was giving it back. Frankie, for all his eccentricities, and for not being a blood member of the tribe, had been loved. By the time Maria was dressed and staring into her coffee, a knock sounded at the screen door. Petra answered it, seeing Mike on the other side.
“Hey. How is she?”
“Holding up, I think?”
“It’s a shock.” He rubbed the back of his neck as she let him in.
“Yeah. I just . . . I thought he had a lot more mileage left in him. He was an old man, but he was tough as nails, you now?”
When Maria saw Mike, he wrapped his arms around her, and she sobbed into his jacket. He stroked her hair and held her hand as she told him what happened.
Petra busied herself washing dishes in the sink. It was the only concrete thing she could think to do to help. Pearl assisted by sitting on the countertop and supervising.
“You gotta watch over her, okay?” Petra said to the cat.
Pearl looked sad, patting at the bubbles. She would miss Frankie just as much as Maria would—that much was clear.
Maria came to her and said, “You don’t have to stay.”
“Are you sure?”
Maria nodded. “I’m okay, now. It’s just . . . a lot, you know?”
“I’ll come back later tonight, if you want. Should I pick up anything for you?”
“I’ll have food coming out of my ears for the next few days. And I think Mike will stay with me.”
“Good.” Petra dried her hands and kissed her friend’s cheek. She was heartened to see the two of them together. She’d never pried about their history. But they were both good people, and she hoped that they would figure out a way to be good for each other.
The roads were empty and still this early in the morning, and a thick mist clung to the ground, as though it were left over from her trip to the spirit world. The whole land seemed to sleep, to be holding its breath for some inkling of the future.
She steeled herself and headed toward the Rutherford Ranch.
If the Hanged Men were gone . . . Petra shuddered to imagine what she would find. In the chamber beneath the Lunaria, would Gabe and the others be hanging as corpses tangled in dead roots? Would that eerie light be forever gone? Would she never get the chance to fully understand Gabe, to explore the what-might-have-beens?
There was no sign of life on the ranch. There were no lights on at the house or the barn on the high ground. A dense, pearly mist had gathered from the sky and hugged the lower land, obscuring the world beyond the barbed-wire fence. She took the Bronco off the gravel road, through the fields. Her headlights reflected shadows of grass and the ghosts of fog before her, nearly useless.
She stopped where she thought the Lunaria was, but could see nothing before her. She hoped she had the right spot, but it seemed as if there were nothing there, as if the tree had been entirely erased from the land. The tree wasn’t visible from the road, and she’d have to hunt for it even on a clear day. But this sense of obliteration chewed at her.
She hopped out of the truck and pulled out the Venificus Locus. She scraped some blood from a scratch on her elbow into the device and squinted at it with a flashlight. The bead of blood moved, sluggishly.
And she followed it. She whistled to Sig and plunged into the mist. The Locus led her to the burned spot in the center of the field. Sal’s corpse was gone, but the tree remained, a broken hulk against the grey sky.
A lump rose in her throat. She didn’t know what she’d been expecting. She’d been hoping that the basilisk’s blood would have regenerated the tree, that it would rise from the field in full, leafed-out glory . . .
But there was something there. She crept forward to see where the copper spear had been plunged into the roots. A tendril of green wood wrapped around the shaft of the spear, with dewy green leaves at the crest. The sapling had grown around it like a caduceus, tiny branches reaching up to the sky. It was only about five feet tall, but it was alive.
And the Hanged Men had to be alive, too. Hope swelled in her.
After about ten minutes of hunting, pacing, and swearing while she stared at the blackened ground, she found the door in the grass that led to the Lunaria’s chamber. Lifting it open, she found a charred tangle of tree roots below her; it was as if the tree had moved during its burning, but it provided better footing for the descent. She climbed down and was able to convince Sig to jump into her arms.
Sal’s body lay on the ground. It looked like someone didn’t have time to dig a proper burial hole, and had just shoved him down the hatch to hide him. His neck was bent at an unnatural angle where he’d been hanged, and the severed rope trickled off into the darkness. She walked around him, sweeping the light ahead of her. The Lunaria’s roots were still and black. None of the golden light dripped through their vessels, nothing of the shimmering biomass that she had known before showed itself. A single golden taproot from the sapling dripped down from the ceiling, like a stalactite, holding nothing.
The Hanged Men dangled from the dead rhizomes of the old tree, like empty fruit. She swept her light at their split and broken faces. The men always rotted at night in the Lunaria’s embrace, but they’d also always regenerated by morning. But these decomposed faces were still, and the bodies were missing limbs, stubs of bone tangling in the roots. She forced herself to reach out and check for pulses, but there was nothing. No sign of life. The ripe smell of decay overwhelmed the soft scent of earth and the stench of burning.
There hadn’t been enough magic in the blood to restore them. There was just the sapling of the tree, and nothing more . . . the realization of that finality suffused her chest and burned her eyes.
The Hanged Men were dead.
All these men, gone forever.
She searched among them for Gabe, staring at each of their decomposing faces, trying to identify teeth and jawbones as her stomach churned. She couldn’t find him. That didn’t mean he wasn’t here—maybe she didn’t recognize him in this mass grave, under the soft blanket of decay. She ran from body to body, her heart in her mouth, sweeping the light back and forth, trying to imagine what each of these corpses would look like with a thick layer of flesh.
She finally stopped, crouched, and pressed the heel of her hand to her brow, sobbing. He was gone. All of them, all that mysterious magic of this wild land, gone.
Sig sidled up to her and licked her cheek. She threw her arm around him and cried into his ruff. He pressed his chest to her shoulder and whined.
It was over.
Gabe had given the blood of the basilisk to her—and that blood might
have saved them. She was acutely aware of the blood thudding in her temples and the hot tears on her skin. She was alive, painfully, horribly alive. All the men were gone. And Gabe . . . she would never have the chance to return to the Stella Camera with him. She had begun to hope for something more with him, and that hope shriveled violently in her chest like wadded-up paper.
Eventually, she forced herself to her feet. This would be the last time she would come here. It would be too dangerous to return, since someone would eventually come searching for Sal’s body. She plodded down the tunnel that she knew led to the Stella Camera. She wanted to see it, one last time, and putting one foot in front of the other was all she could do now, this numb shuffling.
She wound her way to the Stella Camera, wiping her drippy nose. The mist from the ground had soaked deeply in here, and she could make out only the faintest glimmer of the salts in the filtered grey light from above.
This place. Once upon a time, it had churned with possibility. She wondered if anyone would ever find it again.
Sweeping the flashlight beam around the room, salt glittered, and the black lake lapped at the shore. A lone figure stood at the edge of the lake. Her heart slammed against her sternum.
“Gabe?”
He turned. His eyes did not gleam in the dark as they usually did.
She dropped the flashlight and rushed to him, lifting her hands to his face. His flesh felt solid under her fingers, unmarked, and warm. But there was no pulse of sunshine beneath his cheek. “You’re alive.”
He kissed the tips of her fingers. “I am.”
“I went to the Lunaria, and when I didn’t see you there, I thought you were dead. Like the others.”
“I . . .” he began, looked away at the water, and back at her with dark eyes. There was something confused and helpless in them. “There was only enough magic to restore the tree, and me. Just me. I don’t know why. Maybe because I was the oldest and the strongest. The rest . . .” He rubbed his hand over his face, and it remained over his mouth, his eyes glistening with tears. “They’re gone.”
She grabbed his face fiercely, pulling his forehead down to meet hers. “You are alive. That’s miraculous. And I’m so glad for that.” Her gaze fell on his neck, exposed by the undone last buttons of his shirt. She trailed her hand down his neck. The scar around his throat was gone, obliterated, as if it had never been there.
“You don’t understand. I’m alive.” He grabbed her hands. “But that’s all. I’m not . . . magical anymore. There are no more ravens. No glowing blood. No blocking bullets.” He held up his hand, and it bled dull red from a scratch. “I scraped my hand climbing out of the roots. I . . .” he faltered, staring at it with an expression of horror and wonder.
She breathed it in, the totality of that knowledge. “You’re human.”
“Yes.”
She kissed him hard, wanting to drink in every bit of him. He responded by tangling his fingers in her hair, cradling the back of her head in his wounded palm and sliding his other arm around her waist, pressing her body to him. She felt his heart pounding against her chest, a real, aching pulse.
He was alive. She was certain.
And, for now, for this partitioned moment in time, so was she.
Cal rolled over, feeling for all the world like someone had whacked him in the head with a baseball bat and hit a homer with his skull. He groaned and retched, feeling the mercury sliding over his skin, cold against the bruises. Plastic stuck against his skin, and the world was dark around him.
Bel. Bel had shot him. In the face. And he was still alive. What the hell?
He reached up to his face with shaking fingers, tracing the lines of metal around his chin and cheekbones. The mercury had formed a helmet over his head, he realized. It was dissolving now, retracting back under his skin.
Despair lanced through him. Bel was his last hope, and she was done with him. He lifted his head. Plastic stuck to his arms and nose. He tried to pull at it, but it wouldn’t give. It was sticky and . . . oh, my God. He felt a zipper.
He was in a body bag. A fucking body bag.
Whimpering, he wriggled right and left, clawing at the zipper. One of his broken fingernails caught the top of the zipper, and he worked it down enough to get his pinky finger into the gap. He was able to draw it open enough to get some cooler air in his face.
And light. He lifted his head out of the bag.
Oh, Jeez.
He was in the back of what looked like a refrigerated restaurant truck, the air conditioning humming as the refrigerant dribbled out of the blower. A fluorescent light shone overhead, and it illuminated at least a dozen other body bags, stacked haphazardly in the space. A full bag had been thrown over Cal’s legs, and he jerked free of it, curling up in a ball. He was alone with the dead.
He had to get out of here.
He crept to the back of the truck, pressed his ear to the cold metal. No voices outside. Maybe he had a shot at running.
There was a red release button on the inside of the door. Sucking in his breath, he hit it and thrust his shoulder at the door.
The door popped open easily, sending Cal sprawling on the ground with the wind knocked out of him. It was brighter here than in the truck—he registered that it was daylight, but not much else. Scrambling to his feet, he fled into the nearest cover—forest. He wheezed and waded into the underbrush, praying that nobody had seen him.
He ran until his breath finally seized up, driving him to his knees. His stomach cramped, and a string of silver slipped out of his mouth, forming a puddle in the yellow leaves. He panted, staring at his reflection in the quicksilver. The mercury moved under his skin. His nose got longer, cheekbones grew more pronounced, his cheeks thinned, as the mercury slid under his bones and moved the contours of his face. His skin ached and pulled over the swelling.
His own face disappeared. He saw another familiar face in its place: Stroud’s.
He jerked back. It had to be a trick of the light. Had to.
Hello, Cal. It’s been a long time. Stroud’s voice echoed in his skull.
Cal pressed his fist to his forehead. “You’re not real. You’re dead. This can’t be happening.”
Look at me.
Cal peered into the quicksilver mirror. Stroud’s unmistakable visage looked back at him, under the filthy shock of Cal’s own black hair, all sharp angles and the prominent brow. Silver flecks crept into his irises, metal sliding into soft tissue.
I am here. Within you.
Cal whimpered. He rubbed at his face with his palms. The mercury dented under the pressure of his hands, but sprang back and reorganized in Stroud’s image, like a candle melting and being remolded.
Behind him, he could hear people walking in the woods, the crackle of radios. Cal scuttled around in panic.
Run. Don’t let them catch us.
“Well, maybe they’d shoot us, and this would be over,” he whispered back at the voice.
No. They’ll take us apart, molecule by molecule. They’ll keep us alive, tortured. Is that what you want? Or do you want to be free?
Cal climbed to his feet. He leaned forward and backward. Part of him wanted to run to the people, relinquish control over his own life. He’d been in charge of his young life for years, and he had to admit that he’d done a pretty shitty job of it. Maybe it was time to let someone else be in charge, someone with a badge and some legit authority.
Cal. You will never see sunlight again if they catch us. And I will fight them. Their blood will be on your hands.
No. No more killing. He couldn’t face that. He fled. He tried to run away from the voice in his head, the horrible memory of Stroud he wanted to forget. Weeds slashed at his pant legs.
He’d struck his head. He must have. Or else had a schizophrenic break. People just didn’t hear voices. It wasn’t real, couldn’t be. Maybe when
his concussion faded, the voice and the hallucinations would, too. That was his most rational hope, and he clung to it.
I’m real, Cal. I’m in you—in your cells and your DNA. And I’m not leaving you, ever again.
Cal sobbed.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to my amazing editor, Rebecca Lucash, for the opportunity to let Sig romp and stomp around Yellowstone. I’m very grateful for your invaluable editorial magic and insight.
Heartfelt gratitude to my awesome agent, Becca Stumpf, for always holding the door open for new ideas. Thank you for your support and advice throughout these many creative processes.
Special thanks to Caro Perny, Publicity Guru, for all of your amazing promo work for this series.
Many thanks to all the motorcycle gurus for sharing their awesome knowledge: Stephanie Hoover, Aaron Mezger, Bill Tardy, Samantha Groom, Justin Reed, Colin Blain, Brad Lenk, Jay Hobbs, and all of Spite. Thank you, road warriors!
Much gratitude to Marcella Burnard for all the beta reading. I owe you a whole bunch of catnip.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Laura Bickle grew up in rural Ohio, reading entirely too many comic books out loud to her favorite Wonder Woman doll. After graduating with an MA in Sociology-Criminology from Ohio State University and an MLIS in Library Science from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, she patrolled the stacks at the public library and worked with data systems in criminal justice. She now dreams up stories about the monsters under the stairs. Her work has been included in the ALA’s Amelia Bloomer Project 2013 reading list and the State Library of Ohio’s Choose to Read Ohio reading list for 2015–2016. More information about Laura’s work can be found at www.laurabickle.com.
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