Dark Alchemy

by Laura Bickle

  Gabe reached upward, feeling the roots wind around his hands, shoulders, and throat. As the Lunaria lifted him into itself, he awaited the cold sunshine dripping into his veins, bringing with it the chill of sleep.

  “‘As above, so below.’”

  The coyote was waiting for her back at the trailer.

  The sky had purpled like a bruise by the time Petra returned to her new home. The Bronco chewed through the gravel road, kicking up stones that rattled against the undercarriage. She was more than halfway back before she noticed that Maria hadn’t removed the beaded charm from the rearview mirror. Perhaps Maria was trying to lend her some luck. Petra promised herself that she’d return it. Even if there was such a thing as luck, she wasn’t sure that any of it would stick to her.

  She cranked up the windows and shoved down the locks, stuffing the keys into her pocket as she approached the trailer. She balanced her groceries awkwardly on her left hip and held her bloody clothes in a ball at arm’s length. She’d seen no sign of the meth heads on the way over, but she was still wary. In the falling light, she thought she saw movement, and her hand twitched to her side, to the heavy pocket on her right. But, as her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she saw that it was only the coyote.

  He sat upright on the creaky wooden steps to the trailer door, watching her with shining eyes.

  “Hello, again.”

  The coyote cocked his head. One of his ears was black and speckled in gold, as if he’d been painted by a child with a short attention span. He seemed very comfortable in this place.

  “You’ve probably been living here a lot longer than I have.”

  The coyote stuck his hind foot in his speckled ear and scratched.

  “I’m harmless. Really.”

  The coyote looked at her and blinked.

  “I’ll make you a deal. You can keep living here, if I can keep living here.”

  The coyote looked at the sack in her arms. His nose twitched.

  Petra set the bag down. She’d picked up some lunch meat that was probably ruined by now. She dug through the provisions for the package of salami, ripped it open. She crouched before the coyote and extended a piece of meat to him.

  “Seal the deal with a gift?”

  The coyote’s nose quivered. He slunk down the steps, body low to the ground and ears pressed back. He approached slowly, shied to the left, and snatched the piece of meat from her hands. Then he trotted away with his catch.

  Petra fished the trailer key from her pocket and climbed the steps to the door. A piece of paper was taped to the glass. It was a man’s handwriting, all capital letters:

  SOME CRATES OF EQUIPMENT FROM USGS CAME FOR YOU AT THE TOWER FALLS RANGER STATION. YOU CAN COME BY AND PICK IT UP MONDAY MORNING.

  CALL IF YOU NEED ANYTHING.

  –MIKE HOLLANDER

  Good, she thought. She’d be able to get to work right away. Petra stuffed the note in her pocket and jiggled the key in the lock. She heard a rustling behind her, and spun in alarm.

  It was the coyote again, head buried in the grocery sack.

  “Hey!” she shouted.

  The coyote dragged his head out of the bag with his jaws closed around the package of lunch meat. Seeming to grin, he sprinted away into the dark.

  “Little thief.”

  Petra’s hands balled into fists as she went to retrieve the bag. The coyote drove a steep bargain. She guessed that she’d be playing by his rules, not hers.

  Petra carried the sack and her ruined clothes into the stifling heat of the trailer. She switched on the light and opened the windows to get the air moving. Everything seemed as she’d left it. Her money and the engraved compass were still tucked behind the wall.

  She emptied her pockets of the gun, her cell phone, and money. She set her groceries out on the small kitchen table, pleased to have accomplished the acquiring of essentials, like toilet paper and soap.

  Maria’s blue dreamcatcher bottle felt warm in her hand. Hesitantly, she unscrewed the cap and sniffed. It smelled like alcohol and something bitter.

  “Two sips to dreamland,” Petra repeated. She took two slugs from the bottle and grimaced. It tasted metallic, like a mouthful of aluminum foil, burning on the way down. She beat feet across the tiny space to the bathroom for her toothbrush to scrub the taste from her mouth.

  The overhead light was attracting bugs through the window above the futon. That window was missing a screen, and Petra had the unenviable choice of roasting alive or being covered in mosquito bites. She turned the light off and stretched out on the futon, propping her sore ankle up on the futon arm. A cool breeze trickled over her face as she waited for Maria’s potion to kick in. Her eyes roved around the unfamiliar shadows of the trailer.

  Back on the oil rig, there had always been light—­light to ward away ships and to summon helicopters. The rig had glowed like a small city in the darkness as the waves scraped its steel skin. It had been easy to believe that the rig was a world unto its own, a little planet floating in space.

  But something gleamed here, too, in the black. Not the fireflies swimming outside, nor the stars overhead. Something gold and phosphorescent on the floor of the trailer near the door.

  The hair on the back of Petra’s neck lifted. She climbed off the futon to study the pulsing light. It looked like glow-­in-­the-­dark slime from a child’s toy store, the kind that parents inevitably found ground into shag carpet. Warily, Petra turned on the overhead light.

  The glow drained away. All Petra saw was her wadded-­up bloody clothes on the floor of the trailer.

  She shut the overhead light off again, backtracked to the bathroom. She turned the light over the sink on, just enough to trickle into the main area. She crossed back to the floor and stared at the incandescing pile of clothes.

  Petra knelt and poked at them. Where the bloodstains had spattered her shirt, the fabric looked as if it had been covered in phosphorescent paint, a bit of gold glitter that seethed in the light. Light that gave off no heat.

  Fear and curiosity blended in her. She’d never seen anything like this, not even in books and material-­safety data sheets she’d read about radiation. Curiosity won out. She dug in her equipment bag for her hand lens, peered through the magnifying glass at the surface. The closest thing it resembled was cave lichen; it had a curiously granular appearance.

  Petra tucked the clothes into the empty grocery sack and sealed it up as tightly as she could. This bore some analysis, she vowed. But in the morning.

  Maria’s dreamcatcher potion was taking effect; she could feel her thoughts slowing and running together. She washed her hands, climbed back into bed. She felt a tingling in her fingers, and the numbness spread to her face. Petra remembered feeling this way when she’d been given a heavy dose of Klonopin after the accident, after everything on the oil rig fell apart . . .

  “You sure that there’s something down there?”

  The shift supervisor yanked off his hard hat to wipe sweat from his filthy brow. In his oilman’s jumpsuit, the big man was roasting, even with the cool breeze coming off the water. The sky had been white-­hot and clear, the sea calm and smooth as bathwater, but tensions were boiling on the mobile offshore-­drilling unit. They had been drilling for weeks, all on Petra’s assurances that dead dinosaur fluid was roaming somewhere under the seafloor. These assurances were becoming increasingly expensive.

  The drill ship Cassandra had been anchored in the Gulf for days, the drill in its hull pounding away at the seafloor. The mighty engine thrummed an unceasing buzz through the soles of her feet and in the back of her dental fillings.

  “It’s there.” Petra stood with her arms crossed over her clipboard. “I was on the survey ship and sent out the hydrophones myself.” She stood her ground. Shift supervisors like this guy always thought they were right, despite what geologists could show in data. No one had ever
gone out this far before on this range. It was risky, but she knew that there was oil to be found here.

  The shift supervisor squinted at her under a receding hairline. “We should have hit it by now. I don’t know whether your calculations or the buoys were off, but we’re getting nothing but mud.”

  “She says it’s there. Keep drilling.” Des had come up behind him. Even though his jumpsuit was streaked with silt, he cut a handsome figure. Time outdoors had weathered his skin to a golden tan, and green eyes behind sunglasses crinkled at the corners when he smiled. Blond hair had been bleached by the sun to nearly the color of wheat.

  “I don’t like drilling this close to a fault,” the supervisor growled. “It’s dangerous.”

  “The fault is where the oil is,” Petra insisted.

  “You’re only humoring this twit for a piece of ass.” The supervisor glared at Des. It wasn’t out of jealousy. The supervisor hated anything that he perceived as screwing with his crew’s smooth operation. That could be anything from taking long breaks to actual screwing. In his mind, a woman was an unnecessary distraction on a rig.

  Des grabbed the supervisor’s lapel in his fist. Though the supervisor had at least forty pounds on him, Des was all sinew. She knew every inch of that muscle, and knew that the supervisor was on thin ice. “Shut the fuck up. Take a break. I’ll watch the crew for a while.”

  The supervisor glared at Des, then at Petra. Des was the lead engineer on the ship, the installation manager, and the two could only push each other so far. He shrugged out of Des’s grip and stomped away across the deck. Gulls scuttled away as he approached, squeaking protests.

  Des lifted his hard hat and ran his hand through his sweaty hair. “Look, I’m sorry about him.”

  Petra shook her head. “Forget it.” She’d worked around roughnecks long enough to know that the bigger you made an issue, the bigger an issue it became.

  The corner of Des’s mouth turned down. “He needs to mind his own damn business.”

  Petra resisted the urge to kiss the corner of his frown. The rest of the men were milling about, and though there were no secrets on a rig, they did their best to keep others out of their affair. Instead, she clasped her hands behind her back with her clipboard.

  “I’ll deal with him, later,” Des promised.

  A shout from the spire of the derrick snagged Petra’s attention. “Hey, we got something!”

  “What is it?” Des strode to the men at the turntable. Between segments of pipe casing, a spray of dark fluid was beginning to spurt.

  “It’s not mud!” Des gave her the thumbs-­up, grinning, his teeth gleaming white in his tan and dirty face.

  Petra let out a breath she hadn’t known she’d been holding. She grinned, vindicated. Maybe the supervisor would finally shut the hell up, and they could get to work.

  Before she could suck in another breath, her smile faded. The kick of oil spewing out of the casing increased. The blowout-­preventer valve must have failed. She shouted at Des, who turned in enough time to see the drill string being forcefully ejected from the hole, shooting upward with a tearing sound.

  As the metal and rock sheared upward, a spark ripped through the drill string. A deafening roar rumbled through the boat, pitching the deck. An orange fireball raced through the hull of the boat and up the derrick, the heat scorching Petra’s skin.

  She screamed for Des in that fireball, not seeing him, buffeted by the men running and the pitching of the deck. She ran for the fire, but the blaze drove her back. Through tearing eyes, she could see the figures of burning men flailing near the stack. Shrapnel rained from the sky, and black smoke poured over the deck. Klaxons sounded, and she smelled chemical fire-­suppressant foam, charred oil, burned meat . . .

  The orange plume raced high into the air, dissipating in charred black edges. The captain of the vessel was calling on the crew to abandon ship. Petra scrabbled around the edge of the fire, fell to her knees beside a smoldering lump of canvas and blood. It was so hot that she could feel the heat through her gloves when she turned it over to see a blackened face. A blackened face with the plastic of sunglasses and white hard hat melted to a shock of straw-­blond hair.

  Petra turned away and retched on the deck.

  Someone grabbed her wrist. Hard. Petra cried out, her vision blurring. Des had grabbed her wrist with a grip that burned like hot oil. Her skin sizzled under his touch.

  “Des!” She reached to turn the ruins of his face to hers, to give him CPR. But no breath rattled from his lungs. His chest didn’t rise and fall under his blackened jumpsuit. She pounded on his sternum, forced air past his seared and blackened lips.

  But it was no use.

  The firefighters found her sitting beside Des’s body, his fingers curled around her wrist and baked into her own flesh.

  She shut her eyes, sobbing. She couldn’t bear to look as the medics separated them.

  Petra opened her eyes.

  Cold morning light streamed through the window above the trailer futon. Her heart pounded in her throat, and she swallowed it down to her stomach, waiting for the roar of blood in her ears to recede. She scrubbed her sleeve across her eyes. The sea was gone. So was Des. No matter how potent Maria’s dreamcatcher potion was, no matter how real the dreams were in the dark, they were gone in the daylight.

  It had been six months since the accident. Six months of being deposed in lawyers’ offices and taking walks along the beach. Vitrum Oil, the holding company that had owned the rig, quieted the press by lining the pockets of reporters. The official explanation given for the blast was a failure in the pressure seals, an engineering product failure.

  But Petra knew. She knew that it had been her fault. She’d picked the spot. Even though she wasn’t legally culpable, she knew that Des would be alive if it wasn’t for her. As time passed, that certainty grew, sank past the shock into the marrow of her bones. Though the edges of Des’s face seemed to grow fuzzier in her dreams, and her scar was fading, she still felt that hurt in her chest when she took a deep breath.

  She shivered a bit in the chill, tugging the tobacco-­scented blanket closer around her. Her feet felt curiously hot, and she wiggled her toes. Her ankle seemed better. She missed the warmth of sleeping beside Des, how he let her put her cold feet in the crook of his knees in the cramped bunk.

  Something moved at the foot of the bed, and it wasn’t her.

  Holy shit.

  Petra scrambled bolt upright, reaching clumsily for the pistol on the floor. It rattled away from her fingers, skidding under the futon.

  A gold-­flecked ear lifted above the blanket. Then a black one. The coyote turned his golden eyes, half-­lidded in sleep, toward her.

  “What the hell are you doing here?”

  The coyote yawned. He was curled up around her feet, not much larger than a big house cat.

  “Okay, I get that you were asleep. But how did you get in here?”

  Petra’s gaze flicked to the open window. She didn’t know that coyotes could jump. Hell, Maria’s dreamcatcher must have knocked her entirely out for her not to have noticed a coyote scrambling into her bed. No matter how much he looked like a dog, Petra was conscious that he was a wild animal. With teeth.

  The coyote stuck a foot in his ear and scratched. Jesus, she hoped he didn’t have fleas.

  Petra extended her hand gingerly. She had no idea if she could get a rabies shot within a hundred miles of this place. The coyote didn’t look sick . . .

  The coyote sniffed at her hand. She reached for his head to pet him, but he ducked. She didn’t push it. Eventually, he let her touch the back of his head. His fur was rough and coarse, not the soft coat of a domestic animal. He was nervous; she could hear a fine whistle in his chest as his breathing quickened. She took her hand back.

  “Are you sticking around, then?”

  The coyote climbed to h
is feet, stretched. He placed his paws on the windowsill, scrambled over it with claws scraping on the metal. He landed in the dirt with a huff and vanished under the trailer.

  Petra looked after him, resting her cheek on her arm. Perhaps it wasn’t such a bad thing to have something to keep her toes warm, someone to watch over her. Even if it was only for want of salami.

  Chapter Five

  The Alchemist

  Cal hated disturbing the Alchemist at work.

  He hesitated on the basement steps, his knuckles white on the railing. He avoided coming down here, hated everything about it: the creak of the steps if he forgot and walked down the middle of the treads; the smell of sulfur; the snap and crackle of fire. It reminded him of hell. Maybe not hell with capital letters, not the Hell, but certainly a bit of the outer reaches of it.

  He waffled, contemplating going back.

  “Who’s playing on my back stair?” The Alchemist’s voice drifted up the steps, the craggy voice of a man who’d smoked a lot of cigarettes. Among other things.

  Cal shut his eyes. Damn. “It’s me . . . Cal.”

  “Come down, Cal.”

  Cal’s boots clomped on the rickety wooden steps, laces flapping against the risers. He put his sweaty hands in his pockets as he reached the last step and looked around for the Alchemist.

  Glass bottles lined innumerable shelves, creating a maze that flickered in blue light from a furnace in the corner. Wooden apothecaries leaned against the crumbling walls of the basement. Powders and books and bits of bone were strewn across uneven worktables made from cinder blocks, mismatched table legs of scrap wood, and doors torn from the upstairs rooms of the house. Paint peeled from the elaborate six-­panel doors. Mason jars held silvery liquid that seemed to quiver in the uneven light. A hot plate glowed red in the darkness.

  “Stroud?” Cal called. He thought he spied movement in the furnace. Through the grate, a tiny salamander wriggled. It dropped to the ground and scuttled across Cal’s shoe. Cal started, jumping back as the creature slipped away.