Dark Alchemy

by Laura Bickle

  Mike’s eyes narrowed, and he automatically reached for his sidearm. “Coyote—­”

  Petra’s heart lurched into her mouth. “Mike, no! He’s mine.”

  Mike paused. The coyote trotted past him, stopped, looked him up and down.

  “Petra, hon, I hate to tell you, but that’s not a dog. It’s a coyote.” He was using a slow, patronizing tone of voice that must be the one he used when telling tourists that baby bears always have pissed-­off mama bears nearby.

  “I know he’s a coyote,” she snapped. “His name is Sig.”

  Sig slinked away, watching Mike. He trotted over to Mike’s Jeep and pissed on the tire.

  “Hey!” Mike shouted, rushing toward the coyote. Sig ran away, a jaunty jerk to his tail.

  “Ignore him. He’s just territorial. He baptized the Bronco, too.” She decided that the coyote was a better judge of ­people than she was.

  Mike rubbed at his stubble, laughed. “I can’t believe it. You have a coyote for a pet.”

  Petra crossed her arms. “Is there something you came by for? Other than mocking my taste in companions?”

  Mike’s grin faded and he stuffed his hands into his pockets. “Yeah. I heard about the trouble with the tweakers. Wanted to make sure that you were all right.”

  “I’m fine. But you were right about needing to have a gun out here,” she admitted.

  Mike frowned. “Do you want to make a police report? We can call the county sheriff. He hasn’t made it out to Temperance for years, but . . .”

  Petra shook her head. “No point in poking the snake.” She was hoping it was a one-­off, that the tweakers’ holey brains would lose memory of her after a while. “But I should give you your gun back.”

  Mike shook his head. “If you need to keep it for a while, go ahead.”

  “I bought a ­couple of guns.” She held the door open. “Come see.”

  Mike stepped up into the trailer. “You haven’t done any decorating, yet.” His eyes fell on the guns on the kitchen table. “Well, well, well. Are these your new guns?”

  “Yup. From Stan’s Dungeon.”

  Mike picked up one of them, whistled softly. “These look like the real thing. You paid some nice coin for them.”

  “More than I wanted. But I figured that, like the Bronco, if they lasted this long, they’d last awhile longer.” She smirked.

  Mike opened the barrel, spun it. “You haven’t shot these yet?”

  “Nope.”

  There was a gleam in his eye. “Want to?”

  Petra grinned. Boys and their toys. “I was going to.” She lifted a brick of ammunition. “You game?”

  “You bet. I haven’t shot anything this old since . . . since ever.”

  Mike gathered the guns, and Petra picked up the ammunition and a fistful of cotton balls. Mike bounded down the steps to the Jeep, rooted around. He returned with a plastic pop bottle. “This’ll do for target practice.” He walked out ten yards and balanced the bottle on the top of a rock.

  Petra nodded. She wadded up some of the cotton and stuffed it into her ears. She didn’t have proper hearing protection, but she doubted that shooting out in the open like this would cause any permanent damage. She plucked bullets from the box of ammunition, opened the revolver, and began filling the six chambers with bullets.

  “You said you’d shot before?”

  “Yeah,” Petra said. “Mom was a little paranoid. She kept an arsenal in the spice cabinet.”

  Mike loaded the other gun. His fingers brushed hers for a moment while he fished bullets from the brick. Petra unconsciously drew away. “What’d your dad have to say about that?”

  Petra’s mouth thinned. “Dad wasn’t around. At least, not after I was a teenager.” She clicked the gun closed, mindful to point it downrange.

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  She shrugged, weighing how much to tell him. She sensed that she could trust him . . . up to the point where the alpha-­male bull kicked in. Besides, Sig had anointed him. “He was a chemist. Mom called him ‘obsessed.’ He said she ‘lacked vision.’ They argued a lot. Eventually, he left in the middle of the night.”

  Petra aimed for the bottle, closing one eye and sighting in. “He sent letters for a while. He wandered all over . . . New Orleans, the Everglades, San Jacinto. As soon as Mom got ahold of the letters, she destroyed them. She still won’t talk about him.”

  “What did they say?”

  “Nonsense, mostly. Existential musings. Ramblings about dragons and phoenixes. But my mom let me keep the medallion he sent. That, she said, was worth something.”

  Petra squeezed off a shot. The gun bucked upward. It had some kick. The shot went wide, vanishing into the brush.

  “The last letter he wrote me was postmarked from here. From Temperance. It was a postcard of Old Faithful. All it said was: ‘I think I’ve found it.’ And then they stopped.”

  She pulled the trigger again. The gun bucked and the plastic bottle toppled, rolling onto the dirt. It was somehow easier to talk about this without looking someone directly in the eye.

  She squeezed off another shot that sent the bottle spinning away.

  “So you came back here to find him?” Mike’s voice was hard to hear over the receding roar of the shots.

  “It’s one of the reasons.” She wasn’t willing to tell him the rest. The pistol hung heavy in her right hand.

  Mike walked out to the bottle, set it back up again. He returned to where she stood. He aimed his gun and fired six shots in rapid succession, barely stopping to resight. In his hands, the gun didn’t bob and weave. As the thunder receded, the shredded pop bottle rolled along the ground.

  “Nice,” she said.

  “Let me show you something.” Mike stepped beside her. “Fold your hands around the grips of the gun, like this.” He showed her the butt of the gun.

  Petra backed up her grip on the gun.

  “No.” He shook his head. “Let me.” He set his gun down, stepped behind her. Petra could feel his breath in her ear. “Press the heels of your hands together on the back of it. That will absorb the shock of the shot.” He molded her hands around the grips and stepped back. “Try that.”

  Petra sighted the gun, pulled the trigger. The gun didn’t pop up as far in her grip as before. Instead of feeling the shock in her fingers, it was absorbed by her palms.

  “Much better,” she said. “Thanks.”

  “Anytime.”

  Petra and Mike finished off half a box of ammo, stopping only when the plastic pop bottle was reduced to a flattened shred of ribbon. Mike picked it up. “Looks like a jellyfish.”

  She grinned and looked down at the gun. It felt comfortable in her hands. Just as comfortable as when she’d drawn down on Frankie without even thinking twice. Her smile faded.

  “Look, about your dad . . .”

  Petra blinked. “I didn’t mean to run off at the mouth like that—­” But she’d known it might come out eventually, why she had really taken a USGS job in the middle of nowhere. And for the first time, she had been able to speak of her father without tears, which gave her courage.

  “I could do some checking. See if there were any missing persons reports or disturbances in the park’s files. What year?”

  Petra swallowed. “It was 1995.”

  “No problem. It may take some time, but I’ll see if I can dig up anything.”

  “Thanks. That means a lot to me.”

  “Sure.”

  An awkward silence stretched. Mike collected the gun paraphernalia while Petra stared at her toes. “So . . . I’d offer you a drink. But all I have is tap water and ice cubes.”

  The corner of Mike’s mouth turned up. “Let’s go into town. I’m the welcome wagon—­we can get pizza.”

  Petra paused, weighing. It wasn’t a date. It was,
as he said, the welcome wagon. And she could use this opportunity to collect more information about the weirdness that was Temperance.

  “Okay. But no more shooting.”

  Mike shook his head. “Where there are guns, there’s always shooting.”

  “That sounds like a cowboyism,” she muttered. But she wondered if there was some truth to it, if the very idea of walking around like a gunslinger in a B-­movie invited trouble all on its own.

  Chapter Seven

  The Compostela

  Stroud stood in the field, hands in his pockets, staring at the Airstream trailer. Cal fidgeted beside him, kicking at pebbles on the ground. Stroud watched and waited, still as a fucking snake, until the moon had risen and the crickets sang, well after the ranger and the woman had left the trailer. Moisture condensed from the air on his skin, steaming on his breath.

  “This is sacred land,” Stroud said.

  “Huh?” Cal paused in midkick, causing a stone to slide under his boot. He stumbled a bit, then recovered.

  “This was where Lascaris’s house stood.”

  “Lascaris? The old alchemist?”

  Stroud smiled. “Yes. The older alchemist.”

  Cal’s cheeks burned red. “The guy that was the founder of the town. I remember from school.”

  Stroud turned around in a loose circle, as if surveying his domain. “I’ve spent some time mapping where its exact foundations must lie. There are ley lines, here . . . sluggish beneath the earth. If you close your eyes, you can feel them.”

  Cal waited for Stroud to close his eyes, then did the same. He thought that he imagined a dim thrumming beneath the scrub brush and gravel. But that could just have been an Elixir hangover. Hard to tell. His head was fuzzy, his joints ached, and he was pretty sure that he wouldn’t be able to sense an earthquake at the moment.

  “I’ve found bits of glass here, bits of broken slate from shingles. Nothing of significance, in all these years, walking Lascaris’s footsteps like a prospector. Lascaris has hidden his secrets well.”

  Cal imagined Stroud creeping about with a shovel, muttering to himself, searching for . . . for what? “What secrets?”

  “What all alchemists seek . . . the enigma that turns base metal into gold.”

  “You think he could really do that?”

  “I know he did. Temperance flourished with no mines and no miners. Old newspapers described how Lascaris would strike out on ‘constitutionals’ in the mountains, only to return with sacks of gold nuggets the size of his fists he said he’d gleaned from the streams. No one else ever found gold.”

  “Wow. He . . . conjured it? Like magic?”

  “Some magic, some science. But his secret may have died with him, in the fire that destroyed his home. I know . . .” Stroud trailed off.

  Cal stayed silent but opened his eyes, wary.

  Stroud knelt to sketch some symbols in the dirt around the circle made by his footprints. Stroud always got chatty when he worked, and Carl suspected that the stringy alchemist was doing more than doodling. “I used to wonder if the towns­people had enough of his experiments, if they burned him out, like Frankenstein’s monster. Or maybe it was simply a ruse, designed to allow Lascaris to fake his death and escape. But I found his journals and his old letters, read them until the ink bled into my fingertips. And I learned the truth of it . . . that the Rutherfords killed him. They killed him and seized his creations.”

  “His creations?” Cal echoed.

  “Lascaris made sketches of many fearsome things—­objects and creatures that could be the keys to transmuting base metals to gold, of creating eternal life. They’re drawn as leaves on a mighty Alchemical Tree—­a creation that must exist beyond paper, a thing the Rutherfords now possess.

  “Then . . . what’s here?”

  “Some of his other secrets have to be left behind. Here, in his land.”

  “Why not just . . . buy the property? It sure doesn’t look like it would cost much.” Cal knew Stroud had money. Lots of it. He owned the Compostela, and more cash crossed the bar counter than anywhere else in town.

  “I tried. Many times. But the owner would never sell it to me.”

  “Why not?” Cal blurted.

  “I don’t know. The bastard is shielded by a legal trust and won’t answer me, whoever he is. The land, by all rights, should be mine. I can trace my lineage back to Lascaris and a prostitute who had settled in the original town.”

  “Oh.” Cal wanted to say “congratulations,” but wisely zipped his lips before it escaped.

  Stroud gazed at the circle and his squiggly doodles. “But if I can’t have the land, I’ll have Lascaris’s power. If that woman tripped over a piece of the legacy that belongs to me, I’ll have another piece of his knowledge. Something I can use to create a new golden era for alchemy in Temperance.”

  “An era? Like the sixties?”

  Stroud chuckled. “No. Like times past, in Temperance’s heyday. An era that would not just be wealth. If Lascaris had unraveled the secret to turning the miserable dust of this place to gold, then he might just have discovered the key to something even more precious: the elixir of eternal life. Immortality. Gold and immortality are the twin goals of the alchemist. If one is possible, so is the other.”

  “Not the Elixir you make?”

  “The Elixir I make is a pale shadow of the true work.”

  Cal swallowed. Stroud radiated ambition. And batshit crazy. He changed the subject. “Um. So, what’s the circle for?”

  Stroud sat back on his heels. “It’s the Seal of Solomon. For power.”

  “Power for what?”

  “To mark this place as mine. Follow me.”

  Stroud rose and approached the trailer. Cal was thankful that he wasn’t pissing on things to claim them, at least. No lights burned within the Airstream. As Stroud trailed his fingers along the peeling hood of the Bronco, Cal scurried in his wake.

  “Are we gonna break in?”

  “Not exactly. We could break the front door easily, but I’d prefer to be unnoticed.”

  Unnoticed would be better. Unnoticed would cause less trouble. Cal circled around the back of the trailer, glimpsing a window that was propped open. He hissed for Stroud. “There’s a way in.”

  Stroud nodded at him, stared up at the window.

  “Are we looking for something in particular?” Cal said.

  Stroud’s nostrils flared. “Magic. There’s magic in there. Perhaps the artifact I’m looking for . . . maybe more.” Stroud reached up to the windowsill to hoist himself in.

  A deep growl emanated from the darkness inside the trailer. Golden eyes glowed. Cal caught a momentary whiff of fetid salami, then there was a blur of fur and flashing teeth.

  Stroud gasped and let go, falling on his ass in the dirt. He hissed and stared at a gash on the top of his hand that was filling with blood. Gleaming eyes watched through the window.

  Stroud’s eyes narrowed. “Not what I expected.”

  “The guard dog?” Cal squeaked as he scrambled to pick Stroud up off the ground.

  “The woman. She’s like many of the seekers who’ve come here over the years, drawn to the remnants of Lascaris’s power. An alchemist, a magic worker.” Stroud’s lips pulled back from his teeth.

  “Like you?” Cal’s brow wrinkled. The lady seemed fairly normal to him. As in . . . existing in the here and now and not high as a kite.

  “Yes. Like me. It takes something to control a wild animal like that. To bend it to guard duty.” Stroud turned around, back the way they’d come.

  Cal followed. “What now?”

  “We’ll come back. And be better prepared when we do. But for now . . .” Stroud turned to the circle he’d made. Wind twisted in his hair. “For now, I leave a message that I was here.”

  Cal resisted the urge to roll his eyes at the Alc
hemist’s desire to piss on his territory.

  Stroud knelt, pressing his hands to the dirt. It seemed as if something dark and viscous poured from his mouth, into the grooves he’d etched into the dirt. Something shiny and curling that poured forth, moving of its own volition. It reached for Cal, licking at his shoes, like tongues of metallic fire.

  Cal backed away from the darkness that Stroud vomited upon the earth. This was something terrible, something cold and sharp, beyond his understanding. Something that sucked the breath from his lungs and caused his heart to pound in unreasoning fear.

  He did what he did best.

  He ran.

  The Compostela was Temperance’s idea of fine dining.

  Sort of.

  Petra’s eyes adjusted to the dimness. Votive candles in red glass holders glowed on scarred tables, creating shifting shadows on the dark wood paneling. Overhead, stained-­glass lamps hung on chains—­antiques, converted from gaslights, Petra thought. The clack of ivory on a pool table and men’s laughter rang in the back. She smelled cheese and pepperoni and stale beer, and her stomach rumbled.

  Mike slid into a booth that had formerly been a church pew. All the other booths and tables were full, and this one put them by the former apse, near the bar and the pool table. Mike plucked paper menus from a wire basket that held dried hot peppers and parmesan cheese in glass shakers.

  Petra snagged a breadstick from a basket a gaunt waitress in black dropped off. “This is a bizarre little town, isn’t it? Sort of stuck in time.”

  “Yeah. I’m not a native, so it probably seems even odder to me than it really is. Most of the ­people who live here have been here for generations.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “Arkansas. Wanted to be a park ranger ever since I could remember. I lucked out and drew duty here about ten years ago after I got out of the Army.”

  “Let me guess—­military police?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He saluted smartly. “Yellowstone’s a sweet gig, but you see some weird shit out here.”

  Petra leaned forward on her elbows. “Like what?”

  The waitress came by to take their order and disappeared. Mike chewed thoughtfully on a breadstick. “Saw a whole camping party killed by poisonous gases from a mudpot.”