Dark Alchemy

by Laura Bickle

  Whatever his problem was, Sig was keyed up. Petra brushed her teeth, washed her face, and crawled into bed. She felt antsy, too. She briefly considered breaking out Maria’s dreamcatcher and taking a long drink. She didn’t look forward to troubling dreams, but she expected sleep would be long in coming otherwise.

  She fussed with the blankets, reached up to turn out the light . . .

  . . . and saw a stain on the aluminum window ledge above her bed.

  Petra squinted at it. It looked like blood. Not Gabriel’s phosphorescent blood, but plain red blood. It smeared down the edge of the glass. She leaned out the window, saw no one.

  But there was a smudged bloody handprint on the outside of the Airstream’s metallic skin.

  Petra lurched back into the trailer and slammed the window shut. Sig whimpered, hopped up to the bed, and put his paws on the sill.

  Petra turned off the lights. She let her eyes adjust so that she could see into the darkness without being seen.

  “Was there something . . . someone out there, Sig?”

  Sig hopped down from the bed and continued to pace. Petra understood. He was on patrol, thinking that there was something out there, in the complete and inky blackness of Temperance.

  “Good boy,” she said.

  Uneasily, she pulled the blanket up to her chin. Maybe Mike had been right. Maybe she’d sleep better at the lodge. But for tonight, she’d best get used to the idea of trying to sleep with the metronomic sound of Sig’s toenails clicking on the floor.

  “Well. That’s interesting.”

  Petra peered out of the Airstream the next morning at the burned-­out hole at the edge of the property. It looked like a black stain on the earth. She turned quickly inside to stuff all her valuables in her jacket pockets and stash her tools, guns, and ammo in the back of the Bronco. If someone was trying to get into the Airstream, she wasn’t going to leave anything behind in it of more value than the homemade spectrometer. Let the meth heads try to smoke some crystal out of that contraption.

  Sig trotted out of the Airstream, and she locked the door behind her. He yawned, stretched, and headed toward the sagebrush, where smoke rose in a faint tendril. Petra assumed that he had a den somewhere around here, and that he’d be napping for much of the day. But he paused in the brush, sniffing around the edge.

  Petra followed him. The scrub grasses had burned away, and it looked as if there was something silvery embedded in odd squiggles in the ground. This wasn’t a meteor crater. This was something man-­made. And intricately so. Maybe something occultish. Scratches and shapes curved around in a circle, though she had no idea what they meant.

  She picked up a stick and poked at the edge of the symbol, expecting the glint of metal she saw to be some kind of forgotten steel tool or litter.

  But it wasn’t. It moved and wriggled away from the stick, like living water.

  Petra picked up the stick and squinted at a droplet on it. “Mercury.”

  Mercury was poison. And removing it was gonna be a bitch. She wondered if she should contact the property owner or a bomb squad for hazmat removal. She didn’t have a phone number for her landlord, just a P.O. box. She fished her cell phone out of her pocket and took a picture of the scene. She hesitated about calling Mike. She knew he’d be down here in an instant, cordoning it off, clucking over it like a good cop. But this wasn’t parkland, it wasn’t his jurisdiction, and Petra had no desire to be his damsel in distress.

  She prodded at the mercury again with the stick. It rolled away, seeming to squirm into the ground.

  “Weird,” she grumbled, trying to figure out if there was some gap in the ground it was seeking, and hoping it wasn’t going to find its way into the water table as it drained away.

  Sig walked to the edge of the circle, lifted his leg, and pissed on it.

  “Thank you, Sig.”

  He wagged his tail.

  She walked to the Bronco, Sig at her heels. He clambered into the Bronco after her, sitting in the front seat like he owned it.

  “Is that how these things work? You pee on them, and then they’re yours?”

  Sig looked patiently out the window, as if that was a monumentally stupid question and he was expecting her to hurry up and drive.

  Petra cranked the Bronco’s ignition. She half expected the sound of the engine to scare the coyote away, but Sig hung his head out the passenger window as she began to drive slowly down the gravel road. Maybe he had some domestic dog in him, some ancestral memory of letting his ears flap in an automotive-­generated breeze. He seemed happy as the scenery flashed past, his eyes half-­closed, the breeze skimming through his fur.

  Petra consulted a map Maria had left for her in the glove box. The county sheriff’s office was about thirty miles west.

  She could report this thing with the burned mercury on her property. And maybe someone there would also know something about her missing father.

  She’d see if they were as useless as Mike suggested.

  The drive took her east, on two-­lane roads sparsely traveled by traffic. The dusty ribbon of road stretched into the glare of morning. Bugs hung over from the night splattered on the windshield, smeared around by the old windshield wipers to become iridescent tracks.

  The county seat was in a larger town with a railroad passing through it. Petra wound her way through a ridiculous warren of one-­way streets until she found the county jail. It was a small, nondescript two-­story building of 1960s vintage, surrounded by a chain-­link fence with patrol cars parked behind it. The patrol cars were shiny and clean, as if they were rarely driven. Petra parked the Bronco on the street at a parking meter. She left the windows halfway open for Sig and climbed the steps to an entrance marked LOBBY.

  The lobby was little more than a hallway with vending machines and a few plastic chairs. The place smelled like stale coffee. Along the walls hung portraits of the previous county sheriffs. All of them, including the current one, had the last name “Rutherford.” Below her, where Petra imagined the jail cells were, the sounds of shouting emanated. Petra approached a window covered with clear Plexiglas and rang a grimy plastic button for ser­vice.

  A dispatcher came to the window. “Yes?”

  “Hi. I was hoping that you could help me. I had someone trespass on the property I’m renting last night. And they burned something close to my trailer.” Petra showed the dispatcher the photo on her phone.

  The dispatcher squinted at it. “Looks like a fire pit.”

  “I guess. But there’s mercury in it.”

  The dispatcher blinked. “Mercury?”

  “Yeah. It’s hazardous material, poisonous. I, uh, dunno if the bomb squad handles that or . . .” Petra trailed off.

  The dispatcher just stared. “Well, I guess you could rinse it off with a garden hose or something.”

  “Um, that would be bad. Is there . . . like a local EPA office or something?”

  The dispatcher popped her gum and pulled a phone book from under the counter. “It’s about two hours away. Here’s their number.” She turned the phone book around and pointed to it.

  Petra recorded the number in her phone. “Uh, thanks. Is there a report or something I can file on this?”

  “Yeah.” The dispatcher gave her a form to fill out. Petra filled it out as completely as she could, categorizing the offense as “vandalism” and “hazardous material spill.” She was pretty sure that the cops should be filling this part out, and there were several sections that she left blank.

  “Okay,” the dispatcher said, taking the form. “We’ll send somebody out to take a look. They’ll call you.”

  Petra nodded, but stayed standing at the counter.

  The dispatcher chewed her gum slowly. It was pink and smelled like peppermint. “Is there something else you needed?”

  “I’m trying to find a missing person.”
r />   “Wow. You sure have a lot of stuff going on. Do you want to file a missing persons report?” She cracked her gum.

  “Well, the person I’m looking for went missing in 1995. Joseph Dee. This was the last place I heard from him.” Petra fished her photo of her father from her wallet and slid it under the window.

  The dispatcher didn’t touch the photo. “Did you file a missing persons report in 1995?”

  “I didn’t. But maybe someone else did? If he had friends here?”

  The dispatcher rolled her eyes. “Just a minute.” She turned around and yelled to the office behind her. “Hey, are one of you guys free for a public records request?”

  A deputy in a black uniform lumbered to the desk, holding his coffee. “How can I help you, ma’am?”

  “I’m looking for my father. He disappeared in Temperance in 1995. I’m hoping that you can help me find him.”

  The deputy took a deep swig of his coffee, stared at the photo. “Ma’am, do you have a date of disappearance?”

  “Not exactly. But I think it was in June.”

  “Do you have a last known address?”

  “No. I was hoping that you could search your records, see if there were any bodies found around that time that match his description.”

  The deputy frowned. “Ma’am, records retention law only requires us to keep paper records back five years. Anything that old has likely been destroyed or sent to long-­term storage off-­site.”

  Petra’s heart fell. It sure didn’t sound like he was offering to look. “Do you keep anything on microfiche, or electronic records?”

  The deputy stared over his coffee at her. “Do you want to file a missing persons report? That’s about all we can do for you.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I do.” Petra was certain that it wouldn’t do any good, but was determined to cause them an iota of extra work. Even if it meant them opening a file cabinet or feeding the paper to the shredder.

  “Let me get you the form.”

  Petra spent fifteen minutes filling out the form on a clipboard in the lobby. In that time, two ­people who asked for records checks for apartment rental applications were arrested on outstanding warrants and taken downstairs to the jail. One of them had a child with her, who was promptly handed off to the dispatcher. The dispatcher dragged a box of toys out from under a table and began trying to calm the crying child with a teddy bear while she juggled the phone to call children’s ser­vices.

  Mike was right; there were no answers to be found here. She’d have to try elsewhere.

  Petra slid the form under the window and walked out, punching the number for the local EPA office into her cell phone. At least they’d know what to do about the mercury. The call rang through to voice mail, and she got about thirty seconds of a message recorded before getting cut off.

  Chapter Nine

  Flight

  Sal Rutherford was not happy with Gabe.

  In Sal’s world, “not happy” often translated to petty brutality or reckless stupidity. Some days were better than others, but Sal was particularly pissed today.

  “I told you to take care of that problem with the contract hand. You didn’t.”

  “I sent him away.” Gabe threw a bale of hay to the floor of the barn loft. Dust puffed up in a cloud that caused Sal to cough and wipe his nose on his sleeve. The watering whites of his eyes were nearly as yellow as the dust.

  “I wanted him buried. Gone. Not running his yap to anyone who would listen about there being bodies on the property.”

  “You wanted me to kill him and leave another body lying around to be found?”

  “I expect you to be discreet about where you bury bodies.”

  When Sal got angry, there was no reasoning with him, no half measures or calculated plans. Everything was black or white, dead or alive. And the boss man felt better when things were dead, especially things with mouths.

  Gabe reached for another bale. “It’s done.”

  “No, it ain’t. I wanted a body buried.” Sal started toward him, but tripped on a floorboard. He stumbled, swearing, face reddening.

  “Careful, boss.” Gabe lifted the bale to stack it on top of the others.

  Sal reached down, tearing the offending half-­rotted board up from the floor with a splintering sound. He swung it at Gabe. The plank slammed into Gabe’s back in a bright arc of pain. He fell to the floor, gasping.

  “Smart-­ass sumbitch,” Sal huffed. “You ain’t gonna forget who’s in charge of you.”

  The board cracked into Gabe’s shoulder, his face, his ribs. When his lung collapsed, it brought a gasp of blood to his lips. A trickle of blood bubbled in the back of his throat with a roar in his ears that drowned out the sounds of Sal’s swearing and the thudding of the board against his flesh and bones.

  The pain was one of the clearest sensations Gabe could remember in a long time. The years had dimmed a great deal of feeling, for him and for all of his men. Many were little more than automatons, now. They slipped through their days in silence, each day the same as the last and the same as tomorrow. There were different masters, over time—­the Rutherfords had both kind and cruel descendants. All had labored under the illusion of control, the belief that the Hanged Men were simply part of their inherited furniture.

  Sal was the worst so far. Generations of wealth and entitlement had trickled down into a spoiled child that Gabe had been wary of since he’d been old enough to crawl. As a kid, Sal had been known to try to skin snakes alive and set fire to the tails of squirrels. His enthusiasm for cruelty had not waned over time.

  Gabe rolled in the straw, thrusting his hand beneath the hay. From under his sleeve, a mass of black feathers rocketed away from his flesh and landed behind the bales. He hoped Sal took that as a flinch, a reflexive urge to protect his head from the assault, and that he had not seen that little bit of mass split away and flutter into the shadows.

  Sal stepped back, mopping his brow. This was more exercise than the rancher had seen in months. Gabe idly wished for a heart attack. But he had no idea who the property would fall to if Sal died, and what would be worse—­Sal, or an invisible developer who would bulldoze the Lunaria to build vacation condominiums?

  Gabe glanced up at the ceiling. A raven paced silently on a beam, watching. He let go, releasing the lion’s share of his conscious mind into the bird. He often partitioned his awareness among these black fragments of himself, allowing him to see and be in many places at once—­even returning to the Lunaria to help him regenerate. But with concentration, he could force nearly all of his consciousness into one tiny, light vessel.

  Now he perched on the beam, watching Sal advance on his own body. He wasn’t sure what Sal thought had happened—­if he thought that Gabe had passed out, died, or was simply ignoring him. Either way, it didn’t seem to matter.

  Sal kicked Gabe’s body over the edge of the hayloft and it fell as limply as a dishrag off the edge of a sink, down twenty feet to the wooden floor of the barn. It lay motionless, a dribble of blood sliding from the body’s lips to the floor. Shadows scuttled into the dark corners of the barn, shrugging out of Gabe’s boots and from under the collar of his shirt—­bits of his memory and limbs splintering away for survival.

  Gabe rustled his feathers and flew, sailing out the window in his fragile new body and into the outdoors. The air whistled through his feathers, pulling him on an air current away from the barn.

  For now, he was free.

  He hoped that he’d have a body to return to when he got back.

  “Hey, thanks for seeing me.”

  Petra stood awkwardly on Maria Yellowrose’s doorstep with Pearl winding around her ankles. Maria opened the screen door.

  “It’s good to see you. C’mon in. You’re just in time for lunch.”

  A yip sounded from the Bronco, and Petra rolled her eyes. Sig pressed his snout throu
gh the half-­opened window. His tongue lolled over the edge of the glass, and he made as if he was suffocating. Pearl padded over to the truck to watch the spectacle.

  “You got a pet?”

  “Heh. I think he found me. He’s not exactly tame.”

  Pearl jumped from the ground to the roof of the Bronco. She slapped her paws on the windshield, teasing Sig.

  “Did you feed him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then he’s yours. You can let him out.”

  “Um. Will Pearl mind?”

  “Pearl can take care of herself. Trust me.”

  Pearl was spread-­eagled against the windshield, glowering at the coyote. Sig’s wet nose pressed against her belly through the glass.

  “I don’t know if I can trust him.”

  “If you’re feeding him, he won’t wander far. And I’m pretty sure you don’t want him pissing on your upholstery.”

  While Sig was still focused on the windshield, Petra reluctantly opened the passenger door. Pearl reached down and slapped at Sig’s tail; he reeled and yipped at her.

  “Sig!”

  Sig bounded out. He weaved through Petra’s legs and trotted up to Maria’s house, where Maria was dangling a tantalizing piece of chicken before him. He delicately took it from her hand like a gentleman.

  “Where did he come from?” Maria reached out to rub his ears, and he made awful faces of delight.

  “He just appeared,” Petra said helplessly. “And took over.”

  Maria cracked a smile. “Frankie would say that you’ve met your spirit guide. Coyote is a trickster. A powerful friend.”

  “I don’t believe in spirit guides,” Petra blurted.

  “Yeah, well, you may not believe in spirit guides, but all that’s important is that the animal does. That’s what Frankie says, anyway.”

  Sig snorted and trotted into the house like he owned the place.

  Pearl glowered at Petra from the Bronco.

  “I tried,” Petra said.

  The cat jumped down and stiffly followed the coyote into the cottage, tail twitching.