by Laura Bickle
Gabriel wasn’t a man moved by pity or concern.
He was moved by pragmatic things, by expediency. By silence.
He walked soundlessly through the corridors of the county hospital. He found it to be a curious place, obsessed with disinfecting and masking pain to create the illusion of control. A pregnant woman was pushed through the tiled halls in a wheelchair, while a motionless old man was drawn away in a gurney. Life came and life went here, and it was all foreign to him, this buzz and furor over it. Like it was some rare and precious thing, when it teemed all around. Sentimental.
He went first to check on Sal. They’d let Gabe in with no more scrutiny than signing the visitor’s log in an indecipherable scrawl. He entered a glassed-in room, fringed in polka-dotted drapery and painted a sullen pink. Sal lay in a metal bed, tubes running from machines chirping around him. His face was bruised and unmoving. A mask strapped over his nose barely fogged with breath.
Gabe paused at the foot of the bed, where a clipboard with a metal cover hung. At the very least, he was curious to see how long they’d keep Sal. Gabe traced his callused fingers over records of IV fluids administered, pain medications given. His finger stopped at the bottom of the second page, snagging on the thin yellow paper of patient history notes. Metastatic liver cancer. Cirrhosis. Elevated risk of bleeding. The words were hastily scrawled, a quick marker in memory of something too large and complicated to be forgotten.
Gabe paged through the notes. This was not a recent development, not something that had been uncovered in the emergency room. This cancer had been flowering, hidden, behind Sal’s thick hide for some time. Sal knew.
And now Gabe knew, knew why his boss had fed Jeff to the Lunaria. Sal needed to unearth the Hanged Men’s secret to eternal life before his own time ran out.
Gabriel stood over him, watching. It would be very easy to end Sal’s dominion over the Hanged Men, right now. It would take no more than pressing that crisp white pillow over his face and walking away. A finished job.
Gabe even went so far as to reach for the pillow, feeling the coolness of the cotton under his palm.
Tempting. It would be satisfying to do so. And if he had only himself to think of, Gabe would have done it long ago. But killing Sal would not serve the best interests of Gabe or any of the other Hanged Men. Best to wait and let things unfold. Patience had always rewarded him. Perhaps it would reward him with a natural death for Sal, and time for a suitable successor to emerge. Gabe stepped away, back into the bright lights of the hallway, to search for Frankie.
He found him on another floor, one with fewer staff and more noise. Gurneys clattered down the hall, more than one with an unwilling prisoner strapped in. Someone behind a curtain insisted that he was the incarnation of Hamlet, while a young woman stared vacantly through glass, twirling her hair, displaying vicious cut marks on her forearms. A young man stood in the corner and pissed in a mop bucket, singing a pretty convincing sea shanty:
“Who lives in a pineapple under the sea? Absorbent and yellow and . . .”
He found Maria at Frankie’s bedside, smoothing his hair from his brow. She glanced up at Gabe’s shadow in the door.
“How is he?” Gabe asked.
“I’ve never been this scared for him before,” Maria confessed. “Not when he hit a moose while driving drunk. Not when he was found hitchhiking with a garbage bag full of dead trout. Not when he attempted snowmobiling—naked—in January. Not ever. Not even Frankie could do this to himself. That fucker, Sal . . .” She looked away.
Gabe took two steps into the room and stopped. He considered telling Maria that Sal was helpless in a bed two floors up. He imagined that she would finish what he had contemplated.
He kept his mouth shut. Instead, he asked, “Are they taking good care of him?”
Maria sighed. “They hooked him up to IV fluids and a heart monitor. He’s been intubated and had his stomach pumped to keep him from choking on his own vomit again. And they hooked him up to dialysis.” She gestured to a whirring machine beside Frankie, who seemed very small and very fragile in the bed. “Maybe . . . maybe this will be the time he stops drinking.”
“Maybe,” Gabe agreed.
A rustle emanated from the bed. Maria looked up. Frankie turned his head from side to side. He couldn’t speak with the tube in. He flexed his hands that were strapped to the side of the bed.
“Why’s he tied up?”
“He tried to rip his tube out,” Maria said. “The ER doctor ordered him to be restrained. The sedation hasn’t been going well.”
Frankie turned his head to her, eyes wild.
“It’s for your own good, Frankie,” Maria said soothingly, rubbing his arm.
Frankie struggled, trying to talk, his arms straining against the bonds. He glared at Gabe.
“Don’t try to talk,” she said. “He’s not going to hurt you. I promise. Just sleep. Sleep it off.”
He shook his head. Frankie grabbed her hand where it rested next to his restraints. He took her finger between his, pantomined writing.
“I understand.” Maria dug through her purse, came up with a pen and the back of an electric bill envelope. She ripped open the Velcro of the restraint on his right wrist.
Frankie snatched the pen from her and began scratching furiously on the paper.
Maria looked on, then showed it to Gabe. He’d written:
GREEN LION LOST IN THE GARDEN
“Who’s lost?” Maria asked.
Frankie circled “GREEN LION” furiously.
She tried a different tactic. “What does THE GARDEN mean?”
Frankie underlined. “THE GARDEN.”
Maria frowned. “Frankie, I don’t understand.”
Frankie began to draw. He drew a crude shape of a creature standing on its back feet, its open mouth around a disk. It sort of looked like a lion. He drew rays from the disk in a determined fashion.
“That looks like Petra’s pendant,” Gabe said.
Frankie nodded furiously. Around the lion, he began to draw something that looked like thorns. Or barbed wire.
“That doesn’t look like a garden, Frankie.” Maria squinted at it.
Frankie went back to underlining “THE GARDEN.”
Maria frowned. “I last saw Petra at Sal’s ranch when the Feds showed up. She promised to come by to see Frankie.” Maria glanced at her watch. “She hasn’t come.”
Maria dialed Petra’s cell phone number. It rang until it rolled over to voice mail.
Maria stared at the phone. “She’s in trouble, isn’t she?”
Frankie’s eyes had drifted shut. She shook his shoulder, stuffed the envelope under his nose.
“Frankie. Frankie, is that it?”
The old man’s eyes closed.
“Damn it.” Maria stared at the crude drawing and looked up at Gabe. “Do you know what any of this means?”
Gabe’s mouth thinned. “Yes. And it’s nothing good.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Finding the Green Lion
Petra awoke to a dull ache in her veins that grew into a tremendous pounding in her head.
She opened her eyes. The overgrown garden she’d dreamed of was gone. Instead, she was lying on her side in gravel, hands tied behind her back and feet bound with duct tape. She wiggled her fingers, and the ache in her body grew. She swallowed, throat dry, and lifted her head to take in her surroundings. The eye that had been pressed to the gravel was swollen shut,throbbing with a bruise. She felt curiously light-headed, as if she were floating, and moving her head caused yellow spots to form in the periphery of her vision.
Corroded bits of junk surrounded her, tossed haphazardly in what she guessed was a shed made of corrugated steel. Broken chairs, tires, and the dead carcasses of lawn mowers were parked amid old oil drums, broken birdhouses, empty snakeskins, and filthy ma
son jars. The roof was rusting through under the eaves, allowing light to penetrate. A nest of daddy longlegs watched her from the roof, pale and wispy in the golden light.
But it wasn’t just the gaze of the daddy longlegs upon her. Cal squatted before her, holding a bottle of Mountain Dew.
“Hey, you’re awake.”
Petra cast him a murderous glare. “You motherfucking little weasel. Let me go. Now.”
Cal bit his lip. He looked genuinely sorry. “I can’t. Stroud would kill me.”
“Yes, you can. If you let me go, you can leave with me. I won’t press charges.”
He extended the bottle of Mountain Dew. “I can’t. But I brought you something to drink.”
Petra’s tongue was stuck to the roof of her mouth. She paused, torn between the urge to verbally eviscerate poor Cal, who was simply a stupid stooge following orders, and the desire to have a drink.
“I’d love to have a drink. Untie me.”
“No can do.” He extended the lip of the bottle to her mouth, clumsily trying to pour the sickly-sweet liquid. A good third of it dribbled over her face to the floor before he got the hang of pouring it in small sips and giving her time to swallow.
Petra drained the bottle, lay back on the rocks.
“How are you feeling?” he asked.
“Like I’ve been abducted, had my ass kicked, and am tied up in a shed,” Petra retorted.
Cal rolled his eyes. “No. I mean the blood loss.”
Petra’s skin crawled, and she stared at Cal through her good eye. She wiggled her fingers, and her arms ached. Her hands felt rubbery and swollen. She remembered the steak knife and shut her eyes.
Cal picked at a piece of gravel. “Stroud bled you so that he could start playing with the Locus.”
“He what?”
“He took your blood,” Cal repeated helpfully. “He says . . . he says that you should last for a long time.” He tried to give her a reassuring smile.
“Where’s Sig?” she demanded.
“Nobody’s seen your dog since he bounced off the screen door, trying to get at Stroud.”
Petra pressed her cheek back down against the ground. “You have to tell Mike. The ranger from the bar,” Petra said. “Tell him where I am.”
Cal shook his head. “I can’t.”
“Tell Gabe. Tell Maria. Tell someone who can get me out of here.”
Cal rose to his feet, backed away. His eyes were full of regret.
“Cal!” Petra shouted at him, loud enough to make her head pound.
He disappeared from sight. She heard a door being dragged shut and the crimp of a padlock.
He was sorry. But not sorry enough to do anything to help her before Stroud bled her dry and left her for dead. And the way things looked, that was likely to happen a lot sooner than the sheriff’s office showing up with their white horses to arrest Stroud.
Gritting her teeth, she pulled at her bonds. Rolling on the gravel, she succeeded in getting her wrists under her ass, then her feet. The effort made her dizzy, but she managed to get her trembling arms in front of her.
The sight made her nauseous. Her sleeves were hiked up past her elbows, soaked in blood. Long, seeping gashes ran across her forearms. She counted six of them, three on each. If Stroud was expecting her to last a long time, he was going to have to find other places to cut. If infection didn’t set in from his filthy steak knives first. Her fingers were pale and cold.
Despair settled deep in her belly. She wished she was back in her dream, confronting a lion.
Something her father said still rattled in the back of her skull: Use all the tools at your disposal. Your hands and your blood.
She rolled to a sitting position and scanned the shed, looking for something sharp, and spied a broken rake in a corner.
She wormed over to it slowly, taking care not to exert herself too much. She didn’t want to pass out again. Bracing the handle of the rake between her feet, she set her wrists to it. Gritting her teeth, she began to saw at the duct tape.
She’d be damned if she’d give Stroud another opportunity to bleed her. One try was all he got.
The duct tape began to split, and she pulled it free of her wrists, then peeled it free of her ankles. She didn’t dare try to stand yet, just sat with her head between her knees. There was no telling how much blood Stroud had taken from her, but it sure as hell felt like more than what the vampires at the Red Cross took for donations. She tried to count backward to the last year she’d had a tetanus shot. Two years ago? Three?
Wobbly, she climbed to her feet. Unconsciousness still gnawed at the edges of her vision, but she resolutely put one foot before the other until she reached the door of the shed. She tried the handle, shoved at it, but it was clear from the bolts on the inside that there was indeed a hasp and a padlock on the outside.
Shit. She sat down to take stock. She wasn’t getting out until the next time someone came for her. Which meant that she should prepare for that eventuality.
Conserve her energy.
And maybe build a weapon.
Her gaze picked out a few items of interest: the duct tape she’d left on the ground, an old canister vacuum cleaner, a coiled garden hose, a pump garden sprayer, PVC pipe, and a red gasoline can.
She crawled to the gasoline can, shook it. The slosh suggested that it was half-full.
She grinned. It sounded like hope.
Stroud was wrist deep in blood.
And batshit crazy.
Cal was frozen in place halfway down the stairs to the basement, wishing he could melt into the moldering walls. Stroud held the gold compass he’d taken from Petra. He’d soaked it in her blood, and the red liquid spiraled around the compass’s groove, a confused mass of droplets colliding and spinning against each other.
“The Locus,” Stroud murmured. “Look at it, Cal. It reacts, sensing the magic in the things around it.” He thrust the golden disk against the athanor, and the blood spun faster. When he pulled it toward a pile of cinder blocks, the pulse of it slowed.
And it also reacted to Stroud. When he held it close, the red quickened. “It’s got to haveLascaris’s living magic running through it. So much more than a simple tool.”
He set the compass down on his workbench, his hands framing it. A droplet of mercuric sweat dribbled down his fingers, rolled to the Locus. The device hissed as mercury touched it. “Lascaris’s notes were an incomplete set of instructions. But they will be a guide. A guide to finding the magic on Rutherford’s ranch, to uncovering its secrets.” His cracked lips pulled back in a grin.
Cal cleared his throat. “Stroud.”
The grin dissolved into a snarl. “What do you want?”
Cal backed away. “There’s someone here. At the gate to the Garden.”
Stroud grimaced and limped up the stairs, past Cal and into the kitchen.
“Who is it?”
“I think it’s cops.” Cal offered him a set of binoculars with a shaking hand.
Stroud’s eyes narrowed, and he snatched the binoculars from Cal. He crept to the kitchen window and focused on the long driveway leading up to the main road.
“Shit,” he swore.
Dusty blue and black SUVs with government plates had pulled off the road next to the mailbox. Men with windbreakers emblazoned with the letters DEA were spilling out of the SUVs. They were largely interchangeable, men in sunglasses and buzz cuts. Except for the man in the park ranger uniform at the back of the group. Cal recognized him as Petra’s friend.
Stroud was counting the number of men under his breath. Twenty-four. Cal knew that Stroud had at least forty people in the Garden, but these men were trained, and at least two-thirds of Stroud’s garden flowers were stoned at any given moment . . .
A man in a windbreaker and bulletproof vest disengaged from the rest, walked
past the gate down the quarter-mile driveway. A piece of paper was in his hand.
“Looks like they’ve got a warrant,” Stroud mumbled. “Maybe they played rock-paper-scissors for who got to serve it.”
Stroud reached up to feel along the top of the refrigerator, his wound seeping through the bedsheet bandage. Cal’s stomach turned to see it. Stroud came back with a nine-millimeter handgun hidden in a crumpled bag of chips. He checked the ammunition in the clip, brushed the salt from it.
He ate a chip and turned the lights off.
And waited. Cal knitted his fingers together. When Stroud was quiet, it was bad news. He edged backward, back toward the shadows of the living room. Now would be a really good time to slip out the back and make a run for it.
A knock sounded at the front door.
Stroud walked, barefoot, across the sticky linoleum. He reached for the doorknob, opened the door . . .
And fired through the screen door at the DEA agent on his doorstep. Cal squeaked and hid behind the kitchen table.
The agent fell backward into the half darkness, blood blossoming from his right eye. The body fell to the floorboards of the porch.
Stroud closed the front door and locked it. He bent down to pick up another broken potato chip from the floor, chewed it thoughtfully.
He turned on Cal. Cal could barely hear him over the ringing in his ears. “Get the guns from the upstairs bedrooms. And assemble everyone for the disaster plan.”
“Yessir.”
“I’ve prepared for war for years,” Stroud mused. “Expected that it would be war with Rutherford. But I’ll start with the law.”
Petra gently blew on the spark she cradled in her hands.
The flame intensified under the power of her quavering breath. She’d found an abandoned bird nest in a flowerpot in the back of the shed and had struck pieces of flinty gravel together until she’d finally summoned a spark that caught and held. She needed a fire soon; it was growing too dark to scavenge for more materials without it.
And she needed it to breathe life into her weapon.
The bird nest in her palms smoked and began to glow. She blew on it again, encouraging the tongue of fire to lick at the brittle walls of the nest. The nest would burn quickly; she had to work fast.
