Dark Alchemy (23 page)

Flames erupted from the nozzle of the device with a
fwoosh
. The light wreathed the silhouette, and Petra let up on the trigger with a yelp.

Gabe stood before her, his sleeve on fire. He looked at the flames and slapped them out with his hat.

Petra wobbled to her feet, one hand clapped over her mouth. “Shit. I'm sorry.”

Gabe crossed the space between them in two quick steps. He grasped her shoulders, and she sagged against him. His shirt smelled like earth and char.

“Nice toy.”

“Thanks. I made it myself.”

He pushed her hair out of her face. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah. How did you find me?”

“Frankie and Maria. He had a vision that the ‘Green Lion' was in danger. I got the Hanged Men, and we came the back way, through the fields. Sig led us the rest of the way.” He frowned at the blood on her sleeves. He took her wrists and turned her arms over to view the cuts across her arms. “What happened?”

She looked down. “Stroud has the Locus. He . . . he needed blood.”

Gabe's amber gaze darkened. “I will find him.”

“Gabe, I'm sorry, I didn't . . .” He was furious. She hadn't meant to lose the Locus, had no idea that Stroud would try to use it to find the Lunaria. “He said he knew what happened to my father.”

“Never mind the Locus,” he said, and her jaw dropped. “The other Hanged Men are in the field. They'll take you back.”

“But Stroud . . .”

“I will take care of Stroud.” He slipped his arm around her waist to lead her from the shed. “Where is he?”

“In the basement of the farmhouse. He's wounded.”

A gunshot roared from the direction of the house, and Sig whimpered.

“What was that?” she whispered.

Gabe's jaw was a hard line in the gloom. “Maria called your friend Mike. He rustled up some friends in law enforcement. The DEA is here.”

He pushed open the shed door into the falling darkness, looked right and left before pulling Petra into the cool night air. No lights were on in the house or trailers. Petra thought she saw fireflies swimming in the distance. But as her eyes adjusted, she could see that the lights were in pairs: the Hanged Men walking in from the field, climbing over the barbed wire at the back of the compound. Ravens perched on the fence, clotting like blood.

Gabe handed Petra off to the nearest Hanged Man. “Take her to the hospital.”

“Leave Stroud for the DEA,” Petra said. She reached out and put her hand on his charred shirt.

Gabe shook his head. His gaze was bright and murderous. It was the most feeling she'd ever seen in him. “No. Stroud's gone too far.”

He reached out, curled his cold hand around the back of her neck and kissed her with cool lips that tasted like winter.

Petra blinked, stunned, as he drew away.

He gave her a half smile. “What, it's only okay if you kiss me?”

She was speechless as he turned and walked away toward the house, the remaining Hanged Men soundlessly falling in step behind him.

G
abe strode across the ragged grounds of the Garden, seething. Rage was a sensation that he had not experienced in many years. When he had turned over Petra's arms, had seen what Stroud had done, he felt it rise deep within his chest, thaw some of the coldness that lay there. He could almost hear that frost crackle and break.

As he circled around to the front of the house, he could see the DEA advancing behind plastic shields. They had pushed past the gate and a pair of body-­armored men were dragging a fallen officer off the front porch to safety. The officer's face was a mask of blood. From the upstairs windows, Stroud's ­people were firing down on them. The muzzle flashes sizzled bright as lightning in the darkness.

This was clearly not the best way in. Gabe returned to the rear of the house and plucked the paneled back door from its hinges. The Hanged Men moved past him into the acrid gloom of the house. He directed them upstairs with a jerk of his chin, toward Stroud's gunmen. He heard their steps on the stairs, then screams and shouts.

Gabe's gaze swept the dim kitchen. Light leaked out from under a red door that he supposed led to the basement. The lockset was shattered, hanging by its stem. He shoved the door open and plunged down the stairs.

He smelled the sharp bitterness of sulfur, the metallic softness of mercury, the tang of salt. And over it all, the copper scent of blood. He knew those odors: the stench of an alchemist's lab. And the reek of death, gathering close.

The basement glowed in light from an athanor burning at full blast. The heat made the air thick and muzzy, shimmering like noon on summer pavement. The Alchemist stood before his table, on which the Locus and ruddy jars of blood glistened. He was shirtless, his skin the color of slate and twitching over the tide of mercury roiling beneath it. He was packing an ammunition bag of items—­Gabe assumed that he was preparing to flee.

“I was expecting the DEA,” Stroud said, glancing up at him. “After me for selling Elixir.”

Gabe cocked his head. “You've done more than sell poison.”

Stroud shrugged, and the motion sent his grey skin rippling over his shoulder. “I didn't intend for it to be that way. I was trying to create a sense of timelessness. A piece of the Philosopher's Stone. The illusion of forever in a crystal.” He sighed, and the mercury in his skin slumped. “But I've created an incomplete process.”

“Calcination.”

“Yes. Too much of my Elixir, over time . . . they become the calyx, the body of stone.”

“That's not why I'm here. You took something that doesn't belong to you,” Gabe said.

Stroud glared at him. “The bulletproof man. Perhaps you'd like to give me your secret?”

“I think you've had enough of secrets. You've poisoned yourself on them.”

Stroud snarled, lips pulled back from his blackened gums, and threw a bottle at Gabe. He felt the glass explode against his chest, the sizzle of acid against his skin and clothes.

He lunged over the table at Stroud, turning it over and shattering the jars of blood. He slugged Stroud, sending him sprawling on the floor. The Alchemist spat out a glob of mercury and a few teeth, but his fingers skittered in the debris and came up with a table leg. He thrust it at Gabe, slamming it into his belly with all the force his gaunt body could muster.

Gabe gasped as the wood broke his skin and tore. Luminescent blood gushed from the wound. He staggered backward, crashing against a shelf. Bottles shattered against the floor, leaking on the cement. The pain was bright, excruciatingly brilliant, a fever of sensation. He fell to the ground, holding his gut. A string of luminescent blood worked free of his lips. Stroud stood on Gabe's neck, reached down.

“I'll force you to give up your secrets.” The mercury dribbled from his hand, slithered along the ground like a force with its own volition. It began to creep into Gabe's wound. Gabe howled.

Through blurring vision, he saw the trail of liquid from the broken jars running toward the athanor. A panicked salamander scuttled out of the furnace. He could smell the vapors steaming along the floor.

A spark escaped from the furnace, jumping to the volatile compounds on the cement.

And a blinding roar rolled over Gabe that eclipsed all that luminous awareness of fire and pain.

T
he Hanged Men were determined to follow orders.

Two of them led Petra away into the darkness as gunshots flared. She twisted to look behind her. Men were shouting, and Stroud's ­people were fleeing into the fields in the wash of high-­powered flashlight beams.

She couldn't leave Gabe to face Stroud alone. She struggled against the grip of the Hanged Men, but they held her in their cold, viselike hands.

Petra took a deep breath and went limp, allowing her head to sag forward and her knees to buckle. One of the Hanged Men let go, and the other loosened his grip long enough to try to put her over his shoulder to carry her.

Petra slipped out from under his arm and ran.

Blood pounded unevenly in her chest, and her breath was ragged as she charged back toward the house. She was conscious of Sig running beside her, following her back into the fray.

She could make out the figures of DEA agents in body armor storming the garden, tearing down strings of laundry, trampling the pathetic tomato patch and shouting orders. The denizens of the Garden who hadn't already run were returning fire, fighting back with guns and even rocks.

She spied a familiar figure: Mike had a young man down on the ground, handcuffing him. Behind him, she saw another man bearing down with a rifle. A man in ragged jeans and a sweatshirt that didn't say “DEA,” a cigarette dangling from his lips.

She shouted for Mike to look behind him as she disentangled the nozzle of her makeshift flamethrower from the garden hose. Mike couldn't hear her over the fracas, seeming to be busy yelling orders at the man he was handcuffing.

She aimed and pulled the trigger at the rifleman. Gasoline washed over him, and he was engulfed in a plume of flame. He shrieked, dropping the gun and rolling around on the ground beside the farmhouse. The conflagration spread along the dry brush, sparks leaping from the broken tassels of grasses.

Mike looked up at her, stunned.

The fire moved like waves on the ocean did—­inexorable and roaring. From the grass, it spread to the clothesline, turning laundry into burning ghosts. It slipped up the siding of the house, curling and shattering the paint, rushing into the open windows with orange tongues. The flames licked at something shimmering beyond the blackening curtains, some hazy fume that she'd barely tasted before in the kitchen.

The farmhouse exploded in a deafening roar. The concussion hurled Petra to the ground. She rolled over, stunned, staring up at the house that was bursting at its seams in flames that blotted out the stars and the glow of the moon.

She screamed. Gabe was in there.

No. Not again.

And it was all her fault.

 

Chapter Twenty-Two

Burnt Things

C
al couldn't explain why he felt drawn to return to the Garden after the fire destroyed it, but he did. He felt pulled in the way that metal is drawn to a magnet, or the way a vulture is compelled to circle carrion. Maybe it was because the Garden was the only life he'd ever really known.

Maybe it was because he wasn't quite done with that life yet.

When everyone was gone, he ventured out of the grasses and crickets to absorb the devastation. Under a full moon, Cal paced the grounds with his hands in his pockets. He kicked at a piece of hot rubble from the ruined house. The heated metal melted a smudge in the toe of his boot. A few blackened beams reached to the sky, like charred fingers. The chimney still stood, though the cap had begun to slide down the back. It was as if everything had simply been scribbled over with a marker.

He wasn't the only one who'd come back. He'd stayed in the fields overnight and all of the next day, watching the DEA and volunteer firefighters comb the site while the ravens harassed them.

His life, as it had been, was gone. No more being the footman of the local meth lord. He wasn't sure what he was going to do next. Hit the road, he guessed. There was nothing keeping him here.

He stood in the shadow of the broken chimney, remembering how this seemingly tiny pile of broken timbers and scattered shingles used to be a house that smelled like acid and piss. He hated to admit it, but he was relieved that Stroud was dead.

Sort of.

He spied something shiny, glimmering in the darkness like a sliver of moonlight. He knelt, wondering if it was something he'd be able to sell. So far, he'd found about ten dollars in change, a rusted key, and a melted fishing lure.

Cal touched the ground. This section was cool. He dug in the dirt, brushing away the ash and burned clay bricks. But his excitement turned to a cold pit in his stomach as something soft and metallic squished under his hand.

Mercury.

He yanked his hand back, but the mercury stuck to his fingers. This shit was poison; Stroud's madness was evidence of it. He shook them, trying to flip the drops away, but the metal still clung.

He wiped his hand against his jeans, trying to scrub the liquid off. But the droplets crawled up his sleeve, scurrying like ants.

In a panic, Cal yanked off his jacket and began to rub his arm on the ground. The beads of mercury congealed and began to seep into his skin. Jesus, he could feel it soaking through his pores, worming under his flesh. It was hot as liquid metal in his veins, and he gasped, clawing at his body. His nails dug deep bloody welts in his skin, but they summoned only blood. He couldn't dig the mercury out.

He could feel it settling, leaden and heavy in the marrow of his bones. He shook in fear, wondering if he should try to get to a hospital. Maybe they could get it out of him.

A rustle emanated from the far side of the field. Cal dragged his gaze away from his crawling flesh and saw glowing eyes advancing on him over the dark terrain.

Shit.

He'd seen them before, that first night alone at the ranch and again as the Garden burned. Sal Rutherford's ranch hands had come, silent and unflinching, to tear the remains of the farmhouse apart. Stroud had been right: They were unnatural. Magic.

And Cal wanted no more of magic. He scurried away, running to the safety of the road.

Looking behind him, he could see that they had stopped at the ruins of the house, carrying shovels over their shoulders. A raven cawed softly at them, as if in greeting.

With silent determination, they began to dig.

N
othing and no one was indestructible. She knew that, now.

Petra returned to the Garden days later. The sky overhead was a clear blue, feathered with cirrus clouds. The house fire had burned itself out, leaving a pile of charred and broken timbers behind.

She was still bandaged from shoulder to wrist on both arms. Stroud's experimentation would leave her with scars that would never disappear entirely. She'd cut her hair off at the shoulder to remove the ends charred in the explosion, but it still smelled burned whenever it fell over her face. Her gun belt, retrieved by the DEA from a tweaker fleeing the scene, was slung around her hips, feeling more natural than she cared to admit.

But she was alive.

Sig walked at her side. He wore a real dog collar now, with tags for his name and the address of the trailer. His fur felt soft and shiny, thanks to a bottle of shampoo and three types of hair conditioner.

She'd left the Bronco behind the police tape at the gate and walked slowly to the pile of skeletal junk. Ash stirred in the breeze. A backhoe was parked beside the ruins of the house, ready to be pressed into ser­vice soon. Mike had told her that the DEA would be excavating for weeks, but they expected that the heat from the meth lab explosion had likely incinerated any useful evidence or human remains. There was no way to reconstruct Stroud's formula for the calcinating Elixir. The members of the Garden who had been captured didn't know any of Stroud's recipes. DEA was considering the deaths to be a freak accident, a bit of mad science gone wrong.

She stared at the pile of blackened wood: ceiling joists, wall framing, shattered sheets of floor. Even if Gabe had been able to survive fire—­and based on what she'd seen, she thought that there was a fair chance that he could—­there was no way that he could survive the weight of that much wood crushing him. Her heart sagged.

On the way, she'd picked a bouquet of red fireweed. She laid it down on the crumbling chimney. She felt as if she should say something.

“I wish . . .” More words wouldn't come. She couldn't compress what she felt into a phrase.
I wish that you hadn't come back for me. I wish I had known you better. I wish I hadn't fucked it up, because I was beginning to feel something again, and it scared the hell out of me.

Her attention was arrested by something writhing in the shadows behind the ruin of the chimney. She climbed to her feet and squinted at the shadow. Sig scuttled toward it.

“Sig, leave it alone.”

A wing, moving. Petra plunged her hands into the ash to free the raven. She blew ash from its face. It blinked up at her through a filmy eye, its beak parted in stress. She carefully ran her fingers over its feathers, pausing over singe marks on its body. Its left wing had been burned and crumpled. Its tail was a charred nub. But it lived.

Petra sat back on her heels, pressing the bird to her chest. She wondered if this was one of Gabe's, keeping vigil. Maybe, in its own way, it haunted this place. Maybe it was a hand or a foot separated from his destroyed body, searching for the remains. Hope flared in her as she gazed down at the bird.

“Are you part of him?” she asked.

The bird didn't answer.

She wrapped the bird carefully in her denim shirt. It took three tries to get out of the sleeves without causing the wounds under her bandages to howl. The bird's talons chewed into her tank top, leaving smears of soot on it like charcoal in a sketchbook. His head jerked to and fro, searching for the sky beyond her shoulders and the confines of his denim straitjacket.

Whistling for Sig, Petra returned to the Bronco. Sig was suddenly shy. The coyote clambered solemnly into the backseat, leaving shotgun for Petra's burden.

The bird remained silent as Petra cranked the engine. She had a momentary fear that the raven would go batshit and flutter around the car in a panicked escape attempt, but it simply lay where she'd put it, watching her with a marble-­like eye. As the Bronco crunched down the gravel road, late afternoon sun poured through the bug-­smeared windshield. She tried to convince herself that there was some intelligence glimmering in the raven's eye, that she had something more than a half-­roasted and exhausted bird in her truck.

“I know it's stupid,” she told Sig. “I know that it's stupid to think that part of Gabe is still alive . . . that he could be restored.”

Sig glanced back they way they'd come and whined.

“But I have to take the chance. I have to. And if the Hanged Men never came back for him, never brought his body to the Lunaria . . . then at least this part of him can be home.”

The coyote huffed and paced the pleather seats.

Taking the back road to the Rutherford ranch, she exited to the west through a gap in the barbed wire fence and plunged the truck into the sea of golden grass. The axles creaked and groaned at the off-­road terrain. At this hour, the cattle grazed peacefully under blue sky. All seemed ordinary and unenchanted. There was no sign of the Hanged Men.

The Lunaria stood, magnificent at sunset. Gold streamed through the reach of its branches, illuminating bits of grass and dust motes floating in the air, like fireflies. No breeze or birds rustled the branches, like they had in her dreams. The tree was still. But when she looked closer, she saw that part of the tree had begun to wither, as if early autumn had bruised it. Several thick branches were studded with rusty leaves that had once been green.

Petra shut off the engine. She hopped out and waded through the grass. It took her three passes around the tree before she found the ring of the trapdoor. Lifting it open, she peered into the blackness beyond.

Sig whined.

She stared down at her bandaged arms. There might be a possibility that she could get down there unaided, but climbing back out without any help would be impossible.

Returning to the truck, she popped the back tailgate and rummaged about. She came up with jumper cables and returned to the hatch. Tying one end of the jumper cables around the hinge, she threw the other end into the dark.

Petra gathered the singed bird from the truck and crossed back to the hole. Sig was making awful faces, pacing before the entrance to the catacombs.

“You can't go,” she said. “I can't lift you back out.”

He parked himself on his rump, resolved to watch her as she awkwardly grasped the bright yellow cable with one hand, balancing the bird in the crook of her other elbow. Her right foot swung around, probing until she found the cable. Clasping the cable between her knees, she took a deep breath and lowered herself.

The cable turned and twisted as she descended. She slid down, forgetting the clamps at the other end. A clamp ripped into her shin, and she hissed, nearly letting go. The cable was short, and she kicked the darkness with her left foot, feeling nothing below her.

“Damn it.”

Gripping the bird tightly with her left arm, she let go with her right.

She landed on her feet after a short drop, but lost her balance and fell forward onto one knee. She caught herself with her free arm, fingers flexing in the dirt. The bird squirmed at her chest, but she could see nothing until her vision adjusted.

For a moment, Petra dared to believe in the tree's magic. She hoped that Gabe had somehow survived, that the Hanged Men had dug him up under the cover of night and brought him here to regenerate. More than anything, she wanted to find him sleeping in the loving grasp of the tree's roots. She hoped that this bird was one of his, that she could return it and awaken him with this offering.

Sucking in her breath, she took a step forward.

Out of the glare of the light above, she could make out a shimmer of gold before her. The roots of the Lunaria dangled from the ceiling like icicles, gleaming in the shifting shadows. It was daytime, so no phalanx of silent men dangled here. But something was nestled in the brightest part of the roots, an orb that shone like a harvest moon.

She touched it, and it dimmed. The otherworldly shine faded to something she recognized—­the Venificus Locus. The compass was set in a nest of roots that curled around its edges. It still held a drop of her blood, spinning crazily inside it like a wasp in a mason jar, scraping against the gold with an insectile whine.

Unthinking, she reached for it. Some part of her knew that this was hers, that no matter if the Hanged Men had retrieved it in Stroud's Garden,
it belonged to her
.

It came loose as easily as plucking an apple, and she stumbled backward with the compass in one fist and the bird in her other arm. The compass was thick and sticky with a luminescent fluid that trickled over her wrist, as if she'd opened some great and terrible wound in the tree.

The bird started screaming.

Clutching the struggling bird close to her chest, she looked up, up into the seething shadow. The roots were moving, shifting.
Shit.
She'd disturbed something badly in here, and the tree was awake.

Mighty roots turned toward her, and she saw a face hovering above hers, just above the cavity where the compass had lain.

“Oh, my God,” she breathed.

It was Gabe's head—­his face had gone slack in a death's mask of pale horror, his hair wound in the tendrils of roots. His eyes were closed, and his mouth stretched open. He was frozen in a scream—­screaming with the raven's voice.

“Oh, no . . .”

The shifting light illuminated him—­what was left of him. His chest cavity was open and shining, roots winding through the pale fingers of ribs, searching for the compass she'd just removed. His hands hung above him, an impossible distance away from his shoulders—­one pale and unmarked, the other like a clutch of finger bones sewed together with a glowing spiderweb. She couldn't see any feet, or any of the rest of his body in the seething mass of roots and broken bones.

Perhaps only this had survived, this incomplete horror. She remembered what Jeff had been, how the magic of the tree had been unable to re-­form him. Any thoughts she had about Gabe being older and stronger and more magical disintegrated.

Tears ran down her cheeks. “Oh, Gabe . . .” She stuffed the compass in her back pocket and reached out to touch his face with her fingertips. He flinched away. One eye opened, and it was black as obsidian. Inhuman.