CHAPTER
ONE: DUST
No
matter how decent Petra Dee’s intentions were, things always went to shit.
Sweat
dribbled down the back of her neck, sliding down her shoulder blades and
congealing between her skin and the Tyvek biohazard suit. The legs of the suit
made a zip-zip sound, snagging on
bits of prickly pear as she walked through the underbrush of Yellowstone National Park.
She clutched her tool bag tightly in her gloved grip, the plastic of the suit
rustling over the hiss of the respirator in her ears. Her breath fogged the
scuffed clear mask of the suit, softening the edges of the land before her with
a dreamlike filter.
“You
don’t have to do this,” Mike said.
“Consider
it a professional favor, okay?” she said. “And you said it was weird. Now, I’m
curious.”
The
park ranger in the suit in front of her stopped, turned, and awkwardly grabbed
her sleeve. “Look, you don’t have to. The hikers who found it said it was
pretty gruesome.” Mike’s voice was muffled behind his own mask, but his brow
creased as he looked at her. It was clear to her that he now thought better of
bringing her here. Maybe it was his dumb, misplaced sense of chivalry, or maybe
things really did suck as badly as he suggested. With him, it was hard to tell.
“You
can go back,” he suggested. Again.
“Mike.
You need a geologist. There isn’t anybody on your staff who can tell you if
it’s safe to be up here. Weird seismic shit has been happening in the last
couple of weeks—new springs and fumaroles and mudpots opening up in this area,
stuff that isn’t on the maps. And you’re stuck with me unless you want to wait
for the Department of the Interior to show up and tell you what you need to
know.” She didn’t want to be having this discussion out in the open. There were
more men and women in suits behind them, far behind, waiting to see what Mike
and Petra would
do. They might not be within earshot, but it offended her sense of
professionalism. “Besides, I owe you.”
And
she did, big-time. Petra had a knack for causing trouble for Mike. Since she’d
shown up in town two months ago to take a quiet-sounding geology gig with the
federal government, she’d managed to stumble into an underground war between a
cattle baron and the local drug-dealing alchemist. A shitstorm of
administrative paperwork had been generated for Mike when drugs and bodies
turned up in his jurisdiction. Pizza and beer only went so far to balance the
scales of debt.
Mike
rubbed the back of his hood with a crinkling sound. “Yeah, but …”
Petra nodded sharply. “I can do this.” Her voice sounded
steadier than she felt.
“If
you need outta here, just say the word.” Mike started walking again, pushing
aside a branch blocking her way.
She
moved forward to the edge of the tree line, beyond where blotches of color swam
in her sweaty vision. A campsite. A red tent had been pitched in a clearing,
though it tilted in a lopsided fashion on a broken pole, like a giant spider
someone had plucked a leg from. Nice tent—a deluxe model, with mesh windows and
pop-outs. A dead fire with cold ash was surrounded by a ring of rocks. Laundry
dangled from a clothesline: T-shirts, jeans, socks.
And
beyond it, a gorgeously pink mudpot. Iron in the underlying slurry likely
yielded the soft rose color. The acidic hot spring burbled mud, steaming into
the cool air. She was reminded of the steam rising from mountains as the dew
baked off in the spring. There were thousands of these mudpots dotted all
throughout Yellowstone
National Park, too many
to catalog, despite the hazards they posed.
Petra ducked under the clothesline, wrestling for a moment
with a pair of child-sized purple leggings that seemed determined to get
snagged around her respirator hose. After fighting them off, she turned her
attention back to the scene.
A
dark-haired man sat upright at the edge of the dead fire, hunched forward, his
arms tangled in a blanket as if he’d been trying to protect himself from the
cold.
Her
breath echoed quickly in her mask. Mike moved forward to kneel before the man.
Pulling the blanket off, he reached for his neck to take his pulse.
Early
morning sunshine illuminated the man’s face. It was slack, jaw open, violet
tongue protruding from his lips. Broken capillaries covered his cheeks, the red
contrasting with mottled grey skin. His eyes were frozen wide open, and the
sclera were bright red instead of white.
The
blanket fell away to reveal a red flannel shirt. Oddly enough, it looked as if
part of it had been bleached, as if he’d brushed up against a gallon of white
paint. A knife glinted in his right hand, trapped in a claw frozen by rigor
mortis. Petra
squinted to get a good look. The knife was a piece of junk—the blade had been
melted.
The
body rolled over on its side, landing like an action figure holding its pose in
the dirt.
Mike
swore and grabbed his radio. “This is L-6, be advised that we’ve confirmed a
male victim. Tell the medics to …”
Petra turned. That was a big tent. Too big for just one
guy. And then there were the little girls’ leggings that she’d tussled with …
damn it. Steeling herself, she crossed to the tent, her suit creaking.
Sweating, she grasped the tent zipper. Its teeth stuck in the PVC-coated canvas,
and she tried three times before she gave up. Part of the tent had come
unstaked on the right side, letting daylight creep in. She worked that seam and
pulled it open.
She
stumbled back, falling on her ass.
A
woman sat bolt upright in a sleeping bag, with speckled and broken skin like
the man at the fireside. She stared at Petra
with the same blood-red gaze under a tangle of brown hair.
Petra leaned forward to touch her shoulder. The woman
didn’t move, frozen in some unfathomable moment of shock. Heart hammering, Petra fumbled for a pulse. Through her
gloves, the woman felt cold, and her chest didn’t move. Her skin felt swollen,
as if stretched over an unseen trauma.
Mike
crawled into the tent to stare at a bundle beside the woman. He peeled back a
sleeping bag on a little girl, maybe five or six, clutching a dinosaur plush
toy. Her eyes were closed, seeming very peaceful under bruised skin.
“Please
let her be alive,” Petra
whispered.
Mike
shook his head. “No pulse. But … not a mark on her.”
Petra backed out of the tent into the clearing. Blinking,
she reached for her equipment bag and dug out a handheld yellow gas monitor.
Stabbing at the buttons, she waited for the sensors to start analyzing the air.
She
glanced at the mudpot, that beautiful pink jewel barely the size of a bathtub.
The warmth it radiated condensed against her plastic suit. When the call came
in that a man had been found dead near a mudpot in Yellowstone,
the rangers had all assumed that the culprit was poisonous gas, carbon dioxide
or hydrogen sulfide. And that would make sense, but …
While
waiting for the gas monitor to calibrate, Petra
stood to peer into the bubbling mud. It was possible, but poisoning by those
gases was a relatively rare phenomenon. She fished some tongue depressors out
of her pack to dip a glob of the mud out into a specimen bottle for analysis.
A
sharp drumming sounded overhead, and she looked up.
A
woodpecker drilled into a pine tree above her, making a sound like a
jackhammer. Birds had much more delicate respiratory systems than humans. If
poisonous gas had seeped up from the mud here, then the bird should be showing
ill effects. But instead it had found its breakfast, plucking bugs from bark,
ignoring the humans below.
Her
gaze scraped the perimeter of the camp. The vegetation was all wrong
here—brittle and yellow and spotted, as if burned by something acidic. She
knelt to pluck a piece of curled grass to stuff into a specimen bottle.
Low-level amounts of hydrogen sulfide were likely to enhance plant growth. High
levels could kill plants, but not quickly.
She
glanced down at her gas detector. “Huh.”
Mike
had backed away from the tent. “Well?”
“No
carbon monoxide. No sulfur dioxide. Normal
amounts of carbon dioxide. No appreciable levels of hydrogen sulfide right now,
which is what I assumed the culprit would be, since that’s the most common
airborne poison spewed by mudpots.” She pulled the hood of her suit back to
take a sniff of the air. It smelled like pine needles, not like rotten eggs. “I
think that it’s safe for your people to come in. Just … tell them not to touch
anything they don’t have to. Gloves and suits.”
Mike
nodded and began barking orders into his walkie-talkie.
Petra lifted her freckled face to the sky, feeling the
blessedly cool breeze against her cheeks. She spat a bit of dark blond hair out
of her mouth and reached to take another soil sample. Maybe there was some
other toxin here? Something more exotic that would need more tests run. Arsenic
could be here, but it wouldn’t have killed these people so quickly. The ground
was opening up in pockets in the whole Pelican
Creek area. Geologists had been detecting midlevel quakes in previously quiet
land. In a place like Yellowstone, the geology
was always changing, but this was unusual. And it needed to be investigated.
Mike
mopped his brow. “Maybe there were high levels here overnight, and the wind
swept it all away,” he mused. “Or the mudpot belched. A one-time thing.”
“Could
be.” Inspiration struck her, and she stood to examine the man’s body by the
dead fire. He lay where he’d fallen, rigidly on his side. “Could you help me
with him?”
“Sure.
What do you need?”
“I
need to check his pockets for change.”
Mike
rolled the guy over. The body didn’t turn over with a normal thick, human
sound. Petra
heard sloshing, as if they were moving a cooler full of melted ice. Mike came
up with a set of car keys and a fistful of change, which he handed to Petra. She stared at the
debris, pushing aside the quarters, nickels, and dimes in her palm.
“Whatcha
lookin’ for?”
“Pennies
… ah.” She held a penny up to the light. A 2015 penny, bright and shiny and
new. “It wasn’t hydrogen sulfide poisoning.”
“How
can you tell?”
“If
he’d been exposed to hydrogen sulfide, the copper in the penny would have
oxidized. No evidence of that, here. When hydrogen sulfide was used as a
chemical weapon in World War I, copper coins in the pockets of victims turned
nearly black.”
“Great.
Maybe the coroner’s toxicology report will tell us what it was. I’m mostly just
concerned that we’ve got an ongoing hazard situation here.”
“I’ll
run some soil samples,” Petra
said. “In the meantime, you should have your rangers cordon this off for at
least a hundred yards until we know for sure what it was.” She wrinkled her
nose and reached for her respirator. “What the hell is that smell?” It wasn’t
the rotten-eggs smell of hydrogen sulfide. This smelled worse, like roadkill.
Mike
turned to the body. “It …” The smell hit him, and he struggled to pull his hood
over his head. “It’s the body.”
Where
the camper’s corpse had been turned over to the earth, a black, viscous
substance oozed. Two medics had arrived in full gear and grasped the body, one
at the arms and the other at the feet. As they lifted, it seemed as if some
fragile surface tension held by the man’s skin failed. The skin split open, and
dark fluid soaked the dirt to splash against the white suits of the medics.
“Christ,”
Mike said behind his mask. “Only a floater would behave like that.”
“A
floater?” she echoed.
“A
body that’s been in a river for weeks. The gases build up while the organs rot.
But … these guys can’t have been here that long. We’ll know for sure when we
get an ID.”
More
plastic suits showed up with body bags into which to pour what remained of the
camper. They discussed how best to remove the woman and the child from the tent
without rupturing them. It was decided to start with the child.
Petra turned away. She just didn’t want to see that. She
began picking at samples around the edge of the campsite, trying to fade into
the background. But the scene burned behind her eyelids. It wasn’t just the
people that were dead. Death had spread to the vegetation around the campsite
in a circle, as if someone had sprayed the plants with weed killer. As she
ventured farther and farther away, she found a trail of rust-colored grass
vanishing into the forest.
Ignoring
the chatter and radio static behind her, she began to follow the trail. It
spanned an area a little over three feet wide, a perfect path of brittle
vegetation that contrasted sharply with the early autumn grass that still
thrived. She paused before a pine tree that seemed to have had its bark
scorched away by some kind of chemical reaction.
She
began to regret removing her hood. Holding her breath, she chipped a piece of
bark away with an awl and dropped it into a sample bottle.
The
track ended abruptly at a spine of rocks that composed the next ridge. There
were no plants to speak of here, only fine milk quartz pebbles and sandstone
gravel.
She
blew out her breath, frustrated at having lost the trail. Had there been some
kind of chemical accident here? She ran through the desiccants and herbicides
she knew, most of which were not good for people, but the most likely
short-term effects would have been simple respiratory distress or skin contact
allergies. Nothing that could cause the amount of squish and slop that the
medics were dealing with.
No
rational explanation.
Maybe
there was an irrational one.
She
glanced behind her. No one had followed her this far, to the edge of the forest.
She fumbled in her gear bag for the last bit of equipment she’d brought: a
golden compass. Glinting in the sun, it lay flat in the palm of her hand. Seven
rays extended to the rim, with an image of a golden lion devouring the sun in
the center. The Venificus Locus, a
magic detector that she still wasn’t entirely sure she believed in, but
couldn’t discount. Maybe it would have something to say. Maybe it wouldn’t. But
not asking the question would be stupid.
She
stripped off her glove, wiggling her sweaty fingers in the air. A hangnail that
she’d neglected to trim kept annoying her. She ripped it off and hissed when
blood welled up around the cuticle. Clumsily, she sloshed a bright drop of it
into the groove circumscribing the outside of the compass. The blood sizzled on
contact, then gathered itself into a perfectly round bead. It circled the rim
of the compass once, twice …
Petra held her breath, as much in anticipation as not
wanting to spill the blood. The bead of blood swung back and forth in an agitated
fashion, then settled on north, pointing to the campsite right behind her.
“Great,”
she muttered. That was pretty decisive. The compass would have just sucked up
the blood if no magic was present.
This
was weird land. The nearby town, Temperance, had been founded by Lascaris, an
alchemist who’d conjured gold from dead rocks. Some of Lascaris’s old
experiments still wandered the countryside. She’d encountered a few of them in
her short time here: the Hanged Men, the Alchemical Tree of Life, and the Locus
itself—which she’d been told had been made by Lascaris’s own hands.
A
shadow flickering through sunlight caught her eye, and she looked up. She
half-anticipated it to be the woodpecker foraging for more insects, but froze
when she spied a raven watching her, balanced on the edge of a branch. His eyes
reflected no light, his shadow mingling among the flickers of needles and
branches of the lodgepole pine.
She
stared back at it. It might be an ordinary raven. Or it might be one of the
raven familiars of the Hanged Men. She turned the compass toward the bird. The
drop of blood spiraled halfway around the disk before the bird, alerted, took
wing and vanished.
Things
around here were rarely ordinary.
****
Clear now.
The
raven pumped his wings, pulling himself into the blue sky, as far as he could
get from the smell of blood in the compass and the aura of poison clinging to
the campsite. He caught an updraft from the sun-warmed land, skimming along the
south edge of the mountains, over the dark ribbons of road and the dry grasses
of autumn fields.
This
draft required little effort from him. He stretched his wings and allowed his
eyes to drift shut. The sun felt gloriously warm on his back, seeping through
his feathers into his light body. In the
sky, things were simple. There was no magic that could touch him here. No
blood. No pain. There was just sun and air and sky.
He
sailed along the current until it weakened. He twitched his feathers, gave in
to the instinct to flap his wings, and opened his eyes to look down.
A
vast field spread below him, gold and grassy and glinting with dew. A massive
elm tree stood at its center, and below its shade stood a man in a white hat.
The
raven made a slow spiral, relishing the last bit of air through his feathers.
He skimmed around the tree in a lazy arc, approaching the motionless man on the
ground.
The
man opened his arms, as if inviting a lover back. His amber eyes glowed
brighter than the dawn.
The
bird slammed into his chest. Feathers melded with flesh, fluttering into a
pulse and soaking into skin.
Gabriel
let his hands fall. The bird twitched through his consciousness as he absorbed
all it had seen.
Above
him, leaves rustled. Some were living leaves, some dead. The tree stood,
scarred and ancient, but its shadow had grown thin. He reached up to pluck a
brown leaf from a branch of the Hangman’s Tree. This wasn’t the only withered
branch; the tree’s leaves had begun to curl at the center, as if autumn’s
breath had come weeks earlier.
He
turned the leaf over in his hands. The tree was dying. He’d felt it even before
the leaves had begun to drop, as the magic in it faltered. Even the Lunaria,
the Alchemical Tree of Life, couldn’t survive forever. Not after what it had
been put through, creating generations of undead to haunt the Rutherford Ranch.
Not
after what he had been put through. If he closed his eyes, he could still
remember bleeding into the roots of the Lunaria and the tree’s frantic efforts
to put him back together. He’d been torn to pieces in the explosion of a
collapsing house. Wood had pierced and rent his body to bits. It would have
been best to leave him to dust.
But
no … the other Hanged Men had brought him back here, out of sheer instinct. And
the last raven had been brought back to him, the last fragment of himself.
Through excruciating pain and light, he’d been revived.
Though
not wholly. He was conscious of vast gaps in his memory, as if time had eaten
away at an old tintype photograph. He’d forgotten his middle name. He couldn’t
remember the exact year he’d come here, though he knew it had happened over a
century ago. He recalled bits and pieces of alchemy, arcane bits of ephemera
about dissolution and phoenixes. His right hand shook when he wasn’t
concentrating on it, and he’d developed a somewhat mechanical twitch in his
left eye. An irritating limp came and went, even if he parsed his feet away as
ravens and brought them back again.
Revived.
But at terrible cost. The light running through the veins of the tree grew more
sluggish with each sunrise. He could feel it choked off, as if some force had
girdled it beyond retrieval. The end of the tree would be the end of all the
Hanged Men. He remembered that much.
Behind
closed eyes, he thought about that possibility of oblivion. Nothingness was
seductive. No more striving to see another day. Just dust. He’d had a taste of
it, when he’d lain in pieces within the Lunaria’s embrace.
He
crumpled the brittle leaf in his fist and opened his eyes. His gaze traveled to
the south fence, where the rest of the Hanged Men toiled, herding the cattle to
the north pasture. This wasn’t just about him; there were the others to think
of. The others, who had no voice, who would simply cease to exist along with
him if the tree died. He could choose to give up—but the decision was not his
alone.
And
yet … perhaps he had seen a solution. The part of his consciousness he’d sent
out as a bird had detected something strange.
Something
that might save the last thing he held dear.
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