Gabe flew into the dusk as an unkindness of ravens, peering at the ground through dozens of eyes. He skimmed over trails and forests and fields, surging toward the last known location of Joseph Dee. New barricades had been erected on the dark ribbons of roads, lit with flashing lights. He followed them, deep into the park. Fire washed over the horizon, sending up clouds of smoke that stung his eyes. His shadows flickered over the smoke as he spiraled in and out, over the singed trees.
He saw no cars, no headlamps, only the gathering darkness and fire. Soldiers moved at the perimeter of the fire like ants. A helicopter flew away in a fury of sound, a bucket dangling from a line. The Magpie was growing larger than any fire that Gabe had lodged in his memory, and he had seen many in his time. He knew that it was now beyond any human hope of stopping it.
He searched until the darkness became indistinguishable from the smoke. His daylight eyes could see no more. With reluctance, he turned his feathered bodies toward the Rutherford Ranch.
Wind slicked through his wings, and the journey to the Lunaria was short. He heard the tree before he spied it on the ground; the leaves whispered to themselves in the dark. He landed a few yards away, feathers and bird bones clotting into the shape of a man. He reached into his truck for his clothing. He dressed quickly and pulled his pistol out from under the seat. He held the gun in his right hand, his thumb on the hammer.
He approached the tree warily. The branches shuddered, and the whispering increased in volume as he crossed under its canopy.
“No,” Gabe said. “There’s no more making peace. This is war.”
The tree groaned, a sound that reverberated up from the ground and rattled the topmost branches. A tree root rose from the ground and licked his shoe. It had the sense of being a submissive, placating gesture. Gabe tensed and aimed his gun at it. The root froze. Maybe the tree would . . .
The ground opened up beneath him, and he was falling in an avalanche of dirt, tree roots, and rock. He struggled to hold on to his gun as he fell into the dark.
Gabe landed on his left shoulder in the shallows of the underground river, gasping like a fish. He struggled to climb to his feet, swallowing metallic-tasting river water.
The tree was incandescent with rage. Pale yellow light, its lifeblood of stored sunshine, shivered through its roots and dripped down the tendrils into the sluggish river, forming a glowing oil slick around Gabe. Gabe climbed to his feet in the water and trudged toward shore. He aimed his gun at the heart of the tree, curling with angry roots.
“You have me. Leave her alone.”
A root snaked under the water and snapped around Gabe’s ankle. It turned him upside down and hauled him up by his ankle, flailing. Gabe struggled to keep hold of his gun and his wits.
The Lunaria drew him close to its glowing heartwood and shook him sharply. The roots seethed and growled. He shot at them, and the tree winced. But he only had so many bullets. The splinters settled on the water like matchsticks on a puddle.
“I will leave you forever if you don’t let her be.”
The wood of the tree groaned, the sound of a creaking door in an old house.
“Yes. I will fade and die without you. And you will continue on, as you always have. But she will have no reason to come here, ever again.” He swung by his ankle, serene as Odin dangling from the World Tree, Yggdrasil.
The tree reached out with dozens of rhizomes, forming a cage around him.
He snorted. “You can try to imprison me.”
Roots dug into his skin, letting phosphorescent blood. He hissed: “You can try to torture me.”
The tree growled, deep in its heartwood.
“But I will not stay.”
He closed his eyes and exploded in a flurry of ravens. They slipped through the gaps in the cage and flew to the gate. They flitted soundlessly through the spaces in the grate, into the night.
All but one. A nimble root reached out and caught it as it worked its way through the cage. The bird squawked, but the tree held it gently. It gathered the agitated bird to itself, petting and smoothing its feathers.
Gabe paused. He could afford the loss of one raven. When he reintegrated, it would likely mean the loss of an eye or a rib. But there was something in how the Lunaria handled the bird that reminded him of what it had been, in its prior incarnation, long ago, when it had been his midwife into this undead life.
The tree began to sing, slowly, softly, a creaking and soughing that sounded like wind through a bamboo forest. As the tree touched the raven, Gabe could see what it projected to him—the memory of how it had once been two trees, together on a plain. There had been a drought, and the second tree died. The Lunaria mourned its loss, but grew over the stump of the lost tree, making a home for birds and basking in the sun. Worms and moles moved in the earth below it, and it grew content. Lightning struck it a handful of times. It was venerated by men and women who walked the land here, and it once or twice was a ladder for a god climbing into the sky. It had a visceral knowledge of its role as an unknown pillar of the world, as a gateway to what the shamans called the lower, middle, and upper worlds—to the underworld, this physical reality, and the spirit world. It was, by and large, content.
Then Lascaris came. He poured potions and toxins at the base of the tree, uttered incantations upon it. It awakened in a way that a tree should not ever have been awakened. The tree yearned. It dreamed now, and it wanted to know if it was the only thing that had such experiences, this moving from one world to the other. It was confused. Alone.
And then Lascaris brought men to be hanged by the tree. Gabe was the first. He was hanged there, taken down, and the tree claimed him. It cared for him as if he were a squirrel nesting in its branches, or a child. It fed the fallen man light and love and caused him to walk again. And it experienced the world in Gabe’s dreams. Those dreams of the tree and Gabe were a shared reality, a connection to a world that was changing in ways the Lunaria didn’t understand.
And there were more men, men that became the Hanged Men. The Lunaria fed them with all the magic it had, but the magic dwindled. There was only so much light left underground, so much magic remaining to feed them. But all of them, whether they were as self-aware as Gabe, or shadows like some of the last automatons, were the Lunaria’s children. And she loved them all, fiercely. She knit their bones and brains back together every night, to the best of her ability, smoothing their skin like wrinkled shirts.
And then . . . the Lunaria was burned. The Hanged Men died, without her to feed them. She put her last magic into Gabriel, her firstborn. She gave him enough magic to walk away from her, to be just a man. It was her last gift.
But then she recovered. And Gabriel returned to her. She could pour back all the magic she’d drawn from the underground river, back into him. And she was terrified. Terrified of losing him. Terrified that she would be alone, aware, for all of time, just as much as she was terrified of the fire. Gabe sensed that she had gathered all her magic to her, that she was cloaking herself from the view of the phoenix with all her might. But sooner or later, the phoenix would find her, if it wasn’t stopped. Being burned by the phoenix would be almost as bad as being alone. Fear and loneliness crackled through her.
She wanted Gabe here. And she wanted Petra, too. Another child to protect her. She knew the two of them belonged together, and she could return the favor of their protection. She could make them both strong and powerful. And maybe they would bring her other children, other men and women who would accept the gifts she offered. Maybe the wolf-woman, Nine. Maybe the woman, Maria, and her lover, Mike. They could choose who the Hanged Men would be this time, and they could take this land away from the Rutherfords. There could be a new order in this world, a new order of magic and peace in Temperance. A new era.
You cannot make that choice for them, Gabe thought at the tree. Neither can I.
The tree flashed an image to him, an image of Petra in her full glow of health now. And it flashed an all-too-familiar image of her, sickly, and dying.
It could happen again. And it likely will, Gabe thought. But neither you nor I can stop it. It’s the power of time. She is human. She gets to choose.
And though I am no longer human, so do I.
The tree root delicately stroked the raven’s head. It opened its root-hand and let it go.
The raven flew away, to the grate, to join the others perching on the bars.
The tree made a sigh, a sound like a heart breaking. The light dimmed, and all became darkness in the underworld.
The ravens chuffed softly to each other. They gathered, clotting into the shape of a man. Gabriel reached for the gate and tugged on it.
The gate slowly opened.
He walked back inside, on the bank of the underground river.
The tree slowly lit up, hopeful.
He reached up, up in the branches, touch grazing the bullet holes he’d left there.
The branches closed over him, and he let himself be gathered in that embrace, the guts of darkness and light, the source of his life.
They understood each other, now. And there was a truce forged in the shadow of the alchemical Tree of Life.
Petra awoke a bit before dawn.
She slid out of bed before light had begun to flood the kitchen. She was immediately pursued by a sleepy coyote and a cranky cat, both demanding food. She fed them both and brewed some coffee, gazing out into the darkness.
She took her coffee out to the porch. Sig and Pearl, full of kibble, plodded after her. Pearl began to take a bath, and Sig stretched out on the porch to take a second shot at sleep.
She sat on the porch swing and took this moment just to be still. She’d been full of plans and action. Now, she had to clearly evaluate what came next. Her father was being searched for. She and Gabe had to check on the mirror, to see if it had survived the time in Lev’s pizza oven. If it was intact, if it still worked, then they could go chase down the phoenix. Trap the creature in the mirror, and maybe find her father in the process.
Petra had mixed feelings about trapping the phoenix. The phoenix was a being, just like any other. It wasn’t fair to imprison it in a mirror for eternity. Maybe the mirror would be a temporary solution, until they found a way to turn it loose in some pocket of the spirit world, where it could cause little harm. Maybe there was a fireproof forest somewhere there for it to frolic in. Hopefully, when they found her father, he could engineer a ritual that would do just that. She knew he’d been wandering the spirit realms for decades; if anyone knew where to set free a flammable creature, he would know. And for all she knew, maybe he was pursuing it to do just that.
She held the cup of coffee close to her aching chest. He would be all right. He had to be. She felt deep pangs of sorrow and guilt for the people he’d apparently killed. If he had done it, if he was this close to losing it, how had she not known? Had she been blind to his deterioration, wanting to believe that he was the father he had never been to her so much that she ignored that something terrible was wrong? Maybe he’d cracked, knowing his Alzheimer’s was stealing up on him, and was desperately seeking a magical solution, as he’d done before. If she had only agreed to Dr. Vaughn’s tests, maybe this could have been averted. If her father wasn’t in his right mind, this was all on her shoulders, and she knew it.
She watched the sun rise. Not long after, a pickup rolled up. Gabe’s truck. He parked, climbed out, and walked toward her.
He looked really good, as if he’d been freshly showered, shaved, and had slept for two weeks. Petra felt a bit of envy at that. She wondered what it was like, sleeping under the tree. Was it as restorative and dreamless as it looked?
“Good morning, sunshine,” she murmured over her coffee. “There’s coffee inside.”
Gabe kissed the top of her head and sat down in the swing beside her. “I didn’t see any sign of your father last night.”
She hid her disappointment with a deep slurp. “I have something to tell you. And you’re going to be mad.”
He lifted an eyebrow. “Oh?”
She continued. “I went to the Eye of the World last night.” She told him what she’d seen in the Eye, and about her conversation with the toad.
Gabe listened without comment.
“So I traded the watch for an answer,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
Gabe was silent, staring out at the sky. It was some time before he spoke. “It’s done. I can’t say I’d have done any different, in your shoes.”
He was a good man. She reached for his hand and squeezed it. “Thank you. Thank you for understanding this.”
He kissed the top of her hand. “There’s only one way to go. Forward.”
“Do you mean that? With everything—with the conflict we’ve had? With our marriage, the tree, and everything else?”
“As they say, time moves in only one direction. Even if the Great Work were completed tomorrow and the Philosopher’s Stone dropped out of the sky, it could not turn back time. We go forward.”
She nodded, and she smiled. “Forward, then.”
They sat in silence for some minutes, watching the morning wash over the land.
“I guess we go see to the mirror?” she said at last.
“Yeah. Hopefully, it worked.”
“I trust Lev not to have touched it. I just hope . . . I hope I didn’t fuck it up.”
She went inside to get dressed. She set the coffee maker to brew another batch in an hour, hoping that Maria and Nine would sleep in. She gathered her things and put Pearl inside. She led Sig to the pickup, where Gabe waited.
“Let’s check on that mirror.”
“There’s no way we can look at it directly?” Lev asked.
“Not unless you want to spend the rest of your unnatural life behind glass.” Gabe gave him a look.
Lev shrugged. “I’m not dying to spend time in limbo. But I would love to know what spells went into that.”
Gabe glanced at him and raised an eyebrow.
“What? You never know when it might come in handy.”
Gabe didn’t reply immediately. He glanced at Petra, and it seemed he was thinking of the homunculus. “After this is over, I’ll write down what I remember for you.”
Lev nodded. “Thanks. I think that some of this knowledge should stick around in good hands. In case you guys aren’t around sometime and a phoenix shows up.”
Petra was sure that wasn’t the only reason, but she owed Lev. They both did. And if the cost of a brand-new body and rent on his pizza oven was an old spell, she was good with it.
She screwed up her courage and put on her welding gloves. Armed with Lev’s shiny Viking pot, she turned the makeshift mirror to face the door of the pizza oven. Petra opened the door. The handle still felt warm, but it should have had plenty of time to cool. They’d been very patient, and she was certain that Lev looked after it as well as a bird with an egg.
She held her breath. Looking through the reflection in the pan, she carefully inserted a pizza paddle into the oven. She slid it under the mirror and pulled the paddle out. Sweating, she lowered the mirror to the hearth.
Peering through the pan, the mirror looked whole, a lumpy bit of glass that was roughly circular. She slowly grasped it with the welder’s gloves and turned it out on the paddle. It was a whole piece of glass, intact. But what was worrisome was that the silver was gone from the back of the mirror. The heat had bubbled it away, and only a few flakes remained.
“It’s back together,” she said. “But it looks like the silver boiled off.” She’d been afraid this would happen.
“It won’t work without the silver,” Gabe said.
“Wait,” she said. “I can fix it. Let me get some stuff.” She put the pan down on top of the glass, covering it, and headed out to the Bronco. In moments, she was back with a box of gear from the Bronco.
“What’s all this?” Gabe asked.
“Stuff we can use to resilver the mirror.” She spread out the bottles and equipment on a stainless-steel counter. “This is silver nitrate,” she said, pointing at the small bottle. “Geologists use it to test for iodine, chlorine, and bromine. And that’s ammonia and lye drain cleaner.”
Gabe looked at the accumulated stuff appraisingly. “This should be interesting.”
Petra grinned. “Always.” Then her expression clouded. “Do you think it will work?”
“I do not doubt that your science will work. I just hope that there’s enough magic left in the glass for the mirror to retain its properties.”
“I guess we’ll find out,” Lev said. He was sitting on a stool, eating a bag of chips. Sig sat below him and gave him a baleful look. Lev dropped a chip into his mouth, and he made a face like it was a bad-tasting communion wafer.
Petra didn’t speculate. All she could do was the science, and the magic would have to take care of itself. She adjusted the rubber gloves and stared into the cookware mirror. She uncovered the small slab of glass. Working slowly, she cleaned the back of the glass with the drain cleaner, careful to get every speck of dirt removed and wiped it with a damp paper towel. The glass still held heat, and she was careful not to break it with an abrupt temperature change. She placed the glass on a piece of Lev’s parchment paper, conscious to keep it level as possible.
She then measured out a gram of the silver nitrate and added it to ten drops of water. She mixed this in a plastic cup, then added a gram of the lye drain cleaner. Silver oxide began to form as she stirred with a plastic spoon. Carefully, she dropped ammonia in until the silver oxide disappeared. She measured four grams of sugar into the solution—it would act as an aldehyde in this process. She stirred until it all dissolved in the cup, then poured it over the back of the mirror.
The glass was still hot, and the silvering agent took immediately, clouding to an opaque off-white color.
She glanced back at the men. Lev had abandoned his bag of chips and was taking notes on a dog-eared pad of paper. Maybe he really was going to build a magic mirror . . . But she couldn’t think about it now.
“It’s done,” she said. With care, she turned the piece of glass over and peered at it through the Viking pan’s shiny surface.
It was a mirror again. Through warped glass, a shiny silver surface shone. Petra could see a warped reflection of her hand when she passed it between the pan and the mirror, reminding her of something she might see in a fun house. It wasn’t perfect—a bit of dirt in one of the crevices she’d missed had turned black in the reaction—but it was hopefully close enough for alchemical work.
“I do believe that you were an alchemist in a previous life,” Gabe said, and she snorted at that.
“It looks all right,” she said. “But the primary question is . . . does it work?”
They were both silent. Gabe wrapped the mirror in a bandanna, careful not to mar the fragile silvering. Petra cleaned up her tools. As she did so, her thoughts churned.
She had to know if it worked. If it was still magic. And there was only one way.
The Locus.
She closed her eyes. She had to stop being selfish. She had to find the truth and deal with it, sooner or later. If she was no longer human, then she’d have to figure out what she was, and move forward from it.
Gabe stepped up behind her and kissed the top of her head while she washed her hands. She knew, no matter what she was, that she was beloved by her husband and her coyote. That should be enough. If she was no longer human, that would be a terrible loss. But she would survive it.
She dried her hands on a dish towel and went out to the truck. She pulled the Venificus Locus out of the glove box. She carried it back to the kitchen and asked Lev for a paring knife.
“What for?” he asked, handing her a spotless stainless-steel blade.
“We can tell if it’s magic for certain with a tool that Lascaris left behind. The Venificus Locus.” She showed him the golden compass.
“How does it do that?” he asked, staring at it in curiosity.
“It drinks blood.”
“Mmm. Go stand over the sink when you do that, okay?”
Petra went to the sink, as she was told. Gabe put the wrapped mirror down on the counter and moved away, not wanting to interfere with the Locus’s prognostications.
Petra hesitated. Aside from a hangnail the flesh of her fingertips was perfectly unmarked. She hadn’t suffered so much as a bad paper cut since she’d taken on this new body. Sighing, she poked the index finger of her left hand. A red drop of blood welled up, and she dropped it into the groove circumscribing the outer ring of the Locus.
The Locus must have been thirsty. It seemed to suck in the blood, and she added two more drops. The drops flattened, forming a ring around the groove. Petra’s breathing quickened. What did that mean? Did that mean that her blood was contaminated, that she no longer was as human as she felt?
The blood gathered itself into a drop, like mercury. The drop swung around the groove and pointed in the direction of Gabe. Another split off and followed Lev around the room as he unloaded the dishwasher. There seemed to be a dull residue left in the groove, as if there was some lingering magic around this place. But the main thing Petra was thinking about was that the Locus had accepted her blood.
It would only run on plain human blood.
She was human.
Her heart lifted and dropped, as if it had fallen down a roller coaster. The mirror wasn’t magic, but neither was she.
But then the ring of blood belched. A thick drop was summoned up, and the drop raced around the track, having tasted something of magic. It hesitated in front of her, and Petra closed her eyes. Shit, maybe she had been wrong.
When she opened them again, the drop had scuttled away. It was pointing toward the mirror on the kitchen counter.
She let out a shaky breath.
“Well?” Gabe said softly.
“The mirror is magic. But I’m not.”
She broke out into a smile, relief washing over her. She had never thought she’d relish such knowledge like this—the knowledge of being utterly ordinary.
Gabe crossed to her and hugged her. She laughed in relief at this weight being removed from her. She stood on her tiptoes to kiss him, feeling optimistic for the first time in months.
“Where are you going to look for the phoenix?” Lev wanted to know, rubbing a plate with a dish towel.
“Nine said it lurks on the leading edge of the fire line,” Petra said, forcing herself to get back down to business. She pulled up a map on her phone with a weak signal and fiddled with it. “According to the news, it’s creeping along fastest near Bridger Lake, just south of the park.”
Gabe nodded. “Then we’ll start there.”
“Good luck getting around those roadblocks,” Lev said. “I’ve had National Guard soldiers in and out of here, and from what they’ve said, civilians aren’t gonna be able to get there by road. They’re keeping five miles ahead of the fire and advancing forward.”
Petra frowned, staring at the waves on the topographical map. The land got a little rough around there. Off-roading would be problematic.
“I have an idea,” Gabe said.
“You have a helicopter stashed away somewhere?”
“No. Something better.”