Dark Alchemy (15 page)

“It's okay. Really.” He awkwardly patted her shoulder, and his hand lingered an instant too long. “How about some coffee?”

“Okay. But can I have some water for Sig?” The coyote leaned against her leg. Probably doing his damnedest to transmit the escaping plague of fleas onto her jeans, she thought sourly.

A grin split Mike's face as he looked at Sig. “Is that coyote wearing a flea collar?”

“Yeah. And he's not too happy 'bout it.”

“You know, there are places we could get you a real dog.”

Sig gave him a dirty look.

“I'm happy with Sig,
thankyouverymuch
.” Petra opened the tailgate to the Bronco, and the coyote scrambled in for a nap.

“You been out collecting samples?”

“Yeah. Couldn't sleep.” She didn't tell him
where
she'd been collecting samples.

Worry creased his tanned face. At least, it looked like worry and not suspicion. “You shouldn't be out here by yourself. Especially with your knack for finding dead bodies.”

“I have Sig. And the bear spray,” she said, then changed the subject. “Any news on the body on the ridge?”

Mike frowned. “Not much. The working assumption is that it's the body of the missing hiker. They apparently found a backpack somewhere in that mess that contained a wallet, a whole lotta money, and some drug paraphernalia.”

“Money?”

“Yeah. Like several thousand dollars. Who the hell knows what for.”

“Do you have Internet in there?” Petra gestured with her chin at the ranger station.

“Yup. This way.” Mike led her to a back office with a surprisingly new computer and laser printer. A screen saver of classic Pac-­Man chased pastel ghosts around the darkened monitor.

“Nice. Very retro screen saver for a shiny new box.”

“I think that was leftover money from a Homeland Security grant.” He grinned. “Gotta keep on top of things in the outside world.” He typed in his password, interrupting Pac-­Man's hunt, and turned the chair over to Petra.

Petra settled in and searched for “bone overgrowth disease,” which led her to the name of a specific syndrome.

“Fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva, also called FOP,” she muttered. “Hey, look at this.” She pointed to the screen. “This disease causes body tissues to ossify when injured.”

“Wow.” Mike gave a low whistle when she called up a picture of a badly distorted skeleton covered in uneven sheets of bone and cartilidge. “That's sorta like what we saw.”

Petra nodded in satisfaction. “Can you find out if the hiker had this disorder?”

“I can make some calls.” Mike disappeared to the radio room, leaving Petra to her own devices.

She rummaged through her box of goodies from USGS and set up her microscope. She found a few slide images on the Internet of FOP bone cross sections. She eagerly began to chip down the bone fragment she found to make a decent slide. After she'd clumsily made a thin enough slice, she slipped it on a prepared slide with an aqueous solution. Adjusting the magnification, she peered at the sample.

She could see the same clumps and voids in bone cells in her sample as the one on the virtual slide on the Internet. She was no biologist, but this seemed to be leading her in the right direction. Except . . .

She rested her chin in her hand. FOP was a congenital disorder. ­People began experiencing symptoms as children. She'd encountered a grossly progressive case. How had someone that ill gotten up on the ridge in the first place? Bone growth in FOP patients was fast, but could it be that debilitatingly fast? A scan of the articles she'd searched suggested that wasn't possible. Severely malformed bones like this took years to develop. There was no way that this guy was well enough to hike around Yellowstone for months while turning into a skeleton. And the odds of having two cases in a week . . . it defied rational explanation. She hated that.

Mike returned to the small office. “I spoke with the hiker's sister. He was twenty-­two, reportedly in good health, and no known medical conditions other than an appendectomy when he was twelve.”

Petra leaned back in the chair. “So much for that idea.”

“I also heard back from my friend about your unknown caller.”

“Oh yeah?” At least that seemed to be moving quickly. “Did he get an address?”

“You know anybody with an address in the middle of the Bermuda Triangle?”

She stared up at him. “What?”

“As near as he can determine, it bounced off a land-­bound cell tower and two satellites. And the signal came from the middle of the ocean. Which is just not possible.”

Petra stared at the wall. “I don't . . .” Could it be someone she used to work with, out on a boat or a drilling platform? But she knew of no drilling going on in that part of the world.

“Could be a data error. This kind of shit happens. But I'm curious as hell to see if you get any more calls.” Mike took a swig of his coffee and looked at her microscope. “Whatcha looking at?”

She didn't want to tell him she'd been poking around the scene. “I'm getting started on the soil samples from yesterday.”

“I'll let you know if I hear anything else about that body.” Mike shook his head. “I hope they keep us in the loop.”

“Yeah.” But Petra knew enough about bureaucracies to know that was highly unlikely.

Mike handed her a yellow legal pad. “And humor my bureaucratic tendencies. When you get a minute, write out your statement from last night. Also any contact information you have for this Cal guy.”

Which was nothing. She didn't even have a last name. She scribbled down her recollection of the night's events, along with the GPS coordinates for the body at the ranch. She felt as if maybe she should draw them a map with stick figures, too. As she wrote, she felt her writing grow angrier and less legible. She ripped the pages off the legal pad, signed them, and set them aside, blowing out her breath.

Enough of bureaucracy. Time for science.

She organized her soil samples and began to prepare and examine slides. She found bits of ash and the heavy metals that she'd anticipate in geothermic soils, even a fragment of amethyst in one of the samples. Then she switched gears and started to run slides of the petrified forest wood. The pattern of the wood looked as she expected it to—­bits of silicon and white quartz and carbonized organic compounds in shades of brown. She'd managed to get a bit of a calcified microfossil on one chip. The structure was strongly reminiscent of the bone cells in her sample.

She drummed her fingers in frustration. Without the equipment here to do any kind of specialized analysis, she was at a dead end—­on this mystery, anyway. Petra rummaged through her sample sack for a bottle she'd prepared at the trailer. It contained a neatly cut-­out piece of the shirt she'd worn when Gabriel bled all over her the other day, a sample of the phosphorescent blood that contained gold.

She moistened a swab in distilled water, pulled some of the stain off the fabric, and smeared a new slide. Slipping a slide cover into place, she peered through the microscope.

Interesting.

Petra remembered examining her own blood in biology class in college, large roundish blood cells interspersed with small fuzzy platelets. This looked nothing like that. The red blood cells she saw weren't round—­they were spiky. Like viruses. But viruses were too small to be seen under a standard microscope. These were huge. And they showed no signs of degradation, as she'd expect plain blood cells to demonstrate.

Petra shivered. Whatever it was, she hoped it wasn't contagious. It sure as hell didn't seem normal. She shut off the microscope, swept her slides into a box, and grabbed her jacket.

It was time to see if Gabriel had some answers.

 

Chapter Fourteen

Old Scars

T
he Rutherford ranch appeared less fearsome by daylight.

Bucolic, even.

Cattle meandered behind barbed wire fences in tall grass at the foot of the mountains. Petra guessed that they were Angus, nice walking steaks. They crowded into shady spots beneath lonely trees, thickening the shadow. A few interlopers had wandered into the fields; a ­couple of pronghorn had jumped the fence and were grazing greedily with the cattle. Petra saw no evidence of human caretaking for miles, just black specks of cows against the green and gold of the fields.

Nor did she see any evidence of federal agents descending upon the farm and digging for bodies. She passed the area she and Cal had excavated the night before. It appeared undisturbed from her vantage point at the road: no crime scene tape, no guards.

Sig hung his head out the window, barking at birds in the sky. The ravens cawed back to him.

“You can't catch birds,” Petra told him.

He turned and fixed her with a bemused look.

She thought for a moment. Gabriel always seemed to be in the company of ravens. She looked skyward and followed the birds.

She wound around dirt roads for miles until she spied a structure in the distance. Her binoculars showed her a sprawling ranch house. It looked as if it had been rooted in the ground for many decades—­timber and stone, with a metal roof oxidized green from the rain. It reminded her of the lodge. Some distance away from it stood a barn that dwarfed the house, a ramshackle structure of rotting wood.

Petra rolled up to the barn, parking the Bronco beside a beat-­up truck. She recognized it—­the pickup that Gabe had driven from the Compostela. She hopped down and Sig followed her, ears flattened. The shadow of the barn pressed cool against her skin.

She screwed up her courage, walking into the barn with Sig at her side. Her heart hammered, remembering Mike's warning.

“Hello?” Her voice sounded cockier than she felt, though.

Straw dust motes were suspended in thin ribbons of sunshine from the cracks in the walls and ceiling. The smells of rust and dust and manure had sunk deep into the structure. Farm equipment that she couldn't identify was stacked in corners, parked within the structure, making a labyrinth of metal. Eerie silence hung here, interrupted only by the scrabbling of birds and mice in the hayloft. Behind the shafts of light lay darkness.

“Hello?” she called.

She spied a raven perched on the hood of a 1940s vintage tractor. Her skin prickled. The bird paced back and forth agitatedly, ruffling its feathers.

Gabriel and his ravens. He had to be here.

Behind the tractor, she spied a dim glow. Not the clear yellow gleam of sunshine nor the silvery blue hues of fluorescent light. This was a seething and familiar glow—­the glow of Gabriel's blood. She followed it, walking behind the tractor.

She gasped.

A body lay sprawled, unmoving on the floor. Softly shining blood soaked the man's flannel shirt. His elbows and knees were turned at unnatural angles.

Petra knelt beside the body. Brushing aside straw, she stared at a battered but familiar face.

“Gabriel?”

His eyes were swollen nearly shut, and golden blood leaked from his lower lip and ears. She pressed her fingers to his throat. She felt a slow hum, like static on a radio. He was still alive. Alive-­ish.

She reached under his arms and hefted him up to a sitting position. Seeing the front of his shirt, she felt instantly queasy. Through prickles of straw, she could make out the lumps of contusions and broken bones. And—­
oh, fuck
—­he was missing a hand. She stared at his empty sleeve, where his arm just . . . ended.

She struggled to her feet, hauling him with her. She was mindful not to try to touch his ribs, but there was no way to avoid manhandling his injuries. Oddly, he felt lighter than she thought he should, like he was a drained shell of a man.

She half-­carried, half-­dragged him toward the barn door. His boots trailed in the straw. Ravens fluttered after them, casting flickering shadows.

“I've got to get you out of here,” she huffed. He slid out of her arms when she reached the Bronco. She wrestled the door open, shoved him in the passenger seat. Sig leapt into the backseat, affronted by the stickiness and loss of his territory on the front seat.

Petra scrambled over to the driver's side, cranked the engine. The Bronco started up with a snort and growl, and she backed out onto the dirt road. A squad of noisy ravens followed like tin cans strung behind a bride and groom's getaway car.

Mike had been right. The ranch was more dangerous than she'd imagined. Her sticky fingers clutched the steering wheel.

A shot cracked into the back of the Bronco, shattering a taillight. A raven splintered off from the rest of the flock with a shriek, spiraling toward the blue sky.

“Sig, get down.”

Petra scrunched down in the seat and floored the gas. She looked back in the rearview mirror at a portly middle-­aged man holding a gun. He made no move to pursue her, just stood and watched her retreat. Something about the smile on his face chilled her in the afternoon heat, even after he vanished in a haze of dust.

The lone raven was a dot in the sky to the north, dissolving into the blue.

T
he raven careened dizzily into the sky. Clouds and ground whirled around him. One wing's primary feathers had been shredded at the edges by birdshot. He struggled to right himself, clawing the air with his talons and feathers.

Dimly, he knew that he'd lost the other ravens, the other, smaller fragments of his consciousness. But there was nothing for that, now. He snagged an air current sliding down from the mountains that swept him north. Panting, he followed it, letting it push his body forward in the blue.

A familiar landscape unfolded below him: the sparkling blue eye of the spring and the fringe of golden fields swaying beyond. The air current began to peter out, the raven swept his uninjured wing low to turn into a spiral. He landed gracelessly on the roof of a small house, hopping twice before skidding to a teetering stop at the edge of a gutter.

The raven bowed his head, beak parted. He shoved his wing forward, examining it, then pulled the feathers through his beak to seal the damage and knit the feathers as whole as he could make them.

On the ground below, a cat sat and stared up a him, her eyes dilated and black.

The raven cawed shortly at her, and she meowed. Stiffly, she stalked around the edge of the garden, having agreed to grant him a few moments' sanctuary.

Human voices emanated below him.

“Old ghosts are catching up with us.”

A bronze woman with long black hair set her briefcase down on the porch floor. The raven crept forward and peered over the gutter. An old man sat in a porch swing, muttering to himself. His eyes were closed, and he seemed to be asleep. The raven recognized him—­the old man from the well.

The woman paused to kiss the top of his head.

The old man's eyes fluttered open. “They're coming for your friend.”

“Huh?”

The old man blinked at her. “Wha?”

“Never mind,” she said. “I'll make spaghetti for dinner.”

“Yup. Gotta do something with that bumper crop of tomatoes.” The old man rubbed his creased forehead. “How long have I been asleep?”

“Dunno. I just got home. When did you start hitting the bottle today?”

“I haven't.” The man stuck out his lower lip like a petulant child.

The woman opened her mouth to argue, but her attention was captured by the rattle of a truck coming down the road. The shiny pickup stopped in front of the house.

The raven knew that truck, and he screamed a warning.

The woman and the old man ignored the bird, staring at the pickup. But the cat heard him. She wriggled under the porch.

The back of the pickup was full of Sal Rutherford's men. And Sal himself was behind the wheel.

“Get inside, Frankie,” the woman growled.

“I ain't going nowhere,” he said.

Sal slid out of the truck and ambled up to the porch. “Afternoon, Miss Yellowrose.” Though his words were civil, they dripped with sarcasm.

Miss Yellowrose crossed her arms in front of her. “What do you want, Sal?”

His cold smile faded. “You were at my ranch today. I've come to get back what you stole.”

The woman's chin lifted. “What the hell are you talking about?” She hefted her battered briefcase. “I've been at work all day.”

Frankie climbed to his feet, swaying. “Maria's no thief.”

Sal wasn't convinced. “I saw your Bronco leaving my barn. Nobody else has a piece of shit quite like that one.”

“I sold it. ­Couple of days ago.”

Sal's mouth twisted. “What've you been driving to work, then?”

She pointed. “Frankie's Explorer.” She pointed to the green SUV in the drive, now effectively blocked in by Sal's truck.

Sal walked over to the Explorer and slapped his palm on the hood. He winced, so it still must have been hot.

“Who'd you sell it to?” His eyes narrowed in suspicion.

“Some tourist whose car broke down. I felt sorry for her.”

“She got a name?”

“No. She paid cash. She took the title with her.”

Sal rubbed his stubbly chin. “You don't mind if we take a look around, do you?”

“Yeah, I mind. You aren't the cops. This is tribal land. So get off it.”

Frankie reached into his back waistband. A pistol shook in his grip. “You heard my niece. Leave.”

Sal backed off, hands open. “Take it easy, Frankie. I'm just trying to get back what's mine.”

The line of silent ranch hands behind him didn't retreat. They folded around Sal, approached the porch.

Frankie fired. The raven couldn't see if he hit anyone; the three men rushed him in a wall of flannel. Before Maria could shout, Frankie was on his belly with a knee in his back, swearing a blue streak. The gun was in the dirt. The two remaining ranch hands stormed into the house. Inside, the raven could hear the thump of furniture being tossed.

“You can't do this,” said Maria. “You aren't a law unto yourself.”

Sal lit a cigarette, shrugged nonchalantly. “You keep tellin' yourself that, Miss Yellowrose.”

“What the hell are you looking for?” she demanded as glass broke indoors.

“Just a misplaced piece of property,” Sal said, blowing smoke into her face. “Something that I wasn't quite finished with.”

His throat under the heel of a ranch hand, Frankie croaked, “You just keep burying those bodies, Sal. Sooner or later, they're gonna rise up against you.”

“What did you say?” Sal leaned down and jerked Frankie's head back by his hair.

“He's drunk,” Maria pleaded, trying to force herself between Sal and Frankie. “Leave him alone!”

“Them corpses are gonna be the end of you,” Frankie growled.

“Get him up,” Sal said.

Maria hurled herself at Sal and slugged him across the jaw.

Sal recoiled, rubbing his face. And returned the favor. The blow flung Maria across the porch, cracking the back of her head on the mailbox. She was unconscious before she hit the ground.

Sal gestured at the ranch hands. “Leave her here. The old man comes with us.”

He glanced up then, as if he sensed he was being watched. The raven scuttled back on the roof, clinging to the curled shingles. He did not budge until he heard the sound of an engine and saw the truck leaving down the gravel road.

“S
ig, you're gonna have to surrender your flea-­infested bed to our guest.”

The coyote growled.

“Look, I'm not in the habit of hauling strange men home, but you're gonna have to deal.”

Petra dragged Gabriel's limp body out of the truck into the Airstream. It was like wrestling with a rag doll—­awkward, floppy, and expressionless. She didn't know where else to take him. She couldn't take him to a hospital. What on earth would they make of that glow-­in-­the-­dark blood? And she couldn't leave him at the Rutherford ranch. She had no other choice but to invade Sig's bed. She hoped that Gabe survived. There was no good way to explain the body of a man with glowing blood in her bed. If anybody cared.

Besides, she was curious as hell.

She dumped Gabriel's unconscious form onto the futon. Petra cast about the trailer for materials to use as a first aid kit. She came up with the bottle of alcohol she'd gotten from the hardware store, the aluminum tape she used to create the spectroscope, the X-­acto knives, and a ­couple of fistfuls of cotton.

Good enough.

She grasped Gabe's right arm, pushing the sleeve up. His hand . . . his hand just wasn't there. Below the wrist, a jagged wound seemed to suggest it had been torn off, but there was no blood. Not even seeping. She turned his arm over, examining it. Was this an old wound, somehow? But he had been whole the last time she'd seen him . . . it made no sense. Perhaps he used a very good prosthetic that she hadn't noticed? She still bound it up with a towel from the bathroom, wrapping it tightly with aluminum tape.

Next she unbuttoned Gabe's shirt, exposing wounds in his shoulder and ribs. It looked like someone had struck him with some kind of a blunt object—­a baseball bat? Thick swelling and contusions had formed over prickly areas that suggested shattered bone. She gently wrestled Gabriel out of his sleeves, feeling as if she were pouring spaghetti into a drinking straw.

She sat back on her heels. She didn't know how to deal with wounds like these. Gabriel's skin was cold and smooth across his well-­muscled chest. In the shade of the trailer, the wounds looked like splatters from a paintball gun, pulsing a shimmering yellow from the edges. It was as if his skin were stretched tight over a great and terrible light, and rends in his skin allowed it to leak out.