Dark Alchemy Read Free Page A

she was a little girl, before he disappeared. Her throat closed around the memory.
    The howl sounded again, to the east. Clutching the gun and the flashlight, Petra swept the beam across the field of spiky grasses and stones. She whistled, and the howl cut off, midnote.
    â€œCome here, puppy,” she called, feeling moronic. Her breath made ghosts in the air before her, and the chill cut through her tank top and cargo pants.
    The keening began again. Resolved, Petra clomped through the grasses and gravel to the source of the sound. She swatted away mosquitoes determined to make a meal of her, whistling for the dog.
    Twenty yards from the trailer, her whistle froze and fell flat in her mouth. A pair of shining gold eyes peered through the grass at her.
    Petra edged the flashlight to the eyes, raising the gun. The light outlined a small, reddish-­grey creature with big ears and a bushy tail. Not a dog, not a fox. Coyote.
    â€œHey,” she called, wondering why the coyote wasn’t running from her. “You okay, little guy?”
    The coyote blinked, lifted his head, and sniffed in her general direction. He yipped conversationally, then presented his rump to her. He dug with his front paws in the sandy earth like a dog searching for a bone. Judging by the size of the hole, he’d been at it for a while.
    â€œWhatcha got there, little guy?” Petra tried to peer into the hole. It was about a foot and a half deep that she could see, but the coyote was enthusiastically kicking up enough dust to make her cough.
    The coyote ignored her, continuing to dig. Petra backed away, deciding to leave the coyote to his business. Perhaps it was den-­digging season, or he smelled a delicious vole. Whatever he was into, he didn’t want human involvement.
    Suddenly, the coyote broke off and scampered a ­couple of feet from the hole. He looked her straight in the eye and gave a soft, lilting whimper.
    â€œWhat? I don’t want your dinner. I had pretzels on the plane.”
    The coyote laid his forelegs down on the ground and yowled at Petra.
    Petra shined her flashlight down into the hole. Something metallic glinted in the dirt.
    â€œOh. What did you find?”
    She looked back at the coyote, to find that he’d vanished like a puff of smoke in the sere landscape. She held her breath. She couldn’t hear him moving in the undergrowth. He was gone, swallowed into black.
    Petra laid down the gun and reached into the hole, hoping that there was nothing inside that would bite her. Snakes would be just perfect. Blackened wood crumbled under her touch. A tarnished metallic plate was jammed in the side of what looked like an old building beam, turned up at an odd angle. Petra dug into the flaking wood to free it.
    The metal was about the size of her palm, round and ornately engraved. She rubbed at it with her filthy hand, and her heart leapt into her mouth. It looked like a compass with numbers and the cardinal directions carved around the rim, and in the center was an image of a lion devouring the sun. Her fingers fluttered up to her necklace. No, it couldn’t be. Too damn weird.
    She stood up yelled for the coyote. “Hey, come back here!”
    Her voice startled the nearby crickets into silence.
    The metal cut into her palm, but the coyote didn’t answer her with as much as a yip.

 
    Chapter Two
    Temperance
    P etra woke at dawn and squinted at her diver’s watch. Six thirty. Light crept into the trailer, illuminating the strange medallion she’d left on the floor next to her bed after she’d staggered in the night before. She had wanted it close at hand, suspicious that it would dissolve in the morning like a muzzy dream. But it remained.
    She got up to rinse the worst of the grime off the medallion in the bathroom sink. Though pitted and scuffed from age, the compass gleamed soft and yellow. She could now see that its numbers were out of sequence between the cardinal