Chapter 3
THREE
She had, for a moment, hesitated on the tracks before moving on.
Cheyenne National Cemetery
Cheyenne, Wyoming
The woman who had directed us to the Valley of Thorns visited a grave, offered a farewell to a tombstone yet to show signs of age, and walked away. Grief burdened her every step, and while I wanted to see who had died, I discovered the stone to be so fresh it lacked the name of the deceased.
Some families opted to use blank placeholder stones while waiting for the permanent marker so they might have a symbol of their loved one’s passage.
Rather than follow the roadway, she ventured out across the sparsely wooded plains, crossed a set of railroad tracks, and headed away from civilization. Within a few minutes, I recognized where the road ultimately went.
She had, for a moment, hesitated on the tracks before moving on.
During my time in Miami, I had witnessed more suicides than I cared to think about, and those had always cut the deepest. Her grief, which weighed her down and turned her steps sluggish, would claim another life before the day ended: hers.
The minutes stretched into hours, and the woman paused long enough beneath the boughs of a stunted tree to catch a nap and regain her strength.
Three days after leaving the cemetery, she arrived at the shores of a lake, one with a rocky and forested shore.
For a while, she stared out over the water.
Then, with a weary sigh, she stepped in, waded forward, and kept going.
She swam for a while, flipped onto her back, and stared up at the sky. Then as the sky began to bleed, she sank beneath the surface, and only a few bubbles betrayed her passage.
* * *
Wednesday, May 13, 2167
The Valley of Thorns, The Fringe
Dragon Heights, Wyoming
If magic allowed, I would have resurrected Madam Merorie solely so I could wrap my hands around her neck and kill her.
I had no idea what connected the black gravestone to the mercury dragons, but with the same clarity I somehow knew the date I witnessed, I understood she was probably behind the woman’s grief and suicide.
Unlike the rest of the ghosts, who avoided the basement and its grim collection of bones and skulls, the woman drifted down. I stared at her, and she regarded me with a solemn expression before pointing at one of the many skulls.
I headed over, ignoring Erik’s questions, and crouched nearby, realizing I beheld the intact skeleton of an infant.
The pieces of my heart that hadn’t already been broken shattered. “We need to make a trip to Cheyenne,” I informed my fiancé, marveling that I somehow kept my voice steady. “I need a bag and a pair of gloves, please.”
“What did you see?”
“More than I care to think about. I’ll tell you later. If I try to right now, I’ll probably cry.”
“That bad, huh?”
I nodded.
“Citrine, baby, stay with your momma for me, okay?”
In her wisp form, Erik’s carbunclo joined me along with Garnet and Tourmaline. The kittens claimed their spots on my shoulder, and I steadied myself through petting them. I feared what I would learn when touching the baby’s skeleton, but I saw no other choice.
First, I would claim the infant’s bones, and I would take them to Dragon Heights while reporting the dead hidden in the Valley of Thorns. Once I got clearance, I would then head to Cheyenne, confirm the tiny body belonged at the burial site, and see the little one laid to proper rest.
I would also inquire if the woman’s body had been found and discover if there was anything left of her lurking in the water. If not, I would try to learn her name and at least try to see her given peace in death.
I held my tears back by the merest of threads, focusing on my breathing to stay calm.
Somehow, I would bring closure to the many tragedies the mercury dragons had wrought, I would learn their purpose, and I would save as many as I could—if there were any left to save.
The more I learned, the less hope I held of freeing those caught in Madam Merorie’s treacherous grasp.
Erik returned, and he rested on his belly so he could hand me the bag.
“Yes, it’s legal to transfer bones like this as long as a member of law enforcement is overseeing the process.
We’ll have paperwork to do, and black dragons will verify the truth of the situation, but there’s no problem with removing some of the bones.
I assume this has something to do with what you saw? ”
“It does.”
“Would you rather I call in law enforcement? We have reception here, and while we’ll be questioned, we won’t have to go back to Dragon Heights unless we want to.”
“That might be a good idea. But these bones need to come out first.”
“You collect. I’ll call.” Without bothering to get up, he put his phone to his ear, and he murmured softly enough I couldn’t make out his words.
It was likely for the better.
The bag contained the gloves I had requested, and after snapping them on, I placed the burlap on the ground, careful to keep from disturbing the other bones.
Sometimes, latex helped prevent my magic from working, but as the spirit hadn’t even touched me before sending me back into the past, I braced for the worst, and with reverent care, extracted the baby’s skull from the pile.
* * *
Monday, March 12, 2068
The Fringe
Dragon Heights, Wyoming
With sickening certainty, I identified the sterile room as part of the mercury mansion complex in the Fringe. Not quite a hundred years later, I had been there, although the surgical table had been replaced with a bed. Everything else remained the same.
How many people had died in that wretched place, forgotten by everyone and unwanted by the rest of society?
I would work to find out the truth of that to my dying day.
Madam Merorie placed the still body of a baby boy beside the bones of an older child; while I hesitated to make assumptions, the skeleton was of appropriate size to belong to the woman’s deceased son.
Something charged the air, dark and sinister and electric, crackling and leaving behind an ozone stench.
Green and purple light enveloped the infant, turned black, and spread to the skeleton in misty tendrils.
The mercury dragon began to chant in some language I didn’t understand, each harsh syllable strengthening the miasma covering the bodies.
She shouted a word.
An inky void devoured the chamber.
Much like fog burning away in the light of the rising sun, the darkness abated.
Organs coated in a fine layer of fat and muscle covered the skeletal corpse while the infant had been stripped of all his flesh, the ghastly yellowish bones so thinned I spotted the marrow beneath.
“So close,” the mercury dragon murmured. “So close yet so far.”
She heaved a sigh, regarding the bodies while shaking her head. Then she waved her hand, and her son’s flesh dissolved away to nothing.
“It seems new life is not the trick of it. If quality will not do, perhaps quantity is what is needed. I haven’t tried that.
If one can restore so much, then I will try ten, and if that does not work, twenty.
But I will have you back, my darling Adam.
And once you have been returned to my side, I will bring your father back, and we’ll be a family again, happy for all eternity. ”
While rage still burned deep within me, other emotions brewed. I acknowledged her madness, pitied her for her relentless grief, and even sympathized with her plight although I could never condone her actions.
She had taken a mother’s love to an extreme and twisted it to utter darkness, and I dreaded what I would learn as I exhumed her secrets along with the many dead she had left in her wake.
* * *
Thursday, May 14, 2167
The Valley of Thorns, The Fringe
Dragon Heights, Wyoming
After witnessing the infant’s fate, I refused to handle any other bones, although I took care with his remains.
We lingered until after midnight, working in reverent quiet.
Shock over the discovery kept the law enforcement team subdued, and outside of a few questions about why we’d investigated the property in the first place, we were left to observe in somber silence and wait for permission to remove the baby’s body and take him to his proper burial site.
Enzo Acri came to verify I spoke the truth about having used purple dragon magic to divine where the baby should have been buried—and that I’d captured a glimpse of his mother’s fate.
As a private investigator, I couldn’t do much about the situation, but I could meddle some and investigate a case long cold.
Once Cheyenne’s police force gave blessings for us to dig deeper at the situation and confirmed that they had pulled a woman’s body of the same description out of the reservoir a long time ago, Erik and I made the decision to return home for the night.
Before we left in the morning, I would need to make a phone call to the cemetery to determine if the infant could be buried along with his mother.
To my horror and dismay, Cheyenne still had her body stored in a deep freezer along with a bunch of other unsolved murder cases. In a way, I gave them credit.
They’d determined something hadn’t been quite right about her situation, opting for the expense of frozen storage rather than possibly losing any clues that might solve the mystery of her death. A little digging, done by the Dragon Heights officers, shined light on the situation.
Her baby had been stolen shortly after birth, and he had neither birth nor death certificate.
She hadn’t even been given a chance to name him before Madam Merorie had torn him from her arms and stolen his life.
I couldn’t even imagine the pain and suffering she must have endured in the week leading up to her suicide. That she had been unable to even have a headstone carved for him? Unthinkable.