“Like kill a bunch of homunculi?” I ask, thinking back to what Darius did.
“Most alchemists don’t know how to do that. I mean, they know how to make homunculi-repelling charms, but the Mutus can just make homunculi who are immune to those. There’s some alchemies that always have and always will kill them or drive them off, though.”
“Like the one Darius made.”
Lake nods, then laughs and shakes his head. “That was a fucking doozy of a Pointblank, I’ll tell you that much. Silveria’s still trying to figure out just how big the radius was.”
“So why did they give me money?”
Lake looks surprised. “For your Azoth. Duh. You gave Azoth to Darius, right?”
My mouth makes a little ‘o’. “The Sage Council is the one who pays us?”
“Yeah. And pretty damn well, if you ask me. Better money the stronger your Azoth is. I bet they dropped a damned goldmine on your head.”
“I am the goldmine,” I remind him, and he laughs. He’s interrupted by his ringing phone. He picks up, says a few short quips, and looks to me.
“Darius wants me to tell you to use that money to buy a nice dress.”
“For what? And why won’t he just call me himself? I’m sure my number is on the resume Reeves took.”
Lake asks Darius that question. There’s a pause, and then Lake looks up. “He hung up.”
“First he drags me into his world, then he tells me I’m the most important Azoth ever, and now he’s ignoring me?” I snarl. “I don’t get him at all!”
Lake smirks. “It’s just how he is - always pushing people away. I’m the only semi-friend he’s got. His other friends…well. Let’s just say when you live for six-hundred years, you get to see a lot of your friends die. And then you stop wanting to make them, so you won’t have to see them die all over again.”
His words strike me right in the heart. I never even considered that. The idea of it - staying isolated to stop experiencing pain - is not unfamiliar to me. I did the same thing. I still do the same thing. The only difference is I do it because I don’t trust anyone. It’s lonely. I know that much. I’ve barely survived doing it for nineteen years. I can’t imagine doing it for six hundred.
“Why do I need a dress?” I ask.
“For the showing. The fancier the dress, the more you stand out.”
“I don’t want to stand out. Never have, never will.”
“Everybody wants to stand out,” Lake laughs. “Everybody wants to be the center of attention. They just don’t admit it. And you actually get the chance to be! So stop being so freaking modest, and let’s get your ass to the mall.”
We leave the apartment. Lake’s parked his beautiful, vintage motorcycle on the curb, and he hands me a black helmet with a devilish smile.
“Hope you’re the clingy type. I drive fast.”
I laugh and hop in the seat before he can. “And I drive faster. Gimme the keys, slick.”
“You’re kidding,” He chuckles, and throws me the keys. “You don’t like being noticed, but you know how to drive a motorcycle? You’re a constant surprise.”
I rev the engine and smirk. “And you’re being paid to be a constant pain in my ass. Let’s go.”
It’s been a while, but riding a motorcycle is like riding a bike…with a motor. Dad only ever had motorcycles, and I snuck on them and learned when I could. The mall is crowded with families going to watch a movie on a Friday afternoon. Lake pulls me into Gucci and Armani, the clerks fawning over his handsome face and looking impressed at his claims that I’m a rich heiress from France. I shoot him a dirty look, and he just winks at me. Every mink-lined silk dress they throw at me I refuse. It’s too much, too fast. Lake’s too busy flirting with a blonde clerk to notice when I duck out to a store with dresses that couldn’t feed a third world country for a month. I browse, and remember just how much I hate shopping, and malls in general. They always remind me of the one day Mom decided to come back into my life. And all the people’s eyes on me make me uncomfortable - I’m convinced they’re looking at my scar. I would just wear the dress Mom got me to the showing, but after wearing it to the club and getting attacked, it’s ripped at the bottom and smells like blood. And I can’t stand the smell of blood. Not since the night I left the trailer park.
“Hey there, Gloomy.”
I whirl around. Lake’s just behind my shoulder, smiling jovially.
“I’m not gloomy,” I protest.
“You’re cute when you pout,” He singsongs.
“Your judgment is awful. I’m not cute, either.”
“Oh, come off it. You’re damn gorgeous and you know it,” Lake scoffs. “All that dark hair, and your legs go for miles. Five guys in here gave you the double-take.”
“Then they must be looking at you,” I say, pointing to my scar. “Because I’m not exactly considered prime real estate.”
Lake smirks. “That’s all about to change, trust me.”
I finger a gold-sequined dress. Too flashy. I pick up a dark blue one. Much better.
“I don’t want to be prime real estate,” I murmur. “I just want to move on. Try to leave my past behind. I can barely think about my future, let alone about dating someone.”
And besides, I finish in my head, No one deserves a sinner like me.
“You sound like Darius,” Lake sighs, and looks at the dress I hold. “Look, just because your pasts are shitty doesn’t mean you can’t have fun stuff in your life. It’s okay to lighten up once in a while, you know?”
“I don’t deserve to ‘lighten up’,” I whisper. “Not after what I’ve done.”
Lake’s quiet. He rifles through the rack and hands me a simple, v-neck white dress with a flowy skirt.
“It’s exactly my size.”
He smirks. “I might be shit at advice, but I’m good at figuring out a women’s measurements.”
The dress is so beautiful, so perfect, I can’t be mad at him for long. It’s practically the opposite of Mom’s dress. A fresh start. After I pay for it, Lake buys us pretzels, and we eat them on the way back to the motorcycle, the sun setting in a fire-red nuclear explosion on the horizon.
“I was fifteen,” Lake says, watching a group of teenagers in all-black hanging out on the steps of a department store. “My Dad went to jail and my Mom followed him real quick. Grandma couldn’t afford to support me anymore on her tiny disability check, so I left. Came here, to San Francisco. Dealt drugs to get by. Got caught up with the wrong drug lords in the wrong part of town. I would’ve been dead if Darius hadn’t found me when he did.”
My heart twists with the nonchalant sadness in his voice. Lake looks up and smiles at me.
“You fall real far, and deep, and all the lights in your life go out one by one. You want more. You want something, anything. You get sick of the world, of failing. You try to destroy yourself because no one else will do it for you.”
His profile is proud and dark against the setting sun.
“But then, there’s a light. Someone gives you a second chance. You get to start over. The Reapers gave me that. I could make something of myself with my own two hands, save people, make a difference. I hope being an Azoth gives you that, too.” He massages the back of his neck, embarrassed. “Maybe that’s selfish of me, huh?”
I smile for the first time in a few days. “Not at all.”
PART NINE
NINE
Chapter 9
NINE
The alley was drenched in blood.
Five police officers taped off the crime scene, their cars doing a better job of keeping the crowd at bay. People craned their necks to get a view of the macabre - taking pictures with their phones and whispering to each other in hushed tones. Some demanded to know who died, others demanded to know if it was a serial killer. This was the second body in two days.
A shadow hung on the brick wall of a nearby grocer’s. It had depths other shadows didn’t - all the glittering lights of the city were quickly swall
owed by its velvet darkness. To the normal passerby, it looked like a spray-paint adventure gone wrong; one solid black puddle doodled on the wall. But to those sensitive enough, or to those involved with Alchemy, tangled whispers could be heard coming from it - an eldritch language that was all at once seductive and ruthless and completely unintelligible. The shadow moved too quick for the eye to follow, jumping from the shadows thrown by parked cars to shadows clinging under billboards, coming ever close to the crime scene. It waited beneath a taxi, then leapt at the first police officer’s shadow to walk by. It rode the shadow past the police tape and jumped out, settling in the shadow of the mutilated corpse. The shadow felt with all its tendrils, observing without eyes. The corpse was a man. When he’d been alive, his name was Terrence Marble. At forty-seven, he’d accomplished little - his wife had left him when his gambling became excessive. He was a bouncer for a building nearby - the shadow sensed heavy bass and the smell of alcohol in his memories - a club.
The shadow shrank back as a police officer’s flashlight swept over the body. Two officers spoke, observing the body under the light.
“Poor guy. Whoever did it broke seven ribs, and all his fingers.”
“Christ,” the second officer sucked in a breath. “Must’ve had a grudge. Or seven.”
“The Deputy thinks it was torture,” the first officer corrected. “Cult stuff. See the cranial injury?”
They leaned in. The shadow shrank farther, the light concentrating on the corpses’ head practically burning.
“The examiner thinks they removed his brain.” The first officer sighed. They pulled back, the flashlight turning off, and the shadow oozed limply out from beneath the body in relief. A commotion at the police tape pulled the officers away, and the shadow resumed it’s infiltration of what remained of the corpse’s mind.
The officers were not wrong - Terrence had been tortured. Tortured by men in suits, in a grand room with a massive fireplace, and swords on the walls. They broke his fingers one at a time when he wouldn’t talk, and then his ribs when he finally did. The shadow could hear their voices like they were standing right there.
‘You saw her. A girl with black hair, in a shiny black dress. Fairly pretty. What was her ID?’
‘I-I told you,’ Terrence croaked. ‘I d-don’t remember!’
‘Enough of this,’ another voice said. ‘We’re wasting time. Use the Yoretold alchemy.’
‘No!’ The first voice argued. ‘If we do that, he’ll die! We do not senselessly kill, Brother!’
‘Finding Lalei is more important than this man’s life.’
‘P-Please,’ Terrence begged. ‘Please…don’t kill me! I want to live - I want to -’
A flash of light. The shadow recoiled even from the memory-light. The gunpowder smell of an activated Alchemy filled the shadow’s senses, and then he felt what Terrence felt - the sensation of his cranium opening, and his brain being lifted from his skull as the men removed it to delicately pick through its memories in their labs. There was no pain. But then came the sweet smell of death, and the shadow pulled out of the memory before it too was consumed.
The shadow lingered, waiting for the right time to slip out from the body. It hitched a ride on a rat sniffing curiously at the body. An officer’s heavy footsteps scared the rat back into the mound of trash it came from. The shadow used the trash can’s shade, and from there the shade of a telephone pole, climbing to the very top of the building. Undulating like black water, the shadow razed through rooftop after rooftop back to its host - a shirtless young man standing completely still on the roof of a laundromat. His dark hair shaded his completely white eyes - eyes that snapped back to being a cold ice-blue when the shadow slithered up his jeans and settled on his back. The shadow spread its tendrils across the man’s skin like a snake coiling in a comfortable tree, each tendril turning hard and darker black than ever before. It only took seconds, and when it was done, the intricate symbol on the man’s back could pass for any tattoo - albeit a chilling one. At some angles it looked like a demonic skull, at others, a black moth with terrifying eyes on the wings.
The young man coughed, the information the shadow learned flooding his senses all at once in a waterfall of pictures, scents, noises. As he processed it, he grabbed his shirt from the ground and pulled it back on, his high-collared coat over it for good measure. Tonight was cold.
And tomorrow would only be colder.
***
The house is too quiet.
It’s always quiet, the way a catacomb is; cold silence and lonely marble. I chose it because it seemed the perfect grave for an unalive monster like myself. But for a brief moment when Mia was here, the house had been alive. It’s walls echoed with a new voice, a new presence. Now it’s cold once more.
Reeves fixed the windows with lightning speed and accuracy, and disposed of the Mutus body. All traces of the Mutus attack are gone, save for a rapidly-healing cut on Avalanche’s leg.
I re-adjust a length of prima materia, my lab beakers boiling around me. The weapon I’m making is astounding even me. With the girl’s Azoth, anything is truly possible. It’s an elixir, invigorating even the dullest, oldest scrap of prima materia. It’s potency is nearly ten times the Cochlear average, and it refuses to be filtered to any higher purity decibel. I’m not entirely sure of the power of what I’m making, and it scares me. Thrills me. I am a small god, in a godless land.
I splay my hand on the lab’s stainless steel surface, and measure my fingers carefully. Each finger is worth something different, in order of usage - the thumb is most valuable, and even more valuable when it’s your own. Countless alchemists have sacrificed their thumbs for great feats. I won’t need all the thumb, in this instance.
I measure again, and raise the cleaver.
The pain is brief, as all pain is when one is a homunculus. It’s not real pain, but a ghost of it. I ignore the dull throb, the bloodless joint, and put the thumb into a bowl next to the prima materia. I sprinkle three grams of Mia’s blood over it, resisting the primal urge to drink it all right then and there.
“Mutatis mutandis,” I murmur.
The blood-spackled mess contracts into one perfect sphere of flesh and prima materia, light gathering where the blood gleams. The light spreads across the orb’s surface, changing it, shaping it, making it smaller and sharper. When the light fades, a demure, flawless sapphire rests in the bottom of the bowl, shining like an ocean wave in a mirror.
“How curious,” A deep, sardonic voice resounds. “And here I was, under the impression you’d promised the Sage Council not to use fresh Azoth in your experiments anymore.”
I close my eyes and muster what’s left of my patience.
“I have little time for you now, Rothschild,” I say.
The man emerges from the shadows like smoke, his hair a dark brown and kept ragged, though it lingers in his ice-blue eyes. His looks have kept true over the decades - not a single line mars his fierce face. The women alchemists love that face - they talk of it constantly, and he only eggs it on by being a ferocious ladies man. His hawk nose and proud brow are handsome in all respects, but beneath the savage beauty lies a serpent’s wit, and a serpent’s bite.
“A pity,” Rothschild pulls his peacoat tighter around his neck. “Considering you’re the only one on Earth who has all the time in the world.”
“How did you get in?” I pour the sapphire out and examine it under the light.
“Come now,” Rothschild smirks. “You know the shadow has me. You were there the day it bound me. It lets me walk where I please, when I please. Takes a lot of the fun out of breaking in, regrettably.”
I know very well the dark tattoo that rests on his back. It is power incarnate - though even I have no idea where it came from or how it came to be. It’s not alchemy, nor is it born of the science of humans. I’ve always thought it was something else entirely, though the thought unsettles me. I’ve seen horrors of every kind in my lifetime - war, famine, pillage and plunder. But
his tattoo and the faint whispers one can hear if one stands too close to it is the only thing that still makes me shiver in fear.
“What do you want?” I ask wearily. Rothschild sits on the divan, legs crossed confidently.
“I’m doing you a favor,” He sighs. “By telling you this first, and not the Sage Council.”
“What is it?”
“It’s my friends, the Mutus. They think that girl of yours is holy.”
I look up, my eyes piercing into his. Rothschild has long been a double agent for the Sage Council, posing as a Mutus alchemist to feed us information. Why he does it no one knows - but I’ve always thought he did it to rebel against Oliver Rothschild - his father, and the head Archduke of the Mutus.
“She’s not mine,” I correct sternly.
“Methinks the lady doth protest too much,” He singsongs.
“What is your point? Get to it.”
“As you may or may not know, we’re at constant war with them,” He continues. “And they’re more or less a cult. But they’ve gone truly insane, now. They think she’s Lalei, back in the flesh. They killed a bouncer with a Yoretold alchemy to try and track her down via her ID.”
My fists clench. Lalei - the Mutus’s version of Jesus. Lalei was the bride of their alchemist god, whose name they cannot speak, calling him only The Deep. She was an Azoth of great power, such that her Azoth enabled The Deep to create the world and everything in the universe. Or so their story goes. The Mutus worship Lalei as a goddess, and their obsession with her ‘return’ is second only to their obsession with creating homunculi, whom they view as her children.
My nerves begin to writhe. If they think Mia is Lalei reborn, they will stop at nothing to have her. Absolutely nothing. A Yoretold alchemy - designed to pull the memories from a person’s brain and display them to the alchemist - is forbidden. It’s an alchemy that deserves a life sentence in the Darklands. They’ve always skirted the line between legalities, and murdered to get their way, but the Mutus have rarely used forbidden alchemy. Until now.