two

I met Nicolas Flamel in the year 1700. He was the only person who would work with me in spite of the fact I was a woman. He recognized my aptitude for alchemy, and saw that my brother and I were in a desperate situation. Perenelle was less convinced, but she went along with Nicolas’s wishes.

My brother and I had fled Salem Village as teenagers, when my aptitude with plants had convinced the townspeople I was a witch. After leaving Massachusetts and making our way across the Atlantic, we nearly starved to death in London until I began selling my healing plant tinctures, which caught the attention of an alchemist who thought my brother was the apothecary.

I knew nothing of alchemy at the time, until Nicolas took me on as his pupil. He explained that alchemy was about transformation, whether transforming homegrown plants into healing elixirs, impure metals into pure gold, or a crushed spirit into a happy one.

I had always excelled at one of those three types of transformation: plant transformations. In alchemy, plant-based herbal medicines are created through spagyric transformations, using the same steps used in making gold, including fermentation, distillation, and extracting elements from the ashes. I never got the hang of making gold, but I understood plants. And here in Portland I was working hard on the third type of alchemy: finding happiness. For a long time, I hadn’t thought I deserved it.

In my windy spot in front of the painting that reminded me so much of a time long ago, I lifted the chain I wore around my neck to look at my locket and phoenix pendant. The locket served as a reminder to honor the past. It held a miniature portrait of my brother Thomas and a photograph of my love Ambrose. Until recently, I had always felt responsible for both of their deaths. But now the new phoenix charm served as a symbol of hope for the future.

After spending most of my life on the move so that nobody would notice I didn’t outwardly age, I’d put down roots in Portland nearly a year ago. I was tired of running. Tired of hiding. My cozy Craftsman house in the Hawthorne District no longer contained a hole in the roof, my backyard vegetable garden sprawled into the front yard, and I had a unique roommate who was my best friend. I could walk out my front door and down the street to the farmers’ market and Blue Sky Teas, the teashop where I could always find a group of friends—and I’d fallen in love with one of them. Max and so many others I’d met over the past year made me hope I could stay here in Portland for at least a little while longer. As for what would come next … I yearned for the day Max would be ready to learn the truth about me.

The art gallery’s sign above me squawked more loudly in the increasing wind. Summer was coming to a close and the autumn equinox was approaching. Thunder rumbled in the distance, and I cinched my silver coat more tightly around me, but I remained outside on the threshold of the gallery.

Oregonian artist Logan Magnus was a local celebrity in my adopted hometown. He was known as an experimental modern painter, which was ironic because he mixed his own pigments and used organic materials rather than modern synthetic ones, so he was more old-fashioned than I was. Lead, mercury, and turpentine were reported to have been the main poisons he’d swallowed. I knew the substances well. They overlapped with materials I used in alchemy.

Could Logan Magnus have been an alchemist who’d known Nicolas centuries ago? It would certainly explain his use of pigments … No, I knew that was impossible. Not because Logan was dead. Alchemists can die just like anyone else. But one thing you can’t do is grow up in the public eye, which Logan Magnus had done. His father had been a famous artist as well, so there were plenty of photos of Logan growing up in the 1960s and 1970s. Besides, this painting looked like a Philippe Hayden. Was Logan Magnus experimenting with a new style?

The sun dipped below the horizon. Max would be expecting me soon, but I needed to get a better look at the painting first.

All I had left of Nicolas was a note I’d discovered when I returned to Paris earlier that summer. The blue ink had faded over the years so I hadn’t been able to read it beyond the two lines written in old French. Dearest Zoe, If you find this one day … and an even more important one: I hope you can help. I didn’t know what I could help him with, or even if he was still alive. That uncertainty left me feeling like a fraudulent painting, with my inner reality different from my outward appearance—but if you peeled away the slightest bit of paint, you’d see the truth.

The door of the art gallery was within reach. Poised between stepping inside to chase my past or walking on to embrace my future, I hesitated. Taking a deep breath, I took a step forward, only to stumble backward as the door flung open.

A beautiful woman in elegant all-black clothes stepped outside. In shiny black heels, she stood several inches taller than me. Bright streaks of silver-white cut through her long black hair like impossibly thin bolts of lightning slicing through the night sky. Instead of pushing past me, she stopped inches away. She clasped a strong hand around my wrist.

“You,” she said. Her voice was calm but filled with a smoldering rage. “It was you. You killed him.”