forty-nine

Max swore creatively again, but didn’t hang up on me to call 9-1-1.

“It’s Mina’s decision,” he said, and gave me her number. “If you can’t reach her, please, Zoe. Go to the ER.”

It was already evening, so Mina’s medical clinic was closed for the day. That was the only reason she even entertained the idea of seeing us.

“No promises,” Mina said. “But if it’s a choice between your EMT friend treating them in an unsanitary attic or me at my clinic, here’s the address.”

A shriek rang out as I jotted down the location. I nearly dropped my cell phone at the sound of Perenelle’s cry. She jumped protectively in front of Nicolas, who remained unconscious.

“What’s going on?” Mina asked. “I heard that scream. You need an ambulance—”

“That wasn’t the patient,” I said, following Perenelle’s wide-eyed stare.

“Zoe,” Mina snapped, “what on God’s green earth is—”

“We’ll see you soon.” I clicked off.

“Je suis désolé,” the newcomer said from the doorway. “I am so sorry to have disturbed you. Zoe has spoken so much of you both. I wished to meet you.”

Dorian bowed awkwardly. His left wing was bound so thoroughly that he nearly toppled over. I rushed to his side and steadied him. His arm was warm. Could a gargoyle run a fever?

“Perenelle Flamel,” I said, “may I present fellow alchemist Dorian Robert-Houdin.”

Perenelle nodded and pursed her lips. “Something went wrong with the transformation?” She stepped forward cautiously but remained in front of her husband.

Dorian sniffed indignantly and Tobias stifled a laugh.

“You can explain everything after we get Nick stabilized at Mina’s,” Tobias said. “We’ve gotta go.”

Though Tobias had rigged a sling for Dorian, the gargoyle wasn’t especially mobile. He wished to accompany us but understood it would be unwise. Tobias carried Nicolas to the built-in couch of the Airstream, and Perenelle leaned into my shoulder as I helped her into the trailer.

“A gargoyle … ” she murmured. Repeatedly. “He turned into a gargoyle? I must speak with him to discover how this was possible … ”

“Try to keep Nick still,” Tobias said, “and if he wakes up, make sure he doesn’t move the bandages.”

“My foot is well enough for me to drive,” I said. “You should stay in the back to take care of him.”

Tobias shook his head. “He’s as stable as I can get him. If he wakes up, it’s your face he’s going to want to see. At this point, the faces of loved ones will do more than any medical care I can give him.”

“You’re a good man,” Perenelle said, clasping his hands in hers. “Thank you. Yet,” she continued, “do people here think nothing of blood?” She tipped her head toward Tobias’s white T-shirt, which was now dotted with the dark reddish brown of blood and its accompanying sulfurous smell.

“Let me get something to fix that,” I said, and hurried to the house. My ankle protested as I rushed up the squeaking porch steps, but I didn’t slow down until I reached the second floor. Tobias had taken his bag of clothes when he moved out, and he was twice my size, so I proceeded to the attic and my Elixir inventory. A man’s starchy dress shirt that had been tailored over a century ago would do. Clothing back then was made to last.

I was back in the trailer in less than two minutes. I found Tobias and Perenelle huddled together in conversation and handed him the clean shirt. He pulled his bloodied T-shirt over his head, revealing long, deep scars that covered his entire back. The cruel markings crisscrossed his back and shoulders. I’d seen those patterns before, when the wounds were fresh.

“Let’s get the trailer hooked up to the truck,” I said. We worked quickly in silence, and pulled out of the driveway within a few minutes.

The Airstream shook as Tobias navigated down the slope and onto the street. Perenelle stood and took my hands in hers, gasping as the trailer shook. “What’s happening?”

“We’re driving. This is a conveyance.”

“Ah.” She smiled with embarrassment. “I expect we have much to learn.”

I blinked back tears. “I never thought I’d see you both again. I’m so sorry it took me so long to find you.”

“We didn’t feel pain as strongly within the painting,” she said. “I’m thankful for that. This is hella painful.”

Hella? “Your English,” I said, realizing they’d been speaking English instead of French this whole time. “It’s, um, interesting.”

She smiled the mischievous smile of hers I remembered. “As is your choice of clothing. Trousers?”

“How do you speak modern English but not know that women wear trousers?”

Perenelle squeezed Nicolas’s hand and wiped his brow. “I’m attempting to think how best to explain it. We were semi-awake inside the painting. It was like a vivid dream, both real and imagined, and with no sense of time. I don’t know how many years went by—many, by the looks of this rounded silver box.” She looked around the Airstream and clenched her stomach again.

“You don’t have to talk. The poison—”

“Your doctor’s ministrations helped.” She waved away the concern but clenched her jaw as another wave of pain overwhelmed her. “And I want to tell you. There’s so much I want to tell you, dear Zoe … Since it was like a dream, I don’t know how long I have until the memories fade. We heard the words spoken around us, and learned to speak as they did. Naturally, like a child learns a language. It was easier to hear than see, because even when it was night, or when we were enclosed in a crate, we could hear people, and we came to learn their ways of speaking. But usually we had a prominent placement high on a wall. We lived with a family in England for generations. Then there were the sounds of war, followed by darkness. When the light returned, we found ourselves in a strange land called California, where people brought invisible musicians into their homes, enjoyed standing on planks on the ocean, and drank wine while discussing books … ”

I couldn’t help laughing at that. It explained “hella” as well.

“How many years has it been?” she asked.

“It’s the twenty-first century.”

She stared at me with wonder. “But that is far too long for us to have been away from our quest! The backward alchemists—have they escaped France? Stopping them is more important than our own problems.” Her face paled. “Your face betrays you. They have, haven’t they? What havoc have they wrought?” She gripped Nicolas’s unmoving hand more tightly. “I should have listened to him about what they were capable of.” She swept Nicolas’s hair off his forehead again. It refused to stay put. “I always believed them to be stupid, lazy men. I didn’t believe they were a threat.”

“You and Nicolas were both right,” I said. “They were lazy”—which was why they’d found an alchemical loophole to allow themselves to feed on the life forces of others instead of putting in the work themselves—“so they did nothing threatening until their life forces began to fade. That didn’t happen until recently. But Dorian and I stopped them. You don’t have to worry about them.”

“The two of you defeated them? You and the Frenchman in your attic whose alchemy experiment went terribly wrong?”

“Dorian … Yes, and he can tell you about his alchemical history himself.”

She nodded. “You did what Nicolas couldn’t. I always knew you’d go on to do great things. Though I regret that you’ve led a difficult life. I can see it in your eyes and the scars on your skin.”

I looked into her eyes. They couldn’t be described as kind eyes, yet there was compassion and love behind the strength and wariness. “You didn’t want me to discover the Elixir of Life.”

“I didn’t want this life for you. I wanted you to be happy. Not to do merely what you were capable of, but what you truly wanted. That’s why I was so hard on you.”

“You could have told me.”

“Would you have listened?”

She was right, of course. I wouldn’t have. As a young woman in my twenties, I’d misunderstood so much.

“And what about you?” I asked. “Not only a female alchemist, but having to paint under an assumed name as Philippe Hayden in order to be considered a real artist.”

A gleefully proud smile flashed across her face as she clasped her hands together. “You figured that out. Is that how you found us?”

“Partly.”

Perenelle held Nicolas’s hand as she told me about the sacrifices she’d made to bring true alchemy out of the realm of secrecy through her art, and then her discovery of alchemical painting, a technique that combined alchemy and art by using alchemical processes to turn natural substances into pigments and then paint, which allowed an artist to transfer living objects into the world of a canvas.

“I wish I’d known how ill Thomas was,” Perenelle said. “I could have done this for him.” She reached for my hand and squeezed it. Her palm was clammy but the heartfelt gesture comforting.

“The portrait of me and Thomas,” I said. “I never knew you’d done such a thing.”

She blinked at me in surprise. “You’ve seen it?”

“Only in a book.”

“A book?”

“An art history book. It’s not attributed to Hayden—er, to you—but your work is so magnificent that it’s taken its place in history.”

I expected her to tell me how honored she felt that her work had survived, but instead Perenelle asked shyly, “Did you like the painting? I painted it from memory right after Thomas died. I always wanted you to have it … ”

“But I left before you could stop me. I was young and foolish.”

“We were all young and foolish once. But you grew up. You grew up and rescued us.” She clutched her stomach and closed her eyes.

“We’ll be there soon. Mina will be able to properly pump your stomach and take care of Nicolas.”

“Pump my stomach?”

I supposed she hadn’t seen modern medical treatments from the walls of wealthy households. “I wish I could have stopped the backward alchemists before they did this to you.”

“Our injuries?” She shook her head so emphatically that locks of her auburn hair fell loose. “No. None of those imbeciles did this to us.”

I stared at her. “It wasn’t a backward alchemist who attacked you?”

“Edward Kelley,” Perenelle said. “He’s the one who did this to us.”

“The Edward Kelley? I didn’t think he was a true alchemist.” I thought about what I knew of the historical figure. It wasn’t much. Given that I didn’t think he was a real alchemist, Edward Kelley hadn’t especially interested me. History books recorded him as a charming charlatan who’d died at age forty-two in the late 1500s. He was smart and had used multiple surnames to cover up his various crimes. “I thought he was a fraud.”

“He was—at first. He—” Perenelle broke off as the trailer lurched, and gripped the Masonite wall with her free hand.

“It’s okay,” I said. “Tobias knows what he’s doing.” Tobias was driving the trailer like it was an ambulance. I hoped he didn’t draw so much attention to us that we got pulled over. But as the one to examine Nicolas, he knew how quickly we had to get to Mina.

But I wondered … was there a bigger danger lurking? A suspicion was forming in my mind. “Edward Kelley… Didn’t he die long before I was born?”

“We don’t need to worry about Edward now. He discovered the Elixir of Life, but he believes us to be dead.”

“I don’t believe he does.”