fifteen

Getting a closer look at Blue’s house was a tempting thought. Tempting, but dangerous. I wasn’t into danger these days. I’d had enough of it for many lifetimes.

“I’m not breaking into someone’s house,” I said.

“Why not?” Dorian asked.

“It being illegal is the first thing that springs to mind.”

The gargoyle rolled his eyes. “For someone who lives outside of normal society, you have a strange concept of justice.”

“I’m not talking about it being wrong to break in.” I’d lived through the execution of enough unjust laws that “the law” wasn’t high on my list of things I respected. “I’m talking about it being risky. I’m trying to stay under the radar.”

He squinted at me.

“Oh,” I said, “‘under the radar’ is an idiom that means I don’t wish to be detected.”

“Ah yes, I understand now. But this is not the time for an English lesson. If we wish to learn what has become of my book, there is much more we must learn of Blue, no?”

“There are other ways.”

“Such as?”

“I haven’t thought of them yet,” I admitted.

“You know why this is so important to me.” His eyes bore into me.

“I know, Dorian,” I said. “I know.”

———

That’s how a few hours later I found myself making an energizing chocolate elixir to stay alert in the middle of the night.

“Brixton is getting ready for bed,” I said as I came through the kitchen door with a coconut. After dinner I’d made a quick stop at the market for the coconut and checked on Brixton.

Dorian was finishing cleaning up the kitchen after the three-course dinner he’d cooked us—a potato mushroom soup starter, a pumpkin loaf crusted with poppy seeds as the main dish, and a bed of arugula with fennel and orange for the third course. Brixton had eaten everything except the fennel, which he refused to taste. I thought the licorice flavor of fennel would appeal to him, but not so much. He’d accepted a lot that week. I wasn’t going to push.

During dinner that night, Brixton had continued to ask intelligent questions about alchemy. He was understandably confused about what was real and what wasn’t, due to pop culture’s treatment of alchemy that gave it magical properties. The more answers I gave him, the more questions he had. That was alchemy.

Once Dorian finished washing the dishes, he untied the apron from around his waist and hung it on the door hook. “I do not understand why we cannot make the boy a dessert and add something to it that will help him sleep while we are out tonight.”

“I’m not drugging Brixton,” I said emphatically.

“It would be safer.”

“I draw the line at drugging a kid.” I slammed a butcher’s knife into the fresh young coconut, splitting the thick white husk on the first try. Two more firm pounds with the edge of the knife and I had a triangular hole in the coconut.

Cutting into a coconut is daunting if you’re not used to it, but coconut was an important part of the energizing elixir that helped keep me awake when I had to be up well past dark. Being alert during the middle of the night was nearly impossible for me. My only chance at being coherent was natural sugars and fats with a little bit of caffeine.

“Now that you have successfully massacred the coconut,” Dorian said, “you should place it in the fridge.”

“I need to drink this before we go.”

“How long does it last? We should not venture out until after midnight.”

“After midnight?” I set down the knife. “Can’t we go earlier?”

He shook his head resolutely.

———

I stayed awake by again looking through the pages of Dorian’s book, this time hoping the mental preparation of setting up an alchemy lab was enough to spark further understanding.

I paused on a woodcut showing a menagerie of animals. At the bottom of the illustration, the land was covered with toads, symbolizing the First Matter. Yet even in the still illustration, the toads were clearly dead. In the sky above, bees swarmed, symbolizing purification and rebirth. The carving alluded to motion, showing the wind pushing the bees in a counterclockwise direction, pushing them toward the earth.

The stress of not understanding, while knowing what was at stake, did a decent job keeping me awake. Still, I felt myself fading. Midnight might not be a bewitching hour, but it effectively turns me into a pumpkin.

At a few minutes to midnight, I grabbed a jar of unsweetened cocoa powder from the cabinet and scooped a few tablespoons into the blender, scraped vanilla paste from a vanilla pod I kept in a glass jar, added the coconut meat and liquid from the fruit I’d split open earlier, and blended the mixture. I offered half to Dorian. He politely declined.

Before we left, I walked by Brixton’s room, trying not to make too much noise on the creaking floor. I could see through the one-inch space between the door and the floor that his light was off.

We drove my truck to an isolated field near Blue’s house. Dorian took my hand to lead me through the field. His eyes were able to see in the dark much better than mine, so it allowed us to move without a flashlight.

“Is that it?” I asked, pointing to a house blanketed in shadows.

“Yes,” Dorian agreed, “I can see the police tape.”

We had reached the edge of a growth of trees but were still at least fifty yards from the storybook cottage. I hadn’t had much time to study the yard the first time I’d visited. Now that my eyes had adjusted to the moonlight, I couldn’t help noticing some of the more interesting plants. Caught up in the bounty surrounding me, I lost sight of Dorian.

I whipped my head around. I didn’t see him. Some of the weeds grew higher than three feet, so he could have been anywhere in the field.

“Dorian,” I whispered.

He didn’t answer, but I heard a click. I followed the sound. He had just opened the front door.

I hurried to the door, following Dorian inside and closing it behind us.

Unlike the wild nature of the outside of the house, the inside of the cottage was well maintained. In the kitchen, colorful handcrafted dishes filled open cabinets. The remnants of dried herbs hung from hooks on the ceiling. The police must have taken the rest as evidence.

One thing was lacking from the house: photographs. I wondered at first if it was the police who had taken the photos as evidence, until I saw that there were a few photos on a bookshelf. One was a photo of Blue with a younger Brixton. I didn’t recognize the people in the other photos, but they all had Portland backdrop. There was no evidence of Blue’s life before she moved here. The life she’d been running from.

I took a step from the dining room bookshelf into the living room. This was the room I’d seen from the window. The room where Blue’s unconscious body had been. As my foot touched the carpet, the sensation hit me like a gust of cold air. Only there were no doors or windows open.

“What is it?” Dorian asked.

“There’s poison here,” I murmured. I crouched down. “The glass has been removed, but some of the contents spilled onto the rug here.”

“What are you doing?” Dorian exclaimed. “We are not looking for poison. We are looking for my book!”

Ignoring Dorian, I touched the moist rug and smelled my fingertips. I felt a shiver spread from my fingers to the rest of my body. Something was wrong. This wasn’t a concoction infused with Blue’s personal touch. More than that, it was something reminiscent of alchemy.

I stood up hastily, knocking over a small wooden table.

“Are you well?” Dorian asked.

“We need to get out of here.”

“What is wrong?”

“This isn’t something Blue created,” I said. “I’m sensitive to the energies put into extracting plant essences, and Blue’s energy isn’t here.”

“What does that mean?”

“This was no accident. And no suicide attempt.”

“Who made it?”

“All I can tell from this small amount is that it was deliberate poisoning. Someone tried to kill her.” I didn’t say the question hanging on my lips. The question that sent a lightning-bolt shiver through me. Was this the work of an alchemist?

Dorian’s head darted around. His eyes locked on a box of tissue across the room. He moved quickly. A few seconds later, he took my hand in his, wiping away the drops of poison with half of the tissues in the box.

I smiled at the gesture. “I can feel it through my skin because I’m attuned to it, but it’s not going to poison me this way.” I hesitated. “At least I don’t think so.” I could handle toxins, as all alchemists must if they wish to perform laboratory experiments beyond theoretical exercises. But this was different. There was something both strange and familiar about it. I tried to think what it could be, but there wasn’t enough of the substance remaining.

“Mon dieu.”

“We need to leave so I can tell Max that Blue is innocent.”

Dorian crossed his arms and glared at me. “You cannot think you are getting involved in a police investigation. Les flics cannot help us.”

“It’s all connected, Dorian. If we find out what happened to Blue, we find your book. Max seems like a good guy.”

“You propose,” Dorian said stiffly, “waking him up at two o’clock in the morning, telling him you broke into a crime scene, and explaining how you detected that Blue herself did not create the poison she ingested. You are not that careless.”

My body began to shake. What was going on?

“You are ill!” Dorian said. “Do you know what poison it was you touched? Is there an antidote?”

I shook my head as I sat down on the couch and pulled a small purple blanket over me. “I’m only shivering because it’s cold and it’s hours past when I should be sound asleep.” I silently cursed myself. Of course a poison would have a greater effect on me in the middle of the night! Like plants unfurling, I get my strength from the light. I had never before touched a poisonous substance after dark.

“But the poison?”

I shook my head again. “I can’t tell what it is. There isn’t enough here in the rug for me to determine what it is or who made it.” There was another possibility that I hoped wasn’t true. I had pushed my memories of alchemy so far to the back of my mind. Was it possible I could no longer access the knowledge?

“Your skin is pale.”

“I’m fine.”

“Can you walk?”

“Yes. Just give me a minute.”

“Merde. You sit here while I search the yard for anywhere my book could be hidden.”

“I told you—”

“Yes, yes. You are fine. Mais non. Take a nap here on the couch while I search outside. I will return shortly.”

Shortly after Dorian slipped out the door, I felt myself falling asleep. I hopped up. If I went to sleep now, I wouldn’t want to wake up. Instead, I pulled the blanket around me and continued searching Blue’s house for anything the police might have missed. I didn’t have high hopes. Now that I was certain Blue hadn’t poisoned herself on purpose, it was clear she was being framed. The person framing her would have left the stolen items where they would be easily discovered. Meaning Charles Macraith’s murderer must still have Dorian’s book. What did they want with it? And was that all they wanted?

Dorian returned while I was finishing leafing through the books on Blue’s bookshelf, which was full of books on tea, wildcrafting, meditation, plus several dozen romance novels. Dorian’s expression was somber.

“I didn’t find anything either,” I said.

We walked back to the car in silence. The cold chilled me to the point where I began to shake again.

“What you need is a bisque to warm you up,” Dorian said. “I have a container of broth in your fridge, so it will take no time to cook.”

I was too cold and tired to argue. I blasted the heat on our drive back to the house. There was no rain, but the wind was whipping up leaves and bending tree branches.

At first, that’s what I thought I was seeing as I approached the house. As we grew closer, I realized I was mistaken. It wasn’t swaying tree branches in my yard.

Two shadowy figures were creeping up to the house.