Three

I drove through the Hawthorne district of northeast Portland and eased my old truck into the driveway. I sighed as I looked at the gaping hole in the roof, covered with a tarp that flapped in the wind. One day I’d have time to fix the old Craftsman house.

A skinny figure dressed in jeans and a hideous velvet smoking jacket was waiting for me in front of the house.

“Zoe!” Brixton said. “It took you long enough. You have to listen to this.”

Since Brixton wasn’t my kid, I hadn’t been expecting to see him in my house at ten o’clock at night.

“One minute, Brixton. Let’s get inside. What are you wearing? You look like Hugh Hefner.”

“Who?”

“Never mind.”

I stepped across the creaking porch and opened the front door of my house. The diffuse light from a gold-colored Chinese lantern illuminated the corner of the living room, casting a mix of light and shadows across my green velvet couch and Dorian’s stack of library books, which was nearly as tall as he was.

“Dorian?” I called out after Brixton closed the door.

A light peeked through the kitchen door, and I heard a rhythmic scraping sound.

I pushed through the swinging door and found Dorian stirring a steaming pot. As usual, the gargoyle stood on a stepping stool to reach the stove. He’d become a chef after serving as a companion to a blind former chef in Paris, who believed Dorian to be a disfigured man. Now the gargoyle was my roommate. A secret one who didn’t need a bedroom, but a roommate nonetheless.

I was glad to see him safe, but his calm countenance made me question what I thought I’d seen that night. A flash of irritation rose within me. I’d been abrupt with Max because I was worried about Dorian, and here he was acting as if nothing had happened.

“You’re all right, Dorian?”

“Ce n’est rien,” Dorian said, continuing to stir the pot. “It is nothing. My leg merely stiffened from standing still above the stage for so long.”

“You shouldn’t have been there in the first place! What were you thinking?”

“Hey,” Brixton said. “Didn’t you hear me outside? Don’t you want to hear this?”

“I have lived safely in the shadows for over one hundred and fifty years,” Dorian said in his thick French accent, ignoring Brixton as well as he turned to face me. “I know what I am doing.”

“But you’ve never had your body start reverting to stone before.” I studied Dorian’s legs. His left leg was a darker gray than the rest of his body and hung at an awkward angle with his clawed foot turned outward. Something was happening that we didn’t yet understand. “You almost fell. And anyone could have seen you.”

“Yet I did not fall, nor did anyone see me.” He turned back to the stove and switched off the gas flame.

“You were at the show?” Brixton asked.

“It was not remarkable, yet it had some high points. Now will you fetch three mugs?”

The sulking teenager obliged, shoving his cell phone into his pocket and selecting three handmade pieces of pottery, painted with vibrant reds and oranges. I’d bought the mugs in 1960s New Mexico from the craftswoman who made them. I smiled to myself in spite of the situation. I had a small collection of mugs, but those were the ones most people were drawn to. They were my favorites as well. The craftswoman had instilled a loving energy into the clay, transforming a lump of raw materials into something both beautiful and functional. I thought of craftspeople like her as artisan alchemists.

Dorian poured the thick steaming liquid from his pot into the three mugs. He gave a start when he looked up at Brixton. “What is this vulgar jacket you are wearing?”

“Like it?” Brixton asked, his earlier agitation suddenly forgotten. “Veronica thought we should dress up for the show. I found this in the back of my mom’s closet.”

“Hmm … ” Dorian handed Brixton his mug.

Brixton took a sip. “I don’t know how he makes hot chocolate taste so good without milk or sugar.”

“Cocoa elixir?” Dorian looked at me with innocent black eyes that wouldn’t have been out of place on a puppy dog. “I know you have been feeling sick. Alors, I made your favorite.”

“It’s a good thing you’re such a good cook,” I said, accepting the mug. “You know how to bribe me.” I took a sip of the rich, chocolatey drink. It had hints of coconut and cinnamon. “See, I’ve already nearly forgotten you almost got yourself found out tonight.”

Dorian grinned and jumped down from the stool. He stumbled, but caught himself before he fell flat on the linoleum floor. “Merde,” he mumbled.

“You’re due for another infusion of alchemy,” I said, knowing better than to ask if he was all right. “The garden is doing well enough that I’ve got plenty of plants to create salts for your Tea of Ashes.”

“I much prefer the flavor of my cocoa elixir,” Dorian said.

Using a combination of mercury and sulfur, I was able to turn my hand-grown plants into a salt-like ash through an alchemical transformation described in Dorian’s peculiar alchemy book, Non Degenera Alchemia. Salt was one of the three essential elements for alchemists. Mercury is the spirit, sulfur the soul, and salt the body. Dorian’s soul and spirit were intact. It was his body that was failing him. My Tea of Ashes worked by temporarily fooling Dorian’s body into thinking it had been rejuvenated with a true alchemical salt.

Alchemy is usually a long, drawn-out process. It can’t be rushed. The discipline of alchemy strives to turn the impure into something pure, be it transmuting lead into gold or turning a failing body into an immortal one. It’s as much about the alchemist as it is the ingredients. It’s a personal transformation, done in isolation in one’s own laboratory while following a series of natural steps that transform the elements. Using earth, air, water, and fire, you calcinate, dissolve, separate, conjoin, ferment, distill, and coagulate. You get out what you put into it. And alchemical transformations of the body can’t be transferred to others—a lesson I learned the hard way a long time ago.

That’s the way alchemy is supposed to work.

But the book that brought Dorian to life wasn’t like that. Non Degenera Alchemia was backward alchemy, a dangerous alchemical idea that involved quick fixes. I speculated that’s why the title wasn’t simply True Alchemy, but instead the convoluted double-negative Not Untrue Alchemy. Drawing upon external life forces to shortcut nature, backward alchemy was the antithesis of true alchemy. The “death rotation” described in the book’s coded illustrations and Latin text told of backward actions that took minutes instead of months, and began, rather than ended, with fire.

The quick fixes in the book showed me that I could use my energy, along with that of the plants I’d lovingly tended in my garden, to hastily produce the end product of ashes. But it wasn’t a permanent fix. I had only scratched the surface in my understanding of the book.

“Is there enough for seconds?” Brixton asked.

Dorian smiled and topped off Brixton’s cocoa. “It is too bad the magicians selected the orange tree automaton,” he said.

“I thought that was pretty cool,” Brixton said. “That was a real orange that grew from the metal tree.”

“It was nicely done,” I agreed. “You take offense that they stole the idea from the great Jean Eugène Robert-­Houdin?”

“Non. I would have much preferred them to have re-created Father’s pastry chef automaton.”

“Of course you would,” I said, barely able to suppress a smile.

“Bon soir, mes amis,” Dorian said, leaving his empty mug on the counter. He limped out of the kitchen. I presumed he was heading out on his nightly excursion. Since it wasn’t a good idea for him to go out during the day, when it would be too easy for people to see him, he explored the city and surrounding forests at night. Lately his nocturnal jaunts had been limited because a portion of the city’s forests had been overrun by treasure hunters. The brutal winter storm that wrecked my roof had also caused a mudslide that unearthed a portion of hidden jewels from a decades-old train heist. Poor Dorian now had to share the woods with clandestine treasure hunters.

“That was weird,” Brixton said.

So much of my life was weird that I couldn’t be sure which part he was referring to.

“Doesn’t he always insist on cleaning up ‘his’ kitchen?” Brixton continued.

“I think he’s embarrassed that we saw him lose control of his body.”

“That’s exactly why I thought you’d want to hear this.” Brixton attempted to raise an eyebrow enigmatically, but ended up lifting both of them.

“Right! You wanted to tell me something. Sorry, Brix. What is it?”

“The magician Prometheus”—he paused for dramatic effect—“is an alchemist.”

I let out my breath and smiled. Brixton had an active imagination. Ever since he’d broken into my house and learned I was an alchemist, he’d seen alchemists everywhere. Well, perhaps not everywhere. But it had happened on more than one occasion.

“Don’t you see?” Brixton said. “He could help you!”

Brixton knew I’d accidentally discovered the Elixir of Life in my twenties. Aside from my hair, which had turned white centuries ago, the Elixir prevented me from aging. He also knew alchemists weren’t exactly immortal. Even though some of us have unlocked the secrets that transform energy into eternal life, we’re flesh and blood and can be sickened or injured. With my herbal skills, sickness is less of an issue, but I have several scars that remind me how precarious life is.

It was typical of the young that Brixton had never asked me when and where I was born. He knew I used to run a shop in Paris in the early 1900s before returning home to the US and traveling around the country in my 1942 Chevy truck and my 1950 Airstream trailer. He’d never asked, as Dorian had, for the details of my birth and upbringing, so he didn’t know I’d been born in Salem Village in 1676, or that because of my way with herbs and plants, I’d been accused of witchcraft at sixteen. Both I and the world had come far since then.

“Oh, Brix—”

“Why are you looking at me like that?” Brixton asked. “I’m telling you—”

“The same way you told me about Mrs. Andrews?”

“That was different.” He scowled and busied himself with the mug of cocoa.

Brixton had sworn that one of our neighbors hadn’t aged in ten years, from Brixton’s first memories at age four to his current age of fourteen. I’d taken him seriously—only to find out the woman had gotten plastic surgery.

“And Jonas Latham?” I said.

Brixton scowled again. “Even though I wasn’t right about him being an alchemist, I was right that he was up to something.”

While riding his bike to my house, Brixton had noticed a man carrying laboratory supplies that looked similar to my alchemy vessels. As the man slipped into his garage, Brixton caught a glimpse of his “alchemy” lab.

Again, I’d given Brixton the benefit of the doubt. When I went to investigate, the police were at the man’s house, arresting him. Brixton claimed it was a witch hunt and that the police had arrested him for being an alchemist. I asked Max about it, inquiring as a curious neighbor. It turned out the man had been running a meth lab in his garage.

A woman who had plastic surgery. Then a man dealing drugs.

“All right, Brixton. What is it this time?”