Twenty-Six

It wasn’t a fortuitous coincidence, after all, that had led me to the cemetery that afternoon. When I’d lost Peter and Penelope two hours before, I wasn’t far from the entrance to the cemetery. They must have seen me following them and waited to come to the cemetery.

“Good afternoon,” I called down to the path below me on the hill.

“Hello!” Penelope said. If I hadn’t known she was so successful at acting the part of her role of Persephone on the stage, I would have believed she was genuinely happy to see me. Peter, on the other hand, dropped the pine cones he was juggling.

They cut across the grass, walking briskly up the steep incline to meet me. Peter’s hair was no longer red and spiky, but medium brown and combed back. And in place of his bright-red suit he wore a sedate combination of khakis, polo shirt, and loafers. The difference was so striking that if I’d seen him in the street I would have assumed he was a banker or an accountant on his day off, but never a magician or an alchemist.

“We’re here visiting family,” Penelope said. Unlike Peter, she looked much the same as her stage persona with her perfectly rolled sleek curls. She was dressed in a flowing black dress that wrapped elegantly around her tall frame.

“I didn’t realize you were from Portland,” I said. “The show is a homecoming of sorts.”

“Something like that,” Peter murmured, studying my face. “Are you feeling all right?”

“I’m fine. It’s just spring allergies. I’ve been wandering the grounds. I didn’t see any Silverman headstones.”

“Distant relatives with a different name,” Penelope said without missing a beat.

The family connection clicked. One of the mausoleums I’d passed was for the Thorne family. Franklin Thorne. They’d postponed their visit when they thought I was following them. Why didn’t they want me to see them visiting the cemetery? Did they think I’d connect Peter to Franklin Thorne and the loot?

“It was you,” Penelope said, staring at me with a horrific recognition on her face. The Goddess of Spring Growth had turned on me, becoming Queen of the Underworld.

My throat constricted. Penelope had to have known Peter was an alchemist. Could they tell that my sickness was brought on by practicing backward alchemy? By letting them see me in my weakened state, had they figured out I was a fellow alchemist, despite my lie about having bad allergies?

“Zoe Faust,” she continued, ignoring the confused look on Peter’s face, “who is the reason the police searched through every inch of our possessions.”

“I don’t know what you’re—”

“Your cheap knock-off statue, Zoe. The gargoyle you brought to the theater was such a shoddy piece of work that a piece of him must have broken off.”

I froze.

“That,” Penelope said, “was what the police were looking for.”

“My statue?” I croaked.

“Wallace Mason,” she said. “That poor man someone murdered and planted in our set piece—the police found a fragment of a stone statue clutched in his dead hand.”

Dorian’s toe. That’s where it had gone.

The dead man had it.

I drove like a madwoman on my way back to the house. I couldn’t reach him any other way. Dorian didn’t have a cell phone. Not because it would be ridiculous for a gargoyle to have a cell phone—even though we both agreed that would be true as well—but because he had trouble using small keyboards, and touchscreen phones didn’t respond well to his touch. I had a land line so he could make outgoing calls. But because he wasn’t supposed to exist and live with me, he didn’t answer the phone.

Max was waiting for me on the rickety front porch.

“I’m so sorry, Zoe,” he said.

“For what? What’s going on?”

“I really hoped the piece of evidence would match something found at the theater, but it didn’t. They’ll be here any minute. I had to tell them.”

“Tell who, what?”

“About your gargoyle statue. The crime scene guys were looking for a piece of evidence relating to something the investigating officer found. They didn’t find a match in the magicians’ props. But that gargoyle of yours … The magicians said you brought him to the theater. Zoe, it may have been used in the commission of the crime.”

The world around me spun in and out of focus. Stars flashed in my eyes. I couldn’t let myself faint. I focused on Max’s deep brown eyes, trying to steady my breathing.

“You don’t understand,” I said, raising my voice. I hoped Dorian would hear me inside the house and hide, rather than turning to stone as soon as a guest appeared, as he usually did.

“Then why don’t you tell me?”

I opened my mouth but couldn’t speak.

“What’s going on with you, Zoe?”

“I need to go inside.”

Max stepped in front of me. “I can’t let you do that.”

“What are you talking about? This is my house.”

“There’s a search warrant on its way.”

I clutched his arm. “You have to let me inside, Max. My statue isn’t simply a statue.”

Max frowned, but at the same time he took my hand in his and squeezed it gently. “Our guys know how to be careful. They won’t break it. But really, Zoe, I didn’t know you were so attached to physical objects.”

I’d respected Dorian’s wishes that we not share his existence with anyone else, and I agreed with him about the need for secrecy. But this was an emergency. I had to trust Max.

“You’re not listening to me. He’s not a statue.” I took a deep breath. And another. “He’s my French friend.”

“Oh, you mean you borrowed him from that shy friend of yours? Don’t worry, he’ll be able to get his statue back after the investigation.”

“Listen to me, Max. The things you saw your grandmother do when you were a child, when she helped people as an apothecary—there were parts of what she did that you thought were magic, before you decided you didn’t believe in it. You were wrong. It’s not a supernatural magic that apothecaries and alchemists perform, but their work is real. Alchemy brought the statue to life.”

I held my breath and waited for him to respond.

“Zoe,” Max whispered. “I know you’ve been under a lot of stress lately, moving to a new place, buying a house that was a bigger fixer-upper project than you thought, and getting up in the middle of the night to bake for the teashop. I’ve seen how tired and ill you’ve been. And between my trip and work I haven’t been around this month—”

“I’m not going crazy, Max! I’m trying to open up to you and tell you what I’ve been holding back. Come inside with me. I’ll show you.”

I took a frantic step toward the door, but Max’s gentle hold on my hand turned into a firm grip. He held me in place and shook his head as a police car drove up and parked in the driveway.

I stared mutely at the duo who walked up to us.

“It’ll be easier,” Max said softly, “if you let them in and let them have the statue. I’ll get you some help, Zoe. Fighting us right now will only make things worse.”

I closed my eyes and breathed. This couldn’t be happening. It was daytime, so Dorian would be somewhere in the house. I couldn’t warn him. As soon as he heard voices in the house, he’d turn to stone. A defenseless stone statue that the police could take in as evidence. And the longer he stayed in stone, the harder it would be to awaken him.

I nodded numbly and unlocked the door.

The police found a three-and-a-half-foot gargoyle statue standing in the kitchen, next to the fridge. It was missing a pinky toe that matched the piece of stone clutched in Wallace Mason’s hand. But he was very much a stone statue, not the living creature I’d tried to tell Max about moments earlier. I watched helplessly as they carried Dorian from the house.