Thirty-Two

The following morning, I drove to the airport to pick up Tobias Freeman.

A practicing alchemist was my best hope for saving Dorian. However, the more I’d seen of backward alchemy, the less sure I was that a true alchemist could help. Also dampening my optimism was the fact that Dorian was still in police custody. Now, even if Tobias had insights about Not Untrue Alchemy, it might be too late for him to help.

Yet I still found myself looking forward to seeing an old friend who would understand. Especially after Max’s rejection of the very idea that alchemy could be real.

I spotted Tobias as he walked slowly through the secured section of the airport. He was no longer the sickly man I’d known as an escaped slave, but a muscular man standing tall as he helped an elderly couple with their bags. He winked at me from afar, his brown skin crinkling around his golden-flecked hazel eyes in a manner that told me he often smiled. He waited to greet me until he’d left the couple with their grown grandson.

“Zoe Faust,” he said, shaking his head, “as I live and breathe.” He swallowed me in a bear hug.

“I never thought I’d see you again, Toby,” I said into his shoulder, feeling my eyes well with tears.

“Hey,” Tobias said as he let me go. “No need to cry. But why do I think those tears have more to do with the reason you reached out to me than me being here?”

I wiped the tears from my cheeks. “Let’s get out of here first.”

He grinned. “All those years ago, I knew I was right about you being an alchemist.”

I took his elbow and led us toward the parking garage. “I can’t say the same about you. I thought of you often for many years. I hoped you’d made it to Chicago and were growing old in peace, sitting on a rocking chair on your own front porch, as you said you dreamed of doing.” Was this man who looked like he could star in an action movie really the same man I’d nursed back to health so many years ago? If it wasn’t for his unusual eyes and his familiar voice, I wouldn’t have believed it.

“You didn’t notice that I was paying attention to what you were doing all those weeks you looked after me.”

“You were barely conscious.”

“You were single-mindedly focused on what you were doing, I doubt you would have noticed if the livestock from the farm next door had run through the house.”

“Nice try. I remember when that happened. I seem to remember the pig—Charlene?—took a liking to you.”

“Charlene was a nice pig! They’re smart, you know. I think she sensed I was sick and was trying to keep me warm.”

I stopped at the edge of the parking garage and turned to face Tobias. “If it wasn’t for that voice, I’d swear I was only imagining you were the same man.”

“This voice of mine nearly got me into a whole world of trouble.”

I raised a questioning eyebrow.

“You’re right that we should get away from here before we talk,” Tobias said, glancing around the gray and confining cinderblock-like structure.

“This way.”

Tobias took my elbow and held me back. “Let me pick.”

“Pick what?”

“I bet I can guess which car.”

“Cars didn’t exist when we knew each other.”

“But cars have personalities. Take me to the right floor, and I’ll guess yours.”

“You’re on. And this is the right floor.”

“I get three tries, right?”

“Something tells me you won’t need it.”

Tobias walked directly up to my green Chevy truck. It was certainly one of the oldest cars in the parking garage. I saw a couple of others from the 1960s, but nothing besides my pickup was from the forties.

“That obvious?”

“I may have cheated. You’ve got myrrh in here. Who has myrrh these days? I can smell it. I still could have guessed right in three tries, even without the scent of myrrh.” He pointed at a black Mustang. “That would have been my first guess. You hated bicycles. I figured you’d be a car person. But myrrh?”

“It’s a good air freshener. And you really were a lot more observant than I gave you credit for.”

“When you’re in servitude,” he said, leaning against the truck with a confidence I would have expected in a man who grew up with servants of his own, “you learn how to speak little but see everything.”

I unlocked the truck. Tobias gave a low whistle as he climbed inside.

“You fix this up yourself?” he asked.

“I did. Like you said, I’m a car person. Fixing the interior and the engine has a similar energy and rhythm to working in an alchemy lab.”

He picked up the cassette sticking out of the tape player. A flash of anger—or was it confusion?—crossed his face. “If you knew what I was, why didn’t you ever try to find me?”

I frowned. “I was about to ask you the same thing. But I didn’t know what you were until I saw your photograph online yesterday—”

“This tape, Zoe. This is my song. ‘Accidental Life.’”

I stared at him. The reason for my love of the song clicked into place. “You’re the Philosopher?”

He returned my shocked stare with a grin. “You really didn’t know?”

That’s why his voice had felt so familiar. Like home. A man I’d once cared for who’d become an alchemist. I shook my head and laughed, feeling tears escape my eyes again. “I was always drawn to this song, but I never knew why.”

“Truly?”

“By the time that song came out, you should have been about a hundred years old.”

“It was my hundredth birthday. That’s why I wrote the song. I realized I couldn’t give this ‘gift,’ if that’s what it is, to anyone else, and I needed an outlet to deal with that. I never dreamed it would take off. When you’re on the way to being famous, everyone wants a piece of you. You can’t have any privacy.”

“And you can’t have any secrets—not ones you want to remain secret, anyway. Which is no way to be invisible, like we have to be.”

He nodded.

“I always wondered why The Philosopher never recorded another song.”

“Now you know why. It was reported that he moved to Mexico to find himself. He was a philosopher, after all.”

I shook my head as I started the car. We drove in silence for a few minutes as I exited the parking garage.

“Even though I didn’t know you’d become an alchemist,” I said slowly, “you knew about me. Why didn’t you contact me? You didn’t think I’d help you again? I understand you’d want to put those times behind you—”

“Shoot, Zoe. That wasn’t it. You know those were different times. I did try to find you once. I heard that you’d moved to Europe. I never got involved with the society of alchemists—mostly a bunch of traditional white men, especially at the time. Are they hassling you? Is that why you’re so upset and why you tried to find a friendly face from your past?”

“Not exactly. It’s complicated—”

“You’re preaching to the choir.”

“My story will make more sense if I can show you something I’ve got at my house. An alchemy book that’s unlike any other. We’ve got a few minutes until we get home. Why don’t you tell me how you became an alchemist? And are you in touch with other true alchemists?”

Tobias ran his long fingers from the dashboard to the eight-track and shook his head. “I don’t know any true alchemists, in the way that you mean it. The spiritual alchemists are kindred spirits in many ways, but they’re interested in perfecting their own souls, not seeking out the Elixir of Life. I’ve watched them age.”

“But you saw through me in such a short time.”

“I saw much of what you did with herbs to heal me, so the next time I fell ill, I sought out herbalists. It was then that I realized nobody else was doing what you did.”

“Lots of herbalists use family Bibles and put their own energy into the tinctures they create to heal people,” I said. “What made you think what I did was anything more? I was careful—”

“That you were. But not everyone’s favorite book is in a strange code, and not everyone works only when they think nobody else is looking. I doubt anyone else noticed.”

“But you did.”

“I didn’t think much of it for years. Then once I learned to read, I read everything. It was about ten years after you knew me that I found a word for what I saw you doing: alchemy. I was intrigued, because you were unlike anyone else I’d ever known. I was lucky to know many kind people in my life—conductors, other abolitionists, and just plain old folks who didn’t like to see another human being suffer. Alchemy had been pretty much discredited by then, so books were cheap to come by. I liked so much of the philosophy—transforming one’s life. Taking the impure and making it pure. Plus”—he paused and laughed his deep laugh—“I enjoyed the puzzles of the coded pictures.”

“And you always liked puzzles.”

“You remember that?”

“I’d forgotten until this very moment.”

“About fifteen years after I started toying with alchemy, I had my breakthrough.”

“The Philosopher’s Stone and the Elixir of Life.”

He nodded. “I transformed myself from that scrawny, scared pile of bones into a spiritually and physically healthy man.”

“You look great, Tobias.”

“You look pretty damn good, too, Zoe. You used to be skin and bones yourself. I hardly ever saw you eat, and you always had dark circles under your eyes. But even though you look healthier than when I knew you, there’s something … ”

“When you knew me, I didn’t feel I deserved to be taken care of.” I felt for my locket. “I healed others, but never myself. I didn’t take care of myself until decades later. A fellow alchemist helped me realize that if I wanted to heal others, I first needed to heal myself.” I smiled at the memory. “That’s when I transformed myself by eating to take care of my body. Cooking with the plants I used in my laboratory.”

“But … ”

“But what?”

“I can see there’s something wrong with you, Zoe. You’re sick.”

I stole a glance at Tobias as I shifted gears and turned off of Hawthorne. Was it still that obvious? I thought I was doing better that day. “You can tell?”

He shrugged. “I help acutely sick people every day. You’re not at that stage yet, but it looks like you’re on your way. It’s not only your sallow skin, but your jeans are at least two sizes too big. That can’t be good.”

I sighed. If I survived the week, I was going shopping. “I’m getting over the effects of a taxing transformation.”

“Whatever type of transformation it is that you’re messing with,” Tobias said, “you’re in dangerous waters. You need to stop before it kills you.”