I felt a little bit better after telling Dorian what was going on, but I’d feel even better once Max and the Flamels arrived for dinner.
I didn’t like the fact that Perenelle’s painting was generating such interest. I wished I’d taken better care to set up the Flamels’ identities after rescuing them. Their papers were superb and would hold up to scrutiny, but they didn’t have a history that could be traced if anyone tried digging into their pasts. In the twenty-first century, ID documents no longer told enough of one’s story. There was a void where their pasts should be.
When creating a fake identity, it’s always best to stay as close to the truth as possible. For the Flamels, that meant their current identities were that of a French married couple who’d emigrated to the United States long ago, changed their names to reflect people they believed to be a distant relative of Perenelle, and become naturalized citizens several years ago. Which is why they only had US IDs and passports, but no birth certificates.
In my case, to explain why I looked similar to women who lived decades ago, I made up a mother and grandmother who did not exist. That was the easiest way to deal with encountering living people who might remember me from another time. I was named after both my mother and grandmother, of course. Zoe III.
Zoe wasn’t a common name in the English-speaking world when I was born in the late 1600s, but it’s the name I was born with in Salem Village in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. I changed my surname to Faust after I discovered the Elixir of Life in 1704. I was seeking the Elixir for Thomas, hoping I could transfer it to my brother. When I realized I’d wasted Thomas’s last weeks on earth in isolation in my lab, I felt as though I’d made a foolish deal with a devious Devil who’d tempted me with a reward Nicolas warned me was impossible. I’d sacrificed weeks that would have meant the world to me, in exchange for an eternal life I hadn’t wanted.
Before Goethe wrote his tragic play about Faust selling his soul to the Devil in the early 1800s, Johann Georg Faust was a German alchemist who truly lived the 1500s. A chapbook that combined fact and fiction about Faust told of his alchemical research, framing it as a cautionary tale about selling one’s soul to the Devil for knowledge. The legend has been retold so many times, because it continues to speak to modern struggles. Even though I’ve come to love my life, I still find it’s an appropriate name.
Perenelle’s Brother and Sister painting was one of the reasons I was able to let go of most of the guilt I felt for letting Thomas down. It reminded me of the good times we’d had after we fled Salem Village. We’d had more than a decade of adventures, five of them with the Flamels.
I wished they’d hurry up and arrive. When my phone rang, for a fraction of a second I thought it was the doorbell.
“Nicolas isn’t up for leaving the house, I’m afraid,” Perenelle said when I picked up the phone. “There was nothing we could find in the news about why the Brother and Sister painting might be of interest after all this time, so we spent the afternoon looking for art history clues in bookshops and libraries.”
“He overdid it?” I asked. Nicolas’s health hadn’t been the same since his near-fatal encounter with Edward Kelley.
“He’ll be fine,” Perenelle said, her voice betraying her words. “He’s on his way to bed now.”
“Give him a hug for me.”
“Should I still come over after getting Nicolas to bed? If you learned anything in your meeting with Dr. Graves—”
“Nothing that can’t wait until morning,” I said. “Look after Nicolas. That’s the most important thing.”
I hung up the phone, more worried about Nicolas than I admitted to Perenelle. Even under the medical care of Max’s medical doctor sister Mina, Nicolas hadn’t fully recovered. Edward Kelley had failed to kill him, in spite of his best intentions, but the alchemist had caused Nicolas and Perenelle’s imprisonment until I found them a year ago. Dorian had been plying Nicolas with healing food, and I’d been administering homemade herbal teas and tinctures to help his recovery.
Alchemists aren’t immortal. We can die through mortal means. We’ve simply transformed our aging cells so we can continue to live at our present age when we found the Elixir of Life. Or, in my case as an accidental alchemist, I was foolishly seeking the elixir for Thomas when he fell ill. I didn’t realize what I’d discovered until it was too late for him to live and too late for me to die. I remained physically unchanged, except that every hair on my body turned white as the years passed.
I pushed through the swinging kitchen door and found Dorian standing on the stepping stool he needed to work comfortably at the kitchen counter.
“The Flamels won’t be coming to dinner,” I told him. “Nicolas isn’t up for it.”
Dorian placed the garlic he was dicing into a small bowl next to a larger bowl of diced onions. He believed in mise en place, the concept of preparing all of your ingredients and having them in one easy-to-reach place before diving into cooking.
“He is unwell?” Dorian hopped off his stepping stool and dried his hands on a kitchen towel.
“Just tired.” I hoped.
“This is unfortunate. My charred cauliflower steaks with romesco sauce do not save well. I will not be able to send leftovers to him.”
“He’ll be fine with some sleep.” I took an almond from the glass bowl sitting on the counter.
“Do not touch the ingredients!” Dorian admonished as he brandished his rolling pin like a cudgel. “The almonds for the sauce have been weighted precisely,” he grumbled.
I lifted my hands in the air. “No more snacking,” I agreed.
“It is lamentable that the Flamels cannot join us for our evening discussion of the mystery of Perenelle’s painting,” Dorian said as he prepared cauliflower steaks for the oven. “And your beau is more than fashionably late. “
Before I had time to worry, the doorbell rang.
“Sorry I’m late.” Max held a bouquet from the flower shop not far from The Alchemy of Tea. He used to pick flowers from his own cutting garden to bring me flowers, but now that he was a small business owner, he wanted to support other local small businesses owners he was getting to know. I smiled at the sweet scent of honeysuckle.
“I thought for sure Nicolas and Perenelle would have beaten me here.”
“The Flamels will be absent this eve,” said Dorian.
“Nicolas spent the day roaming the aisles of bookshops and libraries in search of helpful research,” I explained, “so he wore himself out and needs to recharge tonight. We’ll regroup tomorrow.”
While Dorian put the finishing touches on dinner, I got Max up to speed on what I’d realized about Arthur Finder and learned from Professor Graves about the painting.
“It’s clearly you in the portrait,” Max said. “That’s what I’m most worried about. I don’t like this.”
“One cannot live life worrying about what might happen,” said Dorian as he served his feast. “It is impossible to know what foul events fate might toss onto the road of life.”
I eyed Dorian. “Are you working on your Gothic novel again?”
Max laughed. “Even I can tell you don’t usually talk like that. You’re working on a novel? I didn’t know that.”
Max and Dorian’s initial meeting this past summer hadn’t gone as smoothly as I’d hoped, and had necessitated smelling salts, administered by our friend Tobias, a fellow alchemist I first met over a century ago. Now that Max and Dorian were friends, they were learning more about each other, but there were still some gaps.
Dorian pursed his lips and gave his wings a solitary flap before folding them tightly against his back. “I have set aside my previous story. Once I solved our last case, I no longer had the desire to write Le Chat et le Monstre. I have begun working on a new cookbook.”
Max caught my eye and only partially succeeded at concealing a smile. Dorian had indeed been pivotal in catching someone who was about to escape during the last murder we investigated, but solving the case had been a group effort.
“My cookbook will be the definitive cookery guide for chefs and bakers who wish to truly understand food transformation,” Dorian continued.
He was well aware that there were many excellent cookbooks on the science of cooking, like Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat and The Flavor Equation, both of which he owned. He used the vast majority of his modest income from his Blue Sky Teas baking on cookbooks, culinary tools, and contributing to our grocery budget. I decided not to point out that he knew these other cookbooks existed. The digression would take us into the wee hours of the night.
Instead, I yawned. It wasn’t a statement, but an involuntary reflex. The sun was down, so my energy was quickly depleting.
“You’re really not worried?” Max asked me.
“It is the sun making her yawn boorishly,” Dorian stated as he pushed my plate towards me.
“Dorian is right,” I said. “Both that I can’t sit around worrying about what might happen, and that I’m mostly just tired since it’s so far into the evening. What else can I do? I’ve hidden the painting away, and I’ll talk with Perenelle in the morning before deciding whether or not to work with Professor Graves. Tonight, it’s more important to take time to appreciate the small things in life,” I said, “like spending time with those I care about.”
“With good food.” Dorian wriggled his horns before taking a bite.
By the time the meal was over, I wasn’t nearly as worried about the art collector. Whatever the future held, I’d face it with people who cared for me.
Dorian had prepared the perfect dessert for the evening. A bite-size biscuit with salted caramel on top, which included just enough sugar to wake me up for a short time before bed. After Max and I had properly praised the meal, Dorian insisted on cleaning up. One benefit of having him be so particular about “his” kitchen was that he both cooked and cleaned.
“I’ll be over at Max’s,” I told him before grabbing a small overnight bag and my silver raincoat.
My arm shot out for my ringing phone, my heart racing.
I had no idea how much time had passed, only that I’d been in a deep stage of sleep. It took me a moment to remember I was at Max’s house.
“Ignore the phone,” Max murmured into my ear, pulling me back to him.
“I can’t,” I insisted. “It’s set to silent for everyone besides you, Dorian, and Tobias. It’s too late for it to be anything besides an emergency.” I shook off Max’s arm and looked at the screen. The number on the screen was my own house. Dorian. I answered the call.
“The thief! The thief!” Dorian cried into the receiver, nearly splitting my eardrum. “I could not stop them!”
“A thief?” I repeated. “Are you all right?”
“I am unharmed, but a burglar has broken in.”
“Are they still there?” Max asked. “Get out of—”
“The burglar has gone.”
“I’m calling the police.” Max already had his phone in his hands. “We’ll be right there.”
“There is no use,” Dorian said. “The thief has fled with their quarry.”
“What did they steal?” I asked. Even though I already knew the answer.
“The painting,” Dorian wailed. “The painting of you and your brother is gone.”