The Tower's Alchemist (The Gray Tower Trilogy, #1)

by Alesha Escobar

CHAPTER TWO

  I really wanted to tell Brande to take his glass of dry Sherry and get the hell out of my office, but you couldn’t say that to a wizard without there being trouble. I lowered my gaze and rustled papers on my desk, hoping maybe he’d get the hint, but he obviously felt he had a few last words to say.

  “I’ll probably be able to see you again in a few months. It’s becoming more difficult to enter and leave Prague...I hope you understand.”

  “Well,” I lifted my gaze and met his, “that’s what happens when you let a gang of Nazis run into your territory.”

  “Isabella—”

  “When we’re over here, I’m Emelie.”

  He waved his hand and took another sip of Sherry. “Of course, Emelie. If we had been ready, perhaps we could’ve fought them off without any trouble. But now...” he shook his head and it made me feel a pang of guilt for being dismissive.

  “We’re all trying to do what we can, right?” I placed my hand over his in a conciliatory gesture. I knew how he felt when the Gray Tower did nothing as the SS and German Armed Forces rolled into Czechoslovakia and took over. However, the Order of Wizards couldn’t make a move without being detected by certain enemies of our own.

  I knew he would’ve been first in line to fight off the enemy despite that fact, and that’s what I was already doing in my own way. I had to admit that I couldn’t escape the nagging feeling that we were so wrapped up in living for a cause, that sometimes it felt like life passed us by. He and I could have easily enjoyed our drinks over a dinner table in a dimly lit nightclub with our bodies swaying to the beat of music. It would have been a nice change of scene from the solitude and monotony of my cramped office.

  Knowing Brande though, he probably thought this was just fine—which was a shame because what girl wouldn’t want to be seen in public with him? I didn’t realize my hand was still touching his as I thought about all this, and he gave me a quizzical look (but he didn’t withdraw his hand, either).

  I pulled my hand away, a little flushed, and just then Ian walked in carrying a file. Brande acknowledged him with a nod and Ian did the same. When Brande faced me again, I saw Ian pointing toward the left wall, at an informational poster that you could find posted in nearly every pub in London nowadays. It portrayed men wearing military uniforms, frozen in laughter with a group of women hanging onto them. A caption at the bottom of the poster read: What you say to your friends...could be heard by the enemy!

  I always laughed at that poster hanging in here, but I’ve seen some inexperienced operatives unwittingly betray themselves and their cohorts by not taking that motto to heart.

  “Emelie.” Ian cleared his throat. “The file is ready.” He furtively glanced at Brande.

  “I swear I tried to make him leave,” I said as I shrugged my shoulders. Ian was even less patient with Brande’s presence than I was.

  Brande pulled a package from a hidden pocket inside his trench coat. “Your emerald spectacles, jade powder, and red garnet lipstick.”

  “Thank you.”

  I didn’t always have time to make or procure enchanted items, and I appreciated whenever he delivered them. Emerald granted the ability to see in the dark; jade’s healing powers had saved me from grievous wounds and poison on several occasions, and I used red garnet sparingly as it inspired romantic desires and aggression. I learned a long time ago to manipulate the magical qualities in these stones and work them into everyday items. Whipping out a stone wasn’t very subtle and, in my line of work, a lack of subtlety could get you killed.

  Brande handed me the coveted items and finished his Sherry. “Perhaps you’ll come to the Gray Tower once you’re done playing spy with the British.” He rose from his seat and shouldered his way past Ian, leaving us alone in the office. I didn’t know why, but Brande’s comment stung me.

  I looked at Ian. “I know what you’re going to say—”

  “I trust you, not him. Besides, don’t you think it’s all part of a nefarious plot that the Gray Tower sends him over? If Bernadine actually did her job and stopped gushing over him at the reception desk, then maybe I could get a few words out of the bloke.”

  I let out an irritated sigh. “I swear, sometimes you act as if you don’t want a wizard on staff. If that’s the case, then you shouldn’t have recruited me.”

  He shook his head as if saying he wasn’t going down that road today. “Look, when are you going to let us take this out?” He glanced at the other half of the office, where an empty desk and chair stood collecting dust. Notes and pictures clung to the wall.

  “Why do you suddenly care?” My eyes narrowed. I noticed, when I had first joined the Special Operations Executive, that all the men had their own offices, while all the women had to pair up and share, sometimes three to an office.

  My officemate and friend was a girl named Stella, whose husband died in a battle last year. She wanted to help the Resistance in any way she could, and successfully ran missions for us, but she hadn’t reported back to us since January—now it was the middle of June.

  “We’ve got a new recruit, I think you’ll like her.”

  “Not interested. What do you have for me?” The last thing I needed was a wide-eyed new girl following me around, talking about how swell it was to spy on the Nazis.

  He opened the file to reveal a dossier and pointed toward a profile picture of an older gentleman. “I presume you’ve heard of Dr. Veit Heilwig?”

  “The scientist? Yes.”

  “For the past three months Allied forces have been taking heavy blows from the Nazis on the Western Front. The bastards have been violating the Geneva Protocol and unleashing a new chemical weapon on our soldiers. We have evidence that—”

  “There may be more than just chemicals in those weapons?” I fondled the Agate stone set in my ring.

  He nodded. “Do you remember that incident with the poisoned food and water?”

  “Believe me, I’m not forgetting that anytime soon.”

  The contaminated goods were unwittingly dispersed among Ally soldiers throughout Europe. Over a thousand men died before it could be counteracted and hundreds more were still lying in hospital beds, strangely disfigured and barely alive. All we could do was separate and destroy the contaminated food, and there was still no known cure.

  “That was Heilwig’s work. Now he’s perfected it...they’re calling it The Plague. At this rate he’ll win the war for Hitler and the Black Wolves, and that’s exactly why we need another alchemist to go up against him, neutralize the new chemical weapons he’s developed, and take him out.”

  “You want me to kill him?”

  “No, take him out of France. We want to extract him.”

  “Why do you want him alive?” And how exactly did they want me to kidnap him? You couldn’t just walk up to a warlock, cuff him and tell him to come along. Next time I’d save my plaintive musings about life passing me by in favor of wanting to just live another day. This was going to be a tough mission.

  “Just...read the dossier. I’ve got MI6 breathing down my neck over this one and Morton’s just dying for an excuse to discredit us.”

  “My goodness, we wouldn’t want that, now would we?” Discredit happened to be the least of my worries, buddy—I could be rotting in Dr. Meier’s Nazi experimental program by next week if I failed. Half the things I heard about it I refused to believe, and the other half I resolved to never find out through experience. I swore this would be my last assignment. If I had any sense left, I’d gracefully exit the stage and go quietly live my life elsewhere...preferably with a handsome guy who didn’t mind that I created explosions and induced heart attacks.

  Ian rolled his eyes. Sometimes I wondered if he wanted to throttle me for my backtalk. “Report to the hangar tomorrow at the appointed time so Richard can take you over to Paris. And don’t be late.”

  “Ian...”

  “What is it?”

  I felt like squirming in my seat. “You got my resignation letter, right? I p
ut it on your desk this morning.”

  He pursed his lips. “I wanted to give you some time to think it over. That Denmark job really got to you, didn’t it?”

  “I’ll do this last assignment, but promise me you’ll have the final paperwork ready to sign when I return from Paris.” My shoulders tensed in anticipation of his objections. I was certain he’d go on about how much SOE needed me.

  “All right then,” he said in a low voice. “I don’t want to see you go, but if that’s what you want...”

  As he turned and headed toward the door with his gangly walk, I glanced at the clock on the wall and winced. Ideally my routine would have been to nestle in my reclining chair and eat dinner by 7 p.m., but instead 8 o’ clock stared back at me without apology. I flipped through the dossier, noting the most important details and memorizing Dr. Heilwig’s face. Once was dropped into Paris tomorrow evening, I wouldn’t have the dossier to reference, nor any identification papers or passports on me.

  We did this for two reasons: an agent’s counterfeit identification could be damaged or lost during transport anyway, and in the case of arrest, the Gestapo often found it difficult to verify or prove she was a spy. I usually obtained papers from trusted sources on an as-needed basis, but if I didn’t need them, then I did not carry papers. When I first began this, I found it all exciting because it allowed me to be anyone I wanted. After a few months, I ended up feeling like I was no one.

  Sometimes I had to remind myself that Emelie was just my code name, and that her preferred mannerisms or activities weren’t necessarily the ones Isabella George liked. My officemate Stella went to France often under the name Angela Wyatt, and had chosen it because her mother’s first name was Angela and she obsessed over the 16th Century poet Thomas Wyatt.

  After my first few missions, I grew apathetic in choosing names. Ian suggested Emelie because, he said, when he was younger, he had always wanted a little sister by that name. Since he never got one and I was the closest thing to it, he had said I should go with the moniker, and I’ve been using it ever since.

  My lips curved into a slight smile at remembering this, but then turned into a frown as I thought about Stella’s failure to report back. Wherever she was, I hoped that she had only been delayed and needed to hide with the French Resistance, or was already en route to London. In any case, I wanted Stella’s belongings to remain here, untouched. If she happened to return—I didn’t want her to think we gave up on her so quickly. In keeping with my weekly routine, I grabbed my dusty handkerchief from my desk drawer and wiped off her belongings.

  I wondered, with a twinge of sadness, if anyone would do that for me if I were missing for five months, and I didn’t even want to think about what Ian would have to tell my family under those circumstances: So sorry, your daughter wasn’t really working for the U.S. Ambassador to Britain—she was gallivanting about Europe engaging in counter-missions against the Nazis because we couldn’t afford Hitler’s occult powers to gain an advantage over Allied forces.

  It would kill my mother and brother to find out about me that way, and although pride kept me from saying it, the longer Stella went missing, the more anxious I grew that I could very well be next. Then what? Without a doubt, this would have to be my last mission behind enemy lines.