The Elusive Elixir

by Gigi Pandian

  “I won’t take long. This isn’t a social call—but I hope it’s a good one. Is Brixton there with you?”

  “Yeah, he is.” How could this be good? Brixton had answered his own phone and stood in the corner, his back to us.

  “Good,” Max said. “Ivan gave a confession.”

  “Ivan,” I whispered, closing my eyes as I let out a sigh of relief.

  “Not what I expected either,” he said, misinterpreting my surprise. “He emailed a confession, and we know he’s not lying to protect anyone, because he gave us details that led to blood evidence. The man was apparently an aggressive salesman who came to the house while Brixton was there. Grabbed Brixton’s arm, which is why Ivan threw him out. I’m betting it’ll be Brixton’s DNA the lab finds under his fingernails when they conclude their analysis. It was an accident, so I wish Brixton had just told us what happened, but I understand that he’s scared. This has been such a strange case—but now life can go back to normal.”

  Normal. I bit back my true reaction. Everything would be all right without me now. It was time to make my sacrifice.

  Fifty

  Brixton used the interruption of the phone calls as an opportunity to escape the rude gargoyle. I walked him downstairs.

  “I can let myself out,” he said.

  “I need a break from those two too,” I said. “You hungry? Before you go, you can grab something from the kitchen.”

  He turned to me, and I saw in his face the caring man he was growing into. “You’re different today, Zoe. I don’t know what it is. I don’t think it’s your frustration with Leo—even though you’re gonna have to watch that dude.”

  I gave him a hug. I hadn’t meant to, but I was overcome with emotion realizing that I wasn’t going to live to see Brixton grow up. “I’m so proud of you,” I said, blinking back tears.

  Once I was sure I wasn’t going to cry, I pulled back from the hug. Brixton was rolling his eyes. “Okay, Zoe. Whatever.”

  I watched Brixton ride his bike down the driveway with his banjo slung over his back. When he reached the street, he briefly glanced both ways. Catching a glimpse of his profile, I was struck by the handsome man he would soon be.

  Instead of going back upstairs, I grabbed my silver raincoat. I scribbled a note to Dorian so he wouldn’t worry, then set off on foot.

  For the next three hours, I walked around my Hawthorne neighborhood of Portland, stopping to speak to the locals walking their dogs, browse the wares of the quirky stores, pick up a cup of tea at Blue Sky Teas, and literally stop and smell the roses.

  Without realizing the route I was taking, I found myself in front of Max’s house. The sun hung low in the sky. The day was coming to a close. As was my life.

  I was here to say goodbye.

  I stood in front of the red door with a gold dragon knocker but paused before I raised my hand to lift it.

  The door swung open and a very wet Max grinned at me. In jeans and a white t-shirt, his feet were bare and he held a towel to sopping wet hair. “I thought I saw someone out here. Sorry, I didn’t hear the door.”

  Inside, I walked through the uncluttered living room, filled with a white couch, pewter coffee table, and paintings of forests that were taller than either of us. I came to a stop in front of the sliding glass door that led to the backyard garden. Max laced his fingers through mine as I looked out at the wooden bench where we’d spent so many happy hours together.

  When I’d been in a reckless mood, I’d allowed myself to fantasize about spending years with Max, sitting on that bench watching the night-blooming jasmine unfurl and the morning-blooming California poppies awaken with the day.

  “You want to go outside?” Max whispered. “Let me grab my—”

  I stopped his words with my lips. He didn’t object. And it was a good thing he didn’t have many things in the house to bump into. Only that plastic skeleton in the hallway.

  An hour later, Max fixed us a pot of lemon balm tea using his grandmother’s iron tea kettle.

  “Sorry about that skeleton,” I said. “I can put it back together. I’m good with my hands.”

  “I know.” He kissed my shoulder. “But don’t worry about it. It’s time I got rid of it. Time I moved on.” He added a sprig of fresh mint to the tea, then handed me a white porcelain cup with deep blue Chinese characters. The minty steam made it the perfect choice.

  It hit me that it had been selfish of me to come here. While I was here to say goodbye, Max was ready to take the next step with me.

  “I’m not entirely convinced the stories about the skeleton are true anyway,” Max said.

  “You didn’t tell me the story. Only that Chadna wanted to draw it out so you’d learn more about it each year as you grew old together.”

  “Supposedly this skeleton originally contained some real human bones.”

  “That’s how med schools used to train their students, you know.”

  “Apparently some of them still do. My guess was that it was a secret society type of thing. Creepy, huh?”

  “Oh my God,” I whispered.

  “It’s not that great a story.”

  “Max, I’m so sorry, but I have to go. I lost track of time.”

  “You’re not staying?”

  I kissed him hard and fast. “No, but I’ll be back.”

  Maybe this wasn’t goodbye after all.

  I ran home, my silver raincoat flapping behind me and hope surging within me. I might not have to sacrifice myself. I now knew what had changed. As a true alchemist, I was looking at it the wrong way around. I was in control of my own life force, but backward alchemists weren’t. They relied on the remains of other willing sacrifices.

  In spite of the late hour, I was energized with hope. Too energized. I failed to notice the front door of the house wasn’t as securely locked as it should have been.

  Only as I bounded up the attic stairs, calling for Dorian and Leopold, did I notice something was off. The house was quiet. Yet it was too early in the night for the gargoyles to be on the prowl.

  I thought to myself that I’d have to lecture Dorian about not following Leopold’s lead of trying be cool. Did gargoyles even care about being cool? Never mind. I’d have years to find out. Since I now knew a better way to save the gargoyles. A way that didn’t involve sacrificing my life. I knew that—

  I stepped into the attic and froze. I saw not two gargoyles, but two people: Percy and Madame Leblanc.

  Only Madame Leblanc wasn’t quite herself. This woman was decades younger. Her daughter? Granddaughter?

  No, it couldn’t be …

  The woman in my attic looked almost identical to the woman with movie-star good looks in the black-and-white photograph Percy carried in his wallet.

  Madame Leblanc wasn’t an innocent actor like the man who played the part of her nephew. She was the backward alchemist who’d killed him. This whole time, she was the mysterious mastermind.

  Fifty-One

  All the pieces fell into place. Madame Leblanc—or whatever her real name was—was the true charismatic leader of the backward alchemists. Not Lucien. Not Percy.

  I should have seen it sooner. In Paris, Madame Leblanc played her role with me so lyrically it was almost theatrical, and she’d believed in my immortality all too readily. She knew I worked with Jasper Dubois, who was an aspiring alchemist, so she was able to create a believable lie. The actor who played her grandnephew policeman had looked young from afar but up close he looked tired—because he was a backward alchemy apprentice. Back in Portland, Percy had said “only three of us left” while telling me about backward alchemy. The woman in the photo in Percy’s wallet had looked familiar. And when Ivan had said “they’ll be returning soon” to the alchemy lab, as opposed to “Percy will be returning soon,” it was Madame Leblanc he was referring to.

  “Cat got your tongue, Z
oe?” she said. The accent was English. “Don’t look so surprised. I’m sure you’ve figured everything out.”

  “I was so gullible,” I hissed, barely able to control my anger at having been so close to the truth but also so far off.

  “Don’t be too hard on yourself, dear. I really am an actress. Made quite a splash in the West End for a while. That’s where Percy found me.” I could believe it. Though her skin was pinched, her large eyes and lips were stunning. Her hair was a rich, lush black, and it flowed past her shoulders.

  “You killed the actor playing your nephew,” I said. “He was your apprentice. That’s how you look so young again.”

  “Oh, do catch up, my dear. And hand over the book. My book.”

  I smiled. Now I had the upper hand. If she didn’t already have Dorian’s book, that meant Dorian and Leopold had gotten away through the hole in the roof. It also meant Madame Leblanc hadn’t figured out the book was, as Dorian would have put it, a McGuffin. Everyone was searching for the damn book, but it wasn’t the key. It was only the clue that pointed to Notre Dame.

  “Why are you smiling? Percy, restrain her.”

  So strong was Madame Leblanc’s presence that Percy had faded into the background. He now stepped forward, though the movement was half-hearted. His eyes darted between the two of us. His hair was flecked with gray, and his jowls sagged. While Madame Leblanc had grown younger, he’d grown older.

  “Don’t touch me, Percival,” I said.

  He stopped.

  Madame Leblanc sighed. Theatrically. “Do I have to do everything myself?”

  “You have me at a loss,” I said. “I don’t even know your real name.”

  She smiled wickedly. “I wondered if I’d gone too far there. Blanche Leblanc: White White. The embodiment of a Ms. Goody Two-Shoes.”

  Mentally kicking myself, I edged my way toward the attic door.

  “I see you moving, Zoe. Stop right there. Don’t you want to know my true name?” The look in her black eyes told me I wasn’t sure I wanted to. “The name I’ve used since my transformation is Raven. And you don’t want to mess with the Raven.”

  The skin on her forearm had firmed enough for me to realize that what I’d mistaken for faded numbers from a concentration camp was actually a tattoo of a raven. My subconscious had noticed it and turned it into a dream.

  “You will give me that book,” she said. She didn’t yell. Her words were so soft that I barely heard them. Yet there was a cold forcefulness to the directive that made me shiver. “I will be restored to my former beauty for eternity.”

  “I don’t have it,” I said, matching her strong, stoic intonation.

  “Wrong answer.” She drew a sword from behind her back.

  Fifty-Two

  It was one of my swords from my collection of antiques that Raven held in her hand.

  “Percy,” I said, “you don’t have to go along with—”

  “Enough!” Raven thrust the sword into the creaking floorboards, showing its might.

  “I swear I don’t have the book here,” I said. I knew I was convincing, because it wasn’t a lie.

  “I know. We’ve searched the house. But I have very persuasive ways of making people talk.”

  I nodded. Not too quickly. I couldn’t let her think I was eager. I couldn’t let her know I now knew more than she did. “I’ll tell you where it is,” I said, “if you let me understand what’s happened. I need to know.”

  “Why?”

  “I have a friend who’s dying, like you.”

  “The gargoyle,” Percy said, raising his hand in earnest like a sycophantic schoolboy. “The gargoyle I told you about.”

  Raven and I both ignored him.

  “I don’t care what happens to me,” I said, “but I want you to help Dorian.”

  I knew she wouldn’t, but there was still a chance I could, if I could think of a way out of this.

  “All right,” Raven said cautiously. She motioned for Percy to close the attic door. He rushed to oblige.

  “I thought you would find our secret alchemy lab,” Raven continued once the door was bolted. “That would have ruined our plans to sacrifice the actor. I couldn’t kill you without hurting myself, so I devised a plan to get you to leave Paris of your own accord.”

  “Because an alchemist can’t kill a person without hurting themselves.”

  She smirked. “Nice try. Percy convinced me it was true, long ago. But now, thanks to you, I know the truth. It’s only a superstition.”

  Me and my big mouth …

  “I never suspected that you had Lucien and Olav’s backward alchemy book,” she continued, “or that you could help us. It was Lucien who realized you had the book and could help solve what the rest of us could not. You aroused his suspicions, and when he asked Percy about a woman called Zoe Faust, Percy told us who you were. That’s why Lucien followed you to Portland.”

  “I made it so easy for him. I even gave him my address.”

  “Most backward alchemists aren’t ‘friends,’ so we don’t keep each other’s confidences. Stupid Lucien didn’t tell us his suspicions that you could help us. And I didn’t tell Lucien of my plan to get rid of you.”

  “That’s why Lucien was truly shocked when I said I was leaving Paris. He was upset that you’d messed up his plans, so he followed me to steal Non Degenera Alchemia—which he originally planned on doing more easily in Paris, before you ruined his scheme.”

  “Lucien was almost out of Alchemical Ashes. He was smoking them frequently to stay young until we could permanently stop our life forces reversing. Lucien was arrogant, and thought he could get the book without much effort.”

  “That’s why he lost his temper so quickly at my friend Ivan’s house,” I said, using the word friend automatically before I could think better of it. “Lucien was upset that Ivan refused to help him.”

  “I’ve never trusted Lucien, so I sent Percy to follow him. Can you believe Lucien once said theater was for the mindless masses? Yet it was my acting skills that fooled you. I’m the one who has outlived them all—”

  Percy cleared his throat.

  “Oh, yes, my love,” Raven said. “Of course I meant we are the ones who have outlived them all. And now we are going to retrieve our long-lost book and live on forever as the beautiful specimens we once were.”

  Raven had to come to Portland to do her own dirty work. And she still mistakenly believed Dorian’s book contained the secret to the “change” that had reversed the transformations of backward alchemy.

  “You’re forgetting the most important part of the story,” I said. “What was the shift that occurred six months ago?”

  She blinked at me. “What do you mean?”

  “What happened six months ago?”

  “We began to age and die.”

  “Percy already told me that much,” I said. “I need to know what triggered the change.”

  “You’re trying to confuse me. Percy warned me that you were overly intellectual. Half of your antiques are books. What good are books? Scripts for the theater are different, of course. The only book I need is the one Olav and Lucien created.”

  Was my theory right? “Who was the first to die?” I asked.

  “Why does it matter?”

  “Humor me.”

  “Olav,” she said, a look of suspicion creeping onto her face.

  “Percy said he wasn’t very intelligent. Is that right?”

  “He was a stupid, stupid, man,” she agreed.

  “How did he die?”

  “The same as the rest of us. He began aging rapidly.”

  “You saw his transformation take place?”

  She hesitated. “We weren’t friends. Who wants to associate with a man less interesting than a rock?”

  “How did you know he died, then?”

/>   “I found him,” Percy spoke up. “Inside the underground tunnels not far from the alchemy lab. The smell … I went to investigate.”

  “What was he doing in there?”

  Percy shrugged. “It’s trendy for people to go down into the catacombs and tunnels these days, so I assumed he was making sure our laboratory entrance remained hidden, as I was.”

  “People get lost down there,” I said. “Especially people—”

  “The idiot!” Raven shrieked. She grasped the hilt of the sword and paced back and forth on the creaky attic floor, her silky black hair snarling around her face. “You mean he got lost in the tunnels and starved or froze to death, like other stupid explorers have done. We’re not immortal, we just don’t age.”

  “Exactly,” I said.

  “Hang on,” Percy said, “I don’t get it.”

  “Olav didn’t die because of a shift,” I said. “His death was the shift. Because backward alchemy is a shortcut tied to another person, Olav’s death broke the link. That’s why you’re all dying.”

  “The sacrifices,” Raven said, comprehension sinking in. “The sacrifices aren’t enough?”

  “What happened to Olav’s bones, Percy?” I asked. “What happened after you found him?”

  “When I touched him,” Percy said, “he turned to ash.”

  I nodded. “And the ashes?”

  “I sprinkled them in the Seine.”

  “So it’s over,” I said softly. “The link is broken.”

  Bones and ash are our core essence. That’s why relics have significance. And that’s why Max’s skeleton helped me see the possibility that a person’s physical body was tied to the shift.

  Raven’s eyes locked on mine. “No. There’s got to be another answer in that book.”

  I shook my head sadly. I didn’t think there was.

  I understood the truth about Non Degenera Alchemia. Backward alchemy was a quick fix for lazy people who were willing to sacrifice the life of another for their own unnatural immortality. To get around the core tenet of alchemy—using guided intent to transform the impure into the pure—backward alchemists had to sacrifice an innocent.