Tempered: Book Four of The St. Croix Chronicles

by Karina Cooper

  Bring her back. That had always been my father’s goal, hadn’t it?

  The hurt I suffered dulled to a muted twinge. How could I ever forget? This was only a repeat of the events in that laboratory those months ago. My father—mad as a whippoorwill—had not changed his tune.

  But I had.

  Once and for all, I would see this done.

  I nodded and faced the distillation rack. Picking up a cloth, I made as though to gauge the temperature of the nearest bit of tube. I took a step forward. “I’ll just—” My foot came down heavily upon the silken hem of my gown. My hand flailed. The cloth slipped, earning a genuine cry of pain as my fingers collided with the hot beaker. It slipped from the heat source, clipped the edge of the table and fell. Glass shattered.

  The blood my father had wrung from that poor bird splattered to the floor.

  “No,” my father shrieked, falling to his knees and scrabbling at the bloody, too-hot pieces.

  I caught at his shoulders. “Wait—Father, don’t!”

  The heat did not seem to matter to him, nor did the sharp edges gouging his palms. “Josephine, Josephine.”

  Such pity filled me that I could not hold back my sob. Tears spilled from my eyes. “Father. Stop, I will fix this.” He stopped resisting me, his hands falling limply to his sides. Blood covered them, though I could not distinguish what was his and what came from the spilled glass.

  He looked up, large tears rolling down his filthy, weathered cheeks. “Josephine? Can you really?”

  I did not flinch. “I can. Fetch me another retort.”

  As a child given a task he knows is important, he clambered to his feet and scarpered off to do as I demanded.

  I did not have to turn to feel Ashmore’s stare upon my back.

  I could not stop to reassure him. I could not even acknowledge his concern.

  I was closer to my reveal; all hinged on my next actions.

  I wiped the blade my father had used upon the gown, leaving a grim smear of too-bright crimson against the material.

  It was, I decided, all too apt.

  My father returned, all but falling over himself to deliver the requested container. The mouth just over the twisting, reaching neck was too small to catch the blood I intended to let into it, but my father had apparently considered this, for he’d fetched a bowl as well.

  “Thank you,” I told him, surprised at the courtesy.

  Was it possible that something of reason still lingered behind his manic stare after all?

  No. I could not think such things; not if I intended to follow through with my plans.

  I laid the blade against my arm. “The blood of a bird is all well and good,” I said, pretending a confidence I did not feel. “Yet this effort requires greater sacrifice, don’t you think?” With a deft flick of my wrist and a sharp downward slide, the blade parted my flesh so quick and easily that I cut too deep in my haste. Blood welled; I gritted my teeth as pain struck a moment later, bringing tears to my eyes.

  A splatter of red upon the table warned me that I’d jerked too far from my goal. Breathing through my teeth, I struggled to clear my vision.

  I could not.

  Thinking it, planning it, even visualizing such a thing was so much different than watching one’s own self bleed freely. I had not considered the reality of the act, which was that of pain and fear all conspiring to draw the resolve from me.

  The floor dipped beneath me. Suddenly light-headed, I swayed. Blood dribbled down my arm, soaked into my bright yellow sleeve, and I cried out when it seemed as though I might simply fall.

  An arm caught about my waist; skeletal fingers clamped like a vice just over my elbow. With a hard tug, I was upright again, and the wound held unerringly over the bowl I’d missed.

  The awful fragrance of my father’s unwashed aroma filled my nose.

  “Mustn’t spill,” he muttered. “Mustn’t spill the—” The voice halted. The fingers about my arm loosened. “What is it? What is being done?”

  Making a fist, I stared not at the filthy hand wrapped about my waist and arm, but the bowl I bled into. “Distilling aether from a source guaranteed to fuel the serum,” I said, forcing calm. “It should have greater impact than a meager bird, don’t you think?”

  “Do I?” My father leaned over. The smell of his breath wafted over my face, putrid and foul. It took all I had not flinch as he turned his head to smile a wide curve with yellowed teeth.

  “Bright girl, poppet. Always was a bright girl,” he crooned. He shook my arm to the get the last drops from my skin. It jarred fresh needles of pain through the wound. “Mustn’t waste, mustn’t use too much. Can’t think.” His smile faded, and he let go of my waist to pat absently at his clothing. “Handkerchief. Where’s…?”

  I covered my wound with a hand, bending my arm to seal it against my own sleeve. “No need,” I said. “Won’t you please pour the fluid into a fresh retort?” I pointed to the spherical flask. “We’ll begin distillation immediately.”

  “Yes.” The old, filthy creature blinked at me, his owlish stare filled with glee. “Yes! She hadn’t thought of this, did she? Of course. Blood to blood.”

  Blood to blood was exactly what I was counting upon. As Abraham St. Croix poured my blood into the glass with great care, it was all I could do not to look at Ashmore.

  Two of this old house’s mysteries were now solved. The sense of paranoia I’d attributed to my fears, and my own sleepwalking adventures.

  One ghost and two madmen, isn’t that what I’d said? The men were here, one imprisoned and one barely cognizant of reality.

  Now, I would have to encourage the ghost to attend this morbid family reunion.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  It took two hours or so to prepare the serum directly. I worked in silence save when I needed to offer direction to my father, whose faculties seemed to come and go.

  Sometimes he spoke to me as his daughter, others as his wife. On occasion, he spoke to me as if he had no recollection of who I was, but some company was preferred to none at all.

  Ashmore did not try to capture my attention again. He did not have to. I was desperately cognizant of the blood upon him, and the lines of pain carved into his features as he watched us work. Maddie Ruth still did not stir, which worried me greatly.

  There were moments, especially when I found myself frustrated by aspects of the formula I chased, when I would suddenly find myself embroiled in a task I had not realized I’d started. That was often the time I caught my father talking to me as though I was Josephine.

  When I looked, whatever task I’d completed in such a fugue was exactly that what the formula demanded.

  Still, all of this preparation was little more than basic science. That I could extract aether without help from one of Mr. Finch’s patented devices was a small victory, yet the time for real alchemy was quickly arriving.

  The thought covered me in a cold, nervous sweat.

  What if I couldn’t do it?

  I could not ask for comfort from either man. The one lacked reason with which to function. The other was a prisoner of an alchemical circle he couldn’t break, and showing him any favor now would alert my captors as to my true loyalties.

  No one could know that I intended to free Ashmore and Maddie Ruth.

  It was for that reason that I focused all my being upon the formula before me.

  It took time, and my forearm throbbed and ached with every gesture. The blood slowed, scab forming quickly. It hurt, but I could function; I did so without complaint. Finally, exhausted and jangled to manic attentiveness, the hardest part arrived.

  Gold and opium mixed with quintessence pulled from my blood. The remnants of my blood had become useless, which I hadn’t accounted for. I should have been more careful when I’d cut myself the first time.

  The mercury had acted as a base, while I believed that the arsenic served as part of the key to separating spirit and body. A certain kind of death needed to be achieved, which made
me consider that the serum was a great deal more complex than I had originally appreciated.

  Opium to separate the anima from the material base of the body. Arsenic to physically create that aspect of death, so that a new anima could inhabit the discarded body. Aether to bind it all.

  The rest to stabilize the serum itself and draw out previously locked qualities in each, for such things required more effort than simple mixing.

  “Father?”

  He started, a snort escaping from his throat. “Eh?”

  I closed the book with a loud snap. “Why aren’t you doing this yourself?”

  “Eh.” He swayed in the manner of a drunk man, but he had not imbibed anything. I’d not even seen him eat.

  Was that concoction he spoke of the reason he still lived? Had he truly and by accident discovered the secret to immortality?

  I could barely believe it, but he’d said himself that he’d taken the cure he’d meant for his wife. Had she taken it, she might have remained alive forever—illness or otherwise. Looking at him now, I wondered if my mother might have turned into something like him.

  The walking dead, for all intents and purposes.

  I did not know what it would take to end him. I was not positive I had it within me to try. My father had supposedly been killed in a laboratory fire, but was not. He’d taken my mother’s serum and escaped. Nearly twenty years later, he was stabbed through the heart, and still he had not died.

  Now he was here before me, a stranger wearing the skeletal grin of an ambulatory corpse with a madman’s mind.

  He waved his bony hands at me. “Used to,” he confessed, then kicked at the ground as a child scolded. “Used to be able to do it, didn’t I, Josephine? Never as skilled as you, I know, I know, but I tried.”

  I couldn’t keep up with how often he transferred my identity in his faltering mind. I said nothing.

  Perhaps he had simply fallen too far into madness to draw upon his knowledge.

  I turned away from the worktable.

  Ashmore lay slumped in the circle, his already pale skin now deathly white. He hunched over Maddie Ruth, as if in his last moments, he might use his body to keep hers safe.

  My heart leapt into my throat, but I forced myself to keep turning, until I faced instead the crucible we’d chosen to house the serum.

  I donned the heavy gloves my father provided and cracked open the small door. It was shaped as a stove, though its temperatures could reach far beyond the normal. Using tongs and great care, I reached through the shimmering waves of heat to extract a heavy clay bowl.

  “Easy,” whispered my father. “Easy. No spilling it, now, or we’ll start all over again.”

  “I know,” I muttered, arms shaking with the effort to hold the heavy tongs and the bowl steady. The scab forming over my wound cracked. “Lay out the tablet.”

  A heavy thunk indicated he obeyed. I turned, sweat pouring down my face from the brief heat, and almost dropped the bowl upon the clay tablet laid on the work table.

  The clay would absorb the heat and protect the wooden surface beneath.

  I blew out a hard sigh.

  “What color is it?” my father demanded, his voice strained. “What color, poppet? Is it pink? Pink like flesh? Like the sun on new skin?”

  I winced. “Yes,” I said. I lay the tongs down beside the bowl, the hot ends resting on the protective tablet. Inside the clay bowl, the serum did not slosh. It was dry as dust, all liquid dried by the crucible’s heat. Yet the components had fused, as they should.

  “Wasn’t it liquid before?” I asked, peering at the shimmering pink and gold contents. It looked right. The very fact my body tightened in fearful anticipation suggested I would never forget the look of the stuff that had almost killed me.

  “Per deliquium.”

  “What?” I frowned at him, expecting more of that mad nonsense instead of perfectly acceptable Latin.

  It wasn’t insanity that filled his eyes when he looked at me, but rational approval. “Per deliquium,” he repeated. “Without the right chemical process to turn it liquid, it will absorb all moisture as salt does, but remain dry as bone.”

  That was not what I wanted to hear. The first time I’d been assaulted by the stuff, it was a dust—a powder. It could be inhaled, but doing so would not allow me the result I needed.

  I straightened, my back aching from so long hunched over bowls and ingredients. I stripped off the gloves. “What chemical process?” I asked, reaching for pen and ink. “I can make it for ease of delivery. Imbibition will be easier than inhalation.” I was not sure if I lied or not. The last I’d inhaled the stuff, it worked pretty quickly—but not so well that Hawke wasn’t able to undo the process.

  The second time, St. Croix had injected it directly into my veins. That had been rather more touch and go. Were it not for the opium base, we would not be standing here contemplating a third attempt.

  Such repetition often served a scientist well.

  “Well considered,” he said, his tone bright. “In order to create a liquid base, it requires—” Without warning, he halted.

  I looked up from my blank page to find him staring at me. As I watched, the light faded from his eyes. “No,” he said, shoulders hunching.

  “No?”

  “I’m sorry,” he continued, so quickly that I don’t think he heard me. “I’m sorry! I know it’s time, I know, but I thought to make it easier—” I did not move, but he cringed, lifting a gnarled hand to hide his face. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Please, forgive me. I did all you asked. I did it all, didn’t I?” He half-turned, his voice breaking. “Even when it cost me. It cost me so much, and I did it all gladly. For you, my girl, you know that.”

  The understanding that fell over me did so with painful clarity. I was beginning to comprehend the nature of my parents’ relationship all too well.

  I had always thought my father the driving force in this relationship, but what I viewed now turned my assumption upside down. My mother’s duplicitous nature, her easy management of Ashmore’s trust, even the way she’d convinced me that she was the wronged party, suggested now a dominant woman whose demands trumped all things.

  My father might have been gifted, but it was Josephine St. Croix who guided him.

  This was it. The time was now; I would not get another opportunity.

  I had too long awaited this family reunion.

  “Let’s talk to mother, shall we?” I lifted one hand. As calmly as if I knew what it was I did, I sketched a T into the air.

  “Cherry.” Ashmore’s voice, suddenly agitated where I expected sullen or slurred. It seemed he wasn’t quite so weak as he let on.

  Good.

  “Cherry, don’t!”

  Disregarding him, I drew a circle about my intangible letter. Summoning all I had, barely even aware of what it was I used to fuel the call, I declared the Trump. “Trina.”

  It unfolded exactly as I’d seen it in my dream.

  The sigil I sketched flared blue, and I felt a great drawing from me—a surge of sensory awareness that rippled from feet to forehead. If it were electricity, I imagined my hair would stand on end.

  Instead, it stole the breath from me, leaving me gasping as the aether flared out from my body to bathe the laboratory in a bright blue radiance.

  St. Croix screamed, covering his eyes, and even I was forced to look away, lifting my hand to block the light before it seared my sight from me.

  I staggered back against the table, catching my weight with an elbow. The book fell to floor at my feet, its pages rifling in a sudden and stark wind.

  Just as abruptly, it all ceased.

  My heart pounded a staggered beat inside my chest. I felt somehow lighter, yet burdened with an exhaustion threatening to swamp my conscious mind. It took more dreadful effort than I feared I had, but I pushed myself once more upright to squint through the after burn in my vision.

  “You surprise me, sweet girl.” My mother’s voice did not fill my head, but l
ilted delicately through the laboratory. “I did not think you had the means.”

  I could summon no quick wit to reply. I simply shook my head as my vision cleared beneath the blue-white light of the show globes overhead.

  My father huddled in a shaking, sobbing mass of gaunt skin, rattling bones and overlarge clothing. Trembling violently, his hands reached out for the vision in blue between us.

  Josephine St. Croix paid him no heed. Her smile was for me, as serene and filled with pride as I had ever hoped to see from even one of my parents.

  That it came on the presupposition of my murder made it all the more monstrous.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  “Josephine.” Ashmore’s voice cracked like a whip.

  I startled, jarring the table beside me. The bowl upon its clay tablet juddered dangerously, but the contents did not puff out as I’d expected it to do. Even still, I did not realize I’d held my breath until I expelled it on a sigh of relief.

  Josephine turned. Her skirts made no noise, unlike my borrowed silk, for as in my dream, it seemed as if the material below her knees faded into a mist. Her hair settled like a rippling jewel down her back.

  Her smile deepened. “Oliver.”

  “No.” My father’s voice quavered, weak and thready.

  It was as if he did not exist. She did not spare his denial one glance, or even allot him the courtesy of a reaction.

  All of her focus suddenly fastened upon Oliver Ashmore.

  He stood, though he did not stand with pride as he had before. His shoulders rounded, one arm wrapped about his ribs as if useless. His face was gray with effort, sweat obvious on his skin, but his eyes blazed in furious demand. “End this nonsense.”

  I half-turned, gathering my skirts in my hands and baring an expanse of leg to do so. When I reached for the cooling clay bowl, my mother’s brilliant green stare flicked to me.

  With my heart in my throat, I affected a shrug. “Ignore him,” I counseled, picking up the bowl with my fabric-swathed hands. I could feel the heat of it seeping through the layers, warm enough that my fingertips tingled in warning. “I shall transfer this to an appropriate ampule.”