“What’s this?” Nicole asked as she looked at her paper.
“It’s a potion recipe from my mother’s writings. I remembered it while we were walking on the beach. The clue mentions a world where mermaids don’t cry, which I think is obviously Earth since we don’t have mermaids. But, if mermaids did cry, they’d have tears, and there was one mention of mermaid tears in my mother’s writings: this recipe.” My copy floated to me. One of the advantages of writing with magic was that the handwriting far surpassed my own.
One vial of mermaid tears
Hair from the underbelly of a golden monkey
One dragon scale
Three ghost mushrooms
One ounce shade of death
Mix and consume immediately.
“We’ll have to go to Elustria for the ingredients, but at least Marguerite isn’t at an advantage by having a sample of it anymore.” Potions were not my strong suit, so I didn’t even know how we’d go about getting the ingredients. Was there a store? A Potions-R-Us of sorts? The CCS had a storehouse. Perhaps we could tap into it. “We’ll make up a vial of this ourselves.”
“Whoa.” Millhook shook his hand. “You don’t go mixing around magical stuff without knowin’ what it’s going to do first.”
“So then what good does it do us? I finally figure out what the clue means and we’re just supposed to sit here and do nothing with that knowledge?”
“There’s plenty we can do with it,” Alex said. “With the ingredients, we can try to figure out what the potion is used for. It’s going to take a while for Marguerite to catch up with us, and she’ll be in the same position we are: trying to figure out what it does.”
“How are we so sure we’re ahead of her? Doesn’t she have access to the same memories?” Nicole asked.
“Yes,” I said. “However, the memories aren’t indexed. You can’t recall them based on keywords. It took me ages to go through them all. This particular memory is my own, and it still took this long for me to make the connection. But this is only an advantage if we act on it.” I looked between Millhook and Alex since they were the ones opposed to making the potion.
“My mom is a potion expert. We can take the recipe to her and she’ll probably be able to give us a good idea of what it does,” Alex said.
My eyebrows raised in shock. Alex had never said anything about his mother. “Why didn’t you mention this sooner?”
“My mom and I aren’t exactly close. Besides, what would it have helped? It’s not like we could go to her and ask what a little vial of orange liquid does. Now you have a recipe, though. It’d be worth the trip to ask her what it might be.”
“Then let’s go. Millhook can stay here and help Nicole with the rest of the riddle and port her should anyone show up.”
“Wait,” Alex said. “We should stay here tonight and go in the morning. Once your adrenaline recedes, you’ll need the sleep, and I think it’s safer for all of us to stay here together. The Directorate doesn’t know where we are and there are limits to what they can do in a busy hotel. We’ll go first thing in the morning. Being ahead of Marguerite means we can afford to be well-rested and sharp.”
I wanted to argue, to plunge ahead and keep going until I dropped, but there were others to think about. Nicole would worry while we were gone, preventing her from getting the sleep she needed. While perseverance was a virtue, needlessly exhausting yourself was foolish. “You’re right. That makes more sense. We’ll get a fresh start tomorrow.”
A little shock flitted across Alex’s eyes. He had been geared up to fight me on this, and I’d just taken the wind out of his sails. Poor guy.
“Uh, Kat, can you come with me to get some ice?” Nicole picked up the little ice bucket from the desk and stared at me intently.
“Sure,” I said, my voice rising at the end like a question. We didn’t need ice.
When the door to the room closed behind us, I looked to Nicole for an explanation, but she motioned to her ears and then to the room. She didn’t speak until we got to the little room with ice and vending machines. “Dude, you’re meeting his mom. How crazy is that?”
“What?” The excited lilt in her voice made this out to be more than it was. “Trust you to think about something like that during a time like this.”
“Hey, after this is all done, you’re going to have a life to live, and I’m betting Alex is going to be a big part of it. No matter how much he says he and his mom aren’t close, you meeting her is a big deal.”
This was exactly what I didn’t need. But Nicole was right: I should be nervous. His mom was a potion expert, and I was a pidge who didn’t even know about magic until less than a year ago. This would not go well. “Gee, thanks, Nicole. As if I weren’t nervous enough already.”
“What do you have to be nervous about? I thought you’d be happy.”
“His mom is a potion expert and I’m a pidge who’s just barely learning magic. She’s going to see right through me, that I don’t belong.”
“What are you talking about? You’re completely magical now. I mean, you’re so magical that it doesn’t even impress you anymore. You didn’t even notice my jaw drop when you came in and started magically writing down the potion recipe. You think like a mage now. You didn’t reach for a pen, you reached for magic. That’s pretty damn cool.”
Maybe Nicole was right. Magic was becoming more second nature to me. When I was at the Citadel, I felt like my humanness showed, but according to Nicole the opposite was true here. In one place I felt too human, and in another I was too magical to pass as human. Maybe the truth was somewhere in the middle. Maybe I was just me.
We returned to the room, sans ice.
Eleven
Alex’s mom worked in a lab in a large valley on the other side of Elustria from the Citadel. For all the time I’d spent in Elustria, I still knew surprisingly little about its geography. If I didn’t need it to fight the Directorate, I didn’t know it.
This area had the same steampunk-type feel as the village outside the Citadel, a world in which magic had curtailed technological advancement. Instead of being built of stone, the buildings here were shorter, more squat, and built of stucco-like material. The place was arid, with a dry heat and ground covered in sand and small shrubs, a completely different climate to the one I was used to experiencing in Elustria. It made perfect sense. Elustria encompassed half of the planet. There would naturally be different climates, but I had always associated Elustria with the Citadel and the surrounding areas of thick forests and rocky mountains. The mountains surrounding the valley were all burnt brown instead of the green and gray of the mountains outside the Citadel.
The streets of the village were filled with imps, humans who I assumed were shifters, and even some elves. It took all my willpower not to stare. In all my time in Elustria, I’d never seen an elf before. They were every bit as cool as I’d imagined. The shifters had strange hair and eye colors, and some had markings likely indicating what animal they shifted into. Someday I’d have to make the time to do a proper tour of Elustria, the magical equivalent of a road trip.
There were even a few sorcerers in town. My skin crawled when I saw them. Magic radiated off of them and my talisman picked up on it. In their presence, I felt more exposed, as if they’d be able to tell exactly what I was. Logically, I knew it would be practically impossible for them to discern that I was a CCS agent, but it’d be easier to notice I was a pidge. Pidges were rare, outcasts from mage society, and I doubted that sorcerers treated them much better. By my side, Alex noticed my discomfort.
“Don’t worry about it. Concordia is really laid-back. Back on Earth, you’d call these people hippies. Even if any of them can tell you’re a pidge, it would probably just make them like you more.”
Alex’s perception stunned me. I hadn’t thought my insecurity was so apparent. “Thanks, but I really don’t want to test that theory. How much farther is your mom’s lab?”
“It’s right over there.” Alex pointe
d to a building on our left, set back from the road so it could sit on the bank of a small creek. “I want to apologize in advance for my mother. She’s a lot to take.”
“Really? You’re warning me about mothers?”
Alex smirked. “Right. Well, you at least have the benefit of never dealing with yours in person. I am not so fortunate.”
From anyone else, the comment would’ve been offensive, but Alex knew it’d make me laugh. There was little humor in my life these days; I took it where I could get it.
Alex knocked on the door and a female voice yelled, “Come in. It isn’t locked.”
Alex opened the door and gestured for me to precede him. The building appeared to be one large open room, a giant lab with a supply cabinet in one corner and a kitchen area in another. Three long tables formed a U shape. Scattered on them were what appeared to be Bunsen burners, except there were no tubes for the gas, just flames underneath flasks and vials. On one wall was a giant fireplace with green fire reaching up from the ground and licking the bottom of a giant cauldron and several kettles. Steam filled the air, and Alex’s mom didn’t even look our way as she carefully measured some powder and poured it into one of the flasks over the Bunsen burner substitute. “Just give me one more minute, and I’ll be right with you.”
“It’s me, Mom.”
“Naturally. Who else would it be? Do you really think I wouldn’t recognize my son’s scent? You’ll have to be gone a lot longer than six months for that.”
“Six months?” As far as I knew, it’d been a lot longer since he’d seen her. I looked to Alex. He shook his head.
“Ah, that must be the pidge. Just a few more seconds for this reaction to take place.” The pink liquid turned a dark green and Alex’s mom straightened from where she’d bent over the flask. “Perfect. Quite strange, if I’m honest, but perfect nonetheless.” She turned to face us, and I could see her clearly for the first time. Her glossy black hair was pulled away from her face in an intricate braid that gathered at the nape of her neck. She had the same yellow eyes as Alex, but that’s where the comparison stopped. While Alex always wore the enchanted black clothes his dad had gotten for him from my mother, his mom sported a bright pink blouse and colorful wraparound skirt.
“It’s nice to meet you, Mrs. Wilders.” Not knowing how to greet a shifter in Elustria, I settled on simply nodding.
“Oh no, dear, call me Penelope. Alex’s father and I never married. We barely had a relationship, just some simple mating to propagate the species.”
“And that’s my mom,” Alex said, irritation coloring his voice.
“It’s our duty to the species. Some of us take that seriously, unlike others.” Penelope pointedly stared at Alex.
“Maybe I don’t see the point in having cubs just so they can wander off on their own.”
“Oh pshaw. You’ve always been far too sensitive, Alex. It’s the way things are done. Do you want our kind to go extinct? Look at what’s happened with the dragon shifters.”
“I’m not having this discussion again.”
“So you didn’t bring her here to introduce her to me?” Penelope pointed toward me as if that were the obvious conclusion.
“No!”
“No.” I spoke at the same time Alex did. As much fun as it was to watch this family drama unfold, now was not the time. We had more important things to discuss. I stepped forward, coming between Alex and his mom. “We came here because Alex said you’re an expert at potions.”
“Yes, so I am. This is a professional inquiry? How delightful. Much more interesting.”
Oh yeah, Penelope was a gem all right. “I have a recipe for a potion, but I don’t know what it’s for. Apparently, my idea of just making it was deemed too stupid, so we came here to ask if you could figure out from the ingredients what it does.”
“You should never make a potion that you’re unfamiliar with unless you’re under the supervision of an expert like myself. Much too dangerous. What if it rendered the drinker invisible and mute and you didn’t know the antidote? You’d quite literally spend the rest of your life unseen and unheard.”
Okay, that was scary shit. Penelope held her hand out for the recipe. When I gave it to her, she quickly scanned the short list.
“This is clearly an ancient potion, probably originating millennia ago. Modern potions use different bases and rely on different catalysts. Unfortunately, I can’t tell you what it does.”
“Why not?” She seemed to have no problem telling us everything else.
“Golden monkeys aren’t something Elustria has, so I don’t know how their hair would react with the other ingredients. I take it it’s a species from Earth. Either that or it’s gone extinct and was not commonly used in ancient potions. The Confederation of Potion Professionals have prohibited the use of ingredients from Earth ever since the Circle of Sorcerers banned mages from traveling there. I can make an educated guess at what the hair does, but that’s it.”
The sorcerers regulated travel between Earth and Elustria. The CCS and the Directorate relied on other magical beings who didn’t mind running afoul of the sorcerers for their portals. “All right, but what about the other ingredients? Can’t you make an educated guess based off of those?”
“That’s not precisely how potion making works. While certain ingredients are used to elicit certain actions, those actions can drastically change based on the introduction of other ingredients. Without knowing how the hair of a golden monkey will interact with everything else, I have no information for you. If it behaves the way I think it will, then I still don’t have an answer for you. These ingredients together don’t do anything. If I were to take out the hair, I can still see no use for the rest of the ingredients together.”
That answer was unacceptable. Right now, this potion was the only thing we had to go on. I couldn’t give up on it. “What if we collect the ingredients? Will you supervise the making of the potion?”
“I don’t anticipate you being able to collect all of the ingredients.”
Alex stepped to my side. “Don’t underestimate her, Mom. I don’t doubt she can collect them, and I’ll help her.”
Penelope arched an eyebrow at him. “Interesting. Your feelings for her have impaired your cognitive abilities. Yet, you still bristle at doing your duty for the species. A pidge can’t produce magical offspring with a mage or sorcerer, but she may be able to produce cubs. Possibly. I haven’t seen any cases, but she does have quite a bit of magic.”
“Mom, stop. We are not discussing this. Kat and I are not having cubs. Drop it. I’m never having cubs. If you keep it up, I’ll go back to the rain forests of Earth and stay there.”
“You won’t, because that runs counter to the exact feelings you’ve exhibited. However, back to the point, the use of dragon scales is highly regulated.”
We’d have to worry about that later. Maybe if we found out what the potion did, we wouldn’t need to make any. “You said it’s the golden monkey hair that’s preventing you from giving us an idea of what this potion does. What if we get you a hair sample? Is there any testing you can do that could give us some answers?”
“Ah, now you’re getting more into my area of expertise. I should be able to give you a rough idea of the potion’s use if given enough time to test the hairs. Depending on how complex the material is and how lucky we get, it could take anywhere from a few hours to a few weeks to come up with an answer.”
“A few weeks? We don’t have that kind of time.” Marguerite could figure out the clues and start a war before we had our answer.
“I’m sorry, but you can’t rush these things. I can only give you my best, and when you’re getting my best you’re getting the best.”
“Nothing like a little humility,” Alex murmured.
“Why should I be humble? I’ve worked hard for the knowledge I’ve acquired. You would understand the feeling had you worked hard toward anything in your life.”
A rumbling growl came from Alex’s ches
t.
Penelope dismissively waved her hand. “Oh please, there’s no need to be so feral.”
“I don’t know why you’re so insistent about propagating the species when you detest our kind,” Alex said. The tension thickened and my muscles prepared to move to intervene if need be.
“Do not mistake my preference for human form as a distaste for our kind. Cat form has its uses, but for my day-to-day work, I require such things as opposable thumbs. However, bring me a hair sample and I’ll show you my cat form. The smell of an ingredient can offer a hint at its use.”
“Cat form is not a tool. It’s a way of experiencing life. You never understood that.”
“Yes, yes, let’s drag out all the drama. I never understood you. I’m a horrible mother. But I’m still your mother, Alex. That’s why you’re here. Now, if there’s nothing else you need, I have experiments to return to.” She looked to each of us, got no response, nodded, and went back to her flask.
Alex gestured for me to follow him out of the lab.
As we walked back through Concordia, I spoke. “I’m hoping that just knowing what the potion does will be enough, but we may still have to make it. Even if Marguerite figures out the recipe, we still have a good start, and she might not have figured out the recipe yet.”
“I’m glad you’re optimistic.”
“You’re not? At best we’re ahead, and at worst we’re on equal ground.”
“Not if we have to make the potion. The dragon scale won’t be as difficult for her to get as it will be for us.”
“Why do you say that?” I wasn’t aware of any power that my aunt had in regards to dragons. She had never mentioned dragons to me at all.
“Because your aunt will simply kill a dragon to get it.”
“And we won’t?”
Alex stopped walking and turned to face me. “No, they’re endangered. Their numbers have dwindled at an alarming rate. You heard what my mother said about shifters. Dragon shifters are at the top of the magical hierarchy. They have to mate with other dragon shifters or sorcerers in order to produce more dragon shifters. Our best bet would’ve been to find one of them, but I honestly don’t know if they still exist. And even if we could kill a dragon”—Alex shook his head—“it’s an evil thing, not something I can live with.”
Magic Hunted (The Elustria Chronicles: Magic Born Book 4) Page 6
