Alchemystic

by Anton Strout

  Alexandra nodded, then took a moment to compose herself. She looked into my eyes, wet with tears, and spoke. “I release you,” she said.

  “Louder!” Kejetan called out from behind me.

  “Leave her be,” I shouted, not taking my eyes from her. I went to let go of her hands, but she would not ease her hold.

  “I release you,” she said, louder this time, and then let her hands drop away from mine.

  I smiled. “Thank you,” I said, then whispered, “Prepare yourself. This does not end things.”

  She nodded, then wrapped her arms around me. Other than during flight, she had never done this, and I found a strange comfort in this most human of gestures. I returned it for a long moment, before letting go and turning from her.

  I walked to my father, Alexandra’s own father stepping in front of me. He was crying.

  “I know you,” he said.

  “It is good to see you again,” I said, and I could not help but smile. “Take care of her.”

  He nodded, then stepped aside.

  “Let us go,” I said to my own father, folding my wings in and stepping past him, not looking back. The sounds of painful groaning came from Alexandra’s brother as the Servants of Ruthenia gathered him up, but I did not look back. With every step, I felt my connection to Alexandra fade, and if I gave in to my longing for it and didn’t keep going now, the family would never be safe. The sounds of the silent procession behind me followed, and by the time I hit the stairs going up, I felt nothing at all.

  Thirty four

  Alexandra

  Free of invaders, the building felt empty, despite Rory and Marshall on either side of me on one of the couches up in the library. It felt twice as empty without feeling any connection whatsoever to Stanis, wherever he was now, probably on his way back to their floating kingdom in Brooklyn. The only small ray of sunshine in it all was discovering Bricksley still miraculously intact. The silence of the art studio would have been unbearable between the three of us without the sound of my little man’s tiny feet tottering to and fro cleaning up the damage from the home invasion.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to my friends. “I feel like such a failure.”

  “On what curve exactly are you grading yourself a failure?” Marshall asked. “It’s not like there’s a job performance scale to judge any of this on.”

  Rory put her arm around me, squeezing. “At least we’re alive. You did the right thing, Lexi. You freed him. You saved us—both of you did. That’s no small feat. Look at me. They broke my pole arm! I was practically fighting with toothpicks there at the end.”

  “And they didn’t get the book,” Marshall added. “Stanis saw to that. And by going with them, he bought us the one thing you do need—time.”

  Despite everything they were saying, compared to Stanis, I had barely done anything. I had restored him only to force upon him the most painful of memories, those of being the struck-down kin of a centuries-old madman. How he could bear all that sudden knowledge was a miracle. And how he could sacrifice himself still to keep me safe transcended even that. My heart felt like it would actually burst from the sheer selflessness of it all.

  The sound of footsteps coming up the stairs at the back of the building had me up and off the couch, still on edge, but judging by their cadence, I needn’t have worried. I simply wasn’t used to the sound of my parents coming up here, especially since my father had insisted they go to church following the earlier incident in the catacombs.

  “So this is where you spend all your time,” my mother said, her eyes rolling over everything across the large expanse of the studio with deliberate adoration. She and my father crossed over to the three of us. “I forgot how beautiful a history this family has.”

  I nodded. “I didn’t take up art just for the hell of it. Not sure about our beautiful history, though…”

  My mother froze when she saw Bricksley waddle by with a giant chunk of twisted metal, adding it to a pile in the art studio. Despite his diminutive stature, my mother’s eyes were filled with wariness.

  “He’s not one of those…things, is he?” she asked.

  “Not one bit,” I said, a small swell of pride rising up in me despite everything else I was feeling.

  “He’s one hundred percent Team Belarus,” Rory said from the couch.

  “Courtesy of your friendly neighborhood Spellmason,” Marshall added, gesturing to me.

  My father walked over to Bricksley, leaning down close to study him. “Fascinating,” he said, turning to look at me with a sparkle in his eye.

  I couldn’t meet his and turned away. “How can you say that?” I asked, feeling a bit of hysteria setting in. “None of this jives with your worldview. You’ll tell the church, this’ll get back to the Vatican, and the pope will probably set up a special secret council to contend with the seemingly demonic goings-on at stately Belarus Manor.”

  “We went to church seeking clarity,” he said. “Relax, my little Alexandra.”

  I turned back, forcing myself to meet his eye. “How do you make your peace with this? With Stanis, alchemy, spell casting, what you might call witchcraft…”

  “Because I’ve met your angel before,” he said with a warm smile. “Long ago when he saved me, if you recall.”

  “You told me,” I said, “how you thought God stepped in to save you from drowning under the ice in the Central Park reservoir, but that’s not what happened at all. That gargoyle fished you out of the reservoir because Alexander Belarus took pity on a dying young man centuries ago, protecting him from his own crazed father and leaving him to watch over us. It’s chemicals and arcana. God had nothing to do with it.”

  My father remained calm, which frankly surprised me. “You call it a gargoyle,” he said with a shrug. “I call it an angel.”

  I shook my head, a little anger building in me and wanting to be clear here. “No, it’s not an angel. It’s a gargoyle, Dad. Trust me. A mortal man turned to stone to save his soul, given a new life by my great-great-grandfather.”

  My father’s smile remained unchanged. He reached over and brushed my hair out of my face like I was a child again, his eyes lit up with a look I knew too well from him—he was humoring me. “Yes, yes, I know, my dear girl. But who are we to say that this is not part of God’s plan?”

  My mother took his arm and they headed off toward the stairs at the far end of the art studio. I didn’t speak up. Why should I fight him on this? He had his faith, and nothing I could argue would change that. And I wasn’t sure I wanted that, anyway. He looked happy, as if the weight of his childhood trauma had been lifted off him with having seen his savior after so long a time. I’d easily take his happiness over my own desire to simply prove my point. In the end, who was right was ultimately immaterial.

  “We will talk about finding a suitable replacement for the business side of things later,” he said, stopping at the top of the stairs leading down. His words knocked the wind out of me harder than any blow I had received during the fight earlier.

  “We will?” I asked, barely getting the words out.

  He turned, both he and my mother smiling, a rare sight in recent years and a welcome one. “Of course,” he said. “It seems the universe has more in store for you than I had planned, and clearly this is His will at work. Wouldn’t I be the fool to stand in the way of it?”

  “But they have Stanis,” I said. “They’ve won.”

  He shook his head. “Have they? Alexandra, my dear, I do hope you’ve learned a little something in your time working with our holdings. The Belarus family did not get where it is by giving up in the face of adversity. Yes, I talk about the luck we’ve had, but it would seem with the resources at your disposal that maybe it’s time you realize that sometimes we need to make our own luck when opportunity presents itself.”

  My fingers rose absently to touch the talisman around my neck as I watched the two of them descend back into our home proper.

  I spun around, looking at Rory and Marshal
l. “Enough sitting around,” I said.

  “Considering my bone bruises and possible breaks, I’m good with sitting,” Marshall said, not moving.

  “Rory, help him up,” I said, and didn’t wait, heading instead to one of the book-covered worktables in the art studio section of the floor. By the time I had flipped open our newly recovered books and had my own notebook out, she had hobbled him over to me.

  “Stanis gave himself over for our protection,” I said, feeling a dash of hope in my heart. “Yes, because he was infused with rules telling him to, but in the end, he made choices based on his feelings, on his humanity. I won’t let that be wasted now that I’ve restored it.”

  “But how?” Marshall asked.

  “The more I learn, the more I learn there is to learn,” I said, searching for a pen. “And Stanis didn’t just hand himself over to save us. He said to prepare ourselves. As Marshall just said a minute ago, Stanis was both protecting the family and buying us time.”

  “Time for what?” Rory asked, but I was already picking my way through the books and scribbling down notes and reference numbers to the other books that were part of the grand Spellmason puzzle.

  “Time for us to return the favor. To learn what I need to, to save him. To prepare for whatever Kejetan has in store. Mad men of power crave war. We need to be ready to bring him one.”

  Even though I no longer felt a hint of our connection, I prayed that somewhere out there he felt the hope I was feeling. Much like everything I’d learned so far, this was about the power of will, and right now, I felt like its patron saint.

  About the Author

  ANTON STROUT was born in the Berkshire Hills mere miles from writing heavyweights Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. He currently lives outside New York City in the haunted corn maze that is New Jersey (where nothing paranormal ever really happens, he assures you).

  His writing has appeared in several DAW anthologies—some of which feature Simon Canderous tie-in stories—including: The Dimension Next Door, Spells of the City, and Zombie Raccoons & Killer Bunnies.

  In his scant spare time, he is an always writer, sometimes actor, sometimes musician, occasional RPGer, and the world’s most casual and controller-smashing video gamer. He now works in the exciting world of publishing, and yes, it is as glamorous as it sounds.

  He is currently hard at work on his next book and can be found lurking the darkened hallways of www.antonstrout.com.