Ajeet fell to his knees, stricken, overwhelmed, lightheaded, unable to breathe, unable to think, all else forgotten. The armed cartridges almost slipped from his limp fingers. The explosive one would have destroyed the room and much of the rest of the house.
Rati had been a rail-thin, raven-haired beauty when they had first met in India after their betrothal. Though Rati’s figure had thickened and matured over the years, Ajeet had worshipped every belly roll, every stretch mark, every wrinkle, every gray hair, every lump of cellulite. They were mute reminders of the happy years they had spent together, and of the beloved child they had created together. To him, Rati always had been beautiful, a work of art made flesh.
Whoever had done this had mutilated that work of art. Defiled her. Desecrated her. Destroyed the only woman he had ever loved. The only woman he would ever love.
Ajeet sobbed so hard he almost choked. Fat tears rolled down his cheeks, hitting the wood floor like raindrops. Salty mucus bubbled out of his nose, dripping into his mouth.
The small sound of whimpering, like that of a wounded and frightened animal, pierced through his grief. Could it be? Sudden hope gave him wings. He flew to the bed, checking for a pulse.
Hope was dashed on the hard rock of reality. Rati’s body was as cold and lifeless as it appeared.
Then who?
Neha. In his shock and grief over Rati, Ajeet had forgotten all about his 6-year-old daughter.
He called for Neha, loudly. No response. The whimpering continued. It came from inside the room, though he could not tell from where and he did not see anyone. His ears were stopped up. He blew his nose messily on this sleeve, clearing his nose and ears.
The closet! Ajeet flung the ajar door wide open. Whoever had searched the bedroom had not skipped the closet. The shoes and clothes had been yanked out and tossed on the bedroom floor. The closet seemed as bare as the soul of whomever had done this to Rati. Yet the whimpering was louder here.
Ajeet crouched down. He reached toward the back corner of the closet, where the whimpering seemed to come from. His hand met with fabric and warm flesh, though his eyes still saw nothing but an empty corner. Whatever he had brushed against recoiled from his touch, shrinking in the other direction. The whimpering got louder. A child crying.
“Neha?” Ajeet said wonderingly, his mind awhirl, in shock, not understanding what was going on. Then what was happening finally penetrated his mind. It had been made dull and sluggish by the horror of seeing Rati.
Ajeet stood, stumbling over the debris on the floor. With trembling, grief-stricken hands, he disarmed the Alchemist cartridges he carried before he dropped one or both and made an already horrific situation worse. Trying hard to not look at his wife, knowing doing so would overwhelm him again, he started shifting through the things strewn on the floor.
After several minutes searching, he found what he was looking for: another Alchemist cartridge, this one of several he normally kept in the drawer of the bedroom nightstand. The drawer had been pulled out and emptied. This particular cartridge had rolled under the radiator. He knew it was the one he wanted because there was a raised code stenciled on each cartridge, similar to the bumps and ridges of braille, that told him the substance each cartridge contained. Without looking at or touching the stenciling, it would be impossible to tell what the cartridges contained as each appeared identical.
Ajeet took the found cartridge and picked up a drinking glass from the nightstand. Incredibly, the glass had not been knocked over and broken. He popped the cartridge open. He poured its neon green contents into the glass, careful to not let any of it spill on him. Despite how small the cartridge was, thanks to Ajeet’s powers, the thick liquid inside of it filled the tall glass halfway.
Ajeet went back to the closet with the glass. “Drink this, baby,” he said in Gujarati, extending the glass to the still-whimpering presence in the closet. “It won’t taste good, but you need to get it all down.”
After a slight hesitation, something took the glass from Ajeet’s hand. As if by magic, the glass lowered, and tilted. The whimpering disappeared. The liquid inside of the glass slowly drained out, seemingly disappearing into thin air.
Ajeet had realized Rati must have dosed Neha with some of his invisibility potion, which he had also kept a cartridge of in the nightstand drawer in case of an emergency. Rati must have done it to hide Neha from whomever had torn the house apart and brutalized her. Neha had just drunk the antidote to the potion.
The seemingly empty air in the closet’s corner started to shimmer. Then, Neha’s 6-year-old body hazily appeared, translucent at first, then more and more opaque with each passing moment. Soon, she was fully visible again.
With her olive skin, silky black hair, and deep-set brown eyes, Neha was a miniature version of her dead mother. Looking at that resemblance now made Ajeet’s heart ache. The only feature of his the child had seemed to inherit was his hook nose. Neha’s thin arms clutched her Lady Justice doll. She hugged the doll to her chest like it was a talisman. Lady Justice of the Sentinels had always been her favorite Hero.
Neha was dressed in a pink tee shirt and shorts. Her shorts were soiled. Due to his roiling emotions and the foul smell coming from his dead wife, Ajeet had not noticed until now the smell of urine and excrement in the closet. Neha’s normally well-groomed long hair was wild and askew, but not as wild as her eyes. Her skin was pale. She looked both like a ghost and like she had seen one.
Despite his gentle urging, Neha would not come to him. She cowered in the corner, like a frightened animal. She would not even speak. A precocious and extremely bright child, normally it was hard to get her to sit still or be quiet. Neha was obviously in shock. Ajeet guessed she had watched what had happened to her mother through the slats in the closet door. She was traumatized by what she had seen.
Ajeet wanted nothing more than to curl up in the corner with his daughter and comfort both her and himself. Then hot anger bubbled up within him, breaking through the thick miasma of his grief. No! There was time for grieving later. First, Ajeet had to find out who had done this to his beloved. And why? Was it merely a simple robbery gone awry? Other than Rati’s gold, nothing seemed to be missing, though it was impossible to tell for sure with the mess that had been made of the house. In light of how the house had been ransacked, had the vandals been looking for something? The Philosopher’s Stone sprang to mind. Only a handful of people alive knew of its existence, though. Of those, only Rati and Ajeet knew it was hidden on their property.
Regardless of why someone had come into their home, the way Rati had been brutalized made no sense. Rati would not hurt a butterfly. Wherever she went, that place was better because of it. She did not have an enemy in the world. Quite the opposite. Everyone loved her. She was warm and open, whereas Ajeet was reserved and standoffish. The yin to his yang. Literally his better half.
Ajeet did not even think about calling the police. The fact he engaged in criminal activity as Alchemist did not factor into that. Rather, he knew the most the police would do would be to arrest his wife’s murderers and put them in jail. Ajeet did not want them arrested. He did not want them in jail. He wanted them dead. He wanted to hurt them. Mutilate them. Brutalize them. Debase them. Treat their bodies as just so much meat. Just as they had done to his sweet, golden Rati.
Suddenly needing to hold his daughter close, Ajeet pulled Neha out of the corner. At first she resisted, clawing like a wildcat, pushing away from him, wailing at such a high pitch that his ears hurt. Then, abruptly, Neha dropped Lady Justice. She clutched her father as tight as her small arms would let her. She sobbed long guttural sobs that stabbed at Ajeet’s already broken heart. Her tears dripped on his work shirt, where they mingled with his own.
They held each other for a long while. Adult and child, father and daughter, widower and orphan. Some helpless, desperate impulse made Ajeet sing her the Gujarati lullaby that Rati always sang Neha to sleep with. No. It was the lullaby Rati used to sing Neha to sleep with.
The song comforted neither of them. It made them cry all the harder.
Something deep inside of Ajeet darkened and hardened. Oaths and curses swirled in his fevered mind.
Wherever they were, whatever it took, however long it took, Ajeet swore to make the vermin who had done this pay.
On all the gods above, on his love for Rati, on their child’s life, he swore it.
CHAPTER 13
Eighteen Years Ago
After a while, it penetrated Ajeet’s shell-shocked mind that sitting here in the closet with Neha was not doing her any good with her mother’s stiffening body merely feet away. Equally important, sitting here was not doing Rati’s murderers any ill.
Ajeet stood. Neha was still glued to his body like she was afraid he would suffer the same fate her mother had.
First, he went to the bathroom. He peeled Neha’s soiled clothes off and threw them in the trash. He washed her, quickly but thoroughly. He put clean clothes on her he got from the garments that had been dumped on her bedroom floor. Throughout all this, Neha took absolutely no initiative. She was like a mannequin whose limbs he had to move for anything to happen. Aside from crying and sniffling, she remained completely mute, staring at her father with still-wild eyes.
With Neha riding his hip—she refused to walk, as if she had forgotten how—Ajeet left their white clapboard house. He looked around carefully, suspicious of every shadow. It was fall, and the leaves on the trees around the house being mostly gone made it easy to see if there was anyone lurking around their suburban house. Everything around the house and on their street seem normal. Ajeet did not see anyone or anything that did not belong.
He hastened to the backyard where a dilapidated tool shed stood. Its wood had turned white and gray with age and weathering. Despite how run-down the exterior was, Ajeet kept the small building’s interior neat and clean. It was neat and clean no longer. Tools, electrical components, and hoses had been pulled from their places on the walls and dumped on the warped wooden floor. Obviously the same people who had been in the house had been here.
With Neha still balanced on his hip—she started screaming whenever he tried to put her down—Ajeet bent over and pulled at a loose floorboard here, pushed another one there and then there, and then stuck his finger in a knothole in the corner. There was an audible click when the last step of the sequence was complete. A section of the wood in the center of the shed rose slightly and then slid to the side, exposing a metal hatch. Ajeet pulled the hatch open. Lights automatically came on in his underground bunker. It was hard to squeeze through the narrow opening with Neha attached to his hip, but Ajeet did it. He closed the hatch, which would trigger the floor above it to shift and conceal the entryway again. Ajeet climbed down the short ladder to the floor of the bunker. Its ceiling was just barely taller than he was.
Ajeet glanced around the cramped underground space. Its walls were made of concrete. The portable metal fabricator he used to construct his gauntlets and the cartridges they contained was in the far corner, as were the gauntlets themselves and a box of cartridges full of various substances. Other than those items, the bunker contained books, charts, beakers, test tubes, scales, measuring devices, other scientific equipment, and various chemicals. It looked like a chemist’s lab, which was exactly what it was. Nothing had been disturbed. Clearly whoever had ransacked the house and the tool shed had not discovered this space. Ajeet was relieved to see everything was as he had left it, including the Philosopher’s Stone.
Ajeet flushed with shame at the thought. I’d give a thousand Philosopher’s Stones to have Rati back, he thought. There were not a thousand of them, of course. There was only one Philosopher’s Stone, the stuff of legends that was all too real. It had been passed down to the firstborn male in Ajeet’s family since time immemorial. Ajeet would eventually have given it to his own son, had the gods seen fit to bless him and Rati with one. His stomach twisted at the thought. That would never happen now. Neha would have to be both son and daughter.
Ajeet nose wrinkled as it always did when he entered his bunker. The smell of decades of urine and feces lingered here, as if it had been baked into the watertight concrete walls. Ajeet’s bunker had originally been a septic tank, before Ajeet and Rati had even bought the property, back before the neighborhood had grown to sufficient size to justify it being linked to the city’s sewage system. When Ajeet bought the house, he had seen the potential in the then-unused septic tank as a place to create the substances he used as Alchemist. He had hired a firm to pump the septic tank out. Then he had used a solvent he had formulated with the help of the Philosopher’s Stone to scrub the septic tank completely clean. The substance had eaten away the residue of the waste material like a swarm of locusts feeding on a farmer’s crops, leaving the concrete walls of the septic tank looking as clean as the day the tank had been built. A bit of the potent smell lingered, though, no matter what Ajeet did.
Ajeet peeled Neha off of him. She squirmed, clearly uncomfortable with the strange, smelly environment. Ajeet had never brought her down here before today. Ajeet’s reasoning had been that what she did not know about, her childish tongue could not tattle about. Ajeet sat her on the hard floor next to a workbench. She promptly started wailing. She shrank against the wall, clutching a leg of the bench like it was a lifeline. Her wild eyes looked at Ajeet with hurt accusal, as if he was abandoning her. The look cut Ajeet to the quick, but he needed his hands free.
Ajeet tugged on a pair of tight lambskin gloves. He never wore gloves made of an artificial material when concocting a substance with the Philosopher’s Stone. For reasons Ajeet did not quite understand, artificial materials wrought havoc with the substances created with the Philosopher’s Stone.
He turned to the Philosopher’s Stone, which lay on a wooden table. It was not a jewel as ignorant Hindu tradition said. It certainly was not a mere stone as even more ignorant Western traditions and legends said.
Rather, it was a book.
A massive and thick brown tome with many hundreds of pages, the Philosopher’s Stone was about three feet long and two feet wide. Made of animal skin and parchment, it was written in an ancient Sanskrit dialect and suffused with an even more ancient magic. Its Sanskrit title roughly translated into The Philosopher’s Stone. Hence the name that had been passed down through millennia of myths and legends. According to family lore, one of Ajeet’s distant ancestors, a great and powerful alchemist, had written the book. That ancestor had memorializing in the book’s pages a lifetime of scholarship, learning, and unlocking the secrets of the universe. According to a competing family legend, that distant ancestor had been nothing more than a thief and whoremonger who had stolen the book while its true author had been preoccupied between the legs of a member of the whoremonger’s inventory.
Ajeet vastly preferred the former version of the story.
Regardless of the truth of the book’s origins, application of the book’s secrets had enabled Ajeet’s ancestors to become rich and powerful. He was the descendant of a long line of kings, emperors, and conquerors. Even Ajeet’s Gujarati last name of Thakore translated into ruler, a surname no doubt adopted by a literal-minded ancestor of Ajeet’s who had possessed more power than he had imagination.
The problem was that the son of a great man was rarely great. Over millennia, the energy and initiative of Ajeet’s family dwindled and faded. The family had grown softer with each passing generation, resting on the laurels of their ancestors and coasting on their achievements rather than struggling to equal or surpass them. Inherited achievement threw cold water on the fire in the belly necessary for continued achievement. Over time, Ajeet’s family believed more and more they were rulers simply because they were Thakores and they deserved to rule by simple birthright, rather than them understanding their power derived from and largely relied on the use of the Philosopher’s Stone.
Inevitably, the power of the Thakores slowly faded over the course of centuries. Now, all that remained of the Tha
kores being rulers was their name. Ajeet’s immediate ancestors had merely been small shopkeepers and struggling merchants. The ability to read the dead language the Philosopher’s Stone was written in and the technical skill to create the substances it described were lost to dusty history. In fact, the last several generations of Ajeet’s family had not even really believed the tales of the Philosopher Stone’s power. They thought it was merely an old wives’ tale, some long dead family storyteller’s attempt to explain why a dusty old book of gibberish had been handed down from generation to generation.
Ajeet had believed the stories, though, when they had been told to him as a small child. They set fire to his imagination, appealing to his sense of adventure and desire to stand out. To be special. Ajeet’s father Nanku gave him the Philosopher’s Stone on his seventh birthday. Though Nanku had told Ajeet he was being gifted the book as part of the family’s grand tradition and in recognition of the fact that Ajeet would soon become a man, in reality Nanku had given his son the book because he was too stingy to buy an actual gift and to get Ajeet off his back, who by that point pestered his father about the book day and night.
From that moment on, Ajeet had devoted his life to unlocking the book’s mysteries. It was why he had studied ancient Sanskrit obsessively, ruining his eyes pouring over ancient texts. Growing up, he had spent countless hours and what little money he had traveling all over India, haunting dusty bookstores, libraries, and private collections with stacks of long-forgotten books sealed shut from disuse to teach himself the dead dialect the Philosopher’s Stone was written in. It was why he had studied chemistry, earning a PhD in that field from Dharmsinh Desai University in Gujarat.
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