Alchemy of Shadows

by David L Burkhead

  “Easier to start a new one than to try to take over the Greyhounds and push them to Div One?” Jeff said.

  “Yeah,” Ata said. He looked at me. “You can’t win. They’ve been chasing you for centuries and they’ll continue for centuries more if they must. Sooner or later, they’ll get lucky.”

  I shrugged.

  “Maybe. But one thing you forget. I’ve never fought them before, just ran. I never had a weapon to use, not really.” I held up one of my new flares. “Now I do.”

  Ata’s eyes widened. Before I or either of the others realized what he was doing, Ata leaped to his feet and pushed past us. He leaped into the pond, splashing out into deeper water, then swimming.

  Jeff reacted with the speed and decisiveness I had come to expect from him. He followed Ata out into the pond.

  I could not see clearly what happened. The light from the single lamp over the parking lot did not stretch out far into the pond. Only the stars and a tiny sliver of moon illuminated the struggle that ensued when Jeff caught up to Ata.

  The two struggling figures went under. I waited, my breath caught in my throat. A figure splashed to the surface, paused for a moment, then dove. Several times I saw the figure dive beneath the surface, each time spending a terrifying duration below.

  Eventually, the figure broke the surface once more, then turned and swam with a strong breast stroke back toward where Becki and I waited. As it neared the shore, the light from the streetlamp revealed Jeff. He reached the shallows and stood, coughing, to wade ashore.

  Becki ran to Jeff, meeting him where the water was mid-calf deep. I stepped out into the water and held out a hand to him. He took it, allowing me to lend my strength, feeble as it was next to his, to assist him to shore.

  “He wouldn’t let me save him,” Jeff muttered. “He dove and...I couldn’t find him.”

  “You tried,” Becki said.

  “We’d better go,” I said. “There’s nothing more we can do here.”

  “He wouldn’t let me...”

  #

  We reached the hotel about an hour later. While I opened the door to our room Jeff and Becki hung back, conversing in low tones. I glanced back from the doorway to see Jeff nod sharply once and turn back toward the Menace. Becki trotted towards me.

  “Jeff?” I asked when Becki reached me.

  “He’s heading out to Walmart,” Becki said. “We’re going to need some sleeping bags or something if we’re going to share this room.”

  “He’s going...in the Menace?”

  Becki grinned. “He said, and I quote, ‘It’s about time that damn clutch and I came to terms.’ I think having you sitting in the passenger seat ‘helping’ just makes him nervous.”

  I winced but thought that maybe she was right. At least the mechanical elixir should take care of any damage he did to the transmission.

  Inside, I popped open the laptop computer and started work. Ata had not given me much information but if the idea was to use the football team to plant people into positions that would be useful to them later, I could learn something helpful.

  The question was, whether the account I had acquired had the right permissions. After a little poking I found out that it did.

  As I was working, I felt Becki come up behind me.

  “List of the football players?” She rested her forearms on my shoulders as she leaned close for a better look at the screen.

  “Along with their majors and their faculty advisors,” I said. “There are a remarkable number of business majors.”

  “No, that’s not uncommon,” Becki said. “When Jeff was checking out various schools we saw that a lot of their football players were studying business. After all, most of them aren’t going to go on to the pros, no matter what they tell themselves.”

  I continued to scan through the list, copying names, majors, and other information into a local file against the time when I finally got shut out of the computer.

  So intent was I on my work that I didn’t notice Becki’s hands at first. Becki toyed with the collar of my shirt with her right hand while her left rested on my shoulder. Her hand then slipped under the shirt and down to my chest.

  “Becki?” I twisted my neck to look up at her. “What are you doing?”

  She leaned closer, nuzzling my neck. “What does it look like I’m doing?”

  “Are you out of your mind? This is not the time.”

  Her left hand slipped off my shoulder and slid down my chest to my stomach. “Don’t you want me?” Her voice turned bitter. “After all, I’m 'a good enough lay’.”

  I twisted out of the chair, bending so that I could pull free of her arms. “Not a good idea, Becki. Not when...”

  “I want you.” She stepped forward. “I want you right here. Right now.”

  “Jeff...”

  “We’ll have plenty of time before he’s back.”

  “Is that what you were talking about before he left?”

  “Does it matter?” She took another step forward.

  “Yes, it matters.” I tried to step back only to run into the wall. “This isn’t right. I don’t want my first time with you to be a revenge fuck.”

  I clapped my hand over my mouth, stunned at the words that had come out of it.

  She stopped, looking stricken.

  I continued more softly. “I care about you, Becki. I wouldn’t go so far as to say love because I’m not sure I remember what love feels like. But if we’re to be together it should be...not like this. Our first time should be because we both want to bring joy to each other, a passion born of desire and caring not of...anger.”

  Still looking stricken, Becki stepped back, then again. Her legs bumped into the bed and she dropped back onto it. She covered her face with her hands and her shoulders shook as she began to cry.

  I found myself sitting next to her, wrapping my arms around her. She twisted, burying her face in my shoulder.

  I sat and held her as she sobbed.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  I woke up, still dressed, lying on top of the covers of the hotel bed. Becki lay curled in a ball beside me, likewise still dressed, one of the hotel’s extra blankets draped over her. The sun slanted down at a sharp angle through the curtains covering the room’s window. The clock on the nightstand said eleven.

  Becki had cried herself out the night before and I had sat and held her until we’d fallen asleep. Jeff must have found us like that and draped a blanket over us, or at least over Becki. I eased my way to the edge of the bed, trying to jostle it as little as possible so as not to wake Becki. I stood and looked around the room. No Jeff.

  I slipped out the door to the covered walkway that ran along the building. I had to shield my eyes despite the shade of the overhead cover that served as a balcony for the upper floor of the building. I did not see the Menace in the lot. I grabbed my phone from my pocket and punched in Jeff’s name from the contact list.

  Jeff answered on the third ring. “Yo.”

  “Just woke up,” I said. “Wondering where you were with my car.”

  “I decided to have a little chat with this clutch, just to let it know who’s boss.”

  “Jeff.”

  “No, seriously, I think I’ve got it down. Hardly any grinding any more. I actually wanted to get some food. Should I bring you back anything?”

  My stomach responded to the idea of food by rumbling.

  “That would be great. I’d hate to have to feed myself from the vending machines here.”

  “How’s Becki?” Jeff asked.

  “She was pretty upset,” I said. “Chuck’s betrayal hit her pretty hard.”

  “She’ll bounce back,” Jeff said. “She’s tougher than you’d think.”

  “I’m getting that impression, yes.”

  The door opened behind me. Becki stepped out beside me. “Is that Jeff?”

  I met her eyes and nodded. “He’s out getting some food.”

  “Have him bring me back a burger with the works an
d fries.”

  “Did you hear?” I asked.

  “Burger and fries,” Jeff said. “And you?”

  “I’ll have the same.”

  “Too bad I’m stopping at a chicken place,” Jeff said. “You two will just have to go hungry.”

  His voice was so flat that for the briefest instant I thought he was serious.

  “Jeff.”

  “Kidding,” he said. “I should be back in about ten, fifteen minutes.”

  “See you then,” I said.

  “Unless you need me to take longer? Half an hour? An hour?”

  “Jeff!”

  “Okay, okay. Pick up the food and straight back. Got it.”

  I shut off the phone.

  “That brother of yours has a vicious sense of humor.”

  A hint of a smile caressed Becki’s lips. “Just whack him with a rolled-up newspaper. That’s what I always do.”

  It was good to see her smile.

  #

  Jeff returned with three fast food meals. He tossed a bag containing the wrappers from a fourth—one he had eaten on the way—into the trash.

  “You okay?” Jeff asked Becki softly as he handed her a drink and a bag containing her burger and fries.

  “I’m fine. Or I will be.”

  Jeff nodded then passed me my food. “We didn’t have a chance to talk last night. You find anything?”

  I opened the laptop and awakened it from its sleep mode. I opened the list I had made the night before.

  “Here’s everybody on the football team, their majors, where they’re from, what financial aid they’re getting. Whatever else I could get that I thought might help.” I turned the computer to face Jeff. “Can you mark the ones that were Ata’s special players?”

  “Sure.” Jeff took a big bite out of the sandwich he held in his left hand. His right moved between mouse and keyboard as he worked on the list.

  While waiting, I nibbled at my own food. The burger was okay. The fries had set under the heat lamp too long.

  Jeff finished his work on the list and turned it back to me. I set down my drink and leaned closer.

  Jeff had transferred my notes from a text document to a spreadsheet. Names, homes, majors, local addresses. All in neat columns. Another column contained simple checks on whether the player was one of Ata’s favorites or not. Jeff had further sorted the spreadsheet to put Ata’s favorites at the top, grouped by major.

  All but three were majoring in pre-law. The exceptions were one studying business administration, one in journalism, and Chuck in Kinesiology.

  Becki leaned past my shoulder and pointed. “Chuck told me he was planning to switch to pre-law.”

  I changed the entry for Chuck then leaned back and stared at the list. I scanned down to the players that weren’t part of Ata’s special group. Two studying pre-law, one pre-med, a few business majors and assorted others.

  “That’s a lot of future lawyers,” I said.

  Jeff nodded. “You get some.” He pointed at the pre-med student. “Doctors too. After all, hopes and dreams aside, most of us recognize that we’ll be lucky if one or two of us get picked up by the NFL. We’ll mostly be going into other fields.” He ran his finger down the list of Ata’s specials. “But this? That’s...unusual to say the least.”

  “Lawyers,” I mused. “A lot of politicians start as lawyers.”

  “So, what do we do about it?” Becki asked.

  “I don’t think we can pick them off one by one like we did, Ata,” I said. “They’ll be looking for us now. We need to get them together.”

  Jeff turned the computer back his way and began typing on the keyboard. After a moment, he nodded and turned it back around.

  “How about this?”

  The screen showed the schedule for the Jaguars’ football team, and the next home game, played in Lucas Oil Stadium, was this upcoming weekend.

  I nodded. “Let’s look at available seats.”

  #

  I had to sell the rest of my reserve supply of gold, convert it to cash and use that to clear the balance on my one working credit card.

  Jeff bought tickets—prime seats down close to the field—while I found a cheap apartment on the east side of town. The apartment was little better, in terms of living arrangements, than the hotel, a simple one bedroom second floor walk-up on the east side of Indianapolis. Becki had the one bedroom and Jeff and I slept in camp cots in the living room, cots purchased used from a Salvation Army thrift store.

  We needed the apartment because I could not do serious alchemy in a hotel room.

  We did not have time for me to make more Elixir of Life, not even the lesser elixir. We would just have to trust to our preparations, and more than a little luck, to keep us safe.

  #

  Becki watched as I shaved magnesium into a liter retort, a glass bulb with an opening at the top for filling and a long neck that angled down to the side to a small mouth. I set the retort on a scale and carefully added more shavings of magnesium until I had exactly fifty grams. I added a half liter of distilled water. I used to distill my own but I found that the distilled water you could purchase at the store worked fine for alchemy. Saved a lot of time that way.

  I pierced the ball of my index finger with a lancet, purchased as part of a diabetic testing kit, and squeezed three drops of blood into the retort. A glass stopper sealed the opening at the top of the retort.

  I set the retort on an electric hot plate and turned the heat on high. Then I set a beaker under the mouth of the retort. In this beaker I had previously filled with one hundred milliliters of distilled water and frozen.

  “What are you making,” Becki asked.

  “Oil of Magnesium,” I said. “As the water boils, it carries the essence with it to the pure ice.”

  She looked at me puzzled.

  I sighed. “I know it doesn’t match what you’ve learned in chemistry. Your history books call alchemy a precursor to chemistry and to a certain extent they’re right. A lot of what we did led to the science of chemistry. But this? This works on a completely different principle, on a plane that only touches the material world but isn’t part of it. I’m manipulating that plane, not the actual atoms and molecules your science understands.”

  “Teach me?” Becki asked.

  I sighed. “I can teach you the manipulations, but the secret?” I rubbed my thumb over the ball of my finger where I had pricked it to get blood. “Albertus did something to me. I don’t know what. But the secret in being able to do the alchemy requires the so-called philosopher’s stone. And, at least for me, it’s my blood that is the philosopher’s stone. Somehow it bridges the gap between the chemical and the alchemical.”

  The water in the retort had come to a brisk boil while we talked. The steam jetting from the mouth of the retort had created a small pool of oil of magnesium in the beaker.

  The oil, and the salt of magnesium which I would make separately would combine to create the Tru-Magnesium which was my sole effective weapon against the Shadows.

  In another vessel I mixed the ingredients for a sleep powder. A single drop of blood was sufficient to catalyze the reaction. Added to a beverage and drunk, the powder would create a swiftly growing sleepiness, demanding the imbiber to seek his bed. Inhaled, the powder would produce instant, deep sleep. Unlike medical anesthetics and narcotics, there was neither the danger of overdose or of physical dependence.

  As I continued to busy myself in the small kitchen preparing other powders and elixirs that I thought might be useful in the coming battle, things to help keep innocents out of the way and unharmed.

  It was nice to not need to hide my work. I could point at something I needed and Becki would hand it to me.

  Jeff took the Menace to get the bald tires replaced. My elixirs could only do so much. Having him outside worried me, but only a little. Of the three of us, Jeff and I were the most distinctive. Very few adult men in modern America were as short as I was, or as tall as Jeff was. Becki could blen
d in better but she stayed at the apartment, assisting me. I had not planned that, it just worked out that way.

  And when Jeff called saying he’d be late getting back, I worried even more.

  I had lost track of time when I heard the front door close.

  “Hey guys.” Jeff’s voice boomed back from through the apartment. He pushed through the drapes hung across the doorway to the kitchen and set several bags on the small table.

  “You’re going to love this, Adrian.” Jeff pulled from one of the bags a wide cloth belt with twin leather straps and brass buckles to secure it. Dozens of pouches covered the belt. “I thought you could wear this under your jacket and it could hold the flares and your potions and elixirs and stuff, all ready to grab when you want it.”

  He pulled two more of the belts out of the bag, then straddled a chair. With him sitting and me standing, this almost put us on a level. Okay, I was a few inches taller. “One for each of us.”

  “Where did you get those?” I picked up one of the belts to examine. Cheap cloth, machine stitched without a lot of attention to detail. A lack of reinforcement where the leather straps stitched to the cloth meant they would soon be ripping free. I set it down and looked up at Jeff.

  “While the mechanics were working on the tires, I crossed the street to grab a quick lunch when this couple came in dressed like something out of Jules Verne. The man had a vest just covered in pouches filled with all sorts of little stoppered bottles.” Jeff grinned. “I thought of you, of course.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “I asked where they’d gotten their outfits. They said they made most of it, but some items can be picked up here and there.”

  “So, you mugged them for their clothes?” Becki peeked into another bag and started pulling out microwavable meals.

  Jeff rolled his eyes. “They listed a few stores that carried this kind of gear. I spent the rest of the afternoon shopping.” He grinned. “I see you found the food, Becki.”