Chapter Sixteen
Recovering from the basilisk poison took me three days, which translates to seventy-two hours, and those seventy-two hours were actually four thousand, three hundred, and twenty minutes. Time crawls when all you can do is shuffle slowly to and from the bathroom.
Sinead and Isabel brought me food, and Isabel also took it upon herself to walk Magnus, who was confused by my dormant state. Kane called once to check how I felt, which gave me a warm fuzzy feeling that I found worrying. The fact that I was attracted to him was no big deal. The fact that I seemed to feel something for him could mean trouble. I knew from painful experience that falling for someone during a job could end very badly.
The leftover venom in my system gave me some strange dreams. One night I dreamed I was breaking into Ddraig Goch’s mansion, except it looked like school, and the dragon was my math teacher. He caught me sneaking in and incinerated my clothes with one fiery breath, leaving me nude in front of the entire class. In another dream I was in prison again, but Kane was my cellmate. I tried to dig us a tunnel so we could escape, but I only had a spoon, and Kane kept taking it away, insisting that he needed it to eat his pudding.
I used most of my endless hours awake in bed to practice on what Sinead called my “flamey hands problem.” I would shut my eyes and start breathing deeply, focusing on each body part in turn, relaxing it, directing my complete attention to those muscles. When Isabel dropped by, she’d coach me, her deep voice instructing me to concentrate on my feet, my ankles, my thighs, going all the way up to my head.
The problem was, I invariably lost concentration, my mind chasing any random detail it snagged upon.
“I can’t even concentrate in my bed,” I grumbled. “What will happen during the job? There’s no way I’ll be able to relax when the shit hits the fan. And you know it will. No plan survives contact with reality. And I can’t have my hands randomly going fwoosh.”
Isabel bit her flamingo-pink lip. “Maybe we’ve been going about this the wrong way,” she said. “We were trying to get you to relax.”
“Because fear or anger is a big no-no.”
“That’s my point. Maybe we just need you to focus on another feeling. Switch gears in your mind. Happiness, sadness, nostalgia, love… those emotions are fine, right? I think that’s what happened that night with the Shades. You were focused on Kane instead of your fear.”
“I was not! I just, uh… I got it together, that’s all.”
“Uh-huh. Well, anyway, doesn’t it sound like it could work?”
I thought about it. “Maybe, yeah. I can make some condensed emotion pills. That way, whenever I feel scared or angry, I could just swallow a happiness pill or a sadness pill and—”
She took my hand. “Or, for once, you can avoid abusing your body with your concoctions, and just use regular human emotions, Lou.”
“Well, sure, if you want to ruin my fun,” I muttered.
“Let’s try it now. Close your eyes and focus on a memory. Something that evokes happiness. Something vivid.”
I shut my eyes, and it came almost instantly. Pink boots, purple skirt, red coat, and pigtails. Clutching her adoptive mother’s hand, half-walking, half-skipping, and talking nonstop. That bright excitement in her eyes as she thought of something new, the way she happily jumped with both feet into a puddle, splashing water, shrieking in laughter. And me, watching her from the corner of my eye, holding Magnus’ leash, yearning for her attention.
I wasn’t sure what I felt right then, but it was definitely powerful, and it wasn’t fear, or anger.
So I trained on focusing very hard on vivid thoughts. A memory of my mother’s smile. The feeling of my first kiss. More memories of my daughter—fragmented and much shorter than I wanted.
And, occasionally, thoughts of Kane. The way he grasped my wrist and pulled me to him. The sensation of him picking me up, carrying me in his arms out of that warehouse. His green eyes, staring into mine.
Sinead kept giving me the details of her nights tailing Maximillian Fuchs. He seemed to leave around nine every evening, choosing a different bar each time. All the bars were high-class joints, which Sinead enjoyed describing in her half-mocking, half-jealous manner. Maximillian spent his time there buying women drinks, talking to them. Every night he ended up leaving with a different woman, going to her place. He’d stay there for about an hour, then leave.
“So… he likes women,” I finally said after she told me about her third night of tailing him.
“He likes a lot of women. And he isn’t exactly the snuggle-until-morning type. He fucks and leaves, Lou. Every time. And he doesn’t seem to get out of the mansion during the day. But I have some good news. He has a type.”
“What’s his type?”
“Tall, pale, elegant. Two of the women were red-headed, the third blonde. All three were ravishing, but in an old-fashioned way. Long dresses, huge cleavage. One of them had a French accent; the second was definitely British; the third I think was German. So I think he’s into aristocratic European women.” She waggled her eyebrows. “Know anyone who matches this description?”
I looked at her innocently. “Ravishing and elegant? Doesn’t ring a bell. All the people I know are kinda crass and ill-mannered.”
“That’s…” She thought about it for a moment. “That’s actually probably true. But if I wanted, I could be an aristocratic European lady. May I introduce—” she changed her accent and tone— “Baroness Fleurette van Dijk.”
“What’s that ghastly accent?”
“It’s Dutch.”
“It sounds like you’re trying to poop.”
“Well, who’s crass now? I’m still working on the accent. Anyway, once Harutaka hacks the servers, he can add Baroness Fleurette van Dijk to the guest list. I’ll enter the banquet, use my feminine wiles to woo Maximillian, and have a drink with him.”
“Then, while you two are drinking, you can drip some truth serum into his wine.” I warmed up to the idea. “You get the combination from him, pick his pocket for the keycard, and voila! We’re in.”
“It’s a fantastic plan! Or, as the Baroness van Dijk would say, fantastisch.”
I flinched. “Awesome, just please work on that abysmal accent.”
I inched slowly across my bedroom, my body not yet entirely healed. The floor was icy cold, and each barefoot step ran chills up my spine. Twice I had to stop because Magnus blocked my way, mouth open wide, tongue lolling. His face indicated that he was ready for a walk, and that he assumed I was ready as well. My dog was cute, but intelligence wasn’t one of his stronger traits. I opened the door to my lab, and slammed it behind me before Magnus could slither inside. He whined and scratched at the door, but I ignored him. The lab was the one room that was off-limits.
Across the room, the counter where I did most of my work lined the wall. All my tools were there—some classic ancient alchemy tools, others more modern, because I tried to move with the times. There was a copper mortar and pestle standing next to a high-powered blender. My retort—a glass container with a long mouth pointed at a downward angle, like an overweight giraffe drinking—lay on a three-legged iron stand above a small gas grill. I had rows of empty tubes, pots, vials, bottles, pans… all waiting to be used. The rest of the lab consisted of shelves, trunks, and cupboards containing my ingredients. Those used to be full, but lately I’d been running out, and many of the jars that lined the shelves were empty.
Installed in one wall was a small safe, containing my most prized possession in the entire world. The safe had a combination dial, and even a skilled burglar would find it almost impossible to crack. But knowing how devious a dedicated burglar could be, it was also etched with various runes that would hopefully keep anyone but me away from the safe’s contents.
I crossed the room to the safe and unlocked it, the mechanism’s ticking echoing in the silent room. I pulled the safe door open, and, ignoring the gun and the meager amount of cash inside, I removed the false bottom. Underneath was a book.
It was thick and leather-bound, the pages yellow and brown with age. Engraved on the cover with spidery letters were the words Tenebris Scientiam. It was a book assumed long gone by sorcerers and alchemists alike. People had been looking for it for centuries, claiming to have seen it, or to have acquired a page of it. And it was in my possession.
The memory echoed in my mind. The sad, serious voice. Your mother left something for you, Lou. Something important.
I took it out, placing it on the counter, and opened it carefully, treating the pages with the utmost care. Once when I’d been careless, a page crackled and broke between my clumsy fingers, and I had cried for hours at my stupidity. Since then, I had coated all the pages with a special oil to strengthen them, and I flipped the pages as if I were touching a delicate butterfly that might flap its wings at any moment.
The Tenebris Scientiam was, for all intents and purposes, a cookbook.
It wasn’t for delicious chocolate cakes or three hundred exciting recipes for paleo. No, this book was for alchemists, and it contained recipes and instructions for some very nifty potions discovered by hundreds of scholars over decades. Unfortunately, like paleo recipes, most tasted like crap.
But the things they could do! Enhance senses, change a person’s shape, heal, kill, distill emotions, manipulate reality. The possibilities were endless, provided you had the right ingredients. Which is where the problem really started. Because the local 7-Eleven did not have hydra venom, or the blood of a martyr, or mistletoe cut on a night when Mercury occults Uranus. Ingredients were expensive. Sometimes impossible to acquire. And I was running out.
I flipped the pages carefully until I reached a recipe I had already made several times: a truth serum. I read the instructions, though I knew them by heart. It required, among other things, a crystallized angel tear. Or, in accountant’s terms, it required nine hundred seventy-five dollars, which is what one of those tears cost, last time I purchased one. I had only one, and the thought of wasting it made me sick. But you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs, and you can’t get a combination key without spiking Maximillian’s drink, so waste it I would.
I walked over to one of the shelves and picked up a jar labeled in my own almost illegible handwriting: Cryst. Angel Tear. It had one small crystal in it, its color a sparkling silver. I put the tear in the glass retort and lit the flame underneath. The tear itself was highly poisonous to humans, but when distilled, I could extract its essence. I wasn’t sure exactly what it contained—perhaps God’s own DNA, or distilled holiness, or maybe just the condensed essence of a whiny angel. But regardless, the essence could compel truth, if used correctly. Which was what I needed here.
While the tear distilled, I went back to my cookbook and skimmed the instructions again.
Something thumped loudly behind me. Probably a client knocking on the shop’s door. I ignored it. The “closed” sign should have been clear enough on its own.
I took a bit of earth from the old country (a.k.a. England) and the shell of a bluebird’s egg, and crushed them together with my pestle. My sharp grinding movements aligned themselves with the rhythm of repeated knocks on the door. Finally, exasperated, I put the pestle down. I returned my cookbook to the safe, and locked it up. I verified that the gas flame wasn’t burning the angel tear, and that the essence was distilling nicely. Then I went to the shop door and unlocked it, preparing myself to shout at the persistent customer.
It was a short Japanese man, his hair the color of cinnamon, and a cheerful smile was plastered on his face. It took me a moment to recognize him. Last time I had seen him, it had been pitch-dark, and I had been vomiting.
“Harutaka!” I remembered I had told Sinead to ask him to come over.
“Yes!” he answered, his voice carrying a mild accent, and a tone of excitement. “You are Lou Vitalis, who saved my life four days ago.”
“You can just call me saved my life,” I said, and then, at his confused look, added, “Sorry. It was a joke. Not very funny. Not funny at all, really.”
“A dad joke,” Harutaka said helpfully.
“Yes, thank you. Come in.”
I moved aside, and he entered the shop, looking around in wonder. Magnus barreled into the room, barking excitedly at the new visitor. Harutaka bent his knee, crouching to look at my dog, frowning in a serious manner.
“That’s my puppy, Magnus. He’s very excitable.”
Harutaka smiled at the dog. Magnus barked again, wagging his tail, and licked Harutaka’s face.
“Magnus, no!” I rebuked him sharply. “I’m sorry. He really likes you, apparently. Usually he doesn’t lick anyone except me and his…” balls. “Uh… anyone except me.”
“Maybe that’s his way of saying hello,” Harutaka suggested, and then, to my astonishment, he stuck out his tongue and licked Magnus’ face.
My puppy was overjoyed. He ran all over the shop, knocking down a stool and a coat rack, then jumped at me, his eyes clearly asking me if I saw what had just freaking happened.
“I have dog hair in my mouth,” Harutaka said, standing up.
“That’s what you get, apparently,” I muttered. “Oh shit, the tear!”
I dashed back to my lab. To my relief, the tear hadn’t burnt yet. I quickly turned off the gas, inspecting the jar with the distilled essence. It condensed on the glass surface, a silvery fog speckled with tiny spots where the liquid materialized. It looked good.
“Can I come in?” Harutaka asked behind me.
Panicked, I glanced at the counter, where the cookbook had been, but then remembered I had put it back in the safe. Aside from it, I didn’t keep any secrets in my lab. “Sure, come in. I have to prepare some stuff. But close the door, don’t let Magnus in.” A wave of dizziness hit me and I leaned on the counter, breathing heavily. My dash had drained what little energy I had.
“Are you all right?”
“Yeah. Still a bit sick from that night. But I’m getting better.” I slowly shuffled back to the mortar and pestle, a wave of nausea roiling in my stomach.
“So.” I began to crush the earth and the eggshell again. “Sinead said you’re willing to help us.”
“Of course.” Harutaka pried a dog hair from his mouth. “After you saved me, it is the least I could do.”
I smiled, amused. “Don’t bullshit me, Harutaka. You’re not doing this out of a sense of debt. You’re doing it for the dragon scales.”
“Can it be both?”
“Sure, whatever floats your boat.”
“Then I would say it’s about twenty percent sense of debt, eighty percent dragon scales.”
I put the crushed powder in a sieve above a copper pot, and began wiggling it back and forth. The powder that filtered through the sieve’s holes and scattered inside the copper pot was brown and thin. “What were you doing in the Shades’ sacred library anyway?”
“I was searching for shadow magic runes.”
“Did you find any?”
“The books were all blank,” he said.
“Well, I guess the Shades don’t read the books, right? They read the books’ shadows.” I tossed the few pebbles and eggshell particles that remained in the sieve into the trash. Then I poured some water into the copper pot.
“That’s very true… What are you doing?”
“What does it look like I’m doing?”
“It looks like you’re preparing mud.”
“That’s pretty much what it is,” I agreed. “But it’s a special mud. Soil from various countries and eggshells of different birds form the baseline for many potions. Just like flour and eggs are often the baseline for cakes.”
“I see.”
I put the pot on the gas and stirred it occasionally. “But you must have known the books in the library would be empty. And you still went there.”
“I may have found a way to read the shadows of books myself,” he said carefully.
“That’s impressive. So did you find what you were looking for?”
He didn’t answer. I kept stirring the mud in the pot, not pressing the point. What he had found in the Shades’ library was his business, but I had a different question in mind. “When we broke in, I got the sense that there’s someone… trapped in one of the Shades’ human bodies.”
“Did you?” he asked. He sounded innocent enough, but I began to suspect Harutaka didn’t divulge knowledge easily. He knew what I was talking about, I was almost sure of it.
“These cult members. They get recruited to their cult, and they’re told that their soul is transferred to the shadow, leaving the body as a sort of empty husk. But that’s not what happens, is it?”
“I think not.”
“What actually happens is they summon something that takes control of their shadow. And they’re left stuck in their body, while the shadow moves it around, like a puppet.”
“It’s a demon,” Harutaka said. “I don’t know which.”
I shivered, remembering the desperate stare of the Shade when our eyes met. Pushing the image away, I turned the gas off, letting the bubbling mud cool a bit, and then poured some of it into a glass tube. I went over to the shelf, taking a dried mushroom from a jar and a small bone from a leather bag. I dropped them both into the tube. Then I picked up the jar with the distilled tear, where the silver liquid slowly formed in the bottom, and dripped three drops into the solution. The entire thing bubbled and frothed. Harutaka hissed in surprise. The color of the mud slowly shifted until it was golden, and glowed with a strange light.
“What is that?” he asked.
“A truth serum,” I said. “We’re going to use it to compel the mansion’s security chief to tell us the combination to the vault door.”
“And what else?” He seemed suddenly very excited.
I blinked. “What do you mean?”
“While he’s under the effect of the serum, he is compelled to give us the truth, right? Why not ask him the big questions? Is there a god? Do we determine our fate, or is it predestined? What is true happiness?”
“Um… it just compels him to tell us what he knows. Not all the truth in the universe.”
“Oh.” His face fell.
“We could get him to divulge his sex kinks, if it’ll make you feel better.”
“I do not think it will.”
I poured the liquid from the tube into a small copper vial, and corked it. “Sinead said you need my help to hack the server,” I said. “I’m going to the mansion tomorrow evening, so I’ll be able to hook you up.”
“Take this.” He pulled a chain from his pocket. A black stone was attached to it, with a single rune in dark red. The tip of a USB stick protruded from it, almost hidden.
“What is that, exactly?”
“It is a magical USB stick.”
I stared at him. “Seriously?”
“Very seriously. This is what I do, Lou. I write code, and magical runes, and I bind them together.”
I took the USB stick from his hand. A constant hum of magical power emanated from it. “What’s that?” I asked, pointing at the rune.
“Chaos,” he said, his tone simple. But he stared at me intently, as if the word meant something more.
“Okay,” I said. The chain was necklace-length, and I draped it around my neck. “So what do I do with it?”
“According to the blueprints Sinead showed me, all the rooms in the mansion are connected to the central heating, except for one.”
I nodded hesitantly. I remembered noticing it when we were poring over the blueprints.
“That should be the server room. It is kept cool because of the computers in it.”
“How do you know it’s not the pantry?”
“Because it’s not adjacent to the kitchen.” He raised his eyebrow. “You’re very weird, Lou Vitalis.”
“I’m weird. Right. Why would there be a whole room of servers?”
“Trust me,” he said. “For the security this dragon has, he needs some strong computers. I want you to go to that room, and just plug the USB key I gave you into one of the computers. I’ll do the rest.”