The Elusive Elixir

by Gigi Pandian

  Dorian climbed into the truck with Non Degenera Alchemia tucked under his arm. On the drive home, I filled Dorian in on what had happened with Percy. He replied with a string of profanities.

  “I am so sorry, my friend,” he said once he’d exhausted all the profane words he knew in both French and English, some of which I’d never heard. “Never fear. Dorian Robert-Houdin is on the case. I will put my little grey cells to work.”

  That’s what worried me.

  Thirty-Four

  I couldn’t fall asleep that night. My mind was racing and refused to calm down enough for my body to get the sleep it craved. I got out of bed and lit a candle. The natural light of the flame was better to get into the mindset of alchemy, and that’s exactly what I needed to do. Through Percy, my life had been connected to backward alchemy for far longer than I’d realized. I rubbed my gold locket, smooth for the decades it had comforted me.

  How was everything connected?

  The sulfurous scent of the candle and a mug of cashew milk cocoa calmed my nerves and awakened my senses. I unlocked the basement door and followed the stairs to my alchemy lab. As I lit a kerosene lantern and sat down at the solid wooden table I’d used for countless alchemical transformations, I thought through the confusing backward alchemy events that had happened.

  I reached for my cell phone. My fingers hesitated for a moment before I sent Tobias a text message. I couldn’t help chuckling to myself. When I was nursing Tobias back to health over 150 years ago, hiding in plain sight on a farm that was part of the Underground Railroad network, neither of us ever imagined a future when people could communicate instantly from hundreds of miles away, let alone without wires on a tiny device that fit in the palm of my hand.

  It was the middle of the night, so I wasn’t expecting him to answer. The very act of sending a message to my oldest living friend was comforting. I gave a start when my phone rang.

  “Sitting up with Rosa?” I asked. I thought of Max, allowing myself a brief moment of the hope that that might one day be me and Max. It was a false hope, I knew. But that didn’t mean I didn’t want it.

  “Is mind reading an alchemical skill I should be trying to hone?” Tobias replied good-naturedly.

  “No supernatural skills required to know how much you love her. How is she?”

  “Why don’t you let me take care of you for a change. Are things not going well in Paris?”

  “I had to leave.”

  A pause. “You’re back in Portland? But that means it’s the middle of the night for you too. You don’t do nighttime, Zoe.”

  “I know.” I hadn’t thought Tobias would reply, much less call me. Where did I begin?

  “I’ve seen you after you stayed up all night.” His voice transformed from concern to anger. “You were no good to anyone after that.”

  “That night we had to run,” I whispered, staring into the flames of the kerosene lantern and remembering the wretched night that left me with scars from harsh thorns and brambles.

  “Are you in physical danger right now?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Then hang up and get some sleep.”

  “Please, Toby.”

  A long sigh sounded over the phone line. “What is it that has you reaching out in this darkest hour of the night?”

  “I’m drowning. I know less than I did two weeks ago, before I went to Notre Dame.”

  “If I’m a sounding board, why don’t you call me back in the morning?”

  “I’m afraid.” I clutched my gold locket.

  A faint rustling sounded on the phone line, followed by the creaking of a door. Softly in the distance came the hum of crickets. I wondered if the lights of Detroit allowed him to see the constellations.

  “I was awake because Rosa was dreaming. She kicked me in her sleep, but when I looked over at her, I couldn’t fall back asleep. When she dreams, I see the same young woman I fell in love with over sixty years ago. I can’t tell her that, though.”

  “She’d think you love her less now, because she aged. Even though it’s not true.” I thought again of Max, wondering if I’d ever be able to tell him just how different I was.

  “If anything, knowing it wouldn’t last forever has made me cherish her all the more.” He cleared his throat. “I’m not letting you stay awake just to get philosophical. Tell me, why are you so afraid?”

  After a moment’s hesitation, the story spilled out of me. Tobias already knew about the unknown shift that had taken place six months before, when anything and anyone who’d been helped along their way by backward alchemy began to have their life force reverse, from gold figures in museums turning to gold dust to living gargoyles returning to stone. And he knew about how, five months ago, Dorian had sought me out so I could help him decode Not Untrue Alchemy.

  I smiled at the memory of my dear friend looking up at me from the wreckage he’d created in one of my shipping crates. I hadn’t smiled at the time; I’d been terrified to find a living gargoyle, not to mention quite unhappy that he’d disturbed my carefully packed glass jars filled with alchemical ingredients. Dorian had apologized profusely and explained that he’d been hungry and was looking in the jars for food. When Tobias had visited, he’d been nearly as frightened to meet Dorian, and I hadn’t known how to broach the subject of a living gargoyle who wasn’t a homunculus to be feared. Since then, the two had bonded.

  Now I told Tobias about what’d I’d recently learned of the formal origins of backward alchemy, in which a group of lazy men living in the 1500s, one of whom was Lucien Augustin, had found out how to shortcut true alchemy by using sacrificial apprentices, and had recorded their findings in a book that was meant only for themselves. Since alchemy connects as it transforms, the book took on the properties of backward alchemists, getting younger with age and not responding to fire as science would normally dictate.

  In the flickering light of my half-finished alchemy lab, I grabbed the notebook on the table I used for recording plant transformations and began to scribble the ideas I was telling Tobias about.

  “Why’d they create a book at all?” Tobias asked. “Sounds like they were selfish men who didn’t want to share their twisted miracle.”

  “They’re the laziest of men, Toby.” I thought of Percy and snapped the pencil in my hand. “They didn’t want to memorize even their most simple alchemical transformations. But they were so lazy they lost track of the book a couple hundred years ago.”

  “You don’t know how it works yet?”

  “Sometimes I feel like I’m so close to understanding, and sometimes I think I’m so far away I wouldn’t understand it if I lived another three hundred years.”

  “Notre Dame didn’t hold the key? I was so sure there was something it could tell you.”

  I hated to admit to Tobias how careless I’d been, but why had I contacted him if I wasn’t going to be honest?

  “Zoe?” he prompted.

  “I was recognized. I had to leave before I was done.”

  Tobias swore.

  “That’s what started the mess I’m in. I thought at first the elderly woman who recognized me had sent a private investigator after me, but it was worse than that.”

  “Worse?”

  “Two backward alchemists followed me home.” I was glad he couldn’t see my face as I explained how I’d learned a man I once knew in Paris had been murdered, seen a second stone gargoyle come alive for the briefest moment, and been tricked by Lucien about a nonexistent book that I hoped could lead me to a knowledgeable backward alchemist. I explained how I’d learned that Ambrose’s son, Percy, was a clueless backward alchemist who’d killed his own father and that Lucien had died and shriveled inside an alchemy lab he’d set up in an abandoned cabin in Portland. It was all the more personal because Brixton had been a witness and now the police were suspicious of him and his mom, but I was so exha
usted I was seeing alchemy everywhere I looked, even in Heather’s paintings.

  As I rambled, I picked up the shard of pencil and continued writing. Pouring my soul out to both Tobias and my notebook, I kept waiting for something to click. It didn’t.

  “I can see why you can’t sleep,” Tobias said.

  “None of it makes any sense.”

  “On the contrary, it makes perfect sense.”

  “I remember you being a philosopher, not a comedian.”

  “I’m serious. You’re the one everyone believes can figure it out. That’s why they’ve all come to you.”

  “Misguided faith in an accidental alchemist.”

  “You really believe that?”

  “Which part?”

  “It wasn’t an accident, Zoe.”

  “I never meant to find it—”

  “You never meant to find the Elixir of Life for yourself. But you worked all hours to find it to save your brother’s life. That’s purpose. Intent. Not an accident.”

  “This isn’t a problem with my ego. I know I’m great at many things. I can grow a thriving garden under the harshest of conditions, I can use spagyrics to create healing elixirs for an assortment of ailments, and I can fix the engine of just about any car produced before 1985. But I’m a terrible liar, I’m awful at turning lead into gold, and I never finished my alchemical training so I don’t know how to decode formal alchemy.”

  “Do you realize the confusion you’ve told me about tonight sounds much more similar to listening to plants and putting a broken engine together than to speaking the secret language of some old white men?”

  I swore. Why are we so blind to seeing what’s right in front of us?

  “I believe they’re right that you can solve this,” Tobias said. “As long as you get some sleep, kiddo.”

  “Kiddo? I’m almost two hundred years older than you.”

  “Then start acting like it. Stop thinking of what you don’t know and focus on what you do. You know more than you think, my friend.”

  Thirty-Five

  I woke up at dawn, after approximately four hours of sleep, with a furious headache and a dry mouth that felt like it was filled with stinging nettles. Tobias was right—I shouldn’t have stayed up. Was he also right that I knew more than I thought I did? With my brain in a fog, I wasn’t much good to anyone at the moment.

  Dorian saved the day. A breakfast feast was waiting for me. The spread took up half the dining table. Dorian had spent the predawn hours baking for me. He’d created variations on several of my favorite foods from my youth, from creamy almond milk porridge to cranberry nut bread. On the other half of the table, Dorian had arranged a set of notecards, written in his impressive cursive script. I helped myself to a serving of porridge and a slice of bread while Dorian explained the notecards.

  “Each card is a piece of the puzzle,” he said. “It is similar to the notes you wrote last night. By writing each separate point on its own notecard, we can move these items around in ways that are not simply chronological. My method is much more fruitful than yours.”

  “You snuck into my room and took my list?” I’d carried the notebook upstairs with me after talking with Tobias, hoping I’d have further revelations during the night. I didn’t.

  Dorian blinked at me innocently. “You left your door open. This was a sign you wanted my assistance.”

  It was a sign it had been a warm night, but no matter. “So you’ve rearranged my notes in a different order so they make more sense?”

  “Oui.”

  I stared at him. “You have?”

  Dorian tapped one of his horns and raised a stone eyebrow. “I have cracked the case!” He grinned triumphantly. “Lucien was not an alchemist! Percival has misled you, Zoe.”

  “We know Lucien is the dead body. Brixton saw him.”

  Dorian waved away my concerns. “Brixton is an impressionable boy. Yet buried in your notes are dismissive descriptions of Heather, the very woman the police believe to be behaving suspiciously. It is she who is our most viable suspect.”

  I popped a bite of cranberry nut bread into my mouth and thought about how to refute the ridiculous idea. Dorian hadn’t had an opportunity to interact with Heather. He could see in stone statue form, so he’d once stood still next to the fire place during a dinner party I’d given, and had observed Heather then. But most of what he knew of people was what Brixton and I told him.

  “Heather wouldn’t kill anyone.” I saw Dorian open his mouth, so I quickly continued. “No, you’re right. Anyone could kill someone, given the right circumstances. But for Heather, this doesn’t make any sense. That’s the more important point. Since you read my notes, you know I don’t think those detectives are a good judge of character.”

  “Non.”

  “No?”

  “It is your own thoughts that betray you.”

  “My own thoughts?”

  “You forget that you and Brixton have both said how strangely she has been behaving of late.”

  “It’s true,” I admitted. “But people have all sorts of things going on in their lives. Heather has a teenage kid and a husband who works out of town. That’s not easy. But she doesn’t have any connection to Lucien.”

  “How do you know there is no connection?” Dorian asked. “Her paintings at Blue Sky Teas—”

  “We’re reading too much into those paintings, Dorian. Brixton told her about the things I sell at my shop, and she’s really creative.”

  “You are missing the point, Zoe. The motive could be any number of things we do not have enough information to understand. It is impossible to see into the hearts of men. No, my point is that your notes contain many points in history that are linked to one another in theory, such as the unfortunate coincidence of being recognized by a woman who knew you when she was a child. But there is only one true fact: science does not lie.”

  While science doesn’t exactly lie, it’s subject to the same human limitations as anything else. Accepted science in one era is later looked upon as laughable. Bloodletting to restore the balance in a sick body, mercury to treat syphilis, aether to explain light and gravity. Concerning forensics, DNA evidence was evolving as other tools had before it. And science didn’t tell the whole story.

  “Alchemy is science,” I said, “but that doesn’t do us any good because they don’t understand it—”

  “Yes, alchemy may be foreign science to these investigators, but they are seeking DNA evidence. You said they have the DNA of the killer, and yet Heather refused to submit to the test!”

  “Do you remember the Phantom of Heilbronn?” I asked.

  “The Phantom of the Opera? Have I told you about the time I snuck into a theater performing the musical and newspapers wrote that the phantom himself had appeared at the show?” He chuckled.

  “No. Heilbronn. An example of when DNA science lied. A supposed female serial killer in Europe who killed dozens of people.”

  “Oh, yes. One of her crimes was committed in France.”

  “She didn’t exist, Dorian. Laboratory results were contaminated with ‘sterile’ cotton swabs. It was the DNA of a factory worker.”

  “This is not bad science. It is human error.”

  “That’s my point. It’s perfectly reasonable to fear what will become of your DNA.”

  “Ah, so.” He scratched his gray chin.

  I looked at the set of carefully placed notecards and thought about how to turn the police onto Percy without revealing alchemy. Percy, whose wounds I’d washed. Aside from his head wound, he didn’t have any scratches on his body.

  But there was someone else who did. I felt as if the room was spinning around me.

  “You are ill?” Dorian asked, his gray forehead creasing with concern. “Your face has gone as pale as a ghost from one of Father’s magic posters.”

&nb
sp; “Yes. No. Where’s my phone?”

  I texted Brixton: Once you’re awake, we need to talk.

  An hour later, Brixton pulled up on his bike.

  “I’m not going to get mad at you,” I said, “so I need you to tell me the truth.”

  “About what?”

  “I know you didn’t want to worry me, which is why you didn’t tell me. But you didn’t only follow Lucien from afar, did you?”

  Dorian gasped. “You cannot mean the boy killed him!”

  Brixton and I both rolled our eyes.

  “Of course not,” I said. “But I think Brixton got closer to Lucien than he wanted to admit, when Lucien was spying on Ivan at his house. He didn’t want to admit his mistake.”

  “Is this true?” Dorian asked Brixton.

  Brixton fidgeted but didn’t reply.

  “Your wrist,” I said. “I didn’t think there was anything sharp on the table. It’s not a scrape from when you hit my table, is it?”

  Brixton shook his head but didn’t look at me.

  “Did Lucien grab you?” I asked. “Is that why you were extra careful to hang back when you saw him again?”

  Brixton stared at us. “You mean it’s my DNA they’ll find under his fingernails?”

  The air felt heavy and stifling. Brixton had a juvenile record. “Did they save your DNA in juvenile court?”

  “I don’t think so. That’s why they had to ask my mom for DNA for that family match thing.”

  “At least your mom didn’t give her DNA to the police. They won’t have any way to match it to you.”

  “Actually,” Brixton said slowly, “she decided to do it. It was killing her, not knowing for sure if it was her dad. When it seemed less likely it was him, that’s when she realized how much she cared.”

  I stared at Brixton. “This is bad,” I said. “Very bad.”