The Elusive Elixir

by Gigi Pandian

  And a child was there. Brixton’s body was sprawled on the cold stone floor.

  He wasn’t moving.

  A lone man stood next to Brixton. He clutched Dorian’s book in muscular hands. The man turned, and I saw his face. Ivan.

  Forty-Five

  Only … Was I mistaken? The hands that gripped Not Untrue Alchemy were too strong to be Ivan’s. His face and his body looked different as well.

  “You don’t have to do this, Ivan,” I said.

  “Zoe? How—”

  “Why don’t you come over here?”

  “What? Oh, Brixton isn’t hurt. He’s sleeping.”

  “He’s not sleeping, Ivan.” A ferocious anger welled up inside me. “He’s dying.”

  Ivan looked hesitantly at Brixton, then shook his head furiously. The motion startled me. Ivan normally moved slowly. Not any longer. That’s why he looked different. A vigorous middle-aged man stood before me. There was no way I could take on this new Ivan physically. If it had only been me, I would have risked fighting him. But with Brixton unconscious beneath him, I had to be smart. I had to reason with Ivan.

  “The apprentice sacrifices their life,” I said. “I know Percy kept the truth from you. That’s how backward alchemy works. That’s how it begins.”

  “No. That’s not how it works. You’re lying.”

  “It’s Lucien and Percy who lied to you.”

  “Lucien? Did he find you? Where is he?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I now know of backward alchemy’s true potential. You lied to me, Zoe. You said it was dangerous, you said he was dangerous. That’s why I didn’t embrace backward alchemy sooner. If only—”

  “Lucien is dead, Ivan. He’s the man who was found in the shed in the woods last week.”

  “You’re trying to confuse me. That man was Heather’s father.”

  “No, it wasn’t. Backward alchemy changes how quickly a body deteriorates. It misled the police. It was Lucien. And if Brixton survives—” I swallowed hard and looked at his unmoving form on the cold floor. Don’t look, Zoe. I couldn’t let myself break down. “If Brixton survives, he’s going to be implicated as a murderer unless we find out who killed Lucien.”

  “This is madness. The boy is simply exhausted from the Death Rotation. And there’s no reason for the police to suspect him.”

  “Lucien caught Brixton following him and grabbed him. Brixton’s skin cells ended up under Lucien’s fingernails.”

  “You’re trying to distract and confuse me. Nothing you’re saying makes any sense. Can’t you see backward alchemy’s potential? Look at what I’ve become. When Brixton wakes up, he’ll be stronger too.”

  “You don’t understand—”

  “You weren’t honest with me, Zoe. How can I believe you now?”

  “You’re right. I’m sorry. It’s hard for me to open up. But I’m ready to talk now. To share everything I know. Why don’t you come over here and we can talk about it?”

  A pained expression crossed Ivan’s face. “I see what you’re doing. You think I wish to hurt Brixton. How little you know of me. I would never do that.”

  “I don’t think you would do so intentionally.” I spoke as calmly as I could manage. “It won’t hurt to get him medical attention, will it? Now that you’re done with the transformation, we could—”

  “We’re not done. Not yet.”

  I said a silent prayer. There was hope for Brixton. “This isn’t you, Ivan. I know you’re a good man. You don’t know what you’re doing. You’ve been lied to.”

  “Only by you. You twisted the facts so I didn’t believe what Lucien had to tell me.”

  “You spoke with him?”

  “He wanted my help. He saw that I had a vast library of books on alchemy and wanted to know if I had Non Degenera Alchemia—the book that you’ve so desperately wanted to understand. You’ve been lying to me since we met. You never wanted to understand that book for the sake of knowledge. Percival told me the truth. It was to save that creature who lives in your attic.” His eyes were pleading. “You could have trusted me, Zoe.”

  “Because you’re showing yourself to be so trustworthy,” I snapped before I could stop myself.

  “This is your fault,” Ivan boomed. “Not mine. If only you’d been honest with me, I could have had the Elixir of Life so much sooner.”

  I looked at Ivan from head to toe. Was he as strong as he now looked? “How do you feel, Ivan?” I asked quietly.

  He frowned and smoothed his wild hair. “Percy said I would feel decades younger immediately, but—” He shrugged. “It must be because there’s more to the process.”

  I thought back on my own true alchemy transformation. I had discovered the Elixir of Life while searching for a cure for my brother, who was dying of the plague. I was so grief-stricken that I didn’t realize what I had become until I saw that I wasn’t aging.

  But true alchemy was different from backward alchemy. The shift in true alchemy was more subtle, because it wasn’t a quick fix. From what I’d seen of backward alchemy, the effects were visible and immediate. Ivan did look much healthier than I’d ever seen him, but the full power of backward alchemy was being diminished by the shift that had taken place six months ago. No matter what Percy claimed, Ivan wouldn’t be able to experience the full effects of backward alchemy until that fissure was fixed.

  “There’s indeed more,” I said, “but not in the way Percy told you. Did he tell you that a shift occurred six months ago and that everyone who’d been granted an extended life through backward alchemy began to die?”

  “It was because you were hoarding that book! That’s why he and the others had to make and smoke Alchemical Ashes, to fight for their lives. He had run out of his supply.”

  “It’s not the book, Ivan. The book contains the secrets of backward alchemy and is tied to Notre Dame, but it has nothing to do with why the power is fading.”

  “You’re still lying. I should have believed Lucien when I had the chance.”

  “What happened when he came to you?”

  “Seeing that I was a scholar of alchemy, he confessed to me that he was a backward alchemist who had been alive for centuries. He suspected you had stolen a book that was his. But I trusted you. I foolishly trusted you, Zoe. He wanted me to steal the book from you, as he said you had done from him. He became angry when I refused. I shoved him out the door.”

  “You shoved him?”

  Ivan snorted. “You have always thought me a weak old man, but Lucien was weaker. It was not difficult to push him out of my house. He fell down the front steps.”

  I gasped.

  “It doesn’t take much strength to hurt a frail man,” Ivan continued, “as I know all too well.”

  “It was you. It was you who killed him.”

  “No, he was not dead. I told you—”

  “Did he hit his head when he fell?”

  Ivan narrowed his eyes that were no longer tired and blood-shot. “He might have, but he got up and left.”

  “To go back to his makeshift alchemy lab to try to make more Alchemical Ashes. He died before he succeeded.”

  On the floor, Brixton groaned. Ivan jerked back, startled.

  “Brix?” I said, rushing to his side. “Can you hear me?”

  His eyes were still closed, but he moaned again. Sweat coated his body.

  “Ivan, please,” I pleaded. “We’ve got to get Brixton help.”

  “He’s not supposed to be hurt,” Ivan whispered. “He must be faking it. Yes, that’s what’s happening. He’s an attention-seeking kid.”

  “He’s not faking it. And he’s going to be arrested for murder.”

  “I would never let that happen,” Ivan said. “You think so little of me? If it comes to that, I’ll tell the police what happened.”

  I r
ecoiled when Ivan’s shoulder touched mine as he knelt over Brixton.

  Ivan cried out. “This isn’t right.” He shook Brixton’s still shoulders.

  “He’s not pretending.”

  “He’s cold,” Ivan murmured. “Too cold. We must help him.”

  “Let me call an ambulance.”

  “No.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut. I’d been so sure I’d gotten through to Ivan.

  “We can’t call an ambulance,” Ivan said. “They’ll be back soon. We have to get Brixton out of here ourselves.”

  I opened my eyes and saw the good man I’d thought of as my friend.

  Ivan handed Not Untrue Alchemy to me. With his newfound strength, he lifted Brixton into his arms and carried him out of the backward alchemy lab beneath Notre Dame.

  In the darkness of the tunnel, Ivan swore. “I don’t know if I can find my way out without them.”

  “That,” I said, “I can help with.” I turned him towards a faintly glowing light. The glow sticks Constantine and Emma had brought were the perfect breadcrumbs to make our way out.

  As I watched Ivan carry Brixton’s limp form from the subterranean gloom out into the summer sunlight, I was filled with two of the most conflicting emotions I’d ever experienced together. The all-encompassing relief of having found Brixton in time was weighed down with the realization that the only remaining hope I had of saving Dorian’s life was the backward alchemy transformation I’d been denying: a sacrifice.

  I now knew, with all certainty, that I would have to sacrifice my own life to save Dorian’s. And I knew that I would do it.

  Forty-Six

  The hospital called Brixton’s family, explaining that he’d been found unconscious and dehydrated, but was stable.

  I hated hospitals, with their overbearing astringent scents that assaulted my senses and my memories of the horrors of medicine of past centuries, but I didn’t want to be far from Brixton. Ivan stayed with me. We hadn’t yet talked about what had transpired, but he’d been the one who carried Brixton’s body from subterranean Paris, and he spoke to the hospital staff so I could keep my name out of it.

  There was another reason it was difficult for me to talk with the staff. I was so thankful Brixton hadn’t died like the actor who played the policeman that it was difficult for me to speak. My eyes kept welling with tears of relief.

  Ivan and I sat together in an outdoor courtyard waiting room. People had recently been smoking here, but the scent was far better than the sterilizing chemicals and strong medicines inside. Neither of us could sit still. I paced the length of the courtyard, and Ivan prodded the newly regenerated muscles of his arms. How long would it last? I couldn’t let myself begin to feel sorry for Ivan. His blind selfishness had nearly killed Brixton.

  “Would you sit with me for a minute?” Ivan asked. “I see your hesitation to be near this monster, but I wish to apologize. And to understand.”

  I joined him on a wooden bench, not wanting to hear his apologies, but wanting even less for the other visitors to hear what he had to say.

  “If I’d performed the Death Rotation experiment properly,” Ivan began, then faltered. “If I—” He cleared his throat and looked up at the wispy clouds above. “If I’d done it right, the boy would be dead?”

  “If you’d finished the transformation,” I said. “Brixton only survived for as long as he did because of his own strength.”

  Brixton had survived for the same reason that my own backward alchemy transformation hadn’t worked well the last time I’d tried it to make Dorian’s Tea of Ashes. He’d lived for the flipside of the reason I’d been sickened.

  “Brix was tending to my garden,” I explained. “He has a green thumb, and the garden flourished. His energy gave strength to the plants he tended, and that energy flowed back into him, giving him strength and protecting him.”

  “Alchemy doesn’t create something out of nothing,” Ivan said. “You tried to teach me that, but I wouldn’t listen.”

  “Alchemy transforms, and the power of the transformations is tied to the practitioner and their materials.”

  “You can tell them the truth,” he said. “Max and the beast. I can see on your face that you want to call them.”

  “He’s not a beast,” I said. The man sitting next to me was much more of a beast than Dorian would ever be. “And what could I possibly tell Max?”

  “The truth. I was blinded by my desire to live, so I believed a hoax. I put Brixton’s life in danger with a desperate plan.”

  “You’re owning up to this?”

  “Of course. I’m mortified by my actions, and thankful alchemy isn’t real so I didn’t harm Brixton.”

  I nodded. He understood we couldn’t explain alchemy to the world. I stepped to the quietest corner of the courtyard and called Max. I kept an eye on Ivan, who wasn’t interested in me. He flexed his fingers and stood on his tiptoes. It must have been a strange sensation to have one’s body transform within hours.

  My call to Max went to voicemail, which I was thankful for since it would be easier to stick to the somewhat truthful lies if I kept to the script I’d rehearsed in my mind. Next I called Dorian. Even with the coded timing of rings he insisted we use, he didn’t answer. Where was he? With me gone, he knew he shouldn’t be baking at Blue Sky Teas.

  Frustrated, I hung up the phone and looked up at the sky for a few seconds. When I turned my attention back to the courtyard, Ivan was gone.

  In his place on the bench was a torn piece of paper. Caught in the gentle breeze, it fluttered to the ground. I ran to it and snatched it in a tense hand. The handwritten scrawl read I’m sorry.

  I crumpled the note in my hand and rushed inside but caught no sight of him. I asked everyone I saw, down every hall I could find, but nobody had seen him. The hospital appeared to be more labyrinthine than the catacombs.

  I wasn’t giving up. I looked from room to room. As I finished searching a hall of patient rooms, a news story on the television in the waiting room caused me to stop my search. On the screen was a face I recognized, one that still bore the marks of bee stings. Professor Chevalier, the scholar studying the gargoyle statue, was being interviewed by a reporter. I turned up the volume.

  Professor Chevalier was explaining the mystery of the curiously posed gargoyle statue thought to be stolen from Notre Dame in the 1860s. There had been a break-in at the university, and thieves had ransacked the whole Architecture Department. The reporter asked the professor how he first noticed the theft.

  “No,” Professor Chevalier protested. “It was not thieves who stole the chimera. The stone creature came to life.”

  The reporter abruptly ended the interview and the camera switched back to a reporter sitting at a desk with a plastic smile frozen on her face. But she wasn’t able to hide the flush filling her cheeks.

  Was it possible? The Death Rotation Ivan and Brixton performed must have also enlivened the gargoyle. Perhaps because I’d left the Alchemical Ashes in his mouth, the nearby alchemy had woken him enough that he could swallow the ashes and escape.

  If I were a gargoyle who once stood atop Europe’s most famous cathedral, where would I go? I left the hospital and headed for Notre Dame.

  People see what they expect to see. They believe what already makes sense to their understanding of the world. Therefore it didn’t surprise me when the tourists I spoke to said they’d seen a disfigured man. They assumed him to be homeless because he wore only a sheet and carried a bottle of liquor. They pointed in the direction they had seen him go.

  I thought I was going to lose my mind as I waited in line to climb to the top of Notre Dame, but it was the only way to gain access to the stairs. I used the time to look up a few things on my cell phone. Now that Brixton was safe, I felt guilty that I hadn’t found the actress who played Madame Leblanc, to warn her that her colleague was dead and she migh
t be next. I found the gendarme actor’s website. He didn’t have any affiliation with an actress who looked like Madame Leblanc.

  A tap on my shoulder alerted me to the fact that the line was moving. It was time to climb the winding steps of Notre Dame once more. I hadn’t heard any screams from above, so I wasn’t entirely certain my theory was correct. But I had to try.

  The first place I looked—near the famous Gallery of Gargoyles—was a bust. But while the guard was dealing with two people blocking the way with banned selfie sticks, I slipped into an off-limits area near the bell tower.

  A scuffling sound startled me.

  “Allo?” I said softly, hoping it wasn’t a cathedral worker.

  A burp broke the silence. I stepped forward and saw a lumpy sheet in the corner. The sheet moved.

  “Do you remember me?” I said. “I tried to help you last week.”

  “Va t’en!”

  “I’m not leaving. I can help you.”

  The gargoyle poked his head out from underneath the sheet and glared at me. “T’es conne.”

  Great. That was all I needed. A drunk gargoyle telling me to get lost and calling me dumb.

  “Are you drunk?

  “‘It is the hour to be drunken! On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.’”

  “You’ve only been awake for an hour … But if you’ve already found liquor, I suppose you don’t need this.” I held up a bottle of absinthe, the same brand that had been found in his frozen hand in Prague.

  He lunged for it. I put the bottle behind my back, hoping he wouldn’t tackle me. This gargoyle was more than a foot taller than Dorian, almost five feet tall.

  “Only if you talk to me,” I continued. “What’s your name?”

  He chuckled. “Leopold. Je m’appelle Leopold.”

  Now that he was standing before me, I got a better look at him. Leopold did look like he could be an older brother to Dorian. Since he’d once stood with the other stone creatures on the Gallery of Gargoyles, he was larger than Dorian in both height and girth. His body was a similar gray color, but his eyes were gray, not black like Dorian’s. His horns were larger than Dorian’s, yet he had no wings.