I ran my hand over his face and got down on my knees. Face to face, I leaned forward and kissed him. “I am back. I’m here now,” I said and kissed him again.
He looked into my eyes and nodded his head slowly. His hand cupped my face and I felt his thumb brush gently across my lips. “I know,” he whispered and kissed me back.
“Well,” Sophie said loudly behind us. I had completely forgotten she and Eve were even in the room. “Now that’s all sorted, how about we get on with why we are even here in the first place?”
Caleb dropped his hands from my waist and I kissed his cheek one last time before standing back up. When I turned around, Eve was still there and, like Sophie, had been watching Caleb and me, only her expression was very different. While Sophie looked embarrassed but relieved that her brother and I were okay, Eve looked confused, like she didn’t quite understand what she had just witnessed.
“Eve,” I said shaking her from her thoughts. I felt like I needed to say hello and apologize at the same time. Not sure where to start, “Hi.” I opened my bag and removed her book. “Sorry to barge in on you like this.” I held the book in my hand as if it could explain for itself. “I’m not sure if you remember, but I borrowed this from you last summer.”
Eve looked at the book in my hands and nodded her head. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I remember everything.”
With a cup of hot tea in hand, I settled into the sofa in Eve’s back room. She sat across from me, her bare legs and feet crisscrossed beneath her, her fingers fidgeted with one of the long white shreds unraveling from her cutoff jeans. Last year, when I met Eve for the first time, she had been so warm, so exuberant. She seemed different now. Whether it was me or her I had no idea but as she leaned forward and removed one of her thin cigarillos from the wooden box on the table between us, she continued to avoid making eye contact with me.
“You’re avoiding something,” I said without thinking.
Eve smiled, placed the brown cigar between her lips and struck a wooden match against the side of the box. “Who’s the psychic now?” she asked as the cigar bounced on her lips with each syllable. She held the flame to the tobacco and the tip roared into a bright red sun. As I watched, Eve closed her eyes and filled her lungs, holding the rich scented smoke deep within her for a moment before blowing a gray cloud into the room around us.
When she opened her eyes, she looked directly into mine. “That guy,” she whispered and pointed towards the waiting room with the two fingers that held the cigar. “What’s his name? Caleb?”
“Yes.”
Eve paused, like she was considering what to say, how to say it. She removed a piece of tobacco from her bottom lip. “You like him,” she said. I noticed it was not a question.
“Yes.”
“And he loves you.”
My head filled with silence. I didn’t know how to respond to such a blatant description of what was happening between Caleb and me. I rolled my lips between my teeth and stared at the table.
Eve sat back in her chair and took another long drag off her tiny cigar. After a moment she shrugged and shook her head. “It makes no difference to me. I just wanted to be clear.” She flicked the long ash into the ashtray on the table. “Very few people meet up with their twin flame.”
My head flew up. What was she saying? “Caleb is my twin flame?” even I could hear the edge of hope in my voice.
Eve looked at me and cocked her head. Her brow was wrinkled like she was confused. “No,” she whispered. “That’s not what I meant.”
“Well, what did you mean?”
Eve shook her head and waved her cigared hand between us, brushing the question away. She leaned forward and picked up the book from the table, “So you’ve returned my book,” she smiled. “Thank you. But maybe we should get to the real reason why you decided to make a special trip to see me instead of spending a few quid and dropping this in the post?”
“I don’t understand it,” I confessed.
“Don’t understand what?”
I nodded at the book. “That. I read passages, then reread passages, pages, chapters…none of it makes any sense to me. I’ve read the entire book but it’s like reading a bunch of unrelated words that are not connected into meaningful sentences. It’s written in gibberish and I need to understand it.”
Eve considered the book in her hands, “What exactly do you need to understand?”
“Alchemy,” my exasperation colored the word.
Eve laughed gently and placed the book back on the table, “Oh well, if that’s all.”
Her sarcasm irritated me, “I’m glad it’s so amusing to you but it’s no joke to me.” I raked my fingers through my tangled hair and left my hands on top of my head, as if they might help hold my frustrations in check. “I’m expected to learn this and I don’t feel like I’m even capable of starting.”
“Did you ever consider that maybe you are not ready to understand it?”
I stared miserably at her, “You sound like my mother.”
“Well your mother must be a brilliant woman,” Eve smiled then took a deep breath as she crushed the end of her cigar into the ashtray. “Alchemy is complex, multilayered, part art, part science, part mystery. You should know that you are coming to a novice,” she touched her chest, “for answers on a topic that takes years to comprehend…a lifetime to master. I can tell you what I know, or at least what I think I know, but I’m no expert.”
I shook my head, “Just point me in a direction.”
Eve laughed, “But which direction to choose. It might help if I know why you need to know,” she rubbed her forehead and closed her eyes.
The last time I had come to see her she had been so overwhelmed from souls in the astral plane it had given her a migraine. I wondered if it was happening again. “Are you okay?”
Eve nodded and pressed her temples, “Yes, but it takes a lot of energy for me to keep your otherworldly admirers in check. It helps if we really focus. Now, what is it you need to know about alchemy? What do you already understand?”
Now it was my turn to laugh, “Practically nothing. Before I went home last year, Franzen tried to start explaining it to me, but all I wanted was to get home and see my father. He said something about power, and connections between people… ‘we are all one,’ he said. I know that Isaac Newton studied it. So did Francis Bacon, who is my ancestor and apparently the real author of Shakespeare, and the son of Elizabeth the First. He worked to try and educate people about it. There is some connection between the founding fathers of the United States and Freemasons, groups like The Eastern Star, which my mother’s family belongs to, and powerful world leaders that belong to a group called The Bilderbergs. It has something to do with religions, turning lead into gold, and eternal life,” I spread my all my fingers apart and laced my hands together, “but I don’t understand how it all fits. I have inherited an elaborate stone puzzle box from my biological father, a crucifix key from my mother, and I’m supposed to solve this puzzle that has never been solved before,” I took a deep breath. “And apparently the next key to the puzzle is being kept by some guy in India.”
Eve stared at me. She didn’t say anything for so long I worried she thought I was probably crazy and was trying to figure out how to get me out of her shop. “Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare?” she said at last.
I sighed, “Yes, apparently.”
“And he was the son of Elizabeth the First?” her question sounded like the gossiping girls at my high school.
“So I’m told,” I worried this was all she had gotten out of my longwinded rant.
She shook her head in disbelief, “All the things they don’t tell you in school.”
My shoulders slumped. “Yes, but—”
“And,” she continued. “You are a descendant of Francis Bacon, a son of Queen Elizabeth the First,” her voice was cresting into an excited pitch and she stood up quickly from her chair. “Of course! The images I saw last year, when we read your cards and I was sh
own…” She hurried to a bookcase built into the far wall and pulled down a large leather album from a high shelf. When she came back, she laid the book on the table between us, flipped open the cover and began running her finger down a series of dated tabs sticking out from the pages. Stopping on one, she turned to the middle of the book and I could see that there were painted pictures.
“When I’ve worked with a client and I get a strong message or vibe from them, I always take notes so I can remember or try to figure out the message later if new insights surface.” She turned the book toward me so I could see what she had done. “Last year, after your visit…I painted these later that day.”
The page was filled with soft watercolor brush strokes. A speckled desert spread far into a thin blue horizon. In the center, an enormous red and yellow crown hovered above the ground. Eve had blurred the crown and sand sprayed out from beneath because it was spinning around and around as it rose higher into the sky above.
“I remember,” I said.
With a careful hand, I turned the page and saw the girl lost in the forest. She looked minuscule, crouched and afraid. In her hand was a scrap of animal hide that looked like it had something written on it and I could see that there were other scraps hidden among the dark trees that loomed over her. One branch seemed to be reaching for her, as if it would grab her from behind and drag her in, swallow her whole into it’s wooded belly. A nervous chill traveled up my spine making my skin rise up in an uneasy anticipation.
As Eve looked on from her seat, I turned to the next page. On the left, a wooden lectern stood in the center of an empty stage. In front of the stage, thousands of multicolored oval dots climbed up the page, shrinking in size as they neared the papers edge. Involuntarily, I squinted my eyes, as if I were looking at the examples of pointillism we’d learned about in art class. Like when I viewed the work of Georges Seurat, the dots connected in my brain, “It’s people,” I said.
“Yes,” Eve said. “Thousands of people waiting for a lecture to begin.”
I looked up at her then, “And who’s giving the lecture?” I pointed to the brown shaped wedge painted onto the page.
Eve looked at me for a moment before answering, “I don’t know for sure.” She leaned forward, flipped the page back, and pointed to the frightened girl, forever trapped in paint, at the center of her own dark nightmare. “But I believe she is.”
The girl’s dark black hair pushed the question I didn’t want answered from my lips. “You think I’m that girl?”
Eve nodded her head and took a deep breath, her slow exhale did nothing to ease the pressure building in my own head.
She reached out a shaky hand and opened the wooden box again. “You’re hard for me to be around,” she placed another tiny cigar between her lips. The sound of her match ripped the air and the scent of sulfur burned my nose. She closed her eyes and inhaled. A tension pulled on her features and settled into the thin lines around her eyes and mouth that I had never noticed before. “There are thousands and thousands of souls pushing in, just like last time.” Eve opened her eyes and looked at me, she smiled but I could see she felt drained. “There is something they want from you, all these souls crying out to you…I’ve never felt anything like it. And now you are being followed and harassed here in this plane as well.” She took a long drag and held it a moment, her eyes considered me like a puzzle to be solved. When she finally exhaled, the smoke tunneled between her lips in a fast moving stream before they shaped the words, “Who are you Charlotte?”
I didn’t even know where to begin answering her question. The seconds shrugged past us and I thought of all the things I might tell her, all the things I had learned about myself and my family since the last time I’d seen her. The truth about my mother and my father. The pressure to solve the puzzle box. My feelings for Caleb and my nightmares about Hayden. “I don’t know who I am,” I said. “Nothing is the way I thought it was, and I thought I was okay with that…at first.” I looked straight into her eyes and knew that what I was about to say was the absolute truth, “But I wish I could just take my mother back, back to our old life with my dad. With Simon,” I shook my head as if that alone could clear away the confusion. “Me, and mom, and my…and Simon.” I looked up at her blue painted ceiling and noticed the constellations stenciled there for the first time. A large sigh escaped from my chest. “Is that wrong? It feels wrong. It feels like an impossible, childish wish.”
Eve uncurled her legs from beneath her and leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees. “It is childish…but that doesn’t make it wrong. Change is always difficult, especially when it’s the kind that knocks our foundations out from under us.”
“I don’t want to do what they’re asking of me,” I whispered the words that I had been harboring in my heart for the last ten months. “I don’t want to,” I said, realizing for the first time that this was the truth. This was why I had made zero progress on solving the puzzle, why I had eventually pushed it aside and allowed it to collect dust instead of putting together a clue so obvious Sophie had figured it out in under half a minute. I didn’t want to.
Eve smiled at me, “And that is why this book,” she touched The Modern Alchemist, “makes no sense to you. As long as you don’t want to understand it, you won’t.” She sat back, sympathy arched the space between her eyes. “It is always the block. You have to first open your mind to the teaching before it can even hope to take hold there and leave an impression.”
My body suddenly felt heavy, as if each of my arms were twenty pounds and my legs were made of stone. “How do I make myself want this when all I want is to run away from it?”
“I can’t answer that. I do know you are not the first person who ever resisted a calling, doubted herself, or felt inadequately prepared to accomplish grand feats. But if you choose to go forward, whatever the reason, you’ll do it one step at a time and learn what you need to know along the way…just like everyone else. You don’t need to be an expert at something before you start out on the path towards it. It’s on the journey, that’s where mastery is developed.” Eve pushed the The Modern Alchemist across the table to me. “I think you should keep this.”
I stared at the book. How could such a small thing, a couple hundred pieces of paper and a smattering of ink and glue, create such a burden, inflict so much dread? I stared, my eyes unable to stop my brain from reading those words. The Modern Alchemist: A Guide to Personal Transformation. Transformation into what? What happens in the end? What happens to me? How do I get there?
What if I say no? No to Franzen. No to my mother. What if I decide something else? I could still stay at Gaersum Aern, stay with Sophie and Caleb—at least for the summer. My uncle would not refuse me that. We could stay and my uncle would keep us safe inside the walls of our large house. He was no Franzen but he would use whatever influence and connections he had to keep us safe.
For as long as he could.
Until Emerick was too powerful to oppose any longer. Because Emerick was not hiding behind the walls of his estate. Emerick was moving upward, gaining even more prominence, gaining even more support. Soon, when Franzen was even weaker and had lost the support of the people keeping my mother safe, keeping her hidden, Emerick would come for her then. Emerick would come for us all then. And whatever secrets, whatever powers the stone puzzle box held, would be his to solve. His to use. Use against my mother, against Grace, against Caleb and Sophie, my uncle and Ms. Steward—against my dad.
And then, he would come for me. True or not, Emerick believed because I was the daughter of Franzen and Elizabeth, I had abilities. Abilities he did not have himself but would like to possess. Would like to use.
If I did nothing, Emerick would take everyone I cared for away—and then he would take me.
I stared at the book, leaned forward, and picked it up.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Lies
The Learjet decelerated and began the slow descent into the New Delhi Indira Gandhi Internation
al Airport. Next to me, Caleb slept in his fully reclined seat, the plush camel colored inflight blanket draped over his legs, his chest rose and fell in a quiet, easy rhythm. Sophie and Aaron slept in separate rows behind us on opposite sides of the aisle. A rich aroma drifted through the cabin and I knew, somewhere in the back, the trimmed and efficient flight attendant with her cropped black hair was brewing coffee in the galley.
Out my window, the ground waited far below us. The indistinguishable landscape suggested we could very well be descending into the heart of California instead of what promised to be the most foreign location I had ever been to—New Delhi, India.
Wispy white clouds streamed past my window and blocked the view of the wing and ground below us. I slid my hand from my lap and onto Caleb’s hand resting on the leather arm between us.
We had lied, and the truth of that worried me.
We all knew Ms. Steward would never let Sophie and Caleb come with me and Aaron to India to search out the Hindu key keeper. Caleb had insisted he would come anyway, that Ms. Steward was incapable of stopping him now that he was old enough, that there wasn’t any way he was going to let me do this alone. Which, of course, started Sophie on a tirade so epic, so ear shattering, Aaron had pulled the Mercedes over on the quiet Glastonbury road, stomped down on the parking break, and stormed out of the car, slamming his door behind him. Speechless, the three of us watched him march down the road ahead, throwing his hands in the air while he shouted to himself.
“You’re not leaving me,” Sophie had added—again.
So we lied. All of us. And when the lie was delivered by my complicit uncle, Ms. Steward never even gave a second thought to the possibility it couldn’t be true. What a wonderful opportunity, how generous of Mr. Spencer to pay. All three kids would be going to India to participate in an educational exchange for the summer. She had clasped her hands in excitement and rushed to help us all pack.
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