> “I buried Rita in a stately grave in Richmond. There were no attendees at the funeral besides me. In a month’s time, there will be the reading of the will. I need to summon the heirs.”
“You’re a real buzzkill, you know that?” Emma said to Gilbert as we walked through the garage and back onto the street. Her sword had somehow disappeared back into the tote bag, along with the newly reclaimed White Hilt. “Was going to cut off her hand for good measure, but I guess I’ll have to save that until after her 18th birthday.”
Gilbert ignored her, and we continued toward Union Square, the crate of mind-linking apples still straining my forearms.
“Umm,” I said to both of them, after a few blocks of total silence, “thanks for bailing me out back there.”
“Don’t get used to it,” said Gilbert. “Anyway, it was better than having to explain to Dalia why our newest member was murdered in the service of Ms. Patel’s revenge quest.”
“Hey!” interrupted Emma.
“You’re lucky I’m even speaking to you,” he said. “The Guild initiation is not about settling old scores. You of all people should know that.”
“I’m sorry,” I interjected, “but you’re the woman from the phone, right?”
Emma nodded.
“And you’re also in the Guild?”
“Right again, Jade. She’s quick, this one.”
Gilbert rolled his eyes at the quip as we reached the interior of Union Square Park, which was still quiet at this early hour. He directed us to one of the benches and I finally put down the crate of apples.
“In case you hadn’t gathered from before, I’m Emma Patel, Second Seat of the Pavonia Table.”
She extended her ring-adorned hand and I shook it.
“The what table?” I asked. “Also, what’s with the fake British accent all of a sudden?”
“S’not fake,” said Emma, breaking into a cockney version of her accent. “Imma true Brit, I am!”
“Oh,” I said. “My mistake.”
“My mum and dad are from Coventry,” said Emma, dropping back into her regular elocution. “Lived there ’til I was 12. Then had to move here after my gran died. When the Guild calls, you can’t refuse.”
“So it would seem,” I said. I thought about adding that all of my calls from the Guild so far had been from her, but dropped it.
“We’ll go over all the formalities at the meeting tonight,” said Gilbert. “And now that the formal initiation is almost over, we’ll get you properly equipped, so you don’t need to be rescued again.”
“Almost over? What else do I have to do? Steal the dodo beak from Oxford?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Gilbert. “We have much more experienced people working on that. No, it’s just a swearing in and a lot of paperwork.”
“Great,” I said. “I love paperwork.”
A shudder ran through me as I remembered the reams of paperwork they had forced me to fill out after Hammond had canned me from my job at RPGLab last month. For a company with only one female developer, it wasn’t a good look to fire said developer, especially after she had just saved the whole team’s ass in front of their biggest investor. As much as I wanted to run to the nearest lawyer and file a wrongful termination suit, the severance package they had offered in exchange for my permanent silence on the issue was too good to pass up.
“You’ll be getting a call at the phone tonight at 10:30 with the meeting location,” said Emma. “Don’t be tardy.”
“Can’t you just tell me right now?” I said. “I’m standing right here.”
“Fine,” she said. “10:45, under the Bethesda Terrace in Central Park.”
“Thank you,” I said. “Wait a minute. How were you expecting me to get up there from all the way downtown in 15 minutes?”
“You caught me. Wanted to see if your friend had left you any speed buffs. Oh well.”
“Let’s get moving,” said Gilbert, and the two Guild members left me alone with my thoughts and a crateful of apples. That was, until Emma ran back a minute later, her tote bag held open.
“Sorry,” she said. “Almost forgot those. Would you mind?”
“What?” I asked. “You want me to dump all of these into that tiny little bag?”
It was obviously no ordinary bag, but she didn’t know how much I still didn’t know about alchemy. If she had pressed me, I would have said that the bottom of the bag was lined with vervorium, just like Polly’s shells and those stupid doorknobs.
“You got it,” Emma said with a shit-eating grin.
I kicked myself for not pocketing some of the apples when I had the chance and then reluctantly poured the entire crate into the tote bag, which accepted them without protest.
“Thanks luv, see you tonight.”
Emma slung the bag around her shoulder effortlessly and retreated east toward Park Avenue.
“Where can I get one of those?” I called after her, but she just chuckled and ran off into the morning sun.
----------------------------------------
The city slowly sprung to life as I walked. The supers sprayed their hoses, cleaning the sidewalks as they did every morning. The coffee shops and the bodegas opened their doors, welcoming in their sleepy patrons looking to start their days with a hot cup of caffeine and a muffin. The commuters headed to the nearest subway station or bus stop.
Two years ago, I would have enjoyed this ambling stroll, still blissfully unaware of the shadows of magic that covered the world. Last year, I was too busy Questing for wooden and iron tokens to care. And now, more than I anything, I wanted to be passed out in my cozy bed in my fifth-floor walk-up with the shades drawn and not wake up for several days.
The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
But that wasn’t an option for several reasons. First, I obviously had to show up at the meeting point tonight. Second, I had abandoned my old apartment and roommate in the middle of the night several weeks ago, leaving only a cryptic note and a wad of cash to pay the rest of my share of the lease, retreating to a still unfurnished studio in Greenpoint. And finally, because there was work that needed doing.
I stopped at a coffee cart on the corner, purchased a large iced coffee, and withdrew a small stoppered vial and plastic eyedropper from my bag. The liquid shimmered a pale green that matched its taste, and I walked over to a bench in front of an empty storefront and carefully uncorked the glass tube. I lowered the tip of the eyedropper into the vial, pulled up a tiny portion of the liquid, and then deposited the liquid into my coffee. Even the 24 ounces of pure caffeine and sugar was not enough to blunt the putrid taste of that one little drop, and I felt my body shudder involuntarily as I drank the entire contents of the cup.
Except it wasn’t my body. The glamour was still active, and I looked at Jade’s reflection in the storefront window, who remained stoic and still while the effects of the vitality serum kicked into high gear. This was a different beast than the one that Beatrice had given me that early morning in our old office after our escape from Doug. That serum had operated like a mini volcano, sending an explosion of heat and rejuvenation into every corner of my body.
The current serum, though, was more like an everlasting gobstopper. The tiny drop kept on working for 24 hours, giving me just enough energy to keep me balanced on that edge between exhaustion, awareness, and delirium. It was a dangerous game I was playing, because I had no doubt that I was setting myself up for a horrific crash at some far-off point in the future.
The recipe I had found tucked under a sliver of carpet in our office on the 47th floor of the Chrysler Building. Everything there had been stripped clean when I finally paid a visit a week after Beatrice’s disappearance. Even the vervorium doorknob that formed the gateway to the island house was gone. Maybe she was still holed up there, waiting out the Guild, but I had barely had a moment to myself in the past month, let alone the half a day it would take to journey by boat out to the South Shore of Long Island.
Beatrice’s handwriting was neat and concise. “Improved vitality serum,” it had said at the top, followed by a list of ingredients, some mundane, some magical, with a list of complicated steps at the bottom. I didn’t know where the hell I was going to get 40 grams of 80-day old lemon zest or 80 grams of a 40-day old cardinal’s feathers, but fortunately, it only took me a day to notice the seemingly random pattern of underlined letters and numbers in the note.
The letters had spelled out “toilet tank in hall” and I had sprinted back to the office to find a yet another envelope taped inside. Unlike the one that she had left me in the bathroom at the Met, this one held only an old key. But much to my disappointment, it wasn’t the vervorium key we had used to travel through the Washington Square Park Archway.
Buoyed by the vitality serum working its alchemy on my exhausted body buried under the glamour, I quickened my pace, eager to get to my current destination before the full morning rush hit. 6th Street was seemingly immune, unlike its brethren, and when I turned off of Fifth Avenue, I found myself walking down an empty block to the green relay mailbox. I fished the old key out of my purse, inserted it into the rusted lock, and turned. The compartment swung open without complaint and I smiled as I looked over its contents.
This had been the second half of Beatrice’s message. The underlined numbers in the recipe had provided the street number and she had scrawled the street name inside the bottom corner of the envelope. During my first visit here, I had been pleasantly surprised to find containers with enough of the prima materia to make at least several vials of the vitality serum. The hideaway had provided a convenient headquarters of sorts, somewhere that couldn’t be tied to Beatrice, to me, or even to Jade.
I smiled at Beatrice’s ingenuity in coming up with this mailbox of all things as a failsafe, but then shook my head as I considered how far she had fallen from the woman with the secret lab on the Lower East Side or the woman with her own private island. This was most likely all the remaining help I was going to get from her, and the thought that I was now truly on my own was terrifying.
My hand absent-mindedly found its way up to the glamour stone and I grasped it slightly, then felt the weight of my counterpart dissolve. With all the commotion in the alley, I had nearly forgotten what “Jade” had done. Was this what Ty had warned me about when she had given me the stone? I hadn’t come across the girl since that morning in the abandoned train station, but her business card was among the items stowed away in the mailbox, along with some peculiarities from my former partner that I hadn’t had time to suss out.
I pulled out my phone and brought up our previous text conversation and was about to send another help request, but then thought better of it. The mystery of the glamour would just have to wait until I had someone new from this side of the world that I could really trust.
Instead, I withdrew the stack of unmarked bills from the mailbox, put a small sealed envelope in its place, and then locked the compartment again. The envelope I had addressed to Molly Vestrit, one of Beatrice’s apparent pseudonyms, and the note inside contained a short missive expressing my hope that she was still OK and to contact me if she was able to safely meet. I doubted she would ever read it.
The cash, which represented a sizable portion of my severance payment, I stuffed into an envelope and placed at the very bottom of my bag. I surveyed the block to see if anyone had noticed my mailbox hideout, but Beatrice had chosen the location wisely, and the street was still deserted. Satisfied that no one was about to rob me, I retreated toward Sixth Avenue and walked south. With five minutes to spare, I reached the rendezvous, a small square in the middle of the West Village dotted with rotting benches and misshapen cobblestones.
I took a seat on one side of a set of back-to-back benches in the middle and waited for Janus to sit down behind me. He had come highly recommended by a number of users in the back corner of Craigslist as one of the best forgers in the city. The cash would pay for the papers that would solidify my double life as Jade Peters: a driver’s license, Social Security number, a passport, and even a rewards credit card with a great sign-up bonus. Maybe I would treat myself to a one-way ticket to Omaha with the miles once I was satisfied that the Guild wasn’t going to kill me right now.
My phone alarm went off, signaling one minute until the drop, so I fished out the envelope of cash and bent down to place it under the bench. As I did, though, the glamour loosed itself from under my sweatshirt and I realized I was still “me.” I quickly pulled the hood over my hair and covered my face with one hand, while activating the glamour with my other hand. When I sat up again, I was Jade, my now voluminous red hair spilling down the sides of my face.
“Jade?” said a gruff voice behind me.
“Yes?” I replied, in Jade’s raspy tones.
“Iss done.”
I almost turned around to look at Janus but remembered the explicit instructions not to do that very thing and instead wait 10 minutes before retrieving the goods. Fine. I had almost the whole day until my next harrowing experience was scheduled to start, so I tried to relax and appreciate the picturesque city park.
An old woman sat on a bench at the far side, knitting a golden scarf. It stretched down to her ankles, and it reminded me of the Golden Fleece from the Jason and the Argonauts movie I watched as a kid. I wondered who she was making it for.
A pair of ducks hopped out of the little pond and waddled over to me, almost as if they were trained to expect food whenever someone sat down by themselves on a bench. I flashed my empty hands, and they quacked angrily and scurried back into the water.
A breeze swept through the park and brought with it a sheet of newspaper. I picked it up to discover that it was from yesterday’s Times Style section, and absent-mindedly turned it over to find the featured Vows column and that’s when my jaw dropped.
The bride and groom stood in the center of a circle of rocks on the outskirts of the woods, surrounded by their wedding party. The women were dressed in bronze sheets of fabric holding bouquets of dark orange flowers and the men had matching bronze bow ties. It was all quite ridiculous and I would have had a good laugh had I not recognized the two women in the center. Because staring up at me from the crinkled half-page photo with half-distant looks in their eyes were none other than Lisa and Stacy.