Chapter 31: Shadows of the past_NYC Questing Guild

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> “My mind is nearly full. After this task is done, I must consider what I need to take with me into the next century.”

Once upon a time I was a normal girl living in a normal world with normal friends, a normal job, and in love with a normal boyfriend.

Now I only really had one of those things. The normal friends, who had spent two nights in prison. The normal job, which I still had, for now. The normal boyfriend, who had already flown all the way to Paris only to find out I wasn’t coming.

Once upon a time, I also stole a tattoo, slowed time, traveled through a magic door, and turned a woman into a statue.

I sighed and took a sip of my tea as I waited on the patio on a chilly February morning for her to arrive.

Finally, after I nearly reached the bottom of the mug, a chipper blonde approached the cafe and took the seat across from me.

“Sorry I’m late!” said Beatrice, her face flush. “Subway was a disaster.”

“No worries,” I said. “I take it you have the book?”

“Yep,” she said, pulling out the diary that had cost us so much.

“And?”

“It’s ... well, it’s a fascinating upheaval of what we thought we knew about the Constitutional Convention. But in terms of alchemy, it’s a complete bust.”

“You cannot be serious,” I said. “There’s nothing in there? Not even a wisp of some new recipe? Why the hell was it hidden then?”

“I’m … umm… I’m not sure. Maybe whoever hid the box just wanted to stash this in the mine too.”

I shook my head and nearly laughed at the role reversal. Ever since Beatrice had woken up from her near coma the next afternoon, she had been walking on eggshells around me. But that was exactly what I didn’t want. After the bachelorette fallout, what I needed more than anything was a friend. I felt my eyes begin to tear, which was becoming a common occurrence these days, and brought my hand up quickly to cover the evidence.

“Are you really still upset about that girl? You didn’t even know her. And anyway, we barely got out alive as it w-”

“I’m not like you!” I nearly shouted. “I’ve never killed anyone before. And you didn’t see the stone sprout from where I had plunged the Medoblad into Frankie’s shoulder. You didn’t see it work its way over her entire body until she was nothing but, nothing but…”

I collapsed onto the table and began to sob uncontrollably. It was all too much to bear. I could make new friends, sure, and find a new boyfriend. But there was no getting over this.

I felt Beatrice’s hand touch my arm and I looked up at the woman I had chosen to save.

“She’s a statue, Jen, but she’s not dead. You have to realize that. If it weren’t for you, she would be though. So stop beating yourself up over things you have no control over.”

“OK,” I said with a whimper before clearing my throat and trying to regain my composure. “How is the research going?”

Beatrice looked down at the table, her eyes refusing to meet mine.

“Haven’t found much there either unfortunately. The Medusa legend doesn’t really touch on reversing the curse. Even killing her didn’t undo it. The best I found was a mention of two veins in her neck: blood from one would curse you and blood from the other would purify you. But we’re dealing with a knife, so not sure how that helps us.”

“That’s not a knife. It’s a nightmare machine. I wish I had left it in the lighthouse.”

“Good thing you didn’t,” said Beatrice. “We’ll need all the help we can get now that the Guild has it out for us.”

“How do you know it was them?” I asked.

“It wasn’t just a coincidence that Gilbert followed us to the Met, and then we’re attacked and left for dead. He planned this whole thing, from the start. To get whatever was in the box.”

“Why didn’t he just do it himself?”

“The Guild isn’t like you and me,” said Beatrice. “They’ve spent generations getting people to do their dirty work, all the while sitting atop a trove of the most powerful alchemic items on the continent. Even as far back as Rita.”

Beatrice opened the diary to a random entry and began to scan the handwriting as she spoke.

“It’s a miracle Gilbert even managed to do as much as he did to us. Guess they are still out of enforcers.”

It was bad enough I had to deal with one sociopath with only two magical items, but a whole guild of them? I sighed and reached for the tea, only to have my ringed finger jerk forward slowly toward Beatrice.

“Get this fucking thing off of me!” I yelled.

“OK,” said Beatrice.

“Excuse me?”

“I said, OK. It’s the absolute least I could do, after what you did for me.”

“Oh. Fine. But don’t think you’re even close to making us square.”

Beatrice pulled out a piece of paper, a quill, and a vial of pitch-black ink. She unscrewed the vial and began stirring the ink with the quill.

“I don’t.”

“Good. What are you going to write?”

I walked over to the other side of the table so I could see the note. As much as Beatrice was playing the part of the grateful victim, I still didn’t put it past her to just do away with me now and not have to be in my debt.

“Should only take a few words, just need to phrase them carefully so it doesn’t accidentally give you another lingering command.”

“How about just, ‘Jen, take off the ring’? Seems like that would do the tr-”

A gust of wind blew the pages of the diary to the end and my finger suddenly lurched forward.

But not toward Beatrice’s ring.

Instead, it stopped on the blank last page of the diary. The ring began to press my hand down into the worn paper as if it was being drawn to a giant magnet hidden in the book and I yelped in pain.

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“W-what’s happening?” I cried out.

“I don’t know!” said Beatrice, who slowly stood up and backed away from the book.

I felt the metal of the ring grow warm around my finger and watched as glowing glyphs on the band appeared. The ring continued to heat up, and I thought it was going to burn my finger off, the pain was so intense. But then the glyphs faded as the ring simply melted into a pool of molten liquid on the page, and I slowly lifted my now-free hand away.

The ring (or what used to be the ring) wasn’t finished though. The silvery liquid spread out onto the entirety of the page, forming into neat handwriting that I immediately recognized as Rita’s.

“December 31, 1787,” the top of the page said.

“Beatrice, you have to see this!” I said and she took a few steps closer to the diary, still not convinced that her own ring wasn’t going to flying onto the page.

“It’s … it was ink!” she said. “All that effort and we had what we were looking for already.”

“No. I don’t think that’s right,” I said. “Is it possible-could my ring have been linked to more than one thing? So it wouldn’t have just melted onto any old page. It had to be this one.”

“But why?” Beatrice said.

“Of course,” I said.

“What?”

“To conceal the diary’s true secret. In case it ended up in the wrong hands.”

I started to read the final entry, Beatrice peering over my shoulder.

> “Today I hid the last remaining gold token of the original 12 we minted. I have no use for it now, but I foresee a day when the seats of the Guild will be occupied by foes or scoundrels or ne’er do wells, and I will have need of a trump card.”

The words continued down the page and I tried to keep reading, but the ink began to shimmer. I wanted to look away, but my eyes remained fixed on those letters. Then, without warning, I fell forward into the page. But instead of smacking my head on the diary, I felt myself falling through space, my body incorporeal. It reminded me of the space inside Beatrice’s mind, except there was nothing but emptiness around me.

It was then that I spotted it.

A single solitary memory, so tiny that if it were a star in the night sky, it would be a speck thousands of light years away.

The speck grew larger after a time, and I braced my mind for what was to come as it finally enveloped my being.

The end of the year comes and another begins and I wonder how long this can continue.

I always seem to get philosophical on December 31.

I suppose it is because the passing of time should always have meaning, even for someone like me, but it gets harder and harder with each successive turn of the calendar.

Today I have a task to complete, though, one that I will need to forget by tomorrow.

I put on my overcoat, making sure the letter is still there, and immediately pull up the hood. This will all be for naught if I am spotted as soon as I step foot onto the street.

It is days like this one that I am glad I had the foresight to install the tunnel. It was expensive and I did not fancy killing the laborers who built it, but it has served me well over the years.

I pull back Volume II of Land Owners, Great Britain and the bookcase creeps forward just a tad. The stairway is dark and the corridor darker but I know my way. When I reach the end, the second set of stairs ascends sharply, and I find the catch on the bookcase’s twin and push it outward.

The townhouse is empty, as it should be. I purchased it a lifetime ago, and it has gotten very little use since. There is a door in the back that leads to a small garden. It is unkempt now, which is a pity, but I remember when all manner of flora were planted back there. In the kitchen is another door that leads to a winding alley and it is the one I take today.

I make my way onto Pearl Street and then head west along Wall Street before reaching William Street, which finally takes me to Hanover Square. The route is circuitous by design, and I convince myself that I have not been followed. I weave through the crowds to 11 Hanover Square. The bank is new, having been housed in Walton House until earlier this year. I much prefer the new location as it does not allow William Walton easy access to snoop around.

The lobby is empty and I summon a young clerk from behind the counter.

“Good morning, ma’am,” he says. “What can I assist you with?”

“I wish to deposit something in a safety deposit box,” I tell him.

“Certainly, ma’am. Does your husband already have an account with us?”

“He does not. Did not, I should say, as he is no longer among the living.”

“Oh, my apologies, ma’am.”

“It’s quite alright. Now, I am assuming there is a good deal of paperwork to fill out?”

“Yes, ma’am. You will need to open an account, which will need to be approved, of course, by the board, and after that you will be able to lease a box in our vault. There are many different si-”

“I am afraid that is not satisfactory nor convenient to my needs. I would like to deposit something today, not next year.”

“I am terribly sorry, ma’am, but we have protocols you see. Protocols I am duty bound to follow. So if you do not mind, we can just-”

“But I do mind,” I say. “Let me suggest an alternative option.”

I pull the letter from my jacket pocket, unfold it, and walk over to the counter and pull out my quill and vial of ink.

“Pardon me, what did you say your name was?” I ask the clerk.

“It’s Stewart, but I don’t understand what…”

“Thank you.”

I append Stewart’s name to the beginning of the letter and hand it to him. His eyes glaze over as he reads the commands and I suspect that the rest of this errand will go smoothly.

Stewart escorts me wordlessly into the bowels of the bank, stopping in one room before leading me down a set of stairs, and then along a corridor until we reach a large iron door. It is locked but Stewart has the key. The door swings open and Stewart walks inside to light the oil lamp before retreating to just outside the door. He hands me another key and I enter the room.

It is lined with wooden rectangular boxes sitting on opposing shelves, all numbered with gold lettering. I light another lamp midway into the room before stopping at box number 42, which matches the number on the key. It fits snugly in the lock and I open the lid to reveal an empty red velvet interior. I retrieve the tiny package wrapped in paper from my coat pocket, place it in the box, and then lock it again.

Stewart escorts me back to the lobby before returning to behind the counter. By the time he resumes his post, I have left the bank, and he has forgotten everything from the past 30 minutes. As an extra precaution, in three months’ time, he will, for no reason that he can comprehend, quit his job, move to Boston, and drown himself in the Charles River.

I return to the empty townhouse and retrieve a simple wooden box from upstairs into which I place the key. I walk out into the garden with the box. There is a rusty garden hoe just by the door and I use it to dig a hole in the back right corner of the garden. I place the box in the dirt, cover it back up, and then finally return through the corridor to my house.

The day is still young, but I am exhausted, and there is still the matter of forgetting what I have just done. I walk upstairs to my desk, take out my other vial of ink, and begin to write.

“Wake up!”

The paper felt rough against my forehead, and my nose hurt from being pressed into the diary. I opened my eyes and slowly sat up to see Beatrice with a manic look in her eyes.

“Wh-hat happened?” I said. “How long have I been out?”

“11 seconds,” said Beatrice. “I was trying to move you off of the page so I could read it, but it was like you were a stat… err, it was like your head was stuck to the diary.”

“Oh.”

My mind was still hazy, trying to reorient myself. Wasn’t I just upstairs at my desk writing in my diary?

No, that wasn’t right. It wasn’t my diary, was it?

It was hers.

Rita’s.

But in my head there now sat a memory of a cold December morning of me - again, not me, but Rita - hiding a gold token in a safe deposit box. I could replay the events of that morning over again, like they had occurred yesterday, and I could recall her thoughts and opinions as if they were my own.

Beatrice suddenly closed the diary in a huff.

“The writing is just gibberish after the first sentence. I can’t make heads or tales of it.”

“What are you talking about?” I said, opening the page a peek to see black ink smeared in patterns down to the very bottom.

“No, that’s not right. It wasn’t like … it was a memory! Her memory, Rita’s. It’s in my head now. I can see what she saw, remember what she thought. I know where the token is.”

Beatrice looked at me with a wide-eyed expression as if I had just escaped from the psych ward.

“Where?” she said.

“It’s in a … wait. Do you have our contract with you?”

She nodded and took it out of her bag.

“Rip it up,” I said.

“What?”

“Rip it up. I’m done being your novice. We’re equals now, as far as I’m concerned. And if you want to know where the token is, then you’ll do as I tell you.”

“Fine,” Beatrice said, tearing the papers in two before stacking the halves and tearing them again. “Satisfied?”

“Yes.”

I recounted the memory in exquisite detail, the scenes playing out in my head as if they were a movie, until finally I reached the end and let out a sigh.

“Incredible,” said Beatrice. “I never thought that these rings, that there was a way to…amazing. So now what?”

“Now,” I said, “now it’s time for us to take on the Guild.”

Chapter 31: Shadows of the past

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