Chapter 41: Apple of my eye_NYC Questing Guild

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> “The capital is burning. A city for a city. It has happened so many times and likely will happen again and again.”

I awoke to find the tip of the Medoblad hovering inches above my nose. It was held there by an irate Beatrice, whose eyes burned with an anger I had yet to see her unleash on me.

“Stop, Beatrice, it’s me!”

The words felt foreign as they left my mouth and I quickly moved my freckled hand down to my chest, but Beatrice brought the blade even closer and I stopped.

“It’s me, Jen! This is just a glamour!”

Beatrice slowly retracted the knife and I scrambled to my feet and staggered backward to the window. I held the green stone out in front of me, the reflection of the mid-morning sun lending it an uncanny luster, before pinching it and letting the illusion fall away.

“Where did you get that?” Beatrice demanded after sheathing the Medoblad.

“Where did you get that?” I said, pointing to the purloined blade.

“I took it out of your bag when we got back from Inwood,” she said. “Replaced it with a regular knife so you hopefully wouldn’t notice.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re not the one the Guild is really after,” said Beatrice. “And it seems like you’ve been hiding things from me. Polly give you that little necklace?”

“No, I got it from that girl Ty we met at the Council meeting. And, I’m not hiding anything. I was going to tell you everything in a few hours, but I found a cure. From a vendor in Hunt’s Point Produce Market. Ty told me about him, after she told me that the Dodo bird in the Natural History Museum is a fake.”

“Oh?” said Beatrice. “I thought you were going home to recuperate, not go rogue on me again and seek out another teenager you just met to help.”

“And I thought you trusted me,” I said. “After all we’ve been through. But when I got back here last night, I found the door knob gone, and so I took the only other thing of value I could find.”

“Please tell me you didn’t…”

I nodded and pulled the small vial out of my bag and offered it to Beatrice.

“Are there any left? Or did you steal them all?” she asked.

“The answer to both of your questions is yes.”

“What the fuck does that mean, Jen?”

Beatrice ran to the freezer and opened the door to find it bereft of anything.

“I took all of your apples, yes,” I said. “But I still have two left at home from my own haul from the orchard.”

“Oh, aren’t we lucky then? Two whole apples. Do you know how long it took me to gather all those apples?”

“Years, I’m sure. The sack was quite heavy, but he didn’t seem very impressed at first. After all, we were in the middle of an Empire State-sized produce market. But after I gave him a demonstration of their power, his whole attitude changed and I knew I had him.”

“So great, he gave you that vial and you just ran out of there?”

“No, of course not. I asked for a demonstration and he obliged. First, I made him heal my wrist. Only took the tiniest of drops.”

I rotated my right hand back and forth and then lifted the workbench chair up over my head with ease, before setting it down with a big grin on my face.

“Congratulations,” said Beatrice. “And I’m sure after that, you were convinced.”

I shook my head.

“Still no. So I stabbed him.”

“You did what?”

I smiled at Beatrice’s reaction.

“Relax, he’s fine. I pulled the knife on him quickly and he didn’t react, not in words and not in thought. He just nodded and stuck out his hand.”

“And you, Jen Jacobs, who a few months ago wouldn’t have said one bad word about anyone, stuck a knife in the hand of a little old man?”

“I’ve changed, maybe not for the better. And how did you know he was an old man? I never said what he looked like.”

“This ‘vendor,’ he have half-moon spectacles and a very pronounced slouch?”

I nodded and Beatrice stormed pass me to the back door and reattached the missing knob.

“Come on,” she said.

“What? What are you doing?”

“What does it look like? Going to see if what that old bugger gave you really works.”

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“I told you it did! Wait, you know him, don’t you?”

Beatrice nodded before holding up her right hand, which bore the small ring with the purple stone.

“He sold me this.”

I entered the portal after Beatrice and emerged a few seconds later into the dark, creaky house only to find that I wasn’t myself.

Beatrice looked back at me with a look of consternation on her face.

“Why did you activate it?” she shouted at me like a teacher lecturing a misbehaving student.

“I didn’t!” I said in that now familiar voice. “I swear! This thing, sometimes, I feel like it has a mind of its own.”

“OK OK, I believe you. Might as well keep it on. If this serum works, it’s probably better that Frankie doesn’t recognize you.”

“Good point. We didn’t exactly leave on the best of terms at our first meeting.”

I walked to the back corner of the house where Frankie still lay under the tarp. Summoning all of my courage, I pulled back the covering and prepared myself for the worst.

It was even more horrible than I remembered.

Frankie lay prone on her back, still in her clothing from that night, which hadn’t been affected by the Medoblad’s alchemy. Her stone hands were positioned under her and her stone feet were close together as if they were still bound, but her face was frozen into a mask of calmness.

I didn’t want to imagine what, if anything, she was thinking. Was her mind still awake within the stone, radiating anger at me for trapping her in there? Or was she merely sleeping, with no knowledge of what had happened to her? In either case, part of me was glad that I wouldn’t have to face her directly.

I uncorked the vial, careful not to let any liquid slip out. One droplet had healed my wrist and two had cured the bloody wound I had created in the vendor’s hand, and I hoped that the rest of the contents would be enough to undo the petrification I had unleashed.

“Ready?” asked Beatrice.

I nodded twice and poured all of the serum onto Frankie’s cheek. It hit the stone and trickled down, the golden liquid pooling at the base of her neck. We waited with bated breath for what seemed like hours for something to happen, until finally, the serum dissolved into the stone.

“Look!” I cried and the pale hues of Frankie’s skin began to blossom amongst the cold gray. The color spread until her entire head was free from the prison and I saw her eyes begin to move slightly back and forth before she finally opened them.

“Can you hear me?” asked Beatrice and Frankie’s green eyes shifted toward her. She nudged her head up and then down ever so slightly but in that moment, it felt like an enormous weight had been lifted off of my shoulders.

“You’re safe now,” I said, in Jade’s voice. “We’re here to help you.”

Frankie turned her gaze to me and I swore that she looked right through the glamour and saw me underneath.

“Let’s help her up,” I said to Beatrice and we each grabbed one of Frankie’s arms, only to feel cold stone underneath her clothes.

“Something’s not right,” said Beatrice as we watched Frankie’s face writhe in pain before she opened her mouth.

“The pearl in the triangle is gold.”

Her voice was barely above a whisper and as soon as the last word left her lips, Frankie closed her eyes and the stone retook her.

“No!” I cried as the red strands of Frankie’s hair turned gray and she became still once again. “It … was … supposed … to … work.”

My fists pounded the wooden floorboards and I sobbed uncontrollably until Beatrice finally pulled me away from her.

“Get a hold of yourself! She’s gone.”

“That’s not true! We just need more of that healing serum. Maybe we can trade the old ma-”

“Enough,” said Beatrice, who threw the tarp back over Frankie. “It’s one dead end after another. First we dredged up a hundreds-year-old book out of a swamp only to find the thing practically blank. Then you somehow pull that miracle serum out of your ass and it actually worked! But only for five fucking minutes, just long enough for dear ‘ol Frankie to recite us a cryptic riddle. And you’ll probably tear your hair out over the next two days trying to figure out what the hell ‘the pearl in the triangle’ means.

“It must be where the gold token is locat-”

“By all means try, but I’m done.”

Beatrice stormed off to the portal and disappeared, leaving me alone with my failure.

The empty serum bottle lay next to the tarp and I picked it up to peer through the small opening. There was a drop or two collected at the bottom, which alone was probably worth more than all the money in my bank account. I re-stoppered the vial and tucked it into one of the still-full cardboard boxes that were strewn about the room.

My phone suddenly buzzed in my pocket and I pulled it out to expecting to find the daily reminder I had made for myself to call in “sick” to work, but instead, it was a text from Duncan.

“Dinner tonight at 8.”

Shit. Was it Monday already? The last thing I wanted to do now was have a heart-to-heart with Duncan. What was I going to say?

Maybe his offer to move to Hong Kong was still on the table. Only a month ago I had contemplated accepting it to escape from Beatrice, but now I found myself in need of it again.

“I’ll be there,” I responded before leaving Frankie to her endless sleep.

I found Beatrice staring out the window when I returned to the office, the glamour tucked in my pocket to avoid any accidental activation mid-transit.

“Look, I thought about what you sai-”

“In college, I used to think I’d have an office like this. High floor, big windows looking out over the city, the mere mortals below hurrying to and fro while I watched from up here, above it all. I thought that was power. But that was before the Quests though. Before someone gave me the call number to Rita’s diary.”

“And then what happened?” I asked.

“After I learned the truth? I realized I had been trying to climb up the wrong ladder. That the real power was wielded in the shadows, wielded by the ones who had mastered the secrets of alchemy, or had it handed it to them by their forebears. And I wanted desperately to ascend to their heights.”

“We still can,” I said.

“No, it’s over. I have half a mind to walk back through that door and burn the whole house to the ground, drown myself in memory serum, and try to have as happy of a life as I can with my jackass husband and my kid before the Guild tracks me down.”

“That doesn’t sound like the woman I know. The woman I kn-”

Beatrice turned back from the window and glared at me with venomous eyes.

“Oh, give it a rest, Jen. You never really knew me. I may play the tough-ass bitch that takes what she wants, but deep down-”

“You’re still that scared little girl hiding in the closet,” I said and Beatrice gasped.

“How … how do you know about that?”

“And you’re the woman who’s had enough. You’re the woman who went toe to toe with the Guild with nothing but perseverance and ingenuity on her side. You’re a mom with a son to protect. And you’re the only person I’ve got left in my life.”

I tried to hold my stoic facade together until Beatrice decided whether I’d given the most inspirational speech she’d ever heard or the craziest. She closed the gap between us in two strides and wrapped her arms around me and I found myself comforting the woman who had threatened to kill me but had also saved me.

“So, now what?” Beatrice asked as she slowly pulled back and pretended that she hadn’t just hugged me.

“I don’t know,” I said. “But I’m sure we’ll figure something out.”

Next: An interesting round of cocktails.

Chapter 41: Apple of my eye

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