Alchemystic (12 page)

Hesitant, the woman stepped toward me to look it over. “The man who attacked me the other night had similar markings,” she said. “What do they mean?”

“It is an ancient mark,” I said, finally recalling it. “The more sections, blocks, the longer it is, the higher up their place is in the order.”

“
What
order?”

“The Servants of Ruthenia,” I recalled, but nothing more.

The woman shuddered as she looked at the arm, then turned her eyes to me. “What
are
you?” she asked. “How do you know that?”

“I was created to
protect
, both you and your family,” I said. I paused, trying to recall something more about the Servants. I lowered the dead man’s arm and stood. “As to how I know this order, I am not sure. My thoughts are not what they once
were; long has my mind been dormant.” I pointed at the mark on the hand again. “It has been a long time since I have seen such things.”

The woman’s eyes narrowed. “How long are we talking here?” she asked.

“I am unsure of that as well,” I said, noting the disappointment on her face at my words. “I am sorry. To my recollection, I do not think I have talked to anyone in many a year. At least, no one I did not then kill.”

A sudden spike of fear radiated off of her and she stepped back. “You’re not going to…you know…?”

When she did not finish her words, I cocked my head. “Explain.”

She let out a long breath, then spoke in a rush. “You’re not going to kill
me
…are you?”

I shook my head. “I am sworn to protect,” I said.

The woman visibly relaxed, looking around the chaos of the room, her eyes passing quickly over the bloody body of
her attacker lying between us.

“You should go,” I said.

She nodded absently. “What about you?”

“I will take care of the body of this man who attacked you,” I said.

“There are others…” she said, walking with a great hesitation over to a stack of thin gray slabs. “Other men here who that man killed.”

“I can take care of them as well.”

She looked up at the hole in the ceiling. “Can you make it look like the roof caved in on them? Like the building was structurally weak? I’m going to need to explain some of this insanity to other people.”

I nodded. “I can do that,” I said. “Once I dispose of your attacker.”

The woman, eyes still wide and locked on mine, gave a small, pained smile, then averted her gaze and started for the door. She was almost to the hallway when she spun around, still shaken.

“Wait,” she said, looking down at the crumpled body of her attacker. “You’re not going to leave…
him
in the park like the other one, are you?”

“You do not wish this?”

She gave a nervous, grim laugh, looking as if she might be violently ill any moment. “No,” she said. “I do not wish that.”

“As you wish,” I said, then added, “but you should tell no one of this.”

She nodded, her eyes glazed, uncertain.

“You should go,” I said. “I will first remove this man from here, then come back to finishing damaging this roof.”

“What
are
you going to do with him?”

“The ocean is deep,” I said, looking down at the body. “This man will be another mystery lost to it.”

The woman moved closer, wonder on her face. “Why
did
you leave that other man in the park outside my family’s building?” she asked.

“As a warning.”

“A warning?” she repeated. “To who?”

I moved closer to her as well, looking down into her face and those hauntingly familiar eyes. “To anyone who would wish to harm you or your family.”

She shook her head and gave a short, nervous laugh. “Why the hell would anyone want to do that in first place?”

“I am not sure,” I said, moving to gather the man’s body up in my arms and walking over to the hole in the ceiling. I looked up through it, gauging how much clearance I had.

The woman ran over to me. “Will I see you again?” she asked.

“Hopefully not,” I said, my heart heavy with the admission.

“Hopefully not?”
Was that disappointment on her face? It was hard to read these humans. “Why not?”

“If you have seen me, then I have broken one of the rules I am meant to follow. Tonight, for instance. I have failed.”

“Failed?” she said, the pitch of her voice rising, incredulous. “You saved my life!”

I considered this for a moment. “There was little choice in doing that,” I said, “but nonetheless, I failed to follow one of the other rules set upon me. I must assess what this all
means.” The necklace around the woman’s neck caught my eye, something familiar to it. Still cradling the dead man, I reached one of my hands out toward it. The woman recoiled first, but let me catch it with the tip of one of my claws, and I lifted it away from her. A small stone disc hung from a metal chain, the stone itself giving off the same form of energy I felt when I was at the Belarus building.

“There is a power in this talisman,” I said. “But it is fading. It is with this as it is with your home. You must heal these things.”

“Heal things?” she said. “Heal things how? I don’t understand.”

“Heal the stone; heal the house,”
I said. “The stone was once strong. Now it is not.”

“Says who?” she asked, anger creeping into her confusion.

“My maker.” I tensed my legs and leapt up through the opening in the ceiling, knocking free some of the surrounding debris as I took flight.

“And who is your maker?” she shouted up after me.

“The one who swore me to protecting your family,” I said, looking back at her frail form down in the room. “The Spellmason Alexander Belarus.”

I took to the sky, heading out to sea, the feeling of confusion coming off the woman fading the farther away I went, but the familiarity of the woman’s face hit me. I knew those features, I realized. I had been seeing them for a long time, always upon waking. They belonged to the face of the man who haunted my reccurring dreams, the man whose name I had just invoked. The woman was not just the maker’s kin; she looked the image of him.

Alexandra

R
ory paced back and forth like a panther and turned to me as I came out of the front door of the old building clutching my broken-strapped shoulder bag and file folders. She ran over to me, eyes wide.

“Are you okay?” she asked. “I heard something like a car accident up on the roof. Jesus, Lexi, you’re covered in white dust. What the hell happened up there?”

I barely remembered leaving the apartment upstairs or how I had gotten back to the lobby, walking in a bit of shell-shocked haze.
I’m cracking up,
I thought. For the first time, I looked down at my body. Bits of plaster dust, ceiling fragments, and splinters of wood were covering just about every inch of my clothes. I looked back up to Rory, my brain having trouble processing the events of the last half hour. If what I had just witnessed was actually real and not some imagined figment due to work- and mugging-related stress, I wasn’t sure how to even articulate it. The small ball of sanity I was struggling to hold on to had me wondering whether I should even try to right now.

I fought for the most basic yet honest of answers I could use. “Roof collapse,” I said after a moment. “I’m fine. Structural
integrity issues. It’s why we were working on the place. Bad build.”

“Jesus,” Rory said, still looking me over. “You sure you’re okay?”

I nodded.

“Were your workers up there?”

The mere mention of them brought a flood of images—the pile of bloody corpses—and tears formed at the corners of my eyes, but I held my tongue. Hadn’t my mysterious savior told me to tell no one? He said he would take care of the situation. I nodded.

“Shouldn’t we call the police or something?”

“No,” I said, trying to restrain the sudden panic in my chest. “Listen, Rory, it’s a real mess up there. You saw my dad and how he handled the police the other night. I’ll let him figure out how to handle this whole job site fiasco.” I didn’t know if or when I was going to ever get into that with him, but that didn’t matter much. Right now I just wanted to get as far away from this place as possible. “Can we get out of here? I’m a little bit on edge after all this.”

I didn’t have to lie or fake being shaken. It was just the
why
of it all that I was keeping from Rory. Part of me hated lying to my best friend, but I sat silent on our cab ride back up to Gramercy Park, wondering not only how I would tell her but
if
I would tell her.

The surreal nature of my evening had me wondering whether I wasn’t just flat cracking up.

Once at my front door, I convinced Rory that all I needed was some sleep to center myself again, and although reluctant to do so, she left once she saw that I was safely in my family’s building. Alone in our lobby, my mind wandered back through the night’s events, already seeming like a distant, strange, and unpleasant nightmare. So deep in thought, I found myself up in the art studio with no memory of how I got there. With two lapses in time tonight, I worried that I’d blink and end up somewhere completely different or, worse, back outside the
comfort of my home, so I settled down onto my favorite comfy couch up there, half-terrified, half–in shock, one hundred percent determined not to move.

My hand snaked up to the family sigil hanging around my neck.
Heal the stone; heal the house,
the creature had said. What did that even mean? And what the hell was a Spellmason? Was this my mind trying to tell me in some effed-up way that real estate was the cause I was meant to embrace? Was all this mental drama its way of telling me to accept it?

My thoughts wove in and out of one another, looping around and around, getting nowhere until I was finally shaken out of them many hours later by noticing the sun rising over the city. I went to stand and stretch, and when I did, something slid off of my lap with a dull
thud
onto the old worn area rug at my feet. My heart caught in my throat. It was one of my great-great-grandfather’s statues. I didn’t remember picking it up from its pedestal off in the art section up here, but I must have. That caused a chill down my spine, but the greater one came when I actually recognized the figure—a much smaller version of last night’s creature—convinced now that I had imagined it.

I grabbed it up off the rug, and, armed by the false bravado of daylight, I ran to the back of the art studio and took the stairs up to the proper roof. The light was blinding compared to the long dark night I had just stayed up through, and the streets were still relatively quiet for this time of early morning in New York City. I walked among the scattering of uncarved and half-finished blocks of stone up there until I reached the edge of the building that overlooked Gramercy Park, where the larger version of the statuette in my hand stood.

It looked like him. The creature who had saved me.

By the light of day it was still an imposing bit of work, but I felt the fool for thinking it anything more than a well-carved chunk of stone depicting an impressively striking man with long hair and batlike wings, a bit of Gothic artwork done by my great-great-grandfather. Compared to the statuette, which was perfect due to being kept inside all these centuries, the stone figure was pockmarked from the wear of age and rain,
and it had even been tagged at some point along one of its legs by a street artist. My rational mind settled itself back in place as the flaws in the stone and the sheer inert quality of the piece reassured me. The bit of graffiti—the defacing of the art—made me almost sad for it, but it also brought me back to reality.

Thanks, Brain. I’ll take a hint. Overwork plus a near mugging are taking their toll.

My father wanted me to stay around the building and I had succeeded in finding a way out yesterday with Rory as my escort, but not today. I was already planning how to spend my day relaxing when I stopped, my eyes catching something. The claws on the creature’s hands. They were coated in a drying reddish-brown liquid, and although I was no medical expert, I knew blood when I saw it.

Whatever relaxation I had started to allow myself evaporated. I clutched the statuette of the creature as I backed away from the large stone version of it. I looked down at the figure, noticing for the first time a name for the piece of art etched into the bottom of the piece.

Stanis.

It wasn’t much to go on, but with a wealth of handwritten information to sift through in my great-great-grandfather’s personal library, it was a start.