Alchemystic (22 page)

Calm,
I thought, fighting to follow that in my mind.

Everything on the desk slowed until they came to a stop, several of the pieces toppling over.

I let out a sigh. “Jesus, that was—”

Rory pointed behind me toward the floor. “Not over,” she said.

I spun around. My little brick-and-clay monster fiend was tottering off across the floor at a remarkable pace, my feelings on it a mix of horror and pride. “Shit,” I hissed out. “Stupid teeny rampage.” I wasn’t sure how much damage the little guy could do, but I didn’t want to wait to find out, especially
with so many of Alexander’s precious books and works of art all around the space.

“Do something!” Rory shouted. “Stop it, Puppet Master!”

I reached out for it with my mind to disarm the little bastard, but it continued on, knocking one of my boots across the room and through a pane of glass on the French doors leading out to the terrace.

“I can’t control it,” I said, unable to exert my will over it, the connection lost. I reached for my large stone book on the table, picked it up, and ran after my creation.

I dropped the book on top of the figure, its legs flying off the body, shattering as they went lifeless. Signs of struggle from beneath the stone book continued until it slowed, then stopped altogether.

“You want to take back what you said earlier?” Rory asked after a moment of silence. “About you being in control of it?”

“Okay, fine,” I said, vexed that she had been wary and, worst of all, right. “I was controlling it at first, but I don’t know…I’ll concede, as you so astutely pointed out, that there might be some merit in my great-great-grandfather’s warnings about trickster spirits and the like, that spirits seek out a vessel to occupy. I guess any vessel will do. In some small way, that’s a positive, right?”

Rory went over to the stone book on the floor and hefted it up with her well-muscled but still petite arms. “
That
I might believe was some form of malevolent spirit, yes. But Stanis? He’s something completely different, far more complex, Lexi. I want you to learn how to build more of them for your family’s protection, but until you figure that part out, I wouldn’t play around too much with this part of the process.”

She handed me the book, and I laid it on one of the empty worktables nearby. “I need to get out of here,” I said, “before I destroy the place.”

Rory went to the folder off to the side of the worktable and picked up the bill of lading from the shipyard. “Brooklyn, then?”

I nodded, grabbing up my shoulder bag and single boot
before stepping carefully past the broken glass and out onto the terrace to fetch my other boot. “Let me change first,” I said, heading for the stairs at the back of the space that led down to my living area. “Hitting Brooklyn in overalls might make me blend in a little
too
much.”

Alexandra

T
he strangest thing about Brooklyn was figuring out where the hip, habitable areas ended and the closed, run-down areas began. Only when the crowds on the street thinned out did I find us heading in what looked to be the right direction. Some of the waterfront had been taken over by developers, all of the buildings fresh and new, but the address on the bill of lading took us well away from those to a land of shipping cargo containers stacked several stories high on top of one another, large freighters docked all along the water. We watched from a distance for about half an hour. The cargo area was patrolled by the occasional slow roll of a security van with Port Authority markings, but the ships themselves were comparatively unattended. A dockworker running a forklift pointed us down the long strip of pavement along the waterfront, and we set off counting down the slip numbers until we found the one on the paperwork.

“These people have been docked here for more than four months,” I said as we walked. “I want to know why, or at the very least if any one of them met with my brother that night.”

“What if they were the ones who dropped a building on him?”

“I guess we’ll see what I can drop on them, then.”

Rory and I stopped, looking up at the ship docked there. It was like the other freighters, more rust than paint on it, and it was massive, rising several stories higher than the tallest stack of cargo crates onshore.

“Well, now what?” she asked, shoving her hands deep into the pockets of her coat.

The gangplank leading from the ship met with a closed-in tower on the land, a door at street level leading into what I presumed were stairs within.

“We go up,” I said, and headed for the tower.

Rory grabbed my arm. “We do?”

“It’s broad daylight and there are security vans patrolling nearby,” I said. “Nothing’s going to happen. We go up on deck, check it out, and if things look too sketchy, we bolt for safety.”

“All right,” she said, letting go of my arm but still sounding unsure. “But I think we’ve already hit sketchy just by being down at the waterfront.”

We headed into the tower, metal stairs taking us up to the gangplank. We snuck off across it to the ship, my hands gripping onto both railings as we went, when a man appeared on the deck of the ship in a brisk walk toward the dock.

“Hey, Blue Hair!” he shouted in a gruff voice.

I touched the talisman around my neck, feeling only a remaining hint of its charge left. He apparently had noticed only Rory, but now that he was staring straight at my blue-haired friend, his eyes also turned to me. “You two…Did a couple of the crew order up some…entertainment?”

“Yes,” I said without thinking, running with the impromptu bluff. A wicked smile crossed his face and I dropped my hand away from my necklace. Unfortunately his eyes went straight to my talisman with recognition, and his face went from wicked and amused to dead cold.

“Holy shit,” he said, and, reaching into his coat pocket, pulled out a now-familiar sight to me, although I wished it wasn’t—a white-handled knife, held in his tattooed hand.

“Does this count as sketchy?” Rory asked.

“Totally,” I said. “Full retreat.”

I spun around with Rory, headed back toward the tower,
but before we got more than ten feet a man with a short brown crew cut and hard features came into view, blocking our way, a knife in hand also.

“Shit,” I said. The two of us started back out the center of the gangplank, men now closing in from both ends. I struggled to get my backpack off while holding on to the railing, and pulled Alexander’s tome free from it.

“Please tell me you have something,” Rory said.

“Not really sure what I can do on a metal walkway fifty feet off the ground,” I said, flipping through the pages, “but I’m looking.” Between the heights, the pressure, not having near enough time studying the book, and the men closing in, it didn’t look promising. “Don’t think I’ve got anything.”

The men were maybe ten feet away on either side of us, knives in hand. Rory turned to me, taking off her horn-rimmed glasses. “Hold these,” she said.

“What are you doing?” I asked, but it was too late to answer. Rory had already turned to face the man coming for me, running at him. At the last second she planted her hands on the railing, stepped up onto it, and, with an open-legged lunge, went over him. She landed with that dancer’s grace of hers, and brought her right leg around like a ballerina going into a turn, catching him behind the knee. He dropped, falling forward, and she planted the heel of her boot in the center of his back, driving him under the rail and off the gangplank, down into the water gap between the ship and shore.

Her eyes were wide, her face flush with anger. I had never seen her this way before. She tore past me toward the man still blocking our escape. As she ran, she planted her hands again on the railing, and, anticipating her, the man raised his knife high, unwilling to fall for the same thing his fellow toady had fallen for. I didn’t bother to tell him that the last thing you should do is try to anticipate Aurora Torres.

She wrapped her hands tight to the railing, and threw herself into a spin around the railing itself, coming in under it just as fast. The momentum slid her like a shot across the gangplank, again, perfect grace and form as she compacted herself down, shooting between his legs. Rory came up hard into his crotch
with both hands, using her accumulated speed to drive her bunched fists into him. He fell to the gangplank, the knife falling over the edge of it, and his hands flew to grab himself.

Rory rolled into a standing position, then came at the prone man, pummeling him with a barrage of kicks, her powerful legs lifting him each time she connected. The first few he reacted to in pain beyond that of her initial blow, but after the blood started flowing, he didn’t seem capable of reacting anymore and his eyes rolled back into his head.

“Whoa, whoa,” I said, pulling her back from the figure on the gangplank. “He’s down, he’s down.”

Rory’s eyes were wide, her breath coming in heavy rasps. Her muscles were tensed in my grip on her, reminding me of a feral cat I had once tried to rescue in an abandoned lot down in Alphabet City. I only hoped that Rory wasn’t about to leave me with a set of scars the same way the cat had.

The man at our feet still breathed, but I didn’t think he’d be getting up anytime too soon. Rory lashed her foot out in his direction to strike again, but I tugged her back from him even farther.

“Where the hell did you learn
that
?” I asked. Her wild eyes relaxed a little, but she stared through me. I shook her hard, her body loose in my hands like a rag doll.

“I don’t know,” she said, her words dull on her lips. “Years of dance training?”

“That’s wasn’t dance,” I said. “Dance isn’t brutal like that.”

Her eyes finally shifted to me, a hint of panic in them. “It’s pretty brutal, actually. You train your body hours on end and then something like this happens…I couldn’t help myself.” She looked down at her bloody boots, then over at him. “Crap…I didn’t kill him, did I?”

I let go of her and stepped toward the body, but not too close. If horror movies had taught me anything, it was to never get close to the lifeless body. I wasn’t going anywhere near enough for him to leap up and grab at me.

“I think he’s alive,” I said, looking him over. My eyes stopped on his face, which was covered in red. “There’s blood everywhere. You could have killed him, Aurora!”

Rory glared at me. “Very compassionate of you, Lexi, but he and his friend were both going to eviscerate us, if you remember thirty seconds ago. If you’ve got a problem with me keeping us alive, by all means, please let me know.”

I sighed. The familiarity of bickering with my old friend was oddly comforting in all this chaos. The sound of commotion rose up on the deck of the ship as a group of men started to form.

“We need to go,” I said, dragging a still-stunned Rory along with me. “Now.”

She didn’t answer, but I was glad to see she put up no resistance. After that display, I think I feared more for those men’s safety than ours.

Alexandra

R
ory’s brutality on the docks must have messed my head up more than I thought, and I spent another restless night tossing and turning as various gruesome combat scenarios played out in my head, almost all of them ending with our grisly deaths.

I didn’t want her doing the fighting for us, not if it brought out her inner cage fighter. Yes, I could learn to eventually—hopefully—build an army of gargoyles, but if yesterday’s early experiment with my little brick-and-clay friend was any indicator, that was a
long
way off.

The next logical step was to first restore the animated friend I already had—Stanis—as soon as I could, which meant hunting out more information about the missing soul stones and restoring them to the four slots hidden beneath the gargoyle’s chest. The strange and mixed language of my great-great-grandfather’s master tome was becoming clearer to me, but what I really needed time for was deciphering his myriad of notebooks and clues about the stones—the Crown of the Titan, the Eye of God, the Ruler’s Chest, and the Heart of the Home.

So after
another
quick morning of rescheduling real estate
showings for later, I spent my time searching through my great-great-grandfather’s library for notebooks that tied to the main book or references to the gemstones in question. A barrel or two of coffee helped to stave off my restless night, and after hours of following handwritten notes and book references down a variety of rabbit holes, one passage struck me about the Crown of the Titans, talking about the jeweled crown of the Titans down in Tartarus.