It erupted in flames. They licked my skin, up to my elbow, casting a strange orange light on the girl’s face. It didn’t hurt—the flames never burned me—but once they were loose, they could do irreparable damage. They could kill.
I had to end this quickly before someone died. Black Lipstick was distracted. I swung my chain, the metal links shimmering as they arced in the air. I let go, and the chain twisted and buckled like a silvery snake. It hit the girl, coiling around her, getting tighter, slithering around her wrists. The knife dropped from the girl’s hands as she struggled to get away.
Flames licking my fingers, I crouched and turned, searching for Laurel and Hardy. My lungs were bursting, begging for air, but tendrils of the sorrow smoke still circled us. Trying to ignore the pounding in my head, my eyes flickered around, searching. I found Laurel pretty much where I had left him. He was lying on the ground in a fetal position, his eyes staring ahead, his face vacant. The smoke had been thickest near the ground, and he had presumably sucked in lungfuls of it when he gasped in pain. He was completely lost in misery.
But where was Hardy? A man the size of a small moon doesn’t just disap—
Something hard slammed into the back of my head. I tumbled forward, hitting the street, the surprise and pain making me gasp, inhaling the bittersweet smoke. I coughed, taking another breath, as I rolled around. Hardy stood above me, looking down.
Alchemy depended in part on your target. A man the size of Hardy would hardly be affected by my tiny vial. He seemed slightly upset, like a man who’s just realized he’s going to be late for work. Not so much sorrow as mild discomfort.
I wish I could say the same about me.
The sadness started from my lungs, spreading throughout my body. I suddenly felt it, the loneliness that always hovered over my shoulder. The person I loved most in the world had been taken from me five years ago. I hardly had time to meet my friends, had no parents, no family. With Breadknife always in the background, all I could do was scramble to survive. When was the last time I’d had a chance to enjoy myself? To spend some time with people I liked? To fall in love?
Five years ago, that was when. Hugging a tiny human in my arms, kissing her small head, whispering to her that we’d always be together, already knowing it was a lie. I should have kissed her more, held her tighter, smelled her just one more time before they took her away.
I hardly noticed that I was trembling on the street’s cobblestones, sobbing, tears turning everything to a blur. Through a veil of tears, I saw the fuzzy shape of Hardy pick up the backpack that held all my night’s earnings, and walk away into the darkness.
Chapter Five
I finally managed to get up from the road, still heaving deep, choking sobs. The four thugs were gone. My silvery chain was discarded on the ground by my bicycle. I scooped it up, and it coiled around my wrist, looping several times, creating an intricate bracelet. My bicycle seemed unharmed, and I righted it and pushed it to my store door, only a dozen yards away. Luckily, my key was in my pocket, and not my backpack. I took it out, unlocked the store, and shuffled inside, carrying the bicycle with me.
All I wanted to do was curl up on my bed in the back room and weep. The thugs had taken my backpack, and with it my money, some expensive ingredients and products, and my favorite coral red lipstick. I didn’t have the payment for Breadknife. I was lonely and hurt and…
And still under the effect of the sorrow fumes. I dragged my body, still full of self-pity, to the counter, where a few tiny vials containing a dark brown liquid stood. I unstopped one, drinking it in one quick gulp. It was oily, and tasted like pee. It was the most important tincture in my shop.
The first thing every alchemist learns is: Always have an antidote. Alchemy is a delicate process, and prone to accidents. Sometimes you might cook the llama’s saliva too much, sometimes you might spill some virgin’s tears into a vat of acid. Seriously, don’t get me started on what happens when you mix beetle dung with vampire dandruff. And, of course, as was the case now, you could accidentally inhale, swallow, or touch your own concoctions. It could get messy, and occasionally deadly. Always have some quick antidotes at hand.
I had more than thirty different cures and antidotes in my shop, but the one I’d just drunk, Margherita’s fix-it-all, was the one that usually worked best. It countered most of the poisons and effects created by alchemy magic. The only real drawback was its abysmal taste. I always carried a vial with me. I’d had one on me earlier, but it had been stolen with the rest of my backpack.
I sat down in the chair behind the small wooden counter, letting the antidote take effect. Slowly, the general weepiness and self-pity I felt dissipated. Tonight had been a shit-show, no doubt about it, but feeling sorry for myself would not help, and was something I preferred to avoid. I tended to ignore all the sadness and anger and guilt I felt, bottling them inside me and never letting them out, like any healthy person does. Let it fester, that’s my motto.
I leaned back into the chair, gazing around me. Tonight’s turbulent events made me look at the shop in a new light. The shop was safety. It was my home.
Quite literally, to be honest. I couldn’t possibly afford to rent two places, so the front room was the shop, and the two rooms in the back were my lab and my bedroom. But the shop was hands-down my favorite of the three.
It was the size of a small grocery store, and I had installed shelves on almost all the walls, going up to the ceiling. These were crowded with bottles, vials, jars, glass tubes, crystals, herbs, and cloth bags of all shapes, sizes, and colors. There was one window, and a shaft of pale moonlight shone on the wooden floorboards. The shop’s electrical light, coming from one dim bulb, wasn’t enough to really shine into the nooks and corners of the room, which gave the entire setting an aura of mystery. Though it hadn’t been intentional, I liked the effect, and had chosen to leave it that way.
My counter was by the wall directly in front of the door. Though the rest of the shop was crowded, the counter itself was always clean and empty except for a small cash register, and a black bound book in which I jotted down any customer orders I didn’t have on hand. My chair had been a gift from Sinead after she’d realized, aghast, that I was using a rusty bar stool. The chair was wooden, with light gray upholstery that already had a slight hollow in the shape of my ass.
Reasonably sure that my fit of misery and sadness had ended, I got up and opened the back door.
A large white shadow dashed at me from the darkness. It barked joyfully, then whined, then barked again, wagged its tail, ran three times around me, and finally, done with the spectrum of canine emotions, sat squarely down, tongue lolling in a permanent delighted grin.