Chapter 2
MACHINATIONS ARE MUCH PREFERABLE TO LABOR
The damn flame burned like a hot poker to a sensitive arse cheek. At least it didn’t brand his palm like one. Apollo Chester—simply Mr. Apollo Chester to his great mortification—kept his hand above the flickering candle flame, just touching, despite the stinging.
All around him in the great alchemist master’s London forge, teenage boys threw their entire arms into raging fires. And pulled them out again unscathed.
Braggarts.
They barely winced when the flame leapt at their flesh, glowing and hard as metal. That was alchemists for you. Metal men. Cursed curiosities.
And a lot more talented than he’d ever given them credit for.
Not that he’d ever admit it out loud.
A giant, gloveless hand clapped him on the shoulder, and Apollo glared at it before picking it up via the intruder’s meaty thumb and dropping it into the air.
The man who owned the hand laughed, enormous and enormously irritating guffaws. “Such a tiny flame, Chester. Still working up your tolerance?”
The flame was a perfectly respectable size. Nothing tiny about it! “I’m improving. And the flame’s bigger than yesterday.” Apollo blew out the candle, rubbed his palm, and dipped it into a nearby bucket of water.
“It’s taking you much longer than my other apprentices.” Baxter Stone, Master of the Alchemist Guild, leaned a hip against Apollo’s worktable. “I wonder if it’s your advanced age or your transcendent blood holding you back?”
Good God, Apollo was nine and twenty, hardly an old man. And what a blow! To hear his transcendent heritage counted as a liability.
Oh, how far he’d fallen. From the heights of divinity all the way into the bloody ashes. But then he’d never belonged on Olympus, and the glamour magic that should have been his had skipped him entirely, gone to his cousin instead. Damn Diana.
Stone ran a hand through his yellow hair and gave a grin that was supposed to be charming but had a hint of slime about the corners. “Don’t worry, lad.”
Lad. How terribly condescending. Stone couldn’t be more than a decade older than Apollo. At most. Apollo resisted kicking the man in the balls.
Blissfully unaware of the danger to his nether regions, Stone clapped a hand on Apollo’s shoulder again.
“It’ll come. And then I’ll be the envy of every alchemist in the nation.
A transcendent tamed by my flames.” He laughed.
Enormous again. And enormously irritating.
Again. “You won’t miss your glamours when you’re forming steel in the forge, Chester.
Damn it, Quinn, careful with that!” He ran across the forge to yank something or other from an apprentice’s hold.
No idea what the device they were collaborating on was. Apollo wasn’t high enough up in the ranks to be privy to that information.
But once… once he’d been a god. Close to it, anyway. He relit the candle and passed his palm back and forth across it, making the tiny flame flicker like the glamours his grandfather had created before his death, those Apollo should have been able to create as the eldest son to the eldest son.
He pushed his chair backward, and it screeched across the stone floor.
The air was thick and suffocating. Every drag of it into his lungs like ashy soup.
He needed fresh stuff, needed sunlight. Moonlight at the very least. He crossed the forge, stepped into the floating chamber in the corner and pulled the lever.
With a jerk, the little wrought iron box began to inch upward and out of the smoky underground forge.
“What a pit,” Apollo mumbled, slouching against one iron-barred side of the device. His cousin-in-law’s forge was much preferable to this hot and odiferous hell. Situated beside the mews behind a reputable Bloomsbury Square residence, Temple Grant’s forge possessed enviable ventilation.
Apollo closed his eyes so tightly during the dark ascent that colors exploded behind his lids like fireworks. Or glamours. His lost birthright.
He’d lost everything.
But what he could build back up with his own two hands.
The floating chamber jerked to a stop, and he opened his eyes.
The long hallway just below the bottom level of the British Museum was busy with alchemists coming and going.
Fairy orbs bobbed about, lighting the entrances to the row of mobile platforms like the one he’d just used.
They went only Merlin knew where. He’d only been to the Master’s forge.
Before he’d apprenticed himself to Stone, he’d had no idea the alchemists possessed a guild headquarters in London.
He’d thought all that rot located in Manchester.
He’d been wrong.
“Often am,” he said, stepping into a dim lobby of sorts. One staircase and two long, dim corridors later, he found himself blinking in the first actual light he’d seen in—God, how long? Twenty-four hours? He’d never put this much work into anything.
No other way to claw back some sort of power, though. If he couldn’t have the clean, golden gleam of glamours, he’d cultivate the brute ferocity of alchemical invention. He’d show the damn world Apollo Chester wasn’t worthless.
“Fuck she’s heavy.” The voice, muffled and deep, came from the museum’s back entrance, a rectangle of light Apollo sleepwalked toward.
Apollo peeked into it. Three men crept through the dark.
One man carried something rather large and lumpy over a shoulder.
A blanket was thrown over the lumpy figure.
But a hank of long, yellow hair hung down, swinging near the man’s arse like a tail.
The men walked through a wall. No. Apollo knew better now.
No wall, that. A hidden alchemist corridor.
Apollo stood. He followed. Why not? Power was slow enough to come to his now hardworking, calloused hands (he mourned the smooth cuticles, buffed nails, baby-soft palms of his former life).
But there were other, quicker ways to get it.
A little blackmail could speed things up a bit.
He eased through the door and shut it silently behind him.
The men barreled down this new hallway—no fairy lights to brighten the way here—and stepped onto a large floating platform.
A pull of the lever and they descended out of view. He couldn’t follow.
But he could wait. And he did. But not for long. Soon the tops of the three men’s heads reappeared, then the rest of their bodies, and they stepped off.
Without their lumpy bundle.
They lumbered toward Apollo with backslaps and cries for ales at the nearest pub.
He clung to the shadows. What he wouldn’t give for a glamour, a little illusion to cast himself in obscurity. He had only an immensity of curiosity. It would do.
He stepped into the floating chamber, pulled the lever, and descended.
Other than their wrought iron ornamental gates, there were no barriers between the riders of the chambers and each floor. When he traveled to the forge each morning, he passed other smaller forges, offices, a library.
This descent was different. He watched nothing but solid rock pass, and when that rock gave way, it was a wall of iron bars. He pulled a small fairy orb from his pocket, and the heat from his palm activated its dim glow, cast a pale-yellow light on this new find.
A dungeon.
“Bloody hell.”
The platform jolted as it stopped, and Apollo grabbed the lever, looking left and right. No guards. No one, it seemed, occupying the little dirty cells. So he stepped off.
“Where’d they put her?” Depending on who she was and who’d ordered her here, Apollo could use this information to ingratiate himself with Stone.
Behind him, the floating chamber’s platform hummed and lifted. Someone had summoned the damn thing. Someone was coming from above.
Apollo’s orb revealed a long corridor stretching out in both directions, cells on either side of it.
A groan echoed down the one to Apollo’s left. He crept that way. If there was an open empty cell, he could hide until whomever was coming finished their business down here and left. He was in luck, every cell was empty. He had plenty of choices.
Another groan, the rustle of cloth against stone.
He hurried toward it, holding his orb high, and was rewarded with his first glimpse of the lump with yellow hair—a woman. Her men’s clothes revealed delicious curves. Right ones, perfect places. No wonder women didn’t wear trousers. Men would be wearing hard-ons all day long.
And those stays. Scandal. Laced over a man’s shirt, pushing her breasts up. Was he lusting after an unconscious woman?
Uncomfortably, yes.
An unconscious woman with lots of yellow hair tangled around a pale face. A pale, familiar face.
“Fuck,” he hissed. That was Temple Grant’s sister!
Temple Grant! Royal Alchemist to the Queen and married to Apollo’s cousin Diana.
The unconscious beauty was Diana’s sister-in-law!
Grant would not be happy about this. That the world’s most dangerous understatement.
If Grant thought Apollo had anything to do with his sister’s current predicament, he’d fashion a steel hammer from a garden gate and slam it into Apollo’s head.
The girl… what was her name? She groaned again, eyes fluttering but closed, and lifted a hand to her temple. Her head lolled to the side, opening the vulnerable curve of her naked neck.
He’d held a blade to her throat once, pressed it, cold in his hand, to the arteries in her pretty little neck. He’d been so damn high on potion and opium, he couldn’t remember much.
What he did remember, though—the curvy armful who’d smelled like warm wine and spices, the silk of her curled hair brushing his cheek. Her bright defiance, how she’d been strong and hissing like a cat in his arms.
He remembered, too, his intent to kill her if he had to.
The platform clanged onto the stone floor down the corridor.
Apollo cursed and shoved his orb back into his pocket, dousing its light.
Footsteps echoed through the dungeon as he dove into an open cell next to the one that held Grant’s sister.
He rolled into the darkness under a narrow cot and pressed himself against the cold bars that made up the walls of the cell.
The footsteps approached, each one louder than the last. Apollo craned his neck to peer into the hallway. Too dark. Couldn’t see a damn thing. Then light blinked on, and the dim glow of a fairy orb illuminated a man’s tall form sailing down the corridor with long, darkness-eating strides.
Apollo held his breath, not quite able to see the man’s face from this low angle as he opened the Grant woman’s cell. He stepped inside, kicked the girl.
Miss Grant groaned once more. She rolled to her side and pushed herself upright. “You.” Her voice was faint, groggy.
“Yes, me. Now, Sybil darling”—the man squatted, bringing his light and his face into view. Apollo swallowed a curse as the Master of the Alchemist Guild grinned—“you and I need to have a little chat.”
Sybil spit in the master’s face.
Her brother would assassinate the entire guild to avenge her. Not that she needed protection. She seemed to have it under control.
Stone’s hand struck out and clasped Sybil’s throat, cutting off a yelp as soon as it began.
Perhaps she didn’t, after all, have it under control.
But that meant…
God help her if Apollo had to play hero. He did not fit the job description. And if he jumped out of his hiding spot now and bashed Stone on the head with… something, he’d lose his apprenticeship.
Sybil clawed at Stone’s hand on her throat, and Stone released her, tossing her back to the floor. She rose, keening like a banshee, and slammed the Master against the iron bars. The entire cell shook.
She did seem to have it under control after all.
Perhaps it would be best if Apollo simply… waited it out. He rolled to his back, closed his eyes, and crossed his arms over his chest like one of the desiccated mummies on show in the museum above—cursed, rotting, his heart removed, forgotten, and sealed inside a jar.