Chapter 4
EAST AND WEST
Apollo was damned. A man couldn’t do the things he’d done and find heaven after he shuffled off this mortal coil. The only heaven for him was one he crafted right here on earth.
So he couldn’t free the Grant chit.
Or so he told himself as he left the museum. Locked in the dungeon, Miss Grant kept Stone’s secrets, well, secret. She couldn’t rat him out. Couldn’t rat Apollo out either, for not helping her. And positioned as he was between a rock and a hard place—a Stone and a Temple, ha!—he had to be careful.
Stone. A true villain, apparently, proficient in machinations, dastardly deeds, and maiden-napping. Made him much more fascinating than before. He’d never have thought the man had it in him.
In the museum’s bustling courtyard, Apollo blinked several times, his dark-accustomed eyes screaming in the sinking sun. No idea what time it was. Despite the heat, he pulled the collar of his greatcoat up high and slipped on his tinted glasses, turning the early-evening world a dark green.
He headed west.
He lived east, only a short walk from the museum, but he headed west, where his feet wanted to go, where they belonged.
Used to.
Grosvenor Square, the city home of the Marquess of Fordham. Marchioness of Fordham now, though she preferred the small terrace home she shared with her husband in Bloomsbury.
He turned the corner, and there it was—his old home, his old life.
White marble rising heavenward, clean glass windows and plush velvet curtains, wrought iron gates with no rust. Four huge mansions occupied the square, three of which were glamoured.
Golden swirls wrapped the white marble walls and columns, glinting in the setting sun.
The windows glowed a rainbow of colors that changed with the shifting light.
The fourth house had once looked like the others—wrapped in gold and rainbows, glamours to show the world where power slept each night and broke its fast each morning.
When his grandfather had been alive, it, too, had been glorious and glamoured.
But Diana didn’t believe in such frivolity, thought there were more useful occupations for her talent.
He wandered through the garden, trailing his fingers through the candles glamoured among the tree branches and bushes. They bobbed in the air like fairy orbs but possessed no substance. His fingers sent them scattering, only to have them reassemble before his eyes.
If he could only so easily reassemble his life.
Pointless, this self-pity.
Miss Grant had called him pathetic. She was right.
He rubbed his chest, just over his heart. The woman was still locked in a dungeon. Would Stone even remember to feed her?
Not his problem.
Carriage wheels slid across the street, the steel at their center smoothing over whatever rocks or potholes might jolt it about.
Leaving the garden behind him, Apollo recognized the crest on the carriage’s door—the Fordham coat of arms. The moon in front of the sun, surrounded by stars that looked like the sparks of newly made or dissolving glamours.
A woman stepped out of the carriage wearing a huge straw bonnet, the sleeves of her gown making her as wide as three women standing side by side. One smacked the footman helping her down in the arm. The footman, wisely, did not react.
Strolling across the street, Apollo said, “Good evening, Mother.”
She froze, swung toward him, then started to cry right in the middle of the damn street. “A-poll-ooooo!”
“Shh.” He whisked her into the shadowed, narrow stairwell that descended to the servant’s entrance. “Shh. No more caterwauling.”
She tilted her face to the sky and sobbed, her bonnet falling off. Her blonde hair had more silver in it than last time he’d seen her, and the lines around her watery blue eyes were deeper. “L-look at youuuuuu!”
“Bloody hell. What’s wrong with me?” He tilted his hat back and took off the glasses, shoved them back into his greatcoat pocket.
“Y-you look like one of theeee—”
“If you wail one more time, Mother, I’ll stuff my gloves in your mouth.” He didn’t have gloves, had left off wearing them once he’d started his apprenticeship.
“—eeeeeeem.” She sniffled, seemed to be winding up for another good crack at busting his eardrums. The hand she wiped across her lower eyelids trembled, and the pale-pink glove she wore came away streaked with tears.
“Damn,” he mumbled. “Mother, it’s not that bad.”
“Not that bad? Apollo! You look just like one of those brutes. No gloves. Skin streaked with soot. And oh”—she snatched up one of his hands and worried over his fingernails—“look. Short and blunt and torn. They don’t even shine anymore.”
“Alchemists don’t shine, Mother. They smolder.”
She sniffed, pulled herself up tall, apparently healed from her fit of sorrow. “You used to be so beautiful.”
He leaned against the nearby wall and crossed his arms over his chest. “It’s lovely to see you, too, Mother. How long has it been? Six or so months?”
She clutched his lapels and yanked him closer, until they were nose to nose. “Come home, Apollo.”
He was damned tired of being tossed about by his clothing today. He shook his mother off. “I am going home. As soon as we’re done with this little reunion.”
“A little hovel somewhere in East London. No, Apollo. You don’t belong there. You belong here. Diana has said you may stay.”
“I’m not living here.”
“Then at least give up on this foolish little hobby. You can’t truly mean to become an alchemist. They’re so…” She eyed him up and down. “Dirty.”
“I do mean to become an alchemist. Apologies for disappointing you so.”
“But it’s so dangerous. Why, just last year our dear Diana was almost murdered after she married that Royal Alchemist fellow.”
He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Because I am the one who almost murdered her.”
She slapped his arm. “Pshaw. You would not have. You were just a trifle upset, which is understandable, considering…”
God, he hated that look of pity. “If you’re scared of anyone it should be me, a useless transcendent without a single ounce of magic in my bones.” Without, even, a soul.
“No, no. It’s the alchemists, dear. Why, just today another young lady has gone missing.
You may know her—Temple Grant’s sister. It’s where I’ve just come from.
Dear Diana called upon me for gossip.” His mother pulled herself up tall.
If she’d been a chick, her feathers would have ruffled with pride.
If Apollo were a chicken—and he most likely was—his feathers would have ruffled, too. But for an entirely different reason. “Missing, you say?”
“Oh yes. Abducted from right in front of her own home. The cook or someone like that saw it with her own eyes.”
“Did she?”
“See? You must return home this very evening. East London is so dangerous. If a girl who’s lived there her whole life—”
“I believe she lives in Hampstead Heath. Hardly East London, that.”
“—can come to such an end, then a helpless young lad like you, innocent and—”
“Mother.”
She stopped talking only to look at him with eyes rimmed by glinting tears.
He took her hand and patted it. “I’m not returning here.”
“But cook will have made a lovely meal. Beef. Asparagus. Diana has left all your grandfather’s wine, and—”
“No.”
“We’ll get you new clothes and”—she withdrew her hand from his embrace—“gloves. And we’ll—”
“No.” He began to climb the stairs.
She hurried after him. “Diana has more than enough money to provide for you, too.”
“Absolutely not.” At the top of the stairs, he kept going down the street.
“Apollo!”
The foot he’d taken his next step with hovered over the ground. He wet his lips, swallowed to wet his throat. Finally he put the foot down and looked over his shoulder at her.
His mother stood on the Grosvenor Square mansion’s doorstep. Candlelight from inside flooded out of sparkling clean windows behind her, casting her face in shadow.
“You do not have to punish yourself,” she said.
“Punishment? You think that’s what this is about? Look around you. Nothing here belongs to me. And no matter what I do, it never will. I’m not wasting my time mourning what I can’t have. I’m not living on borrowed money and pity.”
“It’s your birthright as much as hers.” In the gathering night, his mother’s voice seemed small, a fragile thing.
“My birthright…” He’d been raised to think it so, been raised to know exactly who he was and what his future would look like.
Wait till the death of his grandfather, inherit the money, the lands, the magic.
Join the House of Lords, manage his estates, marry, sire an heir, then help that pudgy baby boy do the exact same as he had done in the exact same order. His life had been preordained.
Now his future stretched before him like an endless black void—empty and unknowable.
“You can always visit me, Mother. If you’re brave enough.” He slipped his glasses back on, tipped his hat, and continued down the street.
By the time he reached his lodgings, night had swallowed London.
The staircase to his room was narrow, steep, and crooked, and the door at the end of the hallway at the top of those stairs was too. He used his key to let himself in. Too dark to see the sparse furnishings. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his fairy orb, set it aglow.
A bed, a window, a table. One fucking chair. No curtains. No rug. He flung off his greatcoat and collapsed onto the bed. It creaked beneath his weight, the springs begging for a quick death.
Like he’d once done. He scrubbed his palms down his face then turned on his side to sleep.
Oh God, you’re dimmer than an unflamed fairy light.
He chuckled. Miss Sybil Grant was a spitfire. Exactly the kind of woman he’d always had a soft spot for. Too bad she was rotting in a dungeon.
Do you care about nothing? No one? You are selfish…
He growled and covered his ears as if doing so would block out the echo of her voice in his mind. “Your brother will find you, princess. Leave me alone.”
Pathetic.
“I’m not going after you.” He needed his beauty sleep.
Do not leave! You can’t leave me here!
He groaned, rolling onto his back. After a long sigh, forceful enough to blow down the thin walls around him, he slammed his boots to the ground.
He really wasn’t the right man to play at knight in shining armor.
But Miss Grant’s brother was a favorite of the queen. And she might prove a useful pawn against Stone.
“Damn you, princess. I’m coming.”