Chapter 19 Transformation
TRANSFORMATION
When Apollo reached the forge, Sybil was already growing the fire. A warm summer breeze lifted the curls at her nape. She’d twisted her hair high on her head and secured it with a metal spike of some sort.
He slipped his gold out of his pocket where it had been since she’d shaped it into a rose that morning.
He leaned a hip against the worktable and called up his inner heat, let the gold come alive in his hand until he could melt one end of the gold, twisting and tempering it.
He pushed back his heat and let the gold cool.
If he had some rubies, he’s place them in the gold, in the spiraling nest of tendrils he’d shaped at one end—drops of blood to wink out from her haphazard coil of hair.
He didn’t, though, so when it cooled and his muscles ached, swollen from metal’s energy, it felt incomplete.
Long and tapered on one end, elaborate curved tendrils on the other.
An ornament not good enough. But all he could give her.
He joined her at the fireside and pulled the metal spike from her hair. Silver, plain, serviceable. He tossed it with a clunk to the worktable as her hair fell to her shoulders.
She blinked up at him with a little crease between her brows that he soothed with the pad of his thumb before circling one finger above her head.
“Turn around,” he said, and when she did, still frowning, he gathered the thick, soft mane of golden hair and twisted it up once more. Gently, he slipped his newly forged gold into the coil of her hair. “There. All done. You may continue.”
She reached up a hand to touch the new hairpin, the twisted coiffure. “I am not surprised you know how to do a woman’s hair.”
He shrugged and returned to the large table to watch her work.
He needed to go outside to the lake. The gold’s energy had stretched him tall and wide; he felt like a restless beast. He needed to prowl.
And it was not just the gold’s energy making him so.
As much as he’d denied it, he had done something in the magnifying room.
Feeling too little and worthless to give this woman everything she deserved, he’d taken up those vines as an extension of himself.
Not quite consciously. More like he’d put a silent prayer out into the universe, and the plants had answered.
God, he didn’t want to think about that, about what it meant.
His grandmother’s journal talked about plants as if they were her children, as if they could talk back, greet her, hug her, love her.
It all felt fucking lonely. To be so dismissed you had to imagine a rosebush de-thorning itself to offer a safe caress.
Ridiculous. Pitiful.
But something had happened, and that knowledge made him restless and sharp, and the beast in him, born of soil and gold, would not leave Sybil. So he paced the forge like a lion caged and kept an eye on her.
“What are you doing?” he asked when she set the device protype into the blazing fire.
“I think it needs to be hot. We need to melt the lead down to discover its components.” She held the prototype with long tongs and flipped it over again and again above the glowing coals. When it was glowing, too, she set it on the nearby anvil. “Bring me lead, please.”
He did, and she dropped it into the open chamber where it sat, a lifeless lump.
“And now…?”
She bit her bottom lip and smoothed her palms down her hips. “I don’t know. It’s circular. The inventor must have meant for the entire shape to be used to advantage. Why else form it that way?”
“Don’t ask me, princess.” He busied himself tidying the shelves on the other side of the room, pretending not to watch her.
“What if…” She reached for the bellows and stuck the tip of it in the opening of the prototype. Then she squeezed air into it.
The lead quivered.
They shared a look, and excitement shivered up his spine.
More air from the bellows, more quivering lead, but as the protype cooled, the lead quit moving.
“Let me try,” Apollo said. “There are other ways to get it to go round.”
She flicked a wrist at him, stepping away from the prototype.
He didn’t bother with the tongs, stuck his hands right into the coals with the prototype, guarding himself against the heat but adding some of his own. His arms and hands glowed as orange as the coals when he removed them.
“Now what?” she asked.
He hung the prototype about his wrist, opening bubble at the top, then he dropped the lead into the opening. And then he began to swing his arm, using force to swing the ring round and round his wrist. He could hear the lead tumbling about inside, finding a smooth rhythm.
“Fascinating,” Sybil breathed, inching nearer.
And didn’t that make him feel like preening. Faster and faster, he swung the ring, the lead inside until the sound shifted, became less the scratch of hard metal against hard metal. It was… softer now.
He set the ring on the table, and they peered inside. It had changed.
Sybil stuck two fingers in the opening. He could almost hear her heart pounding. Or was that his own? She pulled out the lead. And it had changed. But it wasn’t gold.
“It’s become rather”—Sybil squished it between fingers and thumb—“puttylike.”
“Hm.” He tried not to make a single-syllable sound so utterly despondent. And failed.
She patted his shoulder. “It was an excellent idea. But I do not think juggling is the answer. Let us try again.”
And they did. Again and again they tried as the sky darkened to navy and navy became diamond-dotted black. Soon, gold would seep in at the edges of the world.
No gold in the forge, though. Only the dull impervious stubbornness of lead.
Sybil’s eyes were red rimmed from exhaustion. His must be too. His stomach growled, and his muscles screamed, and his mind was as much a putty now as the lead had been when the morning had still been dark as soil rich enough for healthy plant roots.
He tried to pull Sybil toward the door, one hand around her wrist, the other splayed across her ribs. A gentle tug. “You need sleep. We’ll try again later.”
“One more time.” She made for the fire instead of the exit. She needed sleep then food, and if she didn’t care for herself above some foolish device, some goddamned fairy tale, he was going to toss her over his shoulder.
But… Sybil wanted this.
“One more time,” he said with a sigh.
She heated the ring and set it back on the worktable. They’d taken notes all night, and so he knew they’d already tried every conceivable way to make the lead go round the tubing, to coax it into being something it wasn’t. What more was there to try?
Sybil picked up a chunk of lead. She closed it between her prayer-shaped palms and sent up a plea to the heavens, the name Hestia silent on her lips.
She cupped her hands around the lead and made a little opening, her hands like the bubbles around the ring.
She whispered into the bubble, little soothing words he could not quite make out, her hands warming with her own inner heat.
Then she put the lead into the orange-hot prototype and seemed to search the heavens for an answer to what to do next, what method to try.
They’d tried them all.
And she must have come to the same conclusion because she closed her eyes, her lovely face tight with barely restrained sorrow and defeat, and she collapsed against the table, her arms and chest and cheek pressed against the already scorched and dented wood, her lips and face close to the prototype that would likely never work as she wanted it to.
Apollo laid a hand on her back. “Try again later. You’ll figure it out.”
Her back rose with a massive inhalation. He felt as if that breath entered him through his palm and inflated his chest, too, as if she were the bellows and he the fire. Her exhale was just as massive, and it drained him, hollowed him out as her body sank toward the table.
The prototype glowed, shook, then the little bubble where the lifeless lead lay pulsed.
Sybil snapped upright and back a step, right into his chest. “Did you see that?”
“Yes.”
“I’m scared to look.”
“I’m not.” He snapped up the ring and shook it, opening down, until the lead dropped onto the table.
Not lead.
Gold.
They stared at it, the pink-and-yellow sky seeping through the windows and across the table.
When Sybil reached out a hand, it was shaking, but still she managed to take the gold between her hands and turn it in the glowing light. “It looks real.” Her words a whisper.
He took the gold from her, turned up the heat of his body and melted it in his palm. “It is real. Look—gold all the way through.” He closed his hand on the golden puddle, opened it and dropped a sphere into Sybil’s palm. “You did it.”
“I did it. I did it!” She threw her arms around his neck and kissed him. And through her kiss, he learned the taste of joy. Hot like sunlight, sweet like a summer berry, perfect like a happy Sybil.
He kissed her back.
Then he did more, laying her on the worktable and undoing her completely.
Gone clothes and barriers. Gone doubts and fear.
They were gods who had uncovered secrets.
The world lay like a golden sphere in their palms. And the energy from that night’s exertions still powered along his veins.
He was hard as steel and bigger than usual, and he felt like a brute stripping his Sybil bare in the colorful pools of the sunrise.
But she was larger, too, shaped by the fire, the gold. A transformation.
Look at how she reached for him and touched him, how she shared her light so eagerly.
Nothing but pleasure in rushing pinks across her skin as he marked her breasts and inner thighs with the coarse stubble on his jaw and cheeks.
Nothing but greed in her blue eyes as she traced his muscle and stroked his cock.
Nothing but delight in her gasp when he thrust inside her and she fell apart, her climax turning her golden.
“Apollo,” she moaned.
The way she said his name… sultry and breathy and… something more, something deep as the earth and just as old, just as profound.
He came quick and hard, her name like an old prayer to an ancient god, wrenched from his lips as they gasped near her ear, in the lovely, warm home that was the nape of her neck.
She lay panting and happy on scorched wood, almost purring in the pool of sunlight cascading across them when the fog rolled in.
Typical for the morning here. She gave a little shiver, and he gathered her up, took her to the small sofa that he’d kept in the room when he’d refurnished it into a forge.
He lay down upon it and settled her atop him.
They wouldn’t have long to enjoy the press of body against body before Mrs. Collins woke up and began to poke about.
“We did it,” she said with a breathy laugh, ear pressed to his chest. She drew a spiral on his muscle, narrowing in and widening outward, again and again. “The secret to true alchemy. The transmutation of lead to gold. Us.” She looked up at him, eyes wide with wonder. “An apprentice and a woman.”
He kissed the tip of her nose, and she settled back down on him again. That she’d done this thing was no wonder. She was Sybil.
“No wonder Stone wants it,” she mused. “Lead to gold. The man who possesses this device also possesses power. Wealth. Everything his heart desires.” She yawned. “No wonder he was willing to kidnap me to get it.”
If the master alchemist had been willing to steal Sybil to get a theoretical device, what would he do once he discovered the fairy tale was real? It was, technically, Apollo’s job to apprise him of these little details.
Where Sybil was.
What she was doing.
What would Stone do for the information Apollo had?
What would he give Apollo for it?
Power.
Money.
Titles.
Everything Apollo had ever wanted.
And the key to it all had fallen asleep on his chest, listening to the cursed beating of his heart.