Chapter 21 The Future
THE FUTURE
Apollo watched Sybil sleep. Her face soft, her hair spread around her like a halo, like one of those old paintings of the Virgin Mary with a burst of light behind her.
Sybil was a renaissance divinity, pure art.
Pure soul.
Pure.
And not for him.
He slipped out of the bed and pulled the blankets tight around her shoulders.
He hovered nearby until he was convinced she still slept, then he dressed and returned to his room down the hall.
He packed only what he could easily carry in a satchel, then he made his way downstairs to the conservatory.
He trailed his hands along palm fronds and checked the soil of the herbs he’d been growing in a back corner.
He avoided the table in the middle of the room. The one where they had their tea. The one where, squat as a spider, the device lay. Innocent, unassuming, as if it wasn’t even capable of changing the world.
Or a single man’s life.
The sky beyond the glass was brightening, but not enough yet to break through the already rolling fog. He found Governor Grimm and stroked one long, flexible stem.
“I have to leave.” A breath. “I’m not taking you with me.” Another breath. “You have to remain here in case she needs you. You didn’t belong to me anyway. I stole you. I stole…” Her. These foggy days and golden nights.
Working his throat was almost impossible, but he managed to swallow a lump lodged there.
A voice cleared behind him. Not Sybil. He would have felt her coming for him. Somehow. He slipped his hand into his pocket. His lump of gold was there, shaped by her hand into a little spiral. An earthworm, she’d said, because he liked to play in the dirt.
He huffed a laugh, pulling it out of his pocket. A golden worm. A slimy thing that worked its way through the darkness of soil. Fitting.
“Good morning, Mrs. Collins,” he said.
“Good morning, sir.”
“I’m leaving shortly.” He turned, slipping the gold back into his pocket. “I’m not returning.”
She nodded, not a hint of surprise across her lined face. “That’s for the best, Mr. Chester.”
His brows shot up. “You knew?”
“’Course I knew. You look much like your father. A little like your mother about the eyes. And there’s all the carousing you’ve been doing with the lass.”
“You knew that, too, then.”
She snorted. “Not a subtle bone between your eight limbs and four eyes. Two brains but neither capable of hiding very well.”
“Have you told the marchioness?”
“I should have. But this house is more yours than hers.”
He laughed, and it felt so sharp, so loud, he feared the glass surrounding them would break. “None of it is mine.”
She nodded, looking out the window. “Your grandfather won this house in a game of cards. Won me, too, I suppose, since I came with it. I never met him. His wife came here shortly after he won it, when I was still young. She stayed here till she died.”
“You knew my grandmother?”
Mrs. Collins nodded. “She used to spend an awful lot of time in this room. She used to glow. Like you do.”
“I don’t… People don’t—”
“They do sometimes. With enough warmth and love. Your grandmother was a gardener. Of many kinds of things. Things would grow for her with nothing more than a smile, a tender touch.”
This was maudlin. Unnecessary. Apollo snapped up the device, stuffed it into his satchel, and made for the door but paused right on the threshold. “Thank you. For keeping me—us—secret.”
“The new marchioness is a good woman. She came here right after all the excitement in London last year, visiting all her properties with that alchemist husband of hers. She’s a good sort. But it’s… not right, taking away your title, your magic. You were born to carry it.”
“I… I do not think I was.” He crept out of the house and into the sticky morning.
He was saddling a horse when the gold in his pocket began to burn.
“Shit.” He reached into his pocket and tried to pull it out, dropped it. Too hot. The rings of the spiraled worm were melting, separating. He knelt to pick it up when he heard her footsteps.
Sybil was coming for him.
Forget the gold. No time. He whipped the buckles tight, put a foot in the stirrup, and—
“Apollo?”
Both feet off the ground, one leg set to sling over the horse’s back—caught.
He could finish mounting and sprint out that door without a word, without a single look back. He was a coward, after all. A worm.
His boot made no sound as it returned to the dusty stable floor. He licked his lips, wanting to look at her, knowing he shouldn’t look at her.
She stood framed by the stable doors, wearing nothing but her shift and wrapper, her long golden hair tumbling down her back in soft waves that frizzed in the sticky air. The sun rose behind her, stretching yellow and pink tendrils low across the horizon.
“Without saying goodbye?” she said, chin lifted. A challenge. Her bare toes peeked out from the hem of her wrapper.
They were dirty and probably cold, and if he looked at them any longer, he’d cry.
He tried a laugh, tried a lazy grin. Both felt wrong, but they kept away the tears. “Thought it would be easier.”
Her gaze flicked to the satchel slung across his shoulder. “I saw you… In the conservatory. I saw…” She extended her hand. “Give it back.”
The device. “No.”
Her hands became fists at her sides. “It’s mine.”
“As I see it, the ownership is precarious. Stone stole it. You stole it—”
“And now you’ll steal it?”
He bowed low. “It’s what scoundrels do, princess.”
“No.” She took a few steps closer, her fists opening like flowers blooming. Too soon, though. The petals would meet frost from a winter not yet done with the world. “Give it back. Stone will only use it for his own gain.”
“I’ve heard your arguments. I have my own.”
“I’m safe.”
“He’ll come for you. Over and over again.
He’ll come for you.” Somehow, he’d moved closer to her while talking.
He could reach out with a bent arm and touch the tip of her impertinent chin.
“I’m giving him the device.” Her lips thin and hard, but he could soften them.
He leaned forward, missing a breath and a heartbeat.
Didn’t need either with her lips to keep him alive.
She would have met him. Let him. Melted against him.
But he pulled back toward the horse.
She scrambled after him, fury splashed red across her cheeks. “You don’t care about me! You want the device for yourself. Power. Isn’t that what you’ve always dreamed of? A return of everything you once lost.”
He turned his back to her. “That’s right, princess.” One foot in the stirrup. One heart beaten and bloody in the dirt.
“No.” Her hand on his back, the lightest touch. The most painful, too. “No, I’m sorry. I don’t think you would… well, you might, but… Apollo, please don’t. Let us talk about this.”
His foot hit the ground with a thud, and he spun around. They were chest to heaving chest now. “And what? Have your brother discover us naked in your bed? I can’t stay. You know that.”
“Yes.” So soft, so breakable. “I know. But do not leave like this. What if we—”
“There is no we, Sybil. There is nothing to us but a few weeks of memorable fucking.”
Her face screwed up, little wrinkles sliding up her nose.
“Yes, fucking.” He crowded her, and she stumbled backward, but still he kept going, step by step, trying not to lift his hand and smooth those disgusted wrinkles with the pad of his thumb.
Then her back hit the wall beside the doors, and the breath escaped her lungs on a gusty exhalation.
He slapped a hand above her head and leaned in even farther, trapping her.
“That’s what men and women do when there’s no future for them.
They have a good time then they wave goodbye.
Did you think it was anything else? Anything more? ”
Her throat bobbed and her bottom lip quivered, but she bit into it, tamed it, and damn the sight of her little white teeth shot right to his cock.
“I… I don’t know. Maybe there could be. You can’t simply go back to Stone’s forge.
What will you do? Be his pawn the rest of your life?
Bow to small, mean men to grasp whatever power you can? ”
“If that’s all that’s left to me.” But the image, the prophecy, sliced through his skin like a blade. “I could ask you the same questions. What will you do when you return? Hide away in corners with a bright smile? Sneak off to an abandoned forge when you think no one is looking?”
Her jaw ticked.
“When you return to London, will you stand up to your brother? Live your own life? Defy all those rules you honor but secretly wish to smash? If I am doomed to live a small life, so are you, Sybil.”
Her chest seemed to cave in. If she looked up at him, he knew her eyes would be shiny with unshed tears.
With a breath, he mastered his temper. He’d not wanted to leave her like this. He’d hoped to leave with their time tucked into his memory like a diamond he would bring out and shine now and then.
But he’d just proved it was nothing more than a paste jewel—beautiful but fragile. And he’d destroyed it.
“There is no future for us, Sybil. There’s barely one for me. Barely one for you.” At least not the ones they wanted.
She lifted her chin, and he’d been correct. Tears shone in her eyes like stars. But that chin—defiant and set. And behind the tears like stars—a wild bloody witch, ready to curse him and his whole lineage.
“You’re right,” she snapped. “There is nothing for us.”
“We were only—”
“Fucking.”
Lies. “Precisely.” His heart felt like a plant grown too large for its pot, roots pushing through soil, meeting the barrier of hardened clay, bone-hard rib and fire-strengthened muscle.
The clay would eventually break, the roots crawling to freedom.
But his heart couldn’t snap bone, couldn’t rip through muscle. Better to shrink it. Try to.
Sybil’s eyes glistened. “I’ll never speak to you again.”
“That was going to happen anyway.” When she parted her lips, no doubt to object, he rushed in before she could speak, bumping the side of his nose against the side of hers. Lips brushing, breath mingling. “Tell me I’m wrong.”
She wrenched her head to the side, squeezing her eyes closed.
“You can’t. My past, your family, their connection to the queen…
You and I are like this fog. Past the drive of Foggy Hill House, we dissolve.
We aren’t made for lasting.” Lasting. It felt ridiculous to even say it out loud.
That’s how ephemeral they were. He stepped away from her.
“I do this for you, princess.” Back to the horse, all the way up into the saddle this time.
“You do it for yourself.” She marched toward him, stopped mid step. She bent and picked something up, held it up to him.
His gold. One half of it from when it had melted. The other lay glinting in the dirt.
He gripped the reins tightly, but she wouldn’t drop the glittering lump, so he took it, pocketed it, then urged the horse out the door.
She screamed, a piercing thing, flinging her frustration and rage into the air. His horse made a noise, flicked its ears, but Apollo pressed it forward, curving down the drive. She screamed again, this one louder. Birds careened off the branches of nearby trees that lined the road.
It echoed for a moment, her anger hanging in the air, thicker than the fog that meandered through the yellow morning. Then there was nothing.
But he still heard it, her scream. Probably always would.
He’d rather remember other things. How it felt when her heat rose up to meet his.
The kiss at the gate. A trail of honey down her inner thigh.
A worktable that had seen more naked body parts than some marriage beds.
How she looked at just this hour when the sky was new, the fog rolling against her bedchamber window—fresh, sleep hugging her tightly as he crept out of her chamber.
He crept out of her life now. Moving south, the sun rising on his left.
To London.
To Stone.
To his future.
He could see it in exquisite detail—obtainable, what he’d always wanted so very near.
The power of being the only alchemist with the knowledge of true alchemy.
He could keep that knowledge or sell it to the highest bidder.
Riches a given, a title possible. One in the Guild—and perhaps even a new title given by the queen.
He could never be the Marquess of Fordham again.
But he could be a baron or an earl. Even a new title would be better than none.
He could…
He could…
Be thrice cursed and eternally damned.
Because Sybil would despise him for using the device for his own gain.
Not his gain. Hers. He was keeping her safe. He needed to keep her safe. And he’d adopt a pet cause, donate to… to orphans or soldiers or… found a damned school where women could learn alchemy.
Hell.
None of it mattered.
She’d never forgive him.
Apollo rode south, the sun hot on his left, a banshee cry burned into his ears, and he tried not to think about what he’d broken behind him.
Tried.
And failed.