Chapter 5
Noah had been letting Kizzy take over his brain long enough.
He wondered if her rejection had anything to do with her being out of his league, and he had worried about it before.
She was probably making three times his salary.
Kizzy didn’t seem the type to be attracted to money and power, but then again, he didn’t know her that well yet.
The alchemy idea had intrigued him from the start, and if her reluctance to date him was a matter of salary, well, being able to turn lead into gold would go a long way to proving or disproving that theory. It was time to put his old chem class skills to the test.
He had picked up the last of the items he’d needed on Monday, and he would have all of today to experiment. Then it was back to work on Wednesday.
Finding sources of lead wasn’t the hard part.
He’d learned all kinds of things contained lead—bullets, paint, artificial turf, toys, and even candy!
Yikes! Yet the amount of pure lead was often negligible.
Even reclaiming lead shot resulted in about five percent actual lead after all the other metals and alloys were removed.
He had an old Revolutionary War musket ball he’d bought on eBay for some damn reason.
That must contain a lot of pure lead. Maybe its use was finally revealing itself.
The heavy pellet sank quickly to the bottom of the chemical bath, and he swirled the beaker around to remove any grime that had attached itself to the lead ball over the centuries. After a quick rinse and a few minutes in the evaporating dish, he determined it was as clean as he could make it.
He transferred it to the crucible, which already contained a few ingredients mentioned in the Latin translation.
As a modern science nerd, Noah realized pure gold was not something that could be manufactured.
All the gold on earth had been formed billions of years ago when a star went supernova.
To think of recreating the big bang in a spare bedroom would stop anyone from attempting the impossible. At least, it should.
However, Noah had seen the impossible with his own eyes many times.
He and his entire shifter family were scientifically “impossible.” And this book didn’t look completely scientific.
It spoke of magic too. So here he was, armed with a few chemically unstable ingredients, the proper “magical” formula, and his own lunacy.
He had mixed feelings about doing this with his brother in the room. Sure, having another person there for safety was a good idea, but what if they both got hurt?
Just as he lit the Bunsen burner under the clay triangle, the front door opened and Dante’s chipper “I’m home” echoed through the hallway.
With the decision having been made for him, Noah exhaled in relief and leaned back in his chair. “In here!”
Dante appeared in the doorway, holding two grocery bags. His eyes widened as he took in the scene.
“You should put on your safety goggles,” Noah said.
“You should have your head examined! Are you doing what I think you’re doing?”
“Probably.”
“Is this your first attempt?”
“Yup.”
“And you were going to do it without me? Fuck, Noah. We discussed this. What if everything blows up in your face?”
He swiveled on his metal stool, pointing toward the closet. “We have a fire extinguisher.”
“Yeah, a lot of good it will do if you’re dismembered in an explosion.”
“So, what am I supposed to do? Forget the whole thing? That doesn’t sound like me.”
“No. It doesn’t. Just let me be here to watch your back.”
“I guess you want to be blown up too?”
“Hell no. Ma would kill us both…if we survived. Let me just take another look at the Latin text and make sure you’ve done everything right up to this point. Don’t. Move.”
“Okay. I. Won’t.”
Dante hurried to the kitchen to drop off the groceries.
When he came back, he picked up the legal pad, scanned Noah’s notes, and scratched his head.
“Wouldn’t you have to force lead to give up a couple of protons to make it turn to gold?
I don’t see how only the heat from a Bunsen burner can do that. ”
“There’s magic involved.”
“Magic? Like the kind in the Teenage Witch book you had in high school?”
“Maybe. Some of that stuff was handed down over the centuries.”
Dante didn’t snort, snicker, or even crack a smile. He just nodded and picked up the Latin text again.
“I think I’ve got it covered, but knock yourself out.
If I’m going to blow us both up, I need a sandwich first.” Noah was actually grateful for a second pair of eyes to check the formula and the order of the steps in the “spell.” If even one item was off…
who knew what kind of “big bang” might occur?
In the kitchen, he put away all the groceries but the items he needed and began building a deli-worthy sandwich. As he spread mustard and mayo on the top piece of rye bread, ready to close up the whole Dagwood special, Dante entered the kitchen.
“About your notes… Did you use chlorine or liquid chloride?”
“Since pure chlorine is a toxic gas and needs to be combined with a negative ion to create matter at all—”
“Oh, fer Chrissakes. You know what I mean.”
“I’m just explaining what the difference is, but if you want the short answer…”
“Please.”
“Sodium chloride.”
“Salt?”
Noah lifted the salt shaker as if showing where he’d obtained it.
“Are you sure that will do it?”
Noah shrugged. “I don’t see why not.”
“Awesome.” Dante returned to the spare room, and Noah chomped into his sandwich.
BOOM!
* * *
“You’re saying your brother blew up the house?” the fire chief asked.
“No. Hell no. I blew up the house,” a slightly crispy-looking Dante insisted.
His buddies from his own firehouse snickered in the background. Jay Mahoney said, “You just missed us on your day off, didn’t you, Fierro?”
“Nobody blew up the house,” Noah explained. “It was just the spare room.”
“Oh. Just the spare room… Well, that makes it okay,” the Southie captain snapped sarcastically.
Dante’s counterparts on the B shift rotation smirked and shook their heads as they walked by.
The smoking second floor didn’t look too bad from the outside.
The window had blown out, and whatever was smoldering had been extinguished.
Noah’s quick response was to shut off the gas and grab the fire extinguisher from the kitchen while Dante went for the one in the bedroom closet.
“The landlords are going to be furious when they hear about this,” their first-floor neighbor whispered to his young wife.
“There’s no damage to your unit at all, right?” Noah asked. “No smoke or scorch marks anywhere?”
“Uh, not that we can see. I mean, some plaster fell…and who knows what’s going on behind the walls, right?” the wife asked.
“Behind the walls?” Her husband’s thick eyebrows shot up, and he stared at the house.
Noah began to walk toward the building, but Dante stopped him with a hand to his chest. “There’s no fire behind the walls.
No smoke anywhere. It’s out.” He turned to the couple and said, “I emptied two fire extinguishers. Anything that might have caught was bathed in foam before the trucks got here. They did a thorough sweep. They wouldn’t be packing up if there were any danger. ”
“I’ve seen stuff on HGTV,” the female neighbor said. “The support beams are probably really old and could have been knocked out of place.”
“You’re sure it’ll be okay to live in?” the man asked.
“A structural engineer will be called,” Dante said.
“We’ll patch the plaster if the landlord will let us,” Noah added. “Your unit should be fine. If you find any smoke or water damage, let us know. We’ll get both our places checked out and fixed as soon as we can.”
The wife glanced at her husband. “I always thought sharing a house with firefighters would be safer. Who would have thought they’d be the—” Her husband quickly placed his hand over her mouth, then whispered something in her ear.
She stared at the Fierro brothers with her eyes growing wider, as if her husband had just told her they’d set off a bomb on purpose.
“I’m calling the landlord,” the male neighbor said.
“No need.” Dante dug his cell phone out of his pocket. “It was my fault. I’ll call him.”
The couple looked at him and Noah skeptically, then returned to their apartment without another word.
“Yeah, and I’m fine, by the way,” Dante muttered as soon as they were out of earshot. He got the landlord’s voicemail and left a message.
“Hey, Bro. Did the book make it out of there in one piece?” Noah asked.
Dante looked sheepish. “Maybe. I tossed it out the window.”
“You what?”
“It seemed the fastest way to save it and the apartment at the same time. On my way to the fire extinguisher, I threw it out the broken window.”
Noah scrambled to the side where the window was and searched the adjacent narrow strip of grass. He spotted it in the hedge, pages open, a little damp, but not much more tattered than it had been when he’d brought it home.
“Whew.” He hugged the ancient text against his chest.
“Is saving that book really a good thing?” Dante asked as he joined him.
Noah looked like he didn’t know what to say. He probably knew the right answer was no but couldn’t give it to him.
Dante was worried. He thought about telling him to let it go, but that would be like telling Niagara Falls to stop falling. If his brother thought he had a good idea, he’d go back over it a million times, figuring out what had gone wrong. Eventually, he’d try again.
He knew what Noah would get out of it if they succeeded.
A chance to impress Kizzy. He suspected his brother was worried about living up to the reputation of medical professionals the young doctor rubbed elbows with on a daily basis.
Being a firefighter was nice and all, but it wouldn’t support a family in any costly Boston neighborhood—and that’s probably the style Kizzy was accustomed to.
* * *