The Elusive Elixir

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  The Elusive Elixir: An Accidental Alchemist Mystery © 2017 by Gigi Pandian.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any matter whatsoever, including Internet usage, without written permission from Midnight Ink, except in the form of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  First e-book edition © 2017

  E-book ISBN: 9780738750330

  Book format by Bob Gaul

  Cover design by Kevin R. Brown

  Cover illustration by Hugh D’Andrade/Jennifer Vaughn Artist Agent

  Editing by Nicole Nugent

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data (Pending)

  ISBN: 978-0-7387-4236-6

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  To you, my readers, for your

  boundless enthusiasm for a gargoyle.

  One

  The woman was still behind me.

  She was so close to me on the winding, irregular stone steps inside Notre Dame Cathedral that I could smell her breath. Sourdough bread and honey.

  I could have sworn I’d seen her at the boulangerie near my apartment earlier that morning. Now her unwavering gaze bore into me. She must have been at least eighty and wasn’t more than five feet tall. She didn’t fit the profile of someone worth being afraid of. Most people would have dismissed it as a coincidence.

  Unless you’re someone like me, who always has to be careful.

  We emerged from the cramped corridor onto the narrow Gallery of Gargoyles, high above Paris. I shielded my eyes from the sun. A warm wind swept my hair around my face as I looked out through the mesh fencing that covered the once-open balcony.

  The gargoyle known as Le Penseur, “The Thinker,” sat regally with his stone head turned toward the City of Lights, as he had for over 150 years. Unlike my friend Dorian, this gargoyle of Notre Dame wouldn’t be stepping off his stone mount.

  For a few brief seconds, the stunning details Eugène Viollet-le-Duc had added to his chimeras all those years ago made me forget about the woman. The grandeur even made me lose sight of the real reason I was at Notre Dame that day. My quest was never far from my thoughts, but for those fleeting moments, I allowed myself the space to appreciate the splendor of the craftsmanship of generations of artists and laborers.

  A girl around eight years old squealed in delight as she noticed a set of smaller gargoyles perched overhead, grinning maniacally at us. Her younger brother began to cry. His father explained in a thick Welsh accent that gargoyles weren’t to be feared. They weren’t even real, for Heaven’s sake! His father was right—in this particular case.

  If I didn’t get rid of my shadow and get what I needed here at Notre Dame, the Welshman’s words would be true for all gargoyles, including my best friend. I followed the tight walkway for a few steps until I saw it. An unfinished slab of limestone where a gargoyle might have perched.

  This was the spot.

  I glanced behind me. The woman stood a few paces away. In stylish sunglasses with a perfectly knotted silk scarf around her spindly neck, she was simultaneously frail and glamorous. Unlike the crowd of tourists excitedly scurrying past each other on the balcony that was never meant for this volume of visitors, the woman stood stock still. She held no camera. Her gaze didn’t linger on the dramatic cityscape or on the unique stone monsters that surrounded us.

  She looked directly at me, not bothering to conceal her curiosity.

  “May I help you?” I asked, speaking in French. Though the woman hadn’t spoken, the style and care of her clothing, hair, and makeup suggested she was Parisian.

  She pulled her sunglasses off and clenched them in boney hands. “I knew it,” she replied in English. “I knew it was you.” Her voice was strong, with the hint of a rattle in her throat. The forcefulness of her words seemed to surprise her nearly as much as it surprised me.

  My throat constricted, and I instinctively reached for my purse. Empty except for my phone, notebook, wallet, and homemade granola bars packed in parchment paper. I was thankful I’d had the sense to leave Dorian’s alchemy book safely hidden far from me. I willed myself to relax. Things were different now. This wasn’t a witch hunt. Being recognized wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.

  I’d flown from Portland to Paris earlier that week. Because of the urgency of the situation, while I was recovering from an illness and too sick to climb the steps of Notre Dame, I’d stayed busy with people I thought might be able to help me, several of whom blurred together in my mind. Librarians, academics, amateur historians, Notre Dame docents, rare book dealers. Still, I found it surprising that I’d completely forgotten this woman. No, that wasn’t entirely true. Now that she’d removed her sunglasses, there was something vaguely familiar about her … And if she was one of the people who worked at the cathedral, that would explain how she was fit enough to keep pace with me on the hundreds of stairs.

  “Please forgive me,” I said, switching to English, as she had done. “I seem to have forgotten where we met.”

  She shook her head and laughed. “So polite! We have not met. You’re Zoe Faust’s granddaughter, aren’t you?”

  I let out the breath I’d been holding and smiled. “You knew Grandmere?”

  The woman gave me a curious look, her eyes narrowing momentarily, but the action was so quickly replaced with a smile that I might have imagined it.

  “During the Occupation in 1942,” she said. “My name is Blanche Leblanc.”

  “Zoe Faust,” I said automatically.

  The quizzical look on her face returned.

  “Named after my grandmother,” I added hastily, stumbling over the words. I’m a terrible liar. Personally, I think it’s one of my more endearing qualities—who wants to be friends with someone if you never know if they’re being honest?—but in my life it’s also a most inconvenient trait. “It’s lovely to meet you, Madame Leblanc.” That was a lie too. I’m sure she was a nice person, but I didn’t need this complication.

  Three out-of-breath tourists, the stragglers of our group, burst through the top of the winding stairway. While they caught their breath, I led Madame Leblanc away from the crowded section of walkway next to the gargoyles. There wasn’t much space on the gallery, but by stepping bac
k a few feet, at least we wouldn’t be jostled.

  “You look so much like her,” Madame Leblanc said, speaking more softly now. “When I was a young girl, my mother once brought me to her shop. What was the name?”

  “Elixir.”

  “Yes. Elixir. Many foreigners left Paris, but your grandmother stayed and helped people during the war. Her healing remedies saved many lives. But then she left. After the fire … ”

  I returned her sad smile. These days, people think of me as an herbalist. In the past, people thought of me as an apothecary. Not many people have ever known the truth, that I’m an alchemist.

  I’ve never gotten the hang of turning lead into gold, but ever since I was a small child I’ve been able to extract the healing properties of plants. My ability to heal people was one of the things that made me think my accidental discovery of the Elixir of Life wasn’t entirely a curse. But the dangers of living a secret life created a heavy burden. My “grandmother” Zoe Faust is me.

  Since I’ve always been good with herbal remedies, I’ve been able to help both sick and injured people.

  And war leads to far too many of both.

  “Yes,” I said, “Grandmere finally left Paris to help a family that was fleeing with a child too sick to travel.”

  Madame Leblanc’s painted lips quivered. “My first thought was the right one, n’est pas?” Her silk scarf swirled in the wind.

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  “Don’t touch me,” she hissed, twisting away from me. “My mother was right. You are a witch.”

  The Gallery of Gargoyles was loud with the excited voices of tourists of all ages, but suddenly I couldn’t hear anything except the beating of my heart. The multilingual voices of the tourists around us dissipated as if sucked into a vortex. It felt like the only two people left on the Gallery of Gargoyles were me and Madame Leblanc. My stomach clenched. I wished I hadn’t eaten a hearty breakfast from that boulangerie. “You’re confused, madame.”

  “You were in your late twenties then. You have not aged a day. There is no anti-aging cream that good. I know. I have tried them all. You stand before me through witchcraft or some other deal with the devil.”

  I choked. “I’m told my grandmother and I look very much alike,” I said, trying to keep my breathing even. “These things happen—”

  “I am eighty-two years old,” Madame Leblanc cut in. “My eyesight is not what it once was, but my hearing is perfect. Even with the cacophony around us, I would know your voice anywhere.”

  “I’m told that I sound like her, too—”

  “I remember the voice of the soldier who told me that my father was dead.” Her words were slow. Crisp. “I remember the voice of the nurse who handed me my healthy baby girl. And I remember the voice of the apothecary named Zoe who saved many lives in Paris—but not that of my mother.”

  Momentarily stunned by the heartfelt speech, I was at a loss for words. I looked from the woman to the gargoyles surrounding us then out at the Eiffel Tower stretching into the blue sky, Sacre Cour’s man-made grandeur, the flowing river Seine, and wisps of smoke from chimneys. Air, earth, water, fire. Elements I worked with and craved.

  “I don’t know what sort of bargain you made with evil forces to be here today,” Madame Leblanc said, her voice nearly a whisper, “but that woman was not your grandmother. She was you. I know it is you, Zoe Faust. And I will find out what you are. You cannot hide any longer.”

  Two

  My heart galloped loudly in my ears. I feared I might be overcome with vertigo high atop the cathedral. This was a complication I didn’t need.

  “My grandmother always said she felt bad about the people she wasn’t able to help,” I said, forcing myself to speak calmly. “What was your mother’s name? Perhaps she mentioned her to me.”

  “Oh, you tried to help her,” Madame Leblanc said, a snarl hovering on her wrinkled lips. “You gave her a tincture that day she brought me to the shop. But at home, she refused to take it. She said it was witchcraft. She said that nobody’s herbal remedies could be as good as yours without the work of the devil.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “My grandmother wasn’t—”

  “Stop lying!”

  The breathless tourists glanced our way before edging their way past, giving us as wide a berth as possible on the narrow parapet. Maybe my hope of salvaging the situation was misguided. I looked longingly at the exit, wondering if Madame Leblanc would be as quick on the stairs down as she was on the way up.

  “The strong family resemblance has confused you,” I said.

  “I’m not crazy,” Madame Leblanc said.

  The ferocity in her eyes shocked me. Had she harbored this grudge against me since she was a child? I felt bad for her, but I couldn’t say more. The world wasn’t ready to know about alchemy.

  “I’m going to find out what you are,” she said. “You made a grave mistake returning to Paris.”

  “Madame—”

  I broke off as a security guard approached us. He asked if everything was all right, but his bored eyes told me he was more concerned about moving us through the narrow stone gallery than with finding out what our disagreement was about.

  With the distraction from the guard, I wondered if I could make a run for it.

  Six months ago, my life had turned upside down. Perhaps not quite as upside down as it had in 1704 when I accidentally discovered the Elixir of Life, but it was the second-biggest shakeup in the intervening 300 years. Half a year ago, I learned that dangerous backward alchemy was real.

  Alchemy is a personal transformation. Its core principle is transforming the impure into the pure, be it lead into gold or a dying body into a thriving one. Backward alchemy’s Death Rotation skips the natural order and sacrifices one element for another. Backward alchemy takes more than it transforms. Backward alchemy and the Death Rotation are based in death, not life.

  I’ve been running from alchemy for a long time, so I didn’t make this discovery on my own. I’d been sought out by Dorian Robert-Houdin to help understand a book of backward alchemy, Non Degenera Alchemia, which roughly translated to Not Untrue Alchemy. Dorian’s fate was linked to that of the mysterious book filled with disturbing woodcut illustrations and strange Latin text. The book was changing, and so was Dorian. He was dying an unnatural death. He would soon be alive but trapped in stone—a fate that struck me as far worse than death. I couldn’t let that happen to the quirky fellow who had quickly become my best friend.

  Did I mention that Dorian is a gargoyle?

  Dorian Robert-Houdin was originally carved in limestone for Notre Dame’s Gallery of Gargoyles. He’d been a prototype carving by Notre Dame renovator Viollet-le-Duc, created for the brand-new Gallery of Gargoyles built in the 1850s and 1860s. The statue turned out to be too small for the balcony, so Viollet-le-Duc gifted the creation to his friend Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, the French stage magician credited with being the father of modern magic. Neither man was an alchemist, but a stage show magic trick went very wrong one day when the retired magician picked up a beautiful alchemy book. The gargoyle statue came to life as the magician read from the alchemy book he believed to be merely a stage prop. On that day in 1860, Dorian the living gargoyle was born in Robert-Houdin’s home workshop.

  Madame Leblanc and I were now nearly alone with the gargoyles and the security guard. Tourists were divided into groups that the staff sent up the stairs of the cathedral in waves, to prevent an unsafe level of crowding on the gallery. While Madame Leblanc assured the guard we’d be moving on shortly, I tried to ground myself in reality.

  In addition to the stragglers who’d only recently reached the gallery, the only other person nearby was a man in a priest’s collar who was staring intently at one of the gargoyles. Now there was a respectable fellow. If a living gargoyle came to him for help, I bet it would be a calm, well-mannered crea
ture—not like the opinionated Dorian, who thought of himself as a French Poirot and was constantly getting into trouble. Though my fellow misfit Dorian was dear to me, he didn’t listen. Ever.

  I clung to the small amount of relief that I hadn’t followed Dorian’s advice for me to take him with me to Paris. He could shift between life and stone within seconds, so he’d suggested I carry him around Paris in a backpack in stone form. I had no doubt that he would have peeked out of the bag regularly and ruined any hope I had of convincing Madam Leblanc she didn’t need to tell the world I was an immortal witch.

  The guard left us to scowl at two teenage backpackers who were attempting to reach through the mesh barrier to touch a gargoyle. When I turned back to Madame Leblanc, she was blushing.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. Her lips were pinched. It was a difficult phrase for her to utter. “I have been foolish, no? I don’t know what came over me. I hope you will forgive an old woman. It is only that you look so much like her.”

  “De rien,” I said. “Think nothing of it. Good day, madame.” I turned away, giving my attention back to the perch I wanted to verify with my own eyes. There was no doubt in my mind that this section of molding had been constructed to support a gargoyle. It was true.

  Another gargoyle had once perched here. Local history held that a group of drunken Parisians had stolen the stone creature 150 years ago. But I knew the truth. A gargoyle much like Dorian had once stood here. A gargoyle that had come to life and vanished.

  A hand touched my elbow.

  “I would very much like to hear your memories of your grandmother,” Madame Leblanc said. She stood uncomfortably close to me in the confined space. “Your fond memories of her will help me push my mother’s angry memories from my mind. I do not wish to die with such bitterness. It will also allow me to apologize for my foolishness that must have disturbed you. May I treat you to lunch?”

  “It’s truly not necessary to apologize,” I said. “And I, uh, have a phone call I need to make.”