Braggarts.
They barely winced when the flame leapt at their flesh, glowing and hard as metal.That was alchemists for you.Metal men.Cursed curiosities.
And a lot more talented than he’d ever given them credit for.
Not that he’d ever admit it out loud.
A giant, gloveless hand clapped him on the shoulder, and Apollo glared at it before picking it up via the intruder’s meaty thumb and dropping it into the air.
The man who owned the hand laughed, enormous and enormously irritating guffaws.“Such a tiny flame, Chester.Still working up your tolerance?”
The flame was a perfectly respectable size.Nothing tiny about it!“I’m improving.And the flame’s bigger than yesterday.”Apollo blew out the candle, rubbed his palm, and dipped it into a nearby bucket of water.
“It’s taking you much longer than my other apprentices.”Baxter Stone, Master of the Alchemist Guild, leaned a hip against Apollo’s worktable.“I wonder if it’s your advanced age or your transcendent blood holding you back?”
Good God, Apollo was nine and twenty, hardly an old man.And what a blow!To hear his transcendent heritage counted as a liability.
Oh, how far he’d fallen.From the heights of divinity all the way into the bloody ashes.But then he’d never belonged on Olympus, and the glamour magic that should have been his had skipped him entirely, gone to his cousin instead.Damn Diana.
Stone ran a hand through his yellow hair and gave a grin that was supposed to be charming but had a hint of slime about the corners.“Don’t worry, lad.”
Lad.How terribly condescending.Stone couldn’t be more than a decade older than Apollo.At most.Apollo resisted kicking the man in the balls.
Blissfully unaware of the danger to his nether regions, Stone clapped a hand on Apollo’s shoulder again.“It’ll come.And then I’ll be the envy of every alchemist in the nation.A transcendent tamed by my flames.”He laughed.Enormous again.And enormously irritating.Again.“You won’t miss your glamours when you’re forming steel in the forge, Chester.Damn it, Quinn, careful with that!”He ran across the forge to yank something or other from an apprentice’s hold.
No idea what the device they were collaborating on was.Apollo wasn’t high enough up in the ranks to be privy to that information.
But once… once he’d been a god.Close to it, anyway.He relit the candle and passed his palm back and forth across it, making the tiny flame flicker like the glamours his grandfather had created before his death, those Apollo should have been able to create as the eldest son to the eldest son.
He pushed his chair backward, and it screeched across the stone floor.The air was thick and suffocating.Every drag of it into his lungs like ashy soup.He needed fresh stuff, needed sunlight.Moonlight at the very least.He crossed the forge, stepped into the floating chamber in the corner and pulled the lever.With a jerk, the little wrought iron box began to inch upward and out of the smoky underground forge.
“What a pit,” Apollo mumbled, slouching against one iron-barred side of the device.His cousin-in-law’s forge was much preferable to this hot and odiferous hell.Situated beside the mews behind a reputable Bloomsbury Square residence, Temple Grant’s forge possessed enviable ventilation.
Apollo closed his eyes so tightly during the dark ascent that colors exploded behind his lids like fireworks.Or glamours.His lost birthright.
He’d lost everything.
But what he could build back up with his own two hands.
The floating chamber jerked to a stop, and he opened his eyes.The long hallway just below the bottom level of the British Museum was busy with alchemists coming and going.Fairy orbs bobbed about, lighting the entrances to the row of mobile platforms like the one he’d just used.They went only Merlin knew where.He’d only been to the Master’s forge.Before he’d apprenticed himself to Stone, he’d had no idea the alchemists possessed a guild headquarters in London.He’d thought all that rot located in Manchester.
He’d been wrong.
“Often am,” he said, stepping into a dim lobby of sorts.One staircase and two long, dim corridors later, he found himself blinking in the first actual light he’d seen in—God, how long?Twenty-four hours?He’d never put this much work intoanything.
No other way to claw back some sort of power, though.If he couldn’t have the clean, golden gleam of glamours, he’d cultivate the brute ferocity of alchemical invention.He’d show the damn world Apollo Chester wasn’t worthless.
“Fuck she’s heavy.”The voice, muffled and deep, came from the museum’s back entrance, a rectangle of light Apollo sleepwalked toward.
Apollo peeked into it.Three men crept through the dark.One man carried something rather large and lumpy over a shoulder.A blanket was thrown over the lumpy figure.But a hank of long, yellow hair hung down, swinging near the man’s arse like a tail.The men walked through a wall.No.Apollo knew better now.No wall, that.A hidden alchemist corridor.
Apollo stood.He followed.Why not?Power was slow enough to come to his now hardworking, calloused hands (he mourned the smooth cuticles, buffed nails, baby-soft palms of his former life).But there were other, quicker ways to get it.A little blackmail could speed things up a bit.He eased through the door and shut it silently behind him.The men barreled down this new hallway—no fairy lights to brighten the way here—and stepped onto a large floating platform.A pull of the lever and they descended out of view.He couldn’t follow.
But he could wait.And he did.But not for long.Soon the tops of the three men’s heads reappeared, then the rest of their bodies, and they stepped off.
Without their lumpy bundle.
They lumbered toward Apollo with backslaps and cries for ales at the nearest pub.
