Sam
William Taylor is twenty-four.
To Sam, at fifteen, he seems much older. She tries not to stare at him as he drives her out of Mid-City and into the rolling hills. Today, he’s dressed in a dark gray suit with a gold bar clipped across his narrow tie, the collars of his black silk shirt decorated with two pins of winged lions joined by delicate gold chains. He looks like the kind of winter that never comes to Angel City, and next to him, Sam feels her own invisibility in stark relief. She always has something to say around Ari, but with Will, she struggles to think of anything that might interest him, and ends up unable to speak at all.
They pass through two sentried gates, where the guards tip their hats to Will and let them through. The roads are wide and impeccably paved, not a single crack to be seen anywhere, and at intersections are signs engraved in iron plaques against stone.
NO PHOTOGRAPHY. NO VISITORS. PERMITS ONLY.
“I have only one rule for you today,” Will tells her as they finally pull up before a set of massive gates. The wordsRED CITYare carved into one of the pillars. “You don’t speak about what you see here. Do you understand?”
There is a slight accent in his voice that she can’t place, a note of elegance so subtle that she loses it if she concentrates too hard, and a grace to his movements that makes her think of professionals, of grown-ups, of someone who has experienced more life than anyone she’s ever met. Most of all, perhaps, he feels older because he talks to her like she is a child.
“Yes,” she says meekly, dwelling on how he’d brightened the streetlamp at night, how the gun had formed in his hands from the bricks of a wall.
The granite barriers on either side of the gates are draped in curtains of purple and pink bougainvillea, and tall Italian cypress hide most of the property from view. Sam holds her breath as the gates now swing open, revealing a driveway leading deep into the lushness.
Will stops the car in the center of a circular cobblestone lot at the bottom of a green hill, up which winds a stone pathway that disappears over the top. From down here, Sam can only glimpse a few roofs covered in red terra-cotta Spanish tiles, white walls blanketed with climbing roses.
As Will steps out, a valet hurries over to take the car keys from him.
“Mr. Taylor,” he says with a bow of his head. Will nods in return.
A second person comes bearing a tray with two hot white towels and glasses of ice-cold water with strawberry slices and sprigs of mint. “Ms. Taylor’s meeting is running late, sir,” he says as Will wipes his hands with one of the towels. “She wants you to go ahead.”
“We’ll start at the Observatory, then,” Will says.
“I’ll let her know,” the man replies. “She’ll come along shortly.”
“Thank you, Hanover.” Will tosses the towel back on the tray and takes one of the drinks.
Sam watches the luxurious ritual in silence. After a second, the man named Hanover looks at her and glances meaningfully down at the tray. It hadn’t occurred to her that she was being offered the second towel. Hanover gives her an encouraging smile as she hesitantly takes it, wiping her hands in the way she’d seen Will do, and takes a sip from the second drink.
It is cold and refreshing, the mint tingling against her tongue.
“Good?” Hanover asks her with a wink.
His eyes are kind, and she finds herself smiling back. “So good,” she answers, and he gives her a pleased nod.
“Best of luck today, Miss Lang,” he says. “Constantine isn’t easy to please.”
Sam follows beside Will as they make their way up the stone steps of the hill. As they go, he briefly touches the edge of his glass, leaving a trail across its dewy surface. Sam blinks. There is now a pink tint to the drink. It didn’t look like that even a second ago, before he touched it.
Sam’s curiosity gets the best of her. “You changed it?” she asks.
“Don’t ask me to change yours.” He takes a sip. “You’re too young to drink.”
She realizes that he’s somehow added alcohol to his. “But—you just touched it with your hand,” she says, trying to get him to explain it. “Like you changed that streetlight and made the gun, back at the Odyssey.”
“Mm.”
“How did you do those things?”
“Alchemy.”
He says it like he’s giving her the time or the weather report, the wordemerging from him so casually that at first Sam thinks she misheard. But there it is. Confirmation from someone else of the thing she has wondered about for so many years, information she had struggled to acquire, now being offered to her as if it’s no big deal.
“But alchemy isn’t real,” she says faintly, because she doesn’t know what else to say.
