Page 77 of Girl, Unseen

Into the furnace they went. One by one, releasing their secrets to the flame. Augurello's Chrysopoeia, Philalethes' Introitus apertus, Flamel's Book of Hieroglyphic Figures. Centuries of alchemical thought, reduced to smoke and ash. Not that she’d really connected with them anyway. She’d just collected them on her journey to her new life. The only book that mattered was the Corpus Hermeticum.

The police had nothing. No fingerprints, no DNA, no witnesses. She'd been meticulous. They'd chased Ezra's shadow, arrested Todd Peterson the family man, not Ezra Crowley the ersatz messiah. By the time they untangled that web, she'd be a new person. Untouchable.

Tessa had been the real gamble. So many variables at play - wind speed, atmospheric conditions, the pilot's tolerance for sedatives. But in the end, air had claimed its own. One drugged thermos and a sleepy angel spiraling earthward on wax wings.

She still had the charts. Altitude versus time, body mass against chemical concentration. Tessa's fate had been sealed the moment she handedHermesher flask.

And fire had been much simpler than she imagined. All it had taken was a little help from another element, then fire had done the rest.

She'd protected herself well through all of this. No traces left on Marcus's body - earth had taken care of that. No fingerprints survived Sarah's transformation - water purified everything it touched. Gloves had kept her separate from Tessa's coffee, from Victor's water bottles. And tonight, well, tonight she had unlimited access. The perfect cover. The perfect end to the sequence.

Only the quinta essentia remained. The strange nitrogen of the soul that bound all the rest together.

Spirit, they called it. The divine spark. The axle on which the elements turned. The Alchemist knew better. Spirit was just another form of matter, as above so below. Transform one and the other followed; an occult call and response as old as time.

She'd dared what none of the old masters had. Those doddering fools with their eggs and their athanors. Nibbling at the edges of ultimate truth, never bold enough to seize the whole. They'd stopped at the gross matter, never realizing that the real gold lay in rearranging the subtle body. Chrysopoeia was for chumps. Apotheosis, now that was the ticket.

Four elements, four sacrifices. Four steps to glory. She'd proven her devotion, earned her place among the immortals. Now it was time to collect her reward.

Because after tonight, she would never need to turn away from her reflection again.

CHAPTER FORTY ONE

The road to Old Acre Farm hadn't gotten any smoother since Ella's last dance with near-death at Blackwood's barn. She squealed to a halt in front of the old weathered gate, and the silver-gray sky hung low enough to scrape its belly on the barbed wire while crows bitched from above. November in upstate New York - like purgatory with better foliage.

Ella barely bothered putting the SUV in park before she bailed out. The case was a Rubik’s Cube that was a few turns from completion, and Felix Blackwood was one of two people who could help her line up the colors perfectly. The other wouldn’t talk, which meant she wasn’t leaving this farm until she’d extracted every little detail from Felix about the Order’s female members. If the pile of ash formerly known as Victor Ashford was any indication, Ella had a clock tick-tocking in the back of her head until the final element in the sequence turned critical.

She needed answers, and she needed them with enough time left to put a permanent pause on this Philosopher's Stone crap.

The farm squatted on its acreage, about as welcoming as the half-collapsed scarecrow presiding over a field of dead weeds out back. The house stared down at Ella through rheumy windows as she hustled up to the porch.

Her knuckles had barely touched wood when the front door creaked open of its own accord.

‘Felix?’ Ella's voice echoed through the gloom, taunting her with accusations of too little, too late. ‘Felix! Anyone?’

Nothing but petrified silence and the faint ticking of a clock entombed in cobwebs. The farmhouse, despite its status, was fairly small, so if anyone was in here they’d have heard her. Ella backed out of the farmhouse. No point wasting time in there - Felix wasn't exactly the type to curl up with a good book and wait for death to find him. The grounds stretched away like a graveyard of agriculture, where farm equipment came to die and weeds came to prosper.

She crossed the yard at a jog. Three barns hunched against the horizon, and a gust of wind carried something that didn't belong. Not quite smoke, not quite chemical - more like someone had tried to burn a chemistry set. Ella pulled her coat tighter and followed her nose. Thescent led her past a combine harvester that was more rust than metal, through patches of scrub grass that grabbed at her ankles.

The trail strengthened. Definitely burning, but with an edge that spoke of something more complex than paper or wood. She'd smelled it before, back when the Bureau had her running drug lab raids. The kind of smell that came from burning things that weren't meant to see fire.

The largest barn loomed ahead. The gap exhaled that chemical breath, stronger now. Recent.

Ella drew her weapon and edged inside. Daylight filtered through gaps in the roof and painted stripes across a concrete floor that had seen its share of oil stains. In the far corner, heat shimmered off a modified oil drum - the kind of makeshift incinerator that screamed ‘evidence disposal’ to anyone who'd worked Narcotics.

Someone had punched ventilation holes in the bottom and rigged a rusted grill grate halfway up. Low-tech but effective.

Ella approached with caution. Heat radiated off the metal skin while smoke twisted through the air - not the clean white of burning paper, but something chemical. Inside, ash and blackened paper fragments still radiated enough warmth to make her think she'd missed the cleanup crew by minutes. She hunkered down and fished out a pen to gingerly poke at the debris. Bits of charred paper fluttered free. Too fragile to make out any text, but the thickness of the stock and the irregular edges told their own story.

Books. Someone had been burning books.

Something crunched under her feet - a sound that had no business in a barn. She looked down and picked out a strip of glass shards.

Ella rocked back on her heels while her mental gears spun. A missing kid, an empty farm, and a covert book-burning binge.

Someone had been here recently. And that same someone had left in a hurry.

The wind picked up outside, sending something metal clanging against the barn's exterior. Ella spun, weapon ready, but the sound was just weather doing what weather did best - making cops jumpy at exactly the wrong moment.

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