Page 85 of Girl, Unseen

'Bottled spring water only, darling. Two should be enough to see me through. At my age, my bladder is betraying me. Nearly wet myself at the meeting last night.'

‘Your age? You’ll live forever,’ Amelia laughed. ‘Anything else?’

‘Just keep me in your thoughts. And cross everything you've got that this crowd is as receptive as the last one.’ Lydia air-kissed somewhere in the vicinity of Amelia's cheek and put a hand on her shoulder. Amelia flinched. Physical contact was best avoided. ‘I don't know what I'd do without your help organizing these events. You've got such an eye for detail.’

If only you knew, Amelia thought. ‘Always willing to help a member. And friend.’

Lydia spun and made her way across the backstage area, already searching for her next fawning acolyte. Amelia watched the woman go. Lydia Soulwright, the Doyenne of Delusion herself.

But not for much longer.

Amelia hit the stage at a trot. Nothing but a skeleton crew left. One guy futzing with speakers, a few safety-vested mooks sweeping the aisles. The lighting rig hung above it all. Cables crisscrossed the stage, threaded between road cases, and taped down within an inch of their lives. Amelia hopped over them, scanning for her target.

There.

The cluster of water bottles dripping under the lights. A line of soldiers watching for orders.

Amelia ambled over, made sure all eyes were elsewhere, then scooped them up.

She hid them beneath her jacket and marched to the kitchen.

Empty.

Amelia set the bottles down, unstoppered them one-handed and palmed the vial of sodium pentobarbital from her pocket. The irony wasn't lost on her. The same class of chemicals that had destroyed her would now complete her transformation.

Just a sip, that's all it would take.

Amelia caught her reflection in a scuffed backstage mirror. Not a scar in sight, not a single flaw marring the landscape. Her cheeks bloomed with health, eyes flashing like polished stones. Even her hair had lost that brittle straw texture.

It was as the texts had promised. The quinta essentia ran through all things, animating matter, uniting mind and form. She'd cracked the code, solved the riddle that had eluded seekers for centuries.

Forget the Great Work. This was the Greatest Work imaginable. Screw lead into gold. She’d gone one better than the philosopher’s stone and transformed flesh into divinity.

The mirror didn't lie. For the first time in her miserable life, she could meet her own eyes without flinching. Hell, she might paint a self-portrait when this was over.

The Alchemist smiled. By the time they found Soulwright's chiffon-draped corpse, she'd be basking in the afterglow of apotheosis. Let them puzzle over the particulars. Ezra had served his purpose, because when the cops crashed the cult compound, they'd find a regular house of horrors. All the evidence needed to close the case and give the city a shiny new monster to hang on their wall.

Nobody would look twice at mild-mannered Amelia Blackwood.

CHAPTER FORTY SIX

Ella burst into the office and found Luca and Ross already waiting for her. She threw down her things on the table and replayed everything in vivid detail. Her head buzzed with the kind of clarity that usually only came with a fifth of whiskey or a well-timed epiphany.

Ross leaned over the desk. ‘Ella, talk to us.’

She caught her breath and launched into a spiel she’d been unconsciously practicing as she sped here. ‘Amelia Blackwood. Felix’s sister. She’s our unsub.’

How had she missed it? All this time, the killer had been right there, sitting pretty in the fifth row while Ella spilled her guts on stage.

‘His sister? I didn’t know he had one.’

'She's right,' Luca said. 'At the cult's meeting, I saw a figure with flaky skin on her face.'

Ella nodded furiously. ‘Yeah. She was at my lecture at NYU a few days ago, which means she must be a student there, meaning she knows Marcus Thornton. She had a scar on her cheek but had tried to cover it with makeup. Same with her skin condition. There was a tattoo on her wrist too – some triangle-circle hybrid thing.’

‘One of the five from our crime scene. The person I saw at the meeting had tattoos on their wrist too.’

‘Felix confirmed there were only two women in the Order. His sister was one of them.’

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