Page 89 of Girl, Unseen

A flurry of movement at the prop table. Lydia lunged for the bottle. Amelia’s breath caught in her throat, but then Lydia changed course at the last second and grabbed a handful of fairy cards instead.

Damn it to hell.

Lydia turned back to her audience with the cards in hand. ‘Wait... there's someone else coming through. A young man. Does anyone here recognize the name... Michael?’

The show had been running fifteen minutes. Much longer, and the timeline would be thrown off. She'd calculated everything down to the minute - dose, absorption rate, metabolic factors. The longer Lydia delayed, the more variables entered the equation.

No hands went up, so Lydia backtracked. She dropped the cards to the table and lunged for the water again. This time for keeps.

This was it. The moment when theory became reality, when ancient wisdom bloomed into modern miracle. Amelia's hands trembled as she gripped the balcony rail. Her reflection ghosted in the brass: a face transformed by four elements, waiting for the fifth to complete the sequence.

Lydia raised the bottle. Stage lights caught the water inside and turned it to liquid crystal.

Yes. Come on. Do it.

The audience sat transfixed, unaware they were about to witness real magic. Not the cheap parlor tricks Lydia trafficked in, but genuine transformation. The kind of profound change that medieval alchemists had only dreamed of achieving.

Lydia tilted her head back.

Abracadabra, sweetheart.

Amelia could hear the water touching her friend’s lips. She could imagine it gushing down her throat while the sodium pentobarbital worked its magic on the internal organs.

This must have been what an out of body experience felt like, because Amelia lost herself to the hallucination. For a moment she was elsewhere, and the world stopped making sense to her rational brain. The world took on new tones and colors, and she was almost certain that she was hearing things not part of this world. This was transcendence. The ultimate alchemical goal. It was overwhelmingly blissful, and Amelia had to question whether or not she was still on earth, in this theater, because the scene in front of her had changed.

Lydia Soulwright was no longer alone. Two additional bodies had joined the stage, and in one blink, they were standing at either end of the platform. And in the next, they were tackling poor Lydia Soulwright to the ground.

The water bottle arced through the spotlights, spinning end over end before shattering against the floorboards.

Amelia's reality cracked with it.

No. No. Dear God, no.

The crowd erupted. Lydia squawked in most unenlightened outrage shrieked. Her microphone caught her body hitting the floor and blasted feedback through the speakers that felt like ice picks in Amelia's skull.

Sodium pentobarbital soaked into the floorboards, carrying her dreams of perfection with it. The product of months of planning, of careful measurement, of precise timing - all of it destroyed by whoever the hell these two men were.

What the hell was going on?

This isn't happening. I'm dreaming, hallucinating. Or else I've finally achieved gnosis and transcended this mortal plane entirely.

But no. The Gramercy remained stubbornly solid around her. This was real.

Amelia gripped the handrail so hard she thought her bones might shatter. One of the men marched Lydia offstage while another addressed the audience without a microphone. Amelia couldn’t hear what he was saying, but something about him looked familiar. She’d seen that pair of eyes and smooth forehead yesterday.

The fake Felix.

Pure fury blazed through her nervous system. Who the hell did this guy think he was? Scratching her perfect plan, denying her theconsummation she so deserved? She was going to find them, clasp her hands around their necks and squeeze until something snapped. To hell with poison. These people needed to die regardless of the method.

Instinct screamed at her to run. There was a fire exit at the end of the row.

Get out of here, recalibrate, finish the ritual later.

She might have screamed. Might have wept in frustration. But then a voice behind her turned her blood to ice.

‘Freeze. FBI.’

CHAPTER FORTY NINE

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