Page 59 of Adam, Mine

Alain took a moment to compose himself, wiping his face with his hands.

“Your heart is so open. Your father must be a good man.”

“The wind rattles the shutters in the house where my heart lives; the door was torn from the frame,” Elias replied. “But yes, my father is a good man.”

He sat back on his heels and waited.

“If I had known you were like this, Victor would not have left this place living,” Alain promised.

Elias just waited.

Alain sighed and looked at the ceiling. “Would you like me to give you a way to speak to him?”

Elias furrowed his brow in confusion, but he said nothing.

“There are threads between you,” Alain explained. “Your physical health is just one. Your heart is another, and your mind is the final thread. Your health is a matter much more complicated than the heart, but I can—with sacrifice—pluck that thread so it plays a note so sweet that you can feel the echo of his heart shout back.”

“This would require more payment?” Elias asked dubiously.

Alain shook his head. “Not your sacrifice, mine.”

He stood, took Elias’s hand. He led him to the place Elias did not want to go.

It was worse than Elias had imagined. Walls caked with blood, floor slick with it. The head of a ram on the table, draining sloppily into a bucket beneath. Gloves on the floor where Alain had tossed them.

The French alchemist tore the fouled sheets from his table, then wiped it clean with spirits so strong they burned Elias’s nose.

“I am sorry for the mess,” Alain said.

There was no way Elias would ever believe this room spent any time cleaner than this. But he dutifully lay down on the sterilized leather. Alain opened his shirt and vest, then wiped his own chest with spirits. He selected a syringe from a container filled with the same liquid. A needle so fine it looked almost like a hair.

Elias sighed; this would not be the first time he was lied to about pain at a doctor’s office. Then, like all things Alain did, swift and surprising, the French alchemist plunged the needle into his own chest with a small shout. Elias sat up in alarm.

Alain screamed as he pulled the plunger back, the needle filling with a blood so dark it looked nearly black. He coughed, then sank to his knees and coughed again hard before removing the needle and covering the hole quickly with gauze.

He said a few quick words in a language Elias had never heard, then settled back, breathing hard in relief. His forehead had broken out in a wild sweat and his skin was ashen, clammy.

He coughed again and pressed a palm over his heart, waiting for something internal to happen. Then he stood.

Elias watched in silent horror as Alain sprayed the blood into a small tube. Then Alain leaned over it, hand still over his chest, then took a breath. After a moment, tears leaked out of his eyes and dropped upon the viscera. Alain moved his hand from his heart to the place Elias had kissed as Alain cried.

Then he wiped his face and strode across the room to find another jar of some kind of dust, which he added to the watery mixture. Another dark vial of liquid. He squeezed a few drops of blood from Elias’s shirt collar into it as well.

He mixed it with a metal rod, then dipped a paintbrush inside.

“Open your shirt,” he commanded.

Elias did. Too frightened by what he was watching to even argue.

Alain leaned over him and began drawing circles on the center of his chest. They reminded Elias of the symbols on his back but different, less jagged, more graceful.

“If you practice you may be able to control it. Close your eyes and imagine a vibrating string, then imagine closing your fist over it until the vibrations stop. When you want it to start again, imagine plucking it.”

Elias watched him paint. “Will this wash off when I bathe?” he asked, a completely reasonable question.

Alain smiled. “Of course it will. The physical bits anyway; it’s just blood, mud, and tears in the end. But the part that matters will stay.”

When Alain finished drawing, he placed his palm over the center of Elias’s chest. At first nothing happened. Then.