Alchemystic by Anton Strout Read Free Book Online

smile and shoved his hands into his coat pocket.
    “You think things will be okay with the bosses?” Rory asked me.
    I shrugged. “Who knows?” I said. “At least at home I won’t have to deal with any artistic commentary.” I slapped the plastic casing of the art tube.
    Rory smiled. “That’s no reflection on what you produce,” she said. “Art is not their thing. Doug and Julie have just always been practical people.”
    “Practically perfect in every way,” I said in my best Julie Andrews voice.
    “Not bad,” Marshall said. “Have you been practicing?”
    “Not really,” I said, heading for the door out of the art studio. “Sometimes it’s just more pleasant living in my head with dancing cartoon penguins and singing chimney sweeps than it is dealing with life at the decrepit Belarus Manor.”
    “You could move out,” Marshall said.
    “Not until my mom is more stable. And plus I’d have to give up my three a.m. access to my great-great-grandfather’slibrary and art studio,” I said, with a small smile back over my shoulder. “I’ll manage. Besides, bitching is just my way of dealing with all the life changes. It’ll pass, I’m sure.”
    “Good luck!” Rory called after me, raising an invisible glass into the air. “Tell Doug and Julie I say hi! We’ll toast to them!”
    “I hate you, you know,” I reminded her, but Rory only shrugged.
    “It’s okay,” she said, chipper as always. “You hate everybody these days.”
    I didn’t even stop to argue. Sometimes it was better to keep your mouth shut, especially when what Rory was saying was oh, so close to the truth.

Five

Alexandra
    D eep in thought, I discovered far too late that I had walked way east before correcting myself and turning left onto Second Avenue, heading uptown through the East Village on my way toward Gramercy Park. The walk did much to clear my head of all the annoyance that had gone down during the art session. Now if I could avoid a wave of crap on the home front, I could sneak up to my namesake’s deserted art studio in our building along the west side of the park and hopefully get back to work on the sketch rolled up in my art tube. I was excited by the breakthrough I had felt earlier tonight, my eyes becoming attuned to following some of the rules that governed the art world, and while I hated conforming to much of anything, I had to admit it really did help with producing the work I wanted to achieve.
    My mind wandered off once again as I walked along East Sixteenth Street, crossing into Stuyvesant Plaza Park in front of Beth Israel, meandering along the oval stretch of walkway within. The trees there always made me feel like I was deep in the woods, despite the lights and sounds of the city all around. It reminded me of the times Rory and I would gather there as part of our own private would-be teenage coven, justto hang and talk about love-potioning various guys from high school. I was so lost in the pleasant memory that I barely heard the quickened footsteps of someone approaching from behind me until it was too late.
    Strong arms grabbed for me, one of them catching the family pendant around my neck, choking me as I dashed forward. The heavy chain snapped and I was free, but before I could take off, fingers wrapped themselves in my hair with a pained jerk while an arm wrapped hard around my waist. A man’s arm. The art tube lay pressed between us as he tugged me close, and judging from the breath on the back of my head, he had to be at least half a foot taller than me. I contorted my body to break free, but it was no use. The stranger’s grip was solid, and my body went cold in pure fear.
    “At last!” the man’s voice hissed, quiet yet intimidating. He held my necklace up in front of me. “You’re oh, so weak, aren’t you?”
    I pulled my pendant out of his hand, which I noticed was tattooed with an ornate symbol looking like some kind of stylized but blocky demon. I filed it away for a future police