The Alchemy of Forever by Avery Williams Read Free Book Online

green eyes. “Not even the boy at the bar?”
    “Especially not him,” Taryn says fiercely.
    I nod, understanding. “You won’t find any comfort in death,” I promise her. “It’s a void. It’s nothing. You only want to die if you desire that nothingness. If you don’t want to be alone, that means you’re still alive. There’s hope.”
    “Who are you?” she asks. I can barely hear her voice over the wind.
    I think back over my unnaturally long life—my childhood in London, swimming in the sea in the south of France, arriving in San Francisco in the 1960s—and scroll through all the names I’ve gone by, starting with Seraphina and ending with Jennifer. I look her in the eye. “I am no one.”
    She takes a step away from me, closer to the edge. I look down at the hard, glittery pavement, some forty feet below. The surface glistens with moisture.
    “Taryn,” I say urgently. “You can’t fly. The stars aren’t your friends. Climb down. Go back to the bar. Find some people.”
    She hesitates, chewing her lip. I see her resolve softening. “I can’t promise I won’t be back here later, though.”
    “That’s fine. You decide to live one moment at a time. When it’s time to die, really time, you will know.”
    Taryn walks back toward me and I again put my hand on her shoulder. For the first time I see fear in her eyes. Good. Fear indicates a desire to live. “Get down,” I tell her with a little push. And she does, her small hands gripping the ladder, moving slowly, trying not to fall.
    I hold my hand to my brow, watching Taryn fade into the foggy night, her red T-shirt slipping away like a heart. When she’s gone, I let out the breath I’ve been holding. I saved a life tonight. Two, if I count Claudia. It doesn’t erase all the lives I’ve taken, all the borrowed time I’ve lived on. But it’s something.
    I take a step closer to the edge, retracing Taryn’s footsteps. If I run and jump, I should be able to hit the water. But first, I fish in my bag and pull out Cyrus’s book and a lighter. This knowledge dies with me. The cover is leather, dyed a brilliant shade of blue. It reminds me of Cyrus’s eyes—I have seen them in every shade of blue. Currently, they’re an icy blue, like the snow-covered part of a glacier. But when I first met him, they were this exact shade. The rich color of the morning sky before the sun rises. In one smooth motion, I bang the book against the metal platform beneath my feet, and the lock breaks away.
    The pages are thick, smooth vellum. The smell transports me back in time, when I used to sit with my father in his study as he scratched away at his balance sheets. But I realize, my heart sinking, that they won’t burn quickly. My father told me that vellum is made from animal skin—not plant fibers, like modern paper. It’s why the book, at least as old as Cyrus, has lasted.
    I run my hand over the surface of the pages. They are a jumble of Latin, Greek, and Old English, plus other languages I don’t recognize, mixed in with astrological and scientific symbols: the output of Cyrus’s alchemy studies. One page has a rough sketch of two people facing each other, a braided cord joining them at the navel. It’s been painstakingly shaded with metallic ink. I know instantly what it is: the silver cord that binds the soul to the body.
    I don’t have time to burn it, but I can take it with me into the sea. The water will do its job, eventually, washing all the ink away. Hugging the book to my chest, I squeeze my eyes shut, a few tears escaping their corners as I say my final farewells—to my coven, the Incarnates; to Charlotte; to my mother, whom I never got to say good-bye to the first time. I savor the moment as the wind whistles through the crane like a hymn.
    I am ready.
    But before I can send myself into the air, I hear the squeal of tires shredding across asphalt and the sound of shattering glass pierces the night like a gunshot. A girl’s terrified voice