Madly (22 page)

“The Horn will be satisfied once the princess is out of mortal danger. Of course, ZA won't win the hunt exactly, but the princess will be cured—what is the difference? The Wilds passes provided for the hunt will now be rescinded and the royal family requests that all
further hunt-related activities cease immediately.”

“No!” I cry out. It can't be over, not when we're so close. Not after all we've gone through.

“The royal family asks that you destroy any remnants of a love potion in the making, as it is still an illegal mix. They thank the Kemi family for their participation in the hunt. Good night.”

The Summons cuts out. I press on the glass again, and again, but he doesn't return.

My mum puts her hand on my shoulder. “We're sorry, Sam.”

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Samantha

I LIE BACK ON MY BED, curled up under the duvet. The hunt had been my distraction, but now I'm out, I can't shut my eyes. Because whenever I shut my eyes, all I can see is Zain Aster and Princess Evelyn. The dark prince, the beautiful princess.

Then there's me. The nerdy, ordinary girl—meant to hide away in the lab with vials of wizard's beard and weird plants for company, not meant for the grand love story. There's no place for me in this formula. I'm a spare ingredient, not meant for the final brew.

My heart aches.

My mind searches for a mix, but there isn't one. There's no potion to cure the way I feel—unless it's the deepest sleep draught I can imagine, one that will whisk me away until my memories of Zain are distant and faded, like photographs left in the sun. But such a potion doesn't exist.

I feel a sudden rush of lunacy, and I want to laugh and laugh and laugh. Instead, I focus on my breathing. I swallow, but my throat feels tight.

I can't imagine why anyone would want a love potion. Why would anyone want to go through this pain? Why would they suffer this voluntarily? Because if there's one thing history has ever taught us about love potions, it's that they always, always end in tragedy and disaster.

The princess will be the exception. She didn't realize that the boy she tried to potion was in love with her all along. She will wake up from her madness—woken by him, if this story is to be written perfectly—and they will realize how lucky they are to have each other. She will realize the error of her ways; she will apologize for being so silly; he will forgive her.

And my moment on the mountain with Zain? A glitch.

She will never know.

I won't tell.

I know where I'll be.

My life won't be like this ever again, out in the Wilds, Finding alongside Kirsty. I've had enough adventure to last a lifetime. Maybe I'll take a night class in business studies, learn how to turn a decent profit—enough to get by—while watching my amazing sister grow into her power. She will go off and do wondrous things, and she'll always know where to find me.

Maybe in time, I'll see Zain and Princess Evelyn again, as I join the throngs crowded against metal railings to witness their big events—their engagement, their wedding, their first baby. I'll be just another face in the crowd. Maybe I'll wear something with a white fur trim, just to see if I can remind him of the abominable, of the mountain—but his eyes will pass me by, glossing over me to whoever is next. He won't want to look at me closely. Because I'll be the only one who knows.

I'll be the one who knows that to be with the person he loves, he trampled over all the ordinary people he saw beneath him. Including me.

My phone buzzes on my bedside table. It's Anita, texting me.
Have you seen the casts?

I turn on the television but mute the sound. I can read the running news ticker at the bottom:
ZA SAVES THE PRINCESS.
I groan. This is really what Anita wants to show me? But then there's a second headline:
EMILIA THOTH HELD BY POLICE IN ZAMBI.
There's an image of Emilia in the type of glamoured handcuffs that can hold a Talented, her face and hands covered in dirt, her hair wild around her face. I feel a jolt of happiness reach through my dark mood. At least something good came from our trip down there. Dan's footage is shown, but we barely get a mention. Our plight is old news already, in light of the ZA cure.

A picture flashes up from an official ZA press release.
It's a glass vial imprinted with the ZA logo. The vial is filled with a dark crimson liquid, thick like blood.

Exactly how you would expect a love potion to look.

I text back to Anita. At least Emilia was wrong. The princess is safe. Good luck to them.

Anita replies almost immediately. You don't need to be brave, lovely. I'll come over as soon as I can.

Her words bring the first hint of tears to my eyes, as I feel grateful to have people who love me. But I'm not being brave. I am glad the princess is safe, even though it means Granddad was right: In the end, the royals did bend the rules to suit themselves. And Zain broke my heart to save her.

The Princess. It's funny that I haven't thought about her all that much through this whole process, even though it's really all about her.

Sitting alone in my room now, I think about what it would be like to be driven to the most desperate of measures. To be so terrified of rejection that you try to prevent it at any cost. I wonder if Princess Evelyn has ever been rejected in her entire life.

It's not rejection that I'm scared of. Lord knows, I've seen enough of it in my time: from school, from the Talenteds. At least if they're rejecting you, they're paying some sort of attention to you.

No, my biggest fear is anonymity. Oblivion. Obscurity. The fear that I will do nothing more with my life than
rot away in my family store. The fear I will live my whole life and not do anything to make an impact. The fear that I will find the guy who I want to give my heart to, only for him to ignore me. Forget me.

Zain.

I'm disgusting myself, wallowing here, but I can't help that the image of his face is seared behind my eyelids. I don't need a love potion; I need an antilove cure to ease this pain.

It's as if I've taken one of the dark potions. One that causes pain—another highly illegal mix. Pain potions are idiosyncratic. Personal to the mixer. It requires that the mixer be causing someone immense physical pain during the final moments of creation. The more agonizing the pain, the stronger the potion. With no pain at all, it won't work—except maybe to give the recipient a mild stomachache. Too much pain—if you kill while mixing, for example—then it doesn't work either. The potion will burn itself out and be dead in the pan.

The mixer would have to be a pretty awful person to agree to make one of these potions, and who would want to buy from that person, in case you become the next victim?

And love potions aren't even about love, are they? They're about the illusion of it: the fantasy. They're about the lust, the passion. I've seen real love. My parents have it, for one. There's nothing one-sided about it.
It's about two people agreeing to face the world together, no matter the challenges. It's about respect.

It's personal.

Suddenly, like a fissure caused by an earthquake, a chasm opens deep in my mind. No brain, please not now. But it's not a voice that can be turned off.

A hunch screams that something is wrong.

My mind jumps right back to that moment in the library. The words that stood out to me, in that ancient language. Eluvium was the ivy. Indicum. Indigo. That's the color I would have looked for. Not crimson. It was too obvious.

I shake it out of my head. They won't let the princess drink a faulty love potion. If they can't use the horn to verify the potion's authenticity, they'll rigorously test it. There is no way that ZA will make a mistake. There's too much riding on this. Their reputation. Their business. Not to mention the princess's life.

I sit straight up out of bed. ZA have messed this up.

The love potion they've created is wrong. It's not going to work.

And I'm the only one who can fix it.

Chapter Forty

Samantha

I BARGE THROUGH THE HEAVY wooden door that leads into Granddad's lab and breathe a sigh of relief. The lab is neat, unbearably so—exactly as Granddad likes to keep it.

Instead of turning on the overhead light, I head over to the oil burners, lighting them with a long match. It lends the place an eerie glow, the gentle lamplight bouncing off the myriad glass jars and half-formed mixes. I walk over to the long oak table, which runs down the center of the room.

I hear the door swing open, and then I spot a shock of white hair, a wrinkled hand, and the tension disappears from my muscles.

Granddad pops his head around the door and looks at me over his half-moon spectacles. “Everything okay, Sam?”

My eyes well with tears, and I shake my head. “They've got it wrong.”

He potters over to the table and places his hand over mine. “I know.”

“They won't listen to me if I try to use the Summons. What if she's already taken it?”

“There's only one way to convince them.”

I lean my head on his shoulder. “I have to do this, don't I?”

He shifts his shoulder so I'm forced to look up, and then he takes my chin between his fingers. “You never have to do anything. But at this moment, you know the truth. If you want to save her, then you are the only one who will be able to do it.”

I nod. Do I want to save her?

Of course I do. She is the one whom Zain loves. I want to give her back to him. He deserves that, even after everything.

I wipe the tears from my eyes.

“Good girl,” says Granddad. “You have a strong start here.” He walks over to where Dad has stored the potion base I made in Loga. My head feels fuzzy, but I shake it to remove the cobwebs. I lift up the mix of Aphroditas pearl, rosewater, and eluvian ivy, swirling it around in its glass jar.

“It's beautiful,” I whisper. I lift the lid off the jar and the air around me is infused with a delicate scent—like roses and the crest of ocean waves and blue sky in a ­bottle. I almost melt with delight at how good it smells.
“Oh my goodness, they should make this a perfume!”

Granddad winks at me. “Now you know the recipe for Elixir No. 5, the House of Perrod's signature scent.”

My eyes widen; that perfume sells in department stores for hundreds of crowns. I run the base through a strainer, collecting any tiny fragments of powder that haven't completely dissolved. When it looks about as clear as I'm ever going to make it, I turn on a blue-flamed burner and set a cast-iron pot on top of it. I pour the liquid into it from a height, watching it flow and steam as it hits the warm edges of the pot. In this light, from this height, it takes on an almost-champagne tinge, a light yellow-gold that sparkles gently. Blink and you'll miss it shimmer.

Granddad observes me, but he doesn't help. All of it must be done by my hand, especially if I would like it to be as strong as it needs to be.

Next I cut the pink jasmine from the pot Anita gave me, its roots still embedded in the soil. That will help with the strength of it too. Somehow, everything has come together as it needed to. This is my potion to make; I know it.

I pound the delicate petals of the jasmine once or twice on the oak table, bruising the blush of the flower, turning pink to almost brown. Then I drop it into the base. Immediately it starts to smoke and thicken, the liquid bubbling ferociously. This is good. This is what I want. Virility.

The abominable fur is next. My hands shake as I unwrap it from the brown paper we stored it in, three thin, incredibly long strands of translucent hair. Laid on top of each other, they create the deep, pure white of the mountain, but separately they look more like crystal. I compare them to the unicorn horn. They are similar in many ways. But there is no shimmer to the abominable. It is cold and matte. One is loneliness. The other is purity.

The abominable hair is brittle, and as I pick up a strand it crumbles in my fingers. I drop the pieces into a large marble mortar, then I pick up the pestle and begin to grind. It's instant stress relief. I twist and twist the strands of abominable, watching them separate out, crush, dance in the bottom of the mortar. Then I start pounding, driving the substance deep into the stone. It's ridiculous how much pleasure this little act of violence gives me.

I scrape the side of the bowl with the side of the pestle, not allowing a single molecule to escape its punishment.

It still needs to be finer, so I tuck the mortar under my arm and continue to grind from a closer angle. When it's done, it's a fine powder. I carefully tip it all into a glass jar that Granddad has labeled in his spindly handwriting. I only need the tiniest touch of the abominable powder, and the rest will go back onto our store shelves. Crushed abominable fur. For use in love potions, for thawing cold shoulders, and alleviating agoraphobia.

I tip a tiny half teaspoonful of the abominable powder into the mix and turn down the heat on the burner. The mixture calms down, resting at a gentle simmer.

“Let's have a cup of tea,” Granddad says. “We've got a long night ahead of us still.”

I stare back at the mixture wistfully, but nothing is going to happen for the next little while—I must reduce it down by half before we add the unicorn horn.

“Make mine peppermint?” I ask, allowing myself the first small smile in what feels like a long time. I follow him into the kitchen. He fills the kettle up with water and places it on our hot stove. The stove is my favorite part of the kitchen. It's heavy cast iron painted a bright crimson, and it's always on, keeping this part of the house cozy and warm, even if the room is still run down. Looking round at our shabby cupboards and peeling paint, I suddenly think that we might have the money soon to change all that.

“Granddad, why have you never moved the store?”

“Sam, dear, I will never move the store.”

“But why? We could be in a much better location with more foot traffic, we could digitize the stock records, track the prescriptions via computer . . . still keeping the traditional elements of our lab and the way we mix. What's the harm in updating if we have the money? We could turn Kemi's Potion Shop into a real business again. Even if this love potion doesn't work . . . we can turn
things around. And if anything good is going to come from this whole experience, it's that everyone will be reminded of the name Kemi.”

“That's right, which means they know where to find us if they want us.”

“But . . .”

“Sam, there is no ‘but' about it. This shop is not moving anywhere. You might think that only Talenteds are permitted to access magic, but that couldn't be further from the truth. Magic is a part of our atmosphere, the air we breathe. The secrets in there”—he points to my diary, where I've finished inscribing this stage of the recipe—“are worth protecting. There is more magic in these store shelves than there will be in any other modern building. Magic passed down to us from the generations of Kemi that have lived and worked in this store before us.”

The whistle of the kettle interrupts the moment, and I don't have the energy to press on with my questioning. I have a lifetime to learn the store's—and Granddad's—secrets. But first, I have to get the potion right.

After I finish my tea, we head back into the lab. As soon as I open the door, fingers of pale pink smoke slide out into the kitchen. It must be the jasmine. I grab a pair of goggles from a hook before I check on the mixture, and I see that it has dissolved down into a thick, almost gelatinous white substance. It doesn't look anything like
a love potion should at the moment, and there aren't many ingredients left to add. I bite my bottom lip, but remind myself that sometimes the right reactions don't happen until everything is in the pot.

I unscrew the lid from the jar containing the unicorn horn and spill the slivers out onto the table. It looks so fragile, but unlike the abominable hair, it doesn't shatter at the first touch. Or at the second. Or when I take a sharp knife to it. It won't break at all.

“Granddad, do you have any ideas?”

He takes up another piece of the unicorn horn. He rolls it around in his palm, testing its strength with his fingers.

“Do you think maybe I should just stir it into the mixture as it is?” I ask doubtfully.

“You must somehow extract the nutrients inside the horn. If you simply use it as is then the other ingredients will only react with the outer casing.”

“But I don't think I'll be able to bash it open—I mean, it's not responding to any amount of pressure.”

“Well, then maybe you will have to be more subtle than that.”

I want to scream at him,
Why won't you just tell me the answer?
But that isn't my granddad's way. He pats my hand and walks out of the lab. That's the boost I need. If he's leaving, he's confident I will figure it out. If only I had the same confidence in myself.

Thick pink smoke billows out of the pot now, so I move one of the lab hoods—almost like a great upside-down beaker—over the top of it. The idea is to catch some of the fumes, as they might be important later. I'm amazed that it's smoking so much, even though the heat is down low on the burner.

Then it strikes me. I can steam out the nutrients from the unicorn horn. I place the shard in an oversize sieve and balance it under the hood and across the cast-iron pot. There I watch as the smoke engulfs it, swirling around it, before the unicorn horn begins to bead and sweat. I can only hope that it will work. Then I watch as one of the beads falls into the mixture. Immediately the white mixture at the base of the pot turns a dark pink where it splashes. Relieved, I leave the horn to sweat out even more.

Instead, now I go over to the desk where my diary is lying open. I pick up Granddad's fountain pen and slowly write out the remaining ingredients, the quantities that I used, and the method of the recipe itself. I think of the princess, working unknowingly with her evil aunt to find the recipe. But Emilia didn't seem to know about the final ingredient. The one that I'd thought of last night. The one I wouldn't have to go out into the Wilds to find. But the one that is just as dangerous as the others, to me.

When I have another thought, it's panic. My head is
on the desk, the pen fallen against my hand and leaking ink onto my palm. I snatch at my watch—five a.m. I've been asleep for four hours.

The potion.

The mix.

I haven't been watching it.

I race over to the table, knocking my chair over in the process. The smoke has died away almost completely, and the shard of unicorn horn is gone. I peer into the cast iron bowl, dreading what I might find there. But instead, it looks remarkably like a liquid again. Floating at the top is the outer casing of the unicorn horn. I take the sieve and fish it out.

Using my gloves, I pick the pot off the burner and turn it off completely. Then I gently pour the liquid into a clear glass beaker. I almost drop it when I see its color. A beautiful rich crimson, exactly like the potion ZA showed on television. It looks exactly how a love potion should look. If I didn't know better, I would say this was perfect.

But I know it isn't. Now is the time for my hunch about the last piece of the puzzle, the true final ingredient in the mix. From the drawer in the far side of the room, I pull out a long-handled, extremely sharp silver knife. I hold it gently between two fingers and walk back to the table.

I place my palm against the glass edge of the beaker.

“Ready?” I say to myself out loud. I hate doing this. My stomach lurches, but I force myself to be calm. It's just a cut. I've been engulfed by eluvian ivy. I've been scratched by an abominable. I've been bitten by a vampire bat. I can handle a little cut.

I slice with the knife.

It barely has to touch my skin before the blood rises in the crevices of my skin. I pull my hand into a fist and watch as a drop of blood falls into the mixture. Where the blood touches it, it turns indigo.

I'm just admiring my handiwork, when the door opens again. I expect it to be Granddad, but it's not, it's Mum. Her hair is disheveled and she's in her dressing gown and slippers.

“Did you hear?”

“Hear what?”

“The synth potion passed all their tests. They're about to administer it to the princess now.”

“No!” I shout. “No, they can't!”

“Oh my god, Sam, what happened to your hand?”

I look down and it's gushing blood now. I open it out, and my mum rushes forward, grabbing a tissue from the side table and pressing it onto my palm.

“Mum, you don't understand,” I say, barely noticing my hand. “They can't give her that potion. It won't work. It will damage her more. I have the right one.”

I spin around and grab the beaker from the table. But
instead of the liquid I expected, the mixture has turned completely to powder, and the color has changed to a dark, deep indigo.

“Are you sure?” Mum says, looking from my face to the powder in my hand.

“I've never been more sure of anything in my entire life.”

“Then you'd better hurry.”

I race out of the lab, grabbing a bottle of water from the fridge door in the kitchen. I take a moment to measure a teaspoon of the powder and mix it with the water. Then I run to the Summons. If I don't get there in time, the princess is going to be lost, forever.

Once I get to the Summons, I touch the surface tentatively at first, and then harder, until I'm slamming my hand against the glasslike surface.

I scream Renel's name, but if he's there, if he can hear me, he's not listening.

“Renel!” I scream again. “You're making a big mistake! The ZA potion is wrong. You're going to poison her!”

“He's not going to answer,” says Granddad. “Come with me.”

I have no better option than to follow him, even if I debate whether I can run to the castle from here and scream and shout until I'm let into the palace above. I follow him into his bedroom, which is just as jumbled and full of books and alchemist paraphernalia as the lab.