Page 23 of Alchemised

“The High Necromancer knows exactly where I am and what I’m doing. If he wants something, he won’t have it relayed by the likes of you. After all, how many times did you manage to fail him to be banned from receiving a corpse with iron resonance? Was it the second time or the third?”

There was a snarl, followed by the sudden scream of metal and a thud. She peeked out again. Atreus was on the ground; one of the bars of iron in the floor had caught around his leg, pulling him back towards the main wing of the house.

He was clawing at the ground, scrabbling, trying to escape but only succeeding in nearly ripping his fingers off. Atreus screamed with rage, mouth frothing, the noises practically animal.

Ferron idly followed. “I’d be careful with that corpse. Pyromancy is a rare ability, you know. Give yourself a few more months, and I’m sure you’ll manage a spark.”

H ELENA SCUTTLED BACK TO HER room once they were gone; just a glimpse of the house in action had made her far more wary. She’d understood in theory that it was malleable, but seeing the reality of it turned every bit of wrought-iron filigree ominous.

It was not her imagination: The house was almost alive.

And so was Atreus—or reanimated. She would have sworn he’d been executed before the Undying had appeared.

She kept trying to piece together the bits and pieces of her missing memories, but it was difficult to know if she’d forgotten something or never been informed in the first place.

After all, a healer didn’t merit much in the way of security clearance.

Her only knowledge of the battles and military strategy was trying to staunch the sea of blood that followed.

Despite knowing how dangerous it was, she couldn’t help but try to unravel the mystery of what she’d forgotten.

Her mind itched for context. Yet she was playing a cat-and-mouse game with Ferron, and her ignorance was her only defence.

But it didn’t feel protective. It felt like walking blind, with her skin sheared off.

Her mind circled relentlessly, treating every new piece of information as a potential clue, turning it one way and then the other, trying to see if it fit into any of the gaps. What could she have possibly known that would need to be hidden like this?

Stop thinking. She slotted her feet under the wardrobe and began doing sit-ups until her abdominal muscles burned. Lila used to do it in their room when she was anxious and off duty.

Helena needed to focus on Ferron, on finding some way to provoke him into killing her.

He had to have some kind of weakness she could exploit.

Kaine Ferron, where is the chink in your perfect armour?

As if on cue, the door opened, and he walked in.

He stared down at where her feet were tucked under the wardrobe and the way she was laid out, panting from exertion.

“You’ve found something to do with yourself, I see.”

She forced herself to roll over and stand, biting back a wince when she pushed herself up.

He was early for their walk, and this aberration in the daily routine made her suspicious.

“Come here,” he said, withdrawing a vial containing several small white tablets, watching her reaction to it.

“What are those?” she asked when he unscrewed the top and tapped one out.

He raised an eyebrow. “I’ll tell you if you swallow it like a good girl.”

Helena pressed her lips tightly together.

Despite healers generally lacking formal medical training, Helena was intimately acquainted with medicine. She knew very well the power and danger in something as innocuous as a small white tablet.

“You know I’m not going to kill you,” Ferron said, his eyes glittering with amusement. “After all, if I were, you’d feel obliged to come running.”

Helena glowered at him. Poison was only one of the innumerable possibilities.

Ferron didn’t give her an opportunity to choose between compliance and resistance. His resonance settled in her bones and pried her mouth open. He lifted her chin with a finger and dropped the tablet onto the back of her tongue, forcing her to swallow.

It slid like a pebble down her oesophagus.

She expected him to release her immediately, but instead he pulled off his gloves and took her face in his hands, fingertips pressing along her jaw.

The hairs on the back of her neck stood on end, and she kicked him violently in the shin.

His jaw twitched, but he didn’t let go. Her legs simply stopped moving.

“I hate you,” she forced out between her clenched teeth.

He paid her no mind as his eyes went out of focus.

She could tell that he was doing some kind of complex transmutation to her. Something was happening. She should have been panicking, trying to resist as Ferron’s resonance sank into her biochymistry. Instead, she became completely calm.

She could feel him altering her as if she were an instrument he was tuning; tampering, adjusting, manipulating her until she felt empty.

He let go.

She jerked away, expecting the feelings to come rushing back. Vivi mancy of that type was practically useless because it required a constant resonance connection to maintain.

Yet her emotions didn’t come back.

They were somewhere else. Present but distant. Removed.

Ferron watched as she stood there, left intellectualising her confusion.

It was as though a piece of glass had been slotted between them. She was aware she hated him. This was a piece of information that seemed of utmost importance, and yet she couldn’t feel it. Hatred was a construct rather than an emotion.

“How do you feel?” His sharp eyes were cataloguing her every detail.

Her skin prickled with awareness of his scrutiny, a shiver running down her spine, but she didn’t feel the corresponding wash of fear. Just awareness. Her hands had stopped spasming.

“I feel cold,” she said. “Numb. What are those tablets?”

“They were developed during the war. It’s a sort of holding effect on physiological transmutations that would otherwise be temporary.”

Helena blinked, wondering at how that could work. It must have been developed using chymiatria in tandem with vivimancy; developed in stages, addressing each of the various hormones and—

Ferron snapped his fingers in front of her face. “The purpose of this is to acclimate you to the house so I don’t have to waste my time escorting you everywhere, not so you can have something to reverse-engineer. Out.”

Helena was unfazed. It was bizarre how empty she felt. Scarcely human. As if nothing meant anything or had any consequences. The tablets took away the good feelings as much as the bad. She was carved out and empty. An abyss instead of a human.

“Is this what it’s like to be you?”

He gave a dry laugh. “Like it?”

She considered. It was certainly easier to be near Ferron now that she didn’t feel overwhelmed by how much she hated him, and afraid of his capacity to hurt her. She was still excruciatingly aware of how dangerous he was, but without the sickening physical reaction of that knowledge.

“It feels like I’m dead,” she said.

He made an odd sound. “Well, the effect is temporary. It’ll only last a few hours.”

He gestured towards the door, but Helena remained where she was, eyes narrowing.

“You’re being different to me now. You’re less mean.” She furrowed her eyebrows in confusion—a feeling she was still, apparently, capable of experiencing.

He stepped towards her and leaned so close, his breath ran along the length of her neck.

“Why would I torture you when you won’t react?” he asked softly in her ear.

He straightened, raising an eyebrow. “See? Nothing. No elevated pulse, no pounding heart. I could bring in one of your little friends, and peel their skin off right here in front of you, and you wouldn’t react.” He shook his head. “There’s no fun in that.”

Helena nodded, her own ideas developing. This would be the perfect state to be in to finally kill herself without any sense of self-preservation holding her back.

“Outside,” he said again, a look of irritation flashing across his face as if somehow reading her intentions.

Helena retrieved her cloak with a sigh. The lights in the hall were all off, only the dim illumination of daylight trickling through the windows, but she was unafraid. She knew they were only shadows.

She descended the stairs and went to the veranda, standing in the doorway for a moment, but the courtyard was of no interest to her.

She turned to explore the house. She couldn’t help but wonder at Ferron’s choice to drug her. Wasn’t it more convenient for her to be afraid?

He had to have some kind of fail-safe, some trick of keeping an eye on her that she hadn’t realised yet.

She stopped in her tracks, a sudden thought occurring to her, one which had never entered her mind when she’d been consumed by thoughts of shadows.

She turned around and walked back towards the west wing. Ferron was on the veranda, reading a book. He glanced through the open door, but she ignored him, ascending the stairs, scanning every corner as she went towards her room.

She’d rarely looked up. The ceilings were shadowy, the darkness always pressing down on her when she looked too long. She’d focused on her most immediate surroundings, the walls within reach, the next place she’d step, the space between the shadows. She didn’t look up.

There were two dead maids in her room, turning down the bed, the windows thrown open. They dropped the duvet and instantly snapped the windows shut, locking them as Helena entered.

She ignored them, seizing hold of the armchair and dragging it over to the far corner of the room as the manacles bumped against the bones inside her wrist. She stood on the chair and finally resorted to tilting it against the wall, clambering up the back so she could get a good look at the high-up corner nearest the door.

Tucked into the shadow was an eye encased in glass. It swivelled, the pupil contracting, as if it were still alive, and stared straight at her.

The iris was a beautiful, deep blue.

They’re offering a lot of money for eyes, Grace had said.