Page 150 of The Alchemists

Seb tilted his head to regard Conrad. After nearly a year, after all this agony, he was starting to understand what Dr. Metcalf had been trying to explain. This—this husk in front of him—was the real Conrad. Everything else had been a glamour, an enchantment. Without magic he was so much less.

“I came to say goodbye.”

“Sweet of you.” Conrad smirked emptily.

He didn’t stop the cruel little smile that crept onto his lips. He hadn’t felt the shape of it in so long. Conrad brought out the worst in him. He’d told Seb that they were better than everyone else, and Seb had been dumb enough to believe it; cold-blooded enough to want to.

“You think any part of this is for you?”

Conrad had nothing to say to that. Seb let him stew for a while, then scraped back his chair and made his way upright.

“Goodbye, Conrad.”

“What?” He couldn’t keep the shock out of his voice. “That’s it?”

“That’s it,” Seb agreed.

“You’re not going to ask me why? You don’t want⁠—”

“Of course I want to. But I’m only interested in the truth, and I don’t believe you’ll give me that.”

He made for the door.

“Seb!” Conrad’s voice was desperate. “Sebastian!”

He stepped into the hallway.

Conrad’s sobbing followed him all the way to the lobby, “Seb! Please! Come back, please!”

LILY

She hadn’t wanted to do anything for her birthday, hating the way it marked how much time she didn’t have left. The party was really for her family, her friends. They kept it small, though it was the biggest gathering the Victorian on Fountain Avenue had ever seen. She and her Gran had been in charge of beautifying the back yard, and so Lily had spent a very nice afternoon that she’d rather have spent doing anything else, raking leaves and picking up the remains of various gardening attempts.

Everyone contributed something. Tori and Asher fought over which expensive cake to have shipped in from the City. Tori and Seb banished Lily to campus to play Tarot with Daphne while they decorated. Asher spent an entire week creating a signature cocktail in defiance of the fact that Lily remained underage, and even longer curating the perfect playlist. Even Chant, whom Lily had invited after much internal debate, arrived with a bottle of wine that was much too nice for her—if not the Millay Tower crew—to appreciate, and a plate of homemade raspberry macarons.

It had been lovely. Beneath the backyard, transformed with fairy lights and garlands of gold and pink, and enchantments that only Tori could possibly have created with such wanton abandon, they’d drowned in sugar, sipped on champagne cocktails, and laughed. There had been so much laughter it filled the trees. Lily couldn’t stop basking in it. After so many months of stress and danger, knowing that all she had to do for the next month was live, goddammit, she finally felt free.

She marveled as Tori discussed trashy reality TV with her mother—Tori, who was covered in enchantments, oozing magic. She laughed, seeing Asher and Chant once more locked in attrition, this time over which album by that Welsh band was their landmark achievement. She smiled as she watched Daphne and Seb try to explain the rules of Tarot to Gran, and then grinned to herself as Daphne proceeded to fleece the both of them. Life would march on without her.

Now, as they listened to Chant’s sedan wheeze its way out of the driveway, she was finally alone with Seb. They faced each other on the swings, swaying lazily, fingers loosely twined together.

“I can’t believe after all this he actually gave us homework,” she said, shaking her head, tipping it up to take in the soft, gold-sculpted geometry of the magnolia in full bloom, filled with twinkling lights.

“Bastard,” Seb agreed, and she giggled stupidly because she was a little drunk and because he sounded like someone out of a Regency novel, preparing to duel.

Under Dean Meade’s direction, Chant had waived their final alchemy project, only to assign them a paper, and at her birthday party, no less.

“I can’t, in good conscience, let two of my best students fizzle out the year like gentlemen of leisure, so in lieu of the final project, I’m assigning you a paper.”

At that, Lily had sprayed champagne everywhere. Only Seb’s quick reflexes had spared him.

“I want from both of you, an accounting of your year working on the Elumnara in an alchemical framework. You have had unrestricted access to priceless original sources, and I want you to use that. I want you to show me what you’ve learned about yourselves, about each other. Dive deep. Do the work.”

“He didn’t even give us a page count,” Lily protested.

“Devious.”

“Evil,” she corrected, but she was laughing as she said it.