Charles forced a smile. “Certainly. Ask me anything you like.”
“I know a great deal about your factual history, of course.” The alchemist laughed. “House of Perry and Whitby. Bastard son. I believe I’ve bought your blood on the black market a time or two, when your grandfather was still making certain you were his true offspring. Of course, one can see why he was so eager to try and disown you. Bit of a troublemaker, you are.”
Charles hated this already. “Do you have a name?”
“I am Martin Smith,” the alchemist replied. “And I think you will find, as we get to know one another, that we have more in common than you might suspect. But I get ahead of myself.” He leaned forward slightly, letting his steepled fingers fall away to join the others as they nestled casually beneath his chin. “Tell me, Charles Perry, what it is that you want.”
What he wanted? Charles blinked, then frowned. “I thought Bimsy told you. I have nightmares—”
“I did not ask you why you wanted my help,” Smith said. “I asked you what it is you
want
.”
Charles didn’t know what to say. What the devil could this have to do with anything? “I don’t know. To—well, to be happy,” he said lamely. “I want peace. Happiness. Peaceful happiness. Money’s all right, but happiness or peace would be fine. If the dreams were gone, if I could forget—” Charles blushed and looked down at the floor. “I don’t know,” Charles said again, almost in a whisper. “I truly don’t know what I want.”
Smith rose from his chair and gestured at Charles. “Remove your clothes, then turn and face the door.”
Charles took a step backward, stumbling over his own feet. “I beg your pardon?”
“I’m certain I made myself clear.” Smith ran his gaze up and down Charles’s body once more, then curled his lip and shook his head. When Charles failed to move, Smith clapped his hands sharply. “Strip, pet. I don’t fancy doing it myself.”
For a moment, Charles considered bolting. This meeting was clearly going pear-shaped. He’d known the alchemist would be eccentric, and Charles wasn’t against sex, obviously, but—well, this was just odd as all fuck, wasn’t it? But where else would he go if he left? If he got high again now, high enough to dull the wraiths, he risked killing himself or worse. If he went back to his grandfather’s house, he’d
have
to kill himself.
“Please,” Charles said, trying to sound penitent, not panicked. “Please—I need you to stop these dreams.” He glanced at Smith’s long hands again, then, since the subject had been broached, at his groin. “I’m not—I don’t mind trading sex, if that’s what you want, and I’m flattered, but I truly need—”
Smith laughed so hard he could not speak for several minutes.
“Trading sex.” Smith wiped tears from his eyes and righted himself. “I’m not going to fuck you, pet, not if I can help it.”
Charles glanced again at the door. “Bimsy said you used sex magic. I don’t know what that is, but…” When Charles trailed off, waiting for Smith to clarify, the alchemist only lifted one of his pencil-thin eyebrows. Charles cleared his throat. “How does it work?”
Smith leaned forward, his pale eyes dancing in their own cold light. “Take off your clothes, and I’ll show you.”
Oh, it was time to run. The stink was climbing inside Charles’s nostrils now, and he’d gotten his answer as to why this alchemist was rogue: because he was barking mad. Charles began to back away toward the door. “I think I will give this matter a bit more consideration. Thank you, though—yes,
thank you
, because you’ve been very helpful. Truly.” He tripped over a pile of books and knocked his elbow against a table, jostling some tubing. He laughed nervously. “Thank you. Very much. I’ll just—be going—”
Smith tilted his head curiously to the side. “Goodness. Is that fog creeping beneath my door?”
Charles turned, knocking the table again as he cried out. Goddess save him, it was
here
. And it was well formed. It was beneath the door, clinging to the walls, the ceiling—it was everywhere. Charles could see the hands of the wraiths and the edges of their faces. He shouted, glanced around for an exit, then slammed into the table and pressed himself tight against it.
It was at the windows too. It was everywhere.
Smith rose from the desk and walked idly toward Charles. He reached over Charles’s shoulder to a shelf behind the table, withdrew a cigarette from a box, and waved it at Charles. “Undress, pet. I need you naked for what I intend to do. If you hurry, I’ll drive them back before they can reach you.”
Charles started to refuse, then stopped short, realizing what the alchemist was saying. “Wait—you can see them?”
Smith picked up a flint from the table and shrugged. “Not like you, no. But I know they’re there.” He struck the flint, brought the spark up to the end of his cigarette, and inhaled lazily. “And I know they’ll get worse. I also know I won’t stop them until you start stripping down.”
Charles stared at the alchemist for several seconds, trying to gauge his insanity, trying to find some other way out of this. But Smith only stood there smoking, looking slightly bored. The mist wraiths kept coming.
Hesitantly Charles slid out of his jacket.
Smith did nothing.
Charles undid his vest and then his shirt, tugging it out of his trousers and peeling it away from his skin.
Still the alchemist did nothing.
But when Charles pulled his first arm from his sleeve, the alchemist picked up a small, white object from the table, and when Charles withdrew his other arm as well, leaving his torso naked, Smith aimed the object over his shoulder, tossing it backward into the mist. It exploded in a sharp, angry
pop
, shattering in a cloud of dust and stinking so bad that Charles finally gave up and gagged. But when the dust settled, the mist was gone.
Smith resumed smoking. “That ought to buy us enough time to make some inquiries.” He gestured to Charles’s trousers. “Hurry up.”
Charles looked around for somewhere to drape his shirt, but there was nowhere that was not already crowded with sharp objects or dirty apparatuses. He placed it as carefully as he could on a cleanish space on the floor.
Smith watched impassively as Charles crouched down and fought his way out of his boots. “You do not have nightmares, Charles Perry,” he said. “You have visions and you have dreams, and because you have ignored them, they are stealing into your waking hours. But the dreams are not what truly ail you. Your dreams are but a symptom of something greater.” He leaned in closer, his eyes glinting in the dim gaslight and the smoke from his cigarette. “Dreams such as yours are whispers from other places, other times, and even other selves. It is the most basic sort of magic. It is the work of moments to turn off your dreams for a brief period; it is an hour to do so permanently. However you would soon find yourself feeling listless and dull witted.” Smith cast a derisive glance at Charles. “Despite your insistence that you desire nothing more than ‘peace and happiness,’ if you did not have your dreams, you would soon be begging for new nightmares.”
Charles wrenched the second boot free and propped it with the other beneath the table. “I’ve had a lifetime of nightmares, living and waking. I won’t want more nightmares once you get rid of this one.” He rose and wrapped his arms over his naked chest. “I don’t want anything but a nice, boring existence from here on out.”
Smith exhaled smoke into Charles’s face and gave him a withering look. “You practically sustain yourself on scandal. You drink too much. You smoke anything that will give you a high. You fuck anything that moves, male or female and both at once. How you’ve avoided the pillory and mandatory licensing is a magic more powerful than anything I’ll ever know, though I suppose having a grandfather as determined as Augustus Perry to keep his House out of the tabloids goes a long way. You’ve found your way into trouble since you were old enough to reach for it—even the circumstances of your conception are criminal. And this is saying nothing, of course, of that business in the north when you were seventeen.”
Charles hugged himself tighter and looked away. “I don’t want to keep that fucking dream. You wouldn’t even suggest it if you knew what I see every time I close my eyes. For years now they’ve been haunting me—every night! You think I drink and whore for fun? Not anymore, I don’t. I’m trying to forget. I’m terrified of the dark space behind my own eyelids. I just want peace. I swear to you that’s all I want.”
Smith made a derisive sound in the back of his throat. “Let us make a wager, then. For no payment whatsoever, I will remove your nightmare. But first I will walk you, waking, through your dream. All the way through it. If you still wish me to banish it, I will, and you will leave happy and peaceful. I will remain here, unpaid and well shamed for my arrogance.”
Charles glanced at Smith, unable to believe what he had just heard. “And if I want to keep the dream?” he asked, thinking, There is nothing in this world that can make that happen.
“Then you will pay me whatever I ask,” Smith said. “You will submit to me in full rite. You will give me your power whenever I ask for it, however I ask. As much as I ask for. You will be bound to me completely, and you will submit to me willingly until I am finished with you.”
Charles held up his hands. “No more bleeding. I’m not doing that again.”
The end of the cigarette disappearing into the crease of two fingers as Smith bared his palms. “I have no designs on your House blood. I cannot even access it outside the guild. If I so much as sniff it, they will come down upon me.”
“Then what ‘power’ of mine would you be bargaining for?” Charles asked.
Smith’s eyes danced. “Your own, pet. The power that is your own.”
Mad. The man was completely cracked. Power? What power? Charles didn’t have any power! Submit? Sex magic, but they weren’t going to fuck? What would Smith want to do, have Charles polish his shoes with his semen? Would fluids not be involved at all? Would Smith only want to paint mad little symbols all over Charles’s cock? He smiled to himself. This was too easy.
Yes, a deeper part of his mind whispered. It is. Dwell on that for a moment.
But Charles shoved the whisper aside. There was nothing to dwell on. The man had chased the mist away with nothing more than a chalk rock. The alchemist could do more, and he wanted to trade for Charles’s “own power.” Charles had no power. He couldn’t so much as pull a penny from behind someone’s ear. There was nothing to lose. So maybe somehow he lost this wager, and in a moment of insanity, he said he wanted his nightmares back because somehow they weren’t nightmares anymore. So he had to “submit” to Smith. Charles was not shy or proud. Maybe this alchemist was molly and wanted a sex slave. No problem—he’d done that before. Maybe he liked it rough. Also not a problem. Maybe he wanted no sex, like he said—maybe he wanted someone to clean up the place. Boring, but if it got rid of his nightmare or made it a good dream? He didn’t care.
And he
wasn’t
going to keep it. When he got rid of the nightmare, everything would change.
Everything
. He could do anything, go anywhere—he had so much money now from his grandfather that maybe, once the nightmares were gone, maybe he
would
leave the country, just like Lord Whitby had told him to do every time he handed over a pouch. Maybe he would go find a tropical island with nothing but beautiful men and women and new, amazing drugs and sandy beaches.
Oh yes. Once this nightmare was gone, everything would change.
“Not my blood,” Charles said, just to be sure.
Smith held up a hand as if reciting a vow. “I will not so much as scratch you, sir. Not a single nick against your skin.”
And there was no way to use his blood for magic without taking it out of him, that much Charles knew. He stayed a smile. “Fine,” Charles said, trying to sound light, not giddy with certain victory. “I accept your terms.”
Smith nodded, looking almost serene. He motioned once more to Charles’s body. “Finish.”
Charles reached for his belt, pulled it loose, and let his trousers fall. He undid his drawers and stepped out of them too, and then as an afterthought removed his socks. He stood there, naked and cold but not uncertain, and he looked the alchemist in the eye. Oh yes. This was going to be good.
“I’m ready,” he said, and he waited.
Smith didn’t do anything, though, not right away. He continued smoking and watching, and so Charles watched back. His attention became fixed on the cigarette, which made him wish he had one. But as Charles watched, he realized that while the cigarette was nearly spent, it had been that way for several tokes now. Yet Smith smoked it casually, as if he could make it go all night.
After another lengthy inhale, Smith blew the smoke out the side of his mouth as he tapped ash onto Charles’s discarded clothes. “You became testy when I mentioned your family.”
Charles shifted on his feet, letting his gaze slide away to the black pane of the window. “We aren’t particularly close.”
Smith’s smoke curled against Charles’s face, tickling his nose. “The Perrys are one of the legendary Four Houses. The legendary blood of the Goddess herself runs through your veins. You’re plagued by dreams, but you won’t examine any possible reason for them within your own family? Did the dreams never strike you as a warning?”
Charles didn’t answer, just rubbed his arms. He didn’t mind being naked, but he didn’t like being cold. He was thinking and talking too much about the dreams, and as usual, it was calling the nightmare up in his mind. Cold hands, cold and wet and gray. He imagined they were in the shadows, climbing out, coming toward him.
“You’re talking about the curse. It’s a myth. A bunch of nonsense.”
Quit asking stupid questions and give me my release.
“So says the man who has come to a sex magician to rid him of nightmares.” Smith laughed and tapped out his ash again. “You should tell your brother you think the curse is nonsense.”
“My brother is dead,” Charles said. “He went to war in Catal ten years ago, to the Death Unit. No one comes home from that. Not even Saint Jonathan Perry.”
Smith inhaled again. Charles frowned at the nib, trying to catch it growing back. It should be singeing Smith’s fingers by now.