The Etsey Series 1: The Seventh Veil Read Free

alchemist. It still sounded dangerous.
    In the corner of the room, the shadow stirred again, and Charles quickly looked away.
    “I sent a boy over to ask, and he said he could see you today,” Bimsy pressed. “Said you sounded intriguing.”
    The shadows in the other corners were moving too, not yet forming, but they were gaining strength too fast. Within an hour, he’d be in their throes again. I can’t take much more of this . He drew on the cigarette again with some intensity.
    “I thought you was dead when I first found you today,” Bimsy said. “Lord Whitby’s grandson, dead in my house. I all but felt the noose around my neck, lad.”
    Charles tapped his cigarette into the bucket and shook his head. “The ghosts don’t kill me. They won’t.” He didn’t know how he knew this, but he did. Drive him mad, though— that , they could do. Just like dear Dad . He sighed and turned to Bimsy. “If I go to this alchemist, can I come back here again?”
    “If he fixes you, sure enough you can,” Bimsy agreed.
    The shadows were moving again, and the mist was rising. It wouldn’t even be an hour before they were back.
    “The alchemist said to send you over as soon as you were about,” Bimsy said. “Just think, you could have a cure, go home and rest, and be back with a new pair of bunnies by tomorrow night.”
    It would never work like that, Charles knew. If it worked at all, with a rogue alchemist it would never be that easy. But the shadows stalking Charles were taller now, and he could see their faces forming as their thin gray fingers reached around Bimsy’s throat.
    Charles tossed his cigarette into the bucket and sat up in the bed. “Hand me my coat, Bimsy.”
    He shrugged into the blue silk, wrapping himself in stale beer and smoke and perfume, and headed for the door, ignoring as best he could the icy cold and the weak, plaintive cries that echoed all around him.
    * * *
    All alchemists had their lairs in Golden Lane.
    They practiced all over Etsey, but their sanctuaries were in the capital, in Boone: their laboratories, their dungeons, their cabinets of curiosity, and their vaults they never so much as let their apprentices open. The world’s darkest and most dangerous secrets were likely all tucked within this narrow half mile of street, but no thief dared so much as glance down it. Being cured by an alchemist was often enough to get you killed. Stumbling into one of their lairs without their knowledge could bring you a life that made you wish for death.
    Charles turned up his collar and huddled against the wind as he maneuvered his way into the narrow, brick-lined street. There were gas lamps flickering in several of the windows, and in one there was even an electric lamp, a luxury not even Charles’s family yet enjoyed. The shops at this end of the alley were of the guild and therefore were of high quality. Each alchemist here had a patron, and the grander the patron, the grander the storefront. Charles’s grandfather kept one of them. Charles had met him once a year from the time he was born until he was thirteen. He still had nightmares about being stuck with needles, his blood dripping into a bowl as the wizened old creature watched it spill away. The alchemist had taken extra when Lord Whitby wasn’t watching, because it was fun to play with the blood of a House heir, not to mention profitable. In fact, Charles had been fairly certain his first hit of drug at a party had been amplified with a by-product of a visit with Old Rooky.
    Alchemists were nasty, paranoid creatures, and they loved power. Charles’s blood was nothing but power, though little good it did him. He had no talent for magic. He’d tried, but it had come to nothing, which wasn’t unexpected. He had, as his grandfather loved to remind him, talent for nothing at all.
    Except sex. Charles was fantastically good at fucking.
    Charles stopped at the edge of Golden Lane and looked back to the dock, lighting another cigarette as