I shook my head at his injured tone. “Nothing, it’s just—” I searched for words that wouldn’t insult him more.
“You figured if I was involved it would be something underhanded and possibly illegal?”
I chewed on my lip. “Something like that.”
“Kate, you’re the last person I’d pretend to be a saint with. But I honestly do try to mostly stay on the right side of the law these days.”
I shrugged because I was withholding judgment on that. “So alchemical liqueur, huh? It’s kind of a cool idea, I guess.”
He shook his head at me. “You’ve grown too jaded in the last ten years.”
And he’d gotten too … everything. I crossed my arms and looked away from his knowing gaze. “Are we going to do this or what?”
His openness of a few moments prior evaporated and his smile froze. “Of course.” He held out a gallant hand for me to precede him. “The lab is just through there.” He pointed to an arched doorway at the far corner of the cavernous room. As we walked, we skirted around the huge holes where the brewing vats used to rest. Judging from the darkness below, the floor we were on was over a boiler room or storage basement.
John led me through a bricked archway to a room that probably had been a testing room where quality assurance techs made sure the batches were up to the brewery’s standards. But now, it had been completely transformed into an alchemy lab that would make most wizards greener than a youth-potion addict. “Holy shit,” I breathed, walking in.
Large copper distilling vats had been set up along one wall. Under the massive warehouse windows, a dozen barrels and even more boxes with shipping stamps from Canada and Europe sat patiently, waiting to be opened and turned into elixirs. I noted that several of the barrels were marked as containing rose quartz oil. Guess that explained the mysterious shipping manifests Shadi had found.
I turned from the windows toward the worktables that had been set up along the wall opposite the distilling vats. Long coils jutted from glass flasks like alien antennae. This was no slapdash operation. Volos hadn’t gotten my call and hastily put all these things in place. I turned to look at him. “How long have you had this set up?”
“A few weeks. I’d originally intended to use it to refine the recipes for the products we’ll eventually make here, but once Gray Wolf came into the picture, I decided to start working on an antipotion.”
I narrowed my eyes. “When did you start working on it?”
“The day after you killed that MEA snitch.”
My eyes widened. “How did you find out about it so quickly?”
His lips lifted at the corners. “Is that really what you want to ask me?”
I held his gaze to show him his pointed question didn’t embarrass me. “What’s in this for you?”
He nodded, like that was the question he’d been expecting. “It’s the best way I know how to ensure Bane’s plans don’t interfere with mine.”
“That’s not what I meant,” I said.
“I know.” He crossed his arms. “You’re wondering what I want from you.”
I tipped my chin down.
“I don’t know yet.”
In the silence that followed that admission, I felt a lot of conflicting emotions. One, I was surprised he’d actually admitted to being unsure about something. Second, the fact he couldn’t say he didn’t want anything worried the shit out of me. And third, I was both intrigued and terrified to wait for the moment when he finally figured out the answer.
I cleared my throat and looked toward the cold beakers. “How far have you gotten with the antipotion?”
His gaze burned into me for a few moments while he obviously debated whether to let me change the subject. Finally, he sighed. “I’ve already thrown out a couple of batches. I think I’m close with the most recent sample, but there’s something I’m missing in the original potion.”
“Can I see that one?”
He nodded and grabbed a couple of test tubes from a small fridge. “There’s a sample of Gray Wolf, too.” I jerked my gaze toward him. How in the hell had he gotten his hands on the potion when the MEA couldn’t? He shrugged. “How else was I supposed to figure out the recipe?”
I rolled my eyes. Raising the vials, I examined the one labeled GRAY WOLF. “You don’t look like much for a potion that’s been causing so much trouble,” I said to it. I shook the glass and the liquid inside sloshed around like oil.
“What do you know about it?”
“It’s a mix of blood magic and alchemy, but you knew that. Antimony is a core ingredient.” He urged me toward the worktable, where a notebook was laid open with writing in his bold hand. He pointed to a line. “But what’s really interesting is that instead of human blood, Bane used wolf blood.” My brows rose. “And, I could be wrong, but I also detected Van Helmont’s Alkahest, also derived from a wolf.”
My expression morphed into a sour grimace. “Gross.” Van Helmont’s Alkahest was a fancy term for piss salt. Yeah, that’s right, salt derived from urine. “Guess it’s a good thing the potion isn’t administered orally.”
“The thing is, I can’t get over the feeling that if we could read the alchemical signature we’d know what’s missing in the antipotion.”
He was referring to the energy fingerprints wizards left on the potions they created. Typically they didn’t tell you the ingredients as much as the identity of the wizard who cooked it, but sometimes wizards used signature ingredients. If we could figure out which alchemist had helped Bane, we might be able to find the key to breaking the potion.
And by “we,” he meant me.
John was a talented wizard, but his strength lay more in the energies of transformation than those that allowed one to read magic. That was my specialty. The only problem was that reading a potion’s energy sometimes meant seeing other things—like bad omens.
My palms were already sweating. But first, I decided to see if he was right about his prototype not working. I grabbed a small beaker off the shelf.
“You’re going to want to be careful,” John said.
Ignoring his unnecessary warning, I flipped the top off the vial of Gray Wolf and sniffed. The acrid stink of copper and sickly sweet burnt brown sugar of heroin and the chemical bite of drain cleaner singed my nose hairs.
I grabbed a beaker and poured a quarter of the potion—only a couple of teaspoons, really—into a glass beaker. My eyes started to water from the fumes. I reared back to escape the stink. “Grab me a pair of goggles and a mask, will ya?”