plenty of danger already, and a whole lot of weird to go with it.
Before she could change her mind, Donna tugged off the black velvet glove that covered the ironwork on her right hand. She turned the small bronze key in the cabinet lock and rested her fingers against the mechanism. She had no idea what she was actually doing, but if she could open doorways between dimensions, surely she could open a freaking cabinet.
She examined her knuckles, willing something to happen. Anything. The iron tattoos that held her together—and which had bound her power for so long, as she’d recently discovered—were at peace for the moment, still and silent against her pale skin. Sometimes the silver swirls and markings would move, winding around her wrists and hands, up her arms to her elbows. Apart from how strange it was to see, the movement hurt her in a bone-deep sort of ache. Maker once told her it was because some of the iron was lacing together her actual bones. His alchemical magic had been the only thing that had saved her, after the Wood Monster’s jaws had almost destroyed her arms and hands.
Thinking about it still made her shudder, even after all these years.
As she hesitated, the key in the lock, Donna saw her tattoos begin to move. She held her breath—the strange sensation made it feel as though the bones themselves were moving, shifting position and reshaping themselves into something new. It was something that she had no real control over. Watching the tattoos twist and writhe, sort of like soundwaves around the small amount of pale flesh still visible, made her feel nauseated.
She watched in fascination as the shimmering iron across her fingers curled around her hands and seemed to flick toward the lock. Then there was a sharp click and a sudden release of pressure inside her chest, like a balloon had just burst. The cabinet door jumped open.
Donna’s ears popped and the tattoos stopped moving.
She’d done it! She’d actually managed to break Miranda’s protective wards. Donna was pretty sure she’d also alerted her mentor to what she was up to. Well, it’s not like Miranda doesn’t have more important things to think about right now, she thought as she carefully opened the door wider to examine the contents of the shelves.
She lifted down one of the heavy volumes. It was bound in cracked leather and the pages were yellow and musty. Flipping through, she was surprised to see that it was hand-lettered in a barely legible script. The ink was a rusty brown, and some of the pages were filled with columns of numbers and unfamiliar equations.
Turning another page, her attention was immediately drawn to a sinister line drawing of some kind of small creature. It was twisted and knobbly, a bit like a wood elf but even more alien. She’d never seen anything like it before, and she traced the word underneath the illustration with her finger.
“Homunculi,” she read aloud. She’d heard that term before, but this was the first time she’d seen an illustration. “Artificial life forms, based on human physiology, created with the aid of the Philosopher’s Stone.”
Donna shivered. Whoever the artist was, he or she hadn’t seemed to believe that homunculi were all that closely based on human physiology. The creature was weird and lumpy, and about as far from a person as it was possible to get while still having a head, a torso, two arms, and two legs. Yet Donna wasn’t surprised that the Philosopher’s Stone was needed to make these beings, just as the stone was necessary in the creation of the elixir of life. She hoped she’d learn more about the Philosopher’s Stone soon.
The book was arranged alphabetically, and she turned to the B section to look for “British Museum.” There was no entry for it, so she tried “Dee.” She found two pages of cramped, spidery text devoted to Dr. John Dee. Scanning the information, she came to a section that made her pause:
Dee’s Mirror:
A polished piece of volcanic glass (obsidian), used by Dr. John Dee to contact spirits and gain knowledge of Other Worlds.
That sounded familiar … she bit her lip and thought for a moment. Oh, right. John Dee’s scrying mirror was one of the alchemical artifacts stored in the British Museum. Did that mean it was gone now, thanks to the fire? She flipped through some more pages before putting the volume aside. It was full of alchemical terms and definitions, and perhaps it