Oliver began to lose it at one point. Seriously, he needs the shape.”
“He’s off it for three days.”
“Seriously. He needs the shape.” Myron tried to make it clear with his face how important it was.
How much Oliver, who’d spent the time paralyzed with terror, heard of this is debatable. But when Florence took the shape out from the neck of her jumper, Oliver scurried over and fell to his knees. She put one arm around him as he stroked the shape and wept. Silently, Myron turned and slunk away. He crept up the stairs.
From this angle it became clear that the alligator had the rear legs, rump, and tail of a donkey.
No time to think about that! Myron hit the top of the stairs and began to run. He didn’t have much of a plan, but he thought maybe if he beat Mignon Emanuel to her office he could hide in some way that would let him slip in after her. She could go through her secret bookcase passage, and he’d be at liberty to plunder the desk for a key. He took every shortcut Oliver had taught him, but when he rounded the final corner, Mignon Emanuel was already stepping through her office door. She suddenly turned around to look over her shoulder, but Myron ducked back around the corner before he could be noticed, and ran away. And then he caught his breath. He realized that the back of his neck had not prickled at all.
This explained why he had never seen Mignon Emanuel without Florence there as well. Perhaps with more experience he would have been able to distinguish between the presence of one and two immortal lycanthropes, but he was still new at this, and had never noticed.
Mignon Emanuel, he reasoned, was a mere human.
3.
He scarcely saw Oliver for the next few days. This was particularly terrifying, as Myron well knew that he was now in Oliver’s power—Oliver knew his plan, or a fictitious but still damning version of it, after all, and furthermore might be completely insane.
By this point in his stay at the house, Myron hardly needed a guide, but Dr. Aluys nevertheless slipped easily and abruptly into the role Oliver had filled. He was often waiting for Myron in the morning when he came down the stairs, and they lunched together in the kitchen. Presumably, Mignon Emanuel wanted someone to keep an eye on him, and Oliver was not reliable enough anymore.
But Myron liked Dr. Aluys. He was a terrific liar, but Myron had become something of one lately, too, so he did not begrudge him this foible. Dr. Aluys, by his own account, had been born near Paris in 1704. His stepfather had taught him the rudiments of alchemy, and it was to this science that he ascribed both his preternaturally long life and his current occupation here.
“The fabrication of the gold, vraiment, is not very profitable, believe it or not, by reason of the length of time required in transmutation; of the impossibility of working with amounts more than minute in one time; and indeed by reason of expense of materials required. Nevertheless, it offers something, and something is more than nothing, non? In exchange for a certain quantity produced, and a promise I will work to repair Madame Emanuel, I am given my own laboratory, for my own personal research in curing the ‘English disease.’ Here is where I eat my dinner the most of days.”
Myron could not help calling him on this fib. “I’ve been in your laboratory, and it was covered in cobwebs,” he said.
“Ridicule!” exclaimed the alchemist. And then, slapping the back of his hand to his forehead, which gesture shot a cloud of powder from his hair, he cried, “L’alligatâne!” This, Myron learned later, meant “Alligator-donkey.” Dr. Aluys scurried off, returning an hour later covered in what proved to be chickens’ blood.
“Fortunately, the alligator can survive of months without alimentation, and his mouth is an alligator’s mouth!” Dr. Aluys said, smiling. Turned out he had more than one laboratory. Myron assumed the good doctor had been contracted to treat Mignon Emanuel’s platypus venom.
Oh, Dr. Aluys knew all about the conference, but he seemed unconcerned about what it meant. His sole interest, he said, was science, although clearly snuff should have been included on the list. He brought Myron to one of his underground labs and showed him the half-powdered fragments of the philosopher’s stone. He also had terrariums with several species of onycophore—what is commonly called