A Forbidden Alchemy (The Artisan Trilogy)

by Stacey McEwan

And wasn’t that the true evil of war? That it didn’t have the decency to strip the humanity of those we killed?

And the realization hit me like a freight train. I knew then that I couldn’t do it.

But I thought this man before me ought to be carved into stone. My fingers itched to recreate him.

“Will it be a fair toss? Or will you use your medium to manipulate the outcome again?”

“You went home with a bottle of magic in your pocket, Patrick. What twelve-year-old boy could resist the temptation?”

What I could not fathom was how I was not to fall in love with him.

If there was a way out, surely it was with him.

She was, to him, a walking contradiction. Crafter and Artisan. Soft and strong. Vulnerable, yet difficult to read. Wickedly smart and painfully beautiful. A headache to any man trying to divulge all the secrets she was made of.

Gold bloomed behind his eyelids. She tasted like victory. The sum of all he’d ever craved. How many moments had he imagined her in his hands? A hundred? A thousand? Could she feel the core of him rearing, clawing her into its recess?

You’ll stay, I told myself. You’ve picked your side. You will stick to it.

“Me dad got buried in the tunnels. Sometimes Patty invents jobs just to keep people paid.”

“He’s bad to those who’re bad. No idea if that makes him good, though.”

“I think I’ve fallen in love with you,” he said gruffly. “So you’d better fuckin’ come out, Nina. Promise me. Now.”

When he drew back, I saw something new in his expression. A sunbeam in all that darkness. I wondered if it was a picture I’d ever be adept enough to paint. Clouds, skies, muddied skin, and a man who might be, at that very instant, declining into love.

A thousand brilliant bursts of light ruptured in me when he looked at me this way, like I was crafted precisely for him. Like I was the only woman who had ever existed.

“Ah,” she said, tightening her hold around his neck, her mouth hovering dangerously close to his. “But that’s exactly the problem. You’re entirely too easy to fall in love with.”

the sense of foreboding is real

“The bluff stores I saw. And the idium I took… How was it siphoned if not by Domelius Becker? He was the last Alchemist.” And this, Patrick knew, was always how secrets unraveled. Carefully woven fabrications unspooling one after the other. “No,” he uttered. “Not the last.” Her eyes narrowed at first, then widened as she understood. “That title now resides with me.”

And for a moment, I considered revealing it all—the day I was captured in Delfield and dragged back to Belavere City. The ultimatum Tanner had imparted, why I had come here. I wanted to purge it all and be done with it. “I won’t,” I said.

damn it nina i wanna slap you