Chains of Silver (Alchemy Empire Book 1)

Chapter 18

His voice was calm, steady. His words made sense. If he were staying in the cage, I certainly did not want to be there too. I glanced at the open door. Then back at him.

The mask wavered again. Only this time I couldn’t tell if the mask was Dietrich or if the mask was him.

My hands gripping the metal mesh of the cage, I pulled myself to my feet. He did not get up. 

“That’s right. Good. Now walk out the door.”

I took a step. He didn’t stop me, but his magic was strong around me. I needed to get away.

“See, you’re doing it. On your own.”

I judged the short distance to freedom. If I was really quick…

I raced out of the cage and slammed the door behind me. My heart hammered in my chest. I expected him to come flying at me to force the door open. 

But he didn’t get up.

“Lock me in.”

Was he crazy? 

“If I’m the monster, you should lock my cage so I don’t hurt you or others.”

He had a point.

He looked more like Dietrich now. The mask had become transparent, like it was made of the thinnest glass. 

But it still made good sense to be careful.

I hooked the padlock around the door frame. Then I clicked it shut. 

“Good,” he said, still sitting in the corner of the cage. He slid the key through the narrow space between the cage door and wall. It clanged to the floor. “Now we can talk. You’re safe, see?”

I snatched up the key and put it in my pocket. The mask was almost totally gone now. Slowly, I remembered where I was. There was no carnival. I was backstage, in a theater. 

The cage wasn’t a cage. It was a lift. 

And the person in the lift was—“Dietrich.”

He got to his feet. I stumbled back a few steps. His hands wrapped around the bars of the door. “No. Don’t call me that name. I’m not that person, not to you.”

“But—”

“When you look at me, somewhere deep in your mind, you see a monster. You see a cruel creature that hurt you. I want you to say that name.”

This couldn’t be right. My mind still felt fuzzy, but I knew that Dietrich wasn’t the monster. “I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t be afraid—”

“No!” He bit out the word. “You don’t apologize. Not to me. Call me by my name. What’s my name…Claire?”

A cold shiver slid down my spine. That was what he called me. The mask crept over his features again. 

I spoke to the mask. “Your name is Jensen Cornelius. You call yourself Professor.”

He closed his eyes briefly, his hands turning white on the metal bars. “Yes. Now, talk to me. Tell me about how we met.” His voice sounded cool, impersonal, like he was speaking to a stranger.

It felt like reciting lines in a play. I struggled to stay within myself and not float away again. “I was eleven, the end of my first year as an apprentice. All the first-years were taken to see a traveling menagerie outside Aldwych. We heard there was a carnival. We begged our chaperone to take us. He did, but it turned out to be a freak show called Professor Cornelius’ Carnival of Curiosities. There were animals and people on display. All were deformed in some way. A goat with five legs. A human only three feet tall. A boy who could fold his arms in half the wrong direction. A woman so fat, she had to be moved around on a wheeled platform pulled by two elephants.”