– 5 –
“Seriously?” asks Tom.
He looks Linus up and down. Linus shrinks back.
“Mom, you adopted the antichrist? You didn’t think you might, like — you know, mention?”
“Can’t handle it?” asks Amelia, wryly.
“I’d just like a trial period!” Tom pro-tests.
. . .
“It’s very nice to meet you,” says Linus, after a moment.
Tom flashes him an infectious smile — as if to say, this isn’t about you — before going right back to glaring at his Mom. Linus wobbles a little.
“This is supposed to be a house of science,” Tom says.
“I’m a renegade alchemist!”
Tom looks away. He stares at a dust bunny skittering across the floor.
“Do you even know how to feed him?” He glares back up at Amelia. “An antichrist is a big responsibility! What if he needs human souls, huh?”
Amelia breaks down laughing. She leans against the counter.
“You can’t share my room,” says Tom, to Linus. “Well, you can’t have the good half, anyway. And no soul-eating! That’s strict house policy!”
“I don’t eat souls,” says Linus.
“Me neither,” says Tom. He glares at his mom. “This isn’t over, snowflake.”
“My name,” says Amelia, inaccurately, “is mother.”
“Bah,” says Tom. He glares at her and then to Linus. “Do you want to see my chemistry set?”
. . .
“I —”
“I’ve been experimenting with biochemistry,” says Tom. He grabs Linus’ hand. The black dog growls. Tom throws the dog one of the sedative-laced dog biscuits he keeps on him at all times. The dog gulps it out of the air in what it considers to be a badass manner and goes back to growling and then, with a surprising lack of transition, to snoring. Tom drags Linus off. “I’ve been seeing if I can add parasitic snake DNA to soldier ants. But they always come out ordinary snake-ants! Oh, well. I’ll get that problem licked or I’m not a boy adventurer!”
“I — poetry —”
The antichrist gives up on talking and lets Tom Friedman drag him off.
. . .
“You know,” says Bertram, later, as he drinks tea with Amelia and watches the two of them play, “I bet they’d love little Edmund.”
“I don’t know,” says Amelia. “It’s got to be hard for an ordinary kid to understand.”
“That’s why!” says Bertram.
“Hm?”
“Edmund’s got the wolf-gold wound through him,” says Bertram. “The little scamp! He’s going to let Fenris Wolf out one day and then they’ll eat the world.”
“Wow,” says Amelia. “Seriously?”
“Cross my heart,” Bertram Gulley says.
. . .
“That is crazy talk,” says Amelia. “You’re Gulleys. You’re not like me and Tom.”
“Rich people have world-ending scions just like —” Bertram narrows his eyes at Amelia. “Besides,” he says, “you can make gold.”
“That is practically the definition of new money,” Amelia points out.
. . .
They watch as Tom and the antichrist duel one another with plastic lightsabers.
“Edmund needs some renegade in his life, anyway,” Bertram says, after a while. “Never met a more standoffish boy.”
“You should have seen Linus,” giggles Amelia. “He was all ‘sulk this’ and ‘antichrist that’ and ‘nobody can understand the endless emptiness that is my soul’ when I got him.”
“Hard to imagine,” says Bertram Gulley, and he shakes his head.
The black dog catches Tom’s lightsaber in its teeth, growls, and wrestles with the boy; and Linus flails at him with his own saber and he laughs.
– 6 –
Bertram Gulley withdraws money from the bank. He walks out. He walks straight into the point of an umbrella.
“Um,” he says.
“I am the space princess assassin Maria Souvante,” the umbrella’s holder says. “And certain of your colleagues have judged you — unnecessary.”
“That’s probably on account of my vast debts to unsavory interests,” admits Bertram. “But I’ll pay them! Honestly! I don’t need to be assassinated!”
. . .
She pushes lightly on the umbrella. He backs into the bank. She follows.
“Fear not, Mr. Bertram Gulley,” says the space princess assassin. “I am not without mercy. I am sworn to always give my victims one . . . slim . . . chance at survival.”
He gets a step ahead of the umbrella. Two steps. This apparently conforms to her plan and not his own as a gun muzzle flicks out a step and a half from her umbrella’s tip.
“Let us play a game,” says Maria. “Mr. Bertram Gulley, and if you win — well . . .”
“Tag,” says Bertram, frantically. “I’m it!”
Maria leaps back and out of the way as he moves forward. He flees the bank without tagging her. She blinks.
“I didn’t mean to say just any game,” she protests.
She hesitates.
“God, Maria!” she says. She beats her head on the wall of the bank. “You are the worst space princess assassin ever!”
. . .
Bertram pants. He gasps for air. He flees to his car, tears squealing out of the lot, flees across the city to Amelia. He hears the building crumble behind him; and after that, he never again feels safe.
“Amelia!” he cries, bursting in on her. She is staring grimly at a blender full of alchemical substances. Then, almost three seconds later, she startles violently.
“Bertram!”
“I’m being hunted by a space princess assassin!” he says.
“I’ve adopted a girl!” she says. “I don’t know what to do with girls!”
He looks confused.
“You’re a girl,” he says.
“I know!” she says. “But I had a toad!”
“Wait,” he says. “Why have you adopted a girl?”
“She is supposed to destroy the world,” Amelia says. “Well, the portents are ambiguous.”
“There’s no room left for anybody else to destroy the world,” says Bertram, frustrated.
“That’s not her fault,” Amelia says.
“Point,” Bertram concedes.
“They were going to kill her. But I said, ‘no! No killing! Instead I will adopt her!’ Then they gave me that look that people make.”
Bertram eyes her.
“Yes! That one! The one that says, ‘you are quite the renegade, Amelia, but for some reason or other we will accept your unreasonable notions.’”
“About that,” says Bertram.
“Yes?”
“Well,” says Bertram. “I mean, um. It is, I have debts, you see. So, thus, I mean. I mean, the space princess. I mean, she was going to kill me, Amelia.”
“Death is very frightening,” Amelia agrees. “Do little girls like trucks or is that only boys?”
“Dead!” says Bertram. “Bang!”
“Well, buy her off with your money,” Amelia tells him.
“I’m not — I —”
“Or your archaeology!”
Bertram sags.
“I’m such a loser,” he says.
Amelia stares at him with stress-filled eyes. “What if she makes a baby? What if she makes a baby out of trucks?”
That is when the blender’s top explodes, showering the room with alchemy.
. . .
Things might have gone very differently for Bertram and Amelia from there.
If the blender had showered the room with chemistry, for instance, or magic, instead of alchemy, then they might have kissed. They might have found love. He might have honored her memory, when she was gone.
But it wasn’t chemistry. It wasn’t magic. They didn’t kiss. They didn’t become lovers. He just got half of a golden face.
. . .
“I don’t know why I even bother talking to you,” he says, metallically. He’s lost half of his ability to express love, right then and there. He’s turned all two-faced, golden-tongued, and metallic. He clicks his gold teeth together, and his white ones, and he walks away.
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