Free Alchemy, Book Two of the Mercian Trilogy by K. J. Wignall

too. He had already been dragged down into wickedness by this sickness, but he would be dragged no further. He refused to accept that this image represented anything of his future and he strode out of the chamber – he had done evil things, but he was not evil, and evil would not, could not be his destiny.
    It left him more determined than ever to press ahead. As troubled as he was by seeing his victims, as shocked by the possible truth of destroying their souls, he had to keep going or everything, including those eight hundred and forty-three deaths, would have been pointless.
    With nothing more that he could do for the time being, Will simply walked, fast, exploring passage after passage until each one and the overall pattern of the labyrinth were familiar to him. There was no other feature in there and all paths led back eventually to the pentagonal chamber.
    He reached it again and again, but even though he had been in the circular chamber once, he could not bring himself to walk the once-dark corridor to look at it a second time. The memories already associated with that second chamber, of the wall painting, of the soulless faces of his victims, of his mother, were still too troubling.
    Yet as he stood for the last time next to the bronze relief, staring at the tunnel which had taken him there, the thought of his mother offered some reassurance. She had recognised him, had she not, suggesting her spirit had watched over him as he’d grown. And she had tried to impart some advice, even encouragement, something she surely would not have done if only evil awaited him.
    Will thought of her clutching the pendant round her neck, but he had not seen the item of jewellery and could not now know what it had signified. Unless … He reached up and held the broken medallion round his own neck, wondering if this was what she’d been trying to tell him, to think on this medallion and all it promised. It was cold in his hand now, but it had been warm, and somewhere else its twin was warm against Eloise’s skin. It promised a different future to the one painted by Fairburn, and that different future was the only one Will dared imagine.

10
    W ill returned to the house, put the sabre back where it belonged and descended into the cellars. It was another hour before he felt that slight telltale prickling on his skin, warning him that the sun had struggled above the eastern horizon.
    Now his imprisonment here was total, for the next eight hours or so anyway. He paced from cellar to cellar, trying and failing to take his mind off the needling hunger for blood that swept over him, carrying him along. It was a craving made even more unbearable by the recently rekindled memories of his many past victims.
    Helen, whose name he had not known, had been taken in the late autumn of 1988, around the same time of year that he’d met Eloise. And her sacrifice had been made for what now seemed the most meagre of reasons, sustaining him only through the winter months and into the spring when he’d hibernated again.
    Then he’d slept for twenty years, during which time a boy called Stephen Leonard had grown into a man,unknowingly preparing himself for the role of Will’s next victim. Nor did it ease Will’s mind to know that the boy, Jex as he’d become, had been chosen by other forces before Will had found him.
    It was painful to think back on it, and worse to know that there would be an eight hundred and forty-fourth victim, that there had to be because Will’s own spirit seemed to be gnawing away at him, crying out for the sustenance it needed.
    At some point during the morning hours, he heard someone in the house above, a man, whistling as he went about his business. Will’s hunger for blood intensified and it was a relief to hear the slamming of an outer door, the removal of a temptation he could only have resisted for so long.
    It felt at times as if these daylight hours would never end, and he left the cellars and the house almost as