The Elixir

Chapter 1

The pub is warm and golden, the kind of warmth that only old English pubs manage - all dark wood and sticky tables and the faint smell of a hundred years of spilled ale soaked into the floorboards. The cathedral town hums quietly outside the leaded windows. It's nearly ten, and my arms still ache from hauling Mia's frankly inexcusable number of boxes up two flights of creaking stairs.

I wrap both hands around my wine glass and give her my most martyred look across the table.

"I just want you to know," I say, "that I pulled a muscle in my left bum cheek carrying your slow cooker. Your slow cooker, Mia. Who owns that many kitchen appliances when they've never once cooked a meal that didn't involve a microwave?"

Mia snorts into her gin and tonic so hard she has to grab a napkin. She's got that face she always gets when she's trying not to laugh properly - cheeks going pink, eyes scrunching up, which honestly just makes her laugh harder.

"I cook," she protests, when she's recovered enough to speak.

"You reheat. There's a difference."

"Okay, semantics-"

"You have a slow cooker and a rice cooker and something I can only describe as a 'complicated egg situation' and I personally carried all of it up stairs that I'm fairly sure haven't been updated since the Tudors."

She dissolves again. Mia's laugh is ridiculous and wonderful - this bright, slightly honking thing that she always tries to suppress in public and never manages to. Half the pub glances over. She covers her face.

"The egg thing is a poacher," she says, from behind her hands.

"I don't care what it's called. My bum cheek disagrees with its existence."

She drops her hands and grins at me across the table. Mia is - objectively, annoyingly - very pretty. Dark hair cut in a blunt little bob, big brown eyes, the kind of effortlessly curvy figure that means she complains about her jeans every morning while looking fantastic in them. We've been friends since university. I know her well enough to know when she's about to ask me something she's already decided she wants.

She's making that face right now.

"So," she says, swirling her gin.

"No."

"You don't know what I'm going to say."

"Yes I do. You want me to stay over."

She points at me. "Okay yes, but hear me out-"

"Mia."

"Th e building is old, Jess." She lowers her voice conspiratorially, leaning across the table. Her eyes go wide in mock-terror, which is only about forty percent mock. "Like, properly old. Did you hear those stairs? They sound like someone is constantly being murdered on them. And the pipes-"

"Old buildings have pipes-"

"These pipes talk to each other." She grabs my wrist. "I heard them having a conversation when I used the bathroom. In Latin, I think."

I laugh despite myself.

"And," she continues, pressing her advantage, "I have a sofa. A very comfortable sofa that I carried up those same Tudor stairs-"

"I carried-"

"-we carried, together, as a team, and it would be a shame not to use it." She beams at me. Deploying the full Mia expression: hopeful, ridiculous, completely aware of how ridiculous she's being. "One night. I'll make breakfast. With the egg poacher."

I look at her.

She widens her eyes further.

"Oh my God," I say. "Fine."

She does a small, delighted fist-pump under the table. "Knew it. You're my absolute favourite person."

"You were scared of the pipes."

"I am still scared of the pipes. This doesn't change that." She tips her glass toward me. "Thank you. Genuinely. You're a brilliant friend and I'm sorry about your bum cheek."

"You're not sorry at all."

"I'm a bit sorry." She grins. "Another round?"

---

We stumble back to the flat just after eleven, pleasantly warm from the wine, Mia still giggling about something one of the locals had said as we'd left. The town is beautiful at night - old stone under amber streetlights, the cathedral tower visible above the rooftops, everything very quiet and very English and slightly unreal.

The flat's staircase does, in fact, sound exactly like a murder is happening every time we take a step.

"See?" Mia hisses, grabbing my arm on the landing.

"It's just old wood."

"That's what people say before the thing happens."

"What thing?"

"The thing, Jess. The thing that happens in old buildings at night."

"You're twenty-six years old."

"And I am smart enough to be scared of old buildings, yes." She fumbles with her key. "Right. Here we are. Home sweet creaky home."

She gets the door open and we spill inside, and she flicks on the lamps - she hasn't sorted the overhead light yet, so it's all warm and golden and actually rather nice. The flat smells of cardboard boxes and a faint trace of something old beneath it. Stone, maybe. Something herby and dry.

"Right," says Mia, already heading for the kitchen. "I've got wine. Proper wine, not pub wine. Go sit down."

I drop onto the sofa and kick my shoes off and tuck my feet under me. I can hear her in the kitchen, the clink of glasses, a drawer opening and closing twice before she finds the corkscrew.

She comes back with a bottle of red and two mismatched glasses and drops down beside me with the satisfied thump of someone who has fully earned their evening.

"Right," she says, pouring. "First night in my actual grown-up flat."

"Very grown-up," I agree. "Terrifying pipes and everything."

"They've gone quiet now, actually." She tilts her head, listening. "Which is almost worse."

I take my glass. The wine is good - she always has better wine than me, on account of having slightly more patience in Waitrose. We clink, and for a moment we just sit, and it's comfortable in the way that only very old friendships are, where the silence doesn't need filling.

"Are you actually pleased?" I ask. "With the flat?"

"I'm so pleased." She says it simply, warmly, looking around at her boxes and her lamps. "I know it's weird and old and the stairs are homicidal but - I don't know. It feels like mine. Does that sound mad?"

"No. It's a good flat."

"It's a great flat." She grins. "Even if I couldn't have got anything up those stairs without you."

"The bum cheek is still an issue."

"Ice it."

"With what? You haven't unpacked the freezer stuff."

"There are ice cubes. I prioritised." She points at me. "I'm organised."

"You have a box labelled miscellaneous vibes."

"That's - okay, that box is exactly what it sounds like and it's a perfectly valid category."

I laugh and get up, because my body has been making its feelings known since we got back - boxes and stairs and a day's worth of hauling finally catching up with me. I roll my shoulders, wander toward the window - the cathedral tower still visible against the dark sky, lit from below, very still and very old - and then turn and have a proper look at the room.

It's a good room. Uneven walls, like the plaster has been put over stone. Beams above. And along the far wall, half behind where Mia has already pushed a bookshelf - not quite flush with it, slightly to the left - there's something I didn't notice when we were bringing boxes in.

A panel. Small. Maybe eighteen inches square, set into the wall at about waist height. Old wood, darker than the surrounding plaster, with a little iron ring for a handle that's gone the colour of charcoal with age.

"Mia."

"Mm." ;

"Did you know there's a panel in your wall?"

A pause. Then: "What?"

She appears at my shoulder, glass in hand, and we both look at it.

"Huh," she says.

"Did the estate agent mention-"

"She mentioned original features." Mia says this in the slightly hollow tone of someone recalibrating what that phrase might mean. "I assumed she meant the fireplace."

We stand there for a moment, looking at the little iron ring, dark and cold in the lamplight.

"Should we open it?" Mia asks.

"I'm pretty sure there are rules about this," I say.

"What rules?"

"Unwritten ones. Old building rules." I gesture vaguely. "You find a hidden panel in a creaky Tudor flat at eleven o'clock at night, you have to open it. It's basically law. Failure to open constitutes some kind of cosmic bad manners."

Mia considers this with great seriousness. "So not opening it would actually be the risky option."

"Exactly. We'd probably be cursed either way, but at least this way we're cursed politely."

"Right." She nods. "When you put it like that it would be rude not to."

I crouch down in front of it, set my glass on the floor, and close my fingers around the iron ring. It's cold - properly cold, like it's been sitting in shadow for a very long time - and for just a second the whole flat seems very quiet, the pipes holding their breath.

Then I pull, and the panel swings open on surprisingly smooth hinges.

Inside is darkness and the smell of something dry and old - dust, and beneath it something else, faintly sweet, almost medicinal. Like a herbalist's drawer. Like something that was once carefully stored and then simply forgotten.

I lean in and at the back of the little alcove, sitting on what might once have been a scrap of cloth, is a box. Small and dark, maybe six inches long, the wood worn completely smooth with old handling. Something carved on the lid - vines, or letters, hard to tell in the low light.

"Mia. Come and look at this."

She's beside me in an instant. "Is that a box?"

"There is absolutely a box in your wall, yes."

"A hidden box," she adds, with some reverence. "In a secret panel."

She reaches in without further discussion and lifts it out carefully with both hands, then straightens up and carries it to the coffee table with the focused expression of someone transporting something important. We both drop onto the sofa, leaning in, the lamp casting a warm circle of light over the dark wood.

There's a small brass latch, gone green with age. The carving on the lid clearer now - definitely letters, in some old looping script, though not quite anything either of us can read.

Mia looks at me. Her eyes are bright.

I flip the little brass latch - it catches for just a second, stiff with age, then gives with a soft click that sounds very loud in the quiet flat.

I lift the lid.

Inside, nestled in what was once velvet and is now just a kind of dusty reddish fuzz, are five small glass vials, each one cradled in its own little fitted groove. The box has space for nine - four of the slots empty, the absences oddly neat, like missing teeth. Each vial is sealed with dark wax, and each one contains a liquid that's a deep, shifting amber.

And it glows.

Not brightly - just a faint, warm pulse of light, soft and golden, like an ember that hasn't quite gone out. It throws the faintest blush of warmth up onto our faces as we lean over it. In the dim lamplight of the flat it's unmistakable. Gentle and alive and utterly impossible.

"That's..." Mia starts.

"Glowing," I confirm.

"It's glowing, Jess."

"I can see that."

Tucked flat against the inside of the lid, held by a small strip of aged ribbon, is a card. Mia reaches past me and carefully unpins it. The writing is faded but perfectly legible - a careful copperplate hand, very old, very deliberate.

She reads it aloud, slowly.

"The Elixir of Sensual Awakening. One portion: Every ounce of your body shall become permanently more sensitive and alive with pleasure. A powerful wave of orgasmic bliss shall wash through you. Warning: Each portion consumed shall add ten pounds of soft, feminine fullness to your form. Take only with trusted company. Effects are irreversible."

She sets the card down very carefully.

The vials sit there between our wine glasses, pulsing their quiet warm light completely indifferent to the silence that has fallen over the flat.