Lizzie’s magic is as problematic as her sisters’ gifts. Of the three girls, Lizzie is the most powerful and the most disastrous. She’s an alchemist, trying to turn straw into gold.

“Change straw into gold? You’re kidding,” Elric said to Lizzie in a flat voice, though he knew she wasn’t. Oh, Christ, he thought, staring at her. He couldn’t quite believe how someone so angelic looking could be causing this much trouble. Her guileless blue eyes didn’t begin to hint at the intelligence behind them, and with her tousled blond curls and slender body she looked like an impish teenager, not the woman he knew her to be. And what was it with her shoes? She was wearing Road Runner hi-tops – how could he be attracted to a woman wearing Road Runner hi-tops? Because he was.
“We need money,” Lizzie said. “That’s all Dee can think about, and if she didn’t have to worry about it, she’d stop trying to force Mare to go to college, and Mare would stop arguing, and if we needed to pick up and leave we could …” Her voice trailed off, as if she’d realized she’d said too much.
“And that’s what you think you need to do as soon as you can warn your sisters,” he supplied for her. “But I’m not going to let that happen. You don’t need money, you need to stop what you’re doing.”
“I need you to go away and leave us alone,” she said, her voice stronger. She shifted, and he was afraid she was going to try to run for it. He could stop her, of course, without moving. But he was still shaken from their earlier contact, and he couldn’t figure out what had happened. Maybe all that random psychic energy that she and her sisters couldn’t control had managed to get between them and set off sparks. Maybe.
“Too bad. Whatever made you think straw was a good base for gold?”
“It’s traditional in alchemy,” she said stiffly.
“It’s traditional in fairy tales. Rumpelstiltskin, spinning straw into gold. In alchemy you turn base metals into gold. Like lead.”
She blushed. He liked his women sleek and sophisticated, dark-haired and whippet thin. So what was he doing, fascinated by a pretty little girl who blushed? Besides, he was here for a reason, and getting distracted wasn’t part of his plans.
“It doesn’t work,” she said. “I’ve tried lead, copper, iron, Teflon. None of it works, so I went back to straw.”
“And what happens with straw?”
“It catches on fire.”

Lizzie hates her magic — all it’s ever done is screw things up. She thinks she’s longing for a safe, ordinary life with a safe, ordinary man, and she’s trying to ignore destiny. All she wants to do is figure out how to make enough gold that her sisters don’t need to worry and she can get rid of her powers, though she’s not quite sure how she’d do that.

Her experiments are so disastrous that her tiny workshop boasts nine fire extinguishers, and it’s her mishaps that have gotten the attention of powerful people like Elric. She has no trouble transmuting other things — every time she thinks about sex, shoes appear. When she’s upset and nervous household articles like forks start turning into bunnies of varying hues. Even Mare’s cat Py isn’t safe.

She didn’t know what would have happened next if the ferret hadn’t scampered across her foot. She jumped away from him, banging her head against his jaw, and looked around her in dismay. Two ferrets, six mice which should have been white but were instead varying shades of purple, and Pywackt, staring at her in haughty disdain, a deep lavender himself, before he started after the mice.
“You’ve got to stop doing that,” Elric said. “There are already too many rodents in this world.”
Lizzie ignored him, scooping up the mice before Py could get them. A moment later she was holding flowers in her hands, the same roses that had been residing in the now empty vase, and she realized she hadn’t transformed the silver this time. She stuffed the flowers back into the vase, but by this time the ferrets were a pair of leather shoes once more, though Py seemed determined to prove otherwise.

Elric’s perfect for her — he’s a powerful wizard, and when it comes time to do battle they’re evenly match.

She’d been feeling hot, angry, ready to explode, but suddenly she felt cooler, as if a breeze had washed over her skin. She looked down and jumped. He’d somehow managed to change her sensible jeans and t-shirt into the clinging silk nightgown from the night before.
“Hell, no,” she said, furious, and a moment later she was wearing a nun’s habit, a puff of purple mist shimmering around her. She only had a moment to be pleased with herself, before he moved.
“Don’t bother,” he said, and the voluminous folds of cloth disappeared, leaving her in skimpy underwear that might have come from some cosmic Victoria’s Secret. Her slightly small breasts spilled out of the lace bra, and the thong was riding up, both arousing and uncomfortable.
She growled, and a moment later she was frozen, immovable, and something was pinching her butt a lot harder than the strip of lace. She tried to move, only to be rewarded with the sound of clanking metal.
“Armor, Lizzie?”
She was totally immobilized. She threw her weight to one side and fell over, pinned to the bed by the weight of the metal.
It didn’t help that he was laughing. “Let me help you with that,” he said in a kindly tone, an a moment she was lying on the bed without any clothes at all.

In the end Lizzie learns to use, accept, and even love her magic, as it grows and changes and becomes something the Fortune Sisters had never seen. Elric teaches her to temper it, and in the end, when she outstrips even him, he’s only slightly disgruntled that she’s more powerful than he is. Their powers mesh as well as their bodies and souls, and if there’s an occasional ripple in the fabric of the universe you can blame Lizzie and Elric.