This is a work of ction. All incidents and dialogue, and all
characters with the exception of some well-known historical and
public gures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not
to be construed as real. Where real-life historical or public gures
appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those
persons are ctional and are not intended to depict actual events or
to change the ctional nature of the work. In all other respects, any
resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
The Alchemyst
Text copyright © 2007 by Michael Scott
Cover art copyright © 2007 by Michael Wagner
The Magician
Text copyright © 2008 by Michael Scott
Cover art copyright © 2008 by Michael Wagner
The Sorceress
Text copyright © 2009 by Michael Scott
Cover art copyright © 2009 by Michael Wagner
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of
Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc.,
New York.
The titles in this collection were originally published separately in
hardcover by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House
Children’s Books, New York, in 2007, 2008, and 2009, respectively.
Delacorte Press and the colophon are registered trademarks of
Random House, Inc.
Visit us on the Web! GetUnderlined.com
TheSecretsofNicholasFlamel.com
Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at
RHTeachersLibrarians.com
The Alchemyst
Random House Children’s Books
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2007 by Michael Scott
eISBN: 978-0-375-84317-4
The Magician
Random House Children’s Books
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2008 by Michael Scott
eISBN: 978-0-375-84908-4
The Sorceress
Random House Children’s Books
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2009 by Michael Scott
eISBN: 978-0-375-89271-4
The First Codex
Random House Children’s Books
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2012 by Michael Scott
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publisher.
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v3.1_r3
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
The Alchemyst
The Magician
The Sorceress
Published by Delacorte Press an imprint of Random House
Children’s Books a division of Random House, Inc. New York
This is a work of ction. All incidents and dialogue, and all
characters with the exception of some well-known historical and
public gures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not
to be construed as real. Where real-life historical or public gures
appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those
persons are entirely ctional and are not intended to depict actual
events or to change the entirely ctional nature of the work. In all
other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely
coincidental.
Text copyright © 2007 by Michael Scott
All rights reserved.
Delacorte Press and colophon are registered trademarks of Random
House, Inc.
www.GetUnderlined.com
Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at
RHTeachersLibrarians.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Scott, Michael Dylan.
The alchemyst: the secrets of the immortal Nicholas Flamel /
Michael Scott.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: While working at pleasant but mundane summer jobs in
San Francisco, fteen-year-old twins, Sophie and Josh, suddenly nd
themselves caught up in the deadly, centuries-old struggle between
rival alchemists, Nicholas Flamel and John Dee, over the possession
of an ancient and powerful book holding the secret formulas for
alchemy and everlasting life.
(Gibraltar lib. bdg.)
1. Flamel, Nicolas, d. 1418—Juvenile ction. 2. Dee, John, 1527–
1608—Juvenile ction. [1. Flamel, Nicolas, d. 1418—Fiction. 2.
Dee, John, 1527–1608—Fiction. 3. Alchemists—Fiction. 4. Magic—
Fiction. 5. Supernatural—Fiction. 6. Brothers and sisters—Fiction. 7.
Twins—Fiction. 8. San Francisco (Calif.)—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.S42736Alc 2007
[Fic]—dc22
2006024417
eISBN: 978-0-375-84317-4
v3.0_r1
Contents
Master - Table of Contents
The Alchemyst
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Thursday, 31st May
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nighteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Friday, 1st June
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
For Claudette, of course
iamque opus exegi
I am legend.
Death has no claim over me, illness cannot touch me. Look at me
now and it would be hard to put an age upon me, and yet I was
born in the Year of Our Lord 1330, more than six hundred and
seventy years ago.
I have been many things in my time: a physician and a cook, a
bookseller and a soldier, a teacher of languages and chemistry, both
an o cer of the law and a thief.
But before all these I was an alchemyst. I was the Alchemyst.
I was acknowledged as the greatest Alchemyst of all, sought after
by kings and princes, by emperors and even the Pope himself. I
could turn ordinary metal into gold, I could change common stones
into precious jewels. More than this: I discovered the secret of Life
Eternal hidden deep in a book of ancient magic.
Now my wife, Perenelle, has been kidnapped and the book stolen.
Without the book, she and I will age. Within the full cycle of the
moon, we will wither and die. And if we die, then the evil we have
so long fought against will triumph. The Elder Race will reclaim this
Earth again, and they will wipe humanity from the face of this
planet.
But I will not go down without a ght.
For I am the immortal Nicholas Flamel.
From the Day Booke of Nicholas Flamel, Alchemyst
Writ this day, Thursday, 31st May, in
San Francisco, my adopted city
THURSDAY,
31st May
CHAPTER ONE
“OK—answer
me this: why would anyone want to wear an
overcoat in San Francisco in the middle of summer?” Sophie
Newman pressed her ngers against the Bluetooth earpiece as she
spoke.
On the other side of the continent, her fashion-conscious friend
Elle inquired matter-of-factly, “What sort of coat?”
Wiping her hands on the cloth tucked into her apron strings,
Sophie moved out from behind the counter of the empty co ee shop
and stepped up to the window, watching men emerge from the car
across the street. “Heavy black wool overcoats. They’re even
wearing black gloves and hats. And sunglasses.” She pressed her
face against the glass. “Even for this city, that’s just a little too
weird.”
“Maybe they’re undertakers?” Elle suggested, her voice popping
and clicking on the cell phone. Sophie could hear something loud
and dismal playing in the background—Lacrimosa maybe, or
Amorphis. Elle had never quite got over her Goth phase.
“Maybe,” Sophie answered, sounding unconvinced. She’d been
chatting on the phone with her friend when, a few moments earlier,
she’d spotted the unusual-looking car. It was long and sleek and
looked as if it belonged in an old black-and-white movie. As it drove
past the window, sunlight re ected o the blacked-out windows,
brie y illuminating the interior of the co ee shop in warm yellowgold light, blinding Sophie. Blinking away the black spots dancing
before her eyes, she watched as the car turned at the bottom of the
hill and slowly returned. Without signaling, it pulled over directly in
front of The Small Book Shop, right across the street.
“Maybe they’re Ma a,” Elle suggested dramatically. “My dad
knows someone in the Ma a. But he drives a Prius,” she added.
“This is most de nitely not a Prius,” Sophie said, looking again at
the car and the two large men standing on the street bundled up in
their heavy overcoats, gloves and hats, their eyes hidden behind
overlarge sunglasses.
“Maybe they’re just cold,” Elle suggested. “Doesn’t it get cool in
San Francisco?”
Sophie Newman glanced at the clock and thermometer on the
wall over the counter behind her. “It’s two- fteen here…and eightyone degrees,” she said. “Trust me, they’re not cold. They must be
dying. Wait,” she said, interrupting herself, “something’s
happening.”
The rear door opened and another man, even larger than the rst
two, climbed sti y out of the car. As he closed the door, sunlight
brie y touched his face and Sophie caught a glimpse of pale,
unhealthy-looking gray-white skin. She adjusted the volume on the
earpiece. “OK. You should see what just climbed out of the car. A
huge guy with gray skin. Gray. That might explain it; maybe they
have some type of skin condition.”
“I saw a National Geographic documentary about people who
can’t go out in the sun…,” Elle began, but Sophie was no longer
listening to her.
A fourth gure stepped out of the car.
He was a small, rather dapper-looking man, dressed in a neat
charcoal-gray three-piece suit that looked vaguely old-fashioned but
that she could tell had been tailor-made for him. His iron gray hair
was pulled back from an angular face into a tight ponytail, while a
neat triangular beard, mostly black but ecked with gray, concealed
his mouth and chin. He moved away from the car and stepped
under the striped awning that covered the trays of books outside the
shop. When he picked up a brightly colored paperback and turned it
over in his hands, Sophie noticed that he was wearing gray gloves.
A pearl button at the wrist winked in the light.
“They’re going into the bookshop,” she said into her earpiece.
“Is Josh still working there?” Elle immediately asked.
Sophie ignored the sudden interest in her friend’s voice. The fact
that her best friend liked her twin brother was just a little too weird.
“Yeah. I’m going to call him to see what’s up. I’ll call you right
back.” She hung up, pulled out the earpiece and absently rubbed her
hot ear as she stared, fascinated, at the small man. There was
something about him…something odd. Maybe he was a fashion
designer, she thought, or a movie producer, or maybe he was an
author—she’d noticed that some authors liked to dress up in
peculiar out ts. She’d give him a few minutes to get into the shop,
then she’d call her twin for a report.
Sophie was about to turn away when the gray man suddenly spun
around and seemed to stare directly at her. As he stood under the
awning, his face was in shadow, and yet for just the briefest instant,
his eyes looked as if they were glowing.
Sophie knew—just knew—that there was no possible way for the
small gray man to see her: she was standing on the opposite side of
the street behind a pane of glass that was bright with re ected
early-afternoon sunlight. She would be invisible in the gloom behind
the glass.
And yet…
And yet in that single moment when their eyes met, Sophie felt
the tiny hairs on the back of her hands and along her forearms
tingle and felt a pu of cold air touch the back of her neck. She
rolled her shoulders, turning her head slightly from side to side,
strands of her long blond hair curling across her cheek. The contact
lasted only a second before the small man looked away, but Sophie
got the impression that he had looked directly at her.
In the instant before the gray man and his three overdressed
companions disappeared into the bookshop, Sophie decided that she
did not like him.
Peppermint.
And rotten eggs.
“That is just vile.” Josh Newman stood in the center of the
bookstore’s cellar and breathed deeply. Where were those smells
coming from? He looked around at the shelves stacked high with
books and wondered if something had crawled in behind them and
died. What else would account for such a foul stink? The tiny
cramped cellar always smelled dry and musty, the air heavy with
the odors of parched curling paper, mingled with the richer aroma
of old leather bindings and dusty cobwebs. He loved the smell; he
always thought it was warm and comforting, like the scents of
cinnamon and spices that he associated with Christmas.
Peppermint.
Sharp and clean, the smell cut through the close cellar
atmosphere. It was the odor of new toothpaste or those herbal teas
his sister served in the co ee shop across the street. It sliced though
the heavier smells of leather and paper, and was so strong that it
made his sinuses tingle; he felt as if he was going to sneeze at any
moment. He quickly pulled out his iPod earbuds. Sneezing with
headphones on was not a good idea: made your ears pop.
Eggs.
Foul and stinking—he recognized the sulfurous odor of rotten
eggs. It blanketed the clear odor of mint…and it was disgusting. He
could feel the stench coating his tongue and lips, and his scalp
began to itch as if something were crawling through it. Josh ran his
ngers through his shaggy blond hair and shuddered. The drains
must be backing up.
Leaving the earbuds dangling over his shoulders, he checked the
book list in his hand, then looked at the shelves again: The Complete
Works of Charles Dickens, twenty-seven volumes, red leather binding.
Now where was he going to nd that?
Josh had been working in the bookshop for nearly two months
and still didn’t have the faintest idea where anything was. There
was no ling system…or rather, there was a system, but it was
known only to Nick and Perry Fleming, the owners of The Small
Book Shop. Nick or his wife could put their hands on any book in
either the shop upstairs or the cellar in a matter of minutes.
A wave of peppermint, immediately followed by rotten eggs, lled
the air again; Josh coughed and felt his eyes water. This was
impossible! Stu ng the book list into one pocket of his jeans and
the headphones into the other, he maneuvered his way through the
piled books and stacks of boxes, heading for the stairs. He couldn’t
spend another minute down there with the smell. He rubbed the
heels of his palms against his eyes, which were now stinging
furiously. Grabbing the stair rail, he pulled himself up. He needed a
breath of fresh air or he was going to throw up—but, strangely, the
closer he came to the top of the stairs, the stronger the odors
became.
He popped his head out of the cellar door and looked around.
And in that instant, Josh Newman realized that the world would
never be the same again.
CHAPTER TWO
Josh
peered over the edge of the cellar, eyes watering with the
stink of sulfur and mint. His rst impression was that the usually
quiet shop was crowded: four men facing Nick Fleming, the owner,
three of them huge and hulking, one smaller and sinister-looking.
Josh immediately guessed that the shop was being robbed.
His boss, Nick Fleming, stood in the middle of the bookshop,
facing the others. He was a rather ordinary-looking man. Average
height and build, with no real distinguishing features, except for his
eyes, which were so pale that they were almost completely colorless.
His black hair was cropped close to his skull and he always seemed
to have stubble on his chin, as if he hadn’t shaved for a couple of
days. He was dressed as usual in simple black jeans, a loose black Tshirt advertising a concert that had taken place twenty- ve years
earlier and a pair of battered cowboy boots. There was a cheap
digital watch on his left wrist and a heavy silver-link bracelet on his
right, alongside two tatty multicolored friendship bracelets.
Facing him was a small gray man in a smart suit.
Josh realized that they were not speaking…and yet something
was going on between them. Both men were standing still, their
arms close to their bodies, elbows tucked in, open palms turned
upward. Nick was in the center of the shop, while the gray man was
standing close to the door, his three black-coated companions
around him. Strangely, both men’s ngers were moving, twitching,
dancing, as if they were typing furiously, thumb brushing against
fore nger, little nger touching thumb, index and little nger
extended. Tendrils and wisps of green mist gathered in Fleming’s
palms, then curled in ornate patterns and drifted onto the oor,
where they writhed like serpents. Foul, yellow-tinged smoke coiled
and dripped from the gray man’s gloved hands, spattering onto the
wooden oor like dirty liquid.
The stench rolled o the smoke, thickening the atmosphere with
the scent of peppermint and sulfur. Josh felt his stomach twist and
lurch and he swallowed hard; the rotten-egg smell was enough to
make him gag.
The air between the two men shimmered with tendrils of green
and yellow smoke, and where they touched, sparks hissed and
sizzled. Fleming’s ngers moved, and a long st-thick coil of green
smoke appeared in the palm of his hand. He blew on it, a quick
hissing breath, and it spun up into the air, twisting and untwisting
at head height between the two men. The gray man’s short, stubby
ngers tapped out their own rhythm and a yellow ball of energy
spun from his hands and bobbed away. It touched the coil of green
smoke, which immediately wrapped around the ball. There was a
sparking snap… and the invisible explosion blew both men
backward across the room, sending them crashing across the tables
of books. Lightbulbs popped and uorescents shattered, raining
powdery glass onto the oor. Two of the windows exploded
outward, while another dozen of the small square panes shattered
and spiderwebbed.
Nick Fleming tumbled to the oor, close to the opening to the
cellar, almost landing on top of Josh, who was standing frozen on
the steps, wide-eyed with shock and horror. As Nick clambered to
his feet, he pushed Josh back down the stairs. “Stay down, whatever
happens, stay down,” he hissed, his English touched with an
inde nable accent. He straightened as he turned and Josh saw him
turn his right palm upward, bring it close to his face and blow into
it. Then he made a throwing motion toward the center of the room,
as if he were lobbing a ball.
Josh craned his neck to follow the movement. But there was
nothing to see…and then it was as if all the air had been sucked out
of the room. Books were suddenly ripped from the nearby shelves,
drawn into an untidy heap in the center of the oor; framed prints
were dragged from the walls; a heavy woolen rug curled upward
and was sucked into the center of the room.
Then the heap exploded.
Two of the big men in black overcoats caught the full force of the
explosion. Josh watched as books, some heavy and hard, others soft
and sharp, ew around them like angry birds. He winced in
sympathy as one man took the full force of a dictionary in the face.
It knocked away his hat and sunglasses…revealing dead-looking,
muddy, gray skin and eyes like polished black stones. A shelf of
romance novels battered against his companion’s face, snapping the
cheap sunglasses in two. Josh discovered that he, too, had eyes that
looked like stones.
And he suddenly realized that they were stones.
He was turning to Nick Fleming, a question forming on his lips,
when his boss glanced at him. “Stay down,” he commanded. “He’s
brought Golems.” Fleming ducked as the gray man sent three long
spearlike blades of yellow energy across the room. They sliced
through bookshelves and stabbed into the wooden oor. Everything
they touched immediately started to rot and putrefy. Leather
bindings snapped and cracked, paper blackened, wooden
oorboards and shelves turned dry and powdery.
Fleming tossed another invisible ball into the corner of the room.
Josh Newman followed the motion of his boss’s arm. As the unseen
ball sailed through the air, a shaft of sunlight caught it, and for an
instant, he saw it glow green and faceted, like an emerald globe.
Then it moved out of the sunlight and vanished again. This time
when it hit the oor, the e ect was even more dramatic. There was
no sound, but the entire building shook. Tables of cheap paperbacks
dissolved into matchwood, and slivers of paper lled the air with
bizarre confetti. Two of the men in black—the Golems—were
slammed back against the shelves, bringing books tumbling down
on top of them, while a third—the biggest—was pushed so hard
against the door that he was propelled out onto the street.
And in the silence that followed came the sound of gloved hands
clapping. “You have perfected that technique, I see, Nicholas.” The
gray man spoke English with a curious lilt.
“I’ve been practicing, John,” Nick Fleming said, sliding toward
the open cellar door, shoving Josh Newman farther down the stairs.
“I knew you would catch up with me sooner or later.”
“We’ve been looking for you for a very long time, Nicholas.
You’ve got something of ours. And we want it back.”
A sliver of yellow smoke bit into the ceiling above Fleming’s and
Josh’s heads. Bubbling, rotten black plaster drifted down like bitter
snow akes.
“I burned it,” Fleming said, “burned it a long time ago.” He
pushed Josh even farther into the cellar, then pulled the sliding door
closed, sealing them both in. “Don’t ask,” he warned, his pale eyes
shining in the gloom. “Not now.” Catching Josh by the arm, Nick
pulled him into the darkest corner of the bookstore cellar, caught a
section of shelving in both hands and jerked it forward. There was a
click, and the shelving swung outward, revealing a set of steps
hidden behind it. Fleming urged Josh forward into the gloom.
“Quickly now, quickly and quietly,” he warned. He followed Josh
into the opening and pulled the shelves closed behind him just as
the cellar door turned into a foul black liquid and owed down the
stairs with the most appalling stench of sulfur.
“Up.” Nick Fleming’s voice was warm against Josh’s ear. “This
comes out in the empty shop next door to ours. We have to hurry.
It’ll take Dee only a few moments to realize what’s happened.”
Josh Newman nodded; he knew the shop. The dry cleaner’s had
been empty all summer. He had a hundred questions, and none of
the answers that ran through his mind was satisfactory, since most
of them contained that one awful word in them: magic. He had just
watched two men toss balls and spears of something—of energy—at
each other. He had witnessed the destruction those energies had
caused.
Josh had just witnessed magic.
But of course, everyone knew that magic simply did not and could
not exist.
CHAPTER THREE
What was that disgusting smell?
Sophie Newman was just about to press the Bluetooth headset
back into her ear when she breathed deeply and paused, nostrils
aring. She’d just smelled something awful. Closing her phone and
pushing her headset into a pocket, she leaned over the open jar of
dark tea leaves and inhaled.
She had been working in The Co ee Cup since she and her
brother had arrived in San Francisco for the summer. It was an OK
job, nothing special. Most of the customers were nice, a few were
ignorant and one or two were downright rude, but the hours were
ne, the pay was good, the tips were better and the shop had the
added advantage of being just across the road from where her twin
brother worked. They had turned fteen last December and had
already started to save for their own car. They estimated it would
take them at least two years—if they bought no CDs, DVDs, games,
clothes or shoes, which were Sophie’s big weakness.
Usually, there were two other sta on duty with her, but one had
gone home sick earlier, and Bernice, who owned the shop, had left
after the lunchtime rush to go to the wholesalers’ to stock up on
fresh supplies of tea and co ee. She had promised to be back in an
hour; Sophie knew it would take at least twice that.
Over the summer, Sophie had grown used to the smells of the
di erent exotic teas and co ee the shop sold. She could tell her Earl
Grey from her Darjeeling, and knew the di erence between
Javanese and Kenyan co ee. She enjoyed the smell of co ee, though
she hated the bitter taste of it. But she loved tea. In the past couple
of weeks she had been gradually sampling all the teas, particularly
the herbal teas with their fruity tastes and unusual aromas.
But now something smelled foul and disgusting.
Almost like rotten eggs.
Sophie brought a tin of loose tea to her face and breathed deeply.
The crisp odor of Assam caught at the back of her throat: the stench
wasn’t coming from there.
“You’re supposed to drink it, not inhale it.”
Sophie turned as Perry Fleming came into the shop. Perry Fleming
was a tall, elegant woman who could have been any age from forty
to sixty. It was clear that she had once been beautiful, and she was
still striking. Her eyes were the brightest, clearest green Sophie had
ever seen, and for a long time she had wondered if the older woman
wore colored contact lenses. Perry’s hair had once been jet-black,
but now it was shot through with strands of silver, and she wore it
in an intricate braided ponytail that lay along her back almost to the
base of her spine. Her teeth were small and perfect, and her face
was traced with tiny laugh lines at the corners of her eyes. She was
always much more elegantly dressed than her husband, and today
she was wearing a mint green sleeveless summer dress that matched
her eyes, in what Sophie thought was probably pure silk.
“I just thought it smelled peculiar,” Sophie said. She sni ed the
tea again. “Smells ne now,” she added, “but for a moment there, I
thought it smelled like…like…like rotten eggs.”
She was looking at Perry Fleming as she spoke. She was startled
when the woman’s bright green eyes snapped wide open and she
whirled around to look across the street…just as all the little square
windows of the bookshop abruptly developed cracks and two simply
exploded into dust. Wisps of green and yellow smoke curled out into
the street and the air was lled with the stench of rotten eggs.
Sophie caught another smell too, the sharper, cleaner smell of
peppermint.
The older woman’s lips moved, and she whispered, “Oh no…not
now…not here.”
“Mrs. Fleming…Perry?”
The woman rounded on Sophie. Her eyes were wild and terri ed
and her usually faultless English now held a hint of a foreign accent.
“Stay here; whatever happens, stay here and stay down.”
Sophie was opening her mouth to ask a question when she felt her
ears pop. She swallowed hard…and then the door to the bookshop
crashed open and one of the big men Sophie had seen earlier was
ung out onto the street. Now he was missing his hat and glasses,
and Sophie caught a glimpse of his dead-looking skin and his marble
black eyes. He crouched in the middle of the street for a moment,
then he raised his hand to shield his face from the sunlight.
And Sophie felt something cold and solid settle into the pit of her
stomach.
The skin on the man’s hand was moving. It was slowly owing,
shifting viscously down into his sleeve: it looked as if his ngers
were melting. A glob of what appeared to be gray mud spattered
onto the street.
“Golems,” Perry gasped. “My God, he’s created Golems.”
“Gollums?” Sophie asked, her mouth thick and dry, her tongue
suddenly feeling far too large for her mouth. “Gollum, from Lord of
the Rings?”
Perry was moving toward the door. “No: Golems,” she said
absently, “Men of Clay.”
The name meant nothing to Sophie, but she watched with a
mixture of horror and confusion as the creature—the Golem—on the
street crawled out of the sun and under the cover of the awning.
Like a huge slug, he left a wet muddy trail behind him, which
immediately dried in the erce sunlight. Sophie caught another
glimpse of his face before he staggered into the bookshop. His
features had owed like melted wax and a ne web of cracks
covered the skin. It reminded her of the oor of a desert.
Perry dashed out into the street. Sophie watched as the woman
pulled her hair free of its intricate braid and shook it loose. But
instead of lying at against her back, her hair owed out about her,
as if it were blown in a gentle breeze. Only there was no breeze.
Sophie hesitated a moment; then, grabbing a broom, she dashed
across the road after Perry. Josh was in the bookstore!
The bookshop was in chaos.
The once-neat shelves and carefully stacked tables were scattered
and tossed about the room in heaps. Bookcases were shattered,
shelves snapped in half, ornate prints and maps lay crushed on the
oor. The stench of rot and decay hung about the room: pulped
paper and wood turned dry and rotting, even the ceiling was scored
and torn, plaster shredded to reveal the wooden joists and dangling
electrical wires.
The small gray man stood in the center of the oor. He was
fastidiously brushing dust o the sleeve of his coat while two of his
Golems explored the cellar. The third Golem, damaged and sti
from exposure to the sun, leaned awkwardly against a crushed
bookcase. Flakes of gray mudlike skin were spiraling o what
remained of his hands.
The gray man turned as Perry, followed by Sophie, dashed into
the bookshop. He gave a neat little bow. “Ah, Madame Perenelle. I
was wondering where you were.”
“Where is Nicholas?” Perry demanded. She pronounced the name
“Nicola.” Sophie saw a static charge ripple down the woman’s hair,
blue and white sparks crackling.
“Downstairs, I believe. My creatures are looking for him.”
Clutching the broom tightly in both hands, Sophie slipped past
Perry and crept around to the other side of the room. Josh. Where
was Josh? She had no idea what was happening and didn’t care. She
just needed to nd her brother.
“You are looking as lovely as ever,” the gray man said, eyes xed
on Perry. “You haven’t aged a day.” He bowed again, an oldfashioned, courtly movement that he performed e ortlessly. “It is
always a joy to see you.”
“I wish I could say the same for you, Dee.” Perry moved farther
into the room, eyes darting from side to side. “I recognized your foul
stench.”
Dee closed his eyes and breathed deeply. “I rather like the smell
of brimstone. It is so…” He paused. “So dramatic.” Then his gray
eyes snapped open and the smile faded. “We’ve come for the Book,
Perenelle. And don’t tell me you’ve destroyed it,” he added. “Your
continued remarkable good health is proof indeed of its existence.”
Which book? Sophie wondered, glancing around the room; the
shop was full of books.
“We are the guardians of the Book,” Perry said, and something in
her voice made Sophie turn to look at her. The girl stopped, mouth
and eyes wide with horror. A silver mist surrounded Perry Fleming,
rising o her skin in gossamer threads. Pale and translucent in
places, it gathered thick and hard around her hands, making it look
as if she were wearing metal gauntlets. “You will never get it,” Perry
snapped.
“We will,” Dee said. “We’ve accumulated all the other treasures
over the years. Only the Book remains. Now, make it easy on
yourself and tell me where it is….”
“Never!”
“I knew you would say that,” Dee said, and then the huge Golem
launched himself at Perry. “Humans are so predictable.”
Nick Fleming and Josh were opening the door of the dry cleaner’s
when they saw Perry, followed by Sophie, race across the street and
into the bookshop. “Get this door open,” Nick snapped as he
reached under his T-shirt. From a simple square cloth bag dangling
around his neck, he produced what looked like a small book bound
in copper-colored metal.
Josh slammed back the bolts and tugged open the door and Nick
raced out, quickly thumbing through the rough-edged pages as he
ran, looking for something. Josh caught a brief glimpse of ornate
writing and geometric patterns on the thick yellowed pages as he
followed Nick back into the bookshop.
Nick and Josh arrived in time to see the Golem touch Perry.
And explode.
Fine, gritty powder lled the air, and the heavy black overcoat
crumpled to the oor. For a moment, a miniature whirlwind spun
there, churning up the dust, then it curled away.
But Nick and Josh’s entry diverted Perry’s attention. She half
turned…and in that instant Dee drew his left arm across his eyes
and hurled a tiny crystal ball onto the oor.
It was as if the sun had exploded in the room.
The light was incredible. Blinding and harsh, it blanketed the
room in its ghastly are, and with the light came the smell: the stink
of burning hair and overcooked food, smoldering leaves and
scorched metal mingled with the acrid fumes of diesel.
Josh caught a glimpse of his sister just as Dee tossed the crystal.
He was partially shielded by Nick and Perry, both of whom were
battered to the oor by the light. Josh’s vision became a
kaleidoscope of black-and-white still images as the light seared the
rods and cones at the back of his eyes. He saw Nick drop the metalbound book onto the oor…saw two black-clad shapes surround
Perry and vaguely heard her scream…saw Dee snatch the book with
a grunt of triumph while Nick groped blindly on the oor.
“You lose, Nicholas,” Dee hissed, “as you have always lost. Now I
get to take those things most precious to you: your beloved
Perenelle and your book.”
Josh was moving even before he was aware of it. He launched
himself at Dee, catching the small man by surprise. Although only
fteen, Josh was tall for his age, and heavy: he was big enough to
be a linebacker, and the youngest on his football team. He knocked
Dee to the ground, sending the book spinning out of his grasp. Josh
felt the heavy metal cover beneath his ngertips and caught it—just
as he was lifted straight o the oor and tossed into a corner. He
landed on a pile of books that cushioned his fall. Black spots and
darts of rainbow light moved across his eyes every time he blinked.
Dee’s gray shape loomed over Josh, then his gloved hand reached
down for the book. “Mine, I think.”
Josh’s grip tightened, but Dee simply wrenched the book from his
hand.
“You. Leave. My. Brother. Alone.” Sophie Newman brought the
broom down ve times on Dee’s back, once for every word.
Dee barely glanced at her. Clutching the book in one gloved hand,
he caught the broom in the other and muttered a single word, and it
immediately withered and turned to ragged pulpy splinters in
Sophie’s hands. “You’re lucky I’m in a good humor today,” he
whispered, “else I’d do the same to you.” Then Dee and his two
remaining Golems swept out of the devastated bookshop, carrying
Perry Fleming between them, and slammed the door closed. There
was a long moment of silence, and then the last remaining
undisturbed shelf of books clattered to the oor.
CHAPTER FOUR
“I
suppose calling the police is out of the question.” Sophie
Newman leaned against a precariously listing bookcase and
wrapped her arms around her body to stop herself from shaking.
She was surprised that her voice sounded so calm and reasonable.
“We’ve got to tell them that Perry’s been kidnapped….”
“Perry’s not in any danger just yet.” Nick Fleming was sitting on
one of the lower rungs of a short stepladder. He was holding his
head in his hands and breathing deeply, coughing occasionally as he
tried to clear his lungs of dust and grit. “But you’re right, we’re not
going to the police.” He managed a wan smile. “I’m not sure what
we could say to the police that would make any sense to them.”
“I’m not sure that it makes much sense to us either,” Josh said. He
was sitting on the only unbroken chair left in the bookshop.
Although he’d broken no bones, he was bruised all over and knew
he was going to turn several really interesting shades of purple over
the next couple of days. The last time he’d felt like this was when
he’d been run over by three guys on the football eld. Actually, this
felt worse. At least then, he knew what was happening.
“I think that perhaps gas escaped into the shop,” Nick suggested
cautiously, “and what we’ve all experienced and seen is nothing
more than a series of hallucinations.” He stopped, looking at Sophie
and Josh in turn.
The twins lifted their heads to look at him, identical expressions
of disbelief on their faces, bright blue eyes still wide with shock.
“Lame,” Josh said nally.
“Very lame,” Sophie agreed.
Nick shrugged. “Actually, I thought it was a pretty good
explanation. It covered the smells, the explosion in the shop and
any…any peculiar things you thought you might have seen,” he
nished hurriedly.
Adults, Sophie had decided a long time before, were really bad at
making up good excuses. “We didn’t imagine those things,” she said
rmly. “We didn’t imagine the Golems.”
“The what?” Josh asked.
“The big guys were Golems; they were made out of mud,” his
sister explained. “Perry told me.”
“Ah, she did, did she?” Fleming murmured. He looked around the
devastated shop and shook his head. It had taken less than four
minutes to completely trash it. “I’m surprised he brought Golems.
They are usually so unreliable in warmer countries. But they served
his purpose. He got what he came for.”
“The book?” Sophie asked. She had caught a glimpse of it in
Josh’s hand before the small man pulled it free. Although she was
standing in a shop full of books, and their father owned a huge
library of antiquarian books, she had never seen anything like that
particular one before. It looked as if it was bound in tarnished
metal.
Fleming nodded. “He’s been looking for that for a long time,” he
said softly, his pale eyes lost and distant. “A very long time.”
Josh rose slowly to his feet, his back and shoulders aching. He
held out two crumpled pages to Nick. “Well, he didn’t get all of it.
When he pulled the book out of my hand, I guess I must have been
holding on to these.”
Fleming snatched the pages from Josh’s hand with an inarticulate
cry. Dropping to the oor, he brushed away shredded books and
shattered shelving and laid the two pages on the oor side by side.
His long- ngered hands were trembling slightly as he smoothed the
pages at. The twins knelt on the oor on either side of him, staring
intently at the pages…and trying to make sense of what they were
seeing. “And we’re certainly not imagining that,” Sophie whispered,
tapping the page with her index nger.
The thick pages were about six inches across by nine inches long
and were composed of what looked like pressed bark. Tendrils of
bers and leaves were clearly visible in the surface, and both were
covered with jagged, angular writing. The rst letter at the top left-
hand corner of each page was beautifully illuminated in gold and
red, while the rest of the words were written in reddish black ink.
And the words were moving.
Sophie and Josh watched as the letters shifted on the page like
tiny beetles, shaping and reshaping themselves, becoming brie y
almost legible in recognizable languages like Latin or Old English,
but then immediately dissolving and re-forming into ancient-looking
symbols not unlike Egyptian hieroglyphs or Celtic Ogham.
Fleming sighed. “No, you’re not imagining that,” he said nally.
He reached down the neck of his T-shirt and pulled out a pair of
pincenez on a length of black cord. The pincenez were old-fashioned
glasses without arms, designed to perch on the bridge of the nose.
Using the spectacles as magnifying glasses, Nick moved them across
the wriggling, shifting words. “Ha!”
“Good news?” Josh asked.
“Excellent news. He’s missing the Final Summoning.” He squeezed
Josh’s bruised shoulder, making him wince. “If you had wanted to
take two pages from the book, rendering it useless, then you could
not have chosen better than these.” The broad smile faded from his
face. “And when Dee nds out, he’ll be back, and I guarantee you he
will not just bring Golems with him next time.”
“Who was the gray man?” Sophie asked. “Perry also called him
Dee.”
Gathering up the pages, Nick stood. Sophie turned to look at him
and realized that he suddenly looked old and tired, incredibly tired.
“The gray man was Dr. John Dee, one of the most powerful and
dangerous men in the world.”
“I’ve never heard of him,” Josh said.
“To remain unknown in this modern world: that, indeed, is real
power. Dee is an alchemist, a magician, a sorcerer and a
necromancer, and they are not all the same thing.”
“Magic?” Sophie asked.
“I thought there was no such thing as magic,” Josh said
sarcastically, and then immediately felt foolish, after what he’d just
seen and experienced.
“Yet you have just fought creatures of magic: the Golems are men
created of mud and clay, brought to life by a single word of power.
In this century, I’ll wager there are less than half a dozen people
who have even seen a Golem, let alone survived an encounter with
one.”
“Did Dee bring them to life?” Sophie asked.
“Creating Golems is easy; the spell is as old as humanity.
Animating them is a little harder and controlling them is practically
impossible.” He sighed. “But not for Dr. John Dee.”
“Who is he?” she pressed.
“Dr. John Dee was Court Magician during the reign of Queen
Elizabeth I in England.”
Sophie laughed shakily, not entirely sure whether to believe Nick
Fleming. “But that was centuries ago; the gray man couldn’t have
been older than fty.”
Nick Fleming crawled around on the oor, pushing through books
until he found the one he wanted. England in the Age of Elizabeth. He
ipped it open: on the page facing an image of Queen Elizabeth I
was an old-fashioned etching of a sharp-faced man with a triangular
beard. The clothes were di erent, but there was no doubt that this
was the man they had encountered.
Sophie took the book from Nick’s hands. “It says here that Dee
was born in 1527,” she said very softly. “That would make him
nearly ve hundred years old.”
Josh came to stand beside his sister. He stared at the picture, then
looked around the room. If he breathed deeply, he could still smell
the peculiar odors of…magic. That was what he had been smelling
—not mint and rotten eggs, but the scent of magic. “Dee knew you,”
he said slowly. “He knew you well,” he added.
Fleming moved about the shop, picking up odd items and
dropping them to the oor again. “Oh, he knows me,” he said. “He
knows Perry, too. He’s known us for a long time…a very long time.”
He looked over at the twins, his almost colorless eyes now dark and
troubled. “You’re involved now, more’s the pity, so the time for lies
and subterfuge is past. If you are to survive, you will need to know
the truth.”
Josh and Sophie looked at one another. They had both picked up
the phrase “If you are to survive…”
“My real name is Nicholas Flamel. I was born in France in the
year 1330. Perry’s real name is Perenelle: she is ten years older than
me. But don’t ever tell her I said that,” he added hastily.
Josh felt his stomach churn and rumble. He was going to say
“Impossible!” and laugh and be irritated with Nick for telling them
such a stupid story. But he was bruised and aching from being ung
across the room by…by what? He remembered the Golem that had
reached for Perry—Perenelle—and how it had dissolved into powder
at her touch.
“What…what are you?” Sophie asked the question that was
forming on her twin’s lips. “What are you and Perenelle?”
Nick smiled, but his face was cold and humorless, and for an
instant, he almost resembled Dee. “We are legend,” he said simply.
“Once—a long time ago—we were simple people, but then I bought
a book, the Book of Abraham the Mage, usually called the Codex.
From that moment on, things changed. Perenelle changed. I
changed. I became the Alchemyst.
“I became the greatest alchemyst of all time, sought after by kings
and princes, by emperors and even the Pope himself. I discovered
the secret of the philosopher’s stone hidden deep in that book of
ancient magic: I learned how to turn ordinary metal into gold, how
to change common stones into precious jewels. But more than this,
much more, I found the recipe for a formulation of herbs and spells
that keeps disease and death at bay. Perenelle and I became
virtually immortal.” He held up the torn pages in his hand. “This is
all that remains of the Codex. Dee and his kind have been seeking
the Book of the Mage for centuries. Now they have it. And
Perenelle, too,” he added bitterly.
“But you said the Book is useless without these pages,” Josh
reminded him quickly.
“That is true. There is enough in the Book to keep Dee busy for
centuries, but these pages are vital,” Nick agreed. “Dee will be
coming back for them.”
“There’s something else, though, isn’t there?” Sophie asked
quickly. “Something more.” She knew he was holding something
back; adults always did. Their parents had taken months to tell Josh
and her that they would be spending the summer in San Francisco.
Nick glanced at her sharply, and once again she was reminded of
the look Dee had given her earlier: there was something cold and
inhuman in it. “Yes…there is something more,” he said hesitantly.
“Without the Book, Perenelle and I will age. The formulation for
immortality must be brewed afresh every month. Within the full
cycle of the moon, we will wither and die. And if we die, then the
evil we have so long fought against will triumph. The Elder Race
will claim this earth again.”
“The Elder Race?” Josh asked, his voice rising and cracking. He
swallowed hard, conscious now that his heart was thumping in his
chest. What had started out as just another ordinary Thursday
afternoon had turned into something strange and terrible. He played
a lot of computer games, read some fantasy novels, and in those,
elder always meant ancient and dangerous. “Elder, as in old?”
“Very old,” Flamel agreed.
“You mean there are more like Dee, like you?” Josh said, then
winced as Sophie kicked his shins.
Flamel turned to look at Josh, his colorless eyes now clouded with
anger. “There are others like Dee, yes, and others like me, too, but
Dee and I are not alike. We were never alike,” Flamel added bitterly.
“We chose to follow di erent paths, and his has led him down some
very dark roads. He too is immortal, though even I am not sure how
he retains his youth. But we are both human.” He turned to the cash
register, which was lying broken open on the oor, and started
scooping out the money as he spoke. When he turned to look at the
twins, they were startled by the grim expression on his face. “Those
whom Dee serves are not and never were from the race of man.”
Shoving the money into his pockets, he grabbed a battered leather
jacket o the oor. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
“Where will you go? What will you do?” Sophie asked.
“What about us?” Josh nished the thought for her, as she often
did for him.
“First I have to get you to a place of safety before Dee realizes
that the pages are missing. Then I’ll go in search of Perenelle.”
The twins looked at each other. “Why do you have to get us to a
safe place?” Sophie asked.
“We don’t know anything,” Josh said.
“Once Dee discovers that the Book is incomplete, he will return
for the missing pages. And I guarantee you, he will leave no
witnesses on this earth.”
Josh started to laugh, but the sound died in his throat when he
realized that his sister was not even smiling. “You’re…” He licked
suddenly dry lips. “You’re saying that he would kill us?”
Nicholas Flamel tilted his head to one side, considering. “No,” he
said nally, “not kill you.”
Josh heaved a sigh of relief.
“Believe me,” Flamel continued. “Dee can do much worse to you.
Much worse.”
CHAPTER FIVE
The twins stood on the sidewalk outside the bookshop, glass from
the broken windows crunching under their feet, watching as Nick
produced a key. “But we can’t just leave,” Sophie said rmly.
Josh nodded. “We’re not going anywhere.”
Nick Fleming—or Flamel, as they were beginning to think of him
—turned the key in the lock of the bookshop and rattled the door.
Within the shop, they could hear books sliding onto the oor. “I
really loved this shop,” Flamel muttered. “It reminded me of my
very rst job.” He glanced at Sophie and Josh. “You have no choice.
If you want to survive the rest of the day, you have to leave now.”
Then he turned away, pulling on his battered leather jacket as he
hurried across the road to The Co ee Cup. The twins looked at each
other, then hurried after him.
“You’ve got keys to lock up?”
Sophie nodded. She produced the two keys on their Golden Gate
Bridge key ring. “Look, if Bernice comes back and nds the shop
closed, she’ll probably call the police or something….”
“Good point,” Flamel said. “Leave a note,” he told Sophie,
“something short—you had to leave suddenly, some sort of
emergency, that sort of thing. Say that I accompanied you. Scribble
it; make it look as if you left in a hurry. Are your parents still on
that dig in Utah?” The twins’ parents were archaeologists, currently
on loan to the University of San Francisco.
Sophie nodded. “For another six weeks at least.”
“We’re still staying with Aunt Agnes in Paci c Heights,” Josh
added. “Aunt Agony.”
“We can’t just disappear. She’ll be expecting us home for dinner,”
Sophie said. “If we’re even ve minutes late, she gets in a tizzy. Last
week, when the trolley car broke down and we were an hour late,
she’d already phoned our parents by the time we got there.” Aunt
Agnes was eighty-four, and although she drove the twins to
distraction with her constant fussing, they were very fond of her.
“Then you’ll need to give her an excuse too,” Flamel said bluntly,
sweeping into the co ee shop with Sophie close behind him.
Josh hesitated before stepping into the cool, sweet-smelling gloom
of The Co ee Cup. He stood on the sidewalk, his backpack slung
over his shoulder, looking up and down. If you ignored the
sparkling glass littering the sidewalk in front of the bookshop,
everything looked perfectly normal, an ordinary weekday afternoon.
The street was still and silent, the air was heavy with just a hint of
the ocean. Across the bay, beyond Fisherman’s Wharf, a ship’s horn
sounded, the deep noise lost and lonely in the distance. Everything
looked more or less as it had half an hour earlier.
And yet…
And yet it was not the same. It could never be the same again. In
the last thirty minutes, Josh’s carefully ordered world had shifted
and altered irrevocably. He was a normal high school sophomore,
not too brilliant, but not stupid either. He played football, sang—
badly—in his friend’s band, had a few girls he was interested in, but
no real girlfriend yet. He played the occasional computer game,
preferred rst person shooters like Quake and Doom and Unreal
Tournament, couldn’t handle the driving games and got lost in Myst.
He loved The Simpsons and could quote chunks of episodes by heart,
really liked Shrek, though he’d never admit it, thought the new
Batman was all right and that X-Men was excellent. He even liked
the new Superman, despite what other people said. Josh was
ordinary.
But ordinary teens did not nd themselves in the middle of a
battle between two incredibly ancient magicians.
There was no magic in the world. Magic was movie special
e ects. Magic was stage shows with rabbits and doves and
sometimes tigers, and David Copper eld sawing people in half and
levitating over the audience. There was no such thing as real magic.
But how then could he explain what had just happened in the
bookshop? He had watched shelves turn to rotten wood, seen books
dissolve into pulp, smelled the stink of rotten eggs from Dee’s spells
and the cleaner scent of mint when Fleming—Flamel—worked his
magic.
Josh Newman shivered in the bright afternoon sunshine and
ducked into The Co ee Cup, pulling open his backpack and reaching
in for his battered laptop. He needed to use the café’s wireless
Internet connection; he had names he wanted to look up: Doctor
John Dee, Perenelle and especially Nicholas Flamel.
Sophie scribbled a quick note on the back of a napkin, then
chewed the end of the pencil as she read it.
Mrs. Fleming unwell. Gas leak in the shop. Gone to hospital. Mr.
Fleming with us. Everything else OK. Will phone later.
When Bernice came back and found the shop closed just before
the late-afternoon rush, she was not going to be happy. Sophie
guessed that she might even lose her job. Sighing, she signed the
note with a ourish that tore through the paper, and stuck it to the
cash register.
Nicholas Flamel peered over her shoulder and read it. “That’s
good, very good, and it explains why the bookshop is closed too.”
Flamel glanced over his shoulder to where Josh was tapping
furiously at his keyboard. “Let’s go!”
“Just checking my mail,” Josh muttered, powering o the
machine and closing it.
“At a time like this?” Sophie asked incredulously.
“Life goes on. E-mail stops for no man.” He attempted a smile,
and failed.
Sophie grabbed her bag and vintage denim jacket, taking a last
look around the co ee shop. She had the sudden thought that she
would not be seeing it again for a long time, but that was ridiculous,
of course. She turned out the lights, ushered her brother and Nick
Fleming—Flamel—through the door ahead of her and hit the alarm.
Then she pulled the door shut, turned the key in the lock and
dropped the key chain through the letter box.
“Now what?” she asked.
“Now we get some help and we hide until I gure out what to do
with you both.” Flamel smiled. “We’re good at hiding; Perry and I
have been doing it for more than half a millennium.”
“What about Perry?” Sophie asked. “Will Dee…harm her?” She’d
come to know and like the tall, elegant woman over the past few
weeks as she came into the co ee shop. She didn’t want anything to
happen to her.
Flamel shook his head. “He can’t. She’s too powerful. I never
studied the sorcerous arts, but Perry did. Right now all Dee can do is
contain her, prevent her from using her powers. But in the next few
days she will start to age and weaken. Possibly in a week, certainly
within two weeks, he would be able to use his powers against her.
Still, he’ll be cautious. He will keep her trapped behind Wards and
Sigils….” Flamel saw the look of confusion on Sophie’s face.
“Magical barriers,” he explained. “He’ll only attack when he is sure
of victory. But rst he will try to discover the extent of her arcane
knowledge. Dee’s search for knowledge was always his greatest
strength…and his weakness.” He absently patted his pockets,
looking for something. “My Perry can take care of herself. Remind
me to tell you the story sometime of how she faced down a pair of
Greek Lamiae.”
Sophie nodded, though she had no idea what Greek Lamiae were.
As Flamel strode down the street, he found what he was looking
for: a pair of small round sunglasses. He put them on, stuck his
hands in the pockets of his leather jacket and began to whistle
tunelessly, as if he hadn’t a care in the world. He glanced back over
his shoulder. “Well, come on.”
The twins looked at each other blankly, then hurried after him.
“I checked him out online,” Josh muttered, looking quickly at his
sister.
“So that’s what you were doing. I didn’t think e-mail could be that
important.”
“Everything he says checks out: he’s there on Wikipedia and there
are nearly two hundred thousand results for him on Google. There
are over ten million results for John Dee. Even Perenelle is there,
and it mentions the book and everything. It even says that when he
died, his grave was dug up by people searching for treasure and
they found it empty—no body and no treasure. Apparently, his
house is still standing in Paris.”
“He sure doesn’t look like an immortal magician,” Sophie
murmured.
“I’m not sure I know what a magician looks like,” Josh said
quietly. “The only magicians I know are Penn and Teller.”
“I’m not a magician,” Flamel said, without looking at them. “I’m
an alchemyst, a man of science, though perhaps not the science you
would be familiar with.”
Sophie hurried to catch up. She reached out to touch his arm and
slow him down, but a spark—like static electricity—snapped into
her ngertips. “Aaah!” She jerked her hand back, ngertips tingling.
Now what?
“I’m sorry,” Flamel explained. “That’s an aftere ect of the…well,
what you would call magic. My aura—the electrical eld that
surrounds my body—is still charged. It’s just reacting when it hits
your aura.” He smiled, showing perfectly regular teeth. “It also
means you must have a powerful aura.”
“What’s an aura?”
Flamel strode on a couple of steps down the sidewalk without
answering, then turned to point to a window. The word TATTOO
was picked out in uorescent lighting. “See there…see how there is
a glow around the words?”
“I see it.” Sophie nodded, squinting slightly. Each letter was
outlined in buzzing yellow light.
“Every human has a similar glow around their body. In the distant
past, people could see it clearly and they named it the aura. It comes
from the Greek word for breath. As humans evolved, most lost the
ability to see the aura. Some still can, of course.”
Josh snorted derisively.
Flamel glanced over his shoulder. “It’s true. The aura has even
been photographed by a Russian couple called the Kirlians. The
electrical eld surrounds every living organism.”
“What does it look like?” Sophie asked.
Flamel tapped his nger on the shop window. “Just like that: a
glow around the body. Everyone’s aura is unique—di erent colors,
di erent strengths. Some glow solidly, others pulse. Some appear
around the edge of the body, other auras cloak the body like an
envelope. You can tell a lot from a person’s aura: whether they are
ill or unhappy, angry or frightened, for example.”
“And you can see these auras?” Sophie said.
Flamel shook his head, surprising them. “No, I cannot. Perry can,
sometimes. I cannot. But I know how to channel and direct the
energy. That’s what you were seeing earlier today: pure auric
energy.”
“I think I’d like to learn how to do that,” Sophie said.
Flamel glanced at her quickly. “Be careful what you wish for.
Every use of power has a cost.” He held out his hand. Sophie and
Josh crowded around on the quiet side street. Flamel’s hand was
visibly trembling. And when Sophie looked into his face, she noticed
that his eyes were bloodshot. “When you use auric energy, you burn
as many calories as if you had run a marathon. Think of it like
draining a battery. I doubt I could have lasted very much longer
against Dee back there.”
“Is Dee more powerful than you?”
Flamel smiled grimly. “In nitely.” Shoving his hands back into
the pockets of his leather jacket, he continued down the street,
Sophie and Josh now walking on either side of him. In the distance,
the Golden Gate Bridge began to loom over the rooftops. “Dee has
spent the past ve centuries developing his powers; I’ve spent that
same time hiding mine, concentrating only on those few little things
I needed to do to keep Perenelle and myself alive. Dee was always
powerful, and I dread to think what he is capable of now.” At the
bottom of the hill he paused, looking left and right, then abruptly
turned to the left and headed into California Street. “There’ll be
time for questions later. Right now, we have to hurry.”
“Have you known Dee long?” Josh persisted, determined to get
some answers.
Nicholas Flamel smiled grimly. “John Dee was a mature man
when I accepted him as my apprentice. I still took apprentices in
those days, and so many of them went on to make me proud. I had
visions of creating the next generation of alchemists, scientists,
astronomers, astrologers and mathematicians: these would be the
men and women who would create a new world. Dee was probably
the nest student I ever had. So I suppose you could say that I’ve
known him for nearly ve hundred years—though our encounters
have been somewhat sporadic over the past few decades.”
“What turned him into your enemy?” Sophie asked.
“Greed, jealousy…and the Codex, the Book of Abraham the
Mage,” Flamel answered. “He’s coveted that for a long time, and
now he has it.”
“Not all of it,” Josh reminded him.
“No, not all of it.” Flamel smiled. He walked on, with the twins
still on either side of him. “When Dee was my apprentice in Paris,
he found out about the Codex. One day I caught him attempting to
steal it, and I knew then that he had allied himself with the Dark
Elders. I refused to share its secrets with him and we had a bitter
argument. That night he sent the rst assassins after Perry and me.
They were human and we dealt with them easily. The next night,
the assassins were decidedly less than human. So Perry and I took
the Book, gathered up our few belongings and ed Paris. He’s been
chasing us ever since.”
They stopped at a cross light. A trio of British tourists was waiting
for the light to change and Flamel fell silent, a quick glance at
Sophie and Josh warning them to say nothing. The light changed
and they crossed, the tourists heading to the right, Nicholas Flamel
and the twins moving to the left.
“Where did you go when you left Paris?” Josh asked.
“London,” Flamel said shortly. “Dee nearly caught us there in
1666,” he continued. “He loosed a Fire Elemental after us, a savage,
mindless creature that almost devoured the city. History calls it the
Great Fire.”
Sophie looked over at Josh. They had both heard of the Great Fire
of London; they had learned about it in world history. She was
surprised by how calm she felt: here she was, listening to a man
who claimed to be more than ve hundred years old, recounting
historical events as if he had been there when they happened. And
she believed him!
“Dee came dangerously close to capturing us in Paris in 1763,”
Flamel continued, “and again in 1835, when we were in Rome
working as booksellers, as it happens. That was always my favorite
occupation,” he added. He fell silent as they approached a group of
Japanese tourists listening intently to their guide, who was standing
beneath a bright yellow umbrella. When they were out of earshot,
he continued, the events of more than a century and a half earlier
obviously still fresh and bitter in his memory.
“We ed to Ireland, thinking he would never nd us on that
island at the edge of Europe. But he pursued us. He had managed to
master the control of Wights then, and brought two over with him:
the Disease Wight and the Hunger Wight, no doubt intending to set
them on our trail. At some point he lost control of the creatures.
Hunger and disease ravaged that poor land: a million people died in
Ireland’s Great Famine in the 1840s.” Nicholas Flamel’s face
hardened into a mask. “I doubt if Dee even paused to think about it.
He always had nothing but contempt for humankind.”
Sophie glanced at her brother again. She could tell by the
expression on his face that he was concentrating hard, trying to
keep up with the deluge of information. She knew he would want to
go online and check out some of the details. “But he never caught
you,” she said to Flamel.
“Not until today.” He shrugged and smiled sadly. “It was
inevitable, I suppose. Throughout the twentieth century, he kept
getting closer. He was becoming more powerful, his organization
was melding ancient magic and modern technology. Perry and I hid
out in Newfoundland for a long time until he loosed Dire Wolves on
us, and then we drifted from city to city, starting on the East Coast
in New York in 1901 and gradually moving westward. I suppose it
was only a matter of time before he caught up with us,” he added.
“Cameras, videos, phones and the Internet make it so much harder
to remain hidden nowadays.”
“This book…this Codex he was looking for…,” Josh began.
“The Book of Abraham the Mage,” Flamel clari ed.
“What’s so special about it?”
Nicholas Flamel stopped in the middle of the sidewalk so
suddenly that the twins walked right past him. They turned and
looked back. The rather ordinary-looking man spread his arms wide,
as if he were about to take a bow. “Look at me. Look at me! I am
older than America. That is what is so special about the book.”
Flamel lowered his voice and continued urgently. “But you know
something—the secret of life eternal is probably the least of the
secrets in the Codex.”
Sophie found herself slipping her hand into her brother’s. He
squeezed lightly and she knew, without his saying a word, that he
was as frightened as she was.
“With the Codex, Dee can set about changing the world.”
“Changing it?” Sophie’s voice was a raw whisper, and abruptly,
the May air felt chilly.
“Changing it how?” Josh demanded.
“Remaking it,” Flamel said softly. “Dee and the Dark Elders he
serves will remake this world as it was in the unimaginably ancient
past. And the only place for humans in it will be as slaves. Or food.”
CHAPTER SIX
Although
there were other ways he could have used to
communicate, Dr. John Dee preferred this century’s method of
choice: the cell phone. Settling back into the cool leather interior of
the limousine, he ipped open the phone, pointed it to where
Perenelle Flamel was slumped unconscious between two dripping
Golems and took a quick picture.
Madame Perenelle Flamel. His prisoner. Now, that was certainly
something for the photo album.
Dee keyed in a number and hit Send, then he tilted his head,
looking at the graceful woman across from him. Capturing Perenelle
had been an extraordinary stroke of good fortune, but he knew he’d
only managed it because she’d used up so much energy destroying
his Golem. He stroked his small triangular beard. He was going to
have to make more Golems soon. He looked at the two opposite: in
the brief time they had been outside in the early-afternoon sun, they
had started to crack and melt. The big one on Perenelle’s left was
dripping black river mud across the leather seat.
Perhaps he would choose something other than Golems next time.
The brutish creatures worked ne in damper climates, but were
especially unsuited to a West Coast summer. He wondered if he still
had the recipe to create a ghoul.
It was Perenelle who presented him with a problem, however—a
serious problem: he simply wasn’t sure how powerful she was.
Dee had always been rather in awe of the tall, elegant
Frenchwoman. When he’d rst apprenticed himself to Nicholas
Flamel, the Alchemyst, he’d made the mistake of underestimating
her. He’d quickly found that Perenelle Flamel was at least as
powerful as her husband—in fact, there were some areas in which
she was even more powerful. Those traits that made Flamel such a
brilliant alchemyst—his attention to detail, his knowledge of ancient
languages, his in nite patience—made him a poor sorcerer and a
terrible necromancer. He simply lacked the imaginative spark of
pure visualization that was needed for that work. Perenelle, on the
other hand, was one of the most powerful sorceresses he had ever
encountered.
Dee pulled o one of his gray leather gloves and dropped it onto
the seat beside him. Leaning toward Perenelle, he dipped his nger
in the puddle of mud dripping from one of the Golems and traced a
curling symbol on the back of the woman’s left hand. Then he
painted a mirror image of the symbol on her right hand. He dipped
his hand in the sticky black mud again and was inscribing three
wavy lines on her forehead when she suddenly opened her bright
green eyes. Dee abruptly sat back in his seat.
“Madame Perenelle, I cannot tell you what a pleasure it is to see
you again.”
Perry opened her mouth to speak, but no words would form. She
tried to move, but not only were the Golems gripping her arms
tightly, her muscles refused to obey.
“Ah, you must excuse me, but I’ve taken the liberty of placing you
under a warding spell. A simple spell, but it will su ce until I can
organize something more permanent.” Dee smiled, but there was
nothing humorous in his expression. His cell phone trilled, playing
the theme from The X-Files, and he ipped it open. “Excuse me,” he
said to Perenelle.
“You got the photo?” Dee asked. “Yes, I thought that would
amuse you: the legendary Perenelle Flamel in our hands. Oh, I’m
quite sure Nicholas will come after her. And we’ll be ready. This
time he will not escape.”
Perenelle could clearly hear the cackle of laughter on the other
end.
“Yes, of course.” Dee reached into an inside pocket and took out
the copper-bound book. “We have the Codex. Finally.” He began to
turn the thick rough-edged pages as he spoke. His voice fell, and it
was unclear whether he was talking to the caller or to himself. “Ten
thousand years of arcane knowledge in one place…”
Then his voice trailed away. The phone dropped from his hand
and bounced across the oor of the car.
At the back of the book, two pages were missing, roughly torn
out.
Dee closed his eyes and then licked his lips with a quick icking
movement of his tiny tongue. “The boy,” he rasped, “the boy, when
I pulled it from his hand.” He opened his eyes and began to scan the
preceding pages carefully. “Maybe they’re not important…,” he
murmured, lips moving as he followed the shifting, moving words.
He concentrated on the bright illuminated letters at the top of every
page, which gave a clue to what followed. Then he stopped
abruptly, clutching the book in trembling ngers. When he raised
his head, his eyes were blazing. “I’m missing the Final Summoning!”
he howled. Yellow sparks danced around his head, and the rear
window behind him bloomed a spiderweb of white cracks. Tendrils
of yellow-white power dripped from his teeth like saliva. “Go back!”
he roared to the driver. “Go back now. No, stop, cancel that order.
Flamel’s no fool. They’ll be long gone.” He snatched the phone o
the oor and, avoiding Perenelle’s eyes, took a moment to compose
himself. He drew in a deep shuddering breath and visibly calmed
himself, then dialed. “We have a slight problem,” he said crisply
into the phone, voice calm and unemotional. “We seem to be
missing a couple of pages from the back of the book. Nothing
important, I’m sure. Perhaps you would do me a courtesy,” he said
very casually. “You might convey to the Morrigan that I am in need
of her services.”
Dee noticed that Perenelle’s eyes had widened in shock at the
mention of the name. He grinned in delight. “Tell her I need her
special talents and particular skills.” Then he snapped the phone
shut and looked over at Perenelle Flamel. “It would have been so
much easier if they had just given me the Codex. Now the Morrigan
is coming. And you know what that means.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Sophie spotted the rat
rst.
The twins had grown up in New York and had spent most of their
summers in California, so encountering a rat was nothing new.
Living in San Francisco, a port city, one quickly got used to seeing
the creatures, especially early in the morning and late at night,
when they came out of the shadows and sewers. Sophie wasn’t
especially frightened of them, though like everyone else she had
heard the horror stories, urban legends and FOAF—friend of a
friend—stories about the scavengers. She knew they were mostly
harmless unless cornered; she thought she remembered reading
somewhere that they could jump to great heights. She’d also read an
article in the New York Times Sunday magazine that said that there
were as many rats in the United States as there were people.
But this rat was di erent.
Sleek and black, rather than the usual lthy brown, it crouched,
unmoving, at the mouth of the alleyway, and Sophie could have
sworn that its eyes were bright red. And watching them.
Maybe it was an escaped pet?
“Ah, you’ve noticed,” Flamel murmured, catching her arm, urging
her forward. “We’re being watched.”
“Who?” Josh asked, confused, turning quickly, expecting to see
Dee’s long black car cruising down the street. But there was no sign
of any car, and no one seemed to be paying them any special
attention. “Where?”
“The rat. In the alleyway,” Nicholas Flamel said quickly. “Don’t
look.”
But it was too late. Josh had already turned and looked. “By a
rat? A rat is watching us: you cannot be serious.” He stared hard at
the rat, expecting it to turn and scuttle away. It just raised its head
and looked at him, its mouth opening to reveal pointed teeth. Josh
shuddered. Snakes and rats: he hated them equally…though not as
much as he hated spiders. And scorpions.
“Rats don’t have red eyes, do they?” he asked, looking at his
sister, who, as far as he knew, was afraid of nothing.
“Not usually,” she said.
When he turned back, he discovered that there were now two jetblack rats standing still in the alleyway. A third scuttled out of the
gloom and settled down to watch them.
“OK,” Josh said evenly, “I’ve seen men made of mud, I guess I can
accept spying rats. Do they talk?” he wondered aloud.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Flamel snapped. “They’re rats.”
Josh really didn’t think it was such a ridiculous suggestion.
“Has Dee sent them?” Sophie asked.
“He’s tracking us. The rats have followed our scent from the shop.
A simple scrying spell allows him to see what they see. They are a
crude but e ective tool, and once they have our scent they can
follow us until we cross water. But I’m more concerned about
those.” He tilted his chin upward.
Sophie and Josh looked up. Gathering on the rooftops of the
surrounding buildings were an extraordinary number of blackfeathered birds.
“Crows,” Flamel said shortly.
“That’s bad?” Sophie guessed. From the moment Dee had stepped
into the shop, there hadn’t been a whole lot of good news.
“It could be very bad. But I think we’ll be OK. We’re nearly
there.” He turned to the left and led the twins into the heart of San
Francisco’s exotic Chinatown. They passed the Sam Wong Hotel,
then turned right into a cramped back street, then immediately left
into an even narrower alleyway. O the relatively clean main
streets, the alleyways were piled high with boxes and open bins that
stank with that peculiarly sweet-sour odor of rotten food. The
narrow alley they had turned into was especially foul-smelling, the
air practically solid with ies, and the buildings on either side rose
so high that the passage was in gloomy shadow.
“I think I’m going to be sick,” Sophie muttered. Only the day
before, she’d said to her twin that the weeks working in the co ee
shop had really heightened her sense of smell. She’d boasted that
she was able to distinguish odors she’d never smelled before. Now
she was regretting it: the air was rancid with the stink of rotten fruit
and sh.
Josh just nodded. He was concentrating on breathing through his
mouth, though he imagined that every foul breath was coating his
tongue.
“Nearly there,” Flamel said. He seemed una ected by the rank
odors whirling about them.
The twins heard a rasping, skittering sound and turned in time to
see ve jet-black rats scramble across the tops of the open bins
behind them. A huge black crow settled on one of the wires that
crisscrossed the alleyway.
Nicholas Flamel suddenly stopped outside a plain, unmarked
wooden door so encrusted with grime that it was virtually
indistinguishable from the wall. There was no handle or keyhole.
Spreading his right hand wide, Flamel placed his ngertips at
speci c locations and pressed. The door clicked open. Grabbing
Sophie and Josh, he pulled them into the shadow and eased the
door shut behind them.
After the bitter stench of the alleyways, the hallway smelled
wonderful: sweet with jasmine and other subtle exotic odors. The
twins breathed deeply. “Bergamot,” Sophie announced, identifying
the orange odor, “and Ylang-Ylang and patchouli, I think.”
“I’m impressed,” Flamel said.
“I got used to the herbs in the tea shop. I loved the odors of the
exotic teas.” She stopped, suddenly realizing that she was talking as
if she would never go back to the shop and smell its gorgeous odors
again. Right about now, the rst of the early-afternoon crowd would
be coming in, ordering cappuccinos and lattes, iced tea and herbal
infusions. She blinked away the sudden tears that prickled at her
eyes. She missed The Co ee Cup because it was ordinary and
normal and real.
“Where are we?” Josh asked, looking around now that his eyes
had become accustomed to the dim light. They were standing in a
long, narrow, spotlessly clean hallway. The walls were covered in
smooth blond wood, and there were intricately woven white reed
mats on the oor. A simple doorway covered in what looked like
paper stood at the opposite end of the corridor. Josh was about to
take a step toward the door when Flamel’s iron hand clamped onto
his shoulder.
“Don’t move,” he murmured. “Wait. Look. Notice. If you keep
those three words in mind, you just might survive the next few
days.” Digging into his pocket, he picked out a quarter. Positioning
it on his thumb, he icked it into the air. It spun over and over and
began to fall toward the middle of the hallway….
There was a barely perceptible hiss—and a needle-tipped dart
punched right through the metal coin, impaling it in midair and
pinning it to the opposite wall.
“You’ve left the safe and mundane world you once knew,”
Nicholas Flamel said seriously, looking at each twin in turn.
“Nothing is as it seems. You must learn to question everything. To
wait before moving, to look before stepping and to observe
everything. I learned these lessons in alchemy, but you will nd
them invaluable in this new world you’ve unwittingly wandered
into.” He pointed down the corridor. “Look and observe. Tell me:
what do you see?”
Josh spotted the rst tiny hole in the wall. It was camou aged to
look like a knot in the wood. Once he found the rst one, he
realized that there were dozens of holes in the walls. He wondered if
each hole held a tiny dart that was powerful enough to punch
through metal.
Sophie noticed that the oor did not join neatly with the wall. In
three separate places—on both the left-and right-hand sides, close to
the skirting—there was a de nite gap.
Flamel nodded. “Well done. Now watch. We’ve seen what the
darts can do, but there is another defense….” He took a tissue out of
his pocket and tossed it onto the oor, close to one of the narrow
openings. There was a single metallic clink—and then a huge halfmoon-shaped blade popped out from the wall, sliced the tissue into
confetti and slid back into hiding.
“So if the darts don’t get you…,” Josh began.
“The blades will,” Sophie nished. “Well, how do we get to the
door?”
“We don’t,” Flamel said, and turned to push on the wall to the
left. An entire section clicked open and swung back, allowing the
trio to step into a huge, airy room.
The twins recognized the room immediately: it was a dojo, a
martial arts school. Since they were little, they had studied tae kwon
do in dojang like this across the United States as they traveled with
their parents from university to university. Many schools had
martial arts clubs on campus, and their parents always enrolled
them in the best dojo they could nd. Both Sophie and Josh were
red belts, one rank below a black belt.
Unlike other dojos, however, this one was plain and unadorned,
decorated in shades of white and cream, with white walls and black
mats dotted across the oor. But what immediately caught their
attention was the single gure dressed in a white T-shirt and white
jeans sitting with its back to them in the center of the room. The
gure’s spiky bright red hair was the only spot of color in the entire
dojo.
“We’ve got a problem,” Nicholas Flamel said simply, addressing
the gure.
“You’ve got a problem; that’s nothing to do with me.” The gure
didn’t turn, but the voice was surprisingly both female and young,
the accent soft and vaguely Celtic: Irish or Scottish, Sophie thought.
“Dee found me today.”
“It was only a matter of time.”
“He came after me with Golems.”
There was a pause. Still the gure didn’t turn. “He always was a
fool. You don’t use Golems in a dry climate. That’s his arrogance.”
“He has taken Perenelle prisoner.”
“Ah. That’s tough. He’ll not harm her, though.”
“And he has the Codex.”
The gure moved, coming slowly to her feet and turning to face
them. The twins were shocked to discover that they were looking at
a girl not much older than themselves. Her skin was pale, dappled
with freckles, and her round face was dominated by grass green
eyes. Her red hair was so vibrant that Sophie wondered if she had
dyed it that color.
“The Codex?” The accent was de nitely Irish, Sophie decided.
“The Book of Abraham the Mage?”
Nicholas Flamel nodded.
“Then you’re right, we do have a problem.”
Flamel reached into his pocket and pulled out the two pages Josh
had torn from it. “Well, nearly all of the book. He’s missing the
Final Summoning.”
The young woman hissed, the sound like that of water boiling,
and a quick smile ickered across her face. “Which he will want, of
course.”
“Of course.”
Josh was watching the red-haired young woman intently, noting
how she stood perfectly still, like most of the martial arts teachers
he knew. He glanced sidelong at his sister and raised his eyebrows
in a silent question as he inclined his chin slightly toward the girl.
Sophie shook her head. They were curious why Nicholas Flamel
treated her with such obvious respect. Sophie had also come to the
conclusion that there was something wrong about the girl’s
expression, but she couldn’t quite put her nger on it. It was an
ordinary face—perhaps the cheekbones were a little too prominent,
the chin a little too pointed—but the emerald-colored eyes caught
and held one’s attention…and then Sophie realized with a start that
the girl didn’t blink.
The young woman suddenly threw back her head and breathed
deeply, her nostrils aring. “Is that why I can smell Eyes?”
Flamel nodded. “Rats and crows everywhere.”
“And you brought them here?” There was a note of accusation in
her voice. “I’ve spent years building this place.”
“If Dee has the Codex, then you know what he will do with it.”
The young woman nodded. She turned her wide green eyes on the
twins. “And these two?” she asked, nally acknowledging their
presence.
“They were there when Dee attacked. They fought for me, and
this young man managed to tear the pages from the book. This is
Sophie and this is her twin, Josh.”
“Twins?” The young woman stepped forward, and looked at each
of them in turn. “Not identical, but I can see the resemblance now.”
She turned to Flamel. “You’re not thinking…?”
“I’m thinking it’s an interesting turn of events,” Flamel said
mysteriously. He looked at the twins. “I would like to introduce you
to Scathach. She’ll probably not tell you much about herself, so I’ll
tell you that she is of the Elder Race and has trained every warrior
and hero of legend for the past two thousand years. In mythology
she is known as the Warrior Maid, the Shadow, the Daemon Slayer,
the King Maker, the—”
“Oh, just call me Scatty,” the young woman said, her cheeks
turning the same color as her hair.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Dr. John Dee crouched in the back of the car and attempted, not
entirely successfully, to control his temper. The air was heavy with
the odor of sulfur, and thin tendrils of yellow-white re crackled
around his ngertips and puddled on the oor. He had failed, and
while his masters were particularly patient—they often instigated
plans that took centuries to mature—their patience was now
beginning to run out. And they were de nitely not known for their
compassion.
Unmoving, held by the warding spell, Perenelle Flamel watched
him, eyes blazing with a combination of loathing and what might
even have been fear.
“This is becoming complicated,” Dee muttered, “and I hate
complications.”
Dee was holding a at silver dish in his lap, into which he had
poured a can of soda—the only liquid he had available. He always
preferred to work with pure water, but technically any uid would
do. Crouched over the dish, he stared into the liquid and allowed a
little of his own auric energy to trickle across the surface as he
muttered the rst words of the spell of scrying.
For a single moment there was just his own re ection in the dark
liquid, then it shuddered and the soda began to bubble and boil
furiously. When the liquid settled, the image in the bowl no longer
re ected Dee’s face, but showed a curiously at image, rendered in
shades of purple-gray and greenish black. The viewpoint was close
to the ground, shifting and moving with sickening rapidity.
“Rats,” Dee murmured, thin lips curling with distaste. He hated
using rats as Eyes.
“I cannot believe you led them here,” Scatty said, shoving
handfuls of clothes into a backpack.
Nicholas Flamel stood in the doorway of Scatty’s tiny bedroom,
arms folded across his chest. “Everything happened so fast. It was
bad enough when Dee got the Codex, but when I realized there were
pages missing, I knew the twins would be in trouble.”
At the mention of the word twins, Scatty looked up from her
packing. “They’re the real reason you’re here, aren’t they?”
Flamel suddenly found something very interesting to stare at on
the wall.
Scatty strode across the small room, glanced out into the hall, to
make sure Sophie and Josh were still in the kitchen, and then pulled
Flamel into the room and pushed the door closed.
“You’re up to something, aren’t you?” she demanded. “This is
about more than just the loss of the Codex. You could have taken
Dee and his minions on your own.”
“Don’t be so sure. It’s been a long time since I fought, Scathach,”
Flamel said gently. “The only alchemy I do now is to brew a little of
the philosopher’s stone potion to keep Perenelle and myself young.
Occasionally, I’ll make a little gold or the odd jewel when we need
some money.”
Scatty coughed a short humorless laugh, and spun back to her
packing. She had changed into a pair of black combat pants, steeltoed Magnum boots and a black T-shirt, over which she wore a
black vest covered in pockets and zippers. She pushed a second pair
of trousers into her backpack, found one sock and went looking for
its match under her bed.
“Nicholas Flamel,” she said, her voice mu ed by the blankets,
“you are the most powerful alchemyst in the known world.
Remember, I stood beside you when we fought the demon Fomor,
and you were the one who rescued me from the dungeons of An
Chaor-Thanach and not the other way around.” She came out from
under the bed with the missing sock. “When the Rusalka were
terrorizing St. Petersburg, you alone turned them back, and when
Black Annis raged across Manitoba, I watched you defeat her. You
alone faced down the Night Hag and her Undead army. You’ve spent
more than half a millennium reading and studying the Codex, no
one is more familiar with the stories and legends it holds—” Scatty
stopped suddenly and gasped, green eyes widening. “That’s what
this is about,” she said. “This is to do with the legend….”
Flamel reached out and pressed his fore nger to Scatty’s lips,
preventing her from saying another word. His smile was enigmatic.
“Do you trust me?” he asked her eventually.
Her response was immediate. “Without question.”
“Then trust me. I want you to protect the twins. And train them,”
he added.
“Train them! Do you know what you’re asking?”
Flamel nodded. “I want you to prepare them for what is to come.”
“And what is that?” Scathach asked.
“I have no idea”—Flamel smiled—“except that it is going to be
bad.”
“We’re ne, Mom, honestly, we’re ne.” Sophie Newman tilted
the cell phone slightly so that her brother could listen in. “Yes, Perry
Fleming was feeling sick. Something she ate, probably. She’s ne
now.” Sophie could feel the beads of sweat gathering in the small
hairs at the back of her neck. She was uncomfortable lying to her
mother—even though her mother was so wrapped up in her work
that she never bothered to check.
Josh and Sophie’s parents were archaeologists. They were known
worldwide for their discoveries, which had helped reshape modern
archaeology. They were among the rst in their eld to discover the
existence of the new species of small hominids that were now
commonly called Hobbits in Indonesia. Josh always said that their
parents lived ve million years in the past and were only happy
when they were up to their ankles in mud. The twins knew that they
were loved unconditionally, but they also knew that their parents
simply didn’t understand them…or much else about modern life.
“Mr. Fleming is taking Perry out to their house in the desert and
they’ve asked us if we’d like to go with them for a little break. We
said we had to ask you rst, of course. Yes, we spoke to Aunt Agnes;
she said so long as it was OK with you. Say yes, Mom, please.”
She turned to her brother and crossed her ngers. He crossed his
too; they had talked long and hard about what to say to their aunt
and their mother before they made the calls, but they weren’t
entirely sure what they were going to do if their mother said they
couldn’t go.
Sophie uncrossed her ngers and gave her brother a thumbs-up.
“Yes, I’ve got time o from the co ee shop. No, we won’t be a
bother. Yes, Mom. Yes. Love to you, and tell Dad we love him too.”
Sophie listened, then moved the phone away from her mouth. “Dad
found a dozen Pseudo-arctolepis sharpi in near-perfect condition,” she
reported. Josh looked blank. “A very rare Cambrian crustacean,” she
explained.
Her brother nodded. “Tell Dad that’s great. We’ll keep in touch,”
he called out.
“Love you,” Sophie said, cutting the conversation short, then hung
up. “I hate lying to her,” she said immediately.
“I know. But you couldn’t really tell her the truth, now, could
you?”
Sophie shrugged. “I guess not.”
Josh turned back to the sink. His laptop was perched precariously
on the draining board next to his cell phone. He was using the cell
to go online because, shockingly, there was no phone line or
Internet connection in the dojo.
Scatty lived above the dojo in a small two-room apartment with a
kitchen at one end of the hall and a bedroom with a tiny bathroom
at the other. A little balcony connected the two rooms and looked
down directly onto the dojo below. The twins were standing in the
kitchen while Flamel brought Scatty up to date on the events of the
past hour in her bedroom at the other end of the hall.
“What do you think of her?” Josh asked casually, concentrating
on his laptop. He’d managed to get online, but the connection speed
was crawlingly slow. He called up Altavista and typed in a dozen
versions of Scathach before he nally got a hit with the correct
spelling. “Here she is: twenty-seven thousand hits for Scathach, the
shadow or the shadowy one,” he said, then added o handedly, “I
think she’s cool.”
Sophie picked up on the too-casual tone immediately. She smiled
broadly and her eyebrows shot up. “Who? Oh, you mean the twothousand-year-old warrior maid. Don’t you think she might be a
little too old for you?”
A wash of color rose from beneath the neck of Josh’s T-shirt,
painting his cheeks bright red. “Let me try Google,” he muttered,
ngers rattling across the keyboard. “Forty-six thousand hits for
Scathach,” he said. “Looks like she’s real too. Let’s see what Wiki
has to say about her,” he went on, and then realized that Sophie
wasn’t even looking at him. He turned to her and discovered that
she was staring xedly through the window.
There was a rat standing on the rooftop of the building across the
alley, staring at them. As they watched, it was joined by a second
and then a third.
“They’re here,” Sophie whispered.
Dee concentrated on keeping his lunch down.
Looking through the rat’s eyes was a nauseating experience.
Because of their tiny brain, it required a huge e ort of will to keep
the creature focused…which, in an alleyway lled with rotten food,
was no easy task. Dee was momentarily grateful that he had not
used the full force of the scrying spell, which would have allowed
him to hear, to taste and—this was a terrifying thought—to smell
everything the rat encountered.
It was like looking at a badly tuned black-and-white television.
The image shifted, pitched and lurched with the rat’s every
movement. The rat could go from running horizontally on the
ground, to running vertically up a wall, then upside-down across a
rope, all within a matter of seconds.
Then the image stabilized.
Directly in front of Dee, outlined in purple-tinged gray and
glowing in grayish black, were the two humans he had seen in the
bookshop. A boy and a girl—in their midteens, perhaps—and
similar enough in appearance for them to be related. A sudden
thought struck him hard enough to break his concentration: brother
and sister, possibly…or could they be something else? Surely not!
He looked back into the scrying dish and concentrated with his
full will, forcing the rat he was controlling to stand absolutely still.
Dee focused on the young man and woman, trying to decide if one
was older than the other, but the rat’s vision was too clouded and
distorted for him to be sure.
But if they were the same age…that meant they were twins. That
was curious. He looked at them again and then shook his head: they
were humans. Dismissing the thought, he unleashed a single
command that rippled through every rat within a half-mile radius of
the twins’ position. “Destroy them. Destroy them utterly.”
The gathering crows took to the air, cawing raucously, as if
applauding.
Josh watched openmouthed as the huge rat leapt from the roof
opposite, e ortlessly bridging the six-foot space. Its mouth was wide
and its teeth were wickedly pointed. He managed a brief “Hey!” and
jerked away from the window…just as the rat hit the glass with a
furry, wet thump. It slid down to the alley one oor below, where it
staggered around in stunned surprise.
Josh grabbed Sophie’s hand, and dragged her out of the kitchen
and onto the balcony. “We’ve got a problem,” he shouted. And
stopped.
Below them, three huge Golems, trailing aking dried mud, were
pushing their way through the wide-open alley door. And behind
them, in a long sinuous line, came the rats.
CHAPTER NINE
The three Golems moved sti
y into the corridor, spotted the open
door at the far end of the hallway and moved toward it. The ngerlength metal darts hissed from the walls and stuck deeply into their
hardened mud skin, but didn’t even slow the creatures down.
The half-moon blades close to the oor were a di erent matter
altogether. The blades clicked out of their concealed sheaths in the
walls and sliced into the ankles of the clay men. The rst creature
crashed to the oor, hitting it with the sound of wet mud. The
second tottered on one foot before it slowly toppled forward, hit the
wall and slid down, leaving a muddy smear in its wake. The
semicircular blades click-clacked again, slicing the creatures
completely in two, and then the Golems abruptly reverted to their
muddy origin. Thick globules of mud spattered everywhere.
The third Golem, the largest of the creatures, stopped. Its black
stone eyes moved dully over the remains of its two companions, and
then it turned and punched a huge st directly into the wall, rst to
the right, then to the left. A whole section of the wall on the lefthand side gave way, revealing the space beyond. The Golem stepped
into the dojo and looked around, black eyes still and unmoving.
The rats meanwhile raced toward the open door at the end of the
corridor. Most of them survived the scything blades….
In the speeding limousine, Dr. John Dee released his control of
the rats, and now concentrated his attention on the surviving
Golem. Controlling the arti cial creature was much easier. Golems
were mindless beings, created of mud mixed with stones or gravel to
give their esh consistency, and brought to life by a simple spell
written on a square of parchment and pressed into their mouths.
Sorcerers had been building Golems of all shapes and sizes for
thousands of years: they were the source of every zombie and
walking-dead story ever created. Dee himself had told the story of
the greatest of all the Golems, the Red Golem of Prague, to Mary
Shelley one cold winter’s evening when she, Lord Byron, the poet
Percy Bysshe Shelley and the mysterious Dr. Polidori were visiting
his castle in Switzerland in 1816. Less than six months later, Mary
created the story of The Modern Prometheus, the book that became
more commonly known as Frankenstein. The monster in her book
was just like a Golem: created of spare parts and brought to life by
magical science. Golems were impervious to most weapons, though
a sudden fall or blow could shatter their mud skin, especially if it
was dry and hardening. In a damp climate, their skins rarely dried
out and could absorb incredible punishment, but this warm climate
made them brittle—which was why they had fallen so easily to the
concealed blades. Some sorcerers used glass or mirrors for their
eyes, but Dee preferred highly polished black stones. They enabled
him to see with almost razor-sharp clarity, albeit in monochrome.
Dee caused the Golem to tilt his head upward. Directly above
him, on a narrow balcony overlooking the dojo, were the pale and
terri ed faces of the teens. Dee smiled and the Golem’s lips
mimicked the movement. He’d deal with Flamel rst; then he’d take
care of the witnesses.
Suddenly, Nicholas Flamel’s head appeared, followed, a moment
later, by the distinctive spiky hair of the Warrior Maid, Scathach.
Dee’s smile faded and he could feel his heart sink. Why did it
have to be Scathach? He’d had no idea that the red-haired warrior
was in this city, or even on this continent, for that matter. Last he’d
heard of her, she was singing in an all-girl band in Berlin.
Through the Golem’s eyes, Dee watched both Flamel and Scathach
leap over the railing and oat down to stand directly in front of the
mud man. Scathach spoke directly to Dee—but this particular
Golem had no ears and couldn’t hear, so he had no idea what she
had just said. A threat probably, a promise certainly.
Flamel drifted away, moving toward the door, which was now
dark and heaving with rats, leaving Scatty to face him and the
Golem alone.
Maybe she wasn’t as good as she’d once been, he thought
desperately, maybe time had dulled her powers.
“We should help,” Josh said.
“And do what?” Sophie asked, without a trace of sarcasm. They
were both standing on the balcony, looking down into the dojo.
They had watched openmouthed as Flamel and Scatty leaped over
the edge and drifted far too slowly to the ground. The red-haired
girl faced the huge Golem, while Flamel hurried to the door where
the rats were gathering. The vermin seemed reluctant to enter the
room.
Without warning, the Golem swung a huge st, then followed it
up with a massive kick.
Josh opened his mouth to shout a warning, but he didn’t get a
chance to say anything before Scatty moved. One moment she was
standing directly in front of the creature, then she was throwing
herself forward, moving under the blows, closing right in on it. Her
hand moved, blurringly fast, and she delivered a at open-handed
blow to the point of the Golem’s jaw. There was a liquid squelch,
and then its jaw unhinged and its mouth gaped open. In the
blackness of its maw, the twins could clearly see a yellow rectangle
of paper.
The creature struck out wildly and Scatty danced back out of
range. It lashed out a kick, which missed and struck the polished
oorboards, shattering them to splinters.
“We’ve got to help!” Sophie said.
“How?” Josh shouted, but his twin had run into the kitchen,
desperately looking for a weapon. She emerged a moment later
carrying a small microwave oven. “Sophie,” Josh murmured, “what
are you going to do with…?”
Sophie heaved the microwave over the edge of the railing. It
struck the Golem full in the chest—and stuck, globules of mud
spattering everywhere. The Golem stopped, confused and
disorientated. Scatty took advantage of its disorientation and moved
in again, feet and hands striking blows from all angles, further
confusing the creature. Another blow from the Golem came close
enough to ru e Scatty’s spiky red hair, but she caught its arm and
used it as leverage to spin the creature to the oor. Floorboards
cracked and snapped as it hit them. Then her hand shot out…and
almost delicately plucked the paper square from the Golem’s mouth.
Instantly, the Golem returned to its muddy origins, splashing foul,
stinking water and dirt across the once-pristine dojo oor. The
microwave rattled to the ground.
“I guess no one’s cooking anything in that,” Josh murmured.
Scatty waved the square of paper at the twins. “Every magical
creature is kept animated by a spell that is either in or on its body.
All you have to do is remove it to break the spell. Remember that.”
Josh glanced quickly at his sister. He knew she was thinking the
same thing he was: if they ever came up against a Golem again,
there was no way they were getting close enough to stick their
hands in its mouth.
Nicholas Flamel approached the rats warily. Underestimating
them would be deadly indeed, but while he had no di culty
ghting and destroying magical creatures, which were never
properly alive in the rst place, he was reluctant to destroy living
creatures. Even if they were rats. Perry would have no such
compunction, he knew, but he had been an alchemyst for far too
long: he was dedicated to preserving life, not destroying it. The rats
were under Dee’s control. The poor creatures were probably
terri ed…though that would not stop them from eating him.
Flamel crouched on the oor, turned his right hand palm up and
curled the ngers inward. He blew gently into his hand, and a tiny
ball of green mist immediately formed. Then he suddenly turned his
hand and plunged it straight into the polished oorboards, his
ngers actually penetrating the wood. The tiny ball of green energy
splashed across the room like a stain. Then the Alchemyst closed his
eyes and his aura ared around his body. Concentrating, he directed
his auric energy to ow through his ngers into the oor.
The wood started to glow.
Still watching from the landing, the twins were unsure what
Flamel was doing. They could see the faint green glow around his
body, rising o his esh like mist, but they couldn’t work out why
the furry mass of rats gathered in the doorway had not burst into
the room.
“Maybe there’s some sort of spell keeping them from coming in,”
Sophie said, knowing instinctively that her twin was thinking the
same thing.
Scatty heard her. She was systematically shredding the yellow
square of paper she’d taken from the Golem’s mouth to tiny pieces.
“It’s just a simple warding spell,” she called up, “designed to keep
bugs and vermin o the oor. I used to come in here every morning
and nd bug droppings and moths all over the place; it took ages to
sweep it clean. The warding spell is keeping the rats at bay…but all
it takes is one to break through and the spell will be broken. Then
they’ll all come.”
Nicholas Flamel was fully aware that John Dee could probably see
him though the eyes of the rats. He picked out the largest, a catsized creature that remained unmoving while the rest of the vermin
scuttled and heaved about it. With his right hand still buried in the
oorboard, Flamel pointed his left hand directly at the rat. The
creature twitched and, for a single instant, its eyes blazed with
sickly yellow light.
“Dr. John Dee, you have made the biggest mistake of your long
life. I will be coming for you,” Flamel promised aloud.
Dee glanced up from his scrying bowl to see that Perenelle Flamel
was wide awake and watching him intently. “Ah, Madame, you are
just in time to see my creatures overpower your husband. Plus, I’ll
nally have an opportunity to deal with that pest Scathach, and I’ll
have the pages of the book.” Dee didn’t notice that Perenelle’s eyes
had widened at the mention of Scathach’s name. “All in all, a good
day’s work, I think.” He focused his full attention on the biggest rat
and issued two simple commands: “Attack. Kill.”
Dee closed his eyes as the rat uncoiled and launched itself into the
room.
The green light owed out from Flamel’s ngers and ran along
the oorboards, outlining the planks in green light. Abruptly, the
wooden oor sprouted twigs, branches, leaves and then a tree
trunk…then another…and a third. Within a dozen heartbeats a
thicket of trees sprouted out of the oor and were visibly climbing
toward the ceiling. Some of the trunks were no thicker than a nger,
others were wrist thick and one, close to the door, was so wide it
almost lled the opening.
The rats turned and scattered, squealing as they raced down the
corridor, desperately attempting to leap over the click-clacking
blades.
Flamel scrambled back and climbed to his feet, brushing o his
hands. “One of the oldest secrets of alchemy,” he announced to the
wide-eyed twins and Scatty, “is that every living thing, from the
most complex creatures right down to the simplest leaf, carries the
seeds of its creation within itself.”
“DNA,” Josh murmured, staring at the forest sprouting and
growing behind Flamel.
Sophie looked around the once-spotless dojo. It was now lthy,
spattered and splashed with muddy water, the smoothly polished
oorboards broken and cracked with the trees growing from them,
more foul-smelling mud in the hallway. “Are you saying that
alchemists knew about DNA?” she asked. The Alchemyst nodded
delightedly. “Exactly. When Watson and Crick announced that they
had discovered what they called ‘the secret of life’ in 1953, they
were merely rediscovering something alchemists have always
known.”
“You’re telling me that you somehow woke the DNA in those
oorboards and forced trees to grow,” Josh said, choosing his words
carefully. “How?”
Flamel turned to look at the forest that was now taking over the
entire dojo. “It’s called magic,” he said delightedly, “and I wasn’t
sure I could do it anymore…until Scatty reminded me,” he added.
CHAPTER TEN
“So let me get this straight,” Josh Newman said, trying to keep his
voice perfectly level, “you don’t know how to drive? Neither of
you?”
Josh and Sophie were sitting in the front seats of the SUV Scatty
had borrowed from one of her martial arts students. Josh was
driving, and his sister had a map on her lap. Nicholas Flamel and
Scathach were sitting in the back.
“Never learned,” Nicholas Flamel said, with an expressive shrug.
“Never had the time,” Scatty said shortly.
“But Nicholas told us you’re more than two thousand years old,”
Sophie said, looking at the girl.
“Two thousand ve hundred and seventeen, as you humani
measure time with your current calendar,” Scatty mumbled. She
looked into Flamel’s clear eyes. “And how old do I look?”
“Not a day over seventeen,” he said quickly.
“Couldn’t you have found time to learn how to drive?” Sophie
persisted. She’d wanted to learn how to drive since she was ten. One
of the reasons the twins had taken summer jobs this year, rather
than go on the dig with their parents, was to get the money for a car
of their own.
Scathach shrugged, an irritated twitch of her shoulders. “I’ve been
meaning to, but I’ve been busy,” she protested.
“You do know,” Josh said to no one in particular, “that I’m not
supposed to be driving without a licensed driver with me.”
“We’re nearly fteen and a half and we can both drive,” Sophie
said. “Well, sort of,” she added.
“Can either of you ride a horse?” Flamel asked, “or drive a
carriage, or a coach-and-four?”
“Well, no…,” Sophie began.
“Handle a war chariot while ring a bow or launching spears?”
Scatty added. “Or y a lizard-nathair while using a slingshot?”
“I have no idea what a lizard-nathair is…and I’m not sure I want
to know either.”
“So you see, you are experienced in certain skills,” Flamel said,
“whereas we have other, somewhat older, but equally useful skills.”
He shot a sidelong glance at Scathach. “Though I’m not so sure
about the nathair ying anymore.”
Josh pulled away from a stop sign and turned right, heading for
the Golden Gate Bridge. “I just don’t know how you could have
lived through the twentieth century without being able to drive. I
mean, how did you get from place to place?”
“Public transportation,” Flamel said with a grim smile. “Trains
and buses, mainly. They are a completely anonymous method of
travel, unlike airplanes and boats. There is far too much paperwork
involved in owning a car, paperwork that could be traced directly to
us, no matter how many aliases we used.” He paused and added,
“And besides, there are other, older methods of travel.”
There were a hundred questions Josh wanted to ask, but he was
concentrating furiously on controlling the heavy car. Although he
knew how to drive, the only vehicles he’d actually driven were
battered Jeeps when they accompanied their parents on a dig. He’d
never driven in tra c before, and he was terri ed. Sophie had
suggested that he pretend it was a computer game. That helped, but
only a little. In a game, when you crashed, you simply started again.
Here, a crash was for keeps.
Tra c was slow across the famous bridge. A long gray stretch
limo had broken down in the inside lane, causing a bottleneck. As
they approached, Sophie noticed that there were two dark-suited
gures crouched under the hood on the passenger’s side. She
realized she was holding her breath as they drew close, wondering if
the gures were Golems. She heaved a sigh as they pulled alongside
and discovered that the men looked like harassed accountants. Josh
glanced at his sister and attempted a grin, and she knew he had
been thinking the same thing.
Sophie twisted in her seat, and turned to look back at Flamel and
Scatty. In the darkened, air-conditioned interior of the SUV, they
seemed so ordinary: Flamel looked like a fading hippy, and Scatty,
despite her rather military dress sense, wouldn’t have looked out of
place behind the counter at The Co ee Cup. The red-haired girl had
propped her chin on her st and was staring through the darkened
glass across the bay toward Alcatraz.
Nicholas Flamel dipped his head to follow the direction of her
gaze. “Haven’t been there for a while,” he murmured.
“We did the tour,” Sophie said.
“I liked it,” Josh said quickly. “Sophie didn’t.”
“It was creepy.”
“And so it should be,” Flamel said quietly. “It is home to an
extraordinary assortment of ghosts and unquiet spirits. Last time I
was there, it was to put to rest an extremely ugly Snakeman.”
“I’m not sure I even want to know what a Snakeman is,” Sophie
muttered, then paused. “You know, a couple of hours ago, I could
never have imagined myself saying something like that?”
Nicholas Flamel sat back in the comfortable seats and folded his
arms across his chest. “Your lives—yours and your brother’s—are
now forever altered. You know that, don’t you?”
Sophie nodded. “That’s beginning to sink in now. It’s just that
everything’s happening so fast that it’s hard to take it all in. Mud
men, magic, books of spells, rats…” She looked at Scathach.
“Ancient warriors…”
Scatty dipped her head in acknowledgment.
“And of course, a six-hundred-year-old alchemyst…” Sophie
stopped, a sudden thought crossing her mind. She looked from
Flamel to Scatty and back again. Then she took a moment to
formulate her question. Staring hard at the man, she asked, “You are
human, aren’t you?”
Nicholas Flamel grinned. “Yes. Perhaps a little more than human,
but yes, I was born and will always be one of the human race.”
Sophie looked at Scathach. “But you’re…”
Scathach opened her green eyes wide, and for a single instant,
something ancient was visible in the planes and angles of her face.
“No,” she said very quietly. “I am not of the race of humani. My
people were of di erent stock, the Elder Race. We ruled this earth
before the creatures who became humani climbed down from the
trees. Nowadays, we are remembered in the myths of just about
every race. We are the creatures of legend, the Were clans, the
Vampire, the Giants, the Dragons, the Monsters. In stories we are
remembered as the Old Ones or the Elder Race. Some stories call us
gods.”
“Were you ever a god?” Sophie whispered.
Scatty giggled. “No. I was never a god. But some of my people
allowed themselves to be worshipped as gods. Others simply became
gods as humani told tales of their adventures.” She shrugged. “We
were just another race, an older race than man, with di erent gifts,
di erent skills.”
“What happened?” Sophie asked.
“The Flood,” Scatty said very softly, “amongst other things.”
“The earth is a lot older than most people imagine,” Flamel said
quietly. “Creatures and races that are now no more than myth once
walked this world.”
Sophie nodded slowly. “Our parents are archaeologists. They’ve
told us about some of the inexplicable things that archaeology
sometimes reveals.”
“Remember that place we visited in Texas, Taylor something…,”
Josh said, carefully easing the heavy SUV into the middle lane. He’d
never driven anything so big before, and was terri ed he was going
to hit something. He’d had a couple of near misses and was
convinced he’d actually clipped someone’s side mirror, but he’d kept
going, saying nothing.
“The Taylor Trail,” Sophie said, “at the Paluxy River in Texas.
There are what look like dinosaur footprints and human prints in
the same fossilized piece of stone. And the stone is dated to one
hundred million years old.”
“I have seen them,” Flamel replied, “and others like them all
across the world. I have also examined the shoe print that was
found in Antelope Springs in Utah…in rock about ve hundred
million years old.”
“My dad says things like that can be easily dismissed as either
fakes or misinterpretation of the facts,” Josh said quickly. He
wondered what his father would say about the things they had seen
today.
Flamel shrugged. “Yes, that is true. But what science cannot
understand, it dismisses. Not everything can be so easily brushed
aside. Can you dismiss what you’ve seen and experienced today as
some sort of misinterpretation of the facts?”
Sophie shook her head.
Beside her, Josh shrugged uncomfortably. He didn’t like the
direction this conversation was taking. Dinosaurs and humans living
together at the same time was simply inconceivable. The very idea
went against everything his parents had taught them, everything
they believed. But somewhere at the back of his mind, a small voice
kept reminding him that every year archaeologists—including his
parents—kept making extraordinary discoveries. A couple of years
earlier, it was Homo oresiensis, the tiny people in Indonesia,
nicknamed Hobbits; then there was the species of dwarf dinosaur
discovered in Germany, and the hundred-and-sixty- ve-million-yearold dinosaur tracks found in Wyoming and, only recently, the eight
new prehistoric species discovered in a cave in Israel. But what
Flamel was suggesting was staggering in its implications. “You’re
saying that humans and dinosaurs existed on the earth at the same
time,” Josh said, surprised that he sounded so angry.
“I’m saying that humans have existed on the earth with creatures
far stranger, and much older than the dinosaurs,” Flamel said
seriously.
“How do you know?” Sophie demanded. He claimed to have been
born in 1330, he couldn’t have seen dinosaurs…could he?
“It’s all written down in the Codex…and, in the course of my long
life, I’ve seen beasts that are considered myths, I’ve fought beings
from legend, I’ve faced down creatures that looked like they crawled
from a nightmare.”
“We did Shakespeare in school last term…. There’s a line from
Hamlet.” Sophie frowned, trying to remember. “There are more
things in heaven and earth…”
Nicholas Flamel nodded delightedly. “…than are dreamt of in
your philosophy,” he nished the quotation. “Hamlet, act one, scene
ve. I knew Will Shakespeare, of course. Now, Will could have been
an alchemist of extraordinary talent…but then he fell into Dee’s
clutches. Poor Will; do you know that he based the character of
Prospero in The Tempest on Dee?”
“I never liked Shakespeare,” Scatty muttered. “He smelled.”
“You knew Shakespeare?” Josh was unable to keep the disbelief
out of his voice.
“He was my student brie y, very brie y,” Flamel said. “I’ve lived
a long time; I’ve had a lot of students—some made famous by
history, most forgotten. I’ve met a lot of people, human and
unhuman, mortal and immortal. People like Scathach,” Flamel
nished.
“There are more like you…more of the Elder Race?” Sophie
asked, looking at the red-haired girl.
“More than you might think, though I try not to associate with
them,” Scatty said uneasily. “There are those amongst the Elders
who cannot accept that our time is past, that this age belongs to the
humani. They want to see a return to the old ways, and they believe
that their puppet Dee and others like him are in a position to bring
that about. They are called the Dark Elders.”
“I don’t know if anyone has noticed,” Josh interrupted suddenly,
“but would you say there are a lot of birds gathering?”
Sophie turned to stare through the windshield, while Flamel and
Scatty peered through the back window.
The spars and pylons, the braces, ropes and wires of the Golden
Gate Bridge were slowly lling with birds: thousands of them.
Mainly blackbirds and crows, they covered all available surfaces,
with more arriving every moment.
“They’re coming from Alcatraz,” Josh said, dipping his head to
look across the choppy waters toward the island.
A dark cloud had gathered above Alcatraz. It rose out of the
abandoned prison in a dark curl and hung in the air looking like
smoke, but this smoke didn’t dissipate: it moved and circled in a
solid mass.
“Birds.” Josh swallowed hard. “There must be thousands of
them.”
“Tens of thousands,” Sophie corrected him. She turned to look at
Flamel. “What are they?”
“The Morrigan’s children,” he said enigmatically.
“Trouble,” Scatty added. “Big trouble.”
Then, as if driven by a single command, the huge ock of birds
moved away from the island and headed across the bay, directly
toward the bridge.
Josh hit his window button and the tinted glass hummed down.
The noise of the birds was audible now, a raucous cawing, almost
like high-pitched laugher. Tra c was slowing, some people even
stopping to get out of their cars to take photographs with digital
cameras and cell phones.
Nicholas Flamel leaned forward and placed his left hand on Josh’s
shoulder. “You should drive,” he said seriously. “Do not stop…
whatever happens, even if you hit something. Just drive. As fast as
you can. Get us o this bridge.”
There was something in Flamel’s unnaturally controlled voice that
frightened Sophie even more than if he had shouted. She glanced
sidelong at Scatty, but the young woman was rummaging through
her backpack. The warrior pulled out a short bow and a handful of
arrows and placed them on the seat beside her. “Roll up your
window, Josh,” she said calmly. “We don’t want anything getting
in.”
“We’re in trouble, aren’t we?” Sophie whispered, looking at the
Alchemyst.
“Only if the crows catch us,” Flamel said with a tight smile.
“Could I borrow your cell phone?”
Sophie pulled her cell out of her pocket and ipped it open.
“Aren’t you going to work some magic?” she asked hopefully.
“No, I’m going to make a call. Let’s hope we don’t get an
answering service.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Security gates opened, and Dee’s black limousine swerved into the
driveway, the Golem chau eur expertly maneuvering the car
through barred gates into an underground parking garage. Perenelle
Flamel lurched sideways and fell against the sodden Golem sitting
on her right-hand side. Its body squelched with the blow, and
spatters of foul-smelling mud squirted everywhere.
Dr. John Dee, sitting directly opposite, grimaced in disgust and
scooted as far away from the creature as he could. He was on his
cell phone, talking urgently in a language that had not been used on
earth in more than three thousand years.
A drop of Golem mud splashed onto Perenelle’s right hand. The
sticky liquid ran across her esh…and erased the curling symbol
Dee had drawn on her skin.
The binding spell was partially broken. Perenelle Flamel dipped
her head slightly. This was her chance. To properly channel her
auric powers she really needed both hands, and unfortunately, the
ward Dee had drawn on her forehead prevented her from speaking.
Still…
Perenelle Delamere had always been interested in magic, even
before she met the poor bookseller who later became her husband.
She was the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter, and in the tiny
village of Quimper in the northwest corner of France, where she had
grown up, she was considered special. Her touch could heal—not
only humans, but animals, too—she could talk to the shades of the
dead and she could sometimes see a little of the future. But growing
up in an age when such skills were regarded with deep suspicion,
she had learned to keep her abilities to herself. When she rst
moved to Paris, she saw how the fortune-tellers working in the
markets that backed onto the great Notre Dame Cathedral made a
good and easy living. Adopting the name Chatte Noire—Black Cat—
because of her jet-black hair, she set herself up in a little booth in
sight of the cathedral. Within a matter of weeks she built a
reputation for being genuinely talented. Her clients changed: no
longer were they just the tradespeople and stall holders, now they
were also drawn from the merchants and even the nobility.
Close to where she had her little covered stall sat the scriveners
and copiers, men who made their living writing letters for those
who could neither read nor write. Some of them, like the slender,
dark-haired man with startling pale eyes, occasionally sold books
from their tables. And from the rst moment she saw that man,
Perenelle Delamere knew that she would marry him and that they
would live a long and happy life together. She just never realized
quite how long.
They were married less than six months after they rst met.
They’d been together now for over six hundred years.
Like most educated men of his time, Nicholas Flamel was
fascinated with alchemy—a combination of science and magic. His
interest was sparked because he was occasionally o ered alchemical
books or charts for sale or asked to copy some of the rarer works.
Unlike many other women of her time, Perenelle could read and
knew several languages—her Greek was better than her husband’s—
and he would often ask her to read to him. Perenelle quickly
became familiar with the ancient systems of magic and began to
practice in small ways, developing her skills, concentrating on how
to channel and focus the energy of her aura.
By the time the Codex came into their possession, Perenelle was a
sorceress, though she had little patience for the mathematics and
calculations of alchemy. However, it was Perenelle who recognized
that the book written in the strange, ever-changing language was
not just a history of the world that had never been, but a collection
of lore, of science, of spells and incantations. She had been poring
over the pages one bitter winter’s night, watching the words crawl
on the page, when the letters formed and re-formed, and for a
heartbeat she had seen the initial formula for the philosopher’s
stone, and realized instantly that here was the secret to life eternal.
The couple spent the next twenty years traveling to every country
in Europe, heading east into the land of the Rus, south to North
Africa, even into Araby in an attempt to decipher and translate the
curious manuscript. They came into contact with magicians and
sorcerers of many lands, and studied many di erent types of magic.
Nicholas was only vaguely interested in magic; he was more
interested in the science of alchemy. The Codex, and other books
like it, hinted that there were very precise formulas for creating gold
out of stone and diamonds out of coal. Perenelle, on the other hand,
learned as much as she could about all the magical arts. But it had
been a long time since she had seriously practiced them.
Now, trapped in the limo, she recalled a trick she had learned
from a strega—a witch—in the mountains of Sicily. It was designed
for dealing with knights in armor, but with a little adjustment…
Closing her eyes and concentrating, Perenelle rubbed her little
nger in a circle against the car seat. Dee was absorbed in his phone
call and didn’t see the tiny ice white spark that snapped from her
ngertip into the ne-grained leather. The spark ran through the
leather and coiled around the springs beneath. It shot, zzing and
hissing, along the springs and into the metal body of the car. It
curled into the engine, buzzing over the cylinders, circled the
wheels, spitting and snapping. A hubcap popped o and bounced
away…and then abruptly, the car’s electrics went haywire. The
windows started opening and closing of their own accord; the
sunroof hummed open, then slammed shut; the wipers scraped
across the dry windshield, then beat so fast they snapped o ; the
horn began to sound out an irregular beat. Interior lights ickered
on and o . The small TV unit in the left-hand wall popped on and
cycled dizzyingly through all its channels.
The air tasted metallic. Tendrils of static electricity now danced
around the interior of the car. Dee ung his cell phone away,
nursing suddenly numb ngers. The phone hit the carpeted oor
and exploded into shards of melted plastic and hot metal.
“You…,” Dee began, turning to Perenelle, but the car lurched to a
halt, completely dead. Flames leapt from the engine, lling the back
of the car with noxious fumes. Dee pushed the door, but the electric
locks had engaged. With a savage howl, he closed his hand into a
st and allowed his rage to boil through him. The stench of smoke,
burning plastic and melting rubber was abruptly concealed beneath
the stink of sulfur, and his hand took on the appearance of a golden
metal glove. Dee punched straight through the door, practically
ripping it o its hinges, and ung himself out onto the cement oor.
He was standing in the underground car park of Enoch
Enterprises, the huge entertainment company he owned and ran in
San Francisco. He scrambled back as his hundred-and ftythousand-dollar custom-made car was quickly consumed by re.
Intense heat fused the front of the car into irregular clumps of
metal, while the windshield owed like candle wax. The Golem
driver was still sitting at the wheel, una ected by the intense heat,
which did nothing but bake its skin to iron hardness.
Then the garage’s overhead sprinkler system came on, and bitterly
cold water sprayed down onto the re.
Perenelle!
Soaked through, doubled over and coughing, Dee wiped tears
from his eyes, straightened and used both hands to douse the ames
with a single movement. He called up a tiny breeze to clear the
smoke, then ducked his head to peer into the blackened interior of
the car, almost afraid of what he would nd.
The two Golems that had been sitting on either side of Perenelle
were now nothing more than ash. But there was no sign of the
woman—except for the rent in the opposite door that looked as if it
had been hacked by an axe.
Dee folded to the ground with his back to the ruined car and beat
both hands into the lthy mixture of mud, oil, melted plastic and
burnt rubber. He hadn’t secured the entire Codex, and now
Perenelle had escaped. Could this day get any worse?
Footsteps tip-tapped.
From the corner of his eye, Dr. John Dee watched as pointy-toed,
stiletto-heeled black boots came into view. And he knew then the
answer to his question. The day was about to get worse: much
worse. Fixing a smile on his lips, he rose sti y to his feet and
turned to face one of the few of the Dark Elders who genuinely
terri ed him.
“Morrigan.”
The ancient Irish had called her the Crow Goddess, and she was
worshipped and feared throughout the Celtic kingdoms as the
Goddess of Death and Destruction. Once there had been three
sisters: Badb, Macha and the Morrigan, but the others had
disappeared over the years—Dee had his own suspicions about what
had happened to them—and the Morrigan now reigned supreme.
She stood taller than Dee, though most people stood taller than
the doctor, and was dressed from head to foot in black leather. Her
jerkin was studded with shining silver bolts, giving it the
appearance of a medieval breastplate, and her leather gloves had
rectangular silver studs sewn onto the back of the ngers. The
gloves had no ngertips, allowing the Morrigan’s long, spearlike
black nails to show. She wore a heavy leather belt studded with
small circular shields around her waist. Draped over her shoulders,
with its full hood pulled around her face and sweeping to the
ground behind her, was a cloak made entirely of ravens’ feathers.
In the shadow of the hood, the Morrigan’s face seemed even paler
than usual. Her eyes were jet-black, with no white showing; even
her lips were black. The tips of her overlong incisors were just
visible against her lower lip.
“This is yours, I believe.” The Morrigan’s voice was a harsh
whisper, her voice ragged and torn, like a bird’s caw.
Perenelle Flamel came forward, moving slowly and carefully. Two
enormous ravens were perched on her shoulders, and both held
their razor-sharp beaks dangerously close to her eyes. She had
barely scrambled out of the burning car, desperately weakened by
her use of magic, when she’d been attacked by the birds.
“Let me see it,” the Morrigan commanded eagerly.
Dee reached into his coat and produced the metal-bound Codex.
Surprisingly, the Crow Goddess did not reach for it.
“Open it,” she said.
Puzzled, Dee held the book in front of the Morrigan and turned
the pages, handling the ancient object with obvious reverence.
“The Book of Abraham the Mage,” she whispered, leaning
forward, but not approaching the book. “Let me see the back.”
Reluctantly, Dee turned to the back of the book. When the
Morrigan saw the damaged pages, she hissed with disgust.
“Sacrilege. It has survived ten thousand years without su ering any
damage.”
“The boy tore it,” Dee explained, closing the Codex gently.
“I’ll make sure he su ers for this.” The Crow Goddess closed her
eyes and cocked her head to one side, as if listening. Her black eyes
glittered and then her lips moved in a rare smile, exposing the rest
of her pointed teeth. “He will su er soon; my children are almost
upon them. They will all su er,” she promised.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Josh
spotted an opening between two cars—a VW Beetle and a
Lexus. He pushed his foot to the oor and the heavy car shot
forward. But the gap wasn’t quite wide enough. The SUV’s grill
struck the side mirrors on the other two cars and snapped them o .
“Oops…” Josh immediately took his foot o the gas.
“Keep going,” Flamel ordered rmly. He had Sophie’s phone in
his hand and was talking urgently in a guttural, rasping language
that sounded like nothing the twins had ever heard before.
Deliberately not looking in the rearview mirror, Josh roared
across the bridge, ignoring the honks and shouts behind him. He
shot along the outside lane, then cut into the middle lane, then back
out again.
Sophie braced herself against the dashboard, peering through
half-closed eyes. She saw the car hit another side mirror; it came
spinning, almost slowly, up onto the hood of their SUV, scoring a
long scrape in the black paint before it bounced away. “Don’t even
think about it,” she muttered as a tiny open-topped Italian sports car
spotted the same gap in the tra c that Josh was aiming for. The
driver, an older man with far too many gold chains around his neck,
put his foot down and raced for the gap. He didn’t make it.
The heavy SUV caught the right front edge of the little car, just
tapping it on the bumper. The sports car was ung away, spinning
in a complete 360-degree turn on the crowded bridge, bouncing o
four other cars in the process. Josh tore through the opening.
Flamel twisted around in the seat, looking through the rear
window at the chaos they had left in their wake. “I thought you said
you could drive,” he murmured.
“I can drive,” Josh said, surprised that his voice sounded so calm
and steady, “I just didn’t say I was good at it. Do you think anyone
got our license plates?” he asked. This was nothing like one of his
driving games! The palms of his hands were slick and wet and beads
of sweat were running down the sides of his face. A muscle twitched
in his right leg from the e ort of keeping the accelerator pressed
hard to the oor.
“I think they’ve got other things to worry about,” Sophie
whispered.
The crows had descended on the Golden Gate Bridge. Thousands
of them. They came in a black wave, cawing and screaming, wings
cracking and snapping. They hovered over the cars, darting low,
occasionally even landing on car roofs and hoods to peck at the
metal and glass. Cars crashed and sideswiped one another along the
entire length of the bridge.
“They’ve lost focus,” Scathach said, watching the birds’ behavior.
“They’re looking for us, but they’ve forgotten our description. They
have such tiny brains,” she said dismissively.
“Something distracted their dark mistress,” Nicholas Flamel said.
“Perenelle,” he said delightedly. “I wonder what she did. Something
dramatic, no doubt. She always did have a sense of the theatrical.”
But even as he was speaking, the birds rose into the air again, and
then, as one, their black eyes turned in the direction of the eeing
black SUV. This time when they cawed, it sounded like screams of
triumph.
“They’re coming back,” Sophie said quickly, breathlessly. She
realized that her heart was pumping hard against her rib cage. She
looked at Flamel and the Warrior for support, but their grim
expressions gave her no comfort.
Scathach looked at her and said, “We’re in trouble now.”
In a huge black-feathered mass, the crows took o after the car.
Most of the tra c on the bridge was now stalled. People sat
frozen in terror in their cars as the birds owed, foul and stinking,
over the roofs. The SUV was the only car moving. Josh had his foot
pressed at to the oor, and the needle on the speedometer hovered
close to eighty. He was becoming more comfortable with the
controls—he hadn’t hit anything for at least a minute. The end of
the bridge was in sight. He grinned; they were going to make it.
And then the huge crow landed on the hood.
Sophie screamed and Josh jerked the wheel, attempting to knock
the evil-looking creature o , but it had hooked its feet into the
raised ridges on the hood. It cocked its head to one side, looking
rst at Josh, then Sophie, and then, in two short hops, it came right
up to the windshield and deliberately peered inside, black eyes
glittering.
It pecked at the glass…and a tiny starred puncture mark
appeared.
“It shouldn’t be able to do that,” Josh said, trying to keep his eyes
on the road.
The crow pecked again and another hole appeared. Then there
was a thump, followed by a second and a third, and three more
crows landed on the roof of the car. The metal roof pinged as the
birds began to peck at it.
“I hate crows.” Scathach sighed. She rooted through her bag and
pulled out a set of nunchaku—two twelve-inch lengths of ornately
carved wood linked by four and a half inches of chain. She tapped
the sticks in the palm of her hand. “Pity we haven’t got a sunroof,”
she said. “I could get out there and give them a little taste of this.”
Flamel pointed to where a long shaft of sunlight was coming
through a pinhole in the roof. “We may soon have. Besides,” he
added, “these are not normal crows. The three on the roof and the
one on the hood are Dire-Crows, the Morrigan’s special pets.”
The huge bird on the hood tapped the windshield again, and this
time, its beak actually penetrated the glass.
“I’m not sure what I can do…,” Scathach began, and then Sophie
leaned over and hit the windshield wiper switch. The heavy blades
activated…and simply swept the bird o the hood in a urry of
feathers and a shrill croak of surprise. The red-haired warrior
grinned. “Well, there is that, of course.”
Now the rest of the birds had reached the SUV. They settled on
the vehicle in a great blanket. First dozens, then hundreds gathered
on the roof, the hood, the doors, clutching every available opening.
If one fell o or lost its grip, dozens more fought for its place. The
noise inside the car was incredible as thousands of birds pecked and
tapped at the metal, the glass, the doors. They tore into the rubber
molding around the windows, ripped into the spare tire on the back
of the SUV, tearing it to shreds. There were so many on the hood,
pressed up against the windshield, that Josh couldn’t see where he
was going. He took his foot o the accelerator and the car
immediately started to slow.
“Drive!” Flamel shouted. “If you stop, we are truly lost.”
“But I can’t see!”
Flamel leaned through the seats and stretched out his right hand.
Sophie suddenly saw the small circular tattoo on the underside of
his wrist. A cross ran through the circle, the arms of the cross
extending over the edges of the circle. For a single instant it
glowed…and then the Alchemyst snapped his ngers. A tiny ball of
hissing, sizzling ame appeared on his ngertips. “Close your eyes,”
he commanded. Without waiting to see if they obeyed, he icked it
toward the glass.
Even through their closed lids, the twins could see the searing
light that lit up the interior of the car.
“Now drive,” Nicholas Flamel commanded.
When the twins opened their eyes, most of the crows were gone
from the hood, and those few that remained looked dazed and
shocked.
“That’s not going to hold them for long,” Scatty said. She looked
up as a razor-sharp beak punched a hole straight through the metal
roof. She snapped out the nunchaku. She held one stick in her hand,
while the other, attached to the short chain, shot out with explosive
force and cracked against the beak embedded in the roof. There was
a startled shriek and the beak—slightly bent—disappeared.
Sophie turned her head to peer in her side mirror. It was dangling
o the car, barely held on by a shred of metal and some wire. She
could see more birds—thousands of them— ying in to replace those
that had been swept away, and she knew then that they were not
going to make it. There were simply too many of them.
“Listen,” Nicholas Flamel said suddenly.
“I don’t hear anything,” Josh said grimly.
Sophie was just about to agree with him when she heard the
sound. And she suddenly felt the hairs on her arms prickle and rise.
Low and lonely, the noise hovered just at the edge of her hearing. It
was like a breeze, one moment sounding soft and gentle, the next
louder, almost angry. A peculiar odor wafted into the car.
“What is that smell?” Josh asked.
“Smells like spicy oranges,” Sophie said, breathing deeply.
“Pomegranates,” Nicholas Flamel said.
And then the wind came.
It howled across the bay, warm and exotic, smelling of cardamom
and rosewater, lime and tarragon, and then it raced along the length
of the Golden Gate Bridge, plucking the birds o the struts, lifting
them o the cars, pulling them out of the air. Finally the
pomegranate-scented wind reached the SUV. One moment the car
was surrounded by birds; the next, they were gone, and the car was
lled with the scents of the desert, of dry air and warm sand.
Sophie hit a button and the scarred and pitted window jerked
down. She craned her neck out the SUV, breathing in the richly
scented air. The huge ock of birds was being pulled high into the
sky, borne aloft on the breeze. When one escaped—one of the big
Dire-Crows, Sophie thought—it was quickly caught by a tendril of
the warm breeze and pushed back into the rest of the ock. From
underneath, the mass of birds looked like a dirty cloud…and then
the cloud dispersed as the birds scattered, leaving the sky blue and
clear again.
Sophie looked back along the length of the bridge. The Golden
Gate was completely impassable; cars were pointed in every
direction, and there had been dozens of minor accidents, which
blocked the lanes…and of course, e ectively prevented anyone from
following them, she realized. Every vehicle was spattered and
splotched with white bird droppings. She looked at her brother and
saw with a shock that there was a tiny smear of blood on his bottom
lip. She pulled a tissue from her pocket. “You’re cut!” she said
urgently, licking the edge of the tissue and dabbing at her twin’s
face.
Josh pushed her hand away. “Stop. That’s disgusting.” He touched
his lip with his little nger. “I must have bit it. I didn’t even feel it.”
He took the tissue from his sister’s hand and rubbed his chin. “It’s
nothing.” Then he smiled quickly. “Did you see the mess the birds
left back there?” Sophie nodded. He made a disgusted face. “Now,
that is going to smell!”
Sophie leaned back against the seat, relieved that her brother was
ne. When she’d seen the blood she’d been truly frightened. A
thought struck her and she turned around to look at Flamel. “Did
you call up the wind?”
He smiled and shook his head. “No, I’ve no control over the
elements. That skill rests solely with the Elders and a very few rare
humans.”
Sophie looked at Scatty, but the Warrior shook her head. “Beyond
my very limited abilities.”
“But you did summon the wind?” Sophie persisted.
Flamel handed Sophie back her phone. “I just phoned in a
request,” he said, and smiled.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“Turn here,” Nicholas Flamel instructed.
Josh eased his foot o the accelerator and turned the battered and
scarred SUV down a long narrow track that was barely wide enough
to accommodate the car. They had spent the last thirty minutes
driving north out of San Francisco, listening to the increasingly
hysterical radio reports as a succession of experts gave their
opinions about the bird attack on the bridge. Global warming was
the most commonly cited theory: the sun’s radiation interfering with
the birds’ natural navigation system.
Flamel directed them north, toward Mill Valley and Mount
Tamalpais, but they quickly left the highway and stuck to narrow
two-lane roads. Tra c thinned out until there were long stretches
where they were the only car in sight. Finally, on a narrow road that
curved and turned with sickening complexity, he had Josh slow
almost to a crawl. He rolled down his window and peered out into a
thick forest that came right up to the edge of the road. They had
actually driven past the unmarked path before Flamel spotted it.
“Stop. Go back. Turn here.”
Josh looked at his sister as he eased the car onto the rough,
unpaved and rutted track. Her hands were folded in her lap, but he
could see that her knuckles were white with tension. Her nails,
which had been neat and perfect only a few hours previously, were
now rough and chewed, a sure sign of her stress. He reached over
and squeezed her hand; she squeezed tightly in return. As with so
much of the communication between them, there was no need for
words. With their parents away so much, Sophie and Josh had
learned from a very early age that they could only really depend on
themselves. Moving from school to school, neighborhood to
neighborhood, they often found it di cult to make and keep
friends, but they knew that whatever happened, they would always
have each other.
On either side of the overgrown path, trees rose high into the
heavens and the undergrowth was surprisingly thick: wild brambles
and thorn bushes scraped at the side of the car, while furze, gorse,
and stinging nettles, wrapped through with poison ivy, completed
the impenetrable hedge.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Sophie murmured. “It’s just not
natural.” And then she stopped, realizing what she’d just said. She
swiveled around in the seat to look at Flamel. “It’s not natural, is
it?”
He shook his head, suddenly looking old and tired. There were
dark rings under his eyes, and the wrinkles on his forehead and
around his mouth seemed deeper. “Welcome to our world,” he
whispered.
“There’s something moving through the undergrowth,” Josh
announced loudly. “Something big…I mean really big.” After
everything he’d seen and experienced so far today, his imagination
started working overtime. “It’s keeping pace with the car.”
“So long as we stay on the track, we shall be ne,” Flamel said
evenly.
Sophie peered into the dark forest oor. For a moment she saw
nothing, then she realized that what she’d rst taken for a patch of
shadow was, in fact, a creature. It moved, and sunlight dappled its
hairy hide. She caught a glimpse of a at face, a pug nose and huge
curling tusks.
“It’s a pig—a boar,” she corrected herself. And then she spotted
three more, anking the right-hand side of the car.
“They’re on my side too,” Josh said. Four of the hulking beasts
were moving through the bushes to his left. He glanced in the
rearview mirror. “And behind us.”
Sophie, Scatty and Nicholas turned in their seats to stare through
the rear window at the two enormous boars that had slipped
through the undergrowth and were trotting along on the path
behind them. Sophie suddenly realized just how big the creatures
were—each one was easily the size of a pony. They were hugely
muscled across the shoulders, and the tusks jutting up from their
lower jaws were enormous, starting out as thick as her wrist before
tapering to needle-sharp points.
“I didn’t think there were any wild boars in America,” Josh said,
“and certainly not in Mill Valley, California.”
“There are wild boars and pigs all over the Americas,” Flamel said
absently. “They were rst brought over by the Spanish in the
sixteenth century.”
Josh shifted gears, eased o the accelerator and allowed the car to
move forward at a crawl. The road had come to a dead end. The
barrier of bushes, thorns and trees now stretched across the path.
“End of the road,” he announced, putting the car into park and
setting the emergency brake. He looked left and right. The boars
had also stopped moving, and he could see them, four to a side,
watching. In the rearview mirror, he could see that the two larger
boars had stopped too. They were boxed in. What now, he
wondered, what now? He looked at his sister and knew she was
thinking exactly the same thing.
Nicholas Flamel leaned forward between the seats and looked at
the barrier. “I believe this is here to discourage the foolhardy who
have traveled this far. And if one were exceptionally foolish, one
might be tempted to get out of one’s vehicle.”
“But we are neither foolhardy nor foolish,” Scatty snapped. “So
what do we do?” She nodded at the boars. “I haven’t seen this breed
in centuries. They look like Gaulish war boars, and if they are, then
they are virtually impossible to kill. For every one we can see, there
are probably at least three more in the shadows, and that’s not
counting their handlers.”
“These are not Gaulish; this particular breed has no need of
handlers,” Flamel said gently, the merest hint of his French accent
surfacing. “Look at their tusks.”
Sophie, Josh and Scatty turned to look at the tusks of the huge
creatures standing in the middle of the track behind them. “They’ve
got some sort of carvings on them,” Sophie said, squinting in the
late-afternoon light. “Curls.”
“Spirals,” Scatty said, a touch of wonder in her voice. She looked
at Flamel. “They are Torc Allta?”
“Indeed they are,” Flamel said. “Wereboars.”
“By wereboars,” Josh said, “do you mean like werewolves?”
Scatty shook her head impatiently. “No, not like werewolves…”
“That’s a relief,” Josh said, “because for a second there I thought
you were taking about humans who changed into wolves.”
“Werewolves are Torc Madra,” Scatty continued, as if she hadn’t
heard him. “They’re a di erent clan altogether.”
Sophie stared hard at the nearest boar. Beneath its piglike
features, she thought she could begin to see the shapes and planes of
a human face, while the eyes—cool and bright, bright blue—
regarded her with startling intelligence.
Josh turned back to the steering wheel, gripping it tightly.
“Wereboars…of course they are di erent from werewolves.
Di erent clan entirely,” he muttered, “how silly of me.”
“What do we do?” Sophie asked.
“We drive,” Nicholas Flamel said.
Josh pointed at the barrier. “What about that?”
“Just drive,” the Alchemyst commanded.
“But…,” Josh began.
“Do you trust me?” Flamel asked for the second time that day.
The twins looked at each other, then back at Flamel, and nodded,
heads bobbing in unison. “Then drive,” he said gently.
Josh eased the heavy SUV into gear and released the emergency
brake. The vehicle crept forward. The front bumper touched the
seemingly impenetrable barrier of leaves and bushes…and vanished.
One moment it was there; the next, it was as if the bushes had
swallowed the front of the car.
The SUV rolled into the bushes and trees, and for a single instant
everything went dark and chill, and the air was touched with
something bittersweet like burnt sugar…and then the path appeared
again, curving o to the right.
“How…,” Josh began.
“It was an illusion,” Flamel explained. “Nothing more. Light
twisted and bent, re ecting the images of trees and bushes in a
curtain of water vapor, each drop of moisture acting as a mirror.
And just a little magic,” he added. He pointed ahead with a graceful
motion. “We’re still in North America, but now we’ve entered the
domain of one of the oldest and greatest of the Elder Race. We’ll be
safe here for a while.”
Scatty made a rude sound. “Oh, she’s old, all right, but I’m not so
sure about great.”
“Scathach, I want you to behave yourself,” Flamel said, turning to
the young-looking but ancient woman sitting beside him.
“I don’t like her. I don’t trust her.”
“You’ve got to put aside your old feuds.”
“She tried to kill me, Nicholas,” Scatty protested. “She abandoned
me in the Underworld. It took me centuries to nd my way out.”
“That was a little over fteen hundred years ago, if I remember
my mythology,” Flamel reminded her.
“I’ve got a long memory,” Scatty muttered; for an instant she
looked like a sulky child.
“Who are you talking about?” Sophie demanded, and then Josh
hit the brakes, bringing the heavy car to a halt.
“Wouldn’t be a tall woman with black skin, would it?” Josh
asked.
Sophie spun around to look through the cracked windshield,
while Flamel and Scatty leaned forward.
“That’s her,” Scatty said glumly.
The gure stood in the path directly in front of the car. Tall and
broad, the woman looked as if she had been carved from a solid slab
of jet-black stone. The merest fuzz of white hair covered her skull
like a close- tting cap, and her features were sharp and angular:
high cheekbones; straight, pointed nose; sharply de ned chin; lips
so thin they were almost nonexistent. Her pupils were the color of
butter. She was wearing a long, simple gown made of a shimmering
material that moved gently in a wind that didn’t seem to touch
anything around her. As it shifted, rainbow colors ran down its
length, like oil on water. She wore no jewelry, though Sophie
noticed that each of her short blunt ngernails was painted a
di erent color.
“Doesn’t look a day over ten thousand years old,” Scatty
muttered.
“Be nice,” Flamel reminded her.
“Who is it?” Sophie asked again, staring hard at the woman.
Although she looked human, there was something di erent,
something otherworldly about her. It showed in the way she stood
absolutely still and in the arrogant tilt of her head.
“This,” Nicholas Flamel said, a note of genuine awe in his voice,
“is the Elder known as Hekate.” He pronounced the name slowly,
“HEH-ca-tay.”
“The Goddess with Three Faces,” Scatty added bitterly.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“Stay in the car,” Nicholas Flamel directed, opening the door and
stepping outside onto the short-cropped grass.
Scatty folded her arms over her chest and glared out through the
cracked windshield. “Fine by me.”
Flamel ignored her jibe and slammed the door before she could
say anything else. Taking a deep breath, he attempted to compose
himself as he stepped toward the tall, elegant woman surrounded by
the tall lea ess trunks of sequoia trees.
The undergrowth rustled and one of the enormous Torc Allta
appeared directly in front of the Alchemyst, its massive head level
with his chest. Flamel stopped and bowed to the creature, greeting
it in a language that had not been designed for human tongues.
Abruptly, the boars were everywhere, ten of them, eyes bright and
intelligent, the coarse red hair on their backs and shoulders bristling
in the late-afternoon light, long strings of ropey saliva dribbling
from their ornately carved tusks.
Flamel took care to bow to each one in turn. “I did not think there
were any of the Torc Allta clan left in the Americas,” he said to no
one in particular, dropping back into English.
Hekate smiled, the merest movement of her lips. “Ah, Nicholas,
you of all people should know that when we are gone, when the
Elder Race is no more, when even the humani have gone from this
earth, then the Allta clans will reclaim it for themselves. Remember,
this world belonged to the Were clans rst.” Hekate spoke in a deep,
almost masculine voice, touched with an accent that had all the
hissing sibilants of Greece and the liquid consonants of Persia.
Nicholas bowed again. “I understand that the clans are strong in
Europe—the Torc Madra particularly, and I hear that there are Torc
Tiogar in India again, and two new clans of Torc Leon in Africa. All
thanks to you.”
Hekate smiled, her teeth tiny and straight in her mouth. “The
clans still worship me as a goddess. I do what I can for them.” The
unseen, unfelt wind touched her robe, swirling it around her body,
so that it ran with green and gold threads. “But I doubt you have
come all this way to talk to me about my children.”
“I have not.” Flamel glanced back at the battered and scarred
SUV. Josh and Sophie were staring intently at him, eyes wide in
wonder, while Scathach’s face was just visible in the backseat. She
had her eyes closed and was pretending to be asleep. Flamel knew
the Warrior had no need of sleep. “I want to thank you for the Ghost
Wind you sent us.”
Now it was Hekate’s turn to bow. Her right hand moved and
opened, revealing a tiny cell phone cupped in her palm. “Such
useful devices. I can remember a time when we entrusted our
messages to the winds or trained birds. Seems like only yesterday,”
she added. “I am glad the ruse was successful. Unfortunately, you
have probably revealed your ultimate destination to the Morrigan
and Dee. They will know who sent the Ghost Wind, and I am sure
they are aware that I have an enclave here.”
“I know that. And I apologize for drawing them down on you.”
Hekate shrugged, a slight movement of her shoulders that sent a
rainbow of light down her robe. “Dee fears me. He will bluster and
posture, threaten me, possibly even try a few minor spells and
incantations, but he will not move against me. Not alone…not even
with the Morrigan’s assistance. He would need at least two or more
of the Dark Elders to stand against me…and even then he would not
be assured of success.”
“But he is arrogant. And now he has the Codex.”
“But not all of it, you said on the phone.”
“No, not all of it.” Nicholas Flamel drew the two pages from
under his T-shirt and went to hand them to Hekate. But the woman
abruptly backed away, throwing up her hand to shield her eyes, a
sound like hissing steam bubbling from her lips. In an instant the
boars were around Flamel, crowding him, mouths open, tusks huge
and deadly against his skin.
Sophie drew breath to scream and Josh shouted and then
Scathach was out of the SUV, an arrow notched to her bow, leveled
at Hekate. “Call them o ,” she shouted.
The Torc Allta didn’t even glance in her direction.
Hekate deliberately turned her back on Flamel and folded her
arms, then she glanced over her shoulder at Scathach, who
immediately pulled the bowstring taut. “You think that can harm
me?” the goddess laughed.
“The arrow was dipped in the blood of a Titan,” Scathach said
quietly, her voice carrying on the still air. “One of your parents, if I
remember correctly? And one of the few ways left to slay you, I do
believe.”
The twins watched as the Elder’s eyes turned cold and became, for
a split second, gold mirrors, re ecting the scene before her. “Put the
pages away,” Hekate commanded the Alchemyst.
Flamel immediately tucked the two pages back under his T-shirt.
The older woman muttered a word and the Torc Allta stepped back
from the Alchemyst and trotted into the undergrowth, where they
immediately disappeared, though everyone knew they were still
there. Hekate then turned to face Flamel again. “They would not
have harmed you without a command from me.”
“I’m sure,” Nicholas said shakily. He glanced down at his jeans
and boots. They were covered with dribbles and strings of white
Torc Allta saliva, which he was sure was going to leave a stain.
“Do not produce the Codex—or any portion of it—in my
presence…nor in the presence of any being of the Elder Race. We
have an…aversion to it,” she said, choosing the word carefully.
“It doesn’t a ect me,” Scathach said, loosening her bow.
“You are not one of the First Generation of the Elder Race,”
Hekate reminded her. “Like the Morrigan, you are of the Next
Generation. But I was there when Abraham the Mage set down the
rst words of power in the Book. I saw him trap the Magic of First
Working, the oldest magic, in its sheets.”
“I apologize,” Flamel said quickly. “I did not know.”
“There is no reason you should have known.” Hekate smiled, but
there was nothing humorous in it. “That eldritch magic is so strong
that most of my people cannot even bear to look upon the letters.
Those who came after the original Elder Race, though still of our
blood”—and here she gestured toward Scathach—“can look upon
the Codex, though even they cannot touch it. The ape descendents—
the humani—can. It was Abraham’s ultimate joke. He married one
of the rst humani, and I believe he wanted to ensure that only his
children could handle the book.”
“We’re the ape descendents,” Josh said, his voice unconsciously
dropping to little more than a whisper.
“The humani…the human race,” Sophie said, then fell silent as
Flamel continued talking.
“Is that why the Book was given into my keeping?”
“You are not the rst of the humani to…to care for the Codex,”
Hekate said carefully. “It should never have been created in the rst
place,” she snapped, threads of red and green running like live wires
on her robe. “I advocated that every single page should be separated
from the others and dropped into the nearest volcano, and Abraham
along with it.”
“Why wasn’t it destroyed?” Nicholas asked.
“Because Abraham had the gift of Sight. He could actually see the
curling strands of time, and he prophesied that there would come a
day when the Codex and all the knowledge it contained would be
needed.”
Scatty stepped away from the SUV and approached Flamel. She
was still holding the bow loosely by her side, and she noted how
Hekate’s butter-colored eyes watched her closely.
“The Book of the Mage was always assigned a guardian,”
Scathach explained to Flamel. “Some, history recalls as the greatest
heroes of myth, while others were less well known, like yourself,
and a few remained completely anonymous.”
“And if I—a human—was chosen to caretake this precious Codex,
because your people cannot even look upon it, much less touch it,
then it is obvious that another human must have been chosen to
nd it,” Flamel said. “Dee.”
Hekate nodded. “A dangerous enemy, Dr. John Dee.”
Flamel nodded. He could feel the cool, dry pages against his skin
beneath his T-shirt. Although he had possessed the Codex for more
than half a millennium, he knew he had barely even begun to
scratch the surface of its secrets. He still had no real idea just how
old it was. He kept pushing the date of its creation back further and
further. When the Book rst came to him in the fourteenth century,
he believed it to be ve hundred years old. Later, when he started to
do his research, he thought it might be eight hundred years old,
then a thousand years, then two thousand years old. A century ago,
in light of the new discoveries coming out of the tombs of Egypt, he
had reassessed the age of the Book at ve thousand years. And now,
here was Hekate, who was ten thousand and more years old, saying
she had been around when the mysterious Abraham the Mage had
composed the Book. But if the Elder Race—the gods of mythology
and legend—could neither handle nor look upon the book, then
what was Abraham, its creator? Was he of the Elder Race, a humani
or something else, one of the many other mythical races that walked
the earth in those rst days?
“Why are you here?” Hekate asked. “I knew the Codex had been
taken as soon as it left your presence, but I cannot help you recover
it.”
“I have come to you for another reason,” Flamel continued,
stepping away from the car and lowering his voice, forcing Hekate
to lean close to listen to him. “When Dee attacked me, stole the
Book and snatched Perry, two humani came to our aid. A young
man and his sister.” He paused and then added, “Twins.”
“Twins?” she said, her voice as at and expressionless as her face.
“Twins. Look at them: tell me what you see.”
Hekate’s eyes ickered toward the car. “A boy and a girl, dressed
in the T-shirts and denim that are the shabby uniform of this age.
That is all I see.”
“Look closer,” Flamel said. “And remember the prophecy,” he
added.
“I know the prophecy. Do not presume to teach me my own
history!” Hekate’s eyes ared and, for an instant, changed color,
becoming dark and ugly. “Humani? Impossible.” Striding past
Flamel, she peered into the interior of the car, looking rst at
Sophie, and then at Josh.
The twins noticed simultaneously that the pupils of her eyes were
long and narrow, like a cat’s, and that behind the thin line of her
lips, her teeth were pointed, like tiny needles.
“Silver and gold,” Hekate whispered abruptly, glancing at the
Alchemyst, her accent thickening, small pointed tongue darting at
her thin lips. She turned back to the twins. “Step out of the vehicle.”
They looked at Flamel, and when he nodded, both climbed out.
Sophie went around the car to stand next to her brother.
Hekate reached out
rst toward Sophie, who hesitated
momentarily before she stretched out her hand. The goddess took
Sophie’s left palm in her right hand and turned it over, then she
reached for Josh’s hand. He placed his hand in hers without
hesitation, trying to act nonchalant, as if stretching out to touch a
ten-thousand-year-old goddess were something he did every day. He
thought her skin felt surprisingly rough and coarse.
Hekate spoke a single word in a language that predated the
arrival of the earliest human civilization.
“Oranges,” Josh whispered, suddenly smelling—and then tasting
—the fruit.
“No, it’s ice cream,” Sophie said, “freshly churned vanilla ice
cream.” She turned to look at her brother…and discovered that he
was staring at her in wonder.
A silver glow had appeared around Sophie. Like a thin second
skin, it hovered just above the surface of her esh, winking in and
out of existence. When she blinked, her eyes turned to at re ective
mirrors.
The glow that covered Josh was a warm golden hue. It was
concentrated mainly around his head and hands, throbbing and
pulsing in sync with his heartbeat. The irises of his eyes were like
golden coins.
But although the twins could see the glow that hovered around
each other and their own bodies, they felt no di erent. There were
only the smells in the air—oranges and vanilla ice cream.
Without a word, Hekate pulled away from the twins, and
immediately the glow faded. Striding back to Flamel, she caught
him by the arm and moved him farther down the path, out of
earshot of the twins and Scatty.
“Do you have any idea what that was all about?” Sophie asked the
Warrior. There was a distinct tremble in her voice, and she could
still taste vanilla ice cream in her mouth and smell it on the air.
“The goddess was checking your auras,” Scathach said.
“That was the golden glow around Josh?” Sophie asked, looking
at her brother.
“Yours was silver,” Josh said immediately.
Scathach picked up a at pebble and tossed it into the bushes. It
hit something solid, which immediately lumbered away through the
undergrowth. “Most auras are a mixture of colors. Very, very, very
few people have pure colors.”
“Like ours?” Sophie asked.
“Like yours,” Scatty said glumly. “Last person I knew to have a
pure silver aura was the woman you know as Joan of Arc.”
“What about the gold aura?” Josh said.
“Even rarer,” Scatty said. “The last person I can recall having that
color was…” She frowned, remembering. “The boy king,
Tutankhamen.”
“Was that why he was buried with so much gold?”
“One of the reasons,” Scathach agreed.
“Don’t tell me you knew King Tut,” Josh teased.
“Never met him,” Scathach said, “though I did train dear Joan
and fought by her side at Orléans. I told her not to go to Paris,” she
added very softly, pain in her eyes.
“My aura is rarer than yours,” Josh deliberately teased his sister
to break the somber mood. He looked at the Warrior Maid. “But
what exactly does it mean to have pure-colored auras?”
When Scathach turned to look at him, her face was expressionless.
“It means you have extraordinary powers. All of the great magicians
and sorcerers of the past, the heroic leaders, the inspired artists,
have had pure-color or single-color auras.”
The twins looked at one another, suddenly uncertain. This was
just a little too weird, and there was something in Scathach’s lack of
expression that was frightening. Sophie’s eyes suddenly widened in
shock. “I just realized that both of those people, Joan of Arc and
Tutankhamen, died young.”
“Very young,” Josh said, sobering, recalling his history. “They
both died when they were nineteen.”
“Yes, they did, didn’t they?” Scathach agreed, turning away to
look at Nicholas Flamel and the Goddess with Three Faces.
“Humani,” Hekate snarled. “Humani with silver and gold auras.”
She sounded both puzzled and angry.
“It has happened before,” Flamel said mildly.
“You think I don’t know that?”
They were standing at the edge of a bubbling brook that cut
through the trees and fed into an octagonal pond dappled with
white water lilies. Huge red and albino koi moved through the
perfectly clear water.
“I’ve never come across the two auras together, and never in
twins. They possess enormous untapped power,” Flamel said
urgently. “Do I have to remind you of the Codex? ‘The two that are
one and the one that is all’—the very rst prophecy Abraham speaks
of.”
“I know the prophecy,” Hekate snapped, her dress now shot
through with red and black veins. “I was there when the old fool
made it.”
Flamel was about to ask a question, but kept his mouth shut.
“He was never wrong either,” Hekate muttered. “He knew that
Danu Talis would sink beneath the waves and that our world would
end.”
“He also predicted it would come again,” Flamel reminded her.
“When ‘the two that are one and the one that is all’ have arrived,
when the sun and moon are united.”
Hekate tilted her head and her slit-pupiled eyes ickered toward
Josh and Sophie. “Gold and silver, sun and moon.” She turned back
to Flamel. “Do you believe them to be the basis of the prophecy?”
“Yes,” he said simply, “I do. I have to.”
“Why?”
“Because with the Codex now gone, Dee can begin to bring back
the Dark Elders. If the twins are those mentioned in the prophecy,
then, with proper training, I might be able to use them to prevent
that…and to help me rescue Perry.”
“And if you are mistaken?” Hekate wondered aloud.
“Then I have lost the love of my life, and this world and all the
humani on it are lost. But if we are to have any chance of success, I
need your help.”
Hekate sighed. “It’s been a long time…a very long time since I
took a student.” She turned to look at Scathach. “And that didn’t
turn out too well.”
“This is di erent. This time you would be working with raw
talent, pure, untainted power. And we don’t have a lot of time.”
Flamel drew in a deep breath and spoke formally in the ancient
language of the sunken island of Danu Talis. “Daughter of Perses
and Asteria, you are the Goddess of Magic and Spells, I ask you to
Awaken the twins’ magical powers.”
“And if I do it—what then?” Hekate demanded.
“Then I will teach them the Five Magics. Together we will retrieve
the Codex and save Perenelle.”
The Goddess with Three Faces laughed, the sound bitter and
angry. “Have care, Nicholas Flamel, Alchemyst, lest you create
something that will destroy us all.”
“Will you do it?”
“I will have to think upon it. I will give you my answer later.”
Sitting in the car on the other side of the clearing, Sophie and
Josh suddenly became aware that Flamel and Hekate had turned to
stare at them. The twins shivered simultaneously.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“There is something very wrong with this house.” Sophie strode
into her brother’s room, holding her expensive cell phone up to her
face. “I can’t get a signal anywhere.” She moved around the room,
watching the screen, but the signal bar remained at.
Josh looked blankly at his sister. “Wrong with this house?” he
repeated incredulously. Then he spoke very slowly. “Sophie, we’re
inside a tree! I’d say there’s something wrong with that, wouldn’t
you?”
When Hekate had nished speaking with Flamel, she had turned
and disappeared into the woods without saying a word to them, and
it had been left to Flamel to bring them to the goddess’s home.
Instructing them to leave the car, he led them down a narrow
winding pathway that cut through the overgrown woods. They had
been so intent on the strange ora—huge bruise-colored owers
that turned to track their movements, vines that slithered and
squirmed like snakes as they followed them, grasses that had not
existed since the Oligocene era—that they failed to notice that the
path had opened out, and that they were facing Hekate’s home.
Even when they looked up, it took them several moments to make
sense of what they were seeing.
Directly ahead of them, in the center of a broad, gently sloping
plain sprinkled with vast swathes of multicolored owers, was a
tree. It was the height and circumference of a large skyscraper. The
topmost branches and leaves were wreathed in wisps of white cloud,
and the roots that burst from the ground like clawing ngers were
as tall as cars. The tree itself was gnarled and twisted, its bark
scored and deeply etched with cracks and lines. Long vines, like
huge pipes, wrapped around the tree and dangled from the
branches.
“Hekate’s home,” Flamel explained. “You are the only living
humani in the last two thousand years to see it. Even I’ve only ever
read about it.”
Scatty smiled at the looks on the twins’ faces. She nudged Josh.
“Where exactly did you expect her to live? A trailer?”
“I wasn’t…I mean, I don’t know…I didn’t think…,” Josh began.
The sight was incredible, and from the little he had studied about
biology, he knew that no living thing could grow so huge. No
natural thing, he corrected himself.
Sophie thought the tree looked like an ancient woman, bent over
with age. It was all very well for Flamel to talk about the distant
past and a two-thousand-year-old warrior or a ten-thousand-year-old
goddess: the numbers meant almost nothing. Seeing the tree was
di erent. Both she and Josh had seen ancient trees before. Their
parents had taken them to see the three-thousand-year-old giant
redwoods, and they had spent a week camping with their father in
the White Mountains in the north of California as he investigated
the Methuselah Tree, which, at nearly ve thousand years old, was
supposed to be the oldest living thing on the planet. Standing before
the Methuselah Tree, a gnarled and twisted bristlecone pine, it was
easy to accept its great age. But now, seeing Hekate’s tree house,
Sophie had no doubt that it was incredibly ancient, millennia older
than the Methuselah Tree.
They followed a smoothly polished stone path that led to the tree.
As they got closer, they realized that it was more like a skyscraper
than they’d rst thought: there were hundreds of windows cut into
the bark, with lights ickering in the rooms beyond. But it was only
when they reached the main entrance that they appreciated just
how vast the tree was. The smoothly polished double doors towered
at least twenty feet tall, and yet they opened at the merest touch of
Flamel’s ngers. The twins stepped into an enormous circular foyer.
And stopped.
The interior of the tree was hollow. From just inside the entrance,
they could look straight up to where wispy clouds gathered inside
the tree. A gently curving staircase curled up along the inside of the
trunk, and every few steps brought them to an open doorway
spilling out light. Dozens of tiny waterfalls spouted from the walls
and splashed down onto the oor far below, where the water
gathered in a huge circular pool that took up most of the foyer. The
interior walls were smooth and unadorned, except for the twists and
knots of vines that broke through the surface. Josh thought they
looked like veins.
And it was completely deserted.
No one moved within the tree, nothing—human or inhuman—
climbed the countless stairs, no winged creature ew in the moist
air.
“Welcome to the Yggdrasill,” Nicholas Flamel said, stepping back
and allowing them to enter. “Welcome to the World Tree.”
Josh held up his phone. The screen was blank. “And have you
noticed,” he asked, “there are no power sockets?”
“There have to be,” Sophie said decisively. She walked over to the
bed and dropped to her knees. “There are always sockets beside the
beds….”
There were none.
The twins stood in the center of Josh’s room and looked around.
His room was a mirror image of his sister’s. Everything around them
was composed of a honey-colored blond wood, from the highly
polished oors to the smooth walls. There was no glass in the
windows, and the door was a wafer-thin rectangle of wood that
looked and felt like the papery bark of a tree. The only item of
furniture in the room was the bed, a low wooden futon covered with
heavy fur throws. A thick fur rug lay on the oor beside the bed. It
was dappled with an intricate pattern of spots that resembled no
animal either of the twins had ever seen.
There was also a tree growing out of the center of the oor.
Tall, thin and elegant, the red-barked tree rose straight out of the
wooden oor. No limbs protruded from the trunk until it came close
to the ceiling, and then the branches burst out into a canopy that
covered the roof. The leaves were a deep, luxuriant green on one
side, ash white on the other. Every so often, some spiraled to the
oor, and covered it in a soft, almost furry carpet.
“Where are we?” Sophie asked nally, unaware that she had
spoken the thought aloud.
“California?” Josh said softly, but in a voice that suggested he
didn’t quite believe what he was saying.
“After all we’ve seen today?” Sophie asked. “I don’t think so.
We’re inside a tree. A tree big enough to house the whole University
of San Francisco campus, a tree so old it makes the Methuselah Tree
look like it was just planted. And don’t try to tell me it’s a building
shaped to look like a tree. Everything here is made from natural
materials.” She drew a breath and looked around. “Do you think it
could still be alive?”
Josh shook his head. “Can’t be. The whole inside is scooped out.
Maybe it was alive a long time ago; but now it’s just a shell.”
Sophie was not so sure. “Josh, there is nothing modern and
nothing arti cial in this room, no plastics, no metals, no paper;
everything looks hand carved. There aren’t even candles or
lanterns.”
“It took me a while to realize what those bowls of oil were,” Josh
said. He didn’t tell his sister that he’d been about to drink what he
thought was some sort of sweet-smelling fruit juice when he’d seen
the wick oating in it.
“My room is identical to yours,” Sophie continued. She lifted her
phone again. “There’s no signal, and look”—she pointed—“you can
actually see the battery draining away.”
Josh brought his head close to his twin’s, their blond hair
mingling, and stared at the rectangular screen. The battery indicator
on the right-hand side was visibly falling, bar by bar. “You think
that’s why my iPod has no power either?” Josh asked, pulling it
from his back pocket. “It was fully charged this morning. And my
computer is dead.” He suddenly looked at his watch, and then he
lifted his arm to allow his sister to see it. The face of the chunky
military-style digital watch he wore was blank.
Sophie looked at her own watch. “Mine is still working,” she said
in surprise. “Because it winds up,” she said, answering her own
question aloud.
“So something is draining the power,” he muttered. “Some energy
in the air?” He’d never heard of anything that could draw energy
from batteries.
“It is this place,” Scathach said, appearing in the doorway. She
had changed from her black military-style combats and T-shirt into
green and brown camo pants, high-top combat boots and a cut-o
camo T-shirt that exposed her muscular arms. She was wearing a
short sword strapped to her leg and there was a bow over her left
shoulder, with a quiver of arrows just visible over the top of her
head. Sophie noticed that there was a Celtic-looking spiral design
etched into Scatty’s right shoulder; Sophie had always wanted a
tattoo, but she knew her mother would never let her get one. “You
have gone beyond your world into a Shadowrealm,” the Warrior
added. “The Shadowrealms exist partially in your world and
partially in another time and space.” The Warrior remained standing
by the door.
“Are you not going to come in?” Sophie asked.
“You have to invite me,” Scatty said, with a peculiarly shy smile.
“Invite you in?” Sophie turned to her twin, eyebrows raised in a
question.
“You have to invite me in,” Scatty repeated, “else I’ll not be able
to cross the threshold.”
“Just like vampires,” Josh said, abruptly feeling as if his tongue
were too thick for his mouth. After today, he was quite prepared to
believe in vampires, though he really didn’t want to run into one.
He turned to his twin. “The only way a vampire can enter a house is
if he or she is invited. Then they can drink your blood….” He turned
to look at Scatty, eyes suddenly wide. “You’re not a…”
“I don’t like that term,” Scatty snapped.
“Scathach, please enter,” Sophie said, before her brother could
protest further.
The Warrior hopped lightly over the threshold and entered the
room. “And yes,” she said, “I am what you would call a vampire.”
“Oh,” Sophie whispered. Josh tried to stand in front of his sister
to protect her, but she pushed him out of the way. Although she
loved her brother, there were times when he could be too
protective.
“Don’t believe everything you’ve read about my race,” Scathach
said, moving around the room, peering through the windows into
the lush gardens. An enormous yellow-white butter y uttered past
the opening. It was the size of a dinner plate and had not existed on
the earth since the Jurassic period. “Hekate created and maintains
this place by an extraordinary use of magic,” she continued. “But
magic, like everything else, follows certain natural laws. Magic
needs energy, and it takes that energy wherever it can nd it, even
from the tiny batteries in your electrical toys. If no other source of
energy is available, it will take the life force of the magician who
created it. That is why every use of magic weakens the magician.”
“Are you saying nothing electrical works in this Shadowrealm?”
Sophie wondered aloud, and then she shook her head quickly. “But
Hekate used a phone. I saw her showing it to Flamel earlier. Why
doesn’t its battery drain?”
“Hekate is immensely powerful and is more or less immune to the
e ects of the magic she generates. I would imagine that she keeps
the phone on her person so it doesn’t drain, or possibly she keeps it
in the real world with a servant. Many members of the Elder Race
have human servants.”
“Like Flamel and Dee?” Sophie asked.
“Nicholas serves no Elder,” Scathach said slowly. “The Book is his
master. Dee, on the other hand…well, no one knows exactly who, or
what, he serves.” She glanced over her shoulder, her gaze lingering
on each of them. “You’ll probably nd yourself feeling exhausted in
about an hour, muscles sore, maybe even a little headachy. That’s
the magical eld feeding o your auras. Don’t be too concerned,
however: your particular auras are exceptionally strong. Just drink
plenty of liquids.” Scatty moved from window to window and
leaned forward, peering out. “I know they are out there, but I
cannot see them,” she said suddenly.
“Who?” Sophie wondered.
“The Torc Allta.”
“Are they really wereboars? I mean, men who change into boars?”
Sophie asked. She was conscious that her twin hadn’t spoken since
Scathach had entered the room. He was staring at her, eyes wide in
horror, mouth drawn into a thin line. She knew that expression well:
he was scared, and she guessed that he was thinking about all the
vampire novels he’d read and movies he’d seen.
“No, not really,” Scatty said. “I know Nicholas has told you that
before the humani claimed the earth, this world belonged to other
creatures, other races. But even amongst the Elder Race, the Torc
clans were special. They could transform from beast shape to man
shape and back again.” Scatty sat on the edge of the low bed and
stretched her legs straight out in front of her. “When the earliest
humani rst appeared, the Torc clans taught them how to work
wood and stone and how to create re. The humani worshipped the
Torc clans as gods—why do you think so many of the earliest gods
have animal shapes? Think of the cave paintings of creatures that
are neither man nor beast but something in between. You must have
seen statues of the Egyptian gods Sobek, Bastet and Anubis: humani
bodies, but with animal heads. Think of the dances where humani
pretend to be animals: they are just memories of the time when the
Torc clans lived side by side with the humani.”
“Therianthropes,” Sophie said absently.
Scatty looked at her blankly.
“Figures that are made from animal and human shapes mixed
together,” Josh explained. “I told you that our parents are
archaeologists,” he added. Then he looked quickly at the red-haired
woman. “Do you drink blood?” he asked suddenly.
“Josh!” Sophie whispered.
“No, I don’t drink blood,” Scathach said quietly. “Not now. Not
ever.”
“But a vampire—”
Scathach surged to her feet and two steps brought her directly in
front of Josh. She was not quite as tall as he was, but in that
moment, she seemed huge. “There are many types of vampires,
many clans, just as there are many Were clans. Some of my race are
blood drinkers, it is true.”
“But not you,” Sophie said hastily, before her brother could ask
any further awkward questions.
“No, not my clan. Those of my clan…well, we feed in…other
ways,” Scatty said with a wry smile. “And we rarely need to feed,”
she added. She spun away. “Everything you have been taught, all
the myths and legends of your world, have a kernel of truth in them.
You’ve seen wonders today. You will see more in the days to come.”
“What do you mean, in the days to come?” Josh interrupted,
voice rising in alarm. “We’re going home, aren’t we?” But even as
he was asking the question, he knew the answer.
“Eventually,” the Warrior Maid said, “but not today, and
de nitely not tomorrow.”
Sophie laid her hand on her brother’s arm, silencing the question
he was about to ask. “What were you saying about myths and
legends?” she asked.
Somewhere deep in the house a bell chimed, the sound high and
pure. It lingered in the still air.
Scathach ignored it. “I want you to remember that everything you
know—or think you know—about myth and legend is not
necessarily false, nor is it entirely true. At the heart of every legend
there is a grain of truth. I suspect that much of your knowledge
comes from movies and TV. Xena and Dracula have a lot to answer
for. All minotaurs are not evil, the Gorgon Medusa did not turn
every man to stone, not all vampires are blood drinkers, the Were
clans are a proud and ancient race.”
Josh attempted a laugh; he was still shaken by the revelation that
Scathach was a vampire. “You’ll be telling us next that ghosts exist.”
Scathach’s expression remained serious. “Josh, you have entered
the Shadowrealm, the world of ghosts. I want you both to trust your
instincts from now on: forget what you know—or think you know—
about the creatures and races you will encounter. Follow your
hearts. Trust no one. Except each other,” she added.
“We can trust you and Nicholas, though, right?” Sophie said.
The bell rang again, at and piercing in the distance.
“Trust no one,” Scathach repeated, and the twins realized that she
was not answering the question. She turned toward the door. “I
think that’s the dinner bell.”
“Can we eat the food?” Josh asked.
“Depends,” Scatty said.
“Depends on what?” he asked in alarm.
“Depends on what it is, of course. I don’t eat the meat myself.”
“Why not?” Sophie said, wondering if there was some particular
ancient creature they should avoid.
“I’m a vegetarian,” Scatty answered.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Perenelle Flamel sat in a corner of the tiny windowless room and
drew her knees up to her chest, then wrapped her arms around her
shins. She rested her chin on her knees. She could hear voices—
angry, bitter voices.
Perry concentrated on the sound. She allowed her aura to expand
a little as she murmured a small spell she had learned from an Inuit
shaman. The shaman used it to listen to the sh moving under the
arctic ice sheets and the bears crunching across the distant ice elds.
The simple spell worked by shutting down all other senses and
concentrating exclusively on hearing. Perry watched as the color
faded from her surroundings and darkness closed in until she went
blind. She gradually lost her sense of smell and felt the pins-andneedles tingle in her ngertips and toes as her sense of touch dulled,
then faded completely. She knew that if there were anything in her
mouth, she would no longer be able to taste it. Only her hearing
remained, but it was enhanced and supersensitive. She heard beetles
crawling in the walls behind her, heard the scritch-scratch as a
mouse gnawed through wood somewhere above her, knew that a
colony of termites was munching their way through distant
oorboards. She also heard two voices, high and thin, as if they
were being picked up on a badly tuned radio, and coming from a
great distance. Perry tilted her head, homing in on the sound. She
heard wind whistling, the ap of clothing, the high crying of birds.
She could tell that the voices she was hearing were coming from the
roof of the building. They strengthened, warbled and bubbled, and
then abruptly clari ed: they belonged to Dee and the Morrigan, and
Perry could clearly hear the fear in the gray man’s voice and the
rage in the Crow Goddess’s shrill cries.
“She must pay for this! She must!”
“She is an Elder. Untouchable by the likes of you and me,” Dee
said, trying unsuccessfully to calm the Morrigan.
“No one is untouchable. She has interfered where she was not
wanted. My creatures had almost overwhelmed the car when her
Ghost Wind swept them away.”
“Flamel, the warrior Scathach and the two humani have now
disappeared,” Dee’s voice echoed, and Perry frowned, concentrating
hard, trying to follow every word. She was delighted to discover
that Nicholas had sought the assistance of Scathach: she was a
formidable ally. “It’s as if they have vanished o the face of the
earth.”
“They have vanished o the face of the earth,” the Morrigan
snapped. “He’s taken them into Hekate’s Shadowrealm.”
Unconsciously, Perry nodded. Of course! Where else would
Nicholas have gone? The entrance to Hekate’s Shadowrealm in Mill
Valley was closest to San Francisco, and while the Elder was no
friend to the Flamels, she was not allied to Dee and his Dark Elders
either.
“We must follow them,” the Morrigan stated atly.
“Impossible,” Dee said reasonably. “I have neither the skills nor
the powers to penetrate Hekate’s realm.” There was a pause, and
then he added, “Nor do you. She is a First Generation Elder, you are
of the Next Generation.”
“But she is not the only Elder on the West Coast.” The Morrigan’s
voice was a snap of triumph.
“What are you suggesting?” Fear had touched Dee’s voice with a
hint of his original English accent.
“I know where Bastet sleeps.”
Perenelle Flamel sat back against the cold stone and allowed her
senses to return. Feeling came rst—pins and needles racing
through her ngers and toes—then her sense of smell, and nally
sight. Blinking, waiting for the tiny colored spots of light to fade,
Perry tried to make sense of what she had just discovered.
The implications were terrible. The Morrigan was prepared to
awaken Bastet and attack Hekate’s Shadowrealm to retrieve the
pages of the Codex.
Perry shuddered. She had never met Bastet—she didn’t know
anyone who had in the last three centuries and had lived to tell the
tale—but she knew her by reputation. One of the most powerful
members of the Elder Race, Bastet had been worshipped in Egypt
since the earliest ages of man. She had the body of a beautiful
young woman with the head of a cat, and Perry had absolutely no
idea of the magical forces she controlled.
Events were moving surprisingly swiftly. Something big was
happening. Many years before, when Nicholas and Perry had rst
discovered the secret of immortality, they had realized that their
extra-long lives allowed them to view the world from a di erent
perspective. They no longer planned events days or weeks in
advance; often they would make plans decades into the future. Perry
had come to understand that the Elders, whose lives were in nitely
longer, could make plans that encompassed centuries. And that
often meant that events moved with an extraordinarily deliberate
slowness.
But now the Morrigan was abroad. The last time she had walked
in the World of Men, she had been spotted in the bitter, mud- lled
trenches of the Somme; before that she had prowled the
bloodstained battle elds of the American Civil War. The Crow
Goddess was drawn to death; it hung around her like a foul stench.
She was also one of the Elders who believed that humans had been
placed on this earth to serve them.
Nicholas and the twins were safe in Hekate’s Shadowrealm, but
for how long? Bastet was a First Generation Elder. Her powers had
to be at least equal to Hekate’s…and if the Cat Goddess and the
Crow Goddess, combined with Dee’s alchemical magic, attacked
Hekate, would her defenses hold? Perry didn’t know.
And what of Nicholas, Scathach and the twins?
Perenelle felt tears prickle the back of her eyes, but blinked them
away. Nicholas would be six hundred and seventy-seven years old
on the twenty-eighth of September, in three months’ time. He was
well able to take care of himself, though his mastery of practical
spells was very limited, and he could be remarkably forgetful at
times. Only the summer before, he had forgotten how to speak
English and had reverted to his native archaic French. It had taken
her nearly a month to coach him back to speaking English. Before
that he had gone through a period when he had signed his checks in
Greek and Aramaic characters. Perenelle’s lips curled in a smile. He
spoke sixteen languages well and another ten badly. He could read
and write in twenty-two of them—though there wasn’t much chance
to practice his Linear B, cuneiform or hieroglyphics these days.
She wondered what he was doing right now. He would be looking
for her, of course, but he would also need to protect the twins and
the pages that Josh had torn from the Codex. She needed to get a
message to him, she had to let him know that she was ne and to
warn him about the danger they were in.
One of the earliest gifts the young woman known as Perenelle
Delamere had discovered when she was growing up was her ability
to talk to the shades of the dead. It wasn’t until her seventh birthday
that she realized that not everyone could see the ickering blackand-white images she encountered daily. On the eve of her seventh
birthday, her beloved grandmother, Mamom, died. Perenelle
watched as the withered body was gently lifted from the bed where
she had spent the last ten years of her life and laid in the co n. The
small girl had followed the funeral procession through the tiny town
of Quimper and out into the graveyard that overlooked the sea. She
had watched the little rough-hewn box as it was lowered into the
earth, and then she had returned to her home.
And Mamom was sitting up in the bed, eyes bright with their
usual mischief. The only di erence was that Perenelle could no
longer see her grandmother clearly. There was no color to her—
everything was in black-and-white—and her image kept ickering
in and out of focus.
In that instant Perenelle realized she could see ghosts. And when
Mamom turned in her direction and smiled, she knew that they
could see her.
Sitting in the small windowless cell, Perenelle stretched her legs
out in front of her and pressed both hands to the cold concrete oor.
Over the years she had developed a series of defenses to protect
herself from the unwanted intrusions of the dead. If there was one
thing she had learned early on about the dead—particularly the old
dead—it was that they were extraordinarily rude, popping up at the
most inopportune and inappropriate moments. The dead
particularly liked bathrooms—it was a perfect location for them:
quiet and still, with lots of re ective surfaces. Perenelle recalled a
time she’d been brushing her teeth when the ghost of an American
president had appeared in the mirror in front of her. She’d almost
swallowed the toothbrush.
Perenelle had quickly come to understand that ghosts could not
see certain colors—blues and greens and some tints of yellow—and
so she deliberately encouraged those colors into her aura, carefully
creating a shield that rendered her invisible in the particular
Shadowrealm where the shades of the dead gathered.
Opening her eyes wide, Perenelle concentrated on her own aura.
Her natural aura was a pale ice white, which acted like a beacon for
the dead, drawing them to her. But over it, like layers of paint, she
had created auras of bright blue, emerald green, and primrose
yellow. Now, one by one, Perenelle shut o the colors—yellow rst,
then green, then the nal blue defense.
The ghosts came then, drawn to her ice white aura like moths to a
ame. They ickered into existence around her: men, women and
children, wearing clothes from across the decades. Perenelle moved
her green eyes over the glistening images, not entirely sure what she
was looking for. She dismissed women and girls in the owing skirts
of the eighteenth century and men in the boots and gun belts of the
nineteenth and concentrated on those ghosts wearing the clothing of
the twentieth century. She nally picked out an elderly man
wearing a modern-looking security guard’s uniform. Gently easing
the other shades aside, she called the gure closer.
Perenelle understood that people—particularly in modern,
sophisticated societies—were frightened of ghosts. But she knew
that there was no reason to fear them: a ghost was nothing more
than the remnants of a person’s aura that remained attached to a
particular place.
“Can I help you, ma’am?” The shade’s voice was strong, with a
touch of the East Coast in it: Boston perhaps. Standing tall and
straight, like an old soldier, the ghost looked about sixty, though he
could have been older.
“Could you tell me where I am?” Perenelle asked.
“You’re in the basement of the corporate headquarters of Enoch
Enterprises, just to the west of Telegraph Hill. We got Coit Tower
almost directly overhead,” he added proudly.
“You seem very sure.”
“Should be. I worked here for thirty years. Wasn’t always Enoch
Enterprises, of course. But places like this always need security.
Never one break-in on my watch,” he informed her.
“That’s an achievement to be proud of, Mr….”
“It surely is.” The ghost paused, his image ickering wildly.
“Miller. That was my name. Je erson Miller. Been a while since
anyone asked for it. How can I help you?” he asked.
“Well, you’ve been of great assistance already. At least I know I
am still in San Francisco.”
The ghost continued to look at her. “Did you expect not to be?”
“I think I may have slept earlier; I was afraid I might have been
moved out of the city,” she explained.
“Are you being held against your will, ma’am?”
“I am.”
Je erson Miller drifted closer. “Well, that’s just not right.” There
was a long pause while his image ickered. “But I’m afraid I can’t
help you—I’m a ghost, you see.”
Perenelle nodded. “I know that.” She smiled. “I just wasn’t sure if
you knew.” She knew that one of the reasons ghosts often remained
attached to certain places was because they simply did not know
that they were dead.
The old security guard wheezed a laugh. “I’ve tried to leave…but
something keeps pulling me back. Maybe I just spent too much time
here when I was alive.”
Perenelle nodded again. “I can help you leave, if you would like
to. I can do that for you.”
Je erson Miller nodded. “I think I would like that very much. My
wife, Ethel, she passed on ten years before me. Sometimes I think I
hear her voice calling me across the Shadowrealms.”
Perenelle nodded. “She is trying to call you home. I can help you
cut the ties that bind you to this place.”
“Is there anything I can do for you in return?”
Perenelle smiled. “Well, there is one thing…. Perhaps you could
get a message to my husband.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Sophie and Josh followed Scathach through Hekate’s house. There
were reminders everywhere that they were inside a tree: everything
— oors, walls and ceilings—was wooden, and in places, little buds
and shoots of green leaves dappled the walls, as if the wood was still
growing.
With her hand resting lightly on her brother’s shoulder, Sophie
looked around. The house seemed to be composed of a series of
circular rooms that owed, almost imperceptibly, into one another.
She caught glimpses as she and Josh passed them; almost all the
rooms were bare, and most of them had tall red-barked trees
growing through the center of the oor. One room, o to the side
and much larger than the rest, had a large oval-shaped pool in the
middle of the oor. Startlingly large white- owered water lilies
clustered in the center of the pool, giving it the appearance of a
huge unblinking eye. Another room was lled entirely with wooden
wind chimes dangling from the branches of its red tree. Each set of
chimes was a di erent size and shape, some etched and carved with
symbols, others unadorned. They hung still and quiet until Sophie
looked into the room, and then they slowly, melodically began to
rattle together. It sounded like distant whispers. Sophie squeezed
Josh’s shoulder, trying to attract his attention, but he was staring
straight ahead, forehead creased in concentration.
“Where is everyone?” Josh nally asked.
“There is only Hekate,” Scathach said. “Those of the Elder Race
are solitary creatures.”
“Are there many still alive?” Sophie wondered aloud.
Scathach paused by an open door and turned to look back over
her shoulder. “More than you might think. The majority of them
want nothing to do with the humani and rarely venture from their
individual Shadowrealms. Others, like the Dark Elders, want a
return to the old ways, and work through agents like Dee to make it
happen.”
“And what about you?” Josh demanded. “Do you want to return
to these old ways?”
“I never thought they were that great,” she said, then added,
“especially for the humani.”
They found Nicholas Flamel sitting outside on a raised wooden
deck set into a branch of the tree. Growing horizontally from the
tree trunk, the branch was at least ten feet across, and sloped down
to plunge into the earth close to a crescent-shaped pool. Walking
across the branch, Sophie glanced down and was startled to see that
beneath the green weeds that curled and twisted in the pool, tiny
almost-human faces peered upward, mouths and eyes open wide. On
the deck, ve high-backed chairs were arranged around a circular
table, which was set with beautifully hand-carved wooden bowls
and elegant wooden cups and goblets. Warm, rough-cut bread and
thick slices of hard cheese were arranged on platters, and there were
two huge bowls of fruit—apples, oranges and enormous cherries—in
the center of the table. The Alchemyst was carefully slicing the skin
o an emerald green apple with a triangular sliver of black stone
that looked like an arrowhead. Sophie noticed that he had arranged
the green skin into shapes that resembled letters.
Scatty slid into the seat beside the Alchemyst. “Is Hekate not
joining us?” she asked, picking up a piece of cut skin and chewing
on it.
“I believe she is changing for dinner,” Flamel said, slicing o
another curl of skin to replace the piece Scatty was chewing. He
looked over at Sophie and Josh. “Sit, please. Our hostess will join us
shortly and then we’ll eat. You must be exhausted,” he added.
“I am tired,” Sophie admitted. She’d become aware of the
exhaustion a little earlier, and now she could barely keep her eyes
open. She was also a little frightened, realizing that the tiredness
was caused by the magic of the place feeding o her energy.
“When can we go home?” Josh demanded, unwilling to admit that
he too was worn out. Even his bones ached. He felt as if he was
coming down with a cold.
Nicholas Flamel cut a neat slice from the apple and popped it in
his mouth. “I’m afraid you will not be able to return for a little
while.”
“Why not?” Josh snapped.
Flamel sighed. He put down the stone arrowhead and the apple
and placed his hands at on the table. “Right now, neither Dee nor
the Morrigan knows who you are. It’s only because of that, that you
and your family are safe.”
“Our family?” Sophie asked. The sudden thought that her mother
or father might be in danger made her feel queasy. Josh reacted
with the same shock, his lips drawing into a thin white line.
“Dee will be thorough,” Flamel said. “He is protecting a
millennia-old secret, and he will not stop with killing you. Everyone
you know or have come in contact with will have an accident. I’d
hazard a guess that even Bernice’s Co ee Cup will burn to the
ground…simply because you once worked in it. Bernice might even
perish in the re.”
“But she has nothing to do with anything,” Sophie protested,
horri ed.
“Yes, but Dee doesn’t know that. Nor does he care. He has worked
with the Dark Elders for a long time, and now he has come to regard
humans as they do: as little more than beasts.”
“But we won’t tell anyone what we’ve seen…,” Josh began, “and
no one would believe us anyway….” His sentence trailed away.
“And if we don’t tell anyone, then no one will ever know,” Sophie
said. “We’ll never speak of this again. Dee will never nd us.” But
even as the words were leaving her mouth, she was beginning to
realize that it was hopeless. She and Josh were as trapped by their
knowledge of the Codex’s existence as Nicholas and Perry had been.
“He would nd you,” Flamel said reasonably. He glanced at the
Warrior Maid. “How long do you think it would it take for Dee or
one of the Morrigan’s spies to nd them?”
“Not long,” she said, munching on the apple skin. “A couple of
hours maybe. The rats or birds would track you, then Dee would
hunt you down.”
“Once you have been touched by magic, you are forever
changed.” Flamel moved his right hand in front of him, leaving the
faintest hint of pale green smoke dangling in the air. “You leave a
trail.” He hu ed a breath at the green smoke and it curled away and
disappeared.
“Are you saying we smell?” Josh demanded.
Flamel nodded. “You smell of wild magic. You caught a whi of it
earlier today when Hekate touched you both. What did you smell
then?”
“Oranges,” Josh said.
“Vanilla ice cream,” Sophie replied.
“And earlier still, when Dee and I fought: what did you smell
then?”
“Mint and rotten eggs,” Josh said immediately.
“Every magician has his or her own distinctive odor; rather like a
magical ngerprint. You must learn to heed your senses. Humans
use but a tiny percentage of theirs. They barely look, they rarely
listen, they never smell, and they think that they can only
experience feelings through their skin. But they talk, oh, do they
talk. That makes up for the lack of use of their other senses. When
you return to your own world, you will be able to recognize people
who have some taint of magical energy.” He cut out a neat cube of
apple and popped it into his mouth. “You may notice a peculiar
scent, you might even taste it or see it as a shimmer around their
bodies.”
“How long will the feeling last?” Sophie asked, curious. She
reached out and took a cherry. It was the size of a small tomato.
“Will it fade?”
Flamel shook his head. “It will never fade. On the contrary, it will
get stronger. You have to realize that nothing will ever be the same
for either of you from this day forth.”
Josh bit into an apple with a satisfying crunch. Juice ran onto his
chin. “You make that sound like a bad thing,” he said with a grin,
wiping his mouth with his sleeve.
Flamel was about to respond, but glanced up and suddenly came
to his feet. Scathach also rose smoothly, silently. Sophie
immediately stood, but Josh remained sitting until Sophie caught
his shoulder and pulled him up. Then she turned to look at the
Goddess with Three Faces.
But this wasn’t Hekate.
The woman she had seen earlier had been tall and elegant,
middle-aged maybe, her hair cut in a tight white helmet close to her
head, her black skin smooth and unwrinkled. This woman was
older, much, much older. The resemblance to Hekate was there, and
Sophie guessed that this was her mother or grandmother. Although
she was still tall, she stooped forward, picking her way around the
branch, leaning into an ornately carved black stick that was at least
as tall as Sophie. Her face was a mass of ne wrinkles, her eyes
deeply sunken in her head, glittering with a peculiar yellow cast.
She was completely bald, and Sophie could see where her skull was
tattooed in an intricate curling pattern. Although she was wearing a
dress similar to the one Hekate had worn earlier, the metalliclooking fabric ran black and red with her every movement.
Sophie blinked, squeezed her eyes shut and then blinked again.
She could see the merest hint of an aura around the woman, almost
as if she were exuding a ne white mist. When she moved, she left
tendrils of this mist behind her.
Without acknowledging anyone’s presence, the old woman settled
into the seat directly facing Nicholas Flamel. Only when she was
seated did Flamel and Scathach sit. Sophie and Josh sat down also,
glancing from Nicholas to the old woman, wondering who she was
and what was going on.
The woman raised a wooden goblet from the table, but didn’t
drink. There was movement in the trunk of the tree behind her, and
four tall, muscular young men appeared, carrying trays piled high
with food, which they set down in the center of the table before
backing away silently. The men looked so alike that they had to be
related, but it was their faces that drew the twins’ attention: there
was something wrong with the planes and angles of their skulls.
Foreheads sloped down to a ridge over their eyes, their noses were
short and splayed, their cheekbones pronounced, and their chins
receded sharply. The hint of yellow teeth was visible behind thin
lips. The men were bare-chested and barefoot, wearing only leather
kilts, onto which rectangular plates of metal had been sewn. And
their chests, legs and heads were covered with coarse red hair.
Sophie suddenly realized that she was staring, and deliberately
turned away. The men looked like some breed of primitive hominid,
but she knew the di erences between Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon,
and her father had plaster skulls of Australopithecus, Peking man and
the great apes in his study. These men were none of those. And then
she noticed that their eyes were blue: bright blue, and incredibly
intelligent-looking.
“They’re Torc Allta,” she said, and then froze in surprise when
everyone turned to look at her. She hadn’t realized she had spoken
aloud.
Josh, who’d been staring suspiciously at what might have been a
chunk of sh he’d forked out of a big bowl of stew, glanced at the
backs of the four young men. “I knew that,” he said casually.
Sophie kicked him under the table. “You did not,” she muttered.
“You were too busy checking out the food.”
“I’m hungry,” he said, then leaned across to his twin. “It was the
red hair and piggy noses that gave it away,” he murmured. “I
thought you’d realized that.”
“It would be a mistake to let them hear you say that,” Nicholas
Flamel interrupted quietly. “It would also be a mistake to judge by
appearances or to comment on what you see. In this time, in this
place, di erent standards, di erent criteria apply. Here words can
kill—literally.”
“Or get you killed,” Scathach added. She had piled her plate high
with an assortment of vegetables, only some of which were familiar
to the twins. She nodded in the direction of the tree. “But you are
right: they are Torc Allta in their humani form. Probably the nest
warriors of any time,” she said.
“They will accompany you when you leave here,” the old woman
said suddenly, her voice surprisingly strong coming from such a
frail-looking body.
Flamel bowed. “We will be honored by their presence.”
“Don’t be,” the old woman snapped. “They’ll not accompany you
solely for your protection: they’re to ensure that you really do leave
my realm.” She spread her long- ngered hands on the table, and
Sophie noticed that her ngernails were each painted a di erent
color. Strangely, the pattern was identical to the one she’d noticed
on Hekate’s nails earlier. “You cannot stay here,” the woman
announced abruptly. “You must go.”
The twins glanced at each other; why was she being so rude?
Scathach opened her mouth to speak, but Flamel reached over
and squeezed her arm. “That was always our intention,” he said
smoothly. The late-afternoon sunlight slanting through the trees
dappled his face, turning his pale eyes into mirrors. “When Dee
attacked my shop and snatched the Codex, I realized that I had
nowhere else to go.”
“You should have gone south,” the old woman said, her dress
almost completely black now, the red threads looking like veins.
“You would have been more welcome there. I want you to leave.”
“When I began to suspect that the prophecy was beginning to
come about, I knew I had to come to you,” Flamel continued,
ignoring her. The twins, who were following the exchange closely,
noticed how his eyes had ickered brie y in their direction.
The old woman turned her head and looked at the twins with her
butter-colored eyes. Her wizened face cracked in a humorless smile
that showed her tiny yellow teeth. “I have thought about this; I am
convinced that the prophecy does not refer to humani—and
especially not humani children,” she added with a hiss.
The contempt in the woman’s voice made Sophie speak out. “I
wish you wouldn’t talk about us as if we weren’t here,” she said.
“Besides,” Josh said, “your daughter was going to help us. Why
don’t we wait and see what she has to say.”
The elderly woman blinked at him, and her almost-invisible
eyebrows raised in a silent question. “My daughter?”
Sophie saw Scathach’s eyes widen in surprise or warning, but Josh
pressed on.
“Yes, the woman we met this afternoon. The younger woman—
your daughter? Or maybe she’s your granddaughter? She was going
to help us.”
“I have neither a daughter nor a granddaughter!” The old
woman’s dress ared black and red in long sheets of color. Her lips
drew back from her teeth and she snarled some incomprehensible
words. Her hands curled into claws, and the air was suddenly lled
with the citrus scent of lime. Dozens of tiny spinning balls of green
light gathered in the palms of her hand.
And then Scathach slammed a double-edged dagger into the
center of the table. The wood split in two with a thunderous snap
that spewed splinters into the air, and the bowls of food shattered
on the ground. The old woman reared back, the green light
dribbling from her ngers like liquid. It ran hissing and spitting
down the branch before sinking into the wood.
The four Torc Allta were immediately behind the old woman,
curved, scythelike swords in their hands, and three more of the
creatures in their boar shape burst through the undergrowth and
raced up the branch to assume positions behind Flamel and Scatty.
The twins froze, terri ed, unsure what had just happened.
Nicholas Flamel hadn’t moved, he merely continued to cut and eat
the apple. Scathach calmly sheathed her dagger and folded her
arms. She spoke quickly to the old woman. Sophie and Josh could
see Scathach’s lips moving, but all they could hear was a tinny,
mosquito-like buzz.
The old woman didn’t respond. Her face was an expressionless
mask as she stood and swept away from the table, surrounded by
the Torc Allta guards. This time neither Flamel nor Scathach stood.
In the long silence that followed, Scathach stooped down to
gather some of the fallen fruits and vegetables from the ground,
dusted them o and popped them into the only remaining unbroken
wooden bowl. She started to eat.
Josh was opening his mouth to ask the same question Sophie
wanted an answer to, but she reached under the table and squeezed
his arm, silencing him. She was aware that something terribly
dangerous had just occurred, and that somehow Josh was involved.
“I think that went well, don’t you?” Scathach asked eventually.
Flamel nished the apple and cleaned the edge of the black
arrowhead on a leaf. “It depends on how you de ne the word well,”
he said.
Scathach munched on a raw carrot. “We’re still alive and we’re
still in the Shadowrealm,” she said. “Could be worse. The sun is
going down. Our hostess will need to sleep, and in the morning,
she’ll be a di erent person. Probably won’t even remember what
happened tonight.”
“What did you say to her?” Flamel asked. “I’ve never mastered the
Elder Tongue.”
“I simply reminded her of the ancient duty of hospitality and
assured her that the slight to her was unintentional and made
through ignorance and was, therefore, no crime under the Elder
Laws.”
“She is fearful…,” Flamel murmured, glancing toward the huge
tree trunk. The Torc Allta guards could be seen moving inside, while
the largest of the boars had remained outside, blocking the
doorway.
“She is always fearful when the evening draws in. It is when she is
at her most vulnerable,” Scathach said.
“It would be nice,” Sophie interrupted, “if someone told us exactly
what just happened.” She hated it when adults talked among
themselves and ignored any children present. And that was exactly
what was happening now.
Scathach smiled, and suddenly, her vampire teeth looked very
long in her mouth. “Your twin managed to insult one of the Elder
Race and was very nearly turned into green slime for his crime.”
Josh shook his head. “But I didn’t say anything…,” he protested.
He looked at his twin for support as he quickly thought over his
conversation with the old woman. “All I said was that her daughter
or granddaughter had promised to help us.”
Scathach laughed softly. “There is no daughter or granddaughter.
The mature woman you saw this afternoon was Hekate. The old
woman you saw this evening is also Hekate, and in the morning,
you will meet a young girl who is Hekate as well.”
“The Goddess with Three Faces,” Flamel reminded them.
“Hekate is cursed to age with the day. Maiden in the morning,
matron in the afternoon, crone in the evening. She is incredibly
sensitive about her age.”
Josh swallowed hard. “I didn’t know….”
“No reason why you should have—except that your ignorance
could have gotten you killed…or worse.”
“But what did you do to the table?” Sophie asked. She looked at
the ruin of the circular table: it was split down the middle where
Scatty had cut it with her knife. The wood on either side of the split
looked dry and dusty.
“Iron,” Scatty said simply.
“One of the surprising side e ects of the arti cial metal,” Flamel
said, “is its ability to nullify even the most powerful magics. The
discovery of iron really signaled the end of the Elder Race’s power
in this world.” He held up the black stone arrowhead. “That’s why I
was using this. The Elders get nervous in the presence of iron.”
“But you’re carrying iron,” Sophie said to Scatty.
“I’m Next Generation—not pure Elder like Hekate. I can bear to
be around iron.”
Josh licked his dry lips. He was still remembering the green light
buzzing in Hekate’s palms. “When you said ‘turned into green
slime,’ you didn’t really mean…”
Scathach nodded. “Sticky green slime. Quite disgusting. And I
understand the victim retains some measure of consciousness for a
while.” She glanced at Flamel. “I cannot remember the last person
to cross one of the Elders and live, can you?”
Flamel stood. “Let’s hope she doesn’t remember in the morning.
Get some rest,” he said to the twins. “Tomorrow is going to be a
long day.”
“Why?” Sophie and Josh asked simultaneously.
“Because tomorrow, I’m hoping I can convince Hekate to Awaken
your magical potential. If you are going to have any chance of
surviving the days to come, I will have to train you to become
magicians.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Nicholas Flamel watched Sophie and Josh follow Scathach into the
tree. Only when the door had closed behind them did his colorless
eyes betray the worry he felt. That had been close: another
heartbeat or two and Hekate would have reduced Josh to bubbling
liquid. He wasn’t sure if she would have been able to reconstitute
him in the morning when she had taken on her maiden form. He
had to get the twins away from her before their ignorance got them
into trouble.
Flamel walked away from the ruined table and followed the slope
of the tree limb down to the pool. He stepped o the branch and
onto a narrow unpaved path. There were a multitude of marks in
the mud—some were boar tracks, others looked more like human
feet…and some were a curious mixture of both. He knew he was
being followed, that his every movement was being tracked by
creatures he couldn’t see, and he guessed that the Torc Allta were
probably the least of Hekate’s guards.
Crouching by the water’s edge, he took a deep breath and allowed
himself a moment to relax. It would be true to say that this had
been one of the more eventful days in his long life, and he was
exhausted.
From the moment Dee had snatched Perry and the Codex and the
twins had appeared, Flamel knew that one of the rst prophecies he
had read in the Book half a millennium previously was beginning to
come true.
“The two that are one, the one that is all.”
The Codex was full of cryptic phrases and incomprehensible
sayings. Most of them were concerned with the annihilation of Danu
Talis, the ancient homeland of the Elder Race, but there was also a
series of prophecies that had to do with the return of the Dark
Elders and the destruction and enslavement of the humani.
“There will come a time when the Book is taken…”
Well, that was fairly self-explanatory.
“…And the Queen’s man is allied with the Crow….”
That had to refer to Dr. John Dee. He had been Queen Elizabeth’s
personal magician. And the Crow was clearly the Crow Goddess.
“Then the Elder will step out of the Shadows…”
Flamel knew that Dee had been working for centuries with the
Dark Elders to bring about their return. He had heard uncon rmed
reports that more and more of the Dark Elders had left their
Shadowrealms and begun to explore the world of the humani again.
“…And the immortal must train the mortal. The two that are one
must become the one that is all.”
Nicholas Flamel was the immortal of the prophecy. He was sure of
it. The twins—“the two that are one”—must be the mortal who
needed to be trained. But he had no idea what the last phrase
referred to: “the one that is all.”
Circumstances had placed the twins in his care, and he was
determined that no harm should come to them, especially now that
he believed they were destined to play a critical role in the war
against the Dark Elders. Nicholas knew that bringing Josh and
Sophie to the Goddess with Three Faces had been an incredible risk
—especially in the company of Scathach. The Warrior’s feud with
the goddess was older than most civilizations. Hekate was one of the
most dangerous of the Elders. Immensely powerful, one of her many
skills enabled her to Awaken the magical powers that existed in
every sentient creature. However, like many of the Elders, her
metabolism was linked to a solar or lunar cycle. She aged during the
day, and e ectively died when the sun went down, but was then
reborn with the sunrise as a young woman. This peculiar trait
clouded and colored her thinking, and sometimes, as had happened
earlier, the older Hekate forgot the promises her younger selves had
made. Flamel was hoping he would be able to reason with the
maiden Hekate in the morning and convince her to Awaken the
twins’ extraordinary potential.
The Alchemyst knew that everyone had the possibility for magic
within them. Once it had been sparked into life, it tended to become
increasingly powerful of its own accord. Sometimes—very rarely—
children suddenly exhibited extraordinary powers, usually either
telepathy or telekinesis or a combination of both. Some children
realized what was happening and managed to control their growing
powers, while others never fully understood it. Left untrained and
unchecked, magical energy radiated o the children in waves,
moving furniture around, knocking people to the ground, gouging
marks in walls and ceilings. This was often reported as poltergeist
activity. He knew that if Hekate Awakened the twins’ dormant
magical powers, then he could use what he had learned over six
hundred years of study to increase their skills. Not only would he
give them the means of protecting themselves, but he would also be
able to begin preparing them for whatever lay ahead.
Still crouching by the pool, he stared into the green-tinged water.
Red and white koi moved just below the surface, while deeper
down, humanlike faces peered up, eyes huge and blank, mouths
lled with needle-pointed teeth. He decided against dipping his
ngers into the water.
It was commonly held in all the ancient magical books that there
were four elements of magic: Air and Water, Earth and Fire. But
centuries of study had revealed to Nicholas that there were, in fact,
ve elemental forces of magic. The fth force was the magic of
Time, the greatest of all magics. The Elders could control all the
other elements, but the secret of the fth was contained only in the
Codex…and that was one of the many reasons why Dee, and the
Dark Elders he sided with, wanted the Codex. With it in their
possession, they would be able to control time itself.
Along with Perenelle, Nicholas Flamel had spent most of his long
life studying the elemental forces. While Perry had trained herself in
di erent styles of magic, he had concentrated on the formulae and
theorems from the Codex. These formed the basis of the study of
alchemy, which was a type of science. Using the formulae, he had
learned how to turn base metal into gold and coal into diamonds,
but there was very little magic involved. True, it was a remarkably
complex formula and required months of preparation, but the
process itself was almost ridiculously simple. One day he had been
poor, the next wealthy beyond his wildest dreams. Taking Perry’s
advice, he had founded hospitals, established orphanages and
funded schools in his native Paris. Those had been good times…no,
more than that—they had been great times. Life had been so much
simpler then. They had not known about the Elder Race, had not
begun to suspect even the tiniest portion of dark knowledge the
Codex contained.
In recent years, Nicholas would sometimes awaken at the quietest
hour of night with a single thought spinning round and round in his
head: if he had known then what he knew now about the Codex,
would he have continued his research into the philosopher’s stone?
That path had ultimately brought him into contact with the Elder
Race—notably the Dark Elders—and had brought Dr. John Dee into
his life. It had forced Perry and him to fake their own deaths and
ee Paris and ultimately to spend the next half millennium in
hiding. But the study of the Codex had also made them both
immortal. Most nights he answered yes: even knowing all he knew
now, he would still have continued his studies and become the
Alchemyst.
But there were rare occasions, like today, when the answer was
no. Now he stood to lose Perenelle, probably the lives of the
innocent twins and the not-so-innocent Scathach—though she would
not be so easy to kill—and there was also a chance that he had
doomed the world.
Nicholas felt himself grow cold at the thought. The Book of
Abraham was full of what he had rst assumed to be stories,
legends, myths and tales. Over the centuries, his research had
revealed that all the stories were true, all the tales were based on
fact, and what he believed to be legends and myths were simply
reports of real beings and actual events.
The Elder Race existed.
They were creatures that looked human—sometimes—but had the
powers of gods. They had ruled for tens of thousands of years before
the creatures they called the humani—humankind—appeared on the
earth. The rst primitive humani worshipped the Elder Race as gods
and demons and over generations had constructed whole
mythologies and belief systems based around an individual or a
collection of Elders. The gods and goddesses of Greece and Egypt, of
Sumeria and the Indus Valley, of the Toltec and the Celt, existed.
They weren’t di erent gods, however; they were simply the same
Elders called by di erent names.
The Elder Race divided into two groups: those who worked with
the humani and those who regarded them as little better than slaves
—and, in some cases, food. The Elders warred against one another
in battles that took centuries to complete. Occasionally humani
would ght on one side, and their exploits were recalled in great
legends like those of Gilgamesh and Cuchulain, Atlas and
Hippolytus, Beowulf and Ilya of Murom.
Finally, when it became clear that these wars might destroy the
planet, the mysterious Abraham, using a powerful collection of
spells, forced all of the Elder Race—even those who supported the
humani—to retreat from the earth. Most were like Hekate and went
willingly, settling into a Shadowrealm of their own creation, and
afterward had little or no contact with the humani. Others, like the
Morrigan, though she was greatly weakened, continued to venture
out into the humani world and worked to restore the old ways.
Others still, like Scathach, lived anonymously among humankind.
Flamel eventually came to understand that the Codex, which
contained the spells that had driven the Elder Race from this world
and into their Shadowrealms, also contained the spells that would
allow them to return.
And if the Dark Elders returned, then the civilization of the
twenty- rst century would be wiped away in a matter of hours as
the godlike creatures warred among themselves. It had happened
before; mythology and history recorded the event as the Flood.
Now Dee had the Book. All he needed were the two pages Flamel
could feel pressed against his esh. And Nicholas Flamel knew that
Dee and the Morrigan would stop at nothing to get those pages.
Flamel hung his head and wished he knew what to do. He wished
Perenelle were with him; she would surely have a plan.
A bubble burst on the surface of the water. “The lady asks me to
tell you…” Another bubble popped and burst. “…that she is
unharmed.”
Flamel scrambled back from the pool’s edge. Tendrils of mist were
rising from the surface of the water, tiny bubbles popping and
snapping. A shape began to form out of the mist cloud—a surprising
shape: that of an elderly man in a security guard’s uniform. The
shape hovered, twisting and curling over the pond. The late-evening
sunshine shone through the water drops, turning each one into a
brilliant rainbow of light. “You are a ghost?” Nicholas asked.
“Yes, sir, I am. Or I was until Mrs. Flamel freed me.”
“Do you know me?” Nicholas Flamel asked. He wondered quickly
if this might be a trick of Dee’s, but then he dismissed the idea: the
sorcerer was powerful, but there was no way he could penetrate
Hekate’s defenses.
The mist shifted and thickened. “Yes, sir, I believe I do: you are
Nicholas Flamel, the Alchemyst. Mrs. Flamel asked me to go in
search of you. She suggested that I would nd you here, in this
particular Shadowrealm. She overheard Dee mention that you were
here.”
“She is unharmed?” Flamel asked eagerly.
“She is. The small man they call John Dee is terri ed of her,
though the other woman is not.”
“What woman?”
“A tall woman, wearing a cloak of black feathers.”
“The Morrigan,” Flamel said grimly.
“Aye, and that’s the message…” A sh leapt out of the pond and
the gure dissolved into a thousand water droplets that hung frozen
in the air, each one a tiny portion of a jigsaw that made up the
ghost. “Mrs. Flamel says you have to leave…and leave now. The
Crow Goddess is gathering her forces to invade the Shadowrealm.”
“She’ll not succeed. She is Next Generation; she has not the
power.”
The sh leapt again, scattering the water droplets, and the ghost’s
voice drifted and whispered away, dying with each bursting bubble.
“Mrs. Flamel instructed me to tell you that the Crow Goddess
intends to awaken Bastet.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Scathach
stood by the door to Sophie’s room and regarded the
twins with her grass green eyes. “Get some rest,” she said, repeating
Flamel’s advice. “Stay in your rooms,” she added. “You may hear
strange sounds from outside—just ignore them. You are completely
safe so long as you remain within these walls.”
“What sort of sounds?” Josh asked. His imagination was working
overtime, and he was beginning to regret all those hours he’d spent
playing Doom and Quake, scaring himself silly.
Scathach took a moment to consider. “Screams, maybe. Animal
howls. Oh, and laughter.” She smiled. “And believe me, you don’t
want to nd out what’s laughing,” she said, and added, without a
trace of irony, “Sleep tight.”
Josh Newman waited until Scathach had rounded the end of the
corridor before turning to his sister. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
Sophie chewed her bottom lip hard enough to leave the
impression of her two front teeth in the esh, and then nodded.
“I’ve been thinking the same thing.”
“I think we’re in some pretty serious danger,” Josh said urgently.
Sophie nodded again. Events had moved so fast that afternoon
that she’d barely had time to catch her breath. One moment she’d
been working in the co ee shop, the next they were racing across
San Francisco in the company of a man who claimed to be a sixhundred-year-old alchemyst and a girl who looked no older than
herself and yet who Flamel swore was a two-and-a-half-thousandyear-old female warrior. And a vampire. “I keep looking for the
hidden cameras,” she muttered, glancing around the room.
“Cameras?” Josh looked startled. He immediately picked up on
his twin’s thoughts. “You mean like Candid Camera?” He looked
uncomfortable and felt color ood his face: what if he’d managed to
make an idiot of himself in front of the entire nation? He’d never be
able to show his face at school again. He peered up into the corners
of the room, looking for the cameras. They were usually behind
mirrors. There were no mirrors in the room, but Josh knew that
didn’t mean anything; the new generation of cameras were so small
that they were virtually invisible. A sudden thought struck him.
“What about the birds?”
Sophie nodded once more. “I keep coming back to the birds.
Everything else could be special e ects: the Torc Allta could be
trained animals and men in prosthetic makeup, what happened in
Scathach’s dojo could be some sort of e ect and the rats could have
been trained. But not the birds: there were too many of them, and
they ripped the car to shreds.” The birds were what had nally
convinced her that she and Josh were in very real danger…because
if the birds were real, then everything else was real too.
Josh dug his hands into the back pockets of his jeans and stood by
the open window. The dense foliage came right up to the window
ledge, and although there was no glass in the opening, none of the
myriad bugs that itted through the late-evening air entered the
room. He recoiled as a bright blue snake as thick as his wrist
appeared out of the canopy of leaves and ickered a tongue that
was easily six inches long in his direction. The snake vanished as a
ball of tiny buzzing lights appeared, darting smoothly through the
trees. As they shot past the window, Josh could have sworn that the
entire swarm was composed of about a dozen tiny winged women,
none of them bigger than his fore nger. The lights came from
within their bodies. He licked dry lips. “Okay, let’s assume that this
is real…all of it—the magic, the ancient races—then that brings me
back to my original thought: we’ve got to get out of here.”
Sophie walked to the window, stood behind her brother and put
her arm on his shoulder. She was older than he was by twenty-eight
seconds—less than half a minute, Josh always reminded her—but
with their mother and father away so much, she had assumed the
role of a much older sister. Although he was already a good two
inches taller than she was, he would always be her baby brother. “I
agree,” she said tiredly. “We should try and make a run for it.”
Something in his sister’s voice made Josh turn to look at her. “You
don’t think we’ll get away,” he said evenly.
“Let’s try,” she said, not answering his question. “But I’m sure
they’ll come after us.”
“Flamel said that Dee would be able to track us. I’m sure Flamel—
or Scathach—can do that too.”
“Flamel has no reason to follow us,” Sophie pointed out.
“But Dee does,” Josh said. “What happens if we go home and Dee
and his people follow us there?” he wondered aloud.
Sophie frowned. “I’ve been thinking about that. Flamel said that
we’ll be able to see the magical aura that surrounds people.”
Josh nodded.
“Hekate hasn’t Awakened our magical powers.” She frowned
again, trying to remember exactly what Nicholas Flamel had said.
“Flamel said we smelled of wild magic.”
Josh sni ed deeply. “But I can’t smell anything. No fruit or
oranges or vanilla ice cream. Maybe we don’t smell until that
happens.”
“If we managed to make it back home, we could head out to Utah
to Mom and Dad. We could stay with them for the rest of the
summer until all this blows over.”
“That’s not a bad idea,” Josh said. “No one would nd us in the
desert. And right now, the hot, boring, sandy desert sounds really
attractive.”
Sophie turned to look at the door. “There’s only one problem.
This place is a maze. Do you think you can nd the way back to the
car?”
“I think so.” He nodded. “Actually, I’m sure of it.”
“Let’s go, then.” She checked her pocket for her dead cell phone.
“Let’s get your stu .”
The twins paused by the door of Sophie’s room and peered up and
down the corridor. It was deserted and in almost total darkness
except where irregular clumps of arm-length crystals emitted a
milky white light.
Somewhere in the distance, a sound that was caught between
laughter and screaming echoed down the corridors. With their
rubber-soled sneakers making no sound on the oor, they darted
across the corridor into Josh’s room.
“How did we ever get into this mess?” Josh wondered out loud.
“I guess we were just in the wrong place at the wrong time,”
Sophie said. She had remained standing by the door, watching the
corridor. But even as she was saying the words, she was beginning
to suspect that there was more to it than that. There was something
else going on, something to do with the prophecy that Flamel had
referred to, something to do with them. And the very idea terri ed
her.
The twins slipped into the corridor and moved through the
circular rooms, taking their time, peering into each one before
entering. They kept stopping, listening as snatches of conversations
in almost recognizable languages or music played on unidenti able
instruments oated down the corridor. Once, a high-pitched howl of
maniacal laughter sent them ducking into the nearest room as it
seemed to approach, then disappear again. When they crept back
out of the room, they noticed that all the light crystals in the
corridor had dimmed to a bloodred glow.
“I’m glad we didn’t see what passed by,” Josh said shakily.
Sophie grunted a response. Her brother was in the lead; she
followed two steps behind, her hand on his shoulder. “How do you
know where we’re going?” she whispered, bringing her mouth close
to his ear. All the rooms looked identical to her.
“When we rst came into the house, I noticed that the walls and
oor were dark, but as we moved down the corridors, they became
lighter and paler in color. Then I realized that we were walking
through di erent shades of wood, like the rings of a tree trunk. All
we have to do is to follow the corridor that leads to the dark wood.”
“Smart,” Sophie said, impressed.
Josh glanced over his shoulder and grinned. “Told you those
video games weren’t a waste of time. The only way not to get lost in
the maze games is to watch for clues, like patterns on the walls or
ceilings, and to keep a note of your steps so you can retrace them if
you need to.” He stepped out into a corridor. “And if I’m right, the
main door should be…there!” he nished triumphantly.
The twins ed across the vast open eld in front of the huge tree
house, and made their way to the tree-lined pathway that led back
to the car. Even though night had fallen, they had no problem
seeing. The moon hung bright and low in the heavens, and the sky
was lled with an extraordinary number of brilliant stars, which
combined with a swirling band of silvery dust high in the sky to
give the night a peculiar grayish luminescence. Only the shadows
remained pitch black.
Although it wasn’t cold, Sophie shivered: the night felt wrong.
Josh pulled o his hooded sweatshirt and draped it over his sister’s
shoulders. “The stars are di erent,” she muttered. “They’re so
bright.” Craning her neck, she looked up into the heavens, trying to
peer through the branches of the Yggdrasill. “I can’t see the Big
Dipper, and the North Star is missing.”
“And there was no moon last night,” Josh said, nodding to where
the full moon was rising huge and yellow-white over the treetops.
“No moon in our world,” he added solemnly.
Sophie stared hard at the moon. There was something about it…
something wrong. She tried to identify the familiar craters, and then
felt her stomach lurch with a sudden realization. Her hand, when
she pointed upward, was trembling. “That’s not our moon!”
Josh looked hard, squinting against the glare. Then he saw what
his sister was talking about. “The surface is…di erent. Smoother,”
he said softly. “Where are the craters? I can’t see Kepler, Copernicus
or even Tycho.”
“Josh,” Sophie said quickly, “I think we’re looking at the night
sky as it was thousands of years ago, maybe hundreds of thousands
of years ago.” Sophie tilted her head and looked up. Josh was
startled to see that the moonlight gave her face a skeletal
appearance, and he quickly looked away, disturbed. He had always
been close to his sister, but the last few hours had served to remind
him just how important she was to him.
“Didn’t Scathach say that Hekate had created this Shadowrealm?”
Josh asked. “I bet it’s modeled on the world she remembered.”
“So this is the night sky and the moon as they were thousands of
years ago,” Sophie said in awe. She wished she had her digital
camera with her, just to capture the extraordinary image of the
smooth-faced moon.
The twins were looking into the heavens when a shadow ickered
across the face of the moon, a speck that might have been a bird…
except that the wingspan was too wide, and no bird had that
serpentlike neck and tail.
Josh grabbed his sister’s hand and pulled her toward the car. “I’m
really beginning to hate this place,” he grumbled.
The SUV was where they had left it, parked in the center of the
path. The moon washed yellow light across the shattered
windshield, the broken patterns in the starred glass picked out in
shadow. The brilliance also highlighted the scars on the car’s body,
the scratches and gouges in sharp relief. The roof was studded with
hundreds of tiny holes where the birds had pecked through the
metal, the rear window wiper dangled by a thread of rubber and the
two side mirrors were completely missing.
The twins regarded the SUV silently, the full realization of the
bird attack beginning to sink in. Sophie ran a nger down a series of
scratches in the window on the passenger side of the car. Those few
millimeters of glass were all that had protected her esh from the
birds’ claws.
“Let’s go,” Josh said, pulling open the door and sliding into the
driver’s seat. The keys were where he had left them, in the ignition.
“I feel a little bad, running out on Nicholas and Scatty without
saying anything,” Sophie said as she pulled open the door and
climbed in. But the immortal Alchemyst and the Warrior would be
better o without them, she reckoned. They were more than able to
defend themselves; the last thing they needed was two teenagers
slowing them down.
“We’ll apologize if we ever see them again,” Josh said. He
privately thought he would be happy never to see either of them
again. Playing video games was all ne and well. When you were
killed in a game, you just started again. In this Shadowrealm,
though, there were no second chances, and a lot more ways to die.
“Do you know how we get out of here?” Sophie asked.
“Sure.” Her brother grinned, his teeth white in the moonlight.
“We reverse. And we don’t stop for anything.”
Josh turned the key in the ignition. There was a metallic click and
a whining sound, which quickly descended into silence. He turned
the key again. This time there was only the click.
“Josh…?” Sophie began.
It took him just a moment to gure out what had happened. “The
battery’s dead. Probably drained by the same force that drained our
phones,” Josh murmured. He swiveled around in the seat to stare
through the scarred rear window. “Look, we came down that path
behind us; we didn’t turn left or right. Let’s make a run for it. What
do you think?” He turned back to look at his sister, but she wasn’t
looking at him, she was staring through the windshield in front of
her. “You’re not even listening to me.”
Sophie reached over, took her twin’s face in her hand and turned
his head toward the windshield. He looked, blinked, swallowed
hard, then reached over to push down the locks on the doors. “What
now?” he asked.
Crouching directly in front of them was a creature that was
neither bird nor serpent, but something caught in between. It stood
about the size of a tall child. Moonlight dappled its snakelike body
and shone weakly through outstretched batlike wings, the tiny
bones and veins etched in black. Clawed feet dug deeply into the
soft ground, and a long tail lashed to and fro behind it. But it was
the head that held their attention. The skull was long and narrow,
eyes huge and round, the gaping mouth lled with hundreds of tiny
white teeth. The head tilted rst to one side and then the other, and
then the mouth snapped open and closed. The creature took a hop
closer to the car.
There was movement in the air behind it, and a second creature,
even bigger than the rst, dropped from the night skies. It folded its
wings and stood upright as it turned its hideous head toward the
car.
“Maybe they’re vegetarians,” Josh suggested. Leaning over the
driver’s seat, he rummaged in the back of the car, looking for
something he could use as a weapon.
“Not with those teeth,” his sister said grimly. “I think they’re
pterosaurs,” she said, remembering the huge suspended skeleton she
had seen in the Texas Natural Science Center.
“Like pterodactyls?” Josh asked, turning back. He had found a
small re extinguisher.
“Pterosaurs are older,” Sophie said.
A third pterosaur dropped from the night sky, and like three
hunched old men, the creatures began to advance on the car.
“We should have stayed in the tree,” Sophie muttered. They’d
been warned, hadn’t they? Stay in your rooms, don’t leave…and
after everything they’d seen so far, they should have guessed that
Hekate’s Shadowrealm at night was a dangerous and deadly place.
Now they were facing something out of the Cretaceous period.
Josh opened his mouth to reply, then closed it again. He pulled
the retaining pin out of the re extinguisher, arming it. He wasn’t
sure what would happen if he red o a blast of the gas at them.
The three creatures split up. One approached from the front of the
car; the remaining two moved toward the driver and passenger
windows.
“Wish we knew some magic now,” Sophie said fervently. She
could feel her heart tripping in her chest and was aware that her
tongue seemed far too large for her mouth. She felt breathless and
light-headed.
The largest pterosaur leaned across the hood of the car, resting its
huge wings on the scarred metal to support itself. Its long, snakelike
head darted forward to peer into the body of the car, and it slowly
looked from Sophie to Josh and then back to Sophie. Seen this close,
its mouth was enormous, its teeth endless.
Josh positioned the nozzle of the re extinguisher against one of
the many holes in the windshield and aimed it at the pterosaur. His
eyes were darting left and right, watching the approach of the other
two creatures, and his hands were sweating so heavily that he was
nding it di cult to hold the re extinguisher.
“Josh,” Sophie whispered, “do something. Do something now!”
“Maybe the gas in the extinguisher will scare them away,” Josh
replied, unconsciously lowering his voice to a whisper. “Or poison
them or something…”
“And why would you want to do that?” The pterosaur tilted its head
to look at Josh, mouth working, teeth glinting. The words were full
of clicking pops and stops, but the language was English. “We are
not your enemy.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Even
for Bel Air, the area of L.A. renowned for its extravagant
properties, the house was extraordinary. Vast and sprawling, built
entirely of white travertine marble, and accessible only by a private
road, it occupied a sixty-acre estate surrounded by a twelve-foot
wall topped by an electric fence. Dr. John Dee had to wait for ten
minutes outside the closed gates while an armed security guard
checked his identity and another guard examined every inch of the
car, even scanned beneath it with a small camera. Dee was glad he’d
chosen a commercial limousine service, with a human driver; he
wasn’t sure what the guards would have made of a mud Golem.
Dee had own in from San Francisco late in the afternoon on his
private jet. The limousine, booked by his o ce, had picked him up
from Burbank—now renamed Bob Hope Airport, he noted—and
driven him down to Sunset Boulevard through some of the most
appalling tra c he had encountered since he’d lived in Victorian
London.
For the rst time in his very long life, Dee felt as if events were
slipping out of his control. They were moving too quickly, and in his
experience, that was when accidents happened. He was being
rushed by people—well, not people, exactly, more beings—too eager
for results. They had made him move against Flamel today, even
though he’d told them he needed another few days of preparation.
And he’d been right. Twenty-four more hours of planning and
surveillance would have enabled him to snatch Nicholas as well as
Perenelle, and the entire Codex. Dee had warned his employers that
Nicholas Flamel could be tricky indeed, but they hadn’t listened to
him. Dee knew Flamel better than anyone. Over the centuries he
had come close to catching him—very close—but on every occasion,
Flamel and Perenelle had managed to slip away.
Sitting back in the air-conditioned car while the guards continued
their inspections, he recalled the rst time he had met the famous
Alchemyst, Nicholas Flamel.
John Dee was born in 1527. His was the world of Queen Elizabeth
I, and he had served the Queen in many capacities: as an advisor
and a translator, a mathematician and an astronomer, and a
personal astrologer. It had been left to him to choose the date of her
coronation, and he had picked noon on January 15, 1559. He
promised the young princess that hers would be a long reign. It
lasted for forty- ve years.
Dr. John Dee was also the Queen’s spy.
Dee spied for the English Queen across Europe and was her most
in uential and powerful agent operating on the Continent. As a
renowned scholar and scientist, magician and alchemist, he was
welcomed at the courts of kings and the palaces of nobles. He
professed to speak only English, Latin and Greek—though in
actuality, he spoke a dozen languages well, and understood at least
a dozen more, even Arabic and a smattering of the language of
Cathay. He learned early on that people were often indiscreet when
they didn’t know that he understood their every word, and he used
that to his fullest advantage. Dee signed his con dential and coded
reports with the numbers 007. He thought it wonderfully ironic that
hundreds of years later when Ian Fleming created James Bond, he
gave Bond the same code name.
John Dee was one of the most powerful magicians of his age. He
had mastered necromancy and sorcery, astrology and mathematics,
divination and scrying. His journeys across Europe brought him into
contact with all the great magicians and sorcerers of that time…
including the legendary Nicholas Flamel, the man known as the
Alchemyst.
Dee discovered the existence of Nicholas Flamel—who had
supposedly died in 1418—entirely by accident. That encounter was
to shape the rest of his life and, in so many ways, in uence the
history of the world.
Nicholas and Perenelle had returned to Paris in the rst decade of
the sixteenth century, and were working as physicians, tending to
the poor and sick in the very hospitals the Flamels had founded
more than a hundred years earlier. They were living and working
virtually in the shadow of the great Cathedral of Notre Dame. Dee
was in Paris on a secret mission for the Queen, but the moment he
saw the slender dark-haired man and his green-eyed wife working
together in the high-ceiling wards of the hospital, he knew who they
were. Dee was one of the few people in the world who had a copy of
Flamel’s masterwork, The Summary of Philosophy, which included an
engraving of the famous Alchemyst opposite the title page. When
Dee had introduced himself to the doctor and his wife, calling them
by their true names, neither had denied it. Of course, they also
knew of the famous Dr. John Dee by reputation. Although Perenelle
had had some reservations, Nicholas had been delighted with the
opportunity to take on the English magician as a new apprentice.
Dee had immediately left England and spent the next four years
training with Nicholas and Perenelle in Paris.
And it was in Paris, in the year 1575, that he had rst learned of
the existence of the Elder Race.
He had been studying late at night in his tiny attic room in
Flamel’s house when a creature out of a nightmare had slithered
down the chimney, scattering coal and wood as it crawled out onto
the scorched mat. The creature was a gargoyle, one of the ancient
breed of ghouls that infested the sewers and graveyards of most
European cities. Similar to the crude shapes carved in stone that
decorated the cathedral almost directly opposite the house, this was
a living creature of veined, marble-like esh and cinder black eyes.
Speaking in an archaic form of Greek, the gargoyle invited him to a
meeting on the roof of the Cathedral of Notre Dame. Recognizing
that this invitation was not one he could refuse, Dee followed the
creature into the night. Loping along, sometimes on two legs, often
on four, the gargoyle led him through increasingly narrow alleys,
then down into the sewers, and eventually into a secret passageway
that took him deep within the great cathedral’s walls. He followed
the gargoyle up the thousand and one steps carved into the interior
of the wall that nally led onto the roof of the Gothic cathedral.
“Wait,” it had commanded, and then said no more. Its mission
accomplished, the gargoyle ignored Dee and settled down on the
parapet, hunched forward, wings folded over its shoulders, tail
curled tightly against its back, tiny horns visible as they jutted from
its forehead. It peered over the square far below, tracking the
movements of the late-night stragglers or those who had no homes
to go to, looking for a suitable meal. If anyone had chanced to
glance up, the gargoyle would have been indistinguishable from any
of the countless stone carvings on the building.
Dee had walked to the edge of the roof and looked across the city.
All of nighttime Paris was laid out below him, thousands of winking
lights from cooking res, oil lamps and candles, the smoke rising
straight up into the still air, the countless dots of light split by the
black curve of the Seine. From this height, Dee could hear the buzz
of the city—a low drone, like a beehive settling down for the night
—and smell the noxious stench that hung over the streets—a
combination of sewers, rotting fruit and spoiled meat, human and
animal sweat and the stink of the river itself.
Perched over the cathedral’s famous rose window, Dee waited.
The study of magic had taught him many things—especially the
value of patience. The scholar in him enjoyed the experience of
standing on the roof of the tallest building in Paris, and he wished
he’d brought his sketch pad with him. He contented himself with
looking around, committing everything he saw to his incredible
memory. He recalled a recent visit to Florence. He had gone there to
examine the diaries of Leonardo da Vinci. They were written in a
strange cipher which no one had been able to break: it had taken
him less than an hour to crack the code—no one had realized that
Leonardo had written his diaries not only in code, but in mirror
image. The diaries were full of many amazing drawings for
proposed inventions: guns that red many times, an armored coach
that moved without the need of horses, and a craft that could sail
beneath the sea. There was one, however, that particularly
interested Dee: a harness that da Vinci claimed would allow a man
to take to the air and y like a bird. Dee had not been entirely
convinced that the design would work, though he wanted nothing
more in the world than to y. Looking out over Paris now, he began
to imagine what it would be like to strap da Vinci’s wings to his
arms and sail out over the roofs.
His thoughts were interrupted as a icker of movement caught his
attention. He turned to the north, where a shape was moving in the
night sky, a black shadow trailing scores of smaller dots. The
smaller shapes looked as if they could be birds…except that he
knew that birds rarely y at night. Dee knew immediately and
without question that this was what he had been brought up here to
meet. He concentrated on the larger shape as it came closer, trying
to make sense of what he was seeing, but it was only when the
gure dropped onto the roof that he realized he was looking at an
ashen-faced woman dressed entirely in black, wearing a long cloak
of crow’s wings.
That night, Dr. John Dee rst met the Morrigan. That night, he
learned of the Elder Race and how they had been forced from the
world of men by the magic in the Book of Abraham the Mage, a
book that was currently in the possession of Nicholas Flamel. That
night, Dee learned that there were those among the Elders who
wanted to return to their rightful place as the rulers of mankind.
And that night, the Crow Goddess promised Dee that he would one
day control the entire world, he would be master of an empire that
stretched from pole to pole, from sunrise to sunset. All he had to do
was to steal the Book from Flamel and hand it over.
That night, Dr. John Dee became the champion of the Dark
Elders.
It was a mission that had taken him across the world, and into the
many Shadowrealms that bordered it. He had fought ghosts and
ghouls, creatures that had no right to exist outside of nightmares,
others that were left over from a time predating the arrival of the
humani. He had gone to battle at the head of an army of monsters
and had spent at least a decade wandering lost in an icy
Otherworld. Many times, he had been concerned for his safety, but
he had never been truly frightened…until this moment, sitting
before the entrance to a Bel Air estate in twenty- rst-century Los
Angeles. In those early days he had not been fully aware of the
powers of the creatures he served, but nearly four and a half
centuries in their service had taught him many things…including
the fact that death was probably the least of all the punishments
they could in ict on him.
The armed security guard stepped back and the high metal gates
clicked open, allowing Dee’s car to sweep in on the long white stone
driveway toward the sprawling marble mansion that was just visible
through the trees. Although night had fallen, no lights were showing
in the house, and for a moment Dee imagined that no one was at
home. Then he remembered that the person—the creature—he had
come to meet preferred the hours of darkness and had no need of
lights.
The car turned into the circular drive in front of the main
entrance, where the headlights picked up a trio of people standing
on the bottom step. When the car nally crunched to a halt on the
white gravel, a gure stepped up to the door and pulled it open. It
was impossible to make out any details in the gloom, but the voice
that came out of the darkness was male, and spoke to him in heavily
accented English. “Dr. Dee, I presume. I am Senuhet. Please, come
in. We’ve been expecting you.” Then the gure turned away and
strode up the steps.
Dee climbed out of the car, brushed o his expensive suit and,
conscious that his heart was uttering, followed Senuhet into the
mansion. The other two gures fell into step on either side of him.
Although no one said anything, Dee knew they were guards. And he
wasn’t entirely sure they were human.
The magician recognized the heavy, cloying scent as soon as he
stepped into the house: it was frankincense, the rare and incredibly
expensive aromatic gum from the Middle East, used in ancient times
in Egypt and Greece and as far to the east as China. Dee felt his eyes
water and his nose twitch. Those of the Elder Race were particularly
fond of frankincense, but it gave him a headache.
As the three shadowy gures led Dee into the great hallway, he
caught a glimpse of Senuhet: a small, slender man, bald and olive
skinned. He looked as if he was of Middle Eastern origin, from Egypt
or Yemen. Senuhet pushed closed the heavy front door, spoke two
words—“Stay here”—and then disappeared into the darkness,
leaving Dee in the company of the two silent guards.
Dee looked around. Even in the shadowy half-light, he could see
that the hallway was bare. There was no furniture on the tiled oor,
there were no pictures or mirrors on the walls, no curtains on the
windows. He knew that there were houses like this scattered across
the world, homes to those few Dark Elders who liked to walk in the
world of men, usually creating mischief. Though they were
extraordinarily skilled and dangerous, their powers were extremely
limited because of the proliferation of iron in the modern world,
which served to dull their magical energies. In the way that lead
was poisonous to humans, iron, the metal of mankind, was deadly to
the Elder Race. Dee knew, even without looking, that there would
not be a scrap of that particular metal in this house. Everything
would be made of gold or silver, even down to the door handles and
the taps in the bathrooms.
The Dark Elders valued their privacy; their preference was for
quiet, out-of-the-way places—small islands, patches of desert,
countries like Switzerland, portions of the former Soviet Union, the
arctic reaches of Canada, Himalayan temples and the Brazilian
jungle. When they chose to live in cities like this one, their houses
were secured behind walls and wire, the grounds patrolled by armed
guards and dogs. And if anyone was lucky or foolish enough to
actually reach the house, they would encounter older, darker and
more lethal guards.
“This way.”
Dee was pleased that he’d managed to control his fright at the
sound of Senuhet’s voice; he hadn’t heard the man return. Would
they go up or down? he wondered. In his experience those of the
Elder Race fell into two neat categories: those who preferred to
sleep on roofs and those who preferred basements. The Morrigan
was a creature of attics and roofs.
Senuhet stepped into a puddle of light and Dee noted now that his
eyes were painted with black kohl, the top lid completely
blackened, two horizontal lines running from the corners of his eyes
to his ears. Three vertical white lines were painted on his chin,
beneath his lips. He led Dee to a concealed door directly under the
broad staircase and opened it with a password in the language that
the boy king Tutankhamen would have spoken. Dee followed the
gure into a pitch-black corridor and stopped when the door clicked
shut behind them. He heard the man moving ahead of him, then his
footsteps clicking on stairs.
Down. Dee should have guessed that the Dark Elder the Morrigan
had sent him to see would be a creature of basements and tunnels.
“I’ll need light,” he said aloud. “I don’t want to fall down the stairs
in the dark and break my neck.” His voiced echoed slightly in the
con ned space.
“There is no electricity in this house, Dr. John Dee. But we have
heard that you are a magician of note. If you wish to create light,
then you are permitted to do so.”
Without a word, Dee stretched out his hand. A blue spark snapped
to life in his palm. It buzzed and hissed, spinning about, then it
started to grow, from the size of a pea to that of a grape. It gave o
a cold blue-white light. Holding his hand out in front of him, Dee
started down the stairs.
He began to count the steps as he descended, but quickly gave up,
distracted by the decorations on the walls, the ceiling and even the
oor. It was like stepping into an Egyptian tomb, but, unlike any of
the countless tombs he had seen, where the artwork was faded,
chipped and broken and everything was coated in a ne layer of
gritty sand, here the decorations were pristine, brilliant and
complete. The colors, slightly distorted by the blue light he was
carrying, looked as if they had just been laid down, the pictographs
and hieroglyphs were vivid and crisp, the names of gods picked out
in thick gold leaf.
A sudden updraft caused the blue-white ball of light to icker and
dance in his hand, sending the shadows leaping and darting. Dee’s
nostrils ared: the wind carried the stench of something old…old
and long dead.
The stairs ended in a wide, vaulted cellar. Dee felt something
crunch and snap beneath his feet with his rst step. He lowered his
hand and the blue-white light shone across the oor…which was
covered with countless tiny white bones, blanketing the ground in
an ivory carpet. It took Dee a long moment before he recognized the
bones as those of rats and mice. Some of them were so old that they
crumbled into white powder when he disturbed them, but others
were much newer. Unwilling to ask a question to which he really
did not want an answer, Dee followed his silent guide, bones
crunching and crackling with every step. He lifted his hand high,
shedding light across the chamber. Unlike the stairwell, however,
this room was unadorned, the walls streaked black with moisture,
green mold gathering close to the oor, sprouting fungi dappling the
ceiling.
“Looks like you have a problem with damp,” Dee said
unnecessarily, simply to break the growing silence.
“It is of no matter,” Senuhet said quietly.
“Have you been here long?” Dee wondered, glancing around.
“In this place?” The other man paused, considering. “Less than a
hundred years. No time at all, really.”
A shape moved in the shadows. “And we will not be here much
longer. That is why you are here, isn’t it, Dr. Dee?” The voice was a
cross between a sultry growl and a purr, shaping the English words
with di culty. Almost against his will, Dee raised his hand,
allowing the light in his palm to illuminate the tall, slender gure
that moved in the gloom. The light moved over bare feet, toenails
black and pointed like claws, then up a heavy white kiltlike skirt
studded with stones and precious jewels, and a chest crisscrossed
with wide straps etched with Egyptian characters—and nally
reached the head.
Although he knew what he was going to see, Dee couldn’t prevent
the gasp of shock from escaping his lips as he looked at Bastet. The
body was that of a woman, but the head that brushed the arched
ceiling belonged to a cat, sleek and furred, with huge yellow slitpupiled eyes, a long pointed snout and high triangular ears. The
mouth opened and Dee’s cold light ran across gleaming yellow
teeth. This was the creature that had been worshipped for
generations throughout the land of Egypt.
Dee licked dry lips as he bowed deeply. “Your niece, the
Morrigan, sends her regards and has asked me to relay the message
that it is time to take your revenge on the three-faced one.”
Bastet surged forward and wrapped razor-tipped claws in the
folds of Dee’s expensive suit coat, punching holes in the silk.
“Precisely…tell me precisely what my niece said,” she demanded.
“I’ve told you,” Dee said, looking up into the terrifying face.
Bastet’s breath smelled of rotten meat. He tossed the blue-white ball
of light into the air, where it hung, suspended and whirling, then he
carefully removed Bastet’s claws from his jacket. The coat was a
shredded ruin.
“The Morrigan wants you to join her in an attack on Hekate’s
Shadowrealm,” Dee said simply.
“Then it is time,” Bastet announced triumphantly.
The ancient magician nodded, shadows racing and dancing on the
walls with the movement. “It is time,” he agreed, “time for the Elder
Race to return and reclaim this earth.”
Bastet howled, the sound high-pitched and terrifying, and then
the darkness behind her boiled and shifted as thousands of cats of
every breed, of all shapes and sizes, poured into the cellar and
gathered around her in an ever-widening circle. “It is time to hunt,”
she announced, “time to feed.”
The cats threw back their heads and mewled and howled. Dee
found the din utterly terrifying: it sounded like countless lost babies
crying.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Scathach was waiting by the enormous open doors when Sophie
and Josh returned to the tree. The pterosaur hopped along behind
them, and the other two circled low in the sky over their heads, the
downdraft of their wings setting eddies of dust circling and dancing
around them. Although nothing was said, the twins knew they were
being gently—but rmly—herded back toward the house.
In the gloom, Scathach’s face was unnaturally pale, her cropped
red hair black in the shadows. Although her lips were set in a grim
line, her voice, when she spoke, was carefully neutral. “Do you
really want me to tell you just how stupidly dangerous that was?”
Josh opened his mouth to reply, but Sophie caught his arm,
silencing him. “We just wanted to go home,” she said simply,
tiredly. She already knew what the Warrior was going to say.
“You cannot,” Scathach said, and turned away.
The twins hesitated at the door, then turned to look back at the
pterosaur. It tilted its snakelike head and regarded them with a huge
slit-pupiled eye, and its voice echoed atly in their heads. “Don’t
worry too much about Scathach; her bark is much worse than her bite.”
The creature opened its mouth to show hundreds of triangular teeth
in what might have been a smile. “I do believe she was worried about
you,” it added, then turned away, ran in a series of short hops and
took to the air with a crack of wings.
“Don’t say a word,” Sophie warned her brother. Josh’s quips and
comments were always getting him into trouble. Whereas Sophie
had the ability to see something and keep her mouth shut, her
brother always had to make a comment or observation.
“You’re not the boss of me,” Josh snapped, but his voice was
shaky. Josh had a fear of snakes going back to the time he’d gone
camping with their father and had fallen into a rattlesnake nest.
Luckily, the deadly serpent had just fed and had chosen to ignore
him, giving him the seconds he’d needed to scramble away. He’d
had nightmares about snakes for weeks after that, and still did
occasionally, when he was particularly stressed—usually at exam
time. The huge, serpentlike pterosaurs belonged to his darkest
nightmares, and when they’d come hopping out of the night, he’d
felt his heart hammering so powerfully that the skin on his chest
had actually pulsed. When that long-toothed face had leaned toward
him, he’d been sure he was going to faint. Even now, he could feel
the icy sweat trickling along the length of his spine.
Sophie and Josh followed Scathach through Hekate’s house. The
twins were aware now of movement in the shadows, oorboards
creaking underfoot, wooden walls popping and cracking as if the
house were moving, shifting, growing. They were also conscious
that the voices, the screams and shouts of earlier, had fallen silent.
Scathach led them to an empty circular room where Nicholas
Flamel was waiting. He stood facing away from them, hands clasped
tightly against the small of his back, and stared out into the
shadowed night. The only light in the room came from the huge
moon now starting to dip toward the horizon. One side of the room
was bathed in harsh silver-white light, the other was in darkness.
Scatty crossed the room to stand beside the Alchemyst. She folded
her arms across her chest and turned to the twins, her face an
expressionless mask.
“You could have been killed,” Flamel said very softly, without
turning around. “Or worse.”
“You can’t keep us here,” Josh said quickly, his voice sounding
too loud in the silence. “We’re not your prisoners.”
The Alchemyst glanced over his shoulder. He was wearing his tiny
round glasses and, in the gloom, his eyes were hidden behind the
silver circles. “No, you’re not,” he said very quietly, his French
accent suddenly pronounced. “You are the prisoners of
circumstance, of coincidence and chance…if you believe in such
things.”
“I don’t,” Scathach muttered.
“Neither do I,” Nicholas said, turning around. He took o his
glasses and squeezed the bridge of his nose. There were dark circles
under his pale eyes, and his lips were pinched in a thin line. “We are
all prisoners of a sort here—prisoners of circumstance and events.
Nearly seven hundred years ago, I bought a battered secondhand
book written in an incomprehensible language. That day I too
became a prisoner, trapped as securely as if I were behind bars. Two
months ago, Josh, you should never have asked me for a job, and
you, Sophie, should never have started working in The Co ee Cup.
But you did, and because you made those decisions you are both
standing here with me tonight.” He paused and glanced at Scathach.
“Of course, there is a school of thought that suggests that you were
fated to take the jobs, to meet Perenelle and me and to come on this
adventure.”
Scathach nodded. “Destiny,” she said.
“You’re saying that we have no free will,” Sophie asked, “that all
this was meant to happen?” She shook her head. “I don’t, for one
minute, believe that.” The very idea went against everything she
believed; the idea that the future could be foretold was simply
ludicrous.
“Neither do I,” Josh said de antly.
“And yet,” Flamel said very softly, “what if I were to tell you that
the Book of the Mage—a book written more than ten thousand years
ago—speaks of you?”
“That’s impossible,” Josh blurted, terri ed by the implications.
“Ha!” Nicholas Flamel spread his arms wide. “And is this not
impossible? Tonight you encountered the nathair, the winged
guardians of Hekate’s realm. You heard their voices in your heads.
Are they not impossible? And the Torc Allta—are they not equally
impossible? These are creatures that have no right to exist outside of
myth.”
“And what about us?” Scathach asked. “Nicholas is nearly seven
hundred years old, and I am so old I have seen empires rise and fall.
Are we not equally impossible?”
Neither Josh nor Sophie could deny that.
Nicholas stepped forward and put a hand on Josh’s and Sophie’s
shoulders. He was no taller than they were and looked directly into
their eyes. “You must accept that you are trapped in this impossible
world. If you leave, you will bring destruction onto your family and
friends, and in all probability, you will bring about your own
deaths.”
“Besides,” Scathach added bitterly, “if you’re mentioned in the
Book, then you’re supposed to be here.”
The twins looked from Scatty to Flamel. He nodded. “It’s true. The
book is full of prophecies—some of which have certainly come true,
others which may yet come to pass. But it does speci cally mention
‘the two that are one.’ ”
“And you believe…?” Sophie whispered.
“Yes, I believe you may be the prophecy. In fact, I am convinced
of it.”
Scathach stepped forward to stand beside Flamel. “Which means
that you are suddenly much more important—not only to us, but
also to Dee and the Dark Elders.”
“Why?” Josh licked dry lips. “Why are we so important?”
The Alchemyst glanced at Scatty for support. She nodded. “Tell
them. They need to know.”
The twins looked from Scatty back to the Alchemyst. There was a
sense that what he was about to tell them was of immense
importance. Sophie slipped her hand into her brother’s, and he
squeezed her ngers tightly.
“The Codex prophesies that the two that are one will come either
to save or to destroy the world.”
“What do you mean, either save or destroy?” Josh demanded. “It’s
got to be one or the other, right?”
“The word used in the Codex is similar to an ancient Babylonian
symbol that can mean either thing,” Flamel explained. “Actually,
I’ve always suspected that it means that one of you has the potential
to save the world, while the other has the power to destroy it.”
Sophie nudged her brother in the ribs. “That would be you.”
Flamel stepped back from the twins. “In a couple of hours, when
Hekate arises, I will ask her to Awaken your magical potential. I
believe she will do it; I hope and pray that she does,” he added
fervently. “Then we will leave.”
“But where are we going?” Josh asked at the same time that
Sophie said, “Will Hekate not allow us to stay here?”
“I’m hoping some of the other Elders or immortal humans might
be persuaded to help train you. And no, we cannot stay here. Dee
and the Morrigan have contacted one of the most fearsome of the
Elders: Bastet.”
“The Egyptian cat goddess?” Sophie asked.
Flamel blinked in surprise. “I’m impressed.”
“Our parents are archaeologists, remember? While other children
were being read bedtime stories, our parents told us myths and
legends.”
The Alchemyst nodded. “Even as we speak, Bastet and the
Morrigan are gathering their forces for an all-out attack on Hekate’s
Shadowrealm. I suspected that they would try and attack during the
hours of darkness, when Hekate is sleeping, but so far there is no
sign of them, and it will be dawn soon. I’m sure they know that they
will only get one chance, and they need all their forces in place
before they attack. At the moment, they believe we are still ignorant
of their intentions; more importantly, they do not know that we are
aware of Bastet’s involvement. But we will be ready for them.”
“How do we know?” Sophie asked.
“Perenelle told me,” Flamel said, and waved away the next
obvious question. “She is a resourceful woman, she enlisted a
disembodied spirit to pass on a message to me.”
“A disembodied spirit?” Sophie said. “You mean like a ghost?”
She realized that now it was quite easy to believe in ghosts.
“Just so,” Flamel said.
“What will happen if they attack here? I mean, what kind of
attack are we talking about?” Josh asked.
Flamel looked at Scatty. “I was not alive the last time beings of
the Elder Races warred with one another.”
“I was,” Scatty said glumly. “The vast majority of humani will not
even know anything is happening.” She shrugged. “But the release
of magical energies in the Shadowrealms will certainly have an
e ect on the climate and local geology: there may be earthquakes, a
tornado or two, hurricanes and rain, lots of rain. And I really hate
the rain,” she added. “One of the reasons I left Hibernia.”
“There must be something we can do,” Sophie said. “We have to
warn people.”
“And what form would that warning take?” Flamel asked. “That
there is about to be a magical battle that may cause earthquakes and
ooding? Not something you can phone in to your local news or
weather station, is it?”
“We have to—”
“No, we don’t,” the Alchemyst said rmly. “We have to get you
and the pages from the Book away from here.”
“What about Hekate?” Josh asked. “Will she be able to defend
herself?”
“Against Dee and the Morrigan, yes. But with Bastet as their ally, I
simply don’t know,” Scatty answered. “I don’t know how powerful
the goddess is.”
“More powerful than you can imagine.”
They all turned toward the door, where a girl who looked no
older than eleven stood blinking and yawning widely. She rubbed a
hand against her bright yellow eyes and stared at them, then smiled,
her teeth startlingly white against her jet-black skin. She was
wearing a short togalike robe of the same iridescent material that
the crone Hekate had worn, but this time the dress was streaked
with golds and greens. Her ice-white hair curled down to her
shoulders.
The Alchemyst bowed. “Good morning. I did not think you rose
before the dawn.”
“How could I sleep with all this activity?” Hekate demanded. “The
house awakened me.”
“The house…,” Josh began.
“The house,” Hekate said atly, “is alive.”
There were a dozen comments Josh could have made, but
remembering the green slime from the previous night, he wisely
decided to keep his mouth shut.
“I understand that the Morrigan and my Elder sister Bastet are
planning an assault on my Shadowrealm,” the girl said grimly.
Nicholas glanced quickly at Scathach, who shifted her shoulders
slightly in a shrug. She had no idea how Hekate knew.
“I am sure you understand that everything that happens in this
house, every word said or whispered—or even thought,” Hekate
added, glancing sidelong at Josh, “I hear.” The girl smiled and, in
that instant, looked like the older versions of herself. The smiled
curled her lips, but did not light up her eyes. She walked into the
room, and Sophie noticed that as she moved, the house reacted to
her presence. Where she had stood in the doorway, green shoots had
sprouted, and the lintel and doorsill had blossomed tiny green
owers. The Goddess with Three Faces stopped before Nicholas
Flamel and looked up into his troubled eyes. “I would have
preferred that you not come here. I would have preferred that you
not bring trouble into my life. I would have preferred not to go to
battle with my sister and my niece. And I would most certainly have
preferred not to be forced to choose sides.”
Scathach folded her arms across her chest and regarded the
goddess grimly. “You never did like to choose sides, Hekate—no
wonder you have three faces.”
Sophie was watching Hekate as Scathach spoke, and for an instant
she glimpsed something dark and immeasurably old behind the
girl’s eyes. “I have survived the millennia because I heeded my own
counsel,” Hekate snapped. “But I have chosen sides when the
struggle was worth it.”
“And now,” Nicholas Flamel said very softly, “I think it is time to
choose again. Only you can decide, however: is this a worthy
struggle?”
Hekate ignored the question and spun around to face Sophie and
Josh. Her tiny hand moved in the air and immediately the auras
around the twins ared to silver and golden light. She tilted her
head to one side, looking at them, watching the silver bubbles
crawling along the cocoon that enveloped Sophie, and following the
tracery of golden veins that moved up and down Josh’s aura. “You
may be right,” she said eventually, “these may indeed be the ones
spoken of in the cursed Codex. It has been many centuries since I’ve
encountered auras so pure. They possess incredible untapped
potential.”
Flamel nodded. “If I had the time, I would take them to be
properly trained, gradually Awaken their dormant powers…but
events have conspired against me, and time is that one precious
commodity I do not have. It is within your power to unlock their
potential. You can do something in an instant that it would
normally take years to do.”
Hekate glanced over her shoulder at the Alchemyst. “And there
are good reasons why it should take many years,” she said
dismissively. “The humani barely use their senses. Yet you are
proposing to Awaken these two to their full potential. I will not do
it: the sensory overload could destroy them, drive them mad.”
“But—” Flamel began.
“I will not do it.” She turned back to the twins. “What he is asking
me to do could kill you—if you are lucky,” she said, and then turned
and swept from the room, leaving little grassy footprints in her
wake.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The twins were speechless for a moment. Then Josh began, “What
did she mean…?”
But Nicholas hurried past him, following Hekate out into the
hallway. “She’s exaggerating,” he called back over his shoulder.
“Trying to frighten you.”
“Well, it worked,” Josh muttered. He looked at Scathach, but she
turned her back and walked into the garden. “Hey,” he called,
hurrying after her, “come back. I’ve got questions.” He felt a quick
surge of anger; he was tired of being treated like a child. He—and
his sister—deserved some answers.
“Josh,” Sophie warned.
But her brother darted past her and reached for Scathach’s
shoulder. His ngers never even touched her. Suddenly, he was
caught, twisted, turned and then spun through the air. He hit the
ground hard enough to drive the breath from his lungs, and he
found himself staring down the length of Scathach’s sword, the tip
of which she held rock steady between his eyes. When she spoke,
her voice was little more than a whisper. “Last night you insulted a
goddess of the Elder Race; today you’ve managed to irritate one of
the Next Generation—and it’s not even dawn yet,” she added. The
Warrior Maid sheathed her sword and looked over at a stunned
Sophie. She hadn’t even seen Scathach move. “Is he always like
this?” Scatty asked.
“Like what?” Sophie asked.
“Foolish, ill-advised, reckless…? Shall I go on?”
“No need. And yes, he’s usually like this. Sometimes worse.”
When they were growing up, she used to tease Josh that he got all
the “doing” genes, whereas she got the “thinking” genes. Her
brother was both impulsive and reckless, but to be fair, she thought,
he was also loyal and trustworthy.
Scathach pulled Josh to his feet. “If you continue at this rate,
you’ll not last long in this world.”
“I just wanted to ask you a few questions.”
“You’re lucky. A couple of centuries ago, I probably would have
killed you. I used to have a bit of a temper,” she admitted, “but I’ve
been working on my self-control.”
Josh rubbed the small of his back. If Scathach had smashed him
down on the stones, he could really have been hurt, but he
recognized that she’d been careful to drop him onto the grass and
moss. “That felt like a judo throw,” he said shakily, attempting to
sound casual and change the subject.
“Something like that…”
“Where did you learn judo, anyway?”
“I didn’t learn judo. I created the distant ancestor of most of the
martial arts that are studied today,” the red-haired warrior said,
bright green eyes ashing wickedly. “In fact, it would do neither of
you any harm if I were to show you a few simple moves.”
“I think we can do better than simple,” Josh said. “We studied tae
kwon do for two years when our parents were teaching in Chicago,
and we did a year of karate in New York…or was that Boston?”
“You created judo?” Sophie asked, keeping her voice carefully
neutral.
“No, Kano Jigoro created modern judo, but he based his ghting
system on jujitsu, which is related to aikido, which evolved around
the fourteenth century. I believe I was in Japan around then. All
martial arts have a common root. And that’s me,” Scatty said
modestly. “Come, if you know a little tae kwon do and karate, that’s
useful. Let me show you some basic moves while we’re waiting for
Nicholas.”
“Where is he?” Sophie asked, looking back over her shoulder at
the house. What was going on in there? “Is he asking Hekate to
Awaken our magical potential?”
“He is,” Scatty a rmed.
“But Hekate said that could kill us!” Josh said in alarm. He was
beginning to suspect that Flamel’s agenda was about more than just
protecting him and his sister. The Alchemyst was up to something.
“She was only guessing,” Scatty said. “She’s always been a bit of a
drama queen.”
“Then Nicholas is sure we’re in no danger?” Josh said.
“No, he’s not really sure.” Scatty smiled. “But believe me, you are
in danger. The only di erence is if Hekate Awakens you, then you’ll
be in grave danger.”
Nicholas Flamel followed Hekate through the house. The young
woman’s ngers trailed along the walls, leaving streaks of bright
wood touched with leaves and owers in her wake. “I need your
help, Hekate. I cannot do this alone,” he called after her.
The goddess ignored him. She turned down a long, straight
corridor and darted ahead. Her feet left little puddles of green grass
that grew even as Flamel hurried after her. By the time he was
halfway down the corridor it was knee high, then waist high, and
suddenly, the entire corridor was covered in the tall, razor-sharp
grass. Its blades whispered softly together, sounds that might almost
have been words.
Nicholas Flamel allowed a little of his growing anger to seep into
his aura. Closing his right hand into a st, he suddenly splayed his
ngers and the air was touched with the rich, tart odor of mint. The
grass directly ahead of him attened as if it had been hit with a
strong wind, and the Alchemyst was just in time to see the young
woman step into a room set slightly apart from the rest of the house.
If he had delayed a moment longer, he would have walked right
past the opening.
“Enough of these games,” Flamel snapped, stepping into the
room.
Hekate spun to face him. She had aged in the few moments she
had spent running down the corridor. She now looked about fteen.
Her face was set in an ugly mask and her yellow eyes were bitter.
“How dare you speak to me that way!” She raised her hands
threateningly. “You know what I can do to you.”
“You would not dare,” Flamel said with a calm that he did not
feel.
“And why not?” Hekate asked, surprised. She was not used to
being contradicted.
“Because I am the Guardian of the Book.”
“The book you lost…”
“I am also the Guardian who appears in the prophecies in the
Book,” Flamel snapped. “The next-to-last Guardian,” he added. “The
twins also appear in the book. You say you knew Abraham—you
know then how accurate his prophecies and foretellings were.”
“He was often wrong,” Hekate muttered.
“As Guardian, I am asking you to do something I believe to be
essential to the survival of not only the Elder Race, but humani, too:
I want you to Awaken the twins’ magical potential.”
“It could kill them,” the goddess stated atly. She didn’t really
care if the humani cattle lived or died.
“That is a possibility,” Flamel admitted, feeling something icy
settle in the pit of his stomach, “but if you do not help us, then their
deaths are a certainty.”
Hekate turned and walked to the window. Across the sloping
lawn, Scathach was demonstrating a series of punches for the twins.
They were smoothly mimicking her moves. Flamel went to join
Hekate by the window.
“What a world we live in,” he commented, sighing, “when
everything—possibly even the continuance of the human race—lies
on the shoulders of those teenagers.”
“You know why the humani triumphed and the Elder Race was
ultimately banished?” Hekate asked suddenly.
“Because of iron, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, because of iron. We survived the Fall of Danu Talis, we
survived the Flood, and the Age of Ice. And then, about three
thousand years ago, a single metalworker, who had been crafting in
bronze, began to experiment in the new metal. He was just one man
—and yet he managed to wipe out an entire race of people and a
way of life. Great change always comes down to the actions of a
single person.” Hekate fell silent, watching the twins punch and kick
next to Scathach. “Silver and gold. The rarest of all auras,” she
muttered, and for a single heartbeat, the auras bloomed around the
twins. “If I do this and it kills them, will you be able to live with it
on your conscience?”
“I am old now, so old,” Nicholas said very softly. “Do you know
how many friends I’ve buried over the centuries?”
“And did you feel their loss?” There was a note of genuine
curiosity in Hekate’s voice.
“Every one.”
“Do you still?”
“Yes. Every day.”
The goddess reached out and placed her hand on his shoulder.
“Then you are still human, Nicholas Flamel. The day you stop caring
is the day you become like Dee and his kind.” She turned back to
the garden and looked at the twins. They were both trying, and
failing, to land blows on Scathach, who was ducking and weaving,
though not moving from the one spot. From the distance they
looked like three ordinary teenagers practicing a new dance, but
Hekate knew that there was nothing ordinary about any of them.
“I’ll do it,” she said eventually, “I’ll Awaken their powers. The rest
is up to you. You will have to train them.”
Flamel bowed his head so she would not see the tears in his eyes.
If the twins survived the Awakening, then there was a chance, albeit
a slim one, that he would get to see Perenelle again. “Tell me,” he
began, then coughed to clear his throat. “The man who discovered
how to process iron—that blacksmith three thousand years ago.
What happened to him?”
“I killed him,” Hekate said, her yellow eyes wide and innocent.
“His actions destroyed us. What else could I do? But it was too late.
The secret of iron had been introduced into the world.”
Flamel looked at the twins, watched Josh haul his sister to her
feet, watched her hook a leg behind his and drop him to the ground.
Their laughter hung bright and clear in the predawn air. He prayed
that they were not too late this time.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The cats of San Francisco left the city in the dead of night.
Singly and in pairs, feral and scarred street cats, plump, smoothcoated house cats, all shapes, every size, purebred and mixed, longhaired and short-haired, they moved through the shadows in a silent
feline wave. They surged across the bridges, boiled through alleys,
raced through the tunnels beneath the streets, leapt across roofs.
All heading north.
They darted past shocked and terri ed late-night revelers, skirted
rats and mice without stopping to feed, ignored birds’ nests. And
although they moved in complete silence, their passage was marked
by an extraordinary sound.
That night the city of San Francisco echoed with the primeval
howls of a hundred thousand dogs.
Dr. John Dee was unhappy.
And just a little bit frightened. It was all very well to talk about
attacking Hekate in her own Shadowrealm, but it was another thing
entirely to sit at the entrance to her invisible kingdom and watch
the cats and birds arrive, called by their respective mistresses, Bastet
and the Morrigan. What could those small creatures do against the
ancient magic of Hekate of the Elder Race?
Dee sat in a huge black Hummer alongside Senuhet, the man who
acted as Bastet’s servant. Neither of them had spoken during the
short ight in Dee’s private jet from L.A. to San Francisco earlier,
though there were a thousand questions Dee wanted to ask the older
man. Over the years he had come to recognize that the servants of
the Dark Elders—like himself—did not like to be questioned.
They had reached the entrance to Hekate’s Shadowrealm close to
two o’clock, and were in time to see the rst of the Morrigan’s
creatures arriving. The birds swooped in from the north and east in
long, dark ocks, the only sound the snapping of their wings, and
settled in the trees in Mill Valley, gathering so thickly that some of
the branches cracked beneath the strain.
Over the next few hours, the cats arrived.
They poured out of the darkness in a never-ending stream of fur,
and then stopped—all facing the hidden opening to the
Shadowrealm. Dee looked out his car window: he couldn’t see the
ground. It was covered, as far as he could see in every direction,
with cats.
Finally, just as the eastern horizon began to pale with salmoncolored light, Senuhet lifted a small black statue from a bag he wore
around his neck and placed it on the dashboard. It was a beautifully
carved Egyptian cat no bigger than his little nger. “It is time,” he
said softly.
The eyes of the black statue glowed red.
“She is coming,” Senuhet said.
“Why didn’t we attack earlier, when Hekate slept?” Dee asked.
Despite several hundred years of study about the Dark Elders, he
realized that, in truth, he knew very little. But that gave him some
comfort, because he realized that they knew equally little about
humans.
Senuhet waved his hand, gesturing to the gathered birds and cats.
“We needed our allies,” he said shortly.
Dee nodded. He guessed that Bastet was even now moving
through the various Shadowrealms that bordered the human world.
The Elder Race’s aversion to iron meant that certain modern
conveniences—like cars and planes—were o limits to them. His
thin lips curled in a humorless smile; that was why they needed
people like him and Senuhet to act as their agents.
He felt, rather than saw, the birds move in the trees: half a million
—maybe more—heads turned to the west. He followed their gaze,
looking toward the darkest spot in the sky. At rst, he could see
nothing, but then a shape appeared high in the heavens, noticeable
only because it blotted out the stars. The Morrigan was coming.
Dee knew that at the heart of every legend there is a grain of
truth. Looking up into the night sky, watching the pale-faced
creature appear out of the west, her feathered cloak spread behind
her like enormous wings, Dee believed he knew where the legends
of the Nosferatu vampires originated. Over the course of his long
life, he had met vampires—real ones—and none of them were as
terrifying as the Crow Goddess.
The Morrigan settled to the ground directly in front of the
Hummer, cats scattering at the last moment as she folded her cloak
and landed. In the gloom, only the white oval of her face was
visible; her eyes were as black as night, looking like holes burned in
paper.
Then the cats growled, a low rumbling that trembled through the
very air, and Bastet stepped out of the shadows. The Cat Goddess
was wearing the white cotton robes of an Egyptian princess and
holding a spear that was as tall as she was. She strode through the
sea of cats, which parted before her and closed in behind. Towering
over the Morrigan, she bowed deeply to the Crow Goddess. “Niece,
is it time?” she purred.
“It is,” the Morrigan replied, returning the bow. Shrugging back
her cloak, she revealed a longbow strapped across her shoulders.
She unslung the bow and notched an arrow from the quiver at her
hip.
Then, turning as one, the two Dark Elders raced toward the
seemingly impenetrable hedge and leapt through.
The cats and birds owed after them.
“Now it begins,” Senuhet said gleefully, gathering his weapons—
two curved Egyptian bronze swords—and climbing out of the car.
Or ends, Dee thought, but he kept his fears to himself.
FRIDAY,
1st June
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Josh
stood at the edge of the ancient forest with his sister and
watched a trio of tiny winged creatures that looked astonishingly
like dragons whirl and dance through the rst shafts of dawn
sunlight. Josh glanced at her, then looked quickly away. “I don’t
want you to do this,” he said quickly.
Sophie laid her hand on her brother’s arm. “Why not?” she said.
She moved in front of her twin, forcing him to look at her. Over his
left shoulder, in front of the entrance to the incredible Yggdrasill,
she could see Flamel, Scatty and Hekate watching them. All around,
thousands of Torc Allta, both in their human and wereboar forms,
were scurrying about, preparing for battle. The boars wore plates of
leather armor across their haunches and backs, and the human Torc
Allta were carrying bronze spears and swords. Huge ocks of
nathair swooped across the skies and the bushes, and tall grasses
were alive with unseen crawling, slithering, scuttling creatures.
Guards were taking up positions all around the Yggdrasill,
clambering out onto the huge branches, standing guard with bows
and spears in every window.
Sophie looked into her brother’s bright blue eyes. She could see
herself re ected there, and she abruptly realized that his eyes were
magni ed behind unshed tears. She reached for him, but he caught
her hand and squeezed her ngers gently. “I don’t want anything to
happen to you,” he said simply.
Sophie nodded, unwilling to trust herself to speak. She felt exactly
the same way about her twin.
Three of the enormous pterosaur-like nathair ew overhead, the
downdraft of their wings sending plumes of dust along the ground
below. Neither Sophie nor Josh looked up.
“Nicholas said that there are risks,” Josh continued, “but Hekate
said that it’s dangerous, possibly even deadly. I don’t want you to go
through with this Awakening in case something goes wrong,” he
nished quickly.
“We have to do it. Nicholas said—”
“I’m not entirely sure I trust him,” Josh interrupted. “I have a
feeling he’s up to something. He’s too eager for Hekate to Awaken
our powers despite the dangers.”
“He said it’s our only chance,” Sophie persisted.
“Yesterday, he said he had to get us away from the shop to keep
us safe…now, all of a sudden, we have to be trained so that we can
protect ourselves from Dee and these Dark Elders. Trust me, Sophie,
Nicholas Flamel is playing his own game.”
Sophie’s gaze drifted to the Alchemyst. She’d known him for a
couple of months, and she remembered writing in her blog that she
thought he was cool. Of course, now she realized that she didn’t
really know him at all. The man she’d thought of as Nick Fleming
was an imposter. A lie. Flamel was staring intently at her, and for
the briefest of moments, she imagined that he knew what they were
talking about.
“Both of us don’t have to go through this Awakening,” Josh
continued. “Let me do it.”
Again, Sophie looked into his eyes. “And how do you think I’d feel
if something happened to you?”
This time it was Josh who found he couldn’t speak. The idea that
something terrible could happen to his sister had only occurred to
him a little while before. But the very thought of it terri ed him.
Sophie took her brother’s hands in hers. “From the moment we
were born, we’ve done everything together,” she said, her voice low
and serious. “And with Mom and Dad away so much, it’s really
always been just you and me. You’ve always looked after me, I’ve
always looked out for you. I’m not going to allow you to go through
this…process by yourself. We’ll do this—just like we’ve done
everything else—together.”
Josh looked long and hard at his sister. “Are you sure?” he asked.
He was beginning to see a new Sophie.
“I’ve never been more sure.”
They both knew what remained unsaid: neither wanted to be left
behind if anything happened during the Awakening.
Josh nally nodded. He then squeezed his sister’s hand and they
both turned to face the Alchemyst, Hekate and Scatty.
“We’re ready,” the twins said.
“The Morrigan is here,” Scatty informed them as they followed
Nicholas and Hekate through the huge door into the heart of the
tree. She had changed into black pants, a high-necked black T-shirt
that left her arms bare and thick-soled combat boots. She wore two
short swords strapped to her back, the hilts protruding slightly over
her shoulders, and had daubed her eyes and cheekbones with a
black dye that gave her face a startlingly skull-like appearance.
“She’s brought Bastet with her. They’re already surging into the
Shadowrealm.”
“Hekate can hold them back, can’t she?” Sophie asked. She only
had an inkling of the goddess’s powers, but the thought that there
was something more powerful than her was terrifying.
Scatty shrugged. “I have no idea. They’ve arrived in force; they’ve
brought their armies with them.”
“Armies?” Josh echoed. “What kind of armies? More mud
people?”
“No Golems this time. They have brought the birds of the air and
the cats of the earth with them.”
Sophie laughed shakily. “Birds and cats…what can they do?”
Scatty glanced at the girl, the whites of her eyes startling against
the black war paint. “You saw what the birds did to the car on the
way here.”
Sophie nodded, suddenly feeling sick in the pit of her stomach.
Images of the lthy black crows battering the windshield and
pecking holes in the metal hood would haunt her to her dying day.
“Well, imagine what would happen if tens of thousands of birds
gathered.”
“Tens of thousands,” Sophie whispered.
“More like hundreds of thousands,” Scatty said, turning into a
narrow corridor. “The nathair scouts estimate maybe half a million.”
“And didn’t you say something about cats?” Josh asked.
“Yes, I did. More than we can count.”
Josh looked at his sister, the realization of the terrible danger
they faced really beginning to sink in now. They could die in this
strange Shadowrealm and no one would ever know. He felt tears
prickling his eyes and blinked them away; their parents would
spend the rest of their lives wondering what had happened to them.
The corridor they were following turned into another, even
narrower passageway. The ceiling was so low that both twins had to
walk with their heads ducked down. There were no steps or stairs,
but the corridor circled down and down in a long, slow spiral. The
twins realized that they were going into the ground deep beneath
the tree. The walls became darker, the smooth wood now scarred
with straggling roots that curled out and pulled at their hair with
clutching ngers. The air turned damp, perfumed with loam and
fresh earth, rotting leaves and new growth.
“The house is alive,” Sophie said in wonder as they turned into
another twisting, spiraling corridor that was completely composed
of the gnarled and bulbous roots of the great tree that rose above
them. “Even with us moving around inside, with the rooms and the
windows and the pools—it’s still a living tree!” She found the idea
both astonishing and frightening at the same time.
“This tree was grown from a seed of the Yggdrasill, the World
Tree,” Scatty said quietly, rubbing the palm of her hand against the
exposed roots. She brought her palm to her face and breathed
deeply, drawing in the aroma. “Millennia ago, when Danu Talis sank
beneath the waves, a few of the Elders were able to rescue some of
the ora and fauna and transplant it to other lands. But only two of
the Elders, Hekate and Odin, managed to nurture their Yggdrasill
seeds to life. Odin, like Hekate, had power over magic.”
Josh frowned, trying to remember what little he knew about
Odin. Wasn’t he the one-eyed Norse god? But before he could ask,
Hekate disappeared into an opening framed by knots of twisted
roots. Nicholas Flamel stopped and waited for the twins and Scatty
to catch up. His pale eyes were deeply shadowed, and a thin vertical
crease showed between his eyebrows. When he spoke, he chose his
words with care, his nervousness making his French accent even
more pronounced. “I wish you did not have to do this,” he said, “but
you must believe me when I say that there is no other way.” He
reached out and put one hand on Sophie’s right shoulder and one on
Josh’s left shoulder. Their auras—silver and gold— ared brie y,
and the heavy air was touched with the scents of vanilla ice cream
and oranges. “I’m afraid that when you helped Perenelle and me,
you placed yourselves in the most dreadful danger. If—when Hekate
Awakens your magical potential, I will teach you some protective
spells, and there are others I will take you to, specialists in the ve
ancient forms of magic. I’m hoping they will complete your
training.”
“We’re going to be trained as magicians?” Sophie asked. She
guessed she should be more excited, but she kept remembering
Scatty’s words, that once Hekate Awakened their powers, they
would be in grave danger.
“As magicians and sorcerers, as necromancers, warlocks and even
enchanters.” Flamel smiled. He glanced over his shoulder, then
turned back to the twins. “Now go inside and do whatever she tells
you. I know you are afraid, but try not to be. Let me tell you, there
is no shame in fear.” He smiled, his lips curling upward, but the
smile never reached his troubled eyes. “When you come out of that
room, you will be di erent people.”
“I don’t want to be a di erent person,” Sophie whispered. She
wanted everything to be just as it had been a couple of hours
earlier, when everything was ordinary and boring. Right now, she
would give anything to go back to a boring world.
Flamel stepped back from the doorway and ushered the twins
inside. “From the moment you laid eyes on Dee, you started to
change. And once begun, change cannot be reversed.”
It was dark inside the chamber, whose walls were composed
entirely of knotted and twisted roots. Sophie could feel her brother’s
hand in hers and she squeezed his ngers slightly. His hand
tightened in return.
As the twins moved deep into the hollow, which was obviously
larger than it had rst seemed, their eyes gradually adjusted to the
gloom and the room took on a greenish glow. Thick, furry moss
covered the twisted roots and radiated a watery jade green light,
making it appear as if everything were underwater. The air was
heavy with moisture, and drops of liquid gathered on their hair and
skin like tiny beads of sweat. Although it wasn’t cold, they both
shivered.
“You should consider yourselves honored.” Hekate’s voice came
from the green gloom directly ahead of them. “I have not Awakened
a humani for many generations.”
“Who…,” Josh began, and then his voice cracked. He gave a dry
cough and tried again. “Who was the last human you Awakened?”
He was determined not to let his fear show.
“It was some time ago—in the twelfth century, as you humani
measure time—a man from the land of the Scots. I do not remember
his name.”
Both Sophie and Josh instinctively knew that Hekate was lying.
“What happened to him?” Sophie asked.
“He died.” There was a peculiar high-pitched giggle. “He was
killed by a hailstone.”
“Must have been some hailstone,” Josh whispered.
“Oh, it was,” Hekate murmured. And in that moment, they both
knew that she had something to do with the mysterious man’s
death. To Josh the goddess suddenly seemed like a vindictive child.
“So what happens now?” Josh asked. “Do we stand or sit or lie
down?”
“You do nothing,” Hekate snapped, “and this is not something to
be done lightly. For thousands of generations, you humani have
deliberately distanced yourselves from what you laughingly call
magic. But magic is really only the utilization of the entire spectrum
of the senses. The humani have cut themselves o from their senses.
Now they see only in a tiny portion of the visible spectrum, hear
only the loudest of sounds, their sense of smell is shockingly poor
and they can only distinguish the sweetest and sourest of tastes.”
The twins were aware that Hekate was moving about them now.
They couldn’t hear her move, but were able to track her by the
sound of her voice. When she spoke from behind them, they both
jumped.
“Once, mankind needed all those senses simply to survive.” There
was a long pause, and when she spoke again, she was so close that
her breath ru ed Sophie’s hair. “Then the world changed. Danu
Talis sank beneath the waves, the Age of the Lizards passed, the
Time of Ice came, and the humani grew…sophisticated.” She made
the word into a curse. “The humani grew indolent and arrogant.
They found they did not need all their senses, and gradually, they
lost them.”
“You’re saying we lost the powers of magic because we grew
lazy,” Josh said.
Sophie suppressed a groan; one of these days her brother was
going to get them into real trouble.
But when Hekate replied, her voice was surprisingly soft, almost
gentle. “What you call magic is nothing more than an act of the
imagination red by the senses, then given shape by the power of
your aura. The more powerful the aura, the greater the magic. You
two have extraordinary potential within you. The Alchemyst is
correct: you could be the greatest magicians the world has ever
known. But here’s the problem,” Hekate continued, and now the
room grew a little lighter, and they could see the shape of the
woman standing in the center of the room, directly beneath a tangle
of roots that looked exactly like a clutching hand reaching down
from the roof. “The humani have learned to live without their
senses. The brain lters so much data from your consciousness that
you live in a type of fog. What I can do is Awaken your dormant
powers, but the danger—the very real danger—is that it will
overload your senses.” She stopped, then asked, “Are you prepared
to take that risk?”
“I am,” Sophie said immediately, before her brother could protest.
She was afraid that if he made a quip, the goddess would do
something to him. Something ugly and lethal.
The goddess turned to look at Josh.
He sought out his sister in the gloom. The green light lent her face
a sickly cast. The Awakening was going to be dangerous, possibly
even deadly, but he could not allow Sophie to go through it on her
own. “I’m ready,” he said de antly.
“Then we will begin.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Dee waited until the last of the birds and cats had disappeared into
Hekate’s Shadowrealm before he left the car and strolled toward the
hidden opening. Senuhet, Bastet’s servant, had left earlier, eagerly
following his mistress into the Shadowrealm, but Dee had not been
quite so enthusiastic. It was always a bad idea to be rst into battle.
The soldiers in the rear were the ones who tended to survive. He
was guessing that Hekate’s guards had massed just beyond the
invisible wall, and he had no inclination to be rst through the
opening. It didn’t make him a coward, he reasoned; it just made him
careful, and being careful had kept him alive for many hundreds of
years. But he couldn’t hang around out there forever; his inhuman
masters would expect to see him on the battle eld. The small man
drew his two-thousand-dollar leather coat tightly around his
shoulders the moment before he stepped into the opening, leaving
behind the chill early-morning air and stepping into…
…a battle eld.
There were bodies everywhere, and none of them were human.
The Morrigan’s birds had changed when they entered Hekate’s
Shadowrealm: they had become almost human…though not entirely
so. They were now tall and thin like their mistress; their wings had
stretched, becoming long and batlike, connected to human-shaped
bodies by translucent skin and tipped with deadly claws. Their
heads were still those of birds.
There were a few cats scattered among the eld of feathers. They
too had become almost human when they stepped into the
Shadowrealm, and like Bastet, they had retained their cat heads.
Their paws were a cross between human hands and cat claws,
tipped with curved, razor-sharp nails, and their bodies were covered
in a ne down of hair.
Looking around, Dee could see no sign that any of Hekate’s
guards had fallen in battle, and was suddenly frightened: what did
the goddess have guarding her realm? He reached under his coat,
pulled out the sword that had once been called Excalibur and set o
down the path to where the huge tree rose out of the morning mist.
The sunrise ran bloodred along the ancient black blade.
“Birdmen,” Scathach muttered, and then added a curse in the
ancient Celtic language of her youth. She hated birdmen; they gave
her hives. She was standing at the entrance to the Yggdrasill,
watching the creatures appear out of the forest. The mythologies of
every race included stories of men who turned into birds, or birds
who transformed into half-human creatures. In her long life Scatty
had encountered many of the creatures and had once come
perilously close to death when she’d fought a Sirin, an owl with the
head of a beautiful woman. Since that encounter, she’d been allergic
to bird feathers. Already her skin was starting to itch and she could
feel a sneeze building at the back of her nose. The Morrigan’s
creatures moved awkwardly, like hunched-over humans, dragging
their knuckles on the ground. They were poor warriors, but they
often succeeded by sheer force of numbers.
Then Bastet’s cat-people appeared. They moved slowly, stealthily,
some standing on two feet, but most moving on all fours. Here,
Scatty knew, was the basis of the great cat legends of Africa and
India. Unlike the birds, the cat-people were deadly ghters: they
were lightning fast, and their claws were capable of in icting
terrible damage. Scathach sneezed; she was also allergic to cats.
The strange army came to a halt, perhaps awed by the incredible
building-sized tree or just confused by the sight of a single warrior
standing framed in the open doors. They milled about; then, as if
driven by a single command, they surged forward in a long ragged
line.
The Warrior twisted her head from side to side and rolled her
shoulders, and then her two short swords appeared in her hands.
She raised them above her head in an X.
It was the signal the Torc Allta and the nathair had been waiting
for. Seemingly from nowhere, hundreds of the terrifying lizards
hurtled out of the sky, with the sun at their backs, and swooped
over the advancing army. They ew in great sweeping circles, their
huge wings raising enormous plumes of gritty dust that blinded and
confused the birds and cats. Then the Torc Allta, who had been
lying concealed in the tall grass and behind the twisting roots of the
Yggdrasill, rose in the middle of the attackers. As Scatty hurried
back into the depths of the house, she realized how closely the
noises of the battle resembled feeding time at the San Francisco Zoo.
“We’re running out of time,” Scathach yelled to Flamel as she
raced into the corridor.
“How many?” Nicholas asked grimly.
“Too many,” Scatty replied. She paused brie y and then added,
“The Torc Allta and nathair will not be able to hold them for long.”
“And the Morrigan and Bastet?”
“I didn’t see them. But you can be sure they’re coming, and when
they do…” She left the sentence un nished. With Hekate busy
Awakening the twins, nothing would be able to stand against the
two Dark Elders.
“They’ll come,” he said grimly.
Scatty stepped closer to Flamel. They had known each other for
over three hundred years, and although she was his senior by nearly
two millennia, she had come to regard him as the father she no
longer remembered. “Take the twins and ee. I’ll hold them here.
I’ll buy you as much time as possible.”
The Alchemyst reached out and placed his hand on the Warrior’s
shoulder and squeezed. A tiny pop of energy snapped between them
and they both brie y glowed. When he spoke, he unconsciously
reverted to the French language of his youth. “No, we’ll not do that.
When we leave here, we go together. We need the twins, Scatty—
not just you and me, but the entire world. I believe that only they
will be able to stand against the Dark Elders and keep them from
achieving their ultimate aim and reclaiming the earth.”
Scatty looked over his shoulder into the gloomy chamber. “You’re
asking a lot of them. When are you going to tell them the whole
truth?” she asked.
“In time…,” he began.
“Time is something you do not have,” Scatty murmured. “You’ve
started to age. I can see it in your face, around your eyes, and
there’s more gray in your hair.”
Flamel nodded. “I know. The immortality spell is breaking down.
Perenelle and I will begin to age a year for every day we go without
the formulation for immortality. We will be dead by the end of the
month. But by then it will not matter. If the Dark Elders succeed,
the world of the humani will have already ceased to exist.”
“Let’s make sure that doesn’t happen.” Scatty turned her back on
Flamel, then sank to the ground, back straight, her legs folded, feet
turned high on her thighs in a full lotus position, arms outstretched,
palms wrapped around the hilts of the swords that were lying across
her lap. If the cats or birds broke into the house and found the
corridor, they would have to get past her to nd Hekate—and the
Warrior would make them pay dearly.
Hekate had given Flamel a short sta made of a branch of the
Yggdrasill, and now, holding it in both hands, he took up a position
directly outside the door to the chamber where the goddess was
working with the twins. If any of the invaders did manage to get
past Scathach, they would then face him. Scatty would ght with
her swords, hands and feet, but his weapons were potentially even
more destructive. He held up his hand and the narrow space grew
heavy with the smell of mint as his aura ickered and sparked into
green life around him. Though he was still powerful, every use of
magic weakened him and drew on his life force. Scatty was right; he
had started to age. He could feel tiny aches and vague pains where
there had been none before. Even his eyesight was no longer as
sharp as it had been only the day before. If he was forced to use his
powers, it would speed the aging process, but he was determined to
give Hekate all the time she needed. He turned to look over his
shoulder, trying to penetrate the gloom. What was happening in
there?
“We will start with the elder,” Hekate announced.
Sophie could feel her brother drawing a breath to protest, but she
squeezed his ngers so tightly that she could actually feel his bones
grinding together. He kicked her ankle in response.
“It is traditional,” the goddess continued. “Sophie…” She paused,
then said, “What is your family name, your parents’ names?”
“Newman…and my mother’s name is Sara, my father is Richard.”
It felt odd calling her parents anything other than Mom and Dad.
The green light in the chamber brightened and they could see
Hekate outlined against the glowing walls. Although her face was in
darkness, her eyes re ected the green light like chips of polished
glass. She reached out and placed the palm of her hand against
Sophie’s forehead. “Sophie, daughter of Sara and Richard, of Clan
Newman, of the race humani…”
She began in English, but then drifted into a lyrically beautiful
language that predated humanity. As she spoke, Sophie’s aura began
to glow, a misty silver light outlining her body. A cool breeze
wafted across her skin and she was suddenly conscious that she was
no longer hearing Hekate. She could see the goddess’s mouth
moving, but she could not make out the words over the sounds of
her own body—the breath hissing in and out of her nose, the rush of
blood in her ears, the solid beat of her heart in her chest. There was
a pressure on her temples, as if her brain were expanding inside her
skull, and an ache ran the length of her spine and spread outward
into all her bones.
Then the room began to lighten. Hekate—looking older now—was
standing outlined in shifting streams of sparkling lights. Sophie
suddenly realized that she was seeing the goddess’s aura. She
watched as the lights twisted and curled around Hekate’s arm and
owed down into her ngers, and then, with a tingling shock,
Sophie could actually feel it penetrating her skull. For an instant she
was dizzy, disorientated, and then, through the buzzing in her ears,
Hekate’s words abruptly started to make sense. “…I Awaken this
terrible power within you….” The goddess moved her hands over
Sophie’s face, her touch like ice and re. “These are the senses the
humani have abandoned,” Hekate continued. She pressed her
thumbs lightly against Sophie’s eyes.
“To see with acuity…”
Sophie’s vision bloomed, and the darkened chamber came to
blazing light, every shadow picked out in exquisite detail. She could
see each thread and stitch on Hekate’s robe, could pick out
individual hairs on her head and follow the map of tiny wrinkles
that were visibly growing at the corners of her eyes.
“To hear with clarity…”
It was as if cotton had been pulled from Sophie’s ears. Suddenly,
she could hear. It was like the di erence between listening to music
on her iPod headphones and then to the same track on her bedroom
stereo. Every sound in the room magni ed and intensi ed: the
wheezing of her brother’s breath through his nostrils, the tiny
shifting creaks of the huge tree above them, the scritch-scratching of
invisible creatures moving through the roots. Tilting her head
slightly, she could even hear the distant sounds of battle: the
screeching of birds, the roars of cats and the bellowing of boars.
“To taste with purity…”
Hekate’s ngers brushed Sophie’s lips and suddenly the girl was
conscious that her tongue was tingling. She licked her lips, nding
traces of the fruit she had eaten earlier and discovering that she
could actually taste the air—it was rich and earthy—and even
distinguish the water droplets in the atmosphere.
“To touch with sensitivity…”
Sophie’s skin came alive. The fabrics against her skin—the soft
cotton of her T-shirt, the sti denim of her jeans, the gold chain
with her birth sign around her neck, her warm cotton socks—all left
di erent and distinct impressions on her esh.
“To smell with intensity…”
Sophie actually rocked backward with the sudden eye-watering
explosion of scents that invaded her: the spicy otherworldly odors of
Hekate, the cloying earthiness of her surroundings, her brother’s
twenty-four-hour deodorant, which was plainly not working, the
supposedly unscented gel in his hair, the mint of the toothpaste she
had used earlier.
Sophie’s aura began to glow, silver mist rising o her skin like fog
o a lake. It surrounded her body in a pale oval. She closed her eyes
and threw her head back. Colors, smells and sounds were rushing at
her: and they were brighter, stronger, louder than any she had ever
experienced before. The e ect from her heightened senses was
almost painful…no, it was painful. It hurt. Her head throbbed, her
bones ached, even her skin itched—everything was just too much.
Sophie’s head tilted back, and then, almost of their own accord, her
arms shot out to either side…and she rose four inches o the dirt
oor.
“Sophie?” Josh whispered, unable to keep the terror from his
voice. “Sophie…” His sister, wrapped in an undulating silver glow,
was oating in the air directly before him. The light from her body
was so strong that it painted the circular chamber in shades of silver
and black. It was like a scene from a terrifying horror movie.
“Don’t touch her,” Hekate commanded sternly. “Her body is
attempting to assimilate the wash of sensations. This is the most
dangerous time.”
Josh’s mouth went dry and his tongue was suddenly too big for it.
“Dangerous…what do you mean, dangerous?” Something in his
mind clicked and he felt as if his worst fears were about to be
realized.
“In most cases, the brain cannot cope with the heightened
sensations of Awakening.”
“In most cases?” he whispered, appalled.
“In almost every case,” Hekate said, and he heard the regret in
her voice. “That is why I was unwilling to do this.”
Josh asked the question he really didn’t want answered: “What
happens?”
“The brain e ectively shuts down. The person is left in a coma
from which they never awaken.”
“And Flamel knew this could happen?” Josh asked, feeling a great
surge of anger begin in the pit of his stomach. He felt sick. The
Alchemyst had known the Awakening could, in all likelihood, send
him and Sophie into a coma, and yet had still been prepared to let
them go through with it. The rage burned within him, fueled in
equal parts by fear and a terrible sense of betrayal. He’d thought
Flamel was his friend. He’d been wrong.
“Of course,” Hekate said. “He told you there were dangers, didn’t
he?”
“He didn’t tell us everything,” Josh snapped.
“Nicholas Flamel never tells anyone everything.” One side of
Hekate’s face was touched with the silver light radiating from
Sophie, the other was sheathed in black shadow. Suddenly, Hekate’s
nostrils ared and her eyes widened. She looked up at the ceiling of
roots. “No,” she gasped. “No!”
Sophie’s eyes snapped open and then she opened her mouth and
screamed. “Fire!”
“They’re burning the World Tree!” Hekate howled, her face
contorted into a savage mask. Shoving Josh to one side, she darted
out into the corridor, leaving him alone with the person who had
once been his twin. He stared at the girl oating in the air before
him, unsure what to do, afraid to even touch her. All he knew was
that for the rst time in their lives, they were di erent in ways he
could not even begin to comprehend.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
“We
need to go.” Nicholas Flamel caught Josh’s shoulder and
shook him, bringing him back to the present.
Josh turned to look at the Alchemyst. There were tears on his
cheeks, but he was unaware of them. “Sophie…,” he whispered.
“…is going to be ne,” Nicholas said rmly. Shouts echoed in the
corridor outside, the sudden clash of weapons mingling with the
roars of humans and animals. Above it all rose Scathach’s delighted
laughter. Flamel reached for Sophie, who was still oating four
inches above the earth, and his aura ared white-green when he
took her hand. Gently he pulled her back to the ground. As soon as
her feet touched the earth, it was as if all the strength had left her
body, and he caught her before she crumpled to the oor,
unconscious.
Josh was immediately at his sister’s side. He pushed Flamel away
and held his twin in his arms. Crackling energy darted from Sophie’s
fading aura to his esh, but he didn’t even register the tiny stings.
When he looked up at Flamel, his face was an angry mask. “You
knew,” he accused, “you knew how dangerous this was. My sister
could have been left in a coma.”
“I knew that was not going to happen,” Nicholas said calmly,
crouching down beside Josh. “Her aura—your aura—is too strong. I
knew you would both survive. I would never have deliberately
placed either of you in danger. I swear that.” He reached for
Sophie’s wrist to check her pulse, but Josh pushed his hand away.
He didn’t believe him; he wanted to, but somehow Flamel’s words
rang false.
They both jumped as an agonized, catlike squeal came from the
corridor outside. It was followed by Scatty’s voice. “We really
should be leaving. And right now would be a good time!”
The smell of burning wood was stronger, and tendrils of gray
smoke begun to curl into the chamber.
“We’ve got to go. We can talk about this later,” Flamel said
rmly.
“You better believe we will,” Josh promised.
“I’ll help you carry her,” the Alchemyst o ered.
“I can do it myself,” Josh said, and gathered his sister into his
arms. He wasn’t going to trust Sophie to anyone else. He was
surprised by how light she felt, and he was suddenly thankful for all
those painful months of football practice that had made him
stronger than he looked.
The Alchemyst picked up the short sta he’d left propped against
the wall and spun it in the air before him. The tip glowed green and
it left the faintest of smoking emerald trails in the air. “Ready?”
Flamel asked.
Josh, his sister held tightly against his chest, nodded.
“Whatever happens, whatever you see, don’t stop, don’t turn
back. Just about everything outside this doorway will not hesitate to
kill you.”
Josh followed Flamel through the door…and immediately
stopped, frozen in shock. Scatty was standing in the center of the
narrow corridor, her two short swords a blur before her. Behind the
swords, crowding the corridor, were some of the most terrifying
creatures he had ever seen. He’d been expecting monsters; what he
had not been expecting were creatures even more terrifying.
Creatures that were neither beast nor human, but something caught
in between. Humans with the heads of cats snarled and slashed at
Scatty, their claws striking sparks o her swords. Others with the
bodies of men but with the huge peaked skulls of ravens jabbed at
her, attempting to gouge and stab her.
“Scatty—down!” Flamel shouted. Without waiting to see if she
even heard him, he stretched out his arm and leveled the short sta .
His aura ared green and the air was suddenly bitter with the odor
of mint. An emerald-colored globe of spinning light gathered at the
tip of the sta and then shot forward with an audible pop. Scatty
barely managed to duck before the ball sizzled through the air and
shattered against the ceiling almost directly over her head. It left a
bright mark, like a stain, which started to dribble and drip sticky
green light. The scarred head of a tabby cat pushed through the
opening, mouth gaping, fangs glinting. It spotted Scatty and lunged
for her—and a drop of the gooey light splashed o the top of its
head. The cat-headed human went wild. It threw itself back into the
corridor, where it immediately attacked everything in its path. A
birdman stepped up to the opening, and was doused in the dripping
green light. Its black wings abruptly developed holes and tears, and
it fell back with a hideous chattering cawing. Josh noticed that
although the green light, which had the consistency of honey,
burned the creatures, it had no e ect on the wood. He knew he
should be paying more attention, but all his concern was focused on
his sister. She was breathing quickly, and behind her closed eyelids
her eyes were dancing.
Scatty scrambled to her feet and darted back to Flamel and Josh.
“Very impressive, I’m sure,” she muttered. “I didn’t know you could
do that.”
Flamel spun the sta like a baton. “This focuses my power.”
Scatty looked around. “We seem to be trapped.”
“Hekate went this way,” Nicholas said, turning to the right and
pointing to what looked like an impenetrable barrier of knotted
roots. “I saw her come running out of the chamber and walk straight
through this.” He stepped up to the knotted wood and stretched out
his arm. It disappeared right up to the elbow.
“I’ll go rst,” Scatty said. Josh noticed that although she had been
ghting the deadly combination of birds and cats, there was neither
a scratch on her body nor a hair out of place. She wasn’t even
breathing hard—though if she really was a vampire, then maybe she
didn’t need to breathe at all, he thought. Scatty darted forward, and
in the last moment before she reached the wall of roots, she dived
straight into the opening, swords crossed over her chest.
Flamel and Josh looked at one another in the brief moment that
followed…and then Scatty’s head poked through the solid-looking
tangle of roots. “All clear.”
“I’ll take the rear,” Flamel said, stepping back to allow Josh to go
ahead of him. “I’ll deal with anything that follows us.”
Josh nodded, unwilling to trust himself to talk to Flamel. He was
still furious with the Alchemyst for endangering his sister’s life, but
he also recognized that Flamel was now ghting for them, placing
himself in very real danger to protect them. Josh stepped up to the
wall of twisted roots and packed earth, closed his eyes…and walked
right through. There was an instant of damp chill and then he
opened his eyes to see Scatty directly in front of him. He was
standing in a low, narrow chamber created entirely from the
Yggdrasill’s gnarled roots. Clumps of green moss leaked a dim green
light into the chamber, and he could see that Scatty was standing at
the bottom of a set of narrow, irregular steps that led upward into
the gloom. Scatty’s head was tilted to one side, but before Josh
could ask what she was hearing, Flamel stepped through the wall.
He was smiling, and the top of his sta emitted traces of green gas.
“That should hold them for a while.”
“Let’s go,” Scatty called as soon as the Alchemyst appeared.
The stairway was so narrow that Josh was forced to move in a
sideways crab-crawl, head ducked low, with Sophie held close to his
body to prevent her head and legs from cracking against the rough
wooden walls. He tested every step before he took it; he didn’t want
to risk falling and dropping his sister. He suddenly realized that
these steps were cut into the space between the inner and outer bark
of the great tree, and couldn’t help wondering if a tree the size of
Yggdrasill was riddled with secret passages, hidden rooms, forgotten
chambers and lost stairways. It must be, he decided. Did Hekate
even know where they all were? And then, his mind racing, he
wondered who had created these steps. Somehow he could not
imagine the goddess carving them out of the living wood herself.
As they climbed, they could smell the bitter stench of burning
wood, and the sounds of battle came clearer. The cat shrieks became
even more human, the bird screeches were completely terrifying,
and they mingled with the bellowing roars of the boars and the
hissing of the nathair. Now that the group was no longer
underground, the heat and smoke intensi ed and they began to hear
another sound—a deep bass groaning rumble.
“We need to hurry.” Scatty’s voice drifted back out of the gloom.
“We really need to hurry now….” And somehow the forced calm in
the Warrior’s voice frightened Josh more than if she had screamed.
“Careful now; we’ve reached an opening. We’re at the end of a thick
root, about thirty yards away from the main body of the tree. We’re
well clear of the ghting,” she added.
Josh rounded a corner and discovered Scatty standing bathed in
shafts of early-morning sunshine that shone through a curtain of
vines directly ahead of her. She turned to face him, sunlight turning
her red hair golden and running along the blades of her short
swords, and in that moment, Josh saw her as the ancient and
terrifying Warrior she was. The sounds of battle were all around
them, but louder than all the other noises was the groaning rumble
that seemed to vibrate deep in the ground. “What is that sound?” he
asked.
“The cries of the Yggdrasill,” Scatty answered grimly. “Hekate’s
enemies have set light to the World Tree.”
“But why?” He found the very idea horrifying—this ancient living
tree had harmed no one. But the action gave him an insight into the
contempt with which the Dark Elders held life.
“Her powers are inextricably linked to it; her magic brought it to
towering life, its life force keeps her strong. They believe that by
destroying it, they will destroy her.”
Flamel came panting up the steps to stand behind Josh. The
Alchemyst’s thin face was bright red and beaded with sweat.
“Getting old,” he said with a wry smile. He looked at Scatty. “What’s
the plan?”
“Simple,” she began, “we get away from here as quickly as
possible.” Then she spun the sword in her left hand so that the blade
was lying at against the length of her arm. She pointed with the
hilt. Flamel and Josh stood close to her and peered out through the
curtain of vines. On the opposite side of the eld, Dr. John Dee had
appeared, moving cautiously through the undergrowth. The black-
bladed short sword that he held in both hands glowed and ickered
with a cold blue light.
“Dee,” Flamel said. “Never in my life would I have imagined
being delighted to see him. This is good news indeed.”
Both Scatty and Josh looked at him in surprise.
“Dee is human…which means that he came here via human
transportation,” the Alchemyst explained.
“A car”—Scatty nodded in agreement—“that he would probably
have left just outside the Shadowrealm.”
Josh was about to ask how she knew he would have left it outside
when he suddenly realized he knew the answer. “Because he knew if
he drove it in here, the battery would be drained.”
“Look,” Scatty murmured.
They watched one of the huge, boarlike Torc Alltas emerge from
the long grass behind Dee. Although it was still in its beast shape, it
rose on its hind legs, until it reached nearly three times the height of
the man.
“It’s going to kill him,” Josh murmured.
Dee’s sword ared bright blue, and then the small man threw
himself backward, toward the Torc Allta, bringing the sword around
in a short arc. The sudden movement seemed to surprise the
creature, but it easily batted aside the blade…and then it froze.
Where the blade had touched it, a thin sheath of ice grew up the
beast’s arm, tiny crystals sparkling in the early-morning sunshine.
The ice coated the Torc Allta’s chest and owed down its massive
legs and up his shoulders and head. Within a matter of heartbeats
the creature was encased in a block of blue-veined ice. Dee picked
himself up o the ground, dusted o his coat and then, without
warning, hammered on the ice with the hilt of his sword. The block
shattered into millions of tinkling pieces, each one containing a
fragment of the Torc Allta.
“One of the elemental swords,” Scatty remarked grimly,
“Excalibur, the Sword of Ice. I thought it was lost ages past, thrown
back into the lake when Artorius died.”
“Looks like the doctor found it,” Flamel murmured.
Josh discovered that he wasn’t even surprised to hear that King
Arthur had been real, and he found himself wondering which other
legendary gures had really existed.
They watched as Dee hurried back into the undergrowth, heading
for the other side of the huge tree house, where the sounds of battle
were loudest. The smell of smoke was stronger now. Sharp and
bitter, it curled and twisted around the tree, carrying with it the
reek of ancient places and long-forgotten spices. Wood snapped and
cracked, sap boiled and popped and the deep bass thrumming was
now strong enough to set the entire tree vibrating.
“I’ll clear the way,” Scatty said as she darted through the vines.
Almost immediately a trio of the birdmen came winging toward her,
followed by two of the cat-people, running on all fours.
“We’ve got to help her!” Josh said desperately, though he’d no
idea what he could do.
“She is Scathach; she doesn’t need our help,” Flamel said. “She’ll
lead them away from us rst….”
Scathach raced into the undergrowth, running lightly, her heavy
boots making no sound on the soft earth. The birds and cats
followed.
“She’ll back herself up against something, so that they can only
come at her from one side, then she’ll turn to face them.”
Josh watched as Scatty spun and faced her attackers, with her
back to a gnarled oak tree. The cat creatures reached her quickly,
claws ashing, but her short swords were quicker, and struck sparks
from their claws. A bird-creature swung in low, huge wings
apping, talons extended. Driving the sword in her left hand into
the ground, she caught the creature’s extended wrist and yanked it
out of the air, then tossed it into the middle of the snarling cats. The
bird instinctively lashed out at the cats, and suddenly, the animals
were
ghting among themselves. Two more bird-people
immediately dropped onto the cats with a hideous squalling. Scatty
yanked her sword out of the ground and used it to beckon to Flamel
and Josh.
Flamel tapped Josh’s shoulder. “Go. Get to Scathach.”
Josh turned to look at the Alchemyst. “What about you?”
“I’ll wait a moment, then follow and protect you.”
And even though Josh knew Flamel had placed them in terrible
danger, he had no doubts that the Alchemyst would watch his back.
He nodded, then turned and burst through the curtain of vines and
ran, clutching his sister tightly to his chest. Away from the shelter of
the tree, the noise of battle was incredible, but he concentrated on
the ground directly ahead of him, watching for roots or other
irregularities in the earth that could trip him. In his arms, Sophie
stirred; her eyes ickered, and she started to move. Josh tightened
his grip. “Stay still,” he said urgently, though he wasn’t sure if she
could hear him. He shifted direction, moving to the right, away
from the struggling creatures, but he couldn’t help noticing that
when they were badly injured, they reverted to their original bird
and cat shapes. Two bemused-looking cats and three ragged crows
picked themselves out of the dirt and watched him run past. Josh
could hear Flamel running behind him, could smell the mint on the
morning air as the Alchemyst worked his magic. Another ten or
fteen footsteps would take him to Scatty, and Josh knew that once
he was with her, he was safe. But when he reached Scatty, he was
just in time to see her eyes widen in horror. He looked over his
shoulder and saw a tall woman with the head and claws of a sleek
feline, wearing the robes of ancient Egypt, leap at least twenty feet
and land squarely on Nicholas Flamel’s back, driving him into the
ground. A curved, sicklelike claw shot out and sliced his short sta
neatly in two, then the creature threw back her head and hissed and
spat triumphantly.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Perenelle
Flamel was moved from her tiny underground cell by
four small guards dressed entirely in black leather, their heads and
faces concealed behind motorcycle helmets. She wasn’t entirely sure
they were human—certainly she could detect no trace of an aura, a
heartbeat or even breathing from the gures. As they crowded
around her, she caught the faintest hint of something old and dead,
like rotten eggs and overripe fruit. She thought they might be
simulacra, arti cial creatures grown in vats of putrid bubbling
liquid. Perenelle knew that Dee had always been fascinated by the
idea of creating his own followers and had spent decades
experimenting with Golems, simulacra and homunculi.
Without saying a word, and with jerky gestures, the four gures
ushered her out of the cell and down a long, narrow, dimly lit
corridor. Perenelle deliberately moved slowly, giving herself time to
gather her strength and absorb impressions of the place. Je erson
Miller, the ghost of the security guard, had told her that she was in
the basement of Enoch Enterprises, west of Telegraph Hill, close to
the famous Coit Tower. She knew she was deep underground: the
walls ran with moisture, and the air was so cold that it plumed in
clouds before her face. Now that she was out of the cell and away
from its protective spells and charms, she felt a little of her strength
begin to return. Perenelle desperately tried to think of a spell she
could use on the guards, but contact with the ghost of Mr. Miller
had left her exhausted, and she had a headache pulsing at the back
of her eyes that made it hard to concentrate.
A shape suddenly ickered into existence directly ahead of her.
Her breath, a foggy white in the chilly air, had brie y formed a face.
Perenelle glanced at her guards on either side, but they hadn’t
reacted. She drew in a deep lungful of breath, held it, allowing her
body to warm it, and then breathed out in a long, slow exhalation. A
face formed in the white mist: that of Je erson Miller.
Perenelle frowned; his ghost should be long gone by now.
Unless…unless he had come back to tell her something.
Nicholas!
Instantly, she knew her husband was in danger. Perenelle
breathed in another great lungful of air and held it. She
concentrated hard on Nicholas, seeing him clearly in her mind’s eye,
with his narrow, rather mournful-looking face, pale eyes and closely
cropped hair. She smiled, remembering him when he’d been
younger and his hair, thick and dark, had been longer than hers.
He’d always worn it tied back at the nape of his neck with a purple
velvet ribbon. She breathed out and the air turned into a white
cloud that instantly formed into Je erson Miller’s face again.
Perenelle stared into the ghost’s eyes, and there, re ected in his
pupils, she could see her husband trapped beneath the paw of the
cat-headed goddess.
Rage and terror blossomed within her, and suddenly, her
headache and exhaustion left her. Her silver-threaded black hair
rose from her head as if blown in a strong breeze, sparks of blue and
white static snapping along its length. Her ice-white aura ared
around her body like a second skin. Too late the guards realized that
something was wrong. They reached for her, but the moment their
hands touched the glowing edges of her aura, they were catapulted
away as if they’d received an electric shock. One guard even threw
himself onto her body, but before he could lay a nger on her,
Perenelle’s aura caught him and propelled him high into the wall
with enough force to knock the motorcycle helmet o his head. The
gure slid down the wall, arms and legs twisted in awkward
positions. When Perenelle looked at his face, she realized that the
creatures were indeed simulacra. This one was un nished: his face
and head were simply smooth esh, bald, without eyes, nose, mouth
or ears.
The woman raced down the corridor, only pausing when she
came to an oily-looking puddle on the oor. Crouching over the
puddle, she concentrated hard and touched the murky water with
her index and little ngers. Her white aura sizzled when it touched
the liquid, and the water brie y smoked before it cleared and
Perenelle found she was looking at the scene she had brie y
glimpsed in the ghost’s eyes. Her husband was lying under Bastet’s
claws. Behind them, Scatty was struggling to hold o the attacking
cats and birds, while Josh stood with his back to a tree, awkwardly
clutching a branch like a baseball bat, striking out at anything that
came too close. Sophie lay at his feet, moving slowly, blinking in
confusion.
Perenelle glanced up and down the corridor. She could hear
noises in the distance, footsteps against stone, and she knew more
guards were approaching. She could run and hide or she could ght
the guards; she had a little of her strength back. But that wasn’t
going to help Nicholas and the children.
Perenelle looked back into the puddle. In the distance she could
see Hekate withstanding the combined attack of the Morrigan and
her birds and Bastet’s cats. Perenelle also spotted Dee moving
around behind Hekate, the sword in his hand glowing bright,
poisonous blue, while behind them the Yggdrasill burned with erce
red and green ames.
There was one other thing she could do. Something desperate and
dangerous, and if it succeeded, it would leave her utterly exhausted
and completely defenseless. Dee’s creatures would simply be able to
pick her up and carry her away.
Perenelle didn’t think twice.
Crouching over the puddle of dirty water, she placed her right
hand, palm up, in her left hand and concentrated ercely.
Perenelle’s aura began to shift and move, owing down her arms
like drifting smoke, gathering in the palm of her hand, running like
liquid along the creases and lines in her esh. A tiny speck of silverwhite light appeared in the folds of skin. It solidi ed into a perfect
sphere and then it started to spin and grow, and now the ice white
threads of her aura owed more swiftly down her arms. Within a
heartbeat the sphere was the size of an egg, and then Perenelle
suddenly reversed her palm and thrust the ball of pure auric energy
into the water. She uttered three words.
“Sophie. Wake up!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
“Sophie. Wake up!”
Sophie Newman’s eyes snapped open. And then she squeezed
them shut again and pressed her hands against her ears. The lights
were so bright, so vivid, the sounds of battle so incredibly clear and
distinct.
“Sophie. Wake up!”
The shock of hearing the voice again forced her to open her eyes
and look around. She could hear Perenelle Flamel as clearly as if she
were standing beside her, but there was no one there. She was lying
propped against the rough bark of an oak tree, with Josh standing
beside her, a thick branch clutched in both hands, desperately
beating back terrifying creatures.
Sophie slowly pushed herself to her feet, holding on to the tree for
support. The last thing she clearly remembered was the bitter odor
of rich green wood burning. She remembered saying “Fire!” and
then the rest was a series of confused images—a narrow tunnel,
creatures with bird heads and cat skulls—that might have been
dreams.
As Sophie’s eyes adjusted and she looked around, she realized that
they had not been dreams.
They were completely surrounded by birds and cats: hundreds of
them. Some of the cat-headed humans lurked in the long grass and
attempted to creep toward them on all fours or on their bellies,
spitting and clawing. There were birdmen in the branches of the
tree overhead, maneuvering to get close enough to drop down,
while others kept hopping in, jabbing at Josh with their evil-looking
beaks.
On the opposite side of the eld, the Yggdrasill burned. The
ancient wood snapped and cracked, plumes of white-hot sap boiling
up into the pristine air like reworks. But even as the burnt wood
fell away, new growth appeared, fresh and green, in its place.
Sophie was conscious of another sound too, and realized she was
listening to the Yggdrasill. And now, with her incredibly sensitive
hearing, she thought she could make out phrases and words,
snatches of songs and fragments of poems within the agonized cries
of the burning tree. In the distance, she could see Hekate
desperately trying to put out the res, but she was also ghting the
Morrigan, the cats and the birds at the same time. Sophie also
noticed that there were no more nathair in the skies, and very few
of the Torc Allta remained to guard their ancient mistress.
Closer, Sophie spotted Scatty’s bright red hair. She, too, was
surrounded by dozens of birds and cats. The Warrior was moving in
what looked like an intricate dance, twin swords ashing, sending
the creatures howling back from her. Scatty was trying to ght her
way over to where Nicholas Flamel was lying facedown on the
ground beneath the claws of the most terrifying creature Sophie had
ever seen: Bastet, the Cat Goddess. With her incredibly sharp
eyesight, the girl could make out the individual whiskers on Bastet’s
feline face, and she actually saw a droplet of saliva gather on the
overlarge fangs and drip onto the man below.
Flamel saw Sophie looking in his direction. He tried to draw a
breath, but it was di cult with the heavy creature standing on top
of him. “Run,” he whispered, “run.”
“Sophie, I only have a few moments…” Perenelle’s voice echoed
inside the girl’s head, shocking her to full alertness. “This is what you
must do. You must let me speak through you….”
Josh became aware that his sister was climbing to her feet,
swaying slightly, hands pressed to her ears as if the sounds were too
much, eyes squeezed tightly shut. He saw her lips move, as if she
were talking to herself. He lashed out at a pair of humans with
mockingbird heads as they darted forward. The heavy branch
caught one of the creatures squarely on the beak, and it staggered
back, dazed and stunned. The other continued to circle Josh, who
realized that it was not coming for him—it was trying to get to
Sophie. He turned and lashed out at it, but at that moment, a tall,
slender man with a tabby cat’s head came bounding toward him.
Josh tried to swing the branch, but he was o balance and the
catman ducked under the blow. Then it leapt into the air, mouth
gaping, claws extended. With a sour taste at the back of his throat,
Josh admitted to himself that he and Sophie were in desperate
trouble. He needed to get to his sister, he had to protect her…and in
that instant, he knew he was not going to make it. He closed his
eyes at the last minute as the savage cat-headed creature slammed
into his chest, expecting to feel the sting of its claws, to hear its
squalling roar in his face…but all he heard was a gentle purring. He
blinked his eyes open and found he was holding a u y kitten in his
arms.
Sophie! He turned around…and stopped in awe.
Sophie’s aura had ared pure silver around her body. It was so
dense in places that it even re ected the sunlight, making it appear
like a medieval suit of armor. Silver sparks crackled through her
hair and dripped from her ngers like liquid.
“Sophie?” Josh whispered, elated. His sister was ne.
And then Sophie slowly turned her head to look at Josh, and he
experienced the shocking, sickening realization that she did not
recognize him.
The birdman that had been moving in to attack the girl suddenly
darted forward, beak stabbing at her eyes. Sophie snapped her
ngers: tiny droplets of silver spun away from her hands to splash
against the creature. Instantly, it folded and twisted in on itself and
became a disorientated hermit thrush.
Sophie walked past her brother and stepped toward Bastet.
“No farther, little girl,” Bastet commanded, raising a clawed hand.
Sophie’s eyes opened wide and she smiled, and Josh suddenly
found that, for the rst time in his life, he was frightened of his own
sister. He knew that this wasn’t his Sophie; this terrifying creature
could not be his twin.
When the girl spoke, her voice was a harsh croak. “You have no
idea what I can do to you.”
Bastet’s huge feline eyes blinked in surprise. “You can do nothing
to me, little girl.”
“I am no girl. You may be ancient, but you have never encountered
anything like me. I possess the raw power that can nullify your magic. I
can use it to return the birds and cats to their natural forms.” Sophie’s
head titled to one side, a gesture Josh knew well; his sister did it
when she was listening intently to someone. Then she stretched out
her hands toward the Dark Elder. “What do you think would happen if
I were to reach out and touch you?”
Bastet hissed a command, and a trio of huge catmen raced toward
the girl. Sophie ung out her arm, and a long, whip-like, snaking
coil of silver energy owed from her hand. It touched each of the
cats, crackling across their haunches and shoulders, and they
immediately came to stumbling halts, rolling and twisting on the
ground as they transformed into ordinary everyday cats, two
shorthairs and a ragged-looking Persian. The cats bounded to their
feet and streaked o , howling piteously.
Sophie spun the whip above her head, scattering drops of liquid
silver in every direction. “Let me give you a taste of what I can do….”
The silver whip cracked and snapped as she approached.
Scatty suddenly found that three of her adversaries had
transformed into an American robin, a house nch, and a song
sparrow, while the exotic-looking catman directly in front of her
warped into a confused Siamese.
Sophie cracked the silver whip again and again, beating away
their attackers, droplets of silver splashing everywhere, and more
and more of the cat-and birdmen returned to their natural forms.
“Get away from Nicholas,” she said, her lips not moving in synch
with her words, “or we will nd out what your true shape is, Bastet,
who is also Mafdet, Sekhmet and Menhit.”
Bastet slowly stepped away from Flamel and raised herself to her
full towering height. Her slit-pupiled eyes were wide, her mouth
tightly closed. “It has been a long time since anyone has called me
by those names. Who are you—certainly no modern humani girl?”
Sophie’s mouth moved, the words taking a moment or two to
follow. “Beware this girl, Bastet. She is your doom.”
Bastet’s fur was bristling and her bare arms dimpled with goose
bumps. Then she slowly backed away, turned and raced toward the
burning Yggdrasill. For the rst time in millennia, she was
frightened.
Nicholas dragged himself to his feet and staggered toward Sophie,
Josh and Scatty. He stepped up to Sophie. “Perenelle?” he
whispered.
Sophie turned her head to him, eyes blank and unseeing. Her
mouth worked, and then, as in a badly dubbed movie, the words
came. “I’m in San Francisco, held in the basement of Enoch Enterprises.
I’m safe and well. Take
the children south, Nicholas.” There was a long moment of silence;
then, when she spoke again, the words came quicker than Sophie’s
lips could move, and the girl’s silver aura began to fade and her eyes
started to close. “Take them to the Witch.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Dr. John Dee was becoming frantic. Everything was falling apart,
and now there was every possibility that he was going to have to
take an active part in the battle.
Flamel, Scatty and the twins had managed to escape from the
interior of the Yggdrasill and were now ghting on the opposite side
of the eld, no more than two hundred yards away, but he couldn’t
get to them—it would mean crossing a battle eld. The last of the
Torc Allta, both in their human and boar form, fought running
battles with the cat-and birdmen. The nathair had already been
defeated. Initially, the winged serpents had brought chaos and
confusion to the cats and birds, but they were lumbering and
awkward on the ground, and most had been killed once they’d
landed. The massive army of Torc Allta had thinned considerably,
and he guessed that within the hour, there would be no more
wereboars left in North America.
But he could not a ord to wait that long. He had to get to Flamel
now. He had to retrieve the pages of the Codex as soon as possible.
From his hiding place behind a clump of bushes, Dee watched the
Elders. Hekate was standing in the doorway to her tree home,
surrounded by the last of her personal Torc Allta guard. While the
boars fought the cats and birds, Hekate alone faced down the
combined forces of the Morrigan and Bastet.
The three ignored the half-human animals ghting around them.
To the casual observer it would have seemed as if the three Elders
were simply staring at one another. Dee, however, noted the purplegray clouds that gathered only above the Yggdrasill; he saw how the
delicate white and gold owers strewn around the huge tree
withered and died, turning to black paste in an instant; he had seen
the unsightly sheen of fungus that appeared on the smoothly
polished stone path. Dee smiled; surely it would not be long now.
How much longer could Hekate stand against the two Elders, aunt
and niece?
But the goddess showed no sign of weakening.
And then she struck back.
Although the air, now stinking from the burning tree, was still,
Dee watched as an invisible, unfelt breeze whipped the Morrigan’s
cloak about her shoulders and bu eted the huge Bastet, making her
tilt her head and lean forward into the wind. The patterns on
Hekate’s metallic dress whirled with blinding rapidity, the colors
blurred and distorted.
With growing alarm, he saw a dark shadow owing across the
withering grass and then watched as a swarm of tiny black ies
settled on Bastet’s fur, crawling into her ears and up her nose. The
Cat Goddess howled and staggered back, rubbing furiously at her
face. She fell to the ground, rolling over and over in the long grass,
attempting to free herself from the insects. More and more kept
coming, and they were joined by re ants and recluse spiders, which
crawled out of the grass and swarmed over her body. Crouched on
all fours, she threw back her head and screamed in agony, then
turned and ran across the eld, rolling and crawling in the grass,
splashing through a little pool, trying to clean the insects from her
body. She was more than halfway across the eld before the thick,
swirling cloud left her. She rubbed furiously at her face and arms,
leaving long scratches on her skin, before climbing to her feet and
striding back toward the Yggdrasill. And then the swarm of ies,
thicker now, re-formed in the air before her.
In that moment, Dee considered that perhaps—just perhaps—
Hekate could win. Splitting Bastet and the Morrigan had been a
master stroke; ensuring that Bastet could not get back was simply
genius.
Realizing that she could not return to the Yggdrasill, Bastet hissed
her rage, then turned and raced over to where Flamel, Scatty and
the twins were trying to defend themselves. Dee saw her leap an
incredible distance and bring the Alchemyst to the ground. That
gave him some satisfaction, at least, and he allowed himself a slight
smile, which quickly faded—he was still trapped on this side of the
eld. How was he going to get past Hekate?
Even though the Yggdrasill was burning furiously, with whole
sections blazing, burning leaves and blackened strips of branches
spiraling down, sticky streamers of sap exploding from collapsing
branches, Hekate’s powers seemed undiminished. Dee ground his
teeth in frustration; all his research indicated that Hekate had
brought the tree to life by imbuing it with a little of her own life
force. In turn, as it grew, it renewed and replenished her powers.
Burning the tree had been his idea. He had imagined that as it
burned, she would weaken. But on the contrary: setting the tree
alight had only served to enrage the goddess, and her anger had
made her all the more deadly. When Dee saw Hekate’s lips twitch in
what might have been a smile and the Morrigan stagger and then
step back, he began to realize that here, in her own Shadowrealm,
the Goddess with Three Faces was simply too strong for them.
Dee knew then that he would have to act.
Keeping to the shadows of the trees and tall grasses, he moved
around the trunk of the enormous Yggdrasill. He was forced to
crouch down and hide as a Torc Allta in its boar shape crashed
through the undergrowth directly in front of him with at least a
dozen cat-people and twice that number of birdmen clinging to him.
Dee came out of the undergrowth on the opposite side of the tree
from where Hekate and the Morrigan fought. To his right, he could
see that something was happening with Flamel’s group; birds and
cats were scattering in every direction…and then he realized that he
was seeing ordinary birds and everyday cats eeing, not the halfhuman creatures. The Morrigan’s and Bastet’s transformation spells
were failing: was Hekate that powerful? He had to end this now.
Dr. John Dee lifted the short-bladed sword in his hand. Dirty blue
light coiled down its length, and for an instant the ancient stone
blade hummed as an invisible breeze moved across the edge. The
twisting snakes carved into its hilt came to twisting, hissing life.
Gripping the hilt tightly, Dee pressed the point of the blade
against the gnarled bark of the ancient tree…and pushed.
Excalibur slid smoothly into the wood, sinking right up to the hilt
without resistance. For a long moment nothing happened, and then
Yggdrasill began to moan. The sound was like that of an animal in
pain: beginning as a deep grumbling, it quickly rose to a highpitched whimpering. Where the hilt of the sword protruded from the
tree, a blue stain appeared. Like dripping ink, it owed down the
tree and seeped into the ground, then the oily blue light ran along
the veins and seams of wood. Yggdrasill’s cries grew higher and
higher, until they were almost beyond human hearing. The
surviving Torc Allta fell to the ground, writhing in pain, clutching at
their ears; birdmen whirled in confusion and the cat-people began to
hiss and howl in unison.
The blue stain raced around the tree, coating everything in a thin
veneer of glittering ice crystals that re ected the light. Blue-black
and purple-green rainbows shimmered in the air.
The oily stain shot up the length of the tree and out along the
branches, turning everything it touched to faceted crystals. Even the
re was not immune to it. Flames froze, re caught in ornate and
intricate patterns, then spiderwebbed, like ice on the surface of a
pond, and dissolved to sparkling dust. Where the blue stain touched
the leaves, they hardened and broke away from the branches. They
did not spiral to the ground: they fell and shattered with tiny
tinkling sounds, while the branches, now solid pieces of ice, ripped
away from the trunk of the tree and crashed to the earth. Dee threw
himself to one side to avoid being impaled by a three-foot length of
frozen branch. Catching hold of Excalibur’s hilt, he dragged the
stone blade free of the ancient tree and ran for cover.
The Yggdrasill was dying. Huge slabs of bark sheared o , like
icebergs breaking away from an ice cap, and crashed to the ground,
littering the beautiful Shadowrealm landscape with shards of razorsharp ice.
Keeping his distance and watching for falling branches, Dee raced
around the tree; he needed to see Hekate.
The Goddess with Three Faces was dying.
Standing quite still before the crumbling Yggdrasill, Hekate was
ickering through her three faces—young, mature and old—in
heartbeats. The change was happening so fast that her esh had no
time to adapt and she was caught between phases: young eyes in an
old face, a girl’s head on a woman’s body, a woman’s body with a
child’s arms. Her ever-changing dress had lost all color and was the
same solid black as her skin.
Dee stood beside the Morrigan and they watched in silence. Bastet
rejoined them, and together the three observed Hekate and
Yggdrasill’s last moments.
The World Tree was now almost entirely blue, covered with a
sheath of ice. Frozen roots had burst through the ground, destroying
the perfect symmetry of the earth, cutting thick gouges in the soil.
Huge holes had appeared in the massive trunk, revealing the
circular rooms within, which were warped and stained with the blue
ice.
Hekate’s transformations slowed. The changes were taking longer
to materialize because now the blue stain was slowly creeping up
her body, hardening her skin, turning it to ice crystals.
The Morrigan glanced at the blade in Dee’s hand, then quickly
looked away. “Even after all these years in our employ, Dr. Dee, you
can still surprise us,” she said quietly. “I was not aware that you
possessed the Sword of Ice.”
“I’m glad I brought it,” Dee said, not directly answering her. “It
seems Hekate’s powers were stronger than we suspected. At least my
guess—that her strength was connected to the tree—was correct.”
What remained of the Yggdrasill was now a solid block of ice.
Hekate, too, was completely covered beneath a frozen sheet, though
behind the blue crystals, her butter-colored eyes were bright and
alive. The top of the tree began to melt, dirty water running down
the length of the bark, cutting deep grooves into it.
“When I realized that she had the power to nullify your spells, I
knew I had to do something,” Dee said. “I saw how the cats and
birds were reverting to their natural shapes.”
“That was not Hekate’s doing,” Bastet growled suddenly, her
accent thick, her voice beastlike.
The Morrigan and Dee turned to look at the Cat Goddess. The
creature raised a furry claw and pointed across the eld. “It was the
girl. Someone spoke through her, someone who knew my true
names, someone who used the girl’s aura to wield a whip of pure
energy: that’s what reversed our spells.”
Dee looked across the eld where he had seen Flamel, Scatty and
the twins gathered around the oak tree. But there was no sign of
them. He was turning to order the surviving cats and birds to nd
them when he spotted Senuhet staggering up. The old man was
spattered with mud and blood—though none of the blood seemed to
be his—and he had lost one of his curved bronze swords. The
second had snapped in half.
“Flamel and the others have escaped,” he gasped. “I followed
them out of the Shadowrealm. They’re stealing our car,” he added
indignantly.
Howling his rage, Dr. John Dee spun around and ung Excalibur
at the Yggdrasill. The stone blade struck the ancient World Tree,
which tolled with the solemn sound of a great bell. The single note,
high-pitched and serene, hung vibrating on the air…and then the
Yggdrasill began to crack. Long fractures and tears ran the height of
the tree. They started small, but widened as they raced upward in
ragged patterns. Within moments the entire tree was covered in the
crazed zigzagging. Then the Yggdrasill shattered and came crashing
down on the ice statue of Hekate, crushing it to dust.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Josh Newman jerked open the door of the black SUV and felt a
wave of relief wash over him. The keys were in the ignition. He
pulled open the rear door and held it while Nicholas Flamel hurried
toward the car, carrying Sophie in his arms. He reached in and
gently stretched her out on the backseat. Scatty burst through the
barrier of leaves and came hurtling down the path, a broad smile on
her face.
“Now, that,” she said as she launched herself into the back of the
SUV, “was the most fun I’ve had in a millennium.”
Josh climbed into the driver’s seat, adjusted it and turned the key
in the ignition. The big V6 engine growled to life.
Flamel hopped into the passenger’s seat and slammed the door.
“Get us out of here!”
Josh pushed the gearshift into drive, gripped the leather steering
wheel in both hands and pressed the accelerator at to the oor.
The big Hummer lurched forward, kicking up stones and dirt as he
spun it in a circle and then set o down the narrow path, rocking
and bouncing over the ruts, tree branches and bushes scraping its
sides, scoring lines along its pristine paintwork.
Although the sun had risen in both the Shadowrealm and the real
world, the road was still in deep shadow, and no matter where Josh
looked, he still couldn’t nd the controls for the lights. He kept
glancing in the side and rearview mirrors, expecting at any moment
to see the Morrigan or the Cat Goddess step through the wall of
vegetation behind them. It was only when the path ended in a burst
of sunshine and he wrenched the steering wheel to the right, turning
the heavy SUV onto the narrow, winding blacktop, that he eased o
the gas. The Hummer immediately lost speed.
“Everyone OK?” he asked shakily.
He tilted the rearview mirror down so that he could see into the
back. His twin lay stretched across the wide leather seats, her head
on Scatty’s lap. The Warrior was using a scrap of cloth torn from her
T-shirt to wipe the girl’s forehead. Sophie’s skin was deathly white,
and although her eyes were closed, her eyeballs moved erratically
beneath her lids, and she twitched as if she was having a nightmare.
Scatty caught Josh looking at them in the glass and she smiled in
encouragement. “She’s going to be OK,” she said.
“Is there anything you can do?” Josh demanded, glancing at
Flamel sitting next to him. His feelings for the Alchemyst were
completely confused now. On the one hand, he had placed them in
terrible danger, and yet Josh had seen how savagely Flamel had
fought in their defense.
“There is nothing I can do,” Flamel said tiredly. “She is simply
exhausted; nothing more.” Nicholas also looked worn out. His
clothes were streaked with mud and what might have been blood.
Bird feathers stuck in his hair, and both hands were scratched from
his encounters with the cats. “Let her sleep, and when she awakens
in a few hours’ time, she will be ne. I promise you.”
Josh nodded. He concentrated on the road ahead of him,
unwilling to continue the conversation with the Alchemyst. He
doubted that his sister would ever be ne again. He’d seen how she
looked at him, her eyes blank and staring: she hadn’t recognized
him. He’d listened to the voice that had come out of her mouth: it
wasn’t a voice he’d known. His sister, his twin, had been utterly
changed.
They came up on a sign for Mill Valley, and he turned left. He had
no idea where they were going; he just wanted to get away from the
Shadowrealm. More than that: he wanted to go home, wanted to go
back to a normal life, he wanted to forget that he’d ever come across
that ad in the university newspaper his father had brought home.
Assistant Wanted, Bookshop. We don’t want readers, we want
workers.
He’d sent in a résumé and a few days later he’d been called for an
interview. Sophie had had nothing else to do that day and had come
along for company. While she’d been waiting, she’d gone to the
shop across the road for a chai latte. When Josh had come out of
The Small Book Shop, beaming delightedly because he’d been
o ered the job, he’d discovered that Sophie had found a job as well
in The Co ee Cup. They would be working right across the street
from each other—it was perfect! And it had been perfect—until
yesterday, when this madness had begun. He had trouble believing
it had only been yesterday. He looked in the mirror at Sophie again.
She was resting quietly now, completely still, but he was relieved to
see that a little color had come back into her cheeks.
What had Hekate done? No—what had Flamel done? It all came
back to the Alchemyst. This was all his fault. The goddess hadn’t
wanted to Awaken the twins—she knew the dangers. But Flamel had
pushed, and now, because of the Alchemyst, Hekate’s Shadowrealm
paradise was under attack, and his sister had become a stranger to
him.
When Josh had started working in the bookshop for the man he
knew then as Nick Fleming, he’d thought he was a little strange,
eccentric, maybe even a little weird. But as he’d gotten to know
him, he’d come to genuinely like the man, and to admire him.
Fleming was everything Josh’s father wasn’t. He was funny, and
interested in just about everything Josh did, and his knowledge of
trivia was incredible. Josh knew that his father, Richard, was really
only happy and comfortable when he was standing before a lecture
hall full of students or buried up to his knees in dirt.
Fleming was di erent. When Josh quoted Bart Simpson to him,
Fleming countered with Groucho Marx and then went further and
introduced Josh to the movies of the Marx Brothers. They shared a
love of music—even though their tastes were widely di erent; Josh
introduced Nick to Green Day, Lamb and Dido. Fleming
recommended Peter Gabriel, Genesis and Pink Floyd. When Josh let
Fleming listen to some ambient and trance on his iPod, Fleming
loaned him CDs of Mike Old eld and Brian Eno. Josh introduced
Nick to the world of blogging and showed him his and Sophie’s
blog, and they had even started talking about putting the entire
shop’s stock online.
In time Josh had come to think of Fleming as the older brother
he’d always wished he had. And now that man had betrayed him.
In fact, he’d been lying to Josh from the very beginning. He
hadn’t even been Nick Fleming. And somewhere at the back of
Josh’s mind, an ugly question was beginning to form. Keeping his
voice low and his eyes on the road ahead, he asked, “Did you know
all this would happen?”
Flamel sat back into the deep leather seat and turned to look at
Josh. The Alchemyst was partially in shadow and he clutched the
seat belt across his chest with both hands. “What would happen?”
he asked carefully.
“You know, I’m not a kid,” Josh said, his voice rising, “so don’t
talk to me like one.” In the rear seat, Sophie muttered a little in her
sleep, and he forced himself to lower his voice. “Did your precious
Book predict all this?” He caught a glimpse of Scatty moving in the
backseat and realized she had eased forward to hear the Alchemyst’s
answer.
Flamel took a long time before replying. Finally, he said. “There
are some things you must know rst about the Book of Abraham the
Mage.” He saw Josh open his mouth and he pressed on quickly. “Let
me nish. I always knew the Codex was old,” he began, “though I
never knew just how old. Yesterday Hekate said she was there when
Abraham created it…and that would have been at least ten
thousand years ago. The world was a very di erent place then. The
commonly held view is that mankind appeared in the middle of the
Stone Age. But the truth is very, very di erent. The Elder Race ruled
the earth. We have scraps of the truth in our mythology and
legends. If you believe the stories,” he continued, “they possessed
the power of ight, they had vessels that could cross the oceans,
they could control the weather and had even perfected what we
would call cloning. In other words, they had access to a science that
was so advanced, we would call it magic.”
Josh started to shake his head. This was too much to take in.
“And before you say this is all far-fetched, just think how far the
human race has come in the past ten years. If someone had told
your parents, for example, that they would be able to carry their
entire music library in their pocket, would they have believed it?
Now we have phones that have more computing power than was
used to send the rst rockets into space. We have electron
microscopes that can see individual atoms. We routinely cure
diseases that only fty years ago were fatal. And the rate of change
is increasing. Today we are able to do what your parents would
have dismissed as impossible and your grandparents as nothing
short of magical.”
“You haven’t answered my question,” Josh said. He was watching
his speed carefully; they couldn’t a ord to be pulled over.
“What I’m saying to you is that I do not know what the Elder Race
was able to do. Was Abraham making predictions in the Codex, or
was he simply writing down what he had somehow seen? Was he
aware of the future, could he actually see it?” He swiveled around in
the seat to look at Scatty. “Do you know?”
She shrugged, lips curling into a little smile. “I’m Next
Generation; much of the Elder World had vanished before I was
even born, and Danu Talis was long sunk beneath the waves. I’ve no
idea what they could do. Could they see through time?” She paused,
thinking. “I’ve known Elders who seemed to have that gift: Sibyl
certainly could, and so could Themis and Melampus, of course. But
they were wrong more often than they were right. If my travels
have taught me anything, it is that we create our own future. I’ve
watched world-shaking events come and go without anyone making
predictions about them, and I’ve also seen prophecies—usually to do
with the end of the world—that also failed to happen.”
A car overtook them on the narrow country road, the rst they
had seen so far that morning.
“I’m going to ask you the question one more time,” Josh said,
struggling to keep his voice even. “And this time, just give me a
straight yes-or-no answer: was everything that just happened
predicted in the Codex?”
“No,” Flamel said quickly.
“I hear a but in there somewhere,” Scatty said.
The Alchemyst nodded. “There is a little but. There is nothing in
the book about Hekate or the Shadowrealm, nothing about Dee or
Bastet or the Morrigan. But…” He sighed. “There are several
prophecies about twins.”
“Twins,” Josh said tightly. “You mean twins in general or
speci cally to do with Sophie and me?”
“The Codex speaks of silver and gold twins, ‘the two that are one,
the one that is all.’ It is no coincidence that your auras are pure gold
and silver. So yes, I am convinced the Codex is referring to you and
your sister.” He leaned forward to look at Josh. “And if you are
asking me how long I’ve known that, then the answer is this: I
began to suspect only yesterday, when you and Sophie came to my
aid in the shop. Hekate con rmed my suspicions a few hours later
when she made your auras visible. I give you my word that
everything I’ve done has been for your protection.”
Josh started to shake his head; he wasn’t sure he believed Flamel.
He opened his mouth to ask a question, but Scatty put her hand on
his shoulder before he could speak. “Let me just say this,” she said,
her voice low and serious, her Celtic accent suddenly pronounced.
“I’ve known Nicholas Flamel for a very long time. America was
barely even colonized when we rst met. He is many things—
dangerous and devious, cunning and deadly, a good friend and an
implacable enemy—but he comes from an age when a man’s word
was indeed precious. If he gives you his word that he’s done all this
for your protection, then I am suggesting that you believe him.”
Josh eased on the brake and the car slowed as it rounded a
corner. Finally, he nodded and let out his breath in a deep sigh. “I
believe you,” he said aloud. But somewhere in the back of his mind,
he kept hearing Hekate’s last words to him—“Nicholas Flamel never
tells anyone everything”—and he had the distinct impression that
the Alchemyst still wasn’t telling everything he knew.
Suddenly, Nicholas tapped Josh’s arm. “Here—stop here.”
“Why, what’s wrong?” Scatty demanded, reaching for her swords.
Josh signaled and pulled the Hummer o the road to where a
roadside diner sign had ickered into life.
“Nothing’s wrong.” Flamel grinned. “Just time for some
breakfast.”
“Great. I’m famished,” Scatty said. “I could eat a horse. If I
weren’t a vegetarian…and liked horse, of course.”
And you weren’t a vampire, Josh thought, but kept his mouth
shut.
Sophie woke up while Scatty and Flamel were in the diner
ordering breakfast to go. One moment she was asleep, the next she
sat bolt upright in the backseat. Josh jumped and was unable to
prevent a little startled cry from escaping his lips.
He swiveled around in the driver’s seat, kneeling up to lean over
the back. “Sophie?” he asked cautiously. He was terri ed that
something strange and ancient would look through his sister’s eyes
again.
“You don’t want to know what I was dreaming about,” Sophie
said, stretching her arms wide and arching her back. Her neck
cracked as she rotated it. “Ow. I ache everywhere.”
“How do you feel?” Well, it sounded like his sister.
“Like I’m coming down with u.” She looked around. “Where are
we? Whose car is this?”
Josh grinned, teeth white in the shadows. “We stole it from Dee.
We’re somewhere on the road out of Mill Valley, heading back into
San Francisco, I think.”
“What happened…what happened back there?” Sophie asked.
Josh’s smile broadened into a wide grin. “You saved us, with your
newly Awakened powers. You were incredible: you had a silver
whip energy thing, and every time it touched one of the cats or
birds, it changed them back into their real forms.” He trailed o as
she started to shake her head. “You don’t remember anything?”
“A little. I could hear Perenelle talking to me, telling me what to
do. I could actually feel her pouring her aura into me,” she said in
awe. “I could hear her. I could even see her, sort of.” She suddenly
drew in a deep, shuddering breath. “Then they came for her. That’s
all I can remember.”
“Who did?”
“The faceless men. Lots of faceless men. I watched them drag her
away.”
“What do you mean, faceless men?”
Sophie’s eyes were wide and terri ed. “They had no faces.”
“Like masks?”
“No, Josh, not masks. Their faces were smooth—no eyes, no nose,
no mouth, just smooth skin.”
The image that formed in his head was deeply disturbing, and he
deliberately changed the subject. “Do you feel…di erent?” He chose
the word carefully.
Sophie took a moment to consider. What was wrong with Josh,
why was he so concerned? “Di erent? How?”
“Do you remember Hekate Awakening your powers?”
“I do.”
“What did it feel like?” he asked hesitantly.
For a moment Sophie’s eyes ickered with cold silver light. “It
was as if someone had ipped a switch in my head, Josh. I felt alive.
For the rst time in my life I felt alive.”
Josh felt a sudden inexplicable pang of jealousy. From the corner
of his eye, he spotted Flamel and Scatty leaving the diner, arms
piled high with bags. “And how do you feel now?”
“Hungry,” she said. “Extremely hungry.”
They ate in silence: breakfast burritos, eggs, sausage, grits and
rolls, washed down with soda. Scatty had fruit and water.
Josh nally wiped his mouth with a napkin and brushed bread
crumbs o his jeans. It was the rst proper meal he’d had since
lunchtime the day before. “I feel human again.” He glanced
sideways at Scatty. “No o ense.”
“None taken,” Scatty assured him. “Believe me—I’ve never
wanted to be human, though there are, I believe, some advantages,”
she added enigmatically.
Nicholas bundled up the remains of their breakfast and shoved
them into a paper bag. Then he leaned forward and tapped the
screen of the satellite navigation system set into the dashboard. “Do
you know how this works?”
Josh shook his head. “In theory, I guess. We put in a destination
and it tells us the best way to get there. I’ve never used one before,
though. My dad’s car hasn’t got one,” he added. Richard Newman
drove a ve-year-old Volvo station wagon.
“If you looked at it, could you make it work?” Flamel persisted.
“Maybe,” Josh said doubtfully.
“Of course he can. Josh is a genius with computers,” Sophie said
proudly from the backseat.
“This is hardly a computer,” her twin muttered, leaning forward
and hitting the On button. The large square screen ickered to life,
and an incredibly patronizing voice warned them about typing
addresses into the system while driving, then instructed Josh to hit
the OK button, acknowledging that he’d heard and understood the
warning. The screen blinked and immediately showed the position
of the Hummer on an unnamed backroad. Mount Tamalpais
appeared as a little triangle at the top of the screen, and arrows
pointed south to San Francisco. The little track that led to Hekate’s
Shadowrealm wasn’t shown.
“We need to go south,” Flamel continued.
Josh experimented with the buttons until he got the main menu.
“Okay. I need an address.”
“Put in the post o ce at the corner of Signal Street and Ojai
Avenue in Ojai.”
In the backseat, Scatty stirred. “Oh, not Ojai. Please tell me we’re
not going there.”
Flamel twisted in his seat. “Perenelle told me to go south.”
“L.A. is south, Mexico is south, even Chile is south of here. There
are lots of nice places that lie to the south….”
“Perenelle told me to take the children to the Witch,” Flamel said
patiently. “And the Witch is in Ojai.”
Sophie and Josh looked quickly at each other, but said nothing.
Scatty sat back and sighed dramatically. “Would it make a
di erence if I told you I didn’t want to go?”
“None at all.”
Sophie crouched between the seats to stare at the little screen.
“How long will it take? How far away are we?” she wondered out
loud.
“It’s going to take most of the day,” Josh said, leaning forward to
squint at the screen. Where his hair brushed his sister’s, a tiny spark
crackled between them. “We need to get to Highway One. We go
across the Richmond Bridge…” His ngers traced the colored lines.
“Then to I-580, which eventually turns into I-5.” He blinked in
surprise. “We stay on that for over two hundred and seventy miles.”
He hit another button, which calculated some totals. “The entire trip
is just over four hundred miles, and will take at least six and a half
hours. Before today, the farthest I’ve ever driven is about ten miles!”
“Well, this will be great practice for you, then,” the Alchemyst
said with a smile.
Sophie looked from Flamel to Scatty. “Who is this Witch we’re
going to see?”
Flamel snapped his seat belt into place. “We’re going to see the
Witch of Endor.”
Josh turned the key in the ignition and started the car. He glanced
in the rearview mirror at Scatty. “Someone else you’ve fought
with?” he asked.
Scathach grimaced. “Worse than that,” she muttered. “She’s my
grandmother.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
The Shadowrealm was breaking down.
In the west, the clouds had vanished and huge patches of the sky
had already disappeared, leaving only the blinking stars and the
overlarge moon in the black sky. One by one the stars were winking
out of existence, and the moon was beginning to fray at the edges.
“We don’t have much time,” the Morrigan said, watching the sky.
Dee, who was crouching on the ground, gathering as many icy
fragments of Hekate as he could nd, thought he could hear a note
of fear in the Morrigan’s voice. “We have time,” he said evenly.
“We can’t a ord to be here when the Shadowrealm disappears,”
she continued, looking down at him, her face expressionless. But he
knew by the way she hugged the cloak of crow feathers about her
shoulders that she was nervous.
“What would happen?” Dee wondered aloud. He’d never seen the
Crow Goddess like this before, and he took pleasure in her
discom ture.
The Morrigan raised her head to look at the encroaching darkness,
her black eyes re ecting the tiny spots of stars. “Why, we’d
disappear also. Sucked away into the nothingness,” she added softly,
watching the mountains in the distance turn to something like dust.
The dust then spiraled up into the black sky and vanished. “A true
death,” the Morrigan murmured.
Dee was crouched among the melting remains of the Yggdrasill,
while all around him Hekate’s elegant and beautiful world was
turning to dust and blowing away on invisible winds. The goddess
had created her Shadowrealm out of nothingness, and now, without
her presence to hold it together, it was returning to that once more.
The mountains had vanished, blown away like grains of sand, whole
swathes of the forest were slowly fading and blinking out of
existence like lights being turned o and the overlarge moon
hanging low in the sky was losing shape and de nition. Already it
was nothing more than a featureless ball. In the east, the rising sun
was a golden orb of light and the sky was still blue.
The Crow Goddess turned to her aunt. “How long before it all
disappears?” she asked.
Bastet growled and shrugged her broad shoulders. “Who knows?
Even I have never witnessed the death of an entire Shadowrealm.
Minutes perhaps…”
“That’s all I need.” Dee laid the sword Excalibur on the ground.
The smoothly polished stone blade re ected the blackness creeping
in from the west. Dee found three of the largest chunks of ice that
had once been Hekate and placed them on the blade.
The Morrigan and Bastet leaned over his shoulders and stared at
the sword, their re ections rippling and distorted. “What is so
important that you must do it here?” Bastet asked.
“This was Hekate’s home,” Dee replied. “And here, right here, at
the place of her death, the connection to her will be strongest.”
“Connection…,” Bastet growled, and then nodded. She suddenly
knew what Dee was about to attempt: the darkest and most
dangerous of all the dark arts.
“Necromancy,” Dee whispered. “I’m going to talk to the dead
goddess. She spent so many millennia here that it is part of her. I’m
wagering her consciousness remains active and attached to this
place.” He reached out and touched the handle of the sword. The
black stone glowed yellow and the carved snakes around the hilt
came brie y alive, hissing furiously, tongues ickering, before they
solidi ed once again. As the ice melted, the liquid ran over the
black stone, covering it in a thin oily sheen. “Now we shall see what
we shall see,” he muttered.
The water on the blade began to bubble and pop, sizzling and
crackling. And a face appeared in each bubble: Hekate’s face. It kept
ickering through her three guises, only the eyes—butter-colored
and hateful—remaining the same as she glared at him.
“Talk to me,” Dee shouted, “I command you. Why did Flamel
come here?”
Hekate’s voice was a bubbling, watery snap. “To escape you.”
“Tell me about the human children.”
The images that appeared on the sword blade were surprisingly
detailed. They were all from Hekate’s perspective. They showed
Flamel arriving with the twins, showed the two children sitting,
fearful and pale, in the battered and scratched car.
“Flamel believes they are the twins of legend mentioned in the Codex.”
The Morrigan and Bastet crowded closer, ignoring the rapidly
encroaching nothingness. In the west, there were no longer any stars
in the heavens, the moon was gone and huge portions of the sky had
completely vanished, leaving just blackness in its wake.
“Are they?” Dee demanded.
The next image on the sword showed the twins’ auras aring
silver and gold.
“Moon and sun,” Dee murmured. He didn’t know whether to be
horri ed or elated. His suspicions were con rmed. From the rst
moment he’d seen them together, he’d started to wonder if the teens
were, in fact, twins.
“Are these the twins foretold in legend?” he demanded again.
Bastet brought her massive head down next to Dee’s. Her footlong whiskers tickled his face, but he didn’t risk brushing them
away, not with her teeth so close. She smelled of wet cat and
frankincense; Dee felt a sneeze building at the back of his nose. The
Cat Goddess reached out for the blade, but Dee caught her hand in
his. It was like grasping a lion’s paw, and her retracted claws
suddenly appeared dangerously close to his ngers. “Please don’t
touch the blade; this is a delicate spell. There is time for perhaps
one or two more questions,” he added, nodding toward the western
horizon, to where the edges of the earth were crumbling, blowing
away like multicolored dust.
Bastet glared at the black blade, her slit-pupiled eyes aring. “My
sister has—or should I say had—a very special gift. She could
Awaken powers in others. Ask her if she did that with these humani
twins.”
Dee nodded in sudden understanding; he had been wondering
why Flamel had brought the twins to this place. He remembered
now: in the ancient world, it was believed Hekate had power over
magic and spells. “Did you Awaken the twins’ magical abilities?” he
asked.
A single bubble popped. “No.”
Dee rocked back on his heels, surprised. He had been expecting
her to say yes. Had Flamel failed, then?
Bastet growled. “She’s lying.”
“She cannot,” Dee said. “She answers what we ask.”
“I saw the girl with my own eyes,” the Egyptian goddess growled.
“I saw her wield a whip of pure auric energy. I’ve never seen such
power in my life, not since the Elder Times.”
Dr. John Dee glanced at her sharply. “You saw the girl…but what
of the boy? What was he doing?”
“I did not notice him.”
“Ha!” Dee said triumphantly. He turned back to the sword.
The Morrigan’s cloak rustled warningly. “Make this your last
question, Doctor.”
The trio looked up to see that the utter blackness was almost upon
them. Less than ten feet ahead of them, the world ended in
nothingness. Dee turned back to the sword. “Did you Awaken the
girl?”
A bubble popped and the sword ran with images of Sophie rising
o the ground, her aura blazing silver. “Yes.”
“And the boy?”
The sword showed Josh cowering in a corner of a darkened
chamber. “No.”
The Morrigan’s clawlike hands gripped Dee’s shoulders and jerked
him to his feet. He caught his sword and shook the bubbling water
droplets into the rapidly encroaching void.
The mismatched trio—towering Bastet, dark Morrigan and small
human—raced away as the world crumbled into nothingness behind
them. The last remnants of their army—the birdmen and cat-people
—remained, wandering aimlessly. When they saw their leaders
eeing, they turned to follow. Soon every creature was racing to the
east, where the last of the Shadowrealm remained. Senuhet limped
after Bastet, calling out her name, begging her to stop and help him.
But the world dissolved too quickly. It swallowed birds and cats,
it took the ancient trees and rare orchids, the magical creatures and
the mythical monsters. It consumed the last of Hekate’s magic.
Then the void claimed the sun and the world went dark and was
no more.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
The
Morrigan and Bastet burst through the tangled hedges,
carrying John Dee between them. In the next instant the wall of
foliage vanished and one of the many winding paths leading to
Mount Tamalpais appeared. They stumbled, and Dee fell sprawling
in the dust.
“What now?” Bastet growled. “Have we lost, have they won? We
have destroyed Hekate, but she has Awakened the girl.”
John Dee staggered to his feet and brushed o his ruined coat.
There were scrapes and tears in the sleeve, and something had
ripped a st-sized hole through the lining. Carefully wiping
Excalibur clean, he slid it back into its concealed sheath. “It’s not
the girl we need to concentrate on now. It’s the boy. The boy is the
key.”
The Morrigan shook her head, feathers rustling. “You talk in
riddles.” She glanced up into the clear morning skies, and almost
directly overhead a wisp of gray cloud appeared.
“He has seen his sister’s tremendous magical powers Awakened;
how do you think the boy is feeling now? Frightened, angry,
jealous? Alone?” He looked from the Morrigan to the Cat Goddess.
“The boy is at least as powerful as the girl. Is there anyone else on
this continent to whom Flamel could take the boy to have his talents
Awakened?”
“Black Annis is in the Catskills,” the Morrigan suggested, the note
of caution clearly audible in her voice.
“Too unpredictable,” Dee said, “she’d probably eat him.”
“I heard that Persephone was in northern Canada,” Bastet said.
Dee shook his head. “Her years in the Underworld Shadowrealm
have driven her insane. She is dangerous beyond belief.”
The Morrigan drew her cloak tighter around her shoulders. The
cloud above her head thickened and drifted lower. “Then there is no
one in North America. I came across Nocticula in Austria, and I
know that Erichtho still hides out on Thessaly—”
“You’re wrong,” Dee interrupted. “There is one other who could
Awaken the boy.”
“Who?” Bastet growled, frowning, her snout wrinkling.
Dr. John Dee turned to the Crow Goddess. “You could.”
The Morrigan stepped away from Dee, black eyes wide with
surprise, pointed teeth pressing against the bruise-colored esh of
her thin lips. A ripple ran through her black cloak, ru ing all the
feathers.
“You are mistaken,” Bastet hissed. “My niece is Next Generation,
she hasn’t got the powers.”
Dee turned to face the Crow Goddess. If he knew he was playing a
dangerous—possibly even deadly—game, he showed no sign of it.
“At one time, perhaps that would have been true. But the Morrigan’s
powers are more, much, much more, than they were.”
“Niece, what is he talking about?” Bastet demanded.
“Be very, very careful, humani,” the Crow Goddess cackled.
“My loyalty is not in question here,” Dee said quickly. “I have
served the Elders for half a millennium. I am merely looking for a
way to achieve our aim.” He stepped up to the Morrigan. “Once, like
Hekate, you wore three faces: you were the Morrigan, the Macha
and the Badb. Unlike Hekate, though, you and your two sisters
occupied three bodies. It was your consciousnesses that were linked.
Individually you were powerful, but together you were invincible.”
He paused and seemed to be taking a moment to gather his
thoughts, but in actuality, he was ensuring he had a rm grip on
Excalibur beneath his coat. “When did you decide to kill your
sisters?” he asked casually.
With a terrible screech the Morrigan leapt for Dee.
And stopped.
In a ash Excalibur’s black stone blade had appeared at her
throat, blue light zzing and sparking down the blade. The serpent
hilt came to life and hissed at her.
“Please”—Dee smiled, a chilling twist of his lips—“I’ve been
responsible for the death of one Elder today. I’ve no wish to add a
second to my total.” As he spoke, he watched Bastet, who was
moving around behind him. “The Morrigan has the power to
Awaken the boy,” he said quickly. “She possesses the knowledge
and power of her two sisters. If we can Awaken the boy and turn
him to our side, we have gained ourselves an extraordinarily
powerful ally. Remember the prophecy: ‘the two that are one, the
one that is all.’ One to save the world, one to destroy it.”
“And which one is the boy?” Bastet asked.
“Whatever we make him,” Dee said, eyes darting from the
Morrigan to Bastet and back to the Crow Goddess.
Abruptly, Bastet was beside him, her huge claw around his throat.
She lifted him slightly, forcing him to rise on his toes and look into
her chilling eyes. For a single heartbeat, he thought about swinging
the sword around, but he knew that the Cat Goddess was faster, so
much faster than he would ever be. She’d see the twitch of his
shoulders and simply snap his head clean o .
Bastet glared at her niece. “Is it true? Are Macha and the Badb
dead?”
“Yes.” The Morrigan glared at Dee. “But I did not kill them. They
died willingly, and live inside me still.” For a moment her eyes
blazed yellow, then red, then solid black, the colors of the three
ancient goddesses.
Dee was tempted to ask how they had gotten inside her, then
decided that he really didn’t want to know the answer and now
probably wasn’t a good time to ask anyway.
“Could you Awaken the boy?” Bastet demanded.
“Yes.”
“Then do it, Niece,” the Cat Goddess ordered. She turned her
attention back to Dee. Pressing her thumb under his chin, she
pushed his head back. “And if you ever raise a weapon to one of the
Elder Race again, I will see that you spend the next millennia in a
Shadowrealm of my own special creation. And trust me, you will
not like it.” She released her grip and ung him away, sending him
sprawling in the dirt. He was still clutching the sword.
“Tell me,” Bastet commanded, towering over him. “Where are
Flamel and the twins now? Where have they gone?”
Dee climbed shakily to his feet. He brushed dirt o his coat, and
discovered yet another tear in the soft leather; he was never buying
leather again. “He will need to start training the girl. Hekate
Awakened her, but didn’t get a chance to teach her any protective
spells. She’ll need to be taught to protect herself and control her
powers before the stimuli from the physical world drive her mad.”
“So where will they go?” Bastet growled. She wrapped her arms
around her body and shivered. The cloud the Morrigan had
summoned had grown thick and dark as it drifted-lower, and now
hovered just over the treetops. There was moisture in the air, and
the hint of unidenti able spices.
“He’ll not stay in San Francisco,” Dee continued, “he knows we
have too many agents in and around the city.”
The Morrigan closed her eyes and turned slowly, then she raised
her arm. “They’re heading south; I can just about make out the
silver traces of her aura. It’s incredibly powerful.”
“Who is the most powerful Elder south of here?” Dee asked
quickly. “Someone pro cient in elemental magic?”
“Endor,” Bastet answered immediately, “in Ojai. The deadly Witch
of Endor.”
“Mistress of the Air,” the Morrigan added.
Bastet leaned down, her breath foul in the small man’s face. “You
know where you have to go. You know what you have to do. We
must have the pages of the Codex.”
“And the twins?” he asked tightly, trying not to breathe.
“Capture them if you can—if not, then kill them to prevent Flamel
from using their powers.” Then both she and the Crow Goddess
stepped into the thickening cloud and were gone. The damp
grayness swirled away, leaving Dr. John Dee alone on the isolated
path.
“How do I get to Ojai?” he called.
But there was no response.
Dee shoved his hands in the pockets of his ruined leather coat and
set o down the narrow path. He hated it when they did that,
dismissed him as if he were nothing more than a child.
But things would change.
The Elders liked to think that Dee was their puppet, their tool. He
had seen how Bastet had abandoned Senuhet, who had been with
her for at least a century, without a second glance. He knew they
would do exactly the same to him, given the chance.
But Dr. John Dee had plans to ensure that they never got that
chance.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
It was late in the afternoon when Josh
nally turned the Hummer
down the long, curving road that led into the small city of Ojai. The
stress of driving four hundred miles in one long trip was etched onto
his face, and although the computer had estimated that it would
take around six and a half hours, it had taken close to nine. Driving
the big Hummer on the highway was surprisingly easy: he’d simply
put on the cruise control and let it go. It was boring, but o the
highway and on any other type of road, the Hummer was a
nightmare to control. It wasn’t like any of his computer games. It
was just so big, and he was terri ed he was going to run over
something. The huge jet-black vehicle also attracted a lot of
attention—he’d never thought he’d be so happy to have tinted
windows. He wondered what people would think if they knew it
was being driven by a fteen-year-old.
The road curved to the right, and Ojai’s long, straight main street
appeared before him. He slowed as he passed the Psychic Boutique
and the Ojai Playhouse; then the lights changed at Signal Street and
he stopped, leaned across the steering wheel and peered through the
smeared, bug-spattered windshield. His rst impression as he looked
down the empty street was that Ojai was surprisingly green. It was
June in California, that time of year when most things had turned
brown and withered, but here there were trees everywhere,
contrasting with the white stone of the buildings. Directly in front of
him, to his right, a low, ornate white stone tower rose over the post
o ce into the brilliant blue sky, while on the left, a row of shops
was set back from the road, sheltered beneath a row of white stone
arches.
Glancing in the rearview mirror, he was surprised to nd Scatty’s
eyes on him.
“I thought you were asleep,” he said quietly. Sophie, who had
moved up into the passenger seat beside him after a few hours of
driving, lay curled up asleep, and Flamel snored gently beside
Scatty.
“I’ve no need to sleep,” she said simply.
There were a lot of questions he really wanted to ask, but instead,
he just said, “Do you know where we’re going?”
She leaned forward, rested her arms on the back of his seat and
her chin on her arms. “Straight on, past the post o ce—that’s the
building with the tower—then turn right after Libbey Park at Fox
Street. Find a parking space down there.” She nodded to the left,
toward a row of shops nestled under the white arches. “We’re going
there.”
“Is that where your grandmother is?”
“Yes,” Scatty said shortly.
“And is she really a witch?”
“Not just a witch. She is the original Witch.”
“How do you feel?” Sophie asked. She stood on the sidewalk and
stretched, standing on her toes and arching her back. Something
popped in her neck. “That feels good,” she added, turning her face
and closing her eyes against the sun, which was still high in the
cloudless robin’s-egg blue heavens.
“I should be asking you that question,” Josh said, climbing out of
the car. He yawned and stretched, rotating his head from side to
side. “I never want to drive again,” he added. His voice dropped to
little more than a whisper. “I’m glad you’re okay.” He hesitated.
“You are okay, aren’t you?”
Sophie reached out to squeeze her brother’s arm. “I think so.”
Flamel climbed out of the car and slammed his door. Scatty had
already moved away from the car to stand beneath the shelter of a
tree. She’d dug a pair of mirrored sunglasses from her pocket and
popped them onto her face. The Alchemyst went to join her as Josh
hit the alarm on the key chain. The car blipped once and its lights
ashed.
“We need to talk,” Flamel said quietly, though the side street was
deserted. He ran his ngers through his close-cropped hair, and
strands came away on his ngers. He looked at them for a moment,
then brushed them on his jeans. Another year was etched onto his
face, subtly deepening the lines around his eyes and the semicircular
grooves on either side of his mouth. “This person we’re going to see
can be…” He hesitated and then said, “…di cult.”
“You’re telling me,” Scatty muttered.
“What do you mean by di cult?” Josh asked in alarm. After
everything they had just encountered, di cult could mean just about
anything.
“Cranky, cantankerous, irritable…and that’s when she’s in a good
mood,” Scatty said.
“And when she’s in a bad mood?”
“You don’t even want to be in the same city as her!”
Josh was puzzled. He turned to the Alchemyst. “Then why are we
going to see her?”
“Because Perenelle told me to,” he said patiently, “because she is
the Mistress of Air, and can teach Sophie the basics of elemental air
magic, and because she can give Sophie some advice on how to
protect herself.”
“From what?” Josh asked, startled.
“From herself,” Flamel said matter-of-factly, and turned away,
heading back toward Ojai Avenue. Scatty moved out of the shadows
and fell into step beside him. “Wish I’d brought sunscreen. I burn
easily in this sunshine,” she grumbled as they walked away. “And
wait till you see my freckles in the morning.”
Josh turned back to his sister; he was beginning to have some
idea of the huge gulf of understanding that now separated him from
his twin. “Do you have any idea what he was talking about?
Protecting yourself from yourself? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I think I know.” Sophie frowned. “Everything around me is so…
loud, so bright, so sharp, so intense. It’s like someone turned the
volume up. My senses are so acute; you wouldn’t believe what I can
hear.” She pointed to a battered red Toyota driving slowly down the
road. “The woman in that car is talking on the phone to her mother.
She’s telling her she doesn’t want sh for dinner.” She pointed to a
truck parked in a yard on the opposite side of the street. “There’s a
sticker on the back of the truck; do you want me to tell you what it
says?”
Josh squinted; he couldn’t even read the license plate.
“When we ate earlier today, the taste of the food was so
overwhelming it almost made me throw up. I could taste the
individual grains of salt on the sandwich.” She stooped and picked a
jacaranda leaf o the ground. “I can trace each vein in the back of
this leaf with my eyes closed. But you know what’s worst of all? The
smells,” she said, looking deliberately at her brother.
“Hey…” Ever since he’d hit puberty he’d tried every deodorant on
the market.
“No, not just you”—she grinned—“though you’ve really got to
change your deodorant, and I think you’re going to need to burn
your socks. It’s all the scents, all the time. The stink of gas in the air
is awful, the smell of hot rubber on the road, of greasy food, even
the perfume from these owers is overwhelming.” She stopped in
the middle of the street, and her tone abruptly changed. She looked
at her brother, and the tears she had no idea were there started to
leak from her eyes. “It’s too much, Josh. It’s just too much. I feel
sick and my head is pounding, my eyes hurt, my ears ache, my
throat is raw.”
Josh awkwardly tried to put his arms around his sister to hug her,
but she pushed him away. “Please, don’t touch me. I can’t bear it.”
Josh struggled to nd words to respond, but there was nothing he
could say or do. He felt so helpless. Sophie was always so strong,
always in control; she was the person he went to when he was in
trouble. She always had the answers.
Until now.
Flamel! Josh felt the anger are again. This was Flamel’s fault. He
would never forgive the Alchemyst for what he’d done. He looked
up to see Flamel and Scathach turning back to them.
The Warrior came hurrying over to them. “Dry your eyes,” she
commanded sternly. “Let’s not draw attention to ourselves.”
“Don’t talk to my sis—” Josh began, but Scatty silenced him with
a look.
“Let’s get you into my grandmother’s shop; she’ll be able to help.
It’s just across the road. Come on.”
Sophie obediently ran her sleeve across her eyes and followed the
Warrior. She felt so helpless. She rarely cried—she’d even laughed
at the ending of Titanic— so why was she crying now?
Awakening her magical potential had seemed like a wonderful
idea. She’d loved the thought of being able to control and shape her
will, of channeling her aura’s energy and working magic. But it
hadn’t turned out like that. It had left her feeling battered and
exhausted from the stimulation. It had left her in pain. That was
why she was crying.
And she was terri ed that the pain was not going to go away. And
if it didn’t, then what would she do—what could she do?
Sophie looked up to nd her brother staring hard at her, eyes
wide with concern. “Flamel said the Witch will be able to help you,”
he said.
“What if she can’t, Josh? What if she can’t?”
He had no answer to that.
Sophie and Josh crossed Ojai Avenue and stepped under the
arched promenade that ran the length of the block. The temperature
immediately dropped to a bearable level, and Sophie realized that
her shirt was sticking to the small of her back, ice cold against her
spine.
They caught up with Nicholas Flamel, who had stopped in front of
a small antiques shop, a dismayed look on his face. The shop was
closed. Without saying a word, he tapped at the paper clock taped
to the inside of the door. The hands were set to two-thirty and a
handwritten scrawl beneath it said Gone to lunch, back at 2:30.
It was now close to three-thirty.
Flamel and Scatty leaned against the door, peering inside, while
the twins looked through the window. The small shop seemed to sell
only glassware: bowls, jugs, plates, paperweights, ornaments and
mirrors. Lots of mirrors. They were everywhere, and in all shapes
and sizes from tiny circles to huge rectangles. Much of the glass
looked modern, but a few of the pieces in the window were
obviously antiques.
“So what do we do now?” Flamel wondered. “Where can she be?”
“Probably wandered out to get lunch and forgot to come back,”
Scatty said, turning to look up and down the street. “Hardly busy
today, is it?” Even though it was late Friday afternoon, tra c was
light on the main street, and there were fewer than a dozen
pedestrians moving slowly beneath the covered promenade.
“We could check the restaurants,” Flamel suggested. “What does
she like to eat?”
“Don’t ask,” Scatty said quickly, “you really do not want to
know.”
“Maybe if we split up…,” Nicholas began.
On impulse Sophie leaned forward and turned the handle: a bell
jangled musically and the door swung open.
“Nice one, Sis.”
“Saw it done in a movie once,” she muttered. “Hello?” she called,
stepping into the shop.
There was no response.
The antiques shop was tiny, little more than a long rectangular
room, but the e ect of the hundreds of mirrors—some of which
even dangled from the ceiling—made it look much bigger than it
actually was.
Sophie threw back her head and breathed deeply, nostrils aring.
“Do you smell that?”
Her twin shook his head. The number of mirrors was making him
nervous; he kept catching re ections of himself from all sides, and
in every mirror, his image was di erent, broken or distorted.
“What do you smell?” Scatty asked.
“It’s like…” Sophie paused. “Like woodsmoke in the fall.”
“So she has been here.”
Sophie and Josh looked at her blankly.
“That’s the odor of the Witch of Endor. That’s the scent of eldritch
magic.”
Flamel stood by the door looking up and down the street. “She
can’t have gone far, if she left the shop unlocked. I’m going to go
look for her.” He turned to Scatty. “How will I recognize her?”
She grinned, eyes bright and wicked. “Trust me; you’ll know her
when you see her.”
“I’ll be back shortly.”
As Flamel stepped out into the street, a big motorcycle pulled up
almost directly outside the shop. The rider sat there for a moment
and then gunned his engine and roared away. The noise was
incredible: all the glassware in the tiny shop shivered and vibrated
with the sound. Sophie pressed both hands to her ears. “I don’t
know how much more of this I can take,” she whispered tearfully.
Josh led his sister to a plain wooden chair and made her sit down.
He crouched on one side, wanting to hold her hand, but frightened
of touching her. He felt utterly useless.
Scatty knelt down directly in front of Sophie, so that their faces
were level. “When Hekate Awakened you, she didn’t have a chance
to teach you how to turn your Awakened senses on and o . Your
senses are stuck on at the moment, but it won’t be like that all the
time, I promise you. With a little training and a few basic protective
spells, you’ll learn to turn your senses on for just the briefest of
periods.”
Josh looked at the two girls. Once again, he felt apart from his
twin: truly apart. They were fraternal twins, and therefore not
genetically identical. They didn’t share those feelings that identical
twins often spoke about—feeling pain when the other twin was
hurt, knowing when they were in trouble—but right now he could
feel his sister’s distress. He only wished there was something he
could do to ease her pain.
Almost as if she could read his mind, Scatty said suddenly, “There
is something I can do that might help.” The twins picked up on the
note of hesitation in her voice. “It will not hurt,” she added quickly.
“It can’t hurt more than what I’m feeling now,” Sophie whispered.
“Do it,” she said quickly.
“I need your permission rst.”
“Soph—” Josh began, but his sister ignored him.
“Do it,” Sophie repeated. “Please,” she begged.
“I’ve told you I am what you humani call a vampire….”
“You are not drinking her blood!” Josh yelled, horri ed. His
stomach ipped over at the thought.
“I’ve told you before, my clan do not drink blood.”
“I don’t care—”
“Josh,” Sophie interrupted angrily, her aura winking into
existence for a second with her anger, lling the interior of the shop
with the sudden sweetness of vanilla ice cream. A display of glass
wind chimes tinkled and rattled in an unfelt breeze. “Josh, be
quiet.” She swiveled in the seat to look at Scatty. “What do you
want me to do?”
“Give me your right hand.”
Sophie immediately stretched out her hand and Scatty took it in
both of hers. Then she carefully matched the ngers of her left hand
to the girl’s ngers, thumb to thumb, index nger to index nger,
little nger to little nger. “Blood drinking vampires,” she said
absently, concentrating on aligning their hands, “are really the
weakest, the lowliest of our clan. Have you ever wondered why they
drink blood? They’re actually dead—their hearts do not beat, they
have no need to eat, so the blood provides no sustenance for them.”
“Are you dead?” Sophie asked the question Josh was just about to
ask.
“No, not really.”
Josh looked into the mirrors, but he could clearly see Scathach’s
re ection in the glass. She caught him looking and smiled. “Don’t
believe that old rubbish about vampires not casting a re ection: of
course we do; we are solid, after all.”
Josh watched intently as Scathach pressed her ngers to his
sister’s. Nothing seemed to be happening. Then he caught a sparkle
of silver in a mirror behind Scatty and he realized that in the glass,
Sophie’s hand had begun to glow with a pale silver light.
“My race, the Clan Vampire,” Scatty continued very softly, staring
at Sophie’s palm, “were of the Next Generation.”
In the mirror Josh saw that the silver light had begun to pool in
Sophie’s palm.
“We were not Elders. All of us who were born after the fall of
Danu Talis were completely unlike our parents; we were di erent in
incomprehensible ways.”
“You’ve mentioned Danu Talis before,” Sophie murmured sleepily.
“What is it, a place?” There was a warm, soothing feeling owing
up her arm, not unlike pins and needles, but tingling and pleasant.
“It was the center of the world in the Elder Times. The Elder Race
ruled this planet from an island continent known as Danu Talis. It
stretched from what is now the coast of Africa to the shores of North
America and into the Gulf of Mexico.”
“I’ve never heard of Danu Talis,” Sophie whispered.
“Yes, you have,” Scathach said. “The Celts called it the De Danann
Isle; this modern world knows it as Atlantis.”
In the mirror, Josh could see that Sophie’s hand was now glowing
silver-white. It looked as if she were wearing a glove. Tiny sparking
tendrils of silver wrapped themselves around Scatty’s ngers like
ornate rings, and she shuddered.
“Danu Talis was ripped apart because the Ruling Twins—the Sun
and Moon—fought on top of the Great Pyramid. The incredible
magical forces they released upset the balance of nature. I’ve been
told that that same wild magic swirling around the atmosphere
caused the changes in the Next Generation. Some of us were born as
monsters, others were caught between shapes, a few possessed
extraordinary powers of transformation and could become beasts at
will. And others, like those of us who eventually formed the Clan
Vampire, found that we were unable to feel.”
Josh looked sharply at Scathach. “What do you mean, feel?”
The Warrior smiled and looked at him. Suddenly, her teeth
seemed very long in her mouth. “We had little or no emotion. We
lacked the capacity to feel fear, to experience love, to enjoy the
sensations of happiness and delight. The nest warriors are not only
those who do not know fear, but those who are without anger.”
Josh stepped back from Scatty and breathed deeply. His legs were
beginning to cramp, and pins and needles were tingling in his toes.
But he also needed to get away from the vampire. Now all the
mirrors and polished glass surfaces in the shop showed the silver
light owing from Sophie’s hand up Scatty’s arm. It disappeared
into her esh before it reached her elbow.
Scatty turned her head to look at Josh, and he noticed that the
whites of her eyes had turned silver. “Bloodsucking vampires don’t
need the blood. They need the emotions, the sensations carried in
the blood.”
“You’re stealing Sophie’s feelings,” Josh whispered, horri ed.
“Sophie, stop her….”
“No!” his twin snapped, eyes opening wide. The whites of her
eyes, like Scatty’s, had turned re ective silver. “I can actually feel
the pain owing away.”
“The sensations are too much for your sister to bear. They are
becoming painful, and this makes her afraid. I’m just taking away
that pain and fear.”
“Why would anyone want to feel pain or fear?” Josh wondered
aloud, both intrigued and repelled by the very idea. It seemed
somehow wrong.
“So they can feel alive,” Scatty said.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Even before she opened her eyes, Perenelle Flamel knew she had
been moved to a much more secure prison. Someplace deep and
dark and sinister. She could feel the old evil in the walls, could
almost taste it on the air. Lying still, she tried to expand her senses,
but the blanket of malevolence and despair was too strong, and she
found she couldn’t use her magic. She listened intently, and only
when she was absolutely sure that there was no one in the room
with her did she open her eyes.
She was in a cell.
Three walls were solid concrete, the fourth was metal bars.
Beyond the bars she could see another row of cells.
She was in a prison block!
Perenelle swung her legs out of the narrow cot and came slowly
to her feet. She noticed that her clothes smelled slightly of sea salt,
and she thought she could detect the sounds of the not-too-distant
ocean.
The cell was bare, little more than an empty box, about ten feet
long by four feet wide, with a narrow cot holding a thin mattress
and a single lumpy pillow. A cardboard tray lay on the oor just
inside the bars. It contained a plastic jug of water, a plastic cup and
a thick chunk of dark bread on a paper plate. Seeing the food made
her realize just how hungry she was, but she ignored it for the
moment and crossed to the bars and peered out. Looking left and
right, all she could see were cells, and they were empty.
She was alone in the cell block. But where…
And then a ship’s horn, plaintive and lost, sounded in the
distance. With a shiver, Perenelle suddenly knew where Dee’s men
had taken her: she was on the prison island of Alcatraz, The Rock.
She looked around the room, paying particular attention to the
area around the metal gate. Unlike in her previous prison, she
couldn’t see any magical wards or protective sigils painted on the
lintel or the oor. Perenelle couldn’t resist a tiny smile. What were
Dee’s people thinking? Once she had recovered her strength, she’d
charge up her aura, and then bend this metal like putty and simply
walk out of here.
It took her a moment before she realized that the click-click she’d
rst assumed to be dripping water was actually something
approaching, moving slowly and deliberately. Pressing herself
against the bars, she tried to see down the corridor. A shadow
moved. More of Dee’s faceless simulacra? she wondered. They
would not be able to hold her for long.
The shadow, huge and misshapen, moved out of the darkness and
stepped down the corridor to stand before her cell. Perenelle was
suddenly grateful for the bars that separated her from the terrifying
entity.
Filling the corridor was a creature that had not walked the earth
since a millennium before the rst pyramid rose over the Nile. It
was a sphinx, an enormous lion with the wings of an eagle and the
head of a beautiful woman. The sphinx smiled and tilted her head to
one side, and a long black forked tongue ickered. Perenelle noticed
that her pupils were at and horizontal.
This was not one of Dee’s creations. The sphinx was one of the
daughters of Echidna, one of the foulest of the Elders, shunned and
feared even by her own race, even the Dark Elders. Perenelle
suddenly found herself wondering who, exactly, Dee was serving.
The sphinx pressed her face against the bars. Her long tongue shot
out, tasting the air, almost brushing Perenelle’s lips. “Do I need to
remind you, Perenelle Flamel,” she asked in the language of the
Nile, “that one of the especial skills of my race is that we absorb
auric energy?” Her huge wings apped, almost lling the corridor.
“You have no magical powers around me.”
An icy shiver ran down Perenelle’s spine as she realized just how
clever Dee was. She was a defenseless and powerless prisoner on
Alcatraz, and she knew that no one had ever escaped The Rock
alive.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
The
bell jangled as Nicholas Flamel pushed open the door and
stepped back to allow a rather ordinary-looking elderly woman in a
neat gray blouse and gray skirt to precede him into the shop. Short
and round, her hair tightly permed and touched faintly with blue,
only the overlarge black glasses covering much of her face set her
apart. A white cane was folded in her right hand.
Sophie and Josh immediately realized that she was blind.
Flamel cleared his throat. “Allow me to introduce…” He stopped
and looked at the woman. “Excuse me. What do I call you?”
“Call me Dora, everyone else does.” She spoke English with a
decided New York accent. “Scathach?” she suddenly said.
“Scathach!” And then her words dissolved into a language that
seemed to consist of a lot of spitting sounds…which Sophie was
surprised to nd she could understand.
“She wants to know why Scatty hasn’t come to see her in the past
three hundred and seventy-two years, eight months and four days,”
she translated for Josh. She was staring intently at the old woman
and didn’t see the fear and envy that ickered across his face.
The old woman moved quickly around the narrow room, head
darting left and right, never looking directly at Scatty. She
continued to speak, seemingly without stopping for breath.
“She’s telling Scatty that she could have been dead and no one
would have known. Nor cared. Why, only last century she was
desperately ill, and no one called, no one wrote…”
“Gran…,” Scatty began.
“Don’t ‘Gran’ me,” Dora said, dropping into English again. “You
could have written—any language would have done. You could
have phoned….”
“You don’t have a phone.”
“And what’s wrong with e-mail? Or a fax?”
“Gran, have you got a computer or a fax machine?”
Dora stopped. “No. What would I need one of them for?”
Dora’s hand moved and suddenly her white stick extended to its
full length with a snap. She tapped against the glass of a simple
square mirror. “Have you got one of these?”
“Yes, Gran,” Scatty said miserably. Her pale cheeks were ushed
red with embarrassment.
“So you couldn’t nd the time to look in a mirror and talk to me.
You’re so busy these days? I’ve got to hear it from your brother. And
when was the last time you spoke to your mother!”
Scathach turned to the twins. “This is my grandmother, the
legendary Witch of Endor. Gran, this is Sophie and Josh. And you’ve
met Nicholas Flamel.”
“Yes, such a nice man.” She kept turning her head, her nostrils
aring. “Twins,” she said nally.
Sophie and Josh looked at each other. How did she know? Did
Nicholas tell her?
There was something about the way the woman kept moving her
head that intrigued Josh. He tried to follow the direction of her
gaze…and then he realized why the old woman’s head kept moving
left and right: she was somehow seeing them through the mirrors.
Automatically, he touched his sister’s hand and nodded to the
mirror. She glanced at it, back at the old woman, then back at the
mirror, and then she nodded at her brother, silently agreeing with
him.
Dora stepped up to Scathach, her head turned to one side as she
stared hard at a tall length of polished glass. “You’ve lost weight.
Are you eating properly?”
“Gran, I’ve looked like this for two and a half thousand years.”
“So you’re saying I’m going blind now, eh?” the old woman asked,
then burst into surprisingly deep laughter. “Give your old Gran a
hug.”
Scathach carefully hugged the old woman and kissed her cheek.
“It’s good to see you, Gran. You’re looking well.”
“I’m looking old. Do I look old?”
“Not a day over ten thousand.” Scatty smiled.
The Witch pinched Scathach’s cheek. “The last person who
mocked me was a tax inspector. I turned him into a paperweight,”
she said. “I still have it here somewhere.”
Flamel coughed discreetly. “Madame Endor…”
“Call me Dora,” the old woman snapped.
“Dora. Are you aware what happened in Hekate’s Shadowrealm
earlier today?” He had never met the Witch before—he knew her
only by reputation—but he knew she needed to be treated with the
utmost caution. She was the legendary Elder who had left Danu
Talis to live with and teach the humani centuries before the island
sank beneath the waves. It was believed that she had created the
rst humani alphabet in ancient Sumeria.
“Get me a chair,” Dora said to no one in particular. Sophie pulled
up the chair she’d been sitting on and Scatty eased her grandmother
into it. The old woman leaned forward, both hands resting on the
top of her white cane. “I know what happened. I’m sure every Elder
on this continent felt her death.” She saw their looks of shocked
surprise. “You didn’t know?” She turned her head sideways and
stared into a mirror, directly facing Scatty. “Hekate is dead and her
Shadowrealm is no more. I understand an Elder, one of the Next
Generation and an immortal human were responsible for her death.
Hekate will need to be avenged. Not now, and maybe not soon: but
she was family, and I owe her that. See to it.” Scatty bowed.
The Witch of Endor had delivered the death sentence calmly, and
Flamel suddenly realized that this woman was even more dangerous
than he had imagined.
Dora turned her face in another direction and Flamel found
himself looking at her re ection in an ornate silver-framed mirror.
She tapped the glass. “I saw what happened this morning a month
ago.”
“And you didn’t warn Hekate!” Scatty exclaimed.
“I watched one thread of a possible-future. One of many. In some
of the others, Hekate killed Bastet and the Morrigan slew Dee. In
another, Hekate killed you, Mr. Flamel, and was in turn killed by
Scathach. All versions of the future. Today I discovered which came
to pass.” She looked around the room, turning her face from mirror
to polished vase to picture-frame glass. “So I know why you’re here,
I know what you want me to do. And I’ve thought long and hard
about my response. I’ve had a month to think about it.”
“What about us?” Sophie asked. “Were we in your threads?”
“Yes, in some,” the Witch said.
“What happened to us in the others?” The question was out of
Josh’s mouth before he had time to think about it. He really didn’t
want to know the answer.
“Dee and his Golems or the rats and birds killed you in most of
the threads. You crashed the car in others. You died with the
Awakening or fell with the Shadowrealm.”
Josh swallowed hard. “We only survived in one thread?”
“Just one.”
“That’s not good, is it?” he whispered.
“No,” the Witch of Endor stated atly. “Not good at all.” There
was a long pause while Dora looked sidelong into the polished
surface of a silver pot. Then she spoke suddenly. “First you should
know that I cannot Awaken the boy. That must be left to others.”
Josh looked up quickly. “There are others who could Awaken
me?”
The Witch of Endor ignored him. “The girl has one of the purest
silver auras I’ve encountered in many an age. She needs to be taught
some spells of personal protection if she is to survive the rest of the
Awakening process. The fact that she’s still sane and whole these
many hours later is testament to her strength of will.” Her head
tilted back and Sophie caught the old woman’s face looking at her
from a mirror suspended from the ceiling. “This I will do.”
“Thank you,” Nicholas Flamel said with a deep sigh. “I know how
di cult the last few hours have been for her.”
Josh found that he could not look at his sister. There was more to
the Awakening. Did that mean she would have to su er more pain?
It was heartbreaking.
Scathach knelt by her grandmother’s chair and laid a hand on her
arm. “Gran, Dee and his masters are chasing the two missing pages
from the Codex,” she said. “I would imagine that by now they know
—or at least suspect—that Sophie and Josh are the twins mentioned
in the Book of Abraham.”
Dora nodded. “Dee knows.”
Scathach stole a glance at Flamel. “Then he knows that not only
does he have to retrieve the pages, but he has to either capture or
kill the twins.”
“He knows that, too,” Dora con rmed.
“And if Dee succeeds, then this world ends?” Scathach said,
turning the simple sentence into a question.
“The world has ended before,” the Witch answered, smiling. “I’m
sure it will end many times before the sun turns black.”
“You know that Dee intends to bring back the Dark Elders?”
“I know.”
“The Codex says that the Dark Elders can only be stopped by
Silver and Gold,” Scatty continued.
“The Codex also says, if my memory serves me true, that apples
are poisonous and frogs can turn into princes. You don’t want to
believe everything you read in that Codex,” the witch snapped.
Flamel had read the piece in the Codex about apples. He thought
it was possibly referring to apple seeds, which were indeed
poisonous—if you ate several pounds of them. He hadn’t come
across the section about frogs and princes, though he’d read the
Book hundreds of times. There were countless questions he wanted
to ask the Witch, but that wasn’t the reason they were there. “Dora,
will you teach Sophie the principles of Air magic? She needs to
learn enough to at least be able to protect herself from attack.”
Dora shrugged and smiled. “Do I have a choice?”
Flamel had not been expecting that answer. “Of course you have a
choice.”
The Witch of Endor shook her head. “Not this time.” She reached
up and took o her dark glasses. Scatty didn’t move, and only the
muscle twitching in Flamel’s jaw betrayed his surprise. The twins,
however, backed away in horror, their faces registering their shock.
The Witch of Endor had no eyes. There were just hollow empty
sockets where eyes should have been, and nestled in the sockets
were perfect ovals of re ective glass. Those mirrors turned directly
to the twins. “I gave up my eyes for the Sight, the ability to see the
patterns of time—time past, present and possible-future. There are
many patterns, many versions of possible-future, though not so
many as people think. In the past few years, the patterns have been
coming together, weaving ever closer. Now there are only a few
possible futures. Most of them are terrifying,” she added grimly.
“And they are all linked to you two.” Her hand moved unswervingly
to point to Sophie and Josh. “So what choice do I have? This is my
world too. I was here before the humani, I gave them re and
language. I’ll not abandon them now. I’ll train the girl, teach her
how to protect herself and instill in her how to control the magic of
Air.”
“Thank you,” Sophie said carefully into the long silence that
followed.
“Do not thank me. This is not a gift. What I give you is a curse!”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Josh
stepped out of the antiques shop, cheeks aming red, the
Witch’s last words ringing in his ears. “You have to leave. What I
teach is not for the ears of a humani.”
Looking around the room, at Flamel and Scatty and nally his
twin sister, Josh had suddenly realized that he was the last pure
human in the room. Obviously, in the Witch of Endor’s eyes, Sophie
was no longer entirely human.
“No problem. I’ll wait…,” he began, voice suddenly cracking. He
coughed and tried again. “I’ll wait in the park across the road.” And
then, without a backward glance, he left the shop, the jangling of
the bell mocking him as he closed the door.
But it was a problem. A huge problem.
Sophie Newman watched her brother leave the shop, and even
without her Awakened senses, she knew he was upset and angry.
She wanted to stop him, to go after him, but Scatty was standing in
front of her, eyes wide in warning, nger raised to her lips, the
tiniest shake of her head warning Sophie to say nothing. Catching
her shoulder, Scatty led her to stand in front of the Witch of Endor.
The old woman raised her hands and ran surprisingly gentle ngers
over the contours of Sophie’s face. The girl’s aura shivered and
zzed with each gentle touch.
“How old are you now?” she asked.
“Fifteen. Well, fteen and a half.” Sophie wasn’t sure if the half
year made a di erence.
“Fifteen and a half,” Dora said, shaking her head. “I can’t
remember back that far.” She dipped her chin, then tilted it toward
Scatty. “Can you remember back to when you were fteen?”
“Vividly,” Scathach said grimly. “Wasn’t that about the time I
visited you in Babylon and you tried to marry me o to King
Nebuchadnezzar?”
“I’m sure you’re wrong,” Dora said happily. “I think that was
later. Though he would have made an excellent husband,” she
added. She looked up at Sophie and the girl found herself re ected
in the mirrors that were the Witch’s eyes. “There are two things I
must teach you. To protect yourself—that is simplicity itself. But
instructing you in the magic of Air is a little trickier. The last time I
instructed a humani in Air magic, it took him sixty years to master
the basics, and even then he fell out of the sky on his rst ight.”
“Sixty years.” Sophie swallowed. Did that mean she was destined
to spend a lifetime trying to control this power?
“Gran, we haven’t got that sort of time. I doubt we’ve even got
sixty minutes.”
Dora glared into a mirror and her re ection looked out from the
glass of an empty picture frame. “So why don’t you do this, you’re
such an expert, eh?”
“Gran…” Scathach sighed.
“Don’t ‘Gran’ me in that tone of voice,” Dora said warningly. “I’ll
do this my way.”
“We don’t have time to do it the traditional way.”
“Don’t talk to me about tradition. What do the young know about
tradition? Trust me, when I’m nished, Sophie will know all that I
know about the elemental Air magic.” She turned back to Sophie.
“First things rst: are your parents alive?”
“Yes,” she said, blinking in surprise, not sure where this was
going.
“Good. And you talk to your mother?”
“Yes, almost every day.”
Dora glanced sideways at Scatty. “You hear that? Almost every
day.” She took one of Sophie’s hands in hers and patted the back of
it. “Maybe you should be teaching Scathach a thing or two. And
have you a grandmother?”
“My Nana, yes, my father’s mother. I usually call her on Fridays,”
she added, realizing with a guilty start that today was Friday and
that Nana Newman would be expecting a call.
“Every Friday,” the Witch of Endor said signi cantly, and looked
at Scatty again, but the Warrior deliberately turned away and
concentrated on an ornate glass paperweight. She put it down when
she saw that there was a tiny man in a three-piece suit frozen inside
the glass. He had a briefcase in one hand and a sheaf of papers in
the other. His eyes were still blinking.
“This will not hurt,” the Witch said.
Sophie doubted it could be any worse than what she’d already
gone through. Her nose wrinkled at the odor of burnt wood, and she
felt a cool breeze wash over her hands. She looked down. A
gossamer-thin white spiderweb was twisting and spinning from the
Witch of Endor’s ngers and wrapping itself like a bandage around
each of Sophie’s ngers. It curled across her palm, completely
covering it, then wrapped around her wrist and crept up her arm.
She realized then that the Witch had been distracting her with her
questions. Sophie looked into the Witch’s mirrored eyes and found
that she could not put her questions into words. It was as if she had
lost the ability to speak. She was also surprised that instead of
feeling frightened, from the moment the Witch had taken her hand,
a wave of peace and calm had washed through her body. She
glanced sideways at Scatty and Flamel. They were watching the
process, wide-eyed with shock and, in Scathach’s case, with
something like horror on her face.
“Gran…are you sure about this?” Scathach demanded.
“Of course I’m sure,” the old woman snapped, a note of anger in
her voice.
And even though the Witch of Endor was speaking to Scathach,
Sophie could hear her voice in her head, talking to her, whispering
ancient secrets, murmuring archaic spells, divulging a lifetime of
knowledge in the space of heartbeats and breaths.
“This is not a spiderweb,” Dora explained to a stunned and silent
Flamel, noticing that he was leaning forward, staring intently at the
webs spinning around Sophie’s arms. “It is concentrated air mixed
with my own aura. All my knowledge, my experience, even my lore
is gathered in this web of air. Once it touches Sophie’s skin, she will
begin to absorb that knowledge.”
Sophie breathed deeply, drawing the wood-scented air deep into
her lungs. Images ashed impossibly fast in her head, times and
places long past, cyclopean walls of stone, ships of solid gold,
dinosaurs and dragons, a city carved into a mountain of ice and
faces…hundreds, thousands of faces, from every race of mankind,
from every time period, human and half human, werebeast and
monster. She was seeing everyone the Witch of Endor had ever seen.
“The Egyptians got it wrong,” Dora continued, her hands now
moving too fast for Flamel to see. “They wrapped the dead,” she
continued. “They did not realize I wrapped the living. There was a
time when I put a little of myself into my followers and sent them
out into the world to teach in my name. Obviously someone saw
this process in the ancient past and tried to copy it.”
Sophie suddenly saw a dozen people wrapped up like her, and a
younger-looking Dora moving among them, dressed in a costume
from ancient Babylon. Somehow Sophie understood that these were
the priests and priestesses in the cult that worshipped the Witch.
Dora was passing on a little of her knowledge to them so that they
could go out into the world and teach others.
The white weblike air now owed down Sophie’s legs, binding
them together. Unconsciously, she brought her hands up across her
chest, right hand on her left shoulder, left hand on her right
shoulder. The Witch nodded approvingly.
Sophie closed her eyes and saw clouds. Without knowing how,
she knew their names: cirrus, cirrocumulus, altostratus and
stratocumulus, nimbostratus and cumulus. All di erent, each type
with unique characteristics and qualities. She suddenly understood
how to use them, how to shape and wield and move them.
Images ickered.
Flashed.
She saw a tiny woman under a clear blue sky raise a hand and
make a cloud grow directly overhead. Rain irrigated a parched eld.
Flashed again.
A tall bearded man standing on the edge of a huge sea raised his
hands and a howling wind parting the waters.
And ashed again.
A young woman brought a raging storm to a shuddering stop with
a single gesture, freezing it in place, then ran into a imsy wooden
house and grabbed a child. A heartbeat later and the storm ate the
house.
Sophie watched the images and learned from them.
The Witch of Endor touched Sophie’s cheek and the girl opened
her eyes. The whites were dotted with silver sparkles. “There are
those who will tell you that the magic of Fire or Water or even Earth
is the most powerful magic of all. They are wrong. The magic of Air
surpasses all others. Air can extinguish re. It can churn water to
mist and can rip up the earth. But air can also bring re to life, it
can push a boat across still water, can shape the land. Air can clean
a wound, can pluck a splinter from a ngertip. Air can kill.”
The last of the white cobwebbed air closed across Sophie’s face,
completely encasing her, wrapping her like a mummy.
“This is a terrifying gift I have given you. Within you now is a
lifetime—a very long lifetime—of experience. I hope some will be of
use to you in the dire days ahead.”
Sophie stood before the Witch of Endor completely encased in the
white bandagelike air. This was not like the Awakening. This was a
gentler, subtler process. She discovered that she knew things—
incredible things. She had memories of impossible times and
extraordinary places. But mixed with these memories and emotions
were her own thoughts. Already she was beginning to nd it hard to
tell them apart.
Then the smoke began to curl and hiss and steam.
Dora suddenly turned to look for Scatty. “Come and give me a
hug, child. I will not see you again.”
“Gran?”
Dora wrapped her arms around Scathach’s shoulders and put her
mouth close to her ear.
Her voice dropped to little more than a whisper. “I have given
this girl a rare and terrible power. Make sure this power is used for
good.”
Scathach nodded, not entirely sure what the old woman was
suggesting.
“And call your mother. She worries about you.”
“I will, Gran.”
The mummylike cocoon suddenly dissolved into steam and mist
as Sophie’s aura ared brilliant silver. She stretched out her arms,
ngers splayed wide, and the merest whisper of a wind rattled
through the shop.
“Careful. If you break anything, you pay for it,” the Witch
warned.
Then, suddenly, Scathach, Dora and Sophie turned to look out
into the darkening afternoon. An instant later Nicholas Flamel
smelled the unmistakable rotten-egg odor of sulfur. “Dee!”
“Josh!” Sophie’s eyes snapped open. “Josh is out there!”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Dr. John Dee
nally arrived in Ojai as the last light was fading in
spectacular shades of pink over the surrounding Topa Topa
Mountains. He’d been traveling all day; he was tired and irritable
and looking for an excuse to hurt someone.
Hekate’s Shadowrealm had drained his cell battery, and it had
taken him over an hour before he could nd a phone to contact his
o ce. He’d then been forced to sit, fuming, by the side of the road
for another ninety minutes while a team of drivers scoured Mill
Valley’s backroads looking for him. It was close to nine-thirty before
he nally returned to his o ces at Enoch Enterprises in the heart of
the city.
There he’d learned that Perenelle had already been moved to
Alcatraz. His company had recently purchased the island from the
state and had closed it to the public while restoration work was
being carried out. There was talk in the papers that it was going to
be turned into a living history museum. In reality, the doctor
intended to return it to its original use as one of the most secure
prisons in the world. The doctor brie y thought about ying out to
the island to talk to Perenelle, but dismissed the idea as a waste of
time. The missing pages from the Codex and the twins were his
priorities. Although Bastet had said to kill them if he couldn’t
kidnap them, Dee had other ideas.
Dee knew of the famous prophecy from the Book of Abraham the
Mage. The Elders had known that twins were coming, “the two that
are one, the one that is all.” One to save the world, one to destroy it.
But which one was which? he wondered. And could their powers be
shaped and twisted by the instruction they received? Finding the
boy was becoming as important as nding the missing pages of the
Codex. He had to have that gold aura.
Dr. John Dee had lived in Ojai brie y at the turn of the twentieth
century—it was still called the city of Nordho then—when he’d
been plundering the surrounding Chumash burial grounds for their
precious artifacts. He’d hated it: Ojai was too small, too insular and,
in the summer months, simply too hot for him. Dee was always
happiest in the largest of cities, where it was easier to be invisible
and anonymous.
He’d own from San Francisco down to Santa Barbara in the
company helicopter, and rented a nondescript-looking Ford at the
small airport. Then he’d driven down from Santa Barbara, arriving
in Ojai just as the sun was setting in a spectacular display, painting
the town in long, elegant shadows. Ojai had changed dramatically in
the hundred or so years since he’d last seen it…but he still didn’t
like it.
He turned the car onto Ojai Avenue and slowed. Flamel and the
others were close; he could feel it. But he had to be careful now. If
he could sense them, then they—especially the Alchemyst and
Scathach—would be able to sense him. And he still had no idea
what the Witch of Endor was capable of doing. It was extremely
worrying that a very senior Elder had been living in California and
he’d been totally unaware of her presence. He thought he knew the
locations of most of the important Elders and human immortals in
the world. Dee wondered if it was signi cant that he had not been
able to contact the Morrigan throughout the day. He’d phoned her
with persistent regularity on the drive down, but she wasn’t
answering her cell. She was either on eBay or playing one of the
interminable online strategy games she was addicted to. He didn’t
know where Bastet was and didn’t care. She frightened him, and
Dee tended to destroy those people who scared him.
Flamel, Scathach and the twins could be anywhere in the town.
But where?
Dee allowed a little energy to trickle into his aura. He blinked as
his eyes blurred with sudden tears, and blinked again to clear them.
Suddenly, the people in the car next to his, those crossing the road,
and the pedestrians on the sidewalk were outlined in shifting
multicolored auras. Some auras were just wisps of diaphanous tinted
smoke, others were dark spots and sheets of solid muddy colors.
In the end, he found them entirely by chance: he was driving
down Ojai Avenue and had gone past Libbey Park when he spotted
the black Hummer parked on Fox Street. He pulled in behind it and
parked. The moment he got out of his car, he caught the merest hint
of a pure gold aura coming from the park, close to the fountain.
Dee’s thin lips curled in a humorless smile.
They would not escape this time.
Josh Newman sat by the long, low fountain in Libbey Park
directly across from the antiques shop and stared into the water.
Two ower-shaped bowls, one larger than the other, were set in the
center of a circular pool. Water spouted from the top bowl and
owed over the sides into the larger bowl beneath. This in turn
over owed into the pool. The sound helped drown out the nearby
tra c noises.
He felt alone, and more than a little lost.
When the Witch had made him leave the antiques shop, he’d
walked beneath the shaded promenade and stopped in front of the
ice cream shop, lured there by the odors of chocolate and vanilla.
He stood outside, reading the menu of exotic avors, and wondered
why his sister’s aura smelled of vanilla ice cream and his of oranges.
She didn’t even really like ice cream; he was the one who loved it.
His nger tapped the menu: blueberry chocolate chip.
Josh shoved his hand in the back pocket of his jeans…and felt a
rising moment of panic as realized his wallet was missing. Had he
left it in the car, had he…? He stopped.
He knew exactly where he’d left it.
The last place he’d seen his wallet, along with his dead cell, his
iPod and his laptop, was on the oor next to his bed in his room in
the Yggdrasill. Losing his wallet was bad enough, but losing his
computer was a disaster. All his e-mails were on it, along with his
class notes, a partially written summer honors project, three years of
photos—including the trip to Cancún at Christmas—and at least
sixty gigs of MP3s. He couldn’t remember the last time he had
backed up, but it de nitely wasn’t recently. He actually felt
physically ill, and suddenly, the odors from the ice cream parlor
didn’t smell so sweet and enticing.
Thoroughly miserable, he walked to the corner and crossed at the
lights facing the post o ce, then turned left, heading toward the
park.
The iPod had been a Christmas present from his parents. How was
he going to explain to them that he’d lost it? Plus there was close to
another thirty gigs of music on the little hard drive.
But worse than losing his iPod, his wallet or even his computer
was losing his phone. That was a total nightmare. All his friends’
numbers were on it, and he knew he hadn’t written them down
anywhere. Because their parents traveled so much, the twins were
rarely more than one or two semesters at the same school. They
made friends easily—especially Sophie—and they were still in touch
with friends they’d met years earlier in schools scattered across
America. Without those e-mail addresses and phone numbers, how
was he supposed to get in touch with them, how would he ever nd
them again?
There was a water fountain in a little nook before the entrance to
the park, and he bent his head to drink. An ornamental metal lion’s
head was set into the wall over the fountain, and below it there was
a small rectangular plaque with the words Love is the water of life,
drink deeply. He let the icy water splash over his lips and
straightened to look over at the shop, wondering what was
happening inside. He still loved his sister, but did she love him?
Could she love him, now that he was…ordinary?
Libbey Park was quiet. Josh could hear children racing around the
nearby playground, but their voices sounded high and very distant.
A trio of old men, identically dressed in sleeveless shirts, long
shorts, white socks and sandals, gathered on a shady bench. One of
the men was feeding bread crumbs to a quartet of fat and lazy
pigeons. Josh sat down on the edge of the low fountain and leaned
over to trail his hand in the water. After the oppressive heat, it felt
deliciously cool, and he ran his wet ngers through his hair, feeling
water droplets roll down his neck.
What was he going to do?
Was there anything he could do?
In just over twenty-four hours, his life—and his sister’s life too—
had changed utterly and incomprehensibly. What he had once
believed to be merely stories now turned out to be versions of the
truth. Myth had become history, legends had become facts. When
Scatty had revealed earlier that the mysterious Danu Talis was also
called Atlantis, he had almost laughed in her face. To him, Atlantis
had always been a fairy tale. But if Scathach and Hekate and the
Morrigan and Bastet were real, then so was Danu Talis. And so his
parents’ life work—archaeology—was suddenly worthless.
Josh knew deep down that he had also lost his twin, the constant
in his life, the one person he could always count on. She had
changed in ways he could not even begin to comprehend. Why
hadn’t he been Awakened too? He should have insisted that Hekate
Awaken him rst. What would it be like to have those powers? The
only thing he could compare it to was being a superhero. Even when
Sophie’s newly Awakened senses were making her sick, he was
jealous of her abilities.
From the corner of his eye, Josh became aware that a man had sat
down on one of the other edges of the fountain, but he ignored him.
He absently picked at a broken fragment of one of the blue tiles that
ran around the fountain.
What was he going to do?
And the answer was always the same: what could he do?
“Are you a victim too?”
It took him a moment before he realized that the gure sitting to
his right was talking to him. He started to stand up, the golden rule
with creeps being that you never responded, and you never—ever—
entered into any conversation with them.
“It seems we are all victims of Nicholas Flamel.”
Startled, Josh looked up…and found he was staring at Dr. John
Dee, the man he’d hoped never to see again. The last time he’d seen
Dee had been in the Shadowrealm. Then, he’d held the sword
Excalibur in his hands. Now he sat facing him, looking out of place
in his impeccably tailored gray suit. Josh looked around quickly,
expecting to see Golems or rats, or even the Morrigan lurking in the
shadows.
“I am alone,” Dee said pleasantly, smiling politely.
Josh’s mind was racing. He needed to get to Flamel, he needed to
warn him that Dee was in Ojai. He wondered what would happen if
he simply got up and ran. Would Dee try to stop him with magic in
front of all these people? Josh looked over at the three old men
again, and it dawned on him that they probably wouldn’t even
notice if Dee changed him into an elephant right in the middle of
downtown Ojai.
“Do you know how long I’ve been chasing Nicholas Flamel, or
Nick Fleming, or any of the hundreds of other aliases he’s used?”
Dee continued quietly, conversationally. He leaned back and trailed
his ngers through the water. “At least ve hundred years. And he’s
always given me the slip. He’s tricky and dangerous that way. In
1666, when I was closing in on him in London, he set a re that
nearly burned the city to the ground.”
“He told us you caused the Great Fire,” Josh blurted. Despite his
fear, he was curious. And now he suddenly remembered one of the
rst pieces of advice Flamel had given them: “Nothing is as it seems.
Question everything.” Josh found himself wondering if that advice
also applied to the Alchemyst himself. The sun had set, and there
was a de nite chill in the evening air. Josh shivered. The three old
men shu ed away, none of them even glancing in his direction,
leaving him alone with the magician. Strangely, he didn’t feel
threatened by the man’s presence.
Dee’s thin lips ickered in a smile. “Flamel never tells anyone
everything,” he said. “I used to say that half of everything he said
was a lie, and the other half wasn’t entirely truthful either.”
“Nicholas says you’re working with the Dark Elders. Once you
have the complete Codex, you will bring them back into this world.”
“Correct in every detail,” Dee said, surprising him. “Though no
doubt Nicholas has twisted the story somewhat. I am working with
the Elders,” he continued, “and yes, I am looking for the last two
pages from the Book of Abraham the Mage, commonly called the
Codex. But only because Flamel and his wife stole it from the
original Bibliothèque du Roi in the Louvre.”
“He stole it?”
“Let me tell you about Nicholas Flamel,” Dee said patiently. “I’m
sure he’s told you about me. He has been many things in his time: a
physician and a cook, a bookseller, a soldier, a teacher of languages
and chemistry, both an o cer of the law and a thief. But he is now,
and has always been, a liar, a charlatan and a crook. He stole the
Book from the Louvre when he discovered that it contained not only
the immortality potion, but also the philosopher’s stone recipe. He
brews the immortality potion each month to keep Perenelle and
himself at exactly the same age they were when they rst drank it.
He uses the philosopher’s stone formula to turn cheap copper and
lead into gold and chunks of common coal into diamonds. He uses
one of the most extraordinary collections of knowledge in the world
purely for personal gain. And that’s the truth.”
“But what about Scatty and Hekate? Are they Elders?”
“Oh, absolutely. Hekate was an Elder and Scathach is Next
Generation. But Hekate was a known criminal. She was banished
from Danu Talis because of her experiments on animals. I suppose
you would call her a genetic engineer: she created the Were clans,
for example, and loosed the curse of the werewolf onto humanity. I
believe you saw some of her experiments yesterday, the boar
people. Scathach is nothing more than a hired thug, cursed for her
crimes to wear the body of a teen for the rest of her days. When
Flamel knew I was closing in, they were the only people he could go
to.”
Josh was now hopelessly confused. Who was telling the truth?
Flamel or Dee?
He was cold now. Night had not yet fully fallen, but a low mist
had crept in over the town. The air smelled of damp earth and just
the faintest hint of rotten eggs. “What about you? Are you really
working to bring back the Elders?”
“Of course I am,” Dee said, sounding surprised. “It is probably the
single most important thing I can do for this world.”
“Flamel says the Elders—the Dark Elders, he calls them—would
destroy the world.”
Dee shrugged. “Believe me when I tell you that he’s lying to you.
The Elders would be able to change this world for the better….”
Dee’s ngers moved in the water, the ripples languid and
mesmerizing. Startled, Josh saw images forming in the water, the
pictures matching Dee’s soothing words. “In the ancient past, the
earth was a paradise. It had an incredibly advanced technology, but
the air was clean, the water pure, the seas unpolluted.”
There was a rippling image of an island set under cloudless azure
skies. Endless elds of golden wheat marched into the distance.
Trees were laden with an assortment of exotic fruit.
“Not only did the Elder Race shape this world, they even nudged
a primitive hominid on the road to evolution. But the Elders were
driven out from this paradise by the foolish superstition of the mad
Abraham and the spells in the Codex. The Elders did not die—it
takes a lot to kill one of the Elder Race—they simply waited. They
knew that someday mankind would come to its senses and call them
back to save the earth.”
Josh could not take his eyes o the sparkling water. Much of what
Dee said sounded plausible.
“If we can bring them back, the Elders have the powers and the
abilities to reshape this world. They can make the deserts bloom….”
An image formed in the water: huge windblown desert dunes
turning green with lush grass.
Another image appeared. Josh was looking at the earth from
space, just like Google Earth. A huge swirl of dense cloud had
formed over the Gulf of Mexico, heading toward Texas. “They can
control the weather,” Dee said, and the storm dissipated.
Dee’s ngers moved and there appeared the unmistakable image
of a hospital ward with a long row of empty beds.
“And they can cure disease. Remember, these beings were
worshipped as gods because of their powers. And these are the ones
Flamel is trying to stop us from bringing back to the world.”
It took Josh an age to form the single-word question. “Why?” He
couldn’t work out why Flamel would want to prevent such obvious
advances.
“Because he has masters, Elders like Hekate and the Witch of
Endor, for example, who want the world to dissolve into chaos and
anarchy. When that happens, they can come out of the shadows and
declare themselves the rulers of the earth.” Dee shook his head
sadly. “It pains me to say this, but Flamel does not care about you,
nor does he care about your sister. He put her in terrible danger
today simply to roughly Awaken her powers. The Elders I work with
take three days to bring someone through the Awakening
ceremony.”
“Three days,” Josh mumbled. “Flamel said there was no one else
in North America who could Awaken me.” He didn’t want to believe
Dee…and yet everything the man said sounded so reasonable.
“Another lie. My Elders could Awaken you. And they would do it
properly and safely. It is, after all, such a dangerous process.”
Dee got up slowly and walked around to crouch beside Josh,
bringing his eyes level with the boy’s face. Fog was beginning to
thicken and swirl around the fountain, shifting and eddying as he
moved. Dee’s voice was silky smooth, a gentle monotone exactly in
sync with the rippling water. “What’s your name?”
“Josh.”
“Josh,” Dee echoed, “where is Nicholas Flamel now?”
Even in his drowsy state, an alarm bell—very faint and very, very
distant—went o in Josh’s head. He couldn’t trust Dee, he shouldn’t
trust Dee…and yet so much of what he said had the ring of truth to
it.
“Where is he, Josh?” Dee persisted.
Josh started to shake his head. Even though he believed Dee—
everything he said made perfect sense—he wanted to talk to Sophie
rst, he needed to get her advice and opinion.
“Tell me.” Dee lifted Josh’s limp hand and placed it in the pool.
Ripples spun out from it. They settled into the image of a small
antiques shop lled with glassware, directly across the road from
Libbey Park. Grinning triumphantly, Dee came to his feet and
whirled around, staring across the road as he activated his senses.
He located their auras immediately.
The green of Flamel, the gray of Scathach, Endor’s brown and the
girl’s pure silver. He had them—and this time there would be no
mistakes, no escape.
“You sit here and enjoy the pretty pictures,” Dee murmured,
patting Josh on the shoulder. The water bloomed with exotic,
fractal-like patterns, mesmerizing and hypnotic. “I’ll be back for you
shortly.” Then, without moving a muscle, he called in his waiting
army.
Abruptly, the fog thickened and darkened, stinking of rotten eggs
and something else: dust and dry earth, damp and mold.
And horror descended on Ojai.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Nicholas
Flamel’s hands were already beginning to glow with
green light when he pulled open the door of the small shop,
grimacing in annoyance as the bell jangled merrily.
The sun had dipped below the horizon while the Witch worked
with Sophie, and a chill fog had rolled down the valley. It swirled
and rolled the length of Ojai Avenue, curling and twisting through
the trees, leaving everything it touched beaded with moisture. Cars
crept along, their headlights outlined in huge halos of light barely
able to penetrate the gloom. The street was completely deserted; the
people outside had all been dressed for summer weather and had
ed indoors away from the damp.
Scatty joined Flamel at the door. She carried a short sword in one
hand, a nunchaku in the other, dangling loosely on its chain. “This
is not good, not good at all.” She breathed deeply. “Smell that?”
Flamel nodded. “Sulfur. The odor of Dee.”
Scatty rattled the nunchaku. “He’s really starting to annoy me.”
Somewhere in the distance there was a metallic bang as two cars
collided. A car alarm echoed forlornly behind them. And there was a
scream, high-pitched and terrifying, and then another and another.
“It’s coming. Whatever it is,” Nicholas Flamel said grimly.
“We don’t want to be trapped here,” Scatty said. “Let’s nd Josh
and get back to the car.”
“Agreed. He who retreats lives longer.” He turned to look back
into the shop. The Witch of Endor had Sophie by the arm and was
whispering urgently to her. Wisps of white smoke still curled o the
girl, and tendrils of white air dripped from her ngers like unwound
bandages.
Sophie leaned forward and kissed the old woman on the cheek,
then she turned and hurried down the length of the shop. “We have
to go,” she said breathlessly, “we have to get away from here.” She
had no idea what lay outside, but her newfound knowledge enabled
her imagination to populate the fog with any number of monstrous
creatures.
“And close the door behind you,” the Witch called out.
And at that moment all the lights ickered and died. Ojai was
plunged into darkness.
The bell jangled as the trio stepped out into the now-deserted
street. The fog had become so thick that drivers had been forced to
pull o the road and there was no longer tra c moving on the main
street. An air of unnatural silence had fallen. Flamel turned to
Sophie. “Can you pinpoint Josh?”
“He said he’d wait for us in the park.” She squinted, trying to
penetrate the fog, but it was so thick that she could barely see a foot
in front of her face. With Flamel and Scatty on either side of her,
she stepped o the sidewalk and made her way to the middle of the
empty road. “Josh?” The fog swallowed her words, mu ing them to
little more than a whisper. “Josh,” she called again.
There was no response.
A sudden thought struck her and she ung out her right hand,
ngers splayed. A pu of air curled from her hand, but did nothing
to the fog except make it swirl and dance. She tried again, and an
icy gale whipped across the street, cutting a neat corridor through
the fog, catching the rear wing of an abandoned car in the middle of
the road, leaving a ragged indentation in the metal. “Whoops. I
guess I have to practice,” she muttered.
A shape stepped into the opening in the fog, and then a second
and a third. And none of them were alive.
Closest to Sophie, Flamel and Scatty was a complete skeleton,
standing tall and straight, wearing the ragged remains of the blue
uniform coat of a U.S. cavalry o cer. It carried the rusted stump of
a sword in bony ngers. When it turned its head toward them, the
bones at the base of its skull popped and cracked.
“Necromancy,” Flamel breathed. “Dee’s raised the dead.”
Another gure loomed out of the fog: it was the partially
mummi ed body of a man carrying a huge railroad hammer. Behind
it came another dead man, whose remaining esh was tanned to the
consistency of leather. A pair of withered leather gun belts was
slung low across his hips, and when he saw the group, he reached
for the missing guns with skeletal ngers.
Sophie stood frozen in shock, and the wind died away from her
ngers. “They’re dead,” she whispered. “Skeletons. Mummies.
They’re all dead.”
“Yep,” Scathach said matter-of-factly, “skeletons and mummies. It
depends on what type of ground they were buried in. Damp soil,
you get skeletons.” She stepped forward and swept out with a
nunchaku, knocking the head clear o another gunslinger, who’d
been attempting to raise a rusted ri e to his shoulder. “Dry soil, you
get the mummies. Doesn’t stop them from hurting you, though.” The
skeletal cavalry o cer with the broken sword lashed out at her, and
she parried with her own sword. His rusted blade dissolved into
dust. Scatty’s sword swung again and separated the head from the
body, which then immediately crumpled to the ground.
Although the shambling gures moved in complete silence, there
were screams all around now. And even though they were mu ed
by the fog, fear and abject terror were clearly audible in them. The
ordinary citizens of Ojai had become aware that the dead were
walking through their streets.
The fog was now thick with the creatures. They came from all
sides, crowding in on the trio, encircling them in the center of the
road. As the twisting sheets of dampness eddied and owed, more
and more skeletal and mummi ed remains were revealed in brief
glimpses: soldiers in the tattered blues and grays of Civil War
uniforms; farmers in rags of old-fashioned overalls; cowboys in worn
chaps and torn denim; women in long, sweeping skirts, now moldy
and ragged; miners in threadbare buckskins.
“He’s emptied a boot hill graveyard from one of the old
abandoned towns!” Scatty exclaimed, standing with her back to
Sophie, striking out around her. “No one here’s in clothes made
after 1880.” Two skeletal women wearing matching bonnets and the
rags of their Sunday best clicked their way on bony feet across Ojai
Avenue toward her, arms outstretched. Scatty’s sword whipped
around, slicing away the arms, but that didn’t even slow them
down. She shoved her nunchaku back into her belt and pulled out
her second sword. She struck out again, both swords forming an X
in the middle of the air, and lopped o both heads, sending them
bouncing back into the fog. The skeletons crumpled into a disarray
of bones.
“Josh,” Sophie called again, her voice high in desperation. “Josh.
Where are you?” Maybe the mummies and skeletons had gotten to
him rst. Maybe he was going to loom up out of the fog any minute
now, eyes blank and staring, head twisted at an awkward angle. She
shook her head, trying to clear the ghoulish thoughts.
Flamel’s hands burned with cold green re, and the damp fog was
rich with the odor of mint. He snapped his ngers and sent a sheet
of virescent re blazing into the fog. The fogbanks glowed emerald
and aquamarine, but otherwise, the magic had no e ect. Flamel
next threw a small ball of green light directly in front of two
lurching skeletons who loomed up before him. Fire blazed over the
creatures, crisping the remains of their gray Confederate uniforms.
They continued forward, bones clacking on the street, closing in on
him, and there were hundreds more behind them.
“Sophie, get the Witch! We need her help.”
“But she can’t help us,” Sophie said desperately. “There’s nothing
more she can do. She has no power left: she’s given everything to
me.”
“Everything?” Flamel gasped, ducking beneath a swinging st. He
placed his hand on the center of the dead man’s rib cage and
pushed, sending the skeleton ying back into the crowd, where it
fell in a tangle of bones. “Well then, Sophie, you do something!”
“What?” she called. What could she do against an army of the
undead? She was a fteen-year-old girl.
“Anything!”
A mummi ed arm shot out of the fog and cracked her across the
shoulder. It was like being hit by a wet towel.
Fear, revulsion and anger lent her strength. Right at that moment,
however, she couldn’t remember anything the Witch had taught her,
but then her instincts—or maybe the Witch’s imparted knowledge—
took over. She deliberately allowed her anger to surge into her aura.
Abruptly, the air was lled with the richness of creamy vanilla as
Sophie’s aura blazed pure silver. Bringing the palm of her right hand
up to her face, she blew into her cupped ngers, then tossed the
captured breath into the middle of the dead. A six-foot-tall
whirlwind, a miniature twister, appeared, growing up out of the
ground. It sucked the dead nearest to it into its core, grinding and
shattering the bones, then spitting out the splintered remains.
Sophie threw a second and then a third ball of air. The three
twisters danced and moved among the skeletons and mummies,
cutting a swath of destruction through them. She found she could
direct the twisters by simply looking in a particular direction, and
they would obediently drift that way.
Suddenly, Dee’s voice echoed out of the fog. “Do you like my
army, Nicholas?” The fog attened the sound, making it impossible
to locate. “The last time I was in Ojai—oh, over a hundred years ago
—I discovered a marvelous little graveyard just below the Three
Sisters Peaks. The town it was built alongside is long gone, but the
graves and their contents remain.”
Flamel was ghting frantically as sts punched, ngernails
scratched, feet kicked. There was no real strength to the skeletons’
blows or the mummies’ slaps, but what they lacked in force they
made up for in numbers. There were simply too many of them.
There was a bruise beginning to darken beneath his eye and a long
scratch on the back of his hand. Scatty moved around Sophie,
defending her while she controlled the whirlwinds.
“I don’t know how long that graveyard was in use. A couple of
hundred years, certainly. I’ve no idea how many corpses it holds.
Hundreds, maybe even thousands. And, Nicholas, I’ve called them
all.”
“Where is he?” Flamel said through gritted teeth. “He’s got to be
close—very close—to be able to control this number of corpses. I
need to know where he is to do anything.”
Sophie felt a wave of exhaustion wash over her, and suddenly,
one of the twisters wobbled and then vanished. The two that
remained were weaving from side to side as Sophie’s physical
strength ebbed. Another died, and the one that remained was
rapidly losing power. This exhaustion was the price of performing
magic, she realized. But she needed to keep going for just a little
longer; she had to nd her brother.
“We’ve got to get out of here.” Scathach caught Sophie and held
her upright. The skeletal dead surged forward, and Scatty beat them
back with neat, precise movements of her sword.
“Josh,” Sophie whispered tiredly. “Where’s Josh? We’ve got to
nd Josh.”
The fog robbed Dee’s voice of much of its emotion, but the glee in
his tone was evident when he said, “And do you know what else I
discovered? These mountains have been luring creatures other than
humans for the past millennia. The land here is littered with bones.
Hundreds of bones. And remember, Nicholas, I am, rst and
foremost, a necromancer.”
The bear that loomed up out of the gray fogbank was at least
eight feet tall. And even though patches of fur remained on its
skeleton, it was clear that it had died a long time before. The snowwhite bones only emphasized its huge daggerlike claws.
Behind the bear, the skeleton of a saber-toothed tiger appeared.
And then a cougar, and another bear—smaller this time, and not
quite as decomposed.
“A word from me stops them,” Dee’s voice boomed. “I want the
pages of the Codex.”
“No,” Flamel said grimly. “Where is he? Where is he hiding?”
“Where’s my brother?” Sophie called desperately, and then
screamed as a dead hand wrapped itself in her hair. Scathach
chopped it o at the wrist, but it still hung tangled in her hair like a
bizarre hair clip. “What have you done with my brother?”
“You brother is considering his options. Yours is not the only side
in this battle. And now, since I have the boy, all I need are the
pages.”
“Never.”
The bear and the tiger charged through the crowd of bodies,
brushing them aside, trampling them in their eagerness to get to the
trio. The saber-toothed tiger reached them rst. Its gleaming skeletal
head was massive, and the two downward-jutting teeth were at least
eight inches long. Flamel placed himself between Sophie and the
creature.
“Hand over the pages, Nicholas, or I will loose these undead
beasts on the town.”
Nicholas frantically hunted through his memory for a spell that
would stop the creature. He bitterly regretted now not studying
more magic. He snapped his ngers and a tiny bubble of light
popped onto the ground in front of the tiger.
“Is that all you can manage, Nicholas? My, you’re weakening.”
The bubble burst and spread across the ground in a cool emerald
stain.
“He’s close enough to see us,” Nicholas said. “All I need is one
glimpse of him.”
The skeletal tiger’s massive right front paw stepped into the green
light. And stuck. It attempted to lift its leg, but thick strands of
sticky green threads connected it to the road. And now its left paw
stepped into the light and stuck.
“Not quite so weak, eh, Dee?” Flamel shouted.
But the press of bodies behind the saber-toothed tiger kept
pushing it forward. Suddenly, its bony legs snapped o , sending the
huge beast lunging forward. Flamel managed to throw up his arms
before the monster collapsed on top of him, jaw gaping, teeth wide
and savage.
“Good-bye, Nicholas Flamel,” Dee called. “I’ll just take the pages
from your body.”
“No,” Sophie whispered. No, it was not going to end like this. She
had been Awakened, and the Witch of Endor had imbued her with
all her knowledge. There had to be something she could do. Sophie
opened her mouth and screamed, her aura blazing with silver
incandescence.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Josh awoke, his sister’s scream ringing in his ears.
It took him several seconds before he realized where he was:
sitting on the edge of the fountain in Libbey Park, while all around
him thick, foul-smelling banks of fog shifted and twisted and
crawled with half-glimpsed skeletons and mummi ed bodies clothed
in rags.
Sophie!
He had to get to his sister. To his right, in the middle of the grayblack fog, green light sparkled and silver ared, brie y illuminating
the mist from within, casting monstrous shadows. Sophie was there;
Flamel and Scathach, too, ghting these monsters. He should be
with them.
He came shakily to his feet and discovered Dr. John Dee standing
directly in front of him.
Dee was outlined in a sickly yellow aura. It sparked and spat and
hissed like burning fat and gave o the rancid odor of rotten eggs.
The man had his back to him. He was leaning both forearms against
the low stone wall next to the drinking fountain Josh had used
earlier. Dee was staring intently at the events taking place in the
street, concentrating so hard he was shaking with the e ort of
controlling the seemingly endless line of skeletons and mummi ed
humans shu ing past. Now that he was on his feet, Josh noticed
that there were other creatures in the fog too. He could see the
remains of bears and tigers, mountain cats and wolves.
He heard Flamel shout and Sophie scream, and his rst thought
was to rush at Dee. But he doubted he’d even get close. What could
he do against this powerful magician? He wasn’t like his twin: he
had no powers.
But that didn’t mean he was useless.
Sophie’s scream sent out a shock wave of icy air that shattered the
saber-toothed tiger to powder and knocked back the nearest
skeletons. The huge bear crashed to the ground, crushing a dozen
skeletons beneath its bulk. The blast of air had also cleared away a
patch of fog, and for the rst time, Sophie realized the enormity of
what they were facing. There weren’t dozens or even hundreds,
there were thousands of the Old West’s dead marching down the
street toward them. Dotted through the mass were the bony remains
of the animals that had hunted in the surrounding mountains for
centuries. She didn’t know what else she could do. The nal use of
magic exhausted her, and she slumped against Scathach, who
caught her in her left arm while holding one sword in her right
hand.
Flamel climbed tiredly to his feet. Using magic had drained his
reserves of energy as well, and even in the past few minutes he had
aged. The lines around his eyes were deeper, his hair thinner.
Scathach knew he could not survive much longer.
“Give him the pages, Nicholas,” she urged.
He shook his head stubbornly. “I will not. I cannot. I’ve spent my
life protecting the Book.”
“He who retreats lives longer,” she reminded him.
He shook his head. Flamel was bent over, breathing in great
heaving gulps of air. His skin was deathly pale, with two spots of
unnaturally bright red on his cheeks. “This is the exception,
Scathach. If I give him the pages, then I’ve condemned all of us—
Perry, too, and the entire world—to destruction.” He straightened
and turned to face the creatures for what they all knew would be
the last time. “Could you get Sophie away from here?”
Scathach shook her head. “I cannot ght them and carry her.”
“Could you get away on your own?”
“I could ght my way out,” she said carefully.
“Then go, Scatty. Escape. Get to the other Elders, contact the
immortal humans, tell them what happened here, start ghting the
Dark Elders before it is too late.”
“I’ll not leave you and Sophie here,” Scathach said rmly. “We’re
in this together to the end. Whatever that may be.”
“It’s time to die, Nicholas Flamel,” Dee called out of the gloom.
“I’ll make sure to tell Perenelle about this moment in every little
detail.”
A rustle ran through the mass of skeletal human and animal
bodies, and then, as one, they surged forward.
And a monster came out of the fog.
Huge and black, howling savagely, with two huge yellow-white
eyes and dozens of smaller eyes blazing, it drove straight through
the Libbey Park fountain, crushing it to powder, shattering the
ornamental vases, and bore down on Dr. John Dee.
The necromancer managed to ing himself to one side before the
black Hummer crashed into the wall, pounding it to dust. It stuck
nose-down against the remains of the wall, back wheels caught in
the air, engine screaming. The door opened and Josh climbed out
and carefully lowered himself to the ground. He was holding his
chest where the seat belt had cut into it.
Ojai Avenue was littered with the remains of the long dead.
Without Dee to control them, they were just so many bones.
Josh staggered into the street and picked his way through the
bones and scraps of cloth. Something crunched beneath his feet, but
he didn’t even look down.
Suddenly, the dead were gone.
Sophie didn’t know what had happened. There had been a
tremendous roar, a scream of tortured metal and a crunch of stone
and then silence. And in the silence, the dead had fallen down like
windblown grass. What had Dee summoned now?
A shape moved in the twisting fog.
Flamel gathered the last of his energy into a solid sphere of green
glass. Sophie straightened and tried to muster the dregs of her
energy. Scathach exed her ngers. She’d once been told that she’d
die in an exotic location; she wondered if Ojai in Ventura County
quali ed as exotic enough.
The shape loomed closer.
Flamel raised his hand, Sophie gathered the winds and Scathach
lifted her notched sword. Josh stepped out of the night. “I’ve
wrecked the car,” he said.
Sophie screamed with delight. She ran to her brother, and then
her scream turned to one of horror. The skeletal bear had risen from
the ground behind him, paws poised to strike.
Scathach moved, hitting Josh hard, shoving him out of the way,
and sent him tumbling into a mess of bones. The Warrior’s swords
parried the bear’s sweeping blow, sparks blinking in the fog. She
struck out again, and a bear claw as long as her hand tumbled
through the air.
One by one the skeletal animals were climbing to their feet. Two
huge wolves, one little more than bones, the other merely shriveled
esh, loomed out of the fog.
“This way. Here! This way.” The Witch’s voice sounded atly
across the street, and a rectangle of light from an open door lit up
the night. With Scatty supporting Flamel and Josh half carrying his
twin, they raced across the street toward the shop. The Witch of
Endor was standing in the doorway, looking blindly into the night,
an old-fashioned oil lantern held high. “We’ve got to get you out of
here.” She pulled the door closed and pushed the bolts home. “That
won’t hold them long,” she muttered.
“You said…you said you have no powers left,” Sophie muttered.
“I don’t.” Dora ashed a quick grin, revealing perfect white teeth.
“But this place has.” She led them through the shop and into a tiny
back room. “Do you know what makes Ojai so special?” she asked.
Something thumped against the door and all the glassware in the
shop rattled and tinkled.
“It is built on an intersection of ley lines.”
Josh opened his mouth and was actually forming the word ley
when his sister spoke. “Lines of energy that crisscross the globe,”
Sophie whispered in his ear.
“How do you know that?”
“I don’t know; I guess the Witch taught me. Many of the most
famous buildings and ancient sites across the world are built where
the ley lines meet.”
“Exactly,” Dora said, sounding pleased. “Couldn’t have put it
better myself.” The little storeroom was bare except for a long
rectangle propped up against the wall, covered in yellowed back
issues of the Ojai Valley Times.
More blows shook the shop window, the sound of bone against
glass setting them on edge.
Dora swept the papers to the ground to reveal a mirror. It stood
seven feet tall, four feet wide, the glass dirty, speckled and warped,
the images it showed slightly distorted and blurred. “And do you
know what drew me to Ojai in the rst place?” she asked. “Seven
great ley lines meet here. They form a leygate.”
“Here?” Flamel whispered. He knew about ley lines and had
heard about the leygates used by the ancients to travel across the
world in an instant. He hadn’t thought any still existed.
Dora tapped the ground with her foot. “Right here. And do you
know how you use a leygate?”
Flamel shook his head.
Dora reached for Sophie. “Give me your hand, child.” The Witch
took Sophie’s hand and put it on the glass. “You use a mirror.”
The mirror immediately came to blazing life, the glass aring
silver and then clearing. When they looked into the glass, it no
longer showed their re ections, but rather the image of a bare,
cellarlike room.
“Where?” Flamel asked.
“Paris,” Dora said.
“France.” He smiled. “Home.” And without hesitation, he stepped
right through the glass. Now they could see him within the mirror.
He turned and waved them through.
“I hate leygates,” Scatty muttered. “Make me nauseous.” She
hopped through the gate, and rolled to her feet beside Flamel. When
she turned back to face the twins, she did look as if she was about to
throw up.
The skeletal bear lumbered straight through the shop door,
ripping it o its hinges. The wolves and the cougars followed.
Glassware tumbled, mirrors cracked, ornaments shattered as the
beasts lumbered about.
A bruised and cut Dee raced into the shop, pushing the skeletal
beasts aside. A cougar snapped at him and he smacked it on the
snout. If it had had eyes, it would have blinked in surprise.
“Trapped,” he called gleefully. “Trapped and nowhere to go!”
But when he stepped into the storeroom, he knew they had
escaped him once more. It took him a single heartbeat to take in the
tall mirror, the two gures in the glass staring out, the old woman
standing next to the girl, pressing her hand to its surface. The boy
stood alone, holding on to the frame. Dee instantly knew what it
was. “A leygate,” he whispered in awe. Mirrors always acted as the
gates. Somewhere at the other end of the ley line was another
mirror linking them.
The old woman caught the girl and shoved her through the mirror.
Sophie tumbled to the ground at Flamel’s feet, then crouched to turn
and look back. Her mouth moved, but there was no sound. Josh.
“Josh,” Dee commanded, staring at the boy, “stay where you are.”
The boy turned to the glass. Already the image in the mirror had
blurred.
“I’ve told you the truth about Flamel,” Dee said urgently. All he
had to do was to keep the boy distracted for another moment or two
and the mirror would lose its power. “Stay with me. I can Awaken
you. Make you powerful. You can help change the world, Josh.
Change it for the better!”
“I don’t know….” The o er was tempting, so tempting. But he
knew if he sided with Dee, he would lose his sister altogether. Or
would he? If Dee Awakened him, then they would be alike again.
Maybe this was a way he could reconnect with his twin.
“Look,” Dee said triumphantly, pointing to the fading image in
the glass, “they’ve left you, deserted you again, because you are not
one of them. You’re no longer important.”
The mirror ared silver…and Sophie stepped back through the
glass. “Josh? Hurry,” she said urgently, not looking at Dee.
“I…,” he began. “You came back for me.”
“Of course I did! You’re my brother. I’ll never abandon you.”
Then, catching his hand, wrapping her ngers around his, she
pulled him into the glass.
And Dora pushed the mirror, sending it shattering to the oor.
“Whoops.” She turned to face Dee and pulled o her dark glasses to
reveal the mirrors of her eyes. “You should go now. You’ve got
about three seconds.”
Dee didn’t quite make it out of the shop before it exploded.
CHAPTER FORTY
MOVIE COMPANY CAUSES MAYHEM IN SCENIC OJAI
The latest in a long line of horror movies from Enoch Studios
caused tra c mayhem and more than a little confusion in
downtown Ojai yesterday. The special e ects were a bit too
realistic for some locals, and emergency services were
inundated with calls from people who claimed that the dead
were walking the streets.
John Dee, chairman of Enoch Films, a division of Enoch
Enterprises, apologized profusely for the confusion, blaming it
on a power outage and an unseasonable fog that swept in as
they were about to shoot a scene from their new movie. “It
certainly made the extras look extra-scary,” his spokesperson
said. In a related incident, a drunk driver smashed through the
historic Libbey Park fountain and into the recently restored
pergola. Dee has promised to restore the fountain and pergola
to their former glory.
Ojai Valley News
LOCAL ANTIQUES SHOP DEVASTATED BY EXPLOSION
A gas explosion destroyed the shop of longtime Ojai resident
Dora Witcherly late last night. An electrical fault ignited
solvents used by the owner to clean, polish and restore her
antiques. Miss Witcherly was in the shop’s back room when the
explosion occurred and was unharmed and apparently
unconcerned by her brush with death. “When you’ve lived as
long as I have, nothing much surprises you.” She has promised
to reopen the shop in time for the holidays.
Ojai Online
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Deep beneath Alcatraz, Perenelle Flamel lay on a narrow cot, her
face turned toward the back wall of her cell. Behind her, in the
corridor outside, she could hear the sphinx click-clacking up and
down the cold stone oors, and the air was heavy with the musky
odors of snake and lion. Perenelle shivered. The cell was freezing,
and green-tinged water was dripping down the wall inches from her
face.
Where was Nicholas?
What was happening?
Perenelle was afraid, but not for herself. The fact that she was
alive meant that Dee needed her for something, and that sooner or
later she would come face to face with him. And if Dee had a
failing, it was arrogance. He would underestimate her…and then
she would strike! There was a particularly nasty little spell she had
learned in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains in Transylvania
that she was saving just for him.
Where was Nicholas?
She was afraid for Nicholas and the children. It was di cult for
her to judge just how much time has passed, but by examining the
wrinkles forming on the backs of her hands, she guessed she’d aged
at least two years, so two days had passed. Without the immortality
elixir, she and Nicholas would age at the rate of a year a day. They
had less than a month left before they succumbed to old—very old—
age.
And with no one to stand against them, Dee and the others like
him would loose the Dark Elders into the world again. It would be
chaos; civilization would fall.
Where was Nicholas?
Perenelle blinked away tears. She wasn’t going to give the sphinx
the satisfaction of seeing her weep. The Elders had nothing but
contempt for human emotion; they considered it their biggest
weakness. Perenelle knew it was humankind’s great strength.
She blinked again, and it took her a moment to realize what she
was seeing.
The foul dripping water running down the walls had brie y
curled and formed into a pattern. She focused, trying to make sense
of what she was seeing.
The liquid twisted and coiled into a face: Je erson Miller, the
ghost of the security guard. The dribbling water bent into letters on
the moss-streaked walls.
Flamel. Children.
The words lasted less than a heartbeat before they owed away.
Safe.
Now Perenelle had to blink hard to clear her eyes. Flamel and the
children were safe!
Ojai. Leygate. Paris.
“Thank you,” Perenelle mouthed silently as Je erson Miller’s face
dissolved and ran liquid down the wall. She had so many questions
—but at least now she had some answers: Nicholas and the children
were safe. They had obviously reached Ojai and met the Witch of
Endor. She must have opened the leygate to take them to Paris, and
that suggested that the Witch had helped them and had most likely
instructed Sophie in the Magic of Air.
Perenelle knew that the Witch would not have been able to
Awaken Josh’s powers—but in Paris and across Europe there were
Elders and immortal humans who would be able to help, who could
Awaken Josh and train both twins in the ve elemental magics.
She rolled over on her back and looked at the sphinx, which was
now crouched outside her cell, human head resting on enormous
lion’s paws, wings folded across its back. The creature smiled lazily,
long black forked tongue ickering.
“It is ending, Immortal,” the sphinx whispered.
Perenelle’s smile was terrifying. “On the contrary,” she replied. “It
is now only just beginning.”
End of Book One
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Nicholas and Perenelle Flamel were real people. So was Dr. John
Dee. Indeed, all the characters in The Alchemyst, with the exception
of the twins, are based on real historical characters or mythological
beings.
When I originally conceived the idea for The Alchemyst, I thought
the hero would be Dr. John Dee.
John Dee has always fascinated me. In the Elizabethan Age, the
age of the extraordinary, he was exceptional. He was one of the
most brilliant men of his time, and all the details about his life in
The Alchemyst are true: he was an alchemist, a mathematician, a
geographer, an astronomer and an astrologer. He did choose the
date for Queen Elizabeth I’s coronation, and when he was part of
her network of spies, he signed his coded messages “007.” The two
0’s represented the eyes of the Queen, and the symbol that looked
like a 7 was Dee’s personal mark. There is evidence to suggest that
when Shakespeare created the character of Prospero for The
Tempest, he modeled him on Dee.
The series of books based on an alchemist had been growing in
my head and in piles of notebooks for some years, and it seemed
perfectly natural that it should be Dee’s series. As I wrote other
books, I kept coming back to the idea, adding more material,
weaving together all the world mythologies and creating the huge
and intricate background for the stories. I continued to research the
settings, visiting, revisiting and photographing every location I
intended to use in the series.
Every story starts with an idea, but it is the characters that move
that idea forward. The characters of the twins came to me rst. My
story was always about a brother and sister, and in mythological
terms, twins are very special. Just about every race and mythology
has a twin story. As my story progressed, the secondary characters,
such as Scathach and the Morrigan, and then later, Hekate and the
Witch of Endor, appeared. But somehow I still hadn’t quite gotten
the hero, the mentor, the teacher for the twins. Dr. John Dee,
despite being a wonderful character, was simply not the right
character.
Then, one day in the late fall of 2000, I was in Paris on business.
It is di cult to get lost in Paris, so long as you know where the river
Seine is—you can usually see one or more of the great landmarks,
such as the Ei el Tower, Sacré-Coeur or Notre Dame—but somehow
I’d managed to do it. I had left Notre Dame earlier, crossed the Seine
on the Pont d’Arcole, heading toward the Centre Pompidou, and
somewhere between the Boulevard de Sebastopol and the Rue
Beaubourg, I got lost. Not entirely lost; I knew vaguely where I was,
but night was beginning to fall. I turned o the Rue Beaubourg into
the narrow Rue du Montmorency and found myself looking up at a
sign that said AUBERGE NICOLAS FLAMEL: the Nicholas Flamel
Hostel. And in front of the building was a sign that said the house,
where Flamel and his wife had once lived, dated from 1407, which
meant that this had to be one of the oldest houses in Paris.
I went inside and found a charming restaurant, where I had a
meal that night. It was a strange experience, eating in the same
room where the legendary Nicholas Flamel would have lived and
worked. The exposed beams in the ceiling looked original, which
meant they would have been the beams Nicholas Flamel himself
would have seen. In the cellar below my feet, Nicholas and
Perenelle would have stored their food and wine, and their
bedchamber would have been in the small room directly over my
head.
I knew quite a bit about the famous Nicholas Flamel. Dee, who
had one of the largest libraries in England, had Flamel’s books and
would have studied his works.
Nicholas Flamel was one of the most famous alchemists of his
day. Alchemy is a peculiar combination of chemistry, botany,
medicine, astronomy and astrology. It has a long and distinguished
history and was studied in ancient Greece and China, and there is an
argument that it forms the basis for modern chemistry. As with Dee,
all of the details in The Alchemyst about Nicholas Flamel are true.
We know quite a bit about him because not only do his own
writings exist, but also many people wrote about him during his
own lifetime.
He was born in 1330 and scraped by on a living as a bookseller
and a scrivener, writing letters and copying books for clients. One
day he bought a very special book: the Book of Abraham. It, too,
really existed, and Nicholas Flamel left us with a very detailed
description of the copper-bound book, which was written on what
looked like bark.
Accompanied by Perenelle, he spent more than twenty years
traveling all over Europe, trying to translate the strange language
the book was written in.
No one knows what happened to Nicholas Flamel on that journey.
What is authenticated is that when he returned to Paris in the late
fourteenth century, he was extraordinarily wealthy. The rumor
quickly went around that he had discovered the two great secrets of
alchemy in the Book of Abraham: how to create a philosopher’s
stone, which changed ordinary metal into gold, and how to achieve
immortality. Neither Nicholas nor Perenelle would ever con rm the
rumors, and they never explained how they had become so rich.
Although Nicholas and Perenelle continued to live quiet,
unassuming lives, they gave a lot of their money to charity, and
founded hospitals, churches and orphanages.
The records show that Perenelle died rst; not long after, in 1418,
the death of Nicholas Flamel was recorded. His house was sold and
the buyers tore the place apart looking for some of the Flamels’
great wealth. Nothing was ever found.
Later, in the dead of night, the tomb of Nicholas and Perenelle
Flamel was broken into…and that was when it was discovered that
the tomb was empty. Had they been buried in secret graves, or had
they never died in the rst place? Paris buzzed with rumors, and the
legend of the immortal Flamels began almost immediately.
In the years to follow, there were sightings of the Flamels across
Europe.
When I came out of the Auberge Nicolas Flamel that evening, I
looked back at the ancient house. Six hundred years ago, one of the
most famous alchemists in the world lived and worked there—a
man dedicated to science, who had made and given away a vast
fortune and whose house was preserved by the grateful people of
Paris, who even have streets named after him and his wife (the Rue
Nicolas Flamel and the Rue Perenelle in the 4th Arrondissement).
An immortal.
And in that moment, I knew that the twins’ mentor was not Dee:
Sophie and Josh would be taught by Nicholas and Perenelle. As I
stood outside Nicholas and Perenelle’s home on that wet fall
evening, all the pieces of the book came together, and the Secrets of
the Immortal Nicholas Flamel took shape.
Front entrance to the Auberge Nicolas Flamel (the Nicholas
Flamel Hostel) on Rue du Montmorency, Paris.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Only one name usually appears on the cover of a book, but behind
that name there are dozens of people involved in the creation of the
work. Of equal importance, but in no particular order, I must
thank…
Krista Marino, the most patient of editors, who said, “A little more
perspective…”
Frank Weimann, at the Literary Group, who said, “I can sell this.”
And did.
Michael Carroll, who read it rst and last and said, “We need to talk
about…”
O. R. Melling, who said, “Have you nished it yet?”
Claudette Sutherland, who said, “You really should think about…”
And nally, of course: Barry Krost, at BKM, who is surely the
Alchemyst’s grandfather, which would probably make John
Sobanski his nephew!
Published by Delacorte Press
an imprint of Random House Children’s Books
a division of Random House, Inc.
New York
This is a work of ction. All incidents and dialogue, and all
characters with the exception of some well-known historical and
public gures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not
to be construed as real. Where real-life historical or public gures
appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those
persons are ctional and are not intended to depict actual events or
to change the ctional nature of the work. In all other respects, any
resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2008 by Michael Scott
All rights reserved.
Delacorte Press and colophon are registered trademarks of Random
House, Inc.
Visit us on the Web! www.GetUnderlined.com
Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at
RHTeachersLibrarians.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Scott, Michael.
The magician / Michael Scott.—1st ed.
p. cm.—(Secrets of the immortal Nicholas Flamel)
Summary: Fifteen-year-old twins Sophie and Josh Newman continue
their magical training in Paris with Nicholas Flamel, Scatty, and the
Comte de Saint-Germain, pursued by Doctor Dee and the immortal
Niccolò Machiavelli.
PZ7.S42736Mag 2008
dc22
[Fic]—
2007051598
Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and
celebrates the right to read.
eISBN: 978-0-375-84908-4
v3.0_r1
Contents
Master - Table of Contents
The Magician
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Saturday, 2nd June
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Sunday, 3rd June
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Four
Monday, 4th June
Chapter Fifty-Five
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
For Courtney and Piers
Hoc opus, hic labor est
I am dying.
Perenelle, too, is dying.
The spell that has kept us alive these six hundred years is fading,
and now we age a year for every day that passes. I need the Codex,
the Book of Abraham the Mage, to re-create the immortality spell;
without it, we have less than a month to live.
But much can be achieved in a month.
Dee and his dark masters have my dear Perenelle prisoner, they
have nally secured the Book, and they know that Perenelle and I
cannot survive for much longer.
But they cannot be resting easy.
They do not have the complete Book yet. We still have the nal
two pages, and by now they must know that Sophie and Josh
Newman are the twins described in that ancient text: twins with
auras of silver and gold, a brother and sister with the power to
either save the world…or destroy it. The girl’s powers have been
Awakened and her training begun in the elemental magics, though,
sadly, the boy’s have not.
We are now in Paris, the city of my birth, the city where I rst
discovered the Codex and began the long quest to translate it. That
journey ultimately led me to discover the existence of the Elder
Race and revealed the mystery of the philosopher’s stone and nally
the secret of immortality. I love this city. It holds many secrets and
is home to more than one human immortal and ancient Elder. Here,
I will nd a way to Awaken Josh’s powers and continue Sophie’s
education.
I must.
For their sakes—and for the continuance of the human race.
From the Day Booke of Nicholas Flamel, Alchemyst
Writ this day, Saturday, 2nd June,
in Paris, the city of my youth
SATURDAY,
2nd June
CHAPTER ONE
The charity auction hadn’t started until well after midnight, when
the gala dinner had ended. It was almost four in the morning and
the auction was only now drawing to a close. A digital display
behind the celebrity auctioneer—an actor who had played James
Bond on-screen for many years—showed the running total at more
than one million euro.
“Lot number two hundred and ten: a pair of early-nineteenthcentury Japanese Kabuki masks.”
A ripple of excitement ran through the crowded room. Inlaid with
chips of solid jade, the Kabuki masks were the highlight of the
auction and were expected to fetch in excess of half a million euro.
At the back of the room the tall, thin man with the fuzz of closecropped snow white hair was prepared to pay twice that.
Niccolò Machiavelli stood apart from the rest of the crowd, arms
lightly folded across his chest, careful not to wrinkle his Savile
Row–tailored black silk tuxedo. Stone gray eyes swept over the
other bidders, analyzing and assessing them. There were really only
ve others he needed to look out for: two private collectors like
himself, a minor European royal, a once-famous American movie
actor and a Canadian antiques dealer. The remainder of the
audience were tired, had spent their budget or were unwilling to bid
on the vaguely disturbing-looking masks.
Machiavelli loved all types of masks. He had been collecting them
for a very long time, and he wanted this particular pair to complete
his collection of Japanese theater costumes. These masks had last
come up for sale in 1898 in Vienna, and he had then been outbid by
a Romanov prince. Machiavelli had patiently bided his time; the
masks would come back on the market again when the Prince and
his descendents died. Machiavelli knew he would still be around to
buy them; it was one of the many advantages of being immortal.
“Shall we start the bidding at one hundred thousand euro?”
Machiavelli looked up, caught the auctioneer’s attention and
nodded.
The auctioneer had been expecting his bid and nodded in return.
“I am bid one hundred thousand euro by Monsieur Machiavelli.
Always one of this charity’s most generous supporters and
sponsors.”
A smattering of applause ran around the room, and several people
turned to look at him and raise their glasses. Niccolò acknowledged
them with a polite smile.
“Do I have one hundred and ten?” the auctioneer asked.
One of the private collectors raised his hand slightly.
“One-twenty?” The auctioneer looked back to Machiavelli, who
immediately nodded.
Within the next three minutes, a urry of bids brought the price
up to two hundred and fty thousand euro. There were only three
serious bidders left: Machiavelli, the American actor and the
Canadian.
Machiavelli’s thin lips twisted into a rare smile; his patience was
about to be rewarded, and nally the masks would be his. Then the
smile faded as he felt the cell phone in his back pocket buzz silently.
For an instant he was tempted to ignore it; he’d given his sta strict
instructions that he was not to be disturbed unless it was absolutely
critical. He also knew they were so terri ed of him that they would
not phone unless it was an emergency. Reaching into his pocket, he
pulled out the ultraslim phone and glanced down.
A picture of a sword pulsed gently on the large LCD screen.
Machiavelli’s smile vanished. In that second he knew he was not
going to be able to buy the Kabuki masks this century. Turning on
his heel, he strode out of the room and pressed the phone to his ear.
Behind him, he could hear the auctioneer’s hammer hit the lectern
“Sold. For two hundred and sixty thousand euro…”
“I’m here,” Machiavelli said, reverting to the Italian of his youth.
The line crackled and an English-accented voice responded in the
same language, using a dialect that had not been heard in Europe
for more than four hundred years. “I need your help.”
The man on the other end of the line didn’t identify himself, nor
did he need to; Machiavelli knew it was the immortal magician and
necromancer Dr. John Dee, one of the most powerful and dangerous
men in the world.
Niccolò Machiavelli strode out of the small hotel into the broad
cobbled square of the Place du Tertre and stopped to breathe in the
chill night air. “What can I do for you?” he asked cautiously. He
detested Dee and knew the feeling was mutual, but they both served
the Dark Elders, and that meant they had been forced to work
together down through the centuries. Machiavelli was also slightly
envious that Dee was younger than he—and looked it. Machiavelli
had been born in Florence in 1469, which made him fty-eight
years older than the English Magician. History recorded that he had
died in the same year that Dee had been born, 1527.
“Flamel is back in Paris.”
Machiavelli straightened. “When?”
“Just now. He got there through a leygate. I’ve no idea where it
comes out. He’s got Scathach with him….”
Machiavelli’s lips curled into an ugly grimace. The last time he’d
encountered the Warrior, she’d pushed him through a door. It had
been closed at the time, and he’d spent weeks picking splinters from
his chest and shoulders.
“There are two humani children with him. Americans,” Dee said,
his voice echoing and fading on the transatlantic line. “Twins,” he
added.
“Say again?” Machiavelli asked.
“Twins,” Dee added, “with pure gold and silver auras. You know
what that means,” he snapped.
“Yes,” Machiavelli muttered. It meant trouble. Then the tiniest of
smiles curled his thin lips. It could also mean opportunity.
Static crackled and then Dee’s voice continued. “The girl’s powers
were Awakened by Hekate before the Goddess and her
Shadowrealm were destroyed.”
“Untrained, the girl is no threat,” Machiavelli murmured, quickly
assessing the situation. He took a breath and added, “Except perhaps
to herself and those around her.”
“Flamel took the girl to Ojai. There, the Witch of Endor instructed
her in the Magic of Air.”
“No doubt you tried to stop them?” There was a hint of
amusement in Machiavelli’s voice.
“Tried. And failed,” Dee admitted bitterly. “The girl has some
knowledge but is without skill.”
“What do you want me to do?” Machiavelli asked carefully,
although he already had a very good idea.
“Find Flamel and the twins,” Dee demanded. “Capture them. Kill
Scathach if you can. I’m just leaving Ojai. But it’s going to take me
fourteen or fteen hours to get to Paris.”
“What happened to the leygate?” Machiavelli wondered aloud. If
a leygate connected Ojai and Paris, then why didn’t Dee…?
“Destroyed by the Witch of Endor,” Dee raged, “and she nearly
killed me, too. I was lucky to escape with a few cuts and scratches,”
he added, and then ended the call without saying good-bye.
Niccolò Machiavelli closed his phone carefully and tapped it
against his bottom lip. Somehow he doubted that Dee had been
lucky—if the Witch of Endor had wanted him dead, then even the
legendary Dr. Dee would not have escaped. Machiavelli turned and
walked across the square to where his driver was patiently waiting
with the car. If Flamel, Scathach and the American twins had come
to Paris via a leygate, then there were only a few places in the city
where they could have emerged. It should be relatively easy to nd
and capture them.
And if he could capture them tonight, then he would have plenty
of time to work on them before Dee arrived.
Machiavelli smiled; he’d only need a few hours, and in that time
they would tell him everything they knew. Half a millennium on
this earth had taught him how to be very persuasive indeed.
CHAPTER TWO
Josh Newman reached out and pressed the palm of his right hand
against the cold stone wall to steady himself.
What had just happened?
One moment he’d been standing in the Witch of Endor’s shop in
Ojai, California. His sister, Sophie, Scathach and the man he now
knew to be Nicholas Flamel had been in the mirror looking out at
him. And the next thing he knew, Sophie had stepped out of the
glass, taken his hand and pulled him through it. He’d squeezed his
eyes shut and felt something icy touch his skin and raise the small
hairs on the back of his neck. When he’d opened his eyes again, he
was standing in what looked like a tiny storage room. Pots of paint,
stacked ladders, broken pieces of pottery and bundled paintspattered cloths were piled around a large, rather ordinary-looking
grimy mirror xed to the stone wall. A single low-wattage lightbulb
shed a dim yellow glow over the room. “What happened?” he asked,
his voice cracking. He swallowed hard and tried again. “What
happened? Where are we?”
“We’re in Paris,” Nicholas Flamel said delightedly, rubbing his
dusty hands against his black jeans. “The city of my birth.”
“Paris?” Josh whispered. He was going to say “Impossible,” but he
was beginning to understand that that word had no meaning
anymore. “How?” he asked aloud. “Sophie?” He looked to his twin
sister, but she had pressed her ear against the room’s only door and
was listening intently. She waved him away. He turned to Scathach,
but the red-haired warrior just shook her head, both hands covering
her mouth. She looked as if she was about to throw up. Josh nally
turned to the legendary Alchemyst, Nicholas Flamel. “How did we
get here?” he asked.
“This planet is crisscrossed with invisible lines of power
sometimes called ley lines or cursus,” Flamel explained. He crossed
his index ngers. “Where two or more lines intersect a gateway
exists. Gates are incredibly rare now, but in ancient times the Elder
Race used them to travel from one side of the world to the other in
an instant—just as we did. The Witch opened the leygate in Ojai and
we ended up here, in Paris.” He made it sound so matter-of-fact.
“Leygates: I hate them,” Scatty mumbled. In the gloomy light, her
pale, freckled skin looked green. “You ever been seasick?” she
asked.
Josh shook his head. “Never.”
Sophie looked up from her spot leaning against the door. “Liar!
He gets seasick in a swimming pool.” She grinned, then pressed the
side of her face back against the cool wood.
“Seasick,” Scatty mumbled. “That’s exactly what it feels like. Only
worse.”
Sophie turned her head again to look at the Alchemyst. “Do you
have any idea where we are in Paris?”
“Someplace old, I’m guessing,” Flamel said, joining her at the
door. He put the side of his head back against the door and listened.
Sophie stepped back. “I’m not so sure,” she said hesitantly.
“Why not?” Josh asked. He glanced around the small untidy
room. It certainly looked as though it was part of an old building.
Sophie shook her head. “I don’t know…it just doesn’t feel that
old.” She reached out and touched the wall with the palm of her
hand, then immediately jerked it back again.
“What’s wrong?” Josh whispered.
Sophie placed her hand against the wall again. “I can hear voices,
songs and what sounds like organ music.”
Josh shrugged. “I can’t hear anything.” He stopped, abruptly
conscious of the huge di erence between himself and his twin.
Sophie’s magical potential had been Awakened by Hekate, and she
was now hypersensitive to sights and sounds, smells, touch and
taste.
“I can.” Sophie lifted her hand from the stone wall and the sounds
in her head faded.
“You’re hearing ghost sounds,” Flamel explained. “They’re just
noises absorbed by the building, recorded into the very structure
itself.”
“This is a church,” Sophie said decisively, then frowned. “It’s a
new church…modern, late nineteenth century, early twentieth. But
it’s built on a much, much older site.”
Flamel paused at the wooden door and looked over his shoulder.
In the dim overhead light, his features were suddenly sharp and
angular, disturbingly skull-like, his eyes completely in shadow.
“There are many churches in Paris,” he said, “though there is only
one, I believe, which matches that description.” He reached for the
door handle.
“Hang on a second,” Josh said quickly. “Don’t you think there’ll
be some sort of alarm?”
“Oh, I doubt it,” Nicholas said con dently. “Who would put an
alarm on a storeroom in a church?” he asked, jerking the door open.
Immediately an alarm pealed through the air, the sound echoing
and reechoing o the agstones and walls. Red security lights
strobed and ashed.
Scatty sighed and muttered something in an ancient Celtic
language. “Didn’t you tell me once to wait before moving, to look
before stepping and to observe everything?” she demanded.
Nicholas shook his head and sighed at the stupid mistake.
“Getting old, I guess,” he said in the same language. But there was
no time for apologies. “Let’s go!” he shouted over the shrieking
alarm, and darted down the corridor. Sophie and Josh followed
close behind, while Scatty took up the rear, moving slowly and
grumbling with every step.
The door opened onto a short narrow stone corridor that led to
another wooden door. Without pausing, Flamel pushed through the
second door—and immediately a new alarm began to shriek. He
turned left into a huge open space that smelled of old incense, oor
polish and wax. Banks of lit candles shed a golden yellow light over
walls and oor and, combined with the security lights, revealed a
pair of enormous doors with the word EXIT above them. Flamel
raced toward it, his footsteps echoing.
“Don’t touch—” Josh began, but Nicholas Flamel grasped the door
handles and pulled hard.
A third alarm—much louder than the others—went o , and a red
light above the door began to wink on and o .
“Told you not to touch,” Josh muttered.
“I can’t understand it—why is it not open?” Flamel asked,
shouting to be heard above the din. “This church is always open.”
He turned and looked around. “Where is everyone? What time is
it?” he asked, as a thought struck him.
“How long does it take to travel from one place to another
through the leygate?” Sophie asked.
“It’s instantaneous.”
“And you’re sure we’re in Paris, France?”
“Positive.”
Sophie looked at her watch and did a quick calculation. “Paris is
nine hours ahead of Ojai?” she asked.
Flamel nodded, suddenly understanding.
“It’s about four o’clock in the morning; that’s why the church is
closed,” Sophie said.
“The police will be on their way,” Scatty said glumly. She reached
for her nunchaku. “I hate ghting when I’m not feeling well,” she
muttered.
“What do we do now?” Josh demanded, panic rising in his voice.
“I could try and blast the doors apart with wind,” Sophie
suggested hesitantly. She wasn’t sure she had the energy to raise the
wind again so soon. She had used her new magical powers to battle
the undead in Ojai, but the e ort had completely exhausted her.
“I forbid it,” Flamel shouted, his face painted in shades of crimson
and shadow. He turned and pointed across rows of wooden pews
toward an ornate altar picked out in a tracery of white marble.
Candlelight hinted at an intricate mosaic in glittering blues and
golds in the dome over the altar. “This is a national monument; I’ll
not let you destroy it.”
“Where are we?” the twins asked together, looking around the
building. Now that their eyes had adjusted to the gloom, they
realized that the building was huge. They could distinguish columns
soaring high into the shadows overhead and were able to make out
the shapes of small side altars, statues in nooks and countless banks
of candles.
“This,” Flamel announced proudly, “is the church of Sacré-Coeur.”
Sitting in the back of his limousine, Niccolò Machiavelli tapped
coordinates into his laptop and watched a high-resolution map of
Paris wink into existence on the screen. Paris was an incredibly
ancient city. The rst settlement went back more than two thousand
years, though there had been humans living on the island in the
Seine for generations before that. And like many of the earth’s
oldest cities, it had been sited where groups of ley lines met.
Machiavelli hit a keystroke, which laid down a complicated
pattern of ley lines over the map of the city. He was looking for a
line that connected with the United States. He nally managed to
reduce the number of possibilities to six. With a perfectly manicured
ngernail, he traced two lines that directly linked the West Coast of
America to Paris. One nished at the great cathedral of Notre Dame,
the other in the more modern but equally famous Sacré-Coeur
basilica in Montmartre.
But which one?
Suddenly, the Parisian night was broken by a series of howling
alarms. Machiavelli hit the control for the electric window and the
darkened glass whispered down. Cool night air swirled into the car.
In the distance, rising high above the rooftops on the opposite side
of the Place du Tertre, was Sacré-Coeur. The imposing domed
building was always lit up at night in stark white light. Tonight,
however, red alarm lights pulsed around the building
That one. Machiavelli’s smile was terrifying. He called up a
program on the laptop and waited while the hard drive spun.
Enter password.
His ngers ew over the keyboard as he typed: Discorsi sopra la
prima deca di Tito Livio. No one was going to break that password. It
wasn’t one of his better-known books.
A rather ordinary-looking text document appeared, written in a
combination of Latin, Greek and Italian. Once, magicians had had to
keep their spells and incantations in handwritten books called
grimoires, but Machiavelli had always used the latest technology.
He preferred to keep his spells on his hard drive. Now he just
needed a little something to keep Flamel and his friends busy while
he gathered his forces.
Josh’s head snapped up. “I hear police sirens.”
“There are twelve police cars headed this way,” Sophie said, her
head tilted to one side, eyes closed as she listened intently.
“Twelve? How can you tell?”
Sophie looked at her twin. “I can distinguish the di erent
locations of the sirens.”
“You can tell them apart?” he asked. He found himself wondering,
yet again, at the full extent of his sister’s senses.
“Each one,” she said.
“We must not be captured by the police,” Flamel interjected
sharply. “We’ve neither passports nor alibis. We’ve got to get out of
here!”
“How?” the twins asked simultaneously.
Flamel shook his head. “There has to be another entrance…,” he
began, and then stopped, nostrils aring.
Josh watched uneasily as both Sophie and Scatty suddenly reacted
to something he could not smell. “What…what is it?” he demanded,
and then he suddenly caught the faintest whi of something musky
and rank. It was the sort of smell he’d come to associate with a zoo.
“Trouble,” Scathach said grimly, putting away her nunchaku and
drawing her swords. “Big trouble.”
CHAPTER THREE
“What?” Josh demanded, looking around. The smell was stronger
now, stale and bitter, and almost familiar….
“Snake,” Sophie said, breathing deeply. “It’s a snake.”
Josh felt his stomach lurch. Snake. Why did it have to be snakes?
He was terri ed of snakes—though he’d never admit it to anyone,
especially not his sister. “Snakes…,” he began, but his voice
sounded high-pitched and strangled. He coughed and tried again.
“Where?” he asked, looking around desperately, imagining them
everywhere, sliding out from under the pews, curling down the
pillars, dropping down from the light xtures.
Sophie shook her head and frowned. “I don’t hear any…. I’m
just…smelling them.” Her nostrils ared as she drew a deep breath.
“No, there’s just one….”
“Oh, you’re smelling a snake, all right…but one that walks on two
legs,” Scatty snapped. “You’re smelling the rank odor of Niccolò
Machiavelli.”
Flamel knelt on the oor in front of the massive main doors and
ran his hands over the locks. Wisps of green smoke curled from his
ngers. “Machiavelli!” he spat. “Dee didn’t waste any time
contacting his allies, I see.”
“You can tell who it is from the smell?” Josh asked, still surprised
and a little confused.
“Every person has a distinctive magical odor,” Scatty explained,
standing with her back to the Alchemyst, protecting him. “You two
smell of vanilla ice cream and oranges, Nicholas smells of mint…”
“And Dee smelled of rotten eggs…,” Sophie added.
“Sulfur,” Josh said.
“Which was once known as brimstone,” Scatty said. “Very
appropriate for Dr. Dee.” Her head was moving from side to side as
she paid particular attention to the deep shadows behind the
statues. “Well, Machiavelli smells of snakes. Appropriate too.”
“Who is he?” Josh asked. He felt as if he should know the name,
almost as if he’d heard it before. “A friends of Dee’s?”
“Machiavelli is an immortal allied to the Dark Elders,” Scatty
explained, “and no friend to Dee, though they are on the same side.
Machiavelli is older than the Magician, in nitely more dangerous
and certainly more cunning. I should have killed him when I had
the chance,” she said bitterly. “For the past ve hundred years he
has been at the heart of European politics, the puppet master
working in the shadows. The last I heard, he had been appointed the
head of the DGSE, the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure.”
“Is that like a bank?” Josh asked.
Scatty’s lips curled in a tiny smile that exposed her overlong
vampire incisors. “It means the General Board of External Security.
It is the French secret service.”
“The secret service! Oh, that’s just great,” Josh said sarcastically.
“The smell is getting stronger,” Sophie said, her Awakened senses
acutely aware of the odor. Concentrating hard, she allowed a little
of her power to trickle into her aura, which bloomed into a ghostly
shadow around her. Crackles of lustrous silver threads sparkled in
her blond hair, and her eyes turned to re ective silver coins.
Almost unconsciously, Josh stepped away from his sister. He’d
seen her like this before, and she’d scared him.
“That means he’s close by. He’s working some magic,” Scatty said.
“Nicholas…?”
“I just need another minute.” Flamel’s ngertips glowed emerald
green, smoking as they traced a pattern around the lock. A solid
click sounded from within, but when the Alchemyst tried the
handle, the door didn’t move. “Maybe more than a minute.”
“Too late,” Josh whispered, raising an arm and pointing.
“Something’s here.”
At the opposite end of the great basilica, the banks of candles had
gone out. It was as if an unfelt breeze was sweeping down the aisles,
snu ng out the ickering circular night-lights and thicker candles
as it passed, leaving curls of gray-white smoke hanging on the air.
Abruptly, the smell of candle wax grew stronger, much, much
stronger, almost obliterating the odor of serpent.
“I can’t see anything…,” Josh began.
“It’s here!” Sophie shouted.
The creature that owed up o the cold agstones was only
marginally human. Standing taller than a man, broad and grotesque,
it was a gelatinous white shape with only the vaguest hint of a head
set directly onto broad shoulders. There were no visible features. As
they watched, two huge arms separated from the trunk of the body
with a squelch and grew handlike shapes.
“Golem!” Sophie shouted in horror. “A wax Golem!” She ung out
her hand and her aura blazed. Ice-cold wind surged from her
ngertips to batter the creature, but the white waxy skin simply
rippled and owed beneath the breeze.
“Protect Nicholas!” Scathach commanded, darting forward, her
matched swords ickering out, biting into the creature, but without
any e ect. The soft wax trapped her swords, and it took all her
strength to pull them free. She struck again and chips of wax
sprayed into the air. The creature struck at her, and she had to
abandon her grip on her swords as she danced backward to avoid
the crushing blow. A bulbous st thundered into the oor at her
feet, spattering globules of white wax in every direction.
Josh grabbed one of the folding wooden chairs stacked outside
the gift shop at the back of the church. Holding it by two legs, he
slammed it into the creature’s chest…where it stuck fast. As the wax
shape turned toward Josh, the chair was wrenched from his hands.
He grabbed another chair, darted around behind the creature and
slammed the chair down. It shattered across the creature’s
shoulders, leaving scores of splinters protruding like bizarre
porcupine spines.
Sophie froze. She desperately tried to recall some of the secrets of
Air magic that the Witch of Endor had taught her only a few hours
ago. The Witch said it was the most powerful of all magics—and
Sophie had seen what it had done to the undead army of longdeceased humans and beasts Dee had raised in Ojai. But she had no
idea what would work against the wax monster before her. She
knew how to raise a miniature tornado, but she couldn’t risk calling
it up in the con ned space of the basilica.
“Nicholas!” Scatty called. With her swords stuck in the creature,
the Warrior was using her nunchaku—two lengths of wood attached
by a short chain—to batter at the Golem. They left deep
indentations in its skin but otherwise seemed to have no e ect. She
delivered one particularly erce blow that embedded the polished
wood in the creature’s side. Wax owed around the nunchaku,
trapping them. When the creature twisted toward Josh, the weapon
was ripped from the Warrior’s hands, sending her spinning across
the room.
A hand that was only thumb and fused ngers, like a giant mitten,
caught Josh’s shoulder and squeezed. The pain was incredible and
drove the boy to his knees.
“Josh!” Sophie screamed, the sound echoing in the huge church.
Josh tried to pull the hand away, but the wax was too slippery
and his ngers sank into the white goo. Warm wax began to ow o
the creature’s hand, then curl and wrap around his shoulder and roll
down onto his chest, constricting his breathing.
“Josh, duck!”
Sophie grabbed a wooden chair and swung it through the air. It
whistled over her brother’s head, the wind ru ing his hair, and she
brought it down hard—edge- rst—on the thick wax arm where the
elbow should have been. The chair stuck halfway through, but the
movement distracted the creature and it abandoned Josh, leaving
him bruised and coated in a layer of candle wax. From his place
kneeling on the ground, Josh watched in horror as two gelatinous
hands reached for his twin’s throat.
Terri ed, Sophie screamed.
Josh watched as his sister’s eyes ickered, the blue replaced with
silver, and then her aura blazed incandescent the moment the
Golem’s paws came close to her skin. Immediately, its waxy hands
began to run liquid and spatter to the oor. Sophie stretched out her
own hand, ngers splayed, and pressed it against the Golem’s chest,
where it sank, sizzling and hissing, into the mass of wax.
Josh crouched on the ground, close to Flamel, his hands thrown
up to protect his eyes from the brilliant silver light. He saw his sister
step closer to the creature, her aura now painfully bright, arms
spread wide, an invisible unfelt heat melting the creature, reducing
the wax to liquid. Scathach’s swords and nunchaku clattered to the
stone oor, followed, seconds later, by the remains of the wooden
chair.
Sophie’s aura ickered and Josh was on his feet and by her side to
catch her as she swayed. “I feel dizzy,” she said thickly as she
slumped into his arms. She was barely conscious, and she felt ice
cold, the usually sweet vanilla scent of her aura now sour and bitter.
Scatty swooped in to gather up her weapons from the pile of
semiliquid wax that now resembled a half-melted snowman. She
fastidiously wiped her blades clean before she slipped them back
into the sheaths she wore on her back. Picking curls of white wax
o her nunchaku, she slipped them back into their holster on her
belt; then she turned to Sophie. “You saved us,” she said gravely.
“That’s a debt I’ll not forget.”
“Got it,” Flamel said suddenly. He stood back, and Sophie, Josh
and Scathach watched as curls of green smoke seeped from the lock.
The Alchemyst pushed the door and it clicked open, cool night air
rushing in, dispelling the cloying odor of melted wax.
“We could have done with a little help, you know,” Scatty
grumbled.
Flamel grinned and wiped his ngers on his jeans, leaving traces
of green light on the cloth. “I knew you had it well under control,”
he said, stepping out of the basilica. Scathach and the twins
followed.
The sounds of police sirens were louder now, but the area directly
in front of the church was empty. Sacré-Coeur was set on a hill, one
of the highest points in Paris, and from where they stood, they had a
view of the entire city. Nicholas Flamel’s face lit up with delight.
“Home!”
“What is it with European magicians and Golems?” Scatty asked,
following him. “First Dee and now Machiavelli. Have they no
imaginations?”
Flamel looked surprised. “That wasn’t a Golem. Golems need to
have a spell on their body to animate them.”
Scatty nodded. She knew that, of course. “What, then—?”
“That was a tulpa.”
Scatty’s bright green eyes widened in surprise. “A tulpa! Is
Machiavelli that powerful, then?”
“Obviously.”
“What’s a tulpa?” Josh asked Flamel, but it was his sister who
answered, and Josh was once again reminded of the huge gulf that
had opened up between them the moment her powers had been
Awakened.
“A creature created and animated entirely by the power of the
imagination,” Sophie explained casually.
“Precisely,” Nicholas Flamel said, breathing deeply. “Machiavelli
knew there would be wax in the church. So he brought it to life.”
“But surely he knew it would not be able to stop us?” Scatty
asked.
Nicholas walked out from under the central arch that framed the
front of the basilica and stood at the edge of the rst of the two
hundred and twenty-one steps that led down to the street far below.
“Oh, he knew it wouldn’t stop us,” he said patiently. “He just
wanted to slow us down, to keep us here until he arrived.” He
pointed.
Far below, the narrow streets of Montmartre had come alive with
the sounds and lights of a eet of French police cars. Dozens of
uniformed gendarmes had gathered at the bottom of the steps, with
more arriving from the narrow side streets to form a cordon around
the building. Surprisingly, none of them had started climbing.
Flamel, Scatty and the twins ignored the police. They were
watching the tall thin white-haired man in the elegant tuxedo
slowly make his way up the steps toward them. He stopped when he
saw them emerge from the basilica, leaned on a low metal railing
and raised his right hand in a lazy salute.
“Let me guess,” Josh said, “that must be Niccolò Machiavelli.”
“The most dangerous immortal in Europe,” the Alchemyst said
grimly. “Trust me: this man makes Dee look like an amateur.”
CHAPTER FOUR
“Welcome back to Paris, Alchemyst.”
Sophie and Josh jumped. Machiavelli was still far away to be
heard so clearly. Strangely, his voice seemed to be coming from
somewhere behind them, and both turned to look, but there were
only two stained green metal statues over the three arches in front
of the church: a woman on a horse to their right, her raised arm
holding a sword, and a man holding a scepter on their left.
“I’ve been waiting for you.” The voice seemed to be coming from
the statue of the man.
“It’s a cheap trick,” Scatty said dismissively, picking strips of wax
o the front of her steel-toed combat boots. “It’s nothing more than
ventriloquism.”
Sophie smiled sheepishly. “I thought the statue was talking,” she
admitted, embarrassed.
Josh started to laugh at his sister and then immediately
reconsidered. “I guess I wouldn’t be surprised if it did.”
“The good Dr. Dee sends his regards.” Machiavelli’s voice
continued to hang in the air around them.
“So he survived Ojai, then,” Nicholas said conversationally, not
raising his voice. Standing tall and straight, he casually put both
hands behind his back and glanced sidelong at Scatty. Then the
ngers of his right hand started dancing against the palm and
ngers of his left.
Scatty drew the twins away from Nicholas and slowly retreated
under the shadowed arches. Standing between them, she put her
arms around their shoulders—both their auras crackling silver and
gold with her touch—and drew their heads together.
“Machiavelli. The master of lies.” Scatty’s whisper was the merest
breath against their ears. “He must not hear us.”
“I cannot say I am pleased to see you, Signor Machiavelli. Or is it
Monsieur Machiavelli in this age?” the Alchemyst said quietly,
leaning against the balustrade, looking down the white steps to
where Machiavelli was still small in the distance.
“This century, I am French,” Machiavelli replied, his voice clearly
audible. “I love Paris. It is my favorite city in Europe—after
Florence, of course.”
While Nicholas talked to Machiavelli, he kept his hands behind
his back, out of sight of the other immortal. His ngers were moving
in an intricate series of taps and beats.
“Is he working a spell?” Sophie breathed, watching his hands.
“No, he’s talking to me,” Scatty said.
“How?” Josh whispered. “Magic? Telepathy?”
“ASL: American Sign Language.”
The twins glanced quickly at one another. “American Sign
Language?” Josh asked. “He knows sign language? How?”
“You seem to keep forgetting that he’s lived a long time,”
Scathach said with a grin that showed her vampire teeth. “And he
did help create French sign language in the eighteenth century,” she
added casually.
“What’s he saying?” Sophie asked impatiently. Nowhere in the
witch’s memory could she nd the knowledge necessary to translate
the older man’s gestures.
Scathach frowned, her lips moving as she spelled out a word.
“Sophie…brouillard… fog,” she translated. She shook her head.
“Sophie, he’s asking you for fog. That doesn’t make sense.”
“It does to me,” Sophie said as a dozen images of fog, clouds and
smoke ashed through her brain.
Niccolò Machiavelli paused on the steps and drew in a deep
breath. “My people have the entire area surrounded,” he said,
moving slowly toward the Alchemyst. He was slightly out of breath
and his heart was hammering; he really needed to get back to the
gym.
Creating the wax tulpa had exhausted him. He had never made
one so big before, and never from the back of a car roaring through
Montmartre’s narrow and winding streets. It wasn’t an elegant
solution, but all he had needed to do was to keep Flamel and his
companions trapped in the church until he got there, and he had
succeeded. Now the church was surrounded, more gendarmes were
en route and he had called in all available agents. As the head of the
DGSE, his powers were almost limitless, and he’d issued an order to
impose a press blackout. He prided himself on having complete
control of his emotions, but he had to admit that right now he was
feeling quite excited: soon he would have Nicholas Flamel, Scathach
and the children in custody. He would have triumphed where Dee
had failed.
Later he would have someone in his department leak a story to
the press that thieves had been apprehended breaking into the
national monument. Close to dawn—just in time for the earlymorning news—a second report would be leaked, revealing how the
desperate prisoners had overpowered their guards and escaped on
their way to the police station. They would never be seen again.
“I have you now, Nicholas Flamel.”
Flamel came to stand at the edge of the steps and pushed his
hands into the back pockets of his worn black jeans. “I believe the
last time you made that statement, you were just about to break into
my tomb.”
Machiavelli stopped in shock. “How do you know that?”
More than three hundred years ago, in the dead of night,
Machiavelli had cracked open Nicholas and Perenelle’s tomb,
looking for proof that the Alchemyst and his wife were indeed dead
and trying to determine whether they had been buried with the
Book of Abraham the Mage. The Italian hadn’t been entirely
surprised to nd that both co ns were lled with stones.
“Perry and I were right there behind you, standing in the
shadows, close enough to touch you when you lifted the top o our
tomb. I knew someone would come…I just never imagined it would
be you. I’ll admit I was disappointed, Niccolò,” he added.
The white-haired man continued up the steps to Sacré-Coeur.
“You always thought I was a better person than I was, Nicholas.”
“I believe there is good in everyone,” Flamel whispered, “even
you.”
“Not me, Alchemyst, not anymore, and not for a very long time.”
Machiavelli stopped and indicated the police and heavily armed
black-clad French special forces gathering at the bottom of the steps.
“Come now. Surrender. No harm will come to you.”
“I cannot tell you how many people have said that to me,”
Nicholas said sadly. “And they were always lying,” he added.
Machiavelli’s voice hardened. “You can deal with me or with Dr.
Dee. And you know the English Magician never had any patience.”
“There is one other option,” Flamel said with a shrug. His thin lips
curled in a smile. “I could deal with neither of you.” He half turned,
but when he looked back at Machiavelli, the expression on the
Alchemyst’s face made the immortal Italian take a step back in
shock. For an instant something ancient and implacable shone
through Flamel’s pale eyes, which ickered a brilliant emerald
green. Now it was Flamel’s voice that dropped to a whisper, still
clearly audible to Machiavelli. “It would be better if you and I were
never to meet again.”
Machiavelli attempted a laugh, but it came out sounding shaky.
“That sounds like a threat…and believe me, you are in no position
to issue threats.”
“Not a threat,” Flamel said, and stepped back from the top steps.
“A promise.”
The cool damp Parisian night air was abruptly touched with the
rich odor of vanilla, and Niccolò Machiavelli knew then that
something was very wrong.
Standing straight, eyes closed, arms at her sides, palms facing
outward, Sophie Newman took a deep breath, attempting to calm
her thundering heart and allow her mind to wander. When the
Witch of Endor had wrapped her like a mummy with bandages of
solidi ed air, she had imparted thousands of years of knowledge
into the girl in a matter of heartbeats. Sophie had imagined she’d
felt her head swelling as her brain lled with the Witch’s memories.
Since then, her skull had throbbed with a headache, the base of her
neck felt sti and tight and there was a dull ache behind her eyes.
Two days ago she had been an ordinary American teenager, her
head lled with normal everyday things: homework and school
projects, the latest songs and videos, boys she liked, cell phone
numbers and Web addresses, blogs and urls.
Now she knew things that no person should ever know.
Sophie Newman possessed the Witch of Endor’s memories; she
knew all that the Witch had seen, everything she had done over
millennia. It was all a jumble: a mixture of thoughts and wishes,
observations, fears and desires, a confusing mess of bizarre sights,
terrifying images and incomprehensible sounds. It was as if a
thousand movies had been mixed up and edited together. And
scattered throughout the tangle of memories were countless
incidences when the Witch had actually used her special power, the
Magic of Air. All Sophie had to do was nd a time when the Witch
had used fog.
But when and where and how to nd it?
Ignoring Flamel’s voice calling down to Machiavelli, blanking out
the sour smell of her brother’s fear and the jingle of Scathach’s
swords, Sophie concentrated her thoughts on mist and fog.
San Francisco was often wrapped in fog, and she’d seen the
Golden Gate Bridge rising out of a thick layer of cloud. And only last
fall, when the family had been in St. Paul’s Cathedral in Boston,
they’d stepped out onto Tremont Street to nd that a damp fog had
completely obscured the Common. Other memories began to
intrude: mist in Glasgow; swirling damp fog in Vienna; thick foulsmelling yellow smog in London.
Sophie frowned; she had never been to Glasgow, Vienna or
London. But the Witch had…and these were the Witch of Endor’s
memories.
Images, thoughts and memories—like the strands of fog she was
seeing in her head—shifted and twisted. And then they suddenly
cleared. Sophie clearly remembered standing alongside a gure
dressed in the formal clothing of the nineteenth century. She could
see him in her mind’s eye, a man with a long nose and a high
forehead topped with graying curly hair. He was sitting at a high
desk, a thick sheaf of cream-colored paper before him, dipping a
simple pen into a brimming inkwell. It took her a moment to realize
that this was not one of her own memories, nor was it something
she had seen on TV or in a movie. She was remembering something
the Witch of Endor had done and seen. As she turned to look closely
at the gure, the Witch’s memories ooded her: the man was a
famous English writer and was just about to begin work on a new
book. The writer glanced up and smiled at her; then his lips moved,
but there was no sound. Leaning over his shoulder, she saw him
write the words Fog everywhere. Fog up the river. Fog down the river in
an elegant curling script. Outside the writer’s study window, fog,
thick and opaque, rolled like smoke against the dirty glass, blotting
out the background in an impenetrable blanket.
And beneath the portico of Sacré-Coeur in Paris, the air turned
chill and moist, rich with the odor of vanilla ice cream. A trickle of
white dribbled from each of Sophie’s outstretched ngers. The wispy
streams curled down to puddle at her feet. Behind her closed eyes,
she watched the writer dip his pen into the inkwell and continue.
Fog creeping…fog lying…fog drooping…fog in the eyes and throats…
Thick white fog spilled from Sophie’s ngers and spread across
the stones, shifting like heavy smoke, owing in twisting ropes and
gossamer threads. Coiling and shifting, it owed through Flamel’s
legs and tumbled down the steps, growing, thickening, darkening.
Niccolò watched the fog ow down the steps of Sacré-Coeur like
dirty milk, watched it condense and grow as it tumbled, and knew,
in that moment, that Flamel was going to elude him. By the time the
fog reached him it was chest high, wet and vanilla scented. He
breathed deeply, recognizing the odor of magic.
“Remarkable,” he said, but the fog attened his voice, dulling his
carefully cultivated French accent, revealing the harsher Italian
beneath.
“Leave us alone,” Flamel’s voice boomed out of the fog.
“That sounds like another threat, Nicholas. Believe me when I tell
you that you have no idea of the forces gathered against you now.
Your parlor tricks will not save you.” Machiavelli pulled out his cell
phone and hit a speed dial number. “Attack. Attack now!” He raced
up the steps as he spoke, moving silently on expensive leather-soled
shoes, while far below, booted feet thumped on stone as the
gathered police charged up the steps.
“I’ve survived for a very long time.” Flamel’s voice didn’t come
from where Machiavelli expected it to, and he stopped, turning left
and right, trying to make out a shape in the fog.
“The world moved on, Nicholas,” Machiavelli said. “You did not.
You might have escaped us in America, but here, in Europe, there
are too many Elders, too many immortal humans who know you.
You will not be able to remain hidden for long. We will nd you.”
Machiavelli dashed up the nal few steps that brought him
directly to the entrance of the church. There was no mist here. The
unnatural fog started on the top step and owed downward, leaving
the church oating like an island on a cloudy sea. Even before he
ran into the church, Machiavelli knew he would not nd them in
there: Flamel, Scathach and the twins had escaped.
For the moment.
But Paris was no longer Nicholas Flamel’s city. The city that had
once honored Flamel and his wife as patrons of the sick and poor,
the city that named streets after them, was long gone. Paris now
belonged to Machiavelli and the Dark Elders he served. Looking out
over the ancient city, Niccolò Machiavelli swore that he was going
to turn Paris into a trap—and maybe even a tomb—for the
legendary Alchemyst.
CHAPTER FIVE
The ghosts of Alcatraz awoke Perenelle Flamel.
The woman lay unmoving on the narrow cot in the cramped icy
cell deep beneath the abandoned prison and listened to them
whisper and murmur in the shadows around her. There were a
dozen languages she could understand, many more she could
identify and a few that were completely incomprehensible.
Keeping her eyes closed, Perenelle concentrated on the languages,
trying to make out the individual voices, wondering if there were
any she recognized. And then a sudden thought struck her: how was
she able to hear the ghosts?
Sitting outside the cell was a sphinx, a monster with a lion’s body,
an eagle’s wings and the head of a beautiful woman. One of its
special powers was the ability to absorb the magical energies of
another living being. It had drained Perenelle’s, rendering her
helpless, trapping her in this terrible prison cell.
A tiny smile curled Perenelle’s lips as she realized something: she
was the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter; she had been born
with the ability to hear and see ghosts. She had been doing so long
before she had learned how to train and concentrate her aura. Her
gift had nothing to do with magic, and therefore the sphinx had no
power over it. Throughout the centuries of her long life, she had
used her skill with magic to protect herself from ghosts, to coat and
shield her aura with colors that rendered her invisible to the
apparitions. But as the sphinx had absorbed her energies, those
shields had been wiped away, revealing her to the spirit realm.
And now they were coming.
Perenelle Flamel had seen her rst ghost—that of her beloved
grandmother Mamom—when she was seven years old. Perenelle
knew that there was nothing to fear from ghosts; they could be
annoying, certainly, were often irritating and sometimes downright
rude, but they possessed no physical presence. There were even a
few she had learned to call friends. Over the centuries certain spirits
had returned to her again and again, drawn to her because they
knew she could hear, see or help them—and often, Perenelle
thought, simply because they were lonely. Mamom turned up every
decade or so just to check up on her.
But even though they had no presence in the real world, ghosts
were not powerless.
Opening her eyes, Perenelle concentrated on the chipped stone
wall directly in front of her face. The wall ran with green-tinged
water that smelled of rust and salt, the two elements that had
ultimately destroyed Alcatraz the prison. Dee had made a mistake,
as she had known he would. If Dr. John Dee had one great failing, it
was arrogance. He obviously thought that if she was imprisoned
deep below Alcatraz and guarded by a sphinx, then she was
powerless. He could not be more wrong.
Alcatraz was a place of ghosts.
And Perenelle Flamel would show him just how powerful she was.
Closing her eyes, relaxing, Perenelle listened to the ghosts of
Alcatraz, and then slowly, her voice barely above a breathed
whisper, she began to talk to them, to call them and to gather them
all to her.
CHAPTER SIX
“I’m OK,” Sophie murmured sleepily, “really I am.”
“You don’t look OK,” Josh muttered through gritted teeth. For the
second time in as many days, Josh was carrying his sister in his
arms, one arm under her back, the other beneath her legs. He
moved cautiously down the steps of Sacré-Coeur, terri ed he was
going to drop his twin. “Flamel told us every time you use magic it
will steal a little of your energy,” he added. “You look exhausted.”
“I’m ne…,” she muttered. “Let me down.” But then her eyes
ickered closed once more.
The small group moved silently through the thick vanilla-scented
fog, Scathach in the lead with Flamel taking up the rear. All around
them they could hear the tramp of boots, the jingle of weapons, and
the muted commands of the French police and special forces as they
climbed the steps. Some of them came dangerously close, and twice
Josh was forced to crouch low as a uniformed gure darted by.
Scathach suddenly loomed up out of the thick fog, a short, stubby
nger pressed to her lips. Water droplets frosted her spiky red hair,
and her white skin looked even paler than usual. She pointed to the
right with her ornately carved nunchaku. The fog swirled and
suddenly a gendarme was standing almost directly in front of them,
close enough to touch, his dark uniform sparkling with beads of
liquid. Behind him, Josh was able to make out a group of French
police clustered around what looked like an old-fashioned merry-goround. They were all staring upward, and Josh heard the word
brouillard murmured again and again. He knew that they were
talking about the strange fog that had suddenly descended over the
church. The gendarme was holding his service pistol in his hand, the
barrel pointed skyward, but his nger was lightly curled over the
trigger and Josh was once again reminded just how much danger
they were in—not only from Flamel’s nonhuman and inhuman
enemies, but from his all-too-human foes as well.
They walked perhaps another dozen steps…and suddenly the fog
stopped. One moment Josh was carrying his sister through the thick
mist; then, as if he had stepped through a curtain, he was standing
in front of a tiny art gallery, a café and a souvenir shop. He turned
to look behind him and found that he was facing a solid wall of
mist. The police were little more than indistinct shapes in the
yellow-white fog.
Scathach and Flamel stepped out of the murk. “Allow me,”
Scathach said, catching hold of Sophie and lifting her from Josh’s
arms. He tried to protest—Sophie was his twin, his responsibility—
but he was exhausted. The backs of his calves were cramping, and
the muscles in his arms burned with the e ort of carrying his sister
down what had felt like countless steps.
Josh looked into Scathach’s bright green eyes. “She’s going to be
OK?”
The ancient Celtic warrior opened her mouth to reply, but
Nicholas Flamel shook his head, silencing her. He rested his left
hand on Josh’s shoulder, but the boy shrugged it o . If Flamel
noticed the gesture, he ignored it. “She just needs to sleep. The
e ort of raising the fog so soon after melting the tulpa has
completely drained the last of her physical strength,” Flamel said.
“You asked her to create fog,” Josh said quickly, accusingly.
Nicholas spread his arms. “What else could I do?”
“I…I don’t know,” Josh admitted. “There must have been
something you could do. I’ve seen you throw spears of green
energy.”
“The fog allowed us to escape without harming anyone,” Flamel
said.
“Except Sophie,” Josh replied bitterly.
Flamel looked at him for a long moment and then turned away.
“Let’s go.” He nodded toward a side street that sloped sharply
downward, and they hurried into the night, Scathach e ortlessly
carrying Sophie, Josh struggling to keep up. He was not going to
leave his sister’s side.
“Where to?” Scathach asked.
“We need to get o the streets,” Flamel murmured. “It looks like
every gendarme in the city has descended on Sacré-Coeur. I also saw
special forces and plainclothes police that I guess are secret service.
Once they realize we’re not in the church, they’ll probably cordon
o the area and do a street-by-street search.”
Scathach smiled quickly, her long incisors brie y visible against
her lips. “And let’s face it: we’re not exactly inconspicuous.”
“We need to nd a place to—” Nicholas Flamel began.
The police o cer who came racing around the corner looked to
be no more than nineteen—tall, thin and gangly—with bright red
cheeks and the fuzzy beginnings of a mustache on his upper lip. One
hand was on his holster; the other was holding on to his hat. He
skidded to a halt directly in front of them and managed a quick yelp
of surprise as he fumbled for the gun in its holster. “Hey! Arrêtez!”
Nicholas lunged forward and Josh actually saw the green mist
ow from the Alchemyst’s hand before his ngers brushed against
the gendarme’s chest. Emerald light ared around the police
o cer’s body, outlining it in brilliant green, and then the man
simply folded to the ground.
“What did you do?” Josh asked in a horri ed whisper. He looked
at the young police o cer lying still, and was suddenly chilled and
sickened. “You didn’t…you didn’t…kill him?”
“No,” Flamel said tiredly. “Just overloaded his aura. Bit like an
electric shock. He’ll awaken shortly with a headache.” He pressed
his ngertips to his forehead, massaging just over his left eye. “I
hope it’ll not be as bad as mine,” he added.
“You do know,” Scathach said grimly, “that your little display will
have alerted Machiavelli to our position.” Her nostrils ared and
Josh breathed deeply; the air around them stank of peppermint: the
distinctive odor of Nicholas Flamel’s power.
“What else could I do?” Nicholas protested. “You had your hands
full.”
Scatty curled her lips in disgust. “I could have taken him.
Remember, who got you out of Lubyanka Prison with both hands
manacled behind my back?”
“What are you talking about? Where’s Lubyanka?” Josh asked,
confused.
“Moscow.” Nicholas glanced sidelong at Josh. “Don’t ask; it’s a
long story,” he murmured.
“He was going to be shot as a spy,” Scathach said gleefully.
“A very long story,” Flamel repeated.
Following Scathach and Flamel through the winding streets of
Montmartre, Josh thought back to how John Dee had described
Nicholas Flamel to him only the day before.
“He has been many things in his time: a physician and a cook, a
bookseller, a soldier, a teacher of languages and chemistry, both an
o cer of the law and a thief. But he is now, and has always been, a
liar, a charlatan and a crook.”
And a spy, Josh added. He wondered if Dee knew that. He peered
at the rather ordinary-looking man: with his close-cropped hair and
his pale eyes, in his black jeans and T-shirt under a battered black
leather jacket, he would have passed unnoticed on any street in any
city in the world. And yet he was anything but ordinary: born in the
year 1330, he claimed to be working for the good of humanity, by
keeping the Codex away from Dee and the shadowy and terrifying
creatures he served, the Dark Elders.
But whom did Flamel serve? Josh wondered. Just who was the
immortal Nicholas Flamel?
CHAPTER SEVEN
Keeping
a tight rein on his temper, Niccolò Machiavelli strode
down the steps of Sacré-Coeur, the fog curling and swirling behind
him like a cloak. Although the air was beginning to clear, it was still
touched with the odor of vanilla. Machiavelli threw his head back
and breathed deeply, drawing the smell into his nostrils. He would
remember this scent; it was as distinctive as a ngerprint. Everyone
on the planet possessed an aura—the electrical eld that surrounded
the human body—and when that electrical eld was focused and
directed, it interacted with the user’s endorphin system and adrenal
glands to produce a distinctive odor unique to that person: a
signature scent. Machiavelli took a nal breath. He could almost
taste the vanilla on the air, crisp, clear and pure: the scent of raw
untrained power.
And in that moment, Machiavelli knew beyond a doubt that Dee
was correct: this was the odor of one of the legendary twins.
“I want the entire area sealed o ,” Machiavelli snapped to the
semicircle of high-ranking police who had gathered at the bottom of
the steps in the Square Willette. “Cordon o every street, alleyway
and lane from the Rue Custine to the Rue Caulaincourt, from the
Boulevard de Clichy to the Boulevard de Rochechouart and the Rue
de Clignancourt. I want these people found!”
“You are suggesting closing down Montmartre,” a deeply tanned
police o cer said in the silence that followed. He looked to his
colleagues for support, but none of them would meet his eye. “It’s
the height of the tourist season,” he protested, turning back to
Machiavelli.
Machiavelli rounded on the captain, his face as impassive as the
masks he collected. His cold gray eyes bored into the man, but when
he spoke his voice was even and controlled, barely above a whisper.
“You know who I am?” he asked mildly.
The captain, a decorated veteran of the French Foreign Legion,
felt something cold and sour at the back of his throat as he looked
into the man’s stony eyes. Licking suddenly dry lips, he said, “You
are Monsieur Machiavelli, the new head of the Direction Générale
de la Sécurité Extérieure. But this is a police matter, sir, not an
external security matter. You have no authority—”
“I am making this a DGSE matter,” Machiavelli interrupted softly.
“My powers come directly from the president. I will shut down this
entire city if necessary. I want these people found. Tonight, a
catastrophe was averted.” He waved his hand vaguely in the
direction of Sacré-Coeur, now beginning to appear out of the
thinning mist. “Who knows what other terrors they have planned? I
want a progress report on the hour, every hour,” he nished, and
without waiting for a response turned and marched over to his car,
where his dark-suited driver waited, arms folded across his massive
chest. The driver, face half hidden behind wraparound mirrored
sunglasses, opened the door and then closed it gently behind
Machiavelli. After he had climbed into the car, the driver sat
patiently, black gloved hands resting lightly on the leather steering
wheel, and awaited instructions. The sheet of privacy glass that
separated the driver’s section from the back of the car buzzed down.
“Flamel is in Paris. Where would he go?” Machiavelli asked
without preamble.
The creature known as Dagon had served Machiavelli for close to
four hundred years. It was the name by which he had been known
for millennia, and despite his appearance, he had never been even
remotely human. Turning in the seat, he pulled o his mirrored
sunglasses. In the dim car interior, his eyes were bulbous and
shlike, huge and liquid behind a clear, glassy lm: he had no
eyelids. When he spoke, two rows of tiny ragged teeth were visible
behind his thin lips. “Who are his allies?” Dagon asked, shifting
from deplorable French to appalling Italian before dropping back to
the bubbling, liquid language of his long-lost youth.
“Flamel and his wife have always been loners,” Machiavelli said.
“That is why they have survived for so long. To the best of my
knowledge, they have not lived in this city since the end of the
eighteenth century.” He pulled out his slender black laptop and ran
his index nger over the integrated ngerprint reader. The machine
blipped and the screen blinked to life.
“If they came through a leygate, then they came unprepared,”
Dagon said wetly. “No money, no passports, no clothes other than
those they were wearing.”
“Exactly,” Machiavelli whispered. “So they’re going to need to
nd themselves an ally.”
“Humani or immortal?” Dagon asked.
Machiavelli took a moment to consider. “An immortal,” he said
nally. “I’m not sure they know many humani in this city.”
“So which immortals are currently living in Paris?” Dagon asked.
The Italian’s ngers hit a complicated series of keystrokes and the
screen scrolled to reveal a directory called Temp. There were dozens
of .jpg, .bmp and .tmp les in the directory. Machiavelli highlighted
one and hit Enter. A box appeared in the center of the screen.
Enter Password.
His slender ngers clicked across the keyboard as he typed in the
password Del modo di trattare i sudditi della Val di Chiana ribellati,
and a database encoded with unbreakable 256-bit AES encryption,
the same encryption used by most governments for their top-secret
les, blinked open. Over the course of his long life, Niccolò
Machiavelli had amassed a huge fortune, but he considered this
single le to be his most valuable treasure. It was a complete dossier
on every immortal human still living in the twenty- rst century,
compiled by his network of spies across the globe—most of whom
didn’t even know they were working for him. He scrolled through
the names. Not even his own Dark Elder masters knew he possessed
this list, and he was sure some would be very unhappy if they were
to discover that he also knew the locations and attributes of almost
all the Elders and Dark Elders still walking the earth or in the
Shadowrealms that bordered this world.
Knowledge, as Machiavelli well knew, was power.
Although there were three screens devoted to Nicholas and
Perenelle Flamel, hard information was scarce. There were hundreds
of entries, each one a reported sighting of the Flamels since their
supposed deaths in 1418. They had been seen on just about every
continent in the world—except Australia. For the past 150 years,
they had lived on the North American continent, with the rst
con rmed and veri ed sighting of the last century taking place in
Bu alo, New York, in September 1901. He skipped to the section
marked Known Immortal Associates. It was blank.
“Nothing. I have no records of the Flamels’ associating with other
immortals.”
“But now he is back in Paris,” Dagon said, bubbles of liquid
forming on his lips as he spoke. “He will seek out old friends. People
behave di erently at home,” he added; “their guard comes down.
And no matter how long Flamel has lived away from this city, he
will still consider it his home.”
Niccolò Machiavelli looked over the top of the computer screen.
He was reminded yet again of how little he knew about his faithful
employee. “And where is your home, Dagon?” he asked.
“Gone. Long gone.” A translucent skin ickered across the huge
globes of his eyes.
“Why have you remained with me?” Machiavelli wondered aloud.
“Why have you not sought out others of your kind?”
“They too are gone. I am the last of my kind, and besides, you are
not that dissimilar to me.”
“But you are not human,” Machiavelli said softly.
“Are you?” Dagon asked, eyes wide and unblinking.
Machiavelli took a long moment before nally nodding and
returning to the screen. “So we’re looking for someone the Flamels
would have known when they were still living here. And we know
they haven’t been in the city since the eighteenth century, so let us
limit our search to immortals who were around then.” His ngers
tapped the keys, ltering the results. “Seven only. Five are loyal to
us.”
“And the other two?”
“Catherine de Medici is living o the Rue du Dragon.”
“She’s not French,” Dagon mumbled stickily.
“Well, she was the mother of three French kings,” Machiavelli
said with a rare smile. “But she is loyal only to herself….” His voice
trailed away and he straightened. “But what do we have here?”
Dagon remained unmoving.
Niccolò Machiavelli swiveled the computer screen so that his
servant could see the photograph of a man staring directly at the
camera in what was obviously a posed publicity shot. Thick curling
black hair tumbled to his shoulders, framing a round face. His eyes
were startlingly blue.
“I do not know this man,” Dagon said.
“Oh, but I do. I know him very well. This is the immortal human
once known as the Comte de Saint-Germain. He was a magician, an
inventor, a musician…and an alchemist.” Machiavelli closed the
program and shut down the computer. “Saint-Germain was also the
student of Nicholas Flamel. And he’s currently living in Paris,” he
nished triumphantly.
Dagon smiled, his mouth a perfect O lled with razor teeth. “Does
Flamel know that Saint-Germain is here?”
“I have no idea. No one knows the extent of Nicholas Flamel’s
knowledge.”
Dagon pushed his sunglasses back in place. “And I thought you
knew everything.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
“We need to rest,” Josh said
nally. “I can’t go any farther.” He
stopped and leaned against a building, bent over and wheezing.
Every breath was an e ort, and he was beginning to see black spots
dancing in front of his eyes. Any moment now he was going to
throw up. He felt this way sometimes after football practice, and he
knew from experience that he needed to sit and get some liquids
into his system.
“He’s right.” Scatty turned to Flamel. “We need to rest, even if
only brie y. She was still carrying Sophie in her arms, and with
gray glimmers of light illuminating the Parisian rooftops toward the
east, the rst of the early-morning workers had begun to appear.
The fugitives had kept to the dark side streets, and so far no one had
paid any attention to the strange group, but that would quickly
change as the street lled rst with Parisians, then with tourists.
Nicholas stood outlined at the mouth of the narrow street. He
glanced up and down before turning to look over his shoulder. “We
have to push on,” he protested. “Every second we delay brings
Machiavelli closer to us.”
“We can’t,” Scatty said. She looked at Flamel, and for a single
instant, her bright green eyes glowed. “The twins need to rest,” she
said, and then added softly, “And so do you, Nicholas. You’re
exhausted.”
The Alchemyst considered her and then he nodded and his
shoulders slumped. “You’re right, of course. I’ll do as you say.”
“Maybe we could check into a hotel?” Josh suggested. He was
achingly tired, his eyes and throat gritty, head throbbing.
Scatty shook her head. “They would ask for our passports….”
Sophie stirred in her arms, and Scathach gently eased her to the
ground and leaned her up against the wall.
Josh was immediately by her side. “You’re awake,” he said, relief
in his voice.
“I wasn’t really asleep,” Sophie answered, her tongue feeling too
big for her mouth. “I knew what was going on, but it was as if I was
looking at it from the outside. Like watching something on TV.” She
pressed her hands into the small of her back and pushed hard as she
rotated her neck. “Ouch. That hurt.”
“What hurts?” Josh asked immediately.
“Everything.” She attempted to straighten, but aching muscles
protested and a sick headache pulsed behind her eyes.
“Is there anyone here you can call for help?” Josh looked from
Nicholas to Scathach. “Are there any more immortals or Elders?”
“There are immortals and Elders everywhere,” Scatty said. “Few
are as friendly as we are, though,” she added with a humorless
smile.
“There will be immortals in Paris,” Flamel agreed slowly, “but I’ve
no idea where to nd one, and even if I did, I would have no idea
where their allegiances lay. Perenelle would know,” he added, a
hint of sadness in his voice.
“Would your grandmother know?” Josh asked Scatty.
The Warrior glanced at him. “I’m sure she would.” She turned to
look at Sophie. “Amongst all of your new memories, can you recall
anything about immortals or Elders living in Paris?”
Sophie closed her eyes and tried to concentrate, but the scenes
and images that ashed by— re raining from a bloodred sky, a
huge at-topped pyramid about to be overwhelmed by a gigantic
wave—were chaotic and terrifying. She started to shake her head,
then stopped. Even the simplest of movements hurt. “I can’t think,”
she sighed. “My head is so full, it feels like it’s going to burst.”
“The Witch might know,” Flamel said, “but we have no way of
getting in touch with her. She has no phone.”
“What about her neighbors, friends?” Josh asked. He turned back
to his sister. “I know you don’t want to think about this, but you
have to. It’s important.”
“I can’t think…,” Sophie began, looking away and shaking her
head.
“Don’t think. Just answer,” Josh snapped. He took a quick breath
and lowered his voice, speaking slowly. “Sis, who is the Witch of
Endor’s closest friend in Ojai?”
Sophie’s bright blue eyes closed again and she swayed as if she
was about to faint. When her eyes opened, she shook her head. “She
has no friends there. But everyone knows her. Maybe we could call
the store next to hers…,” she suggested. Then she shook her head.
“It’s too late there.”
Flamel nodded. “Sophie’s right; it’ll be closed at this time of
night.”
“It’ll be closed, all right,” Josh agreed, a touch of excitement
entering his voice, “but when we left Ojai, the place was in chaos.
And don’t forget, I drove a Hummer into the fountain in Libbey
Park; that had to have caught someone’s attention. I’ll bet the police
and the press are there right now. And the press might answer some
questions if we ask the right ones. I mean, if the Witch’s shop was
damaged they’re sure to be looking for a story.”
“It might work…,” Flamel began. “I just need to know the name
of the newspaper.”
“Ojai Valley News, 646-1476,” Sophie said immediately. “I
remember that much…or the Witch does,” she added, and then
shuddered. There were so many memories in her head, so many
thoughts and ideas…and not just the terrifying and fantastic images
of people and places that should never have existed, but also
ordinary mundane thoughts: phone numbers and recipes, names and
addresses of people she’d never heard of, pictures from old TV
shows, posters from movies. She even knew the name of every
single Elvis Presley song.
But all of these were the Witch’s memories. And right now, she
had to struggle to remember her own cell phone number. What
would happen if the Witch’s memories grew so strong that they
overwhelmed her own? She tried to focus on the faces of her
parents, Richard and Sara. Hundreds of faces ickered past, images
of gures carved in stone, the heads of giant statues, paintings
daubed onto the sides of buildings, tiny shapes etched in shards of
pottery. Sophie started to get frantic. Why couldn’t she remember
her parents’ faces? Closing her eyes, she concentrated hard on the
last time she had seen her mother and father. It would have been
about three weeks ago, just before they had left for the dig in Utah.
More faces tumbled behind Sophie’s closed eyes: images on scraps of
parchment, fragments of manuscripts or cracked oil paintings; faces
in faded sepia photographs, in blurred newspapers…
“Sophie?”
And then, in a ash of color, the faces of her parents popped into
her head, and Sophie felt the Witch’s memories fade away and her
own come back to the surface. She suddenly knew her own phone
number.
“Sis?”
She opened her eyes and blinked at her brother. He was standing
directly in front of her, his face close to hers, his eyes pinched with
concern.
“I’m OK,” she whispered. “I was just trying to remember
something.”
“What?”
She attempted a smile. “My phone number.”
“Your phone number? Why?” He stopped, and then added, “No
one ever remembers their own phone number. When was the last
time you called yourself?”
Hands wrapped around steaming mugs of bittersweet hot
chocolate, Sophie and Josh sat opposite one another in an otherwise
empty all-night café close to the Gare du Nord Metro station. There
was only one sta member behind the counter, a surly shavenheaded assistant wearing an upside-down name tag that said ROUX.
“I need a shower,” Sophie said grimly. “I need to wash my hair
and brush my teeth, and I need to change my clothes. It feels like
days since my last shower.”
“I think it is days. You look terrible,” Josh agreed. He reached
over and pulled loose a strand of blond hair that had stuck to his
sister’s cheek.
“I feel terrible,” Sophie whispered. “Remember that time last
summer when we were in Long Beach and I had all that ice cream,
then ate the chili dog and the curly fries and had the extra-large
root beer?”
Josh grinned. “And you nished o my bu alo wings. And my ice
cream!”
Sophie smiled at the memory, but her grin quickly faded.
Although the temperature that day had risen into the hundreds,
she’d started shivering, icy beads of sweat running down her back as
a ball of iron settled into the pit of her stomach. Luckily, she hadn’t
fastened her seat belt before she’d thrown up, but the results had
still been spectacularly messy, and the car had been unusable for at
least a week afterward. “That’s how I feel right now: cold, shivery,
aching all over.”
“Well, try not to throw up in here,” Josh murmured. “I don’t think
Roux, our cheerful server, would be too impressed.”
Roux had worked in the café for four years, and in that time he
had been robbed twice and threatened often but never hurt. The allnight café saw all sorts of strange and often dangerous characters
come through the doors, and Roux decided that this unusual quartet
certainly quali ed as the rst sort and maybe even both. The two
teenagers were dirty and smelly and looked terri ed and exhausted.
The older man—maybe the kids’ grandfather, Roux thought—was
not in much better shape. Only the fourth member of the group—
the red-haired, green-eyed young woman wearing a black top, black
trousers and chunky combat boots—looked bright and alert. He
wondered what her relationship was to the others; she certainly
didn’t look as if she was related to any of them, but the boy and girl
were alike enough to be twins.
Roux had hesitated when the old man had produced a credit card
to pay for the two hot chocolates. People usually paid cash for
something so small, and he wondered if the card was stolen. “I’ve
run out of euros,” the old man said with a smile. “Could you ring up
twenty and give me some cash?” Roux thought he spoke French
with a peculiar, old-fashioned, almost formal lilt.
“It is strictly against our policy…,” Roux began, but another look
at the hard-eyed red-haired girl made him reconsider. He attempted
a smile at her as he said, “Sure, I think I can do that.” If the card
had been reported stolen, it wouldn’t scan in the machine anyway.
“I would be very grateful.” The man smiled. “And could you give
me some coins?”
Roux rang up eight euro for the two hot chocolates and swiped
the Visa for twenty euro. He was surprised that it was an American
credit card; he would have sworn by his accent that the man was
French. There was a delay and then the card went through, and he
deducted the cost of the two drinks and handed over the change in
one- and two-euro coins. Roux went back to the math textbook
hidden under the counter. He’d been wrong about the group. It
wasn’t the rst time and wouldn’t be the last. They were probably
visitors just o one of the early-morning trains; they were nothing
out of the ordinary.
Well, maybe not all of them. Keeping his head down, he raised his
eyes to look at the red-haired young woman. She was standing with
her back to him, talking to the old man. And then she slowly and
deliberately turned to look at him. She smiled, the merest curl of her
lips, and Roux suddenly found his textbook very interesting.
Flamel stood at the café counter and looked at Scathach. “I want
you to stay here,” he said softly, slipping from French into Latin. His
eyes ickered to where the twins sat drinking their hot chocolate.
“Watch over them. I’ll go nd a phone.”
The Shadow nodded. “Be careful. If anything happens and we get
separated, let’s meet back in Montmartre. Machiavelli will never
expect us to double back. We’ll wait outside one of the restaurants—
maybe La Maison Rose—for ve minutes at the top of every hour.”
“Agreed. But if I’m not back by noon,” he continued very softly, “I
want you to take the twins and leave.”
“I will not abandon you,” Scathach said evenly.
“If I don’t come back, it’s because Machiavelli has me,” the
Alchemyst said seriously. “Scathach, even you would not be able to
rescue me from his army.”
“I’ve faced down armies before.”
Flamel reached out and laid his hand on the Warrior’s shoulder.
“The twins are our priority now. They must be protected at all cost.
Continue Sophie’s training; nd someone to Awaken Josh and train
him. And rescue my dear Perenelle, if you can. And if I die, tell her
my ghost will nd her,” he added. Then, before she could say
anything else, he turned and strode out into the chilly predawn air.
“Hurry back…,” Scatty whispered, but Flamel had gone. If he was
captured, she decided, no matter what he said, she was going to tear
this city apart until she found him. Taking a deep breath, she looked
over her shoulder and found the shaven-headed assistant staring at
her. There was a spiderweb tattooed onto the side of his neck, and
the entire length of both of his ears was pierced with at least a
dozen little studs. She wondered how painful that had been. She’d
always wanted pierced ears, but her esh simply healed too quickly,
and she’d no sooner had the piercing done than the hole closed up.
“Something to drink?” Roux asked, smiling nervously, a metal ball
visible in his tongue.
“Water,” Scatty said.
“Sure. Perrier?”
“Tap. No ice,” she added, and turned away to join the twins at the
table. She spun a chair around and straddled it, leaning her
forearms across the top of the chair and resting her chin on her
arms.
“Nicholas has gone to try and get in touch with my grandmother
to see if she knows anyone here. I’m not sure what we’re going to do
if he cannot get through.”
“Why?” Sophie asked.
Scatty shook her head. “We’ve got to get o the streets. We were
lucky to get away from Sacré-Coeur before the police threw up a
cordon around it. No doubt they have found that stunned o cer by
now, so their search will have moved outward, and the patrols will
have our descriptions. It’s only a matter of time before we’re
spotted.”
“What will happen then?” Josh wondered aloud.
Scathach’s smile was terrifying. “Then they’ll see why I am called
the Warrior.”
“But what happens if we’re caught?” Josh persisted. He still found
the idea of being hunted by the police nearly incomprehensible. It
was almost easier to imagine being hunted by mythical creatures or
immortal humans. “What would happen to us?”
“You would be turned over to Machiavelli. The Dark Elders would
consider you pair quite a prize.”
“What…” Sophie looked quickly at her brother. “What would they
do to us?”
“You really don’t want to know,” Scathach said sincerely, “but
trust me when I tell you that it would not be pleasant.”
“And what about you?” Josh asked.
“I have no friends amongst the Dark Elders,” Scathach said softly.
“I’ve been their enemy for over two and a half thousand years. I
would imagine they have a very special Shadowrealm prison
prepared for me. Something cold and wet. They know I hate that.”
She smiled, the tips of her teeth pressing against her lips. “But they
haven’t got us yet,” she said lightly, “and they’ll not get us easily.”
She turned to squint at Sophie. “You look terrible.”
“So I’ve been told,” Sophie said, wrapping both hands around the
steaming mug of chocolate and bringing it to her lips. She breathed
deeply. She could smell every subtlety in the rich aroma of cocoa
and felt her stomach rumble, reminding her that it had been a long
time since they had eaten. The hot chocolate tasted bitter on her
tongue, eye-wateringly strong, and she remembered reading
somewhere that European chocolate had a greater cocoa content
than the American chocolate she had grown up with.
Scatty leaned forward and dropped her voice. “You need to give
yourselves time to recuperate from all the stresses you’ve been
through. Traveling from one side of the world to the other via a
leygate takes its toll—it feels like massive jet lag, I’m told.”
“And I guess you don’t get jet lag?” Josh muttered. There was a
joke in the family that he could get jet lag on a car trip from one
state to the next.
Scatty shook her head. “No, I don’t get jet lag. I don’t y,” she
explained. “You’d never get me up in one of those things. Only
creatures with apping wings are meant to be in the skies. Though I
did ride a lung once.”
“A lung?” Josh asked, confused.
“Ying lung, a Chinese dragon,” Sophie said.
Scathach turned to look at the girl. “Calling up the fog must have
burned through a lot of your aura’s energy. It’s important that you
not use your power again for as long as possible.”
The trio sat back as Roux came out from behind the counter with
a tall glass of water. He placed it on the edge of the table, attempted
a nervous smile at Scatty and then backed away.
“I think he likes you,” Sophie said with a weak grin.
Scatty turned to glare at the assistant again, but the twins saw her
lips twist in a smile. “He’s got piercings,” she said, loud enough for
him to hear. “I don’t like boys with piercings.”
Both girls smiled as the back of Roux’s neck ared bright red.
“Why is it important that Sophie not use her powers?” Josh asked,
bringing the conversation back to Scatty’s earlier comment. An
alarm had gone o at the back of his mind.
Scathach leaned forward across the table, and both Sophie and
Josh moved in to hear her. “Once a person uses all their natural
auric energy, then the power starts to feed o their esh for its
fuel.”
“What happens then?” Sophie asked.
“Have you ever heard of spontaneous human combustion?”
Sophie’s expression was blank, but Josh nodded. “I have. People
just bursting into ames for no reason: it’s an urban legend.”
Scatty shook her head. “It’s no legend. Many cases have been
recorded throughout history,” she said evenly. “I’ve even witnessed
a couple myself. It can happen in a heartbeat, and the re, which
usually starts in the stomach and lungs, burns so ercely that it
leaves little more than ash behind. You have to be careful now,
Sophie: in fact, I’d like you to promise me not to use your power
again today, no matter what happens.”
“And Flamel knew this,” Josh said quickly, unable to keep the
anger from his voice.
“Of course,” Scatty said evenly.
“And he didn’t think it was worth telling us?” Josh snapped. Roux
looked over at the raised voice, and Josh took a deep breath and
continued in a hoarse whisper. “What else isn’t he telling us?” he
demanded. “What else comes with this gift?” He almost spat out the
last word.
“Everything has happened so fast, Josh,” Scatty said. “There
simply hasn’t been time to train or instruct you properly. But I want
you to remember that Nicholas has your best interests at heart. He is
trying to keep you safe.”
“We were safe until we met him,” Josh said.
The skin tightened across Scatty’s cheekbones and the muscles in
her neck and shoulders twitched. Something dark and ugly ickered
behind her green eyes.
Sophie reached out and put a hand on both Scatty’s and Josh’s
arms. “Enough,” she said tiredly. “We shouldn’t ght with each
other.”
Josh was about to respond, but the look on his sister’s exhausted
face scared him, and he nodded. “OK. For now,” he added.
Scatty nodded too. “Sophie is correct.” She turned to look at Josh.
“It is unfortunate that everything has fallen on Sophie at the
moment. It’s a pity your powers weren’t Awakened.”
“You’re not half as sorry as I am,” he said, unable to keep the note
of bitterness from his voice. Despite all that he had seen, and even
knowing the dangers, he wanted the powers his twin had. “It’s not
too late, though, is it?” he asked quickly.
Scatty shook her head. “You can be Awakened at any time, but I
don’t know who would have the power to Awaken you. It needs to
be done by an Elder, and there are only a handful with that
particular skill.”
“Like who?” he demanded, looking at Scathach, but it was his
sister who answered, dreamily.
“In America, Black Annis or Persephone could do it.”
Josh and Scatty turned to look at her.
Sophie blinked in surprise. “I know the names, but I don’t even
know who they are.” Suddenly, her eyes lled with tears. “I have all
these memories…that aren’t even mine.”
Josh took his sister’s hand and squeezed it gently.
“They are all the Witch of Endor’s memories,” Scathach said
softly. “And be glad you don’t know who Black Annis or Persephone
is. Especially Black Annis,” she added grimly. “I’m surprised that if
my grandmother knew where she was, she let her live.”
“She’s in the Catskills,” Sophie began, but Scathach reached over
and pinched the back of her hand. “Ouch!”
“I just wanted to distract you,” Scathach explained. “Don’t even
think about Black Annis. There are some names that should never be
spoken aloud.”
“That’s like saying don’t think of elephants,” Josh said, “and then
all you can think of are elephants.”
“Then let me give you something else to think about,” Scathach
said softly. “There are two police o cers in the window staring at
us. Don’t look,” she added urgently.
Too late. Josh turned to look, and whatever expression crossed his
face—shock, horror, guilt or fear—brought both o cers racing into
the café, one pulling his automatic from its holster, the other
speaking urgently into his radio as he drew his baton.
CHAPTER NINE
With hands pushed deep in the pockets of his leather jacket, still
wearing his none-too-clean black jeans and scu ed cowboy boots,
Nicholas Flamel didn’t look out of place with either the earlymorning workers or the homeless beginning to appear on the streets
of Paris. The gendarmes gathered in small groups on the corners
were talking urgently together or listening to their radios and didn’t
even give him a second glance.
This wasn’t the rst time he had been hunted in these streets, but
it was the rst time without allies and friends to help him. He and
Perenelle had returned to their home city at the end of the Seven
Years’ War in 1763. An old friend needed their help, and the
Flamels never refused a friend. Unfortunately, however, Dee had
discovered their whereabouts and had chased them through the
streets with an army of black-clad assassins, none of whom was
entirely human.
They had escaped then. Escaping now might not be so easy. Paris
had changed utterly. When Baron Haussmann had redesigned Paris
in the nineteenth century, he had destroyed a huge portion of the
medieval section of the city, the city Flamel was so familiar with.
All the Alchemyst’s hiding places and safe houses, the secret vaults
and hidden attics, were gone. He had once known every street and
alley, each twisting lane and hidden courtyard of Paris; now he
knew as much as the average tourist.
And at that moment, not only did he have Machiavelli chasing
them, the entire French police force was also on the lookout for
them. And Dee was on his way. Dee, as Flamel well knew, was
capable of just about anything.
Nicholas breathed in the cool predawn Parisian air and glanced at
the cheap digital watch he wore on his left wrist. It was still set to
Paci c time, where it was now twenty minutes past eight in the
evening, which meant—he did a quick calculation in his head—that
it was ve-twenty a.m. in Paris. He thought brie y about resetting
the watch to Greenwich Mean Time, but quickly decided against it.
A couple of months ago, when he’d tried resetting the watch for
daylight savings, it had started madly blipping and ashing. He’d
worked on it for over an hour without any success; it had taken
Perenelle thirty seconds to x it. He only wore it because it came
with a countdown timer. Every month, when he and Perenelle
created a new batch of the immortality potion, he reset the counter
to 720 hours and allowed it to count down to zero. With the passing
of years, they had discovered that the potion was timed to a lunar
cycle and lasted roughly thirty days. Over the course of the month,
they would age slowly, almost imperceptibly, but once they drank
the potion, the e ects of the aging process would quickly reverse—
hair would darken, wrinkles soften and disappear, aching joints and
sti muscles become supple again, eyesight and hearing sharpen.
Unfortunately, it was not a recipe that could be copied down;
each month the formula was unique, and each recipe only worked
once. The Book of Abraham the Mage was written in a language that
predated humanity, and in an ever-changing, always-moving script,
so that entire libraries of knowledge were held within the slender
volume. But every month, on page seven of the copper-bound
manuscript, the secret of Life Eternal appeared. The crawling script
remained static for less than an hour before it shifted, twisted and
trickled away.
The one and only time the Flamels had tried using the same
recipe twice, it had actually sped up the aging process. Luckily,
Nicholas had taken only a sip of the colorless, rather ordinarylooking potion when Perenelle noticed that lines were appearing
around his eyes and on his forehead and that the hair from his full
beard was falling away from his face. She’d knocked the cup from
his hand before he’d taken another mouthful. However, the lines
remained etched on his face, and the thick beard he had been so
proud of had never grown again.
Nicholas and Perenelle had brewed the most recent batch of the
potion at midnight the past Sunday, just under a week ago. He
pressed the left-hand button on the watch and called up the
stopwatch function: 116 hours and 21 minutes had passed. Another
press of the button brought up the time remaining: 603 hours, 39
minutes, or about 25 days. As he watched, another minute ticked
away: 38 minutes. He and Perenelle would age and weaken, and of
course, every time either of them used their powers, that would only
quicken the onset of old age. If he did not retrieve the Book before
the end of the month and create a new batch of the potion, then
they would both rapidly age and die.
And the world would die with them.
Unless…
A police car roared past, siren howling. It was followed by a
second and a third. Like everyone else on the street, Flamel turned
to follow their progress. The last thing he needed to do was to
attract attention to himself by standing out from the crowd.
He had to retrieve the Codex. The rest of the Codex, he reminded
himself, his hand absently touching his chest. Hidden beneath his Tshirt, dangling on a leather cord, he wore a simple square cotton
bag that Perenelle had stitched for him half a millennium ago, when
he had rst found the Book. She had created it to hold the ancient
volume; now all it contained were two pages Josh had managed to
tear out. The book was still incredibly dangerous in the hands of
Dee, but it was the last two pages, which contained the spell known
as the Final Summoning, that Dee needed to bring his Dark Elder
masters back to this world.
And Flamel would not—could not—allow that.
Two police o cers turned a corner and strolled down the center
of the street. They stared hard at some of the pedestrians and peered
into the shop windows, but they walked past Nicholas without even
looking at him.
Nicholas knew that his priority now was to nd a safe haven for
the twins. And that meant he had to nd an immortal living in
Paris. Every city in the world had its share of humans with life spans
that extended into centuries or even millennia, and Paris was no
exception. He knew that immortals liked the big anonymous cities,
where it was easier to disappear amongst an ever-changing
population.
Long ago, Nicholas and Perenelle had come to realize that at the
heart of every myth and legend was a grain of truth. And every race
told stories of people who lived exceptionally long lives: the
immortals.
Over the centuries, the Flamels had come into contact with three
entirely di erent types of immortal humans. There were the
Ancients—of whom there were now perhaps no more than a handful
still alive—who hailed from earth’s very distant past. Some had
witnessed the entire span of human history, and it had made them
more, and less, than human.
Then there were a few others who, like Nicholas and Perenelle,
had discovered for themselves how to become immortal. Down
through the millennia, the secrets of alchemy had been discovered,
lost and rediscovered countless times. One of the greatest secrets of
alchemy was the formula for immortality. And all alchemy—and
possibly even modern science—had one single source: the Book of
Abraham the Mage.
Then there were those who had been given the gift of
immortality. These were humans who had, either accidentally or
deliberately, come to the attention of one or other of the Elders who
had remained in this world after the Fall of Danu Talis. The Elders
were always on the lookout for people of exceptional or unusual
ability to recruit to their cause. And in return for their service, the
Elders granted their followers extended life. It was a gift very few
humans could refuse. It was also a gift that ensured absolute,
unswerving loyalty…because it could be withdrawn as quickly as it
had been given. Nicholas knew that if he encountered immortals in
Paris—even if he had known them in the past—there would now be
a very real danger that they were in the service of the Dark Elders.
He was passing an all-night video store that advertised high-speed
Internet when he noticed the sign in the window, written in ten
languages: NATIONAL & INTERNATIONAL CALLS. CHEAPEST
RATES. Pushing open the door, he suddenly breathed in the sour
odor of unwashed bodies, stale perfume, greasy food and the ozone
of too many computers packed tightly together. The store was
surprisingly busy: a group of students who looked like they’d been
up all night clustered around three computers displaying the World
of Warcraft logo, while most of the other machines were taken up
by serious-faced young men and women staring intently at the
screens. As he made his way to the counter at the back of the shop,
Nicholas could see that most of the young people were e-mailing
and instant-messaging. He smiled brie y; only a few days ago, on
Monday afternoon, when the bookshop was quiet, Josh had spent an
hour explaining to him the di erence between the two methods of
communication. Josh had even set him up with his own e-mail
account—which Nicholas doubted he would ever use—though he
could see a use for the instant-messaging programs.
The Chinese girl behind the counter was dressed in ragged and
torn clothes that Nicholas thought looked t only for the trash but
that he guessed had probably cost a fortune. She was in full goth
makeup and was busy painting her nails when Nicholas stepped up
to the desk.
“Three euro for fteen minutes, ve for thirty, seven for fortyve, ten for an hour,” she rattled o in atrocious French without
looking up.
“I want to make an international call.”
“Cash or credit card?” She still hadn’t raised her head, and
Nicholas noticed that she was blackening her nails not with polish
but with a felt-tip marker.
“Credit card.” He wanted to conserve the little cash he had to buy
some food. Although he rarely ate, and Scathach never ate, he
would need to feed the children.
“Use booth number one. Instructions are on the wall.”
Nicholas slipped into the glass-fronted booth and pulled the door
closed behind him. The shouts of the students faded, but the booth
smelled strongly of stale food. He quickly read the instructions as he
shed the credit card he’d used to buy hot chocolate for the twins
from the back of his wallet. It was in the name of Nick Fleming, the
name he’d been using for the past ten years, and he brie y
wondered whether Dee or Machiavelli had the resources to track
him through it. He knew that of course they did, but a quick smile
curled Flamel’s thin lips; what did it matter? All it would tell them
was that he was in Paris, and they already knew that. Following the
instructions on the wall, he dialed the international access code and
then the number Sophie had recalled from the Witch of Endor’s
memories.
The line crackled and clicked with transatlantic static, and then,
more than ve and a half thousand miles away, the phone started
ringing. It was answered on the second ring. “Ojai Valley News; how
can I help?” The young woman’s voice was surprisingly clear.
Nicholas deliberately a ected a thick French accent. “Good
morning…or rather, good evening to you. I’m delighted to nd you
still at the o ce. This is Monsieur Montmorency, phoning you from
Paris, France. I’m a reporter with Le Monde newspaper. I’ve just seen
online that you’ve had quite an exciting evening there.”
“Gosh—news does travel fast, Mr….”
“Montmorency.”
“Montmorency. Yes, we’ve had quite an evening. How can we
help?”
“We would like to include a piece in this evening’s paper—I was
wondering if you had a reporter on the scene?”
“Actually, all our reporters are downtown at the moment.”
“Would it be possible to put me through, do you think? I can get a
quick on-the-spot description of the scene and a comment.” When
there was no immediate response, he added quickly, “There would
be a proper credit for your newspaper, of course.”
“Let me see if I can patch you through to one of our reporters on
the street, Mr. Montmorency.”
“Merci. I am very grateful.”
The line clicked again, and there was a long pause. Nicholas
guessed that the receptionist was talking to the reporter before
transferring the call. There was another click, and the girl said,
“Putting you through….” He was saying thank you when the phone
was answered.
“Michael Carroll, Ojai Valley News. I understand you’re calling
from Paris, France?” There was a note of incredulity in the man’s
voice.
“Indeed I am, Monsieur Carroll.”
“News travels fast,” the reporter said, echoing the receptionist.
“The Internet,” Flamel said vaguely, adding, “There’s a video on
YouTube.” He had absolutely no doubt that there were videos of the
scene in Ojai online. He turned to stare out into the Internet café.
From where he was standing he could see half a dozen screens; each
one displayed a Web page in a di erent language. “I’ve been asked
to get a quote for our arts and culture page. One of our editors has
visited your beautiful city often and bought several amazing glass
pieces from an antiques shop on Ojai Avenue. I’m not sure if you
know it: the shop sells only mirrors and glassware,” Flamel added.
“Witcherly Antiques,” Michael Carroll said immediately. “I know
it well. I’m afraid it was completely destroyed in an explosion.”
Flamel felt suddenly breathless. Hekate had died because he had
brought the twins into her Shadowrealm; had the Witch of Endor
shared Hekate’s fate? He cleared his throat and swallowed hard.
“And the owner, Mrs. Witcherly? Is she…?”
“She’s ne,” the reporter said, and Flamel felt a wave of relief
wash over him. “I’ve just taken a statement from her. She’s in
remarkably good spirits for someone whose shop has just blown
up.” He laughed and added, “She said that when you’ve lived as
long as she has, nothing much surprises you.”
“Is she still there?” Flamel asked, trying to contain the eagerness
is his voice. “Would she like to make a statement for the French
press? Tell her it’s Nicholas Montmorency. We spoke once before;
I’m sure she’ll remember me,” he added.
“I’ll ask….”
The voice faded away and Flamel heard the reporter calling out
for Dora Witcherly. In the background, he also heard the sound of
countless police, re and ambulance sirens and the fainter shouts
and cries of distressed people.
And it was all his fault.
He shook his head quickly. No, it was not his fault. This was Dee’s
doing. Dee knew no sense of proportion; he had almost burned
London to the ground in 1666, had devastated Ireland with the
Great Famine in the 1840s, had destroyed most of San Francisco in
1906—and now he’d emptied the graveyards around Ojai. No doubt
the streets were littered with bones and bodies. Nicholas heard the
reporter’s muted voice and then the sound of the cell phone being
handed over.
“Monsieur Montmorency?” Dora said politely in perfect French.
“Madame. You are unharmed?”
Dora’s voice fell to a whisper and she slipped into an archaic form
of the French language that would be incomprehensible to any
modern eavesdropper. “It’s not that easy to kill me,” she said
quickly. “Dee has escaped, cut, bruised, battered and very, very
upset. You are all safe? Scathach too?”
“Scatty is safe. However, we’ve had an encounter with Niccolò
Machiavelli.”
“So he’s still around. Dee must have warned him. Be careful,
Nicholas. Machiavelli is more dangerous than you can imagine. He
is even more cunning than Dee. Now I must hurry,” she added
urgently. “This reporter is getting suspicious. He probably thinks I’m
giving you a better story than I gave him. What do you want?”
“I need your help, Dora. I need to know who I can trust in Paris. I
need to get the children o the streets. They’re exhausted.”
“Hmmm.” The line crackled with the sound of rustling paper. “I
don’t know who is in Paris at the moment. But I’ll nd out,” she said
decisively. “What time is it there?”
He glanced at his watch and did the math. “Five-thirty in the
morning.”
“Get to the Ei el Tower. Be there by seven a.m. and wait for ten
minutes. If I can nd someone trustworthy, I’ll have them meet you
there. If no one you recognize arrives, go back at eight and then at
nine. If no one is there by nine, then you’ll know there is no one in
Paris you can trust, and you will have to make your own
arrangements.”
“Thank you, Madame Dora,” he said quietly. “I’ll not forget this
debt.”
“There are no debts between friends,” she said. “Oh, and
Nicholas, try and keep my granddaughter out of trouble.”
“I’ll do my best,” Flamel said. “But you know what she’s like: she
seems to attract trouble. Though right now, she’s watching over the
twins in a café not far from here. At least she can’t get into any
trouble there.”
CHAPTER TEN
Scathach brought her leg up, pressed the sole of her foot against
the seat of a chair and shoved hard. The wooden chair skipped
across the oor and slammed into the two police o cers as they
pushed through the door. They crashed to the ground, a radio ying
from the hand of one, a baton from the hand of the other. The
squawking radio skidded to a halt at Josh’s feet. He leaned over and
poured his hot chocolate on it. It died in a zz of sparks.
Scathach surged to her feet. Without turning her head, she raised
an arm and pointed at Roux. “You. Stay right where you are. And
don’t even think about phoning for the police.”
Heart hammering, Josh grabbed Sophie and pulled her away from
the table, toward the back of the shop, shielding her with his body
from the police at the door.
One of the o cers raised a gun. And Scatty’s nunchaku struck it
in the barrel with enough force to bend the metal and send the
weapon spinning from the man’s hand.
The second o cer scrambled to his feet, pulling out a long black
baton. Scathach’s right shoulder dipped and the nunchaku reversed
direction in midair, the twelve-inch length of hardened wood
striking the police baton just above its short handle. The baton
shattered into ragged splinters. Scathach ipped the nunchaku back
and it dropped into her outstretched hand.
“I’m in a really bad mood,” she said in perfect French. “Believe
me when I tell you that you really do not want to ght me.”
“Scatty…,” Josh hissed in alarm.
“Not now,” the Warrior snapped in English. “Can’t you see I’m
busy?”
“Yeah, well, you’re about to get busier,” Josh shouted. “A lot
busier. Look outside.”
A police riot squad, in black body armor, full-face helmets and
shields, armed with batons and assault ri es, were racing down the
street, straight for the café.
“RAID,” the shop assistant whispered in horror.
“Just like SWAT,” Scathach said in English, “only tougher.” She
sounded almost pleased. Glancing sidelong at Roux, she snapped in
French, “Is there a back door?”
The shop assistant was shocked into immobility, staring at the
approaching squad, and didn’t react until Scathach whipped out the
nunchaku and the rounded end whistled past his face, the breeze
making him blink.
“Is there a back door?” she demanded again, but in English.
“Yes, yes, of course.”
“Then get my friends out.”
“No…,” Josh began.
“Let me do something,” Sophie said, a dozen wind spells
ickering into her consciousness. “I can help….”
“No,” Josh protested, and reached for his twin just as her blond
hair crackled, sparkling silver.
“Out!” Scatty shouted, and suddenly it was as if the planes and
angles of her face had altered, cheekbones and chin becoming
prominent, green eyes turned to re ective glass. For an instant,
there was something ancient and primeval—and totally alien—in
her face. “I can take care of this.” She started spinning the
nunchaku, creating an impenetrable shield between her and the two
policemen. One o cer picked up a chair and ung it at her, but the
nunchaku turned it to matchwood.
“Roux—get them out now!” Scatty snarled.
“This way,” the terri ed clerk said in American-accented English.
He pushed past the twins and led them down a narrow chilly
corridor and out into a small foul-smelling yard piled high with
trash cans, bits of broken restaurant furniture and the skeleton of a
long-abandoned Christmas tree. Behind them came the sound of
breaking wood.
Roux pointed to a red gate and continued in English. His face was
the color of chalk. “That leads to the alleyway. Turn left for the Rue
de Dunkerque; right will bring you down to the Gare du Nord Metro
station.” Behind them there was a tremendous smash, followed by
the sound of breaking glass. “Your friend, she is in so much
trouble,” he moaned miserably. “And RAID will wreck the shop.
How am I going to explain that to the owner?”
There was another crash from inside. A slate tile slid o the roof
and crashed into the yard.
“Go, go now.” He spun the combination lock and tugged the gate
open.
Sophie and Josh ignored him. “What do we do?” Josh asked his
twin. “Go or stay?”
Sophie shook her head. She glanced at Roux and lowered her
voice to a whisper. “We have nowhere to go—we don’t know
anyone in the city except Scatty and Nicholas. We don’t have any
money and we have no passports.”
“We could go to the American embassy.” Josh turned to Roux. “Is
there an American embassy in Paris?”
“Yes, of course, on the Avenue Gabriel, beside the Hôtel de
Crillon.” The shaven-headed youth cringed as a colossal thump
shook the whole building, lling the air with minute particles of
dust. The glass in the window beside them cracked from top to
bottom and more tiles slid o the roof, to rain down into the yard.
“And what do we tell the embassy?” Sophie demanded. “They’ll
want to know how we got here.”
“Kidnapped?” Josh suggested. And then a sudden thought struck
him and he felt sick. “And what do we tell Mom and Dad? How are
we going to explain it to them?”
Crockery tinkled and shattered, and then there was a tremendous
crack.
Sophie cocked her head to one side and brushed her hair o her
ear. “That was the main window.” She took a step back toward the
door. “I should help her.” Wisps of mist curled o her ngers as she
reached for the handle.
“No!” Josh snatched her hand, and static crackled between them.
“You can’t use your powers,” he whispered urgently. “You’re too
exhausted; remember what Scatty said. You could burst into
ames.”
“She’s our friend—we can’t abandon her,” Sophie snapped. “I
won’t, anyway.” Her brother was a loner and had never been good
at making or keeping friends in school, whereas she was intensely
loyal to hers, and she had started to think of Scatty as more than
just a friend. Although she loved her brother deeply, she had always
wanted a sister.
Josh caught Sophie’s shoulders and turned her to face him. He
was already a head taller than she was and had to look down into
the blue eyes that mirrored his own. “She’s not our friend, Sophie,”
his voice low and serious. “She’s never going to be our friend. She’s
a two-and-a-half-thousand-year-old…something. She admitted to us
that she’s a vampire. You saw the way her face changed in there:
she’s not even human. And…and I’m not sure she’s all Flamel makes
her out to be. I know he isn’t!”
“What do you mean?” Sophie demanded. “What are you trying to
say?”
Josh opened his mouth to reply, but a series of rattling thumps
vibrated through the entire building. Whimpering with fear, Roux
darted out into the alley. The twins ignored him.
“What do you mean?” Sophie asked again.
“Dee said—”
“Dee!”
“I talked to him in Ojai. When you were in the shop with the
Witch of Endor.”
“But he’s our enemy!”
“Only because Flamel says he is,” Josh said quickly. “Sophie, Dee
told me that Flamel is a criminal and Scathach is basically just a
hired thug. He said that she was cursed for her crimes to wear the
body of a teenager for the rest of her life.” He shook his head
quickly and hurried on, his voice low and desperate. “Sis, we know
next to nothing about these people…Flamel, Perenelle and
Scathach. The only thing we do know is that they’ve made you
di erent—dangerously di erent. They’ve taken us halfway across
the world, and look where we are now.” Even as he was speaking,
the building shook, and then a dozen more tiles slid o the roof and
crashed into the yard, sending razor-sharp fragments ying around
them. Josh yelped as a chunk stung his arm. “We can’t trust them,
Soph. We shouldn’t.”
“Josh, you have no idea what powers they’ve given me….” Sophie
caught her brother’s arm, and the air, which was foul with the stink
of rotting food, was touched with the odor of vanilla, and then, a
moment later, the scent of oranges as Josh’s aura ared brie y
golden. “Oh, Josh, the things I could tell you. I know everything the
Witch of Endor knew….”
“And it’s making you sick!” Josh yelled angrily. “And don’t forget,
if you use your powers one more time, you could literally explode.”
The twins’ auras ared gold and silver. Sophie squeezed her eyes
shut as a ood of impressions, vague thoughts and random ideas
slammed into her consciousness. Her blue eyes blinked,
momentarily silver, and she suddenly realized that she was
experiencing her brother’s thoughts. She wrenched her hand away
from him and the thoughts and sensations immediately faded.
“You’re jealous!” she whispered in amazement. “Jealous of my
powers.”
Color touched Josh’s cheeks, and Sophie saw the truth in his eyes
even before he spoke the lie. “I am not!”
Suddenly, a black-clad police o cer burst through the door and
out into the yard. There was a long crack running down the front of
his face visor, and he was missing one of his black boots. Without
pausing, he limped past them and ran into the alley. They could
hear the pat of his naked foot and the slap of the leather sole fade
away.
Then Scatty strolled out into the yard. She was twirling her
nunchaku as if she were Charlie Chaplin swinging a cane. There
wasn’t a hair out of place or a mark on her body, and her green eyes
were bright and alert. “Oh, I’m in a much better mood now,” she
announced.
The twins looked past her into the corridor. Nothing and no one
moved in the darkness beyond.
“But there were about ten of them…,” Sophie began.
Scathach shrugged. “Twelve, actually.”
“Armed…,” Josh said. He glanced sidelong at his sister, then back
at the Warrior. He swallowed hard. “You didn’t…didn’t kill them,
did you?”
Wood snapped and something collapsed in the shop
“No, they’re just…sleeping.” Scatty smiled.
“But how did you—” Josh began.
“I am the Warrior,” Scatty said simply.
Sophie caught a hint of movement and opened her mouth to
scream just as the shape appeared out of the corridor and a longngered hand fell on Scathach’s shoulder. The Warrior didn’t react.
“I can’t leave you alone for ten minutes,” Nicholas Flamel said,
stepping out of the shadows. He nodded at the open gate. “We’d
better go,” he added, ushering them toward the alleyway.
“You missed the ght,” Josh told him. “There were ten of
them….”
“Twelve,” Scathach corrected him quickly.
“I know,” the Alchemyst said with a wry smile, “only twelve: they
didn’t stand a chance.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“Escaped!” Dr. John Dee snarled into the cell phone. “You had
them surrounded. How could you let them escape?”
On the other side of the Atlantic, Niccolò Machiavelli remained
calm and controlled, only the tightening of his jaw muscles
revealing his anger. “You are remarkably well informed.”
“I have my sources,” Dee snapped, his thin lips twisting into an
ugly smile. He knew it would drive Machiavelli crazy knowing there
was a spy in his camp.
“You had them trapped in Ojai, I understand,” Machiavelli
continued softly, “surrounded by an army of the risen dead. And yet
they escaped. How could you let them do that?”
Dee sat back in the soft leather seat of the speeding limousine. His
face was lit only by the screen of his cell phone, its glow touching
his cheekbones and outlining his sharp goatee in cold light, leaving
his eyes in shadow. He hadn’t told Machiavelli that he’d used
necromancy to raise an army of dead humans and beasts. Was this
the Italian’s subtle way of letting him know that he had a spy in
Dee’s camp?
“Where are you now?” Machiavelli asked.
Dee glanced out the window of the limousine, trying to read the
road signs ashing past. “Somewhere on the 101, heading down to
L.A. My jet is fueled and ready to go, and we’re cleared for takeo
as soon as I arrive.”
“I would anticipate having them in custody before you land in
Paris,” Machiavelli said. The line crackled furiously, and he paused
before adding, “I believe they will attempt to contact SaintGermain.”
Dee sat bolt upright. “The Comte de Saint-Germain? He’s back in
Paris? I heard he had died in India looking for the lost city of
Ophir.”
“Obviously not. He has an apartment o the Champs-Elysées and
two homes in the suburbs that we are aware of. They are all under
observation. If Flamel contacts him, we’ll know.”
“Don’t let them escape this time,” Dee barked. “Our masters
would not be pleased.” He snapped the phone shut before
Machiavelli could respond. Then his teeth ashed in a quick smile.
The net was closing tighter and tighter.
“He can be so childish,” Machiavelli muttered in Italian. “Always
has to have the last word.” Standing in the ruins of the co ee shop,
he carefully closed his phone and looked around at the devastation.
It was as if a tornado had ripped through the café. Every item of
furniture was broken, the windows were shattered, and there were
even cracks in the ceiling. The powdery remains of cups and saucers
mixed with spilled co ee beans, scattered tea leaves and broken
pastries on the oor. Machiavelli bent to lift up a fork. It was curled
in a perfect S shape. Tossing it aside, he picked his way through the
debris. Scathach had single-handedly defeated twelve highly trained
and heavily armed RAID o cers. He had been vaguely hoping that
perhaps she had lost some of her martial arts skills in the years since
he had last encountered her, but it seemed that his hope had been in
vain. The Shadow was as deadly as ever. Getting close to Flamel and
the children would be di cult with the Warrior in the picture. In
his long life, Niccolò had encountered her on at least half a dozen
occasions, and he’d barely survived each time. They’d last met in
the frozen ruins of Stalingrad in the winter of 1942. If it hadn’t been
for her, his forces would have taken the city. He’d sworn then that
he would kill her: maybe now was the time to keep that promise.
But how to kill the unkillable? What could stand against the
warrior who had trained all of history’s greatest heroes, who had
fought in every great con ict and whose ghting style was at the
heart of just about every martial art?
Stepping out of the demolished shop, Machiavelli breathed
deeply, clearing his lungs of the bitter, acrid odor of spilled co ee
and sour milk that hung in the air. Dagon pulled open the car door
as he approached, and the Italian saw himself re ected in his
driver’s dark glasses. He paused before stepping into the car and
glanced up at the police closing o the streets, the heavily armed
riot squad gathering in small groups and the plain clothes o cers in
their unmarked cars. The French secret service were his to
command, he could order in the police, and he had access to a
private army of hundreds of men and women who would do his
bidding without question. And yet he knew that none of them could
stand against the Warrior. He came to a decision and looked at
Dagon before climbing into the car.
“Find the Disir.”
Dagon sti ened, showing a rare sign of emotion. “Is that wise?”
he asked.
“It is necessary.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
“The Witch said we should get to the Ei
el Tower by seven, and to
wait there for ten minutes,” Nicholas Flamel said as they hurried
down the narrow alley. “If no one shows up in that time, we are to
return there at eight and again at nine.”
“Who’ll be there?” Sophie asked, jogging to keep up with Flamel’s
long stride. She was exhausted, and the few moments sitting in the
café had only served to emphasize just how tired she was. Her legs
felt leaden and there was a sharp stitch in her left side.
The Alchemyst shrugged. “I don’t know. Whoever the Witch can
contact.”
“That’s assuming there is anyone in Paris willing to risk helping
you,” Scathach said lightly. “You are a dangerous enemy, Nicholas,
and probably an even more dangerous friend. Death and destruction
have always followed closely at your heels.”
Josh glanced sidelong at his sister, knowing she was listening. She
deliberately looked away, but he knew she was uncomfortable with
the conversation.
“Well, if no one turns up,” Flamel said, “then we’ll go to plan B.”
Scathach’s lips curled into a humorless smile. “I didn’t even know
we had a plan A. What’s plan B?”
“I haven’t gotten that far yet.” He grinned. Then the smile faded.
“I just wish Perenelle were here; she’d know what to do.”
“We should split up,” Josh said suddenly.
Flamel, who was in the lead, glanced over his shoulder. “I don’t
think so.”
“We have to,” Josh said rmly. “It makes sense.” But as he said it,
he wondered why the Alchemyst didn’t want them to split up.
“Josh is right,” Sophie said. “The police are looking for the four of
us. I’m sure they have a description by now: two teenagers, a redhaired girl and an old man. It’s not really a common group.”
“Old!” Nicholas sounded vaguely insulted, his French accent
pronounced. “Scatty is two thousand years older than I!”
“Yes. But the di erence is that I don’t look it,” the Warrior teased
with a grin. “Splitting up is a good idea.”
Josh stopped at the mouth of the narrow alley and looked up and
down. Police sirens wailed and warbled all around them.
Sophie stood beside her brother, and while the similarity in their
features was obvious, he suddenly noticed that there were now lines
on her forehead, and her bright blue eyes had become cloudy, the
irises ecked with silver. “Roux said we should turn left for the Rue
de Dunkerque or right for the Metro station.”
“I’m not sure that splitting up…” Flamel hesitated.
Josh spun around. “We have to,” he said decisively. “Sophie and I
will—” he began, but Nicholas shook his head, interrupting him.
“OK. I agree that we should split up. But the police may be
looking for twins….”
“We don’t look too much like twins,” Sophie said quickly. “Josh is
taller than me.”
“And you both have blond hair and bright blue eyes, and neither
of you speaks French,” Scatty added. “Sophie, you come with me.
Two girls together will not attract too much attention. Josh and
Nicholas can go together.”
“I’m not leaving Sophie…,” Josh protested, suddenly panicked at
even the thought of being separated from his sister in this strange
city.
“I’ll be safe with Scatty,” Sophie said with a smile. “You worry too
much. And I know Nicholas will look after you.”
Josh didn’t look too sure. “I’d rather stay with my sister,” Josh
said rmly.
“Let the girls go together; it’s better this way,” Flamel said.
“Safer.”
“Safer?” Josh said incredulously. “Nothing about this is safe.”
“Josh!” Sophie snapped, in the exact tone that their mother
sometimes used. “Enough.” She turned back to the Warrior. “You’ll
need to do something with your hair. If the police have a
description of a red-haired girl in black combats…”
“You’re right.” Scathach’s left hand moved in a quick twisting
gesture and suddenly she was holding a short-bladed knife between
her ngers. She turned to Flamel. “I’m going to need some cloth.”
Without waiting for an answer, she spun him around and lifted his
battered leather jacket. With neat precise moves, she cut a square
from the back of Flamel’s loose black T-shirt. Then she dropped his
leather jacket back in place and twisted the square of fabric into a
bandana, knotting it at the back of her head, covering her
distinctive hair.
“This was my favorite T-shirt,” Flamel muttered. “It’s vintage.” He
shifted his shoulder uncomfortably. “And now my back is cold.”
“Don’t be such a baby. I’ll buy you a new one,” Scatty said. She
caught Sophie’s hand. “Come on. Let’s go. See you at the Tower.”
“Do you know the way?” Nicholas called after her.
Scatty laughed. “I lived here for nearly sixty years, remember? I
was here when the tower was built.”
Flamel nodded. “Well, try not to draw attention to yourself.”
“I’ll try.”
“Sophie…,” Josh began.
“I know,” his sister answered, “be careful.” She turned back and
hugged her brother quickly, their auras crackling. “Everything’s
going to be all right,” she said softly, reading the fear in his eyes.
Josh forced himself to smile, and he nodded. “How do you know?
Magic?”
“I just know,” she said simply. Her eyes blinked brie y silver.
“This is all happening for a reason—remember the prophecy.
Everything’s going to work out ne.”
“I believe you,” he said, even though he didn’t. “Be careful, and
remember,” he added, “no wind.”
Sophie hugged him quickly again. “No wind,” she whispered in
his ear, and then spun away.
Nicholas and Josh watched Scatty and Sophie disappear down the
street, heading toward the Metro station; then they turned in the
opposite direction. Just before they rounded a corner, Josh glanced
back over his shoulder and saw that his sister had done the same.
They both raised their hands and waved good-bye.
Josh waited until she had turned away and then lowered his
hand. Now he was truly alone, in a strange city, thousands of miles
from home, with a man he didn’t trust, a man he had started to fear.
“I thought you said you knew the way,” Sophie said.
“It’s been a while since I was here,” the Warrior admitted, “and
the streets have changed quite a bit.”
“But you said you were here when the Ei el Tower was built.”
She stopped, abruptly realizing what she had just said. “And when
was that exactly?” she asked.
“In 1889. I left a couple of months later.”
Scathach stopped outside the Metro station and asked directions
from a newspaper and magazine seller. The tiny Chinese woman
spoke very little French so Scathach quickly switched to another
language. Sophie abruptly realized that she recognized it—it was
Mandarin. The smiling clerk came out from behind the counter and
pointed down the street, speaking so quickly that Sophie was unable
to pick up individual words, despite the Witch’s knowledge of the
language. It sounded as if she were singing. Scathach thanked her,
then bowed, and the woman matched the bow.
Sophie caught the Warrior’s arm and dragged her away. “So much
for not attracting attention to yourself,” she murmured. “People
were starting to stare.”
“What were they staring at?” Scathach asked, genuinely puzzled.
“Oh, probably just the sight of a white girl speaking uent
Chinese and then bowing,” Sophie said with a grin. “It was quite a
performance.”
“One day everyone will speak Mandarin, and bowing is just good
manners,” Scathach said, setting o down the street, following the
directions the woman had given.
Sophie fell into step beside her. “Where did you learn Chinese?”
she asked.
“In China. Actually, I was speaking Mandarin to the woman, but I
also speak Wu and Cantonese. I’ve spent a lot of time in the Far East
over the centuries. I used to love it there.”
They walked in silence, and then Sophie said, “So how many
languages do you speak?”
Scathach frowned, eyes brie y closing as she considered. “Six or
seven…”
Sophie nodded. “Six or seven; that’s impressive. My mom and dad
want us to learn Spanish, and Dad is teaching us Greek and Latin.
But I’d really like to learn Japanese. I really want to visit Japan,”
she added.
“…six or seven hundred,” Scathach continued, then laughed aloud
at the stunned expression on Sophie’s face. She slipped her arm
through Sophie’s. “Well, I suppose a few of those would be dead
languages, so I’m not sure they count, but remember, I’ve been
around for a very long time.”
“Have you really lived for two and a half thousand years?” Sophie
asked, glancing sidelong at the girl who looked no older than
seventeen. She suddenly grinned: never once had she imagined
herself asking a question like that. It was just another example of
how her life had changed.
“Two thousand, ve hundred and seventeen humani years.”
Scathach smiled a tight-lipped smile that hid her vampire teeth.
“Hekate once abandoned me in a particularly nasty Underworld
Shadowrealm. It took me centuries to nd my way out. And when I
was younger I spent a lot of time in the Shadowrealms of Lyonesse,
Hy-Brasil and Tir na nOg, where time moves at a di erent pace.
Shadowrealm time is not the same as humani time, so I really only
count my time on this earth. And who knows, you may get to nd
out for yourself. You and Josh are unique and powerful and will
grow even more powerful as you master the elemental magics. If
you don’t discover the secret of immortality yourselves, someone
may o er it to you as a gift. Come on, let’s cross.” Catching hold of
Sophie’s hand, she pulled her across a narrow road.
Although it had only just turned six in the morning, tra c was
starting to build. Vans were making deliveries to restaurants, and
the chill morning air was beginning to ll with the mouth-watering
odors of fresh-baked bread and pastries and percolating co ee.
Sophie breathed in the familiar fragrances: croissants and co ee
reminded her that only two days ago she had been serving those in
The Co ee Cup. She blinked away the sting of sudden tears. So
much had happened, so much had changed in the past two days.
“What’s it like to live so long?” she wondered aloud.
“Lonely,” Scatty said quietly.
“How long…how long will you live?” she asked the Warrior
cautiously.
Scatty shrugged and smiled. “Who knows? If I’m careful, exercise
regularly and watch my diet, I could live another couple of
thousand years.” Then her smile faded. “But I’m not invulnerable,
nor am I invincible. I can be killed.” She saw the stricken look on
Sophie’s face and squeezed her arm. “But that’s not going to happen.
Do you know how many humani, immortals, Elders, were-creatures
and assorted monsters have tried to kill me?”
The girl shook her head.
“Well, nor do I, actually. But there have been thousands. Maybe
even tens of thousands. And I’m still here; what does that tell you?”
“That you’re good?”
“Hah! I’m better than good. I am the best. I am the Warrior.”
Scathach stopped and looked into a bookshop window, but Sophie
noticed that when she turned to talk, her bright green eyes were
darting everywhere, taking in their surroundings.
Resisting the temptation to turn around, Sophie lowered her voice
to a whisper. “Are we being followed?” She was surprised to
discover that she wasn’t the least bit afraid; she knew, instinctively,
that nothing could harm her when she was with Scatty.
“No, I don’t think so. Just old habits.” Scathach smiled. “The same
habits that have kept me alive through the centuries.” She moved
away from the shop and Sophie linked her arm with Scatty’s.
“Nicholas called you other names when we met you….” Sophie
frowned, trying to remember how he’d rst introduced Scathach
back in San Francisco only two days ago. “He called you the Warrior
Maid, the Shadow, the Daemon Slayer, the King Maker.”
“Those are just names,” Scathach muttered, sounding
embarrassed.
“They sound like more than names,” Sophie pressed. “They sound
like titles…titles you’ve earned?” she persisted.
“Well, I’ve had lots of names,” Scathach said, “names my friends
gave me, names my foes called me. I was the Warrior Maid rst, and
then I became the Shadow, because of my skills at concealment. I
perfected the rst camou age clothing.”
“You sound like a ninja,” Sophie laughed. Listening to the Warrior
talk, images from the Witch’s memories ickered through her head,
and she knew that Scatty was telling the truth.
“I tried teaching ninjas, but they were never that good, believe
me. I became the Daemon Slayer when I killed Raktabija. And I was
called the King Maker when I helped put Arthur on the throne,” she
added, her voice turning grim. She shook her head quickly. “That
was a mistake. And not my rst either.” She laughed, but it came
out shaky and sounding forced. “I’ve made a lot of mistakes.”
“My dad says you can learn from your mistakes.”
Scatty barked a laugh. “Not me.” She was unable to keep the note
of bitterness from her voice.
“It sounds like you’ve had a tough life,” Sophie said quietly.
“It’s been tough,” the Warrior admitted.
“Has there ever been a…” Sophie paused, hunting for the word.
“Have you ever had a…a boyfriend?”
Scathach looked at her sharply, then turned her face away to stare
into a shop window. For a moment Sophie thought she was
examining the display of shoes, but then she realized that the
Warrior was looking at her own re ection in the glass. The girl
wondered what she saw.
“No,” Scatty nally admitted. “There’s never been anyone close,
anyone special.” She smiled tightly. “The Elders fear and avoid me.
And I try not to get too close to humani. It’s too hard watching them
age and die. That is the curse of immortality: to watch the world
change, to see everything you know wither. Remember that, Sophie,
if someone o ers you the gift of immortality.” She made the last
word sound like a profanity.
“It sounds so lonely,” Sophie said carefully. She never thought
about what it must be like to be immortal before—to live on while
everything familiar changed and everyone you knew left you. They
walked a dozen steps in silence before Scatty spoke again.
“Yes, it’s been lonely,” she admitted, “very lonely.”
“I know about lonely,” Sophie said thoughtfully. “With Mom and
Dad away so much or moving us from city to city, it’s hard to make
friends. It’s almost impossible to keep them. I suppose that’s why
Josh and I have always been so close; we’ve had no one else. My
best friend, Elle, is in New York. We talk on the phone all the time,
and e-mail and chat on IM, but I haven’t seen her since Christmas.
She sends me photos o her cell every time she changes her hair
color, so I know what she looks like,” she added with a smile. “Josh
doesn’t even try to make friends, though.”
“Friends are important,” Scathach agreed, squeezing Sophie’s arm
lightly. “But while friends come and go, you will always have
family.”
“What about your family? The Witch of Endor mentioned your
mother and brother.” Even as she was speaking, images from the
Witch’s memories popped into her mind: a sharp-faced older woman
with bloodred eyes and an ashen-skinned young man with blazing
red hair.
The Warrior shrugged uncomfortably. “We don’t talk much these
days. My parents were Elders, born and raised on the isle of Danu
Talis. When my grandmother Dora left the island to teach the rst
humani, they never forgave her. Like many Elders, they considered
the humani to be little better than beasts. ‘Curiosities,’ my father
called them.” A icker of disgust crossed her face. “Prejudice has
always been with us. My mother and father were even more
shocked when I announced that I too was going to work with the
humani, to ght for them, to protect them when I could.”
“Why?” Sophie asked.
Scatty’s voice grew soft. “It was obvious to me, even then, that the
humani were the future and that the days of the Elder Races were
drawing to a close.” She glanced sidelong at Sophie, who was
surprised to nd Scathach’s eyes bright and glittering, almost as if
there were tears in them. “My parents warned me that if I left home,
I would bring shame on the family name and they would disown
me.” Scatty’s voice trailed into silence.
“But you still left,” Sophie guessed.
The Warrior nodded. “I left. We didn’t speak for a millennium…
until they were in trouble and needed my help,” she added with a
grim smile. “We talk occasionally now, but I’m afraid they still
consider me an embarrassment.”
Sophie squeezed her hand gently. She felt uncomfortable with
what the Warrior had just told her, but she also realized that Scatty
had shared something incredibly personal, something that Sophie
doubted the ancient warrior had ever shared with anyone else. “I’m
sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.”
Scathach squeezed back. “You didn’t upset me. They upset me—
more than two thousand years ago, in fact—and I can still
remember it as if it were yesterday. It’s been a long time since
anyone took the trouble to ask about my life. And believe me, it’s
not been all bad. I’ve had some wonderful adventures,” she said
brightly. “Did I tell you about the time I was the lead singer in an
all-girl band? Sort of goth-punk Spice Girls, but we only did Tori
Amos covers. We were very big in Germany.” She lowered her voice.
“The problem was, we were all vampires….”
Nicholas and Josh turned onto the Rue de Dunkerque and
discovered there were police everywhere. “Keep walking,” Nicholas
said urgently as Josh slowed. “And act natural.”
“Natural,” Josh muttered. “I don’t even know what that means
anymore.”
“Walk quickly, but don’t run,” Nicholas said patiently. “You’re
completely innocent, a student on the way to class or heading to a
summer job. Look at the police, but don’t stare. And if one looks at
you, don’t turn away quickly, just let your eyes drift on to the next
character. That’s what an ordinary citizen would do. If we’re
stopped, I’ll do the talking. We’ll be ne.” He saw the skeptical look
on the boy’s face and his smile widened. “Trust me, I’ve been doing
this for a very long time. The trick is to move as if you have every
right in the world to be here. The police are trained to look for
people who look and act suspicious.”
“Don’t you think we fall into both categories?” Josh asked.
“We look like we belong—and that makes us invisible.”
A group of three policemen didn’t even look in their direction as
they walked past. Josh noticed that each was wearing a di erent
type of uniform, and the men seemed to be arguing.
“Good,” Nicholas said when they were out of earshot.
“What’s good?”
Nicholas inclined his head in the direction they had just come.
“You saw the di erent uniforms?”
The boy nodded.
“France has a complicated police system; Paris even more so.
There is the Police Nationale, the Gendarmerie Nationale and the
Préfecture de Police. Machiavelli has obviously pulled out all the
stops to nd us, but his great failing has always been that he
assumes that other people are as coldly logical as he is. He
obviously thinks that if he puts all these police resources on the
streets, they will do nothing but search for us. But there is a great
deal of rivalry between the various units, and no doubt everyone
wants the credit for capturing the dangerous criminals.”
“Is that what you’ve made us into now?” Josh asked, unable to
disguise the sudden bitterness in his voice. “Two days ago, Sophie
and I were happy, normal people. And now look at us: I barely
know my own sister. We’ve been hunted, attacked by monsters and
now we’re on a police most-wanted list. You’ve made us criminals,
Mr. Flamel. But this isn’t the rst time you’ve been a criminal, is it?”
he snapped. He shoved his hands deep into his pockets and closed
them into sts to prevent them from shaking. He was scared and
angry, and the fear was making him reckless. He’d never talked to
an adult like that before.
“No,” Nicholas said mildly, his pale eyes starting to glitter
dangerously. “I’ve been called a criminal. But only by my enemies.
It seems to me,” he added after a long pause, “that you’ve been
talking to Dr. Dee. And the only place you could have encountered
him was in Ojai, since that was the only time you were out of my
sight.”
Josh didn’t even think about denying it. “I met Dee when the
three of you were busy with the Witch,” he admitted de antly. “He
told me a lot about you.”
“I’m quite sure he did,” Flamel murmured. He waited by the curb
as a dozen students on bicycles and mopeds sped past; then he
strolled across the street. Josh hurried after him.
“He said that you never tell anyone everything.”
“True,” Flamel agreed. “If you tell people everything, you take
away their opportunity to learn.”
“He said you stole the Book of Abraham from the Louvre.”
Nicholas walked for half a dozen steps before nodding. “Well, I
suppose that is true too,” he said, “though it’s not quite so
straightforward as he would like to paint it. Certainly, in the
seventeenth century, the book brie y fell into the hands of Cardinal
Richelieu.”
Josh shook his head. “Who’s that?”
“Have you never read The Three Musketeers?” Flamel asked in
astonishment.
“Nope. Didn’t even see the movie.”
Flamel shook his head. “I’ve got a copy in the shop…,” he began,
and then stopped. When he’d walked away from the bookshop on
Thursday, it had been a trashed ruin. “Richelieu appears in the
books—and the movies, too. He was a real person and was known
as the l’Eminence Rouge—the Red Eminence—so named after his
cardinal’s red robes,” he explained. “He was King Louis XIII’s chief
minister, but in reality he ruled the country. In 1632, Dee managed
to trap Perenelle and me in a part of the old city. His inhuman
agents had surrounded us; there were ghouls in the earth beneath
our feet, Dire-Crows in the air, and Baobhan Sith were tracking us
through the streets.” Nicholas shrugged uncomfortably at the
memory and looked up and around, almost as if he expected to see
the creatures appear again. “I was beginning to think that I was
going to have to destroy the Codex rather than see it fall into Dee’s
hands. Then Perenelle suggested one last option: we could hide the
book in plain sight. It was simple and brilliant!”
“What did you do?” Josh asked, curious now.
Flamel’s teeth ashed in a quick smile. “I sought an audience with
Cardinal Richelieu and presented him with the book.”
“You gave it to him? Did he know what it was?”
“Of course he did. The Book of Abraham is famous, Josh—or
maybe infamous might be a better word. Next time you go online,
look it up.”
“Did the cardinal know who you were?” he asked. Listening to
Flamel talk, it was easy—so easy—to believe everything he said.
And then he remembered how believable Dee had been back in Ojai.
Flamel smiled, remembering. “Cardinal Richelieu believed I was
one of the descendants of Nicholas Flamel. So we presented him
with the Book of Abraham and he put it in his library.” Nicholas
laughed softly as he shook his head. “The safest place in all of
France.”
Josh frowned. “But surely when he looked at it, he saw that the
text moved?”
“Perenelle put a glamour over the book. It’s a particular type of
spell—astonishingly simple, apparently, though I could never master
it—so when the cardinal looked at the book, he saw what he
expected to see: pages of ornate Greek and Aramaic writing.”
“Did Dee catch you?”
“Almost. We escaped down the Seine on a barge. Dee himself
stood on the Pont Neuf with a dozen musketeers and red scores of
shots at us. They all missed; despite the musketeers’ reputation, they
were terrible shots,” he added. “And then, a couple of weeks later,
Perenelle and I returned to Paris, broke into the library and stole
our book back. So I suppose you could say that Dee is right,” he
concluded. “I am a thief.”
Josh walked on in silence; he had no idea what to believe. He
wanted to believe Flamel; working in the bookshop alongside the
man, he’d grown to like and respect him. He wanted to trust him…
and yet he could never forgive him for putting Sophie in danger.
Flamel glanced up and down the street; then, putting his hand on
Josh’s shoulder, he guided him through the stalled tra c and across
the Rue de Dunkerque. “Just in case we’re being followed,” he said
softly, his lips barely moving as they darted through the earlymorning tra c.
Once they were across the road, Josh shrugged o Nicholas’s
hand. “What Dee said made a lot of sense,” he continued.
“I’m sure it did,” Flamel said with a laugh. “Dr. John Dee has
been many things in his long and colorful life, a magus and a
mathematician, an alchemist and spy. But let me tell you, Josh, he
was often a rogue and always a liar. He is a master of lies and halftruths, and he practiced and perfected his craft in that most
dangerous of times, the Elizabethan Age. He knows that the best lie
is one that is wrapped around a core of truth.” He paused, his eyes
ickering over the crowd streaming past them. “What else did he
tell you?”
Josh hesitated for a moment before replying. He was tempted not
to reveal all of his conversation with Dee but then realized that he’d
probably said too much already. “Dee said that you only used the
spells in the Codex for your own good.”
Nicholas nodded. “It’s a fair point. I use the immortality spell to
keep Perenelle and myself alive, that is true. And I use the
philosopher’s stone formulation to turn ordinary metal into gold and
coal into diamonds. There’s no money in bookselling, let me tell
you. But we only make as much wealth as we need—we’re not
greedy.”
Josh hurried ahead of Flamel, then turned around to face him.
“This isn’t about the money,” he snapped. “There is so much else
you could be doing with what’s in that book. Dee said it could be
used to turn this world into a paradise, that it could cure all disease,
even repair the environment.” He found it incomprehensible that
someone would not want to do that.
Flamel stopped in front of Josh. His eyes were almost on a level
with the boy’s. “Yes, there are spells in the Book which would do all
that and much, much more,” he said seriously. “I’ve glimpsed spells
in the Book that could reduce this world to a cinder, others that
would make the deserts bloom. But Josh, even if I could work those
spells—which I cannot—the material in the Book is not mine to
use.” Flamel’s pale eyes bored into Josh’s, and Josh had no doubt
now that the Alchemyst was telling the truth. “Perenelle and I are
only the Guardians of the Book. We are simply holding it in trust
until we can pass it on to its rightful owners. They will know how to
use it.”
“But who are the rightful owners? Where are they?”
Nicholas Flamel put both hands on Josh’s shoulders and stared
into his bright blue eyes. “Well, I was hoping,” he said very softly,
“that it might be you and Sophie. In fact, I’m gambling everything—
my life, Perenelle’s life, the survival of the entire human race—that
you are.”
Standing on the Rue de Dunkerque, looking into the Alchemyst’s
eyes, reading the truth in them, Josh felt the people fade away until
it was as if they were standing alone on the street. He swallowed
hard. “And you believe that?”
“With all my heart,” Flamel said simply. “And everything I have
done, I’ve done to protect you and Sophie and to prepare you for
what is to come. You have to believe me, Josh. You must. I know
you’re angry because of what has happened with Sophie, but I
would never let her come to harm.”
“She could have died or fallen into a coma,” Josh muttered.
Flamel shook his head. “If she were an ordinary human, then yes,
that could have happened. But I know she isn’t ordinary. Nor are
you,” he added.
“Because of our auras?” Josh asked, digging for as much
information as he could get.
“Because you are the twins of legend.”
“And if you’re wrong? Have you thought about that: what
happens if you’re wrong?”
“Then the Dark Elders return.”
“Would that be so bad?” Josh wondered aloud.
Nicholas opened his mouth to reply and quickly pressed his lips
tightly together, biting back whatever he had been about to say, but
not before Josh saw the quick ash of anger that darted across his
face. Finally, Nicholas forced his lips into a smile. Gently, he turned
Josh around so that he was facing the street. “What do you see?” he
asked.
Josh shook his head and shrugged. “Nothing…just a bunch of
people heading o to work. And the police looking for us,” he
added.
Nicholas caught Josh’s shoulder and urged him down the street.
“Don’t think of them as a bunch of people,” Flamel admonished
sharply. “That’s how Dee and his kind see humankind: what they
call the humani. I see individuals, with worries and cares, with
family and loved ones, with friends and colleagues. I see people.”
Josh shook his head. “I don’t understand.”
“Dee and the Elders he serves look at these people and see only
slaves.” He paused, then quietly added, “Or food.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Lying
at on her back, Perenelle Flamel stared at the stained stone
ceiling directly above her head and wondered how many other
prisoners incarcerated on Alcatraz had done the same. How many
others had traced the lines and cracks in the stonework, seen shapes
in the black water marks, imagined pictures in the brown damp?
Almost all of them, she guessed.
And how many had heard voices? she wondered. She was sure
that many of the prisoners had imagined they heard sounds in the
dark—whispered words, hushed phrases—but unless they possessed
Perenelle’s special gift, what they were hearing did not exist outside
their imaginations.
Perenelle heard the voices of the ghosts of Alcatraz.
Listening intently, she could distinguish hundreds of voices,
maybe even thousands. Men and women—children, too—clamoring
and shouting, muttering and crying, calling out for lost loved ones,
repeating their own names again and again, proclaiming their
innocence, cursing their jailers. She frowned; they weren’t what she
was looking for.
Allowing the voices to wash over her, she sorted through the
sounds until she picked up one voice louder than all the rest: strong
and con dent, it cut through the babble, and Perenelle found herself
concentrating on it, focusing on the words, identifying the language.
“This is my island.”
It was a man, speaking Spanish in an old, very formal accent.
Concentrating on the ceiling, Perenelle tuned out the other voices.
“Who are you?” In the chill damp of the cell, her words pu ed from
her mouth like smoke and the myriad ghosts fell silent.
There was a long pause, as if the ghost was surprised to be spoken
to; then he said proudly, “I was the rst European to sail into this bay,
the rst to see this island.”
A shape began to form on the roof directly over her head, the
crude outline of a face appearing in the cracks and spiderwebs, the
black damp and the green moss lending it shape and de nition.
“I called this place la Isla de los Alcatraces.”
“The Isle of the Pelicans,” Perenelle said, her words the merest
whispered breath.
The face in the ceiling solidi ed brie y. It was that of a handsome
man with a long, narrow face and dark eyes. Water droplets formed
and the eyes blinked tears.
“Who are you?” Perenelle asked again.
“I am Juan Manuel de Ayala. I discovered Alcatraz.”
Claws click-clacked on the stones outside the cell, and the smell of
snake and rancid meat wafted down the corridor. Perenelle
remained silent until the scent and the footsteps retreated, and
when she looked at the ceiling again, the face had taken on more
detail, the cracks in the stonework creating the deep wrinkles on the
man’s forehead and around his eyes. A sailor’s face, she realized, the
wrinkles caused by squinting toward distant horizons.
“Why are you here?” she wondered aloud. “Did you die here?”
“No. Not here.” Narrow lips curled in a smile. “I returned because I
fell in love with this place from the very rst moment I set eyes on it. It
was in the year of Our Lord 1775, and I was on the good ship San
Carlos. I even remember the month, August, and the date, the fth.”
Perenelle nodded. She had come across ghosts like de Ayala’s
before. Men and women who had been so in uenced or a ected by
a place that they returned to it again and again in their dreams, and
eventually, when they died, their spirit returned to the same
location to become a Guardian ghost.
“I have watched over this island for generations. I will always watch
over it.”
Perenelle stared up at the face. “It must have saddened you to see
your beautiful island become a place of pain and su ering,” she
probed.
Something twisted in the shape’s mouth, and a single drop of
water fell from its eye to spatter on Perenelle’s cheek.
“Dark days, sad days, but gone now…thankfully, gone.” The ghost’s
lips moved and the words whispered in Perenelle’s head. “There has
not been a human prisoner on Alcatraz since 1963, and the island has
been peaceful since 1971.”
“But now there is a new prisoner on your beloved island,”
Perenelle said evenly. “A prisoner guarded by a warden more
terrible than any this island has ever seen before.”
The face in the ceiling altered, watery eyes narrowing, blinking.
“Who? You?”
“I am held here against my will,” Perenelle said. “I am Alcatraz’s
last prisoner, and I am guarded by no human jailor, but by a
sphinx.”
“No!”
“See for yourself!”
The plaster crackled and damp dust rained down on Perenelle’s
face. When she opened her eyes again, the face in the ceiling had
gone, leaving nothing more than a stain in its wake.
Perenelle allowed herself a smile.
“What amuses you, humani?” The voice was a slithering hiss, and
the language predated the human race.
Swinging herself into a sitting position, Perenelle focused on the
creature standing in the corridor less than six feet from her.
Generations of ancient humans had tried to capture the image of
this creature on cave walls and pots, etching her shape in stone,
capturing her likeness on parchments. And none of them had even
come close to the true horror of the sphinx.
The body was that of a hugely muscled lion, the fur scarred and
cut with the evidence of old wounds. A pair of eagle’s wings curled
out of its shoulders and lay at against its back, the feathers ragged
and lthy. And the small, almost delicate-looking head was that of a
beautiful young woman.
The sphinx stepped up to the bars of the cell, and a black forked
tongue wavered in the air in front of Perenelle. “You have no reason
to smile, humani. I have learned that your husband and the Warrior
are trapped in Paris. Soon they will be prisoners, and this time Dr.
Dee will ensure that they never escape again. I understand the
Elders have given the doctor permission to nally slay the legendary
Alchemyst.”
Perenelle felt something twist in the pit of her stomach. For
generations the Dark Elders had been intent on capturing Nicholas
and Perenelle alive. If she was to believe the sphinx and they were
prepared to kill Nicholas, then everything had changed. “Nicholas
will escape,” she said con dently.
“Not this time.” The lion’s tail of the sphinx whipped excitedly
back and forth, raising plumes of dust. “Paris belongs to the Italian,
Machiavelli, and soon he will be joined by the English Magician.
The Alchemyst cannot evade them both.”
“And the children?” Perenelle asked, eyes narrowing dangerously.
If anything had happened to Nicholas or the children…
The sphinx’s feathers ru ed, raising a musty sour smell. “Dee
believes the humani children are powerful, that they may indeed be
the twins of prophecy and legend. He also believes they can be
convinced that they should serve us, rather than following the
ramblings of a mad old bookseller.” The sphinx took a deep
shuddering breath. “But if they do not do as they are told, then they
too will perish.”
“And what about me?”
The sphinx’s pretty mouth opened to reveal a maw of savage,
needle-pointed teeth. Her long black tongue thrashed wildly in the
air. “You are mine, Sorceress,” she hissed. “The Elders have given
you to me as a gift for my millennia of service to them. When your
husband has been captured and slain, then I will be given
permission to eat your memories. What a feast it will be. I intend to
savor every last morsel. When I am nished with you, you will
remember nothing, not even your own name.” The sphinx started to
laugh, the sound hissing and mocking, bouncing o the bare stone
walls.
And then a cell door slammed.
The sudden sound shocked the sphinx into silence. Her small head
turned, her tongue ickering, tasting the air.
Another door boomed shut.
And then another.
And another.
The sphinx spun away, claws striking sparks o the oor. “Who’s
there?” Her voice screeched o the damp stones.
Abruptly, all the cell doors in the upper gallery rattled open and
closed in quick succession, the sound a rumbling detonation that
vibrated deep into the heart of the prison, causing dust to rain from
the ceiling.
Snarling and hissing, the sphinx bounded away, looking for the
source of the noise.
With an icy smile, Perenelle swung her feet back up on the bench,
lay back and rested her head on her laced ngers. The island of
Alcatraz belonged to Juan Manuel de Ayala, and it looked as though
he was announcing his presence. Perenelle heard cell doors clang,
wood thump and walls rattle and knew what de Ayala had become:
a poltergeist.
A noisy ghost.
She also knew what de Ayala was doing. The sphinx fed o
Perenelle’s magical energies; all the poltergeist had to do was to
keep the creature away from the cell for a little time and Perenelle’s
powers could begin to regenerate. Raising her left hand, the woman
concentrated hard. The tiniest ice white spark danced between her
ngers, then zzled away.
Soon.
Soon.
The Sorceress closed her hand into a st. When her powers had
recovered, she would bring Alcatraz tumbling down around the
sphinx’s ears.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The
beautifully intricate Ei el Tower loomed more than nine
hundred feet over Josh’s head. There was a time when he’d
compiled a list for a school project of the Ten Wonders of the
Modern World. The metal tower had been number two on that list,
and he’d always promised himself that someday he’d get to see it.
And now that he was nally in Paris, he didn’t even look up.
Standing almost directly beneath the center of the tower, he rose
on his toes, turning his head left and right, searching for his twin
among the surprisingly large number of early-morning tourists.
Where was she?
Josh was scared.
No, more than scared—he was terri ed.
The last couple of days had taught him the true meaning of fear.
Prior to the events of Thursday, Josh had only ever really been
afraid of failing a test or being publicly humiliated in class. He had
other fears too, those vague, shivery thoughts that came in the dead
of night, when he found himself lying awake wondering what would
happen if his parents had an accident. Sara and Richard Newman
both held PhD’s in archaeology and paleontology, and while that
wasn’t the most dangerous line of work, their research sometimes
took them into countries in the midst of religious or political
turmoil, or they conducted their digs in areas of the world ravaged
by hurricanes or in earthquake zones or close to active volcanoes.
The sudden movements of the earth’s crust often threw up
extraordinary archaeological nds.
But his deepest, darkest fear was that something would happen to
his sister. Although Sophie was twenty-eight seconds older, he
always thought of her as his baby sister. He was bigger and
stronger, and it was his job to protect her.
And now, in a way, something terrible had happened to his twin.
She had changed in ways he could not even begin to comprehend.
She had become more like Flamel and Scathach and their kind than
like him: she had become more than human.
For the rst time in his life, he felt alone. He was losing his sister.
But there was one way to be her equal again: he had to have his
own powers Awakened.
Josh turned—just as Sophie and Scathach appeared, hurrying
across a broad bridge that led directly to the tower. Relief washed
over him. “They’re here,” he said to Flamel, who was facing the
opposite direction.
“I know,” Nicholas said, his French accent sounding stronger than
usual. “And they’re not alone.”
Josh tore his gaze away from his approaching sister and Scathach.
“What do you mean?”
Nicholas inclined his head slightly and Josh turned. Two tourist
buses had just arrived at the Place Jo re and were disgorging their
passengers. The tourists—Americans, Josh guessed by their clothing
—milled around, chatting and laughing, cameras and videos already
whirring while their guides tried to gather them together. A third
bus, bright yellow, pulled up, spilling dozens of excited Japanese
tourists out on the pavement. Confused, Josh looked at Nicholas: did
he mean the buses?
“In black,” Flamel said enigmatically, pointing by lifting his chin.
Josh turned and spotted the man in black striding toward them,
moving swiftly through the holiday crowd. None of the tourists even
glanced at the stranger weaving his way among them, twisting and
turning like a dancer, taking care to not so much as brush against
them. Josh guessed the man was probably about his own height, but
it was impossible to make out his body shape because he was
wearing a three-quarter-length black leather coat that apped about
him as he walked. The collar was turned up, and his hands were
pushed deep into the pockets. Josh felt his heart sink: now what?
Sophie raced up and punched her brother in the arm. “You got
here,” she said breathlessly. “Any trouble?”
Josh tilted his head toward the approaching man in the leather
coat. “I’m not sure.”
Scathach appeared beside the twins. She wasn’t even breathing
hard, Josh noted. In fact, she wasn’t breathing at all.
“Trouble?” Sophie asked, looking at Scathach.
The Warrior smiled, tight-lipped. “Depends how you de ne
trouble,” she murmured.
“On the contrary,” Nicholas said, smiling broadly. He heaved a
sigh of relief. “It’s a friend. An old friend. A good friend.”
The man in the black coat was closer now, and the twins could
see that he had a small, almost round face, deeply tanned skin and
piercing blue eyes. Thick shoulder-length black hair was swept back
o his high forehead. Mounting the steps, he pulled both hands out
of his pockets and spread his arms wide, silver rings winking on
every nger and on his thumbs, matching the silver studs in both
ears. A broad smile revealed misshapen, slightly yellowed teeth.
“Master,” he said, wrapping both arms around Nicholas and
kissing him quickly on both cheeks. “You have returned.” The man
blinked, eyes moist, and for an instant the pupils winked red. There
was a sudden hint of burnt leaves in the air.
“And you never left,” Nicholas said warmly, holding the man at
arm’s length and examining him critically. “You look well, Francis.
Better than the last time I saw you.” He turned, putting his arm
around the man’s shoulder. “Scathach you know, of course.”
“Who could forget the Shadow?” The blue-eyed man stepped
forward, caught the Warrior’s pale hand in his and brought it to his
lips in an old-fashioned courtly gesture.
Scathach leaned forward and pinched the man’s cheek hard
enough to leave a red mark. “I told you last time; don’t do that to
me.”
“Admit it—you love it.” He grinned. “And this must be Sophie
and Josh. The Witch told me about them,” he added. The man’s
bright blue eyes remained wide and unblinking as he regarded the
two in turn. “The twins of legend,” he murmured, frowning a bit as
he stared hard at them. “You’re sure?”
“I’m sure,” Nicholas said rmly.
The stranger nodded and bowed slightly. “The twins of legend,”
he repeated. “I am honored to make your acquaintance. Allow me to
introduce myself. I am le Comte de Saint-Germain,” he announced
dramatically, and then paused, almost as if he expected them to
know the name.
The twins looked at him blankly, identical expressions on their
faces.
“But you must call me Francis; all my friends do.”
“My favorite student,” Nicholas added fondly. “Certainly my best
student. We’ve known one another a long time.”
“How long?” Sophie asked automatically, although even as she
was asking the question, the answer popped into her head.
“For about three hundred years or so,” Nicholas said. “Francis
trained to be an alchemist with me. He quickly surpassed me,” he
added. “He specialized in creating jewels.”
“I learned everything I know about alchemy from the master:
Nicholas Flamel,” Saint-Germain said quickly.
“In the eighteenth century, Francis was also an accomplished
singer and musician. And what are you this century?” Nicholas
asked.
“Well, I have to say I am disappointed you’ve not heard of me,”
the man said in accentless English. “You’ve obviously not been
keeping up with the charts. I’ve had ve number-one hits in the
States and three in Germany, and I won an MTV Europe Best
Newcomer award.”
“Best Newcomer?” Nicholas grinned, emphasizing the word new.
“You!”
“You know that I have always been a musician, but in this
century, Nicholas, I’m a rock star!” he said proudly. “I am
Germain!” He looked at the twins as he spoke, eyebrows raised,
nodding, waiting for them to react to the announcement.
They shook their heads simultaneously. “Never heard of you,”
Josh said bluntly.
Saint-Germain shrugged and looked disappointed. He brought the
collar of his coat up around his ears. “Five number-one hits,” he
muttered.
“What type of music?” Sophie asked, biting the inside of her
cheek to keep herself from smiling at the crestfallen expression on
the man’s face.
“Dance…electro…techno…that sort of thing.”
Sophie and Josh shook their heads again. “Don’t listen to it,” Josh
answered, but Saint-Germain was no longer looking at the twins. His
head had swiveled toward the Avenue Gustave Ei el, to where a
long sleek black Mercedes had pulled up to the curb. Three plain
black vans drew up behind it.
“Machiavelli!” Flamel snapped angrily. “Francis, you were
followed.”
“But how…,” the count began.
“Remember, it’s Niccolò we’re dealing with.” Flamel looked
around quickly, assessing the situation. “Scathach, take the twins,
go with Saint-Germain. Protect them with your lives.”
“We can stay, I can ght,” Scathach said.
Nicholas shook his head. He waved at the gathered tourists. “Too
many people. Someone would be killed. But Machiavelli is not Dee;
he’s subtle. He’ll not use magic—not if he can help it. We can use
that to our advantage. If we split up, he will follow me; I’m the one
he wants. And not just me.” Reaching under his shirt, he pulled out
a small square cloth bag.
“What’s that?” Saint-Germain asked.
Nicholas answered Saint-Germain but looked at the twins as he
spoke. “Once it held the entire Codex, but now Dee has that. Josh
managed to tear two pages from the back of the book. They’re in
here. The pages contain the Final Summoning,” he added
signi cantly. “Dee and his Elders need these pages.” He smoothed
the cloth and then suddenly handed the bag over to Josh. “Keep
these safe,” he said.
“Me?” Josh looked from the bag to Flamel’s face but made no
move to take it from the man’s hand.
“Yes, you. Take it,” Flamel commanded.
Reluctantly, the boy reached for the bag, the cloth crackling and
sparking as he shoved it under his T-shirt. “Why me?” he asked. He
looked quickly at his sister. “I mean, Scathach or Saint-Germain
would be better….”
“You rescued the pages, Josh. It’s only right that you should guard
them.” Flamel gripped Josh’s shoulders and looked into the boy’s
eyes. “I know I can trust you to take care of them.”
Josh pressed his hand against his stomach, feeling the cloth
against his skin. When Josh and Sophie had started working in the
bookshop and the co ee shop respectively, their father had used an
almost identical phrase when talking about Sophie. “I know I can
trust you to take care of her.” In that moment, he’d felt both proud
and a little bit frightened. Right now, he just felt frightened.
The Mercedes driver’s door opened and a man in a black suit
climbed out, mirrored shades re ecting the early-morning sky,
making it look as if he had two holes in his face.
“Dagon,” Scathach snarled, sharp teeth suddenly visible, and
reached for a weapon in her bag, but Nicholas caught her arm and
squeezed it.
“This is not the time.”
Dagon opened the rear door and Niccolò Machiavelli emerged.
Although he was at least a hundred yards away, they could clearly
see the look of triumph on his face.
Behind the Mercedes, the vans’ doors slid open simultaneously
and heavily armed and armored police jumped out and started
jogging toward the tower. A tourist screamed, and the dozens of
people standing around the base of the Ei el Tower immediately
swiveled their cameras in that direction.
“Time to go,” Flamel said quickly. “You head across the river, I’ll
lead them in the other direction. Saint-Germain, my friend,”
Nicholas whispered softly, “we’re going to need a distraction to help
us escape. Something spectacular.”
“Where will you go?” Saint-Germain demanded.
Flamel smiled. “This was my city long before Machiavelli came
here. Perhaps some of my old haunts still remain.”
“It has changed a lot since you were last here,” Saint-Germain
warned. As he was speaking, he took Flamel’s left hand in both of
his, turned it over and pressed the ball of his right thumb into the
center of the Alchemyst’s palm. Sophie and Josh were close enough
to see that when he took his hand away, there was the impression of
a tiny black-winged butter y on Flamel’s skin. “It will lead you back
to me,” Saint-Germain said mysteriously. “Now, you wanted
something spectacular.” He grinned and pushed back the sleeves of
his leather coat to reveal bare arms. His skin was covered in dozens
of tiny tattooed butter ies that wrapped around his wrists like
bracelets, then coiled up around his arm to the crook of his elbow.
Lacing the ngers of his hands together, he twisted his wrists and
bent them outward with an audible crack, like a pianist preparing to
play. “Did you ever see what Paris did to celebrate the millennium?”
“The millennium?” The twins looked at him blankly.
“The millennium. The year 2000. Although the millennium should
have been celebrated in 2001,” he added.
“Oh, that millennium,” Sophie said. She looked at her brother,
confused. What did the millennium have to do with anything?
“Our parents took us to Times Square,” Josh said. “Why?”
“Then you missed something truly spectacular here in Paris. Next
time you’re online, check out the pictures.” Saint-Germain rubbed
his arms briskly and then, standing below the huge metal tower, he
raised his hands high and suddenly the scent of burnt leaves lled
the air.
Both Sophie and Josh watched the butter y tattoos spasm, then
shiver and pulse on Saint-Germain’s arms. Gossamer wings trembled
and vibrated, antennas twitched…and then the tattoos lifted away
from the man’s esh.
An endless stream of tiny red and white butter ies peeled o
Saint-Germain’s pale skin and curled into the cool Parisian air. They
circled upward, spinning away from the small man, a seemingly
never-ending spiral of crimson and ashen dots. The butter ies curled
around the struts and spars, the rivets and bolts of the metal tower,
covering it in an iridescent, shimmering skin.
“Ignis,” Saint-Germain whispered, throwing back his head and
clapping his hands together.
And the Tower exploded into a cracking, sparking fountain of
light.
He laughed delightedly at the twins’ expressions and said, “Know
me: I am le Comte de Saint-Germain. I am the Master of Fire!”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“Fireworks,” Sophie breathed in awe.
The Ei el Tower lit up with a spectacular reworks display. Blue
and gold traceries of light raced almost one thousand feet to the
mast at the very top of the tower, where they blossomed into
fountains of blue globes. Sparking, hissing, zzing rainbow-colored
threads wove through the struts, bursting and snapping. The tower’s
thick rivets popped with white re, while the arching spars rained
cool ice blue droplets into the street far below.
The e ect was dramatic, but it became truly spectacular when
Saint-Germain snapped the ngers of both hands and the entire
Ei el Tower turned bronze, then gold, then green and nally blue in
the morning sun. Rattling traceries of light darted up and down the
metal. Catherine wheels and rockets, fountains and Roman candles,
ying spinners and snakes spun o from every oor. The mast at the
very tip of the tower fountained red, white and blue sparks that
cascaded like bubbling liquid down through the heart of the tower.
The crowd was entranced.
People gathered at the base, oohing and aahing, applauding at
each new explosion, their cameras clicking furiously. Motorists
stopped on the roads and climbed out of their cars, holding camera
phones to snap the stunning and beautiful images. Within moments,
the dozens of people around the tower had grown to a hundred and
then, within a matter of minutes, had doubled and then doubled
again as people came running from shops and homes to observe the
extraordinary display.
And Nicholas Flamel and his companions were swallowed up by
the crowd.
In a rare display of emotion, Machiavelli hit the side of the car so
hard it hurt his hand. He watched the growing crowd of people and
knew his men would not be able to get through in time to prevent
Flamel and the others from escaping.
The air sizzled and spat with reworks; rockets went whizzing
high into the air, where they exploded into spheres and streamers of
light. Firecrackers and sparklers rattled around each of the tower’s
four giant metal legs.
“Sir!” A young police captain stopped before Machiavelli and
saluted. “What are your orders? We can push through the crowd,
but there may be injuries.”
Machiavelli shook his head. “No, do not do that.” Dee would do
it, he knew. Dee would not hesitate to level the entire tower, killing
hundreds just to capture Flamel. Drawing himself up to his full
height, Niccolò could just about make out the shape of the leatherclad Saint-Germain and the lethal Scathach herding the young man
and woman away. They melted into the now-huge crowd and
disappeared. But surprisingly, shockingly, when he looked back,
Nicholas Flamel remained where he had rst seen him, standing
almost directly beneath the center of the tower.
Flamel raised his right hand in a mocking salute, the silver-link
bracelet he wore re ecting the light.
Machiavelli caught the police captain’s shoulder, spun him around
with surprising strength and pointed with his long narrow ngers.
“That one! If you do nothing else today, get me that one. And I want
him alive and unharmed!”
As they both watched, Flamel turned and hurried toward the west
leg of the Ei el Tower, toward the Pont d’Iéna, but whereas the
others had run across the bridge, Flamel turned to the right, onto
the Quai Branly.
“Yes, sir!” The captain struck out at an angle, determined to cut
o Flamel. “Follow me,” he shouted, and his troops spread out in a
line behind him.
Dagon stepped up to Machiavelli. “Do you want me to track SaintGermain and the Shadow?” His head turned, nostrils aring with a
wet sticky sound. “I can follow their scent.”
Niccolò Machiavelli shook his head slightly as he climbed back
into the car. “Get us out of here before the press turns up. SaintGermain is nothing if not predictable. He’s undoubtedly heading to
one of his homes, and we have them all under observation. All we
can do is hope we capture Flamel.”
Dagon’s face was impassive as he slammed the car door closed
behind his master. He turned in the direction Flamel had run and
saw him disappear amongst the crowd. The police were close
behind, moving fast even though they were weighed down by their
body armor and weapons. But Dagon knew that over the centuries
Flamel had escaped both human and inhuman hunters, had slipped
past creatures that had been myth before the evolution of the apes
and had outwitted monsters that had no right to exist outside of
nightmares. Dagon doubted that the police would catch the
Alchemyst.
Then he cocked his head, nostrils aring again, catching the scent
of Scathach. The Shadow had returned!
The enmity between Dagon and the Shadow went back millennia.
He was the last of his kind…because she had destroyed his entire
race one terrible night two thousand years ago. Behind his
wraparound mirrored sunglasses, the creature’s eyes lled with
sticky colorless tears, and he swore that, no matter what happened
between Machiavelli and Flamel, this time he would have his
revenge on the Shadow.
“Walk, don’t run,” Scathach commanded. “Saint-Germain, take
the lead, Sophie and Josh in the middle, I’ll take up the rear.”
Scatty’s tone left no room for argument.
They darted across the bridge and turned right onto the Avenue
de New York. A series of lefts and rights brought them to a narrow
side street. It was still early, and the street was entirely in shadow.
The temperature dropped dramatically, and the twins immediately
noticed that the ngers of Saint-Germain’s left hand, which were
gently brushing against the dirty wall, left tiny sparks in their wake.
Sophie frowned, sorting through her memories—the Witch of
Endor’s memories, she reminded herself—of the Comte de SaintGermain. She caught her brother looking sidelong at her and raised
her eyebrows in a silent question.
“Your eyes turned silver. Just for a second,” he said.
Sophie glanced over her shoulder to where Scathach was trailing
behind and then looked at the man in the leather coat. They were
both out of earshot, she thought. “I was trying to remember what I
knew….” She shook her head. “What the Witch knew about SaintGermain.”
“What about him?” Josh said. “I’ve never heard of him.”
“He is a famous French alchemist,” she whispered, “and along
with Flamel, probably one of the most mysterious men in history.”
“Is he human?” Josh wondered aloud, but Sophie pressed on.
“He’s not an Elder or Next Generation. He’s human. Even the
Witch of Endor didn’t know a lot about him. She met him for the
rst time in London in 1740. She knew immediately that he was an
immortal human, and he claimed he’d discovered the secret of
immortality when he was studying with Nicholas Flamel.” She
shook her head quickly. “But I don’t think the Witch quite believed
that. He told her that while traveling in Tibet he had perfected a
formula for immortality that didn’t need to be renewed each month.
But when she asked him for a copy, he told her he’d lost it.
Apparently, he spoke every language in the world uently, was a
brilliant musician and had a reputation as a jewel maker.” Her eyes
blinked silver again as the memories faded. “And the Witch didn’t
like or trust him.”
“Then neither should we,” Josh whispered urgently.
Sophie nodded, agreeing. “But Nicholas likes him, and obviously
trusts him,” she said slowly. “Why is that?”
Josh’s expression was grim. “I’ve told you before: I don’t think we
should be trusting Nicholas Flamel, either. Something’s not right
about him—I’m convinced.”
Sophie bit back her response and looked away. She knew why
Josh was angry with the Alchemyst; her brother was envious of her
Awakened powers, and she knew he blamed Flamel for putting her
in danger. But that didn’t mean he was wrong.
The narrow side street led onto a broad tree-lined avenue.
Although it was still too early for rush-hour, the spectacular light
and reworks display around the Ei el Tower had brought any
tra c in the area to a standstill. The air was lled with the blare of
car horns and the whooping of police sirens. A re truck was caught
in the tra c jam, its wails rising and falling, though there was
nowhere for it to go. Saint-Germain strode across the road, looking
neither left nor right as he dug in his pocket for a slender black cell
phone. He ipped it open and hit speed dial. Then he spoke in
rapid- re French.
“Are you calling for help?” Sophie asked when he had closed the
phone.
Saint-Germain shook his head. “Ordering breakfast. I’m
famished.” He jerked his thumb back in the direction of the Ei el
Tower, which was still erupting reworks. “Creating something like
that—if you’ll pardon the pun—burns a lot of calories.”
Sophie nodded, understanding now why her stomach had been
rumbling with hunger since she’d created the fog.
Scathach caught up with the twins and fell into step alongside
Sophie as they hurried past the American Cathedral. “I don’t think
we’re being followed,” she said, sounding surprised. “I would have
expected Machiavelli to send someone after us.” She rubbed the
edge of her thumb against her bottom lip, chewing on her ragged
nails.
Sophie automatically brushed Scatty’s hand away from her
mouth. “Don’t bite your nails.”
Scathach blinked at her in surprise, then self-consciously put her
hand down. “An old habit,” she muttered. “A very old habit.”
“What happens now?” Josh asked.
“We get o the streets and rest,” Scathach said grimly. “Have we
much farther to go?” she called out to Saint-Germain, who was still
in the lead.
“A few minutes,” he said, without turning around. “One of my
smaller town houses is nearby.”
Scathach nodded. “Once we get there, we’ll lie low until Nicholas
returns, get some rest and a change of clothes.” She wrinkled her
nose in Josh’s direction. “And a shower, too,” she added
signi cantly.
Color touched the young man’s cheeks. “Are you saying I smell?”
he asked, both embarrassed and angry.
Sophie laid her hand on her brother’s arm before the Warrior
could answer. “Just a little,” she said. “We probably all do.”
Josh looked away, clearly upset, then glanced back at Scathach. “I
don’t suppose you smell,” he snapped.
“No,” she said. “No sweat glands. The Vampire are a much more
evolved species than the humani.”
They continued in silence until the Rue Pierre Charron opened out
onto the broad Champs-Elysées, Paris’s main thoroughfare. To their
left they could see the Arc de Triomphe. Tra c on both sides of the
street was stopped, with drivers standing alongside their cars
chatting animatedly, gesticulating wildly. All eyes were turned to
the rippling reworks still exploding over the Ei el Tower.
“How do you think this will be reported on the news?” Josh said.
“The Ei el Tower suddenly erupting with reworks.”
Saint-Germain glanced over his shoulder. “Truth is, it’s not that
out of the ordinary. The tower is often lit up with reworks—on
New Year’s Eve and Bastille Day, for example. I would imagine it
will be reported that next month’s Bastille Day reworks went o
prematurely.” He stopped and looked around, hearing someone call
out his name.
“Don’t look…,” Scatty began, but it was too late: the twins and
Saint-Germain had turned in the direction of the shouts.
“Germain…”
“Hey, Germain…”
Two young men who were standing next to their unmoving car
were pointing at Saint-Germain and shouting his name.
Both men were dressed in jeans and T-shirts and looked alike,
with slicked-backed hair and overlarge sunglasses. Abandoning their
car in the middle of the road, they wove through the stalled tra c,
both holding what Josh thought looked like long, narrow blades in
their hands.
“Francis,” Scatty warned urgently, her hands locking into sts.
She moved forward just as the rst man reached Saint-Germain, “let
me….”
“Gentlemen.” Saint-Germain turned toward the two men, smiling
widely, though the twins, who were behind him, saw yellow-blue
ames dance across his ngertips.
“Great concert last night,” the rst man said breathlessly,
speaking English with a strong German accent. He pushed back his
sunglasses and held out his right hand, and Josh realized that what
he’d rst imagined was a knife was nothing more than a fat pen.
“Any chance I could get an autograph?”
The ames on Saint-Germain’s ngers winked out. “Of course,” he
said, smiling delightedly, reaching for the pen and pulling a spiralbound notebook from an inner pocket. “Did you get the new CD?”
he asked, ipping open the notebook.
The second man, wearing identical glasses, plucked a black and
red iPod from the back pocket of his jeans. “Got it on iTunes
yesterday,” he answered in the same distinctive accent.
“And don’t forget to check out the DVD of the show when it
comes out in a month’s time. Got some great extras, a couple of
remixes and a great mashup,” Saint-Germain added as he signed his
name with an elaborate ourish and pulled the pages from the
notebook. “I’d love to chat, guys, but I’m in a rush. Thanks for
stopping, I appreciate it.”
They shook hands quickly and the two men hurried back to their
car, high- ving one another as they compared their autographs.
Smiling broadly, Saint-Germain took a deep breath and turned to
look at the twins. “Told you I was famous.”
“And you’ll soon be dead famous if we don’t get o this street,”
Scathach reminded him. “Or maybe just dead.”
“We’re just here,” Saint-Germain muttered. He led them across
the Champs-Elysées and down a side street, then ducked into a
narrow, high-walled cobbled lane that snaked around the backs of
the buildings. Stopping halfway down the alley, he slid a key into an
anonymous-looking door set ush with the wall. The wooden door
was chipped and scarred, foul green paint peeling in long strips to
reveal blistered wood beneath; the bottom was splintered and
cracked from rubbing the ground.
“May I suggest a new gate?” Scathach said.
“This is the new gate.” Saint-Germain smiled quickly. “The wood
is just a disguise. Beneath it is a slab of solid steel with a ve-point
dead bolt.” He stepped back and allowed the twins to precede him
through the entrance. “Enter freely and of your own will,” he said
formally.
The twins stepped forward and were vaguely disappointed with
what they found. Behind the gate was a small courtyard and a fourstory building. To the left and right, tall spike-tipped walls
separated the house from its neighbors. Sophie and Josh had been
expecting something exotic or even dramatic, but all they saw was
an unkempt leaf-strewn rear garden. A huge and hideous stone
birdbath was set in the center of the courtyard, but instead of water,
the bowl was lled with dead leaves and the remains of a bird’s
nest. All the plants in the pots and baskets surrounding the fountain
at its center were dead or dying.
“The gardener’s away,” Saint-Germain said without a trace of
embarrassment, “and I’m really not very good with plants.” He held
up his right hand and spread his ngers. Each one popped alight
with a di erent-colored ame. He grinned and the colored ames
painted his face in ickering shadows. “Not my specialty.”
Scathach paused by the gate, looking up and down the alleyway,
head tilted to one side, listening. When she was satis ed that they
were not being followed, she closed the door and turned the key in
the lock. The dead bolts slid into place with a satisfying thunk.
“How will Flamel nd us?” Josh asked. Even though he was wary
and fearful of the Alchemyst, he felt even more nervous around
Saint-Germain.
“I gave him a little guide,” Saint-Germain explained.
“Will he be all right?” Sophie asked Scathach.
“I’m sure he will be,” she said, though the tone of her voice and
the look in her eyes betrayed her fears. She was turning away from
the gate when she sti ened, jaw unhinging, vampire teeth suddenly
—terrifyingly—visible.
The door to the rear of the house had opened suddenly, and a
gure stepped out into the courtyard. Abruptly, Sophie’s aura blazed
silver-white, the shock sending her spinning back into her brother,
bringing his aura to crackling life as well, outlining his body in gold
and bronze. And as the twins held on to one another, blinded by the
silver and gold light of their own auras, they heard Scathach
scream. It was the most terrifying sound they had ever heard.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“Stop!”
Nicholas Flamel kept running, turning to the right, racing down
the Quai Branly.
“Stop or I shoot!”
Flamel knew the police wouldn’t shoot—they couldn’t.
Machiavelli would not want him harmed.
The slap of leather on concrete and the jingle of weapons were
close now, and he could hear his pursuer’s even breathing.
Nicholas’s own breathing was beginning to come in great heaving
gasps, and there was a stitch in his side just below his ribs. The
recipe in the Codex kept him alive and healthy, but there was no
way he could outrun this highly trained and obviously t police
o cer.
Nicholas Flamel stopped so suddenly that the police captain
almost ran right into him. Standing still, the Alchemyst turned his
head to look back over his left shoulder. The policeman had drawn
an ugly black pistol and was holding it in a steady two-handed grip.
“Don’t move. Raise your hands.”
Nicholas turned slowly to face the police o cer. “Well, make
your mind up, what’s it to be?” he asked mildly.
Behind his protective goggles, the man blinked at him in surprise.
“Do I not move? Or do I raise my hands?”
The police o cer gestured with the barrel of the gun and Flamel
raised his hands. Five more RAID o cers came running up. They
trained a variety of weapons on the Alchemyst as they spread out in
a line alongside their captain. With his hands still in the air,
Nicholas turned his head slowly to look at each of them in turn. In
their black uniforms, helmets, balaclavas and goggles, they looked
like insects.
“Get down on the ground. Do it, do it now!” the captain
commanded. “Keep your hands in the air.”
Nicholas slowly folded to his knees.
“Now lie down! Facedown!”
The Alchemyst lay at on the Parisian street, his cheek against the
cool, gritty pavement.
“Stretch your arms wide.”
Nicholas stretched out his arms. The police o cers shifted
position, quickly encircling him, but they still kept their distance.
“We have him.” The police captain spoke into the microphone
positioned in front of his lips. “No, sir. We’ve not touched him. Yes,
sir. Immediately.”
Nicholas wished Perenelle were with him now; she would know
what to do. But if the Sorceress had been with him, then he would
not be in this mess in the rst place. Perenelle was a ghter. How
often had she urged him to stop running, to use half a millennium of
his alchemical knowledge and her sorcery and magic and take the
ght to the Dark Elders? She’d wanted him to gather the immortals,
the Elders and the Next Generation who supported the humani and
wage a war against the Dark Elders, Dee and his kind. But he
couldn’t; he’d been waiting all his life for the twins foretold in the
Codex.
The two that are one, the one that is all.”
There had never been any doubt in his mind that he would
discover the twins. The prophecies in the Codex were never wrong,
but like everything else in the book, the words of Abraham were
never clear and were written in a variety of archaic or forgotten
languages.
he two that are one, the one that is all.
here will come a time when the Book is taken
nd the Queen’s man is allied with the Crow.
hen the Elder will step out of the Shadows
nd the immortal must train the mortal. The two
hat are one must become the one that is all.
And Nicholas knew—beyond a shadow of a doubt—that he was
the immortal mentioned in the prophecy: the hook-handed man had
told him.
Half a millennium ago, Nicholas and Perenelle Flamel had
traveled throughout Europe in an attempt to understand the
enigmatic metal-bound book. Finally, in Spain, they had met a
mysterious one-handed man who had helped translate portions of
the ever-changing text. The one-handed man had revealed that the
secret of Life Eternal always appeared on page seven of the Codex at
the full moon, while the recipe for transmutation, for changing the
composition of any material, appeared only on page fourteen. When
the one-handed man had translated the rst prophecy, he had
looked at Nicholas with coal black eyes and reached over to tap the
Frenchman’s chest with the hook that took the place of his left hand.
“Alchemyst, here is your destiny,” he had whispered.
The mysterious words suggested that Flamel would one day nd
the twins…the prophecy hadn’t revealed that he’d end up lying
spread-eagled on a dirty Parisian street surrounded by armed and
very nervous police o cers.
Flamel closed his eyes and breathed deeply. Pressing his
outspread ngers against the stones, he reluctantly drew upon his
aura. The merest gossamer thread of green-gold energy seeped o
his ngertips and soaked into the stones. Nicholas felt the tendril of
his auric energy curl through the pavement, then into the earth
beneath. The hair-thin thread snaked through the soil, looking…
searching…and then, nally, nding what he was looking for: a
seething mass of teeming life. Then it was a simple matter of using
transmutation, the basic principal of alchemy, to create glucose and
fructose and bind them together with a glycosidic bond to create
sucrose. The life stirred, shifted, owed toward the sweetness.
The police captain raised his voice. “Cu him. Search him.”
Nicholas heard the shu ing approach of two police o cers, one
on either side. Directly in front of his face, he saw highly polished
thick-soled black leather boots.
And then, magni ed because of its closeness to his face, Nicholas
spotted the ant. It popped up out of a crack in the pavement,
antennae waving. It was followed by a second, and a third.
The Alchemyst pressed his thumbs against the third nger of each
hand and snapped his ngers. Minuscule sparkles of mint-smelling
green-gold spun into the air, coating the six police o cers in
in nitesimal particles of power.
Then he transmuted the particles into sugar.
Abruptly, the pavement around Flamel turned black. A mass of
tiny ants erupted from below the street, surging up out of the cracks
in the stone. Like a thick glutinous syrup, they spread across the
pavement, owing over boots before suddenly curling up around the
legs of the police o cers, coating them in a heaving swarm of
insects. For a moment the men were shocked into immobility. Their
suits and gloves protected them for another instant, and then one
man twitched, and another and another as the ants found the tiniest
of openings in the men’s suits and darted inside, legs tickling, jaws
nipping. The men began jerking, twisting, turning, slapping at
themselves, throwing down their weapons, pulling o their gloves,
tugging at their helmets, tossing aside their goggles and balaclavas
as thousands of ants crawled over their bodies.
The police captain watched as their prisoner—who was
completely untouched by the heaving blanket of ants—sat up and
fastidiously dusted himself o before rising to his feet. The captain
tried to point his gun at the man, but ants were clawing at his
wrists, tickling the palms of his hands, nipping his esh, and he
couldn’t hold the weapon steady. He wanted to order the man to sit
down, but there were ants crawling across his lips, and he knew if
he opened his mouth they would dart inside. Reaching up, brushing
his helmet o his head, he jerked o his balaclava and ung it to
the ground, arching his back as insects crawled along his spine. He
ran his hand across his head and felt it dislodge at least a dozen
ants. They fell across his face and he squeezed his eyes shut. When
he opened them again, the prisoner was strolling towards the Pont
de l’Alma train station, hands in his pockets, looking as if he hadn’t
a care in the world.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Josh forced his eyes open. Black spots danced in front of them, and
when he raised his hand to his face, he could see the ghost of his
own golden aura still visible around his esh. Reaching out, he
found his sister’s hand and caught it. She squeezed gently, and he
turned to nd her blinking her eyes open.
“What happened?” he mumbled, too shocked and numb to even
be scared.
Sophie shook her head. “It was like an explosion….”
“I heard Scathach scream,” he added.
“And I thought I saw someone coming out of the house…,” she
added.
They both turned back to the town house. Scathach was at the
door, her arms wrapped around a young woman, holding her
tightly, swinging her around in a circle. Both women were laughing
and squealing with delight, shouting at one another in rapid- re
French. “I guess they know each other,” Josh said as he helped his
sister to her feet.
The twins turned to look at the Comte de Saint-Germain, who was
standing to one side, arms folded across his chest, smiling
delightedly. “They’re old friends,” he explained. “They’ve not met in
a long time…a very long time.” Saint-Germain coughed. “Joan,” he
said politely.
The two women broke apart and the woman he’d called Joan
turned to look at Saint-Germain, her head tilted at a quizzical angle.
It was impossible to guess her age. Dressed in jeans and a white Tshirt, she was Sophie’s height, almost unnaturally slender, and her
deeply tanned and awless skin emphasized huge gray eyes. Her
auburn hair was cut in a short boyish style. There were tears on her
cheeks that she brushed away with a quick movement of her palm.
“Francis?” she asked.
“And these are our visitors.”
Holding Scathach’s hand, the young woman stepped closer to
Sophie. As the woman approached, Sophie felt a sudden pressure in
the air between them, as if some invisible force was pushing her
back, and then, abruptly, her aura ared silver around her and the
air was lled with the sweet aroma of vanilla. Josh grabbed his
sister’s arm and his own aura crackled alight, adding the scent of
oranges to the air.
“Sophie…Josh…,” Saint-Germain began. The rich, sweet aroma of
lavender lled the courtyard as a hissing silver aura grew around
the short-haired young woman. It hardened and solidi ed,
becoming metallic and re ective, molding itself into a breastplate
and greaves, gloves and boots, before nally solidifying into a
complete medieval suit of armor. “I would like to introduce my
wife, Joan…”
“Your wife!” Scatty squealed, shocked.
“…whom you—and history—know as Joan of Arc.”
Breakfast had been laid out on a long polished wooden table in
the kitchen. The air was rich with the odor of newly baked bread
and brewing co ee. Plates were piled high with fresh fruit, pancakes
and scones, while sausages and eggs sizzled in a pan on the oldfashioned iron range.
Josh’s stomach started rumbling the moment he stepped into the
room and saw the food. His mouth lled with saliva, reminding him
just how long it had been since he’d last eaten. He’d only managed a
couple of sips of the hot chocolate at the café earlier before the
police arrived.
“Eat, eat,” Saint-Germain said, grabbing a plate in one hand and a
thick croissant in the other. He bit into the pastry, spilling waferthin akes onto the tiled oor. “You must be famished.”
Sophie leaned in close to her brother. “Could you get me
something to eat? I want to talk to Joan. I need to ask her
something.”
Josh glanced quickly at the young-looking woman who was
pulling cups from the dishwasher. Her short haircut made it
impossible to guess her age. “Do you really think she’s Joan of Arc?”
Sophie squeezed her brother’s arm. “After all we’ve seen, what do
you think?” She nodded toward the table. “I just want fruit and
cereal.”
“No sausage, no eggs?” he asked, surprised. His sister was the
only person he knew who could eat more sausages than he could.
“No.” She frowned, blue eyes clouding. “It’s funny, but even the
thought of eating meat is making me feel sick.” She grabbed a scone
and turned away before he could comment, and approached Joan,
who was pouring co ee into a tall glass cup. Sophie’s nostrils ared.
“Hawaiian Kona co ee?” she asked.
Joan’s gray eyes blinked in surprise and she inclined her head.
“I’m impressed.”
Sophie grinned and shrugged. “I worked in a co ee shop. I’d
know the smell of Kona anywhere.”
“I fell in love with it when we were in Hawaii,” Joan said. She
spoke English with the merest hint of an American accent. “I keep it
for a special treat.”
“I love the smell; hate the taste. Too bitter.”
Joan sipped a little more co ee. “I’ll bet you didn’t come here to
talk about co ee?”
Sophie shook her head. “No, I didn’t. I just…” She stopped. She
had just met this woman, yet she was about to ask her an incredibly
personal question. “Can I ask you something?” she said quickly.
“Anything,” Joan said sincerely, and Sophie believed her. She
took a deep breath and her words tumbled out in a rush.
“Scathach once told me you were the last person to have a pure
silver aura.”
“That’s why yours reacted to mine,” Joan said, wrapping both
hands around the cup and staring at the girl over the rim. “I do
apologize. My aura overloaded yours. I can teach you how to
prevent that from happening.” She smiled, revealing straight white
teeth. “Though the chances of meeting another pure silver aura in
your lifetime are incredibly slim.”
Sophie nibbled nervously on the blueberry scone. “Please excuse
me for asking, but are you really…really Joan of Arc, the Joan of
Arc?”
“Yes, I really am Jeanne d’Arc.” The woman gave a short bow. “La
Pucelle, the Maid of Orléans, at your service.”
“But I thought…I mean, I always read that you died….”
Joan dipped her head and smiled. “Scathach rescued me.” She
reached out and touched Sophie’s arm, and immediately, ickering
images of Scathach on a huge black horse, wearing white and jet
armor and wielding two blazing swords, danced behind her eyes.
“The Shadow single-handedly fought her way through the huge
crowd who had gathered to watch my execution. No one could
stand against her. In the panic, chaos and confusion, she snatched
me right out from under the noses of my executioners.”
The images ashed in Sophie’s head: Joan, wearing ragged and
scorched clothing, clinging to Scathach as the Warrior maneuvered
her armored black horse through the panicking crowd, the blazing
swords in either hand clearing their path.
“Of course, everyone had to say they saw Joan die,” Scatty said,
joining them, carefully slicing a pineapple into neat chunks with a
curved knife. “No one—neither English nor French—was going to
admit that the Maid of Orléans had been snatched out from under
the noses of perhaps ve hundred heavily armed knights, rescued by
a single female warrior.”
Joan reached out and took a cube of pineapple from Scathach’s
ngers and popped it into her mouth. “Scatty took me to Nicholas
and Perenelle,” she continued. “They gave me shelter, looked after
me. I’d been injured in the escape and was weakened from months
of captivity. But despite Nicholas’s best attention, I would have died
if it had not been for Scatty.” She reached over and squeezed her
friend’s hand again, not seeming to notice the tears on her cheeks.
“Joan had lost a lot of blood,” Scathach said. “No matter what
Nicholas or Perenelle did, she was not getting any better. So
Nicholas performed one of the rst-ever blood transfusions.”
“Whose blood—” Sophie started to ask, until she suddenly
realized she knew the answer. “Your blood?”
“Scathach’s vampire blood saved me. And kept me alive, too—
made me immortal.” Joan grinned. Sophie noted that her teeth were
normal, not pointed like Scatty’s. “Luckily, it has none of the
vampire side e ects. Though I am vegetarian,” she added. “Have
been for the last few centuries.”
“And you’re married,” Scathach said accusingly. “When did that
happen, and how, and why wasn’t I invited?” she demanded, all in
one breath.
“We got married four years ago on Sunset Beach in Hawaii, at
sunset, of course. We looked everywhere for you when we decided,”
Joan said quickly. “I really wanted you there; I wanted you to be my
maid of honor.”
Scathach’s green eyes narrowed, remembering. “Four years ago…I
think I was in Nepal chasing down a rogue Nee-gued. An
abominable snowman,” she added, seeing Sophie’s and Joan’s blank
looks.
“We’d no way of contacting you. Your cell wasn’t working, and emails bounced back saying your mailbox was full.” Joan caught
Scathach’s hand. “Come, I have photos I can show you.” The woman
turned back to Sophie. “You should eat now. You need to replace
the energy you’ve burned up. Drink plenty of liquids. Water, fruit
juices, but no ca eine—no tea and no co ee, nothing that’s going to
keep you awake. Once you’ve eaten, Francis will show you to your
rooms, where you can shower and rest.” She slowly looked Sophie
up and down. “I’ll get you some clothes. You’re about my size. And
then later we’ll talk about your aura.” Joan held up her left hand
and spread her ngers. An articulated metal glove sparkled into
existence over her esh. “I’ll show you how to control it, how to
shape it, make it into anything you wish.” The glove turned into a
metal raptor’s claw complete with curved talons before it faded back
to Joan’s tanned esh. Only her ngernails remained silver. She
leaned in and kissed Sophie quickly on each cheek. “But rst you
must rest. Now,” she said, looking at Scathach, “let me show you
the photos.”
The two women hurried from the kitchen, and Sophie made her
way back down the long room to where Saint-Germain was talking
earnestly to her brother. Josh handed her a plate piled high with
fruit and bread. His own plate was heaped with eggs and sausages.
Sophie felt her stomach object at the sight and she forced herself to
look away. She nibbled on the fruit, listening to the conversation.
“No, I’m human, I cannot Awaken your powers,” Saint-Germain
was saying as she joined them. “For that you need an Elder or one
of the handful of Next Generation who could do it.” He smiled,
showing his misshapen teeth. “Don’t worry, Nicholas will nd
someone to Awaken you.”
“Is there anyone here, in Paris, who could do it?”
Saint-Germain took a moment to consider. “Machiavelli would
know someone, I’m sure. He knows everything. But I don’t.” He
turned to Sophie, bowing slightly. “I understand you were lucky
enough to be Awakened by the legendary Hekate and then trained
in the Magic of Air by my old teacher, the Witch of Endor.” He
shook his head. “How is the old witch? She never liked me,” he
added.
“Still doesn’t,” Sophie said quickly, then blushed. “I’m sorry. I
don’t know why I said that.”
The Count laughed. “Oh, Sophie, you didn’t say it…well, not
really. The Witch did. It’s going to take some time for you to sort
through her memories. I got a call from her this morning. She told
me how she imbued you not only with the Magic of Air, but with
her entire body of knowledge. The mummy technique hasn’t been
used in living memory; it is incredibly dangerous.”
Sophie glanced quickly at her brother. He was watching SaintGermain carefully, listening to every word. She noted the tension in
his neck and jaw from how he was squeezing his mouth shut.
“You should have rested for at least twenty-four hours to allow
your conscious and subconscious time to sort through the sudden
in ux of alien memories, thoughts and ideas.”
“There wasn’t time,” Sophie muttered.
“Well, there is now. Eat up; then I’ll show you to your rooms.
Sleep as long as you like. You’re completely safe. No one even
knows you’re here.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“They’re in Saint-Germain’s town house o
the Champs-Elysées.”
Machiavelli pressed the phone to his ear and leaned back in the
black leather chair, swiveling to look through the tall window. In
the distance, across the slanted tile rooftops, he could make out the
tip of the Ei el Tower. The reworks had nally stopped, but a pall
of rainbow-colored clouds still hung in the air. “Don’t worry,
Doctor, we have the house under observation. Saint-Germain,
Scathach and the twins are inside. There are no other occupants.”
Machiavelli held the phone away from his ear as static rippled
and crackled. Dee’s jet was just taking o from a small private
air eld north of L.A. It would stop in New York to refuel, then y
transatlantic to Shannon in Ireland and refuel again before
continuing on to Paris. The crackling faded and Dee’s voice, strong
and clear, came through the phone.
“And the Alchemyst?”
“Lost in Paris. My men had him on the ground at gunpoint, but he
somehow coated them in sugar and then unleashed every ant in the
city onto them. They panicked; he escaped.”
“Transmutation,” Dee remarked. “Water is composed of two parts
hydrogen and one part oxygen: sucrose has the same ratio. He
changed the water into sugar; it’s a parlor trick—I would have
expected more of him.”
Machiavelli ran his hand across his short snow white hair. “I
though it was rather clever myself,” he said mildly. “He hospitalized
six police o cers.”
“He will return to the twins,” Dee snapped. “He needs them. He’s
been waiting all his life to nd them.”
“We’ve all been waiting,” Machiavelli reminded the Magician
quietly. “And right now, we know where they are, which means we
know where Flamel will go.”
“Do nothing until I get there,” Dee commanded.
“And have you any idea when that might—” Machiavelli began,
but the line was dead. He was unsure whether Dee had hung up or
the call had dropped. Knowing Dee, he guessed he’d hung up; that
was his usual style. The tall, elegant man tapped the phone against
his thin lips before replacing the handset. He had no intention of
following Dee’s orders; he was going to capture Flamel and the
twins before Dee’s plane touched down in Paris. He would do what
Dee had failed to do for centuries, and in return, the Elders would
grant him anything he desired.
Machiavelli’s cell phone buzzed in his pocket. He pulled it out and
looked at the screen. An unusually long string of numbers scrolled
across it, looking like no other number he’d ever seen before. The
head of the DGSE frowned. Only the president of France, a few
highly placed cabinet ministers and his own personal sta had this
number. He hit Answer but didn’t speak.
“The English Magician believes you will try and capture Flamel and
the twins before he arrives.” The voice on the other end spoke Greek
in a dialect that had not been used in millennia.
Niccolò Machiavelli sat bolt upright in his chair. “Master?” he
said.
“Give Dee your full support. Do not move against Flamel until he
arrives.” The line went dead.
Machiavelli carefully placed his cell phone on the bare desk and
sat back. Holding both hands up before his face, he was unsurprised
to nd that they were shaking slightly. The last time he’d spoken to
the Elder he called Master had been more than a century and a half
ago. This was the Elder who had granted him immortality at the
beginning of the sixteenth century. Had Dee somehow contacted
him? Machiavelli shook his head. Highly unlikely; probably Dee had
contacted his own master and asked him to make the request. But
Machiavelli’s master was one of the most powerful of the Dark
Elders…. That brought him back to a question that had troubled
him down through the centuries: who was Dee’s master?
Every human granted immortality by an Elder was bound to that
Elder. An Elder who bestowed immortality could just as easily
revoke it. Machiavelli had even seen it happen: he’d watched a
healthy-looking young man wither and age in a matter of
heartbeats, eventually collapsing into a pile of crackling bones and
dusty skin.
Machiavelli’s dossier of immortal humans was cross-linked to the
Elder or Dark Elder they served. There were only a very few humani
—like Flamel, Perenelle and Saint-Germain—who owed no loyalty
to an Elder, because they had become immortal by their own e orts.
No one knew whom Dee served. But it was obviously someone
more powerful than Machiavelli’s own Dark Elder master. And that
made Dee all the more dangerous.
Leaning forward, Machiavelli pressed a button on his desk phone.
The door immediately opened and Dagon stepped into the room, his
mirrored sunglasses re ecting the bare walls.
“Any reports on the Alchemyst?”
“Nothing. We’ve accessed the video from the security cameras in
the Pont de l’Alma station and every station it connects with and
we’re analyzing it now, but it’s going to take time.”
Machiavelli nodded. Time was something he did not have. He
waved a long- ngered hand in the air. “Well, we might not know
where he is now, but we know where he’s going: to Saint-Germain’s
house.”
Dagon’s lips parted stickily. “The house is under observation. All
entrances and exits are secured; there are even men in the sewers
beneath the building. No one can get in or out without us observing
them. There are two RAID units in vans in nearby side streets and a
third unit in the house next to Saint-Germain’s property. They can
be over the wall in moments.”
Machiavelli stood up and stepped out from behind the desk. With
his hands behind his back, he walked around the tiny anonymous
o ce. Although it was his o cial address, he rarely used this room,
and it held nothing but the desk, two chairs, and the telephone. “But
is it enough, I wonder? Flamel has escaped from six highly trained
o cers who were holding him at gunpoint, facedown on the
pavement. And we know Saint-Germain—the Master of Fire—is
inside this property. We had a little example of his abilities this
morning.”
“The reworks were harmless,” Dagon said.
“I’m sure he could have just as easily turned the tower to liquid.
Remember, he makes diamonds from coal.”
Dagon nodded.
Machiavelli continued. “We also know that the American girl’s
powers have been Awakened, and we’ve seen a little of what she
can do. The fog at Sacré-Coeur was an impressive feat for someone
untrained and so young.”
“And then there is the Shadow,” Dagon added.
Niccolò Machiavelli’s face turned into an ugly mask. “And then
there is the Shadow,” he agreed.
“She took out twelve heavily armed o cers in the co ee shop this
morning,” Dagon said emotionlessly. “I’ve watched her face down
entire armies, and she survived for centuries in an Underworld
Shadowrealm. Flamel is obviously using her to protect the twins.
She must be destroyed before we move against any of the others.”
“Indeed.”
“You will need an army.”
“Perhaps not. Remember, ‘Cunning and deceit will every time serve a
man better than force,’ ” he quoted.
“Who said that?” Dagon asked.
“I did, in a book, a long time ago. It was true in the court of the
Medicis, and it is true now.” He looked up. “Did you send for the
Disir?”
“They’re on their way.” Dagon’s voice turned sticky. “I don’t trust
them.”
“No one trusts the Disir.” There was no humor in Machiavelli’s
smile. “Did you ever hear the story of how Hekate trapped Scathach
in that Underworld?”
Dagon remained unmoving.
“Hekate used the Disir. Their feud with the Shadow goes back to
the time just after the sinking of Danu Talis.” Putting his hands on
the creature’s shoulders, Machiavelli stepped close to Dagon, taking
care to breathe through his mouth. Dagon exuded a shy odor; it
coated his pale skin like oily, rancid sweat. “I know you hate the
Shadow, and I have never asked you why, though I have my
suspicions. It is obvious that she has caused you much pain.
However, I want you to put aside your feelings; hate is the most
useless of all emotions. Success is the best revenge. I need you
focused and by my side. We are close now, so close to victory, close
to returning the Elder Race to this world. Leave Scathach to the
Disir. But if they fail, then she is yours. I promise you.”
Dagon opened his mouth to reveal the circle of needle-pointed
teeth. “They will not fail. The Disir intend to bring Nidhogg.”
Niccolò Machiavelli blinked in surprise. “Nidhogg…it’s free?
How?”
“The World Tree was destroyed.”
“If they loose Nidhogg on Scathach, then you are right. They will
not fail. They cannot.”
Dagon reached up and pulled o his sunglasses. His huge bulbous
sh eyes were wide and staring. “And if they lose control of
Nidhogg, it could devour the entire city.”
Machiavelli took a moment to consider. Then he nodded. “It
would be a small price to pay to destroy the Shadow.”
“You sound just like Dee.”
“Oh, I am nothing like the English Magician,” Machiavelli said
feelingly. “Dee is a dangerous fanatic.”
“And you’re not?” Dagon asked.
“I’m only dangerous.”
Dr. John Dee sat back into the soft leather seat and watched the
sparkling grid of L.A.’s lights fall away beneath him. Checking an
ornate pocket watch, he wondered if Machiavelli had received the
phone call from his master yet. He imagined he had. Dee grinned,
wondering what the Italian would make of that. If nothing else, it
would at least show Machiavelli who was in charge.
It didn’t take a genius to realize that the Italian would go after
Flamel and the children himself. But Dee had spent too long chasing
the Alchemyst to lose him at the very end…especially to someone
like Niccolò Machiavelli.
He closed his eyes as the plane rose and his stomach twitched. He
automatically reached for the paper bag on the seat beside him: he
loved ying, but his stomach always protested. If everything went as
planned, then he would soon be the ruler of the entire planet and
he’d never need to y again. Everyone would come to him.
The jet climbed at a steep angle and he swallowed hard; he’d had
a chicken wrap in the airport and was regretting it now. The zzy
drink had been a de nite mistake.
Dee was looking forward to the time when the Elders returned.
Perhaps they could reestablish the network of leygates across the
world and make
ying unnecessary. Closing his eyes, Dee
concentrated on the Elders and the many bene ts they would bring
to the planet. In the distant past, he knew the Elders had created a
paradise on earth. All the ancient books and scrolls, the myths and
legends of every race, spoke about that glorious time. His master
had promised him that the Elders would use their powerful magic to
return the planet to that paradise. They would reverse the e ects of
global warming, repair the hole in the ozone layer and bring the
deserts to life. The Sahara would bloom; the polar ice caps would
melt away, revealing the rich land beneath. Dee thought he would
found his capital city in Antarctica on the shores of Lake Vanda. The
Elders could reestablish their ancient kingdoms in Sumer, Egypt,
Central America and Angkor, and with the knowledge contained in
the Book of Abraham, it would be possible to raise Danu Talis again.
Of course, Dee knew that the human population would become
slaves, and some would become food for those Elders who still
needed to eat, but that was a small price to pay for the many other
bene ts.
The jet leveled and he felt his stomach settle. Opening his eyes, he
breathed deeply and checked his watch again. He found it hard to
believe that he was hours—literally hours—away from nally
capturing the Alchemyst, Scathach and, now, the twins. They were
an added bonus. Once he had Flamel and the pages from the Codex,
the world would change.
He would never understand why Flamel and his wife had worked
so hard to prevent the Elders from bringing civilization back to
earth. But he’d be sure to ask him…just before he killed him.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Nicholas Flamel paused on the Rue Beaubourg and turned slowly,
pale eyes scanning the street. He didn’t think he was being followed,
but he needed to be certain. He’d taken the train to the Saint-Michel
Notre-Dame station and crossed the Seine on the Pont d’Arcole,
heading in the direction of the glass-and-steel monstrosity that was
the Pompidou Center. Taking his time, stopping often, darting from
one side of the road to the other, pausing at a newsstand to buy the
morning paper, stopping again for some foul co ee in a cardboard
cup, he kept checking for anyone paying close attention to his
movements. But as far as he could determine, there was no one
following him.
Paris had changed since he’d last been in the city, and though he
now called San Francisco home, this was the city of his birth and
would always be his city. Only a couple of weeks ago, Josh had
loaded Google Earth onto the computer in the bookshop’s back
room and shown him how to use it. Nicholas had spent hours
looking down on the streets he’d once walked, nding buildings
he’d known in his youth, even discovering the location of the
Church of the Holy Innocents, where he’d supposedly been buried.
He had been particularly interested in one street. He’d found it on
the map program and virtually walked down it, never realizing that
he would soon do so in reality.
Nicholas Flamel turned left o the Rue Beaubourg onto the Rue
de Montmorency—and stopped as suddenly as if he had walked into
a wall.
He drew a deep shuddering breath, conscious that his heart was
pounding. The wash of emotions was extraordinarily powerful. The
street was so narrow that the morning sunlight didn’t reach it,
leaving it in shadow. It was lined on both sides with tall, mostly
white-and-cream-colored buildings, many of them with hanging
baskets spilling owers and greenery across the walls. Round-topped
black metal poles had been inserted into the sidewalk on both sides
of the street to prevent cars from stopping.
Nicholas walked slowly down the street, seeing it as it had once
been. Remembering.
More than six hundred years ago, he and Perenelle had lived on
this street. Images of medieval Paris ickered behind his eyes, a
jumbled mismatched mess of wooden and stone houses; narrow
winding lanes; rotten bridges; tumbled listing buildings and streets
that were little better than open sewers. The noise, the incredible,
incessant noise, and the foul miasma that hung over the city—a
mixture of unwashed disease-ridden humans and lthy animals—
were things he would never forget.
At the bottom of the Rue de Montmorency, he found the building
he had been looking for.
It hadn’t changed much. The stone had once been cream; now it
was ancient, chipped and weathered, stained black with soot. The
three wooden windows and doors were new, but the building itself
was one of the oldest in Paris. Directly above the middle door was a
number in blue metal—51—and above that was a tired-looking
stone sign announcing that this had once been the MAISON DE
NICOLAS FLAMEL ET DE PERENELLE, SA FEMME. A red sign in the
shape of a shield announced that this was the AUBERGE NICOLAS
FLAMEL. Now it was a restaurant.
Once it had been his home.
Stepping up to the window, he pretended to read the menu as he
peered inside. The interior had been completely remodeled, of
course, countless times probably, but the dark beams that stretched
across the white ceiling appeared to be the same beams he’d so
often looked up at more than six hundred years ago.
He and Perenelle had been happy here, he realized.
And safe.
Their lives had been simpler then: they hadn’t known about the
Elders or the Dark Elders; they’d known nothing of the Codex, or of
the immortals who guarded and fought over it.
And both he and Perenelle had still been fully human.
The ancient stones of the house had been carved with an
assortment of images, symbols and letters that he knew had puzzled
and intrigued scholars down through the ages. Most were
meaningless, little more than the shop signs of their day, but there
were one or two that had special signi cance. Quickly glancing left
and right and nding the narrow street empty, he reached up with
his right hand and traced the outline of the letter N, which was cut
into the stone to the left of the middle window. Green power curled
around the letter. Then he traced the ornate F on the opposite side
of the window, leaving a shimmering outline of the letter in the air.
Catching hold of the window frame with his left hand, he hauled
himself up onto the ledge and reached over his head with his right
hand, his ngers nding the shapes of letters in the ancient stone.
Allowing the tiniest trickle of his aura to ow through his ngers,
he pressed a sequence of letters…and the stone beneath his esh
turned warm and soft. He pushed…and his ngers sank into the
stone. They wrapped around the object he had secreted within the
solid block of granite back in the fteenth century. Pulling it free,
he stepped o the window ledge and dropped lightly to the ground,
quickly wrapping his copy of Le Monde around the object. Then he
turned and headed down the street without so much as a backward
glance.
Before he stepped out onto the Rue Beaubourg, Nicholas turned
over his left hand. Nestled in the center of his palm was the perfect
impression of the black butter y Saint-Germain had pressed into his
skin. “It will lead you back to me,” he’d said.
Nicholas Flamel brushed his right fore nger over the tattoo.
“Take me back to Saint-Germain,” he murmured. “Bring me to him.”
The tattoo shivered on his skin, black wings rippling. Then it
suddenly peeled away from his esh and hung apping in the air
before him. A moment later, it danced and wove down the street.
“Clever,” Nicholas muttered, “very clever.” And he set o after it.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Perenelle Flamel stepped out of the prison cell.
The door had never been locked. There was no need: nothing
could get past the sphinx. But now the sphinx was gone. Perenelle
breathed deeply: the sour odor of the creature, the musty
combination of snake, lion and bird, had lessened, allowing the
usual smells of Alcatraz—salt and rusting metal, seaweed and
crumbling stone—to take over. She turned to the left, moving
swiftly down a long cell-lined corridor. She was on the Rock, but
she had no idea where she was within the huge crumbling complex.
Although she and Nicholas had lived in San Francisco for years, she
had never been tempted to visit the ghost-haunted island. All she
knew was that she was deep below the surface of the earth. The
only light came from an irregular scattering of low-wattage bulbs set
behind wire cages. Perenelle’s lips twisted in a wry smile; the light
was not for her bene t. The sphinx was afraid of the dark; the
creature came from a time and place where there really were
monsters in the shadows.
The sphinx had been lured away by the ghost of Juan Manuel de
Ayala. She had gone in search of the mysterious noises, the rattling
bars and slamming doors that had suddenly lled the building.
Every moment the sphinx was away from her cell, Perenelle’s aura
recharged. She wasn’t back up to full strength—she would need to
sleep and eat rst—but at least she was no longer defenseless. All
she had to do was to keep out of the creature’s way.
A door slammed somewhere high above her, and Perenelle froze
as claws click-clacked. Then a bell began to toll, slow and solemn,
lonely and distant. There was a sudden clatter of iron-hard nails on
stone as the sphinx raced o to investigate.
Perenelle folded her arms across her body and ran her hands up
and down them, shivering slightly. She was wearing a sleeveless
summer dress, and normally she’d be able to regulate her
temperature by adjusting her aura, but she had very little power left
and she was reluctant to use it in any way. One of the sphinx’s
special talents was her ability to sense and then feed o magical
energy.
Perenelle’s at sandals made no sound on the damp stones as she
moved down the corridor. She was wary, but not frightened.
Perenelle Flamel had lived for more than six hundred years, and
while Nicholas had been fascinated with alchemy, she had
concentrated on sorcery. Her research had taken her into some very
dark and dangerous places, not only on this earth, but also in some
of the adjoining Shadowrealms.
Somewhere in the distance, glass shattered and tinkled to the
ground. She heard the sphinx hiss and howl in frustration, but that
sound too was far away. Perenelle smiled: de Ayala was keeping the
sphinx busy, and no matter how hard she looked, she would never
nd him. Even a creature as powerful as a sphinx had no power
over a ghost or a poltergeist.
Perenelle knew that she needed to get to an upper level and out
into the sunshine, where her aura would recharge more quickly.
Once she was in the open air, she could use any of a dozen simple
spells, cantrips and incantations she knew that would make the
sphinx’s existence a misery. A Scythian mage, who’d claimed to
have helped build the pyramids for the survivors of Danu Talis who
had settled in Egypt, had taught her a very useful spell for melting
stone. Perenelle would not hesitate to use it to bring the entire
building down on top of the sphinx. It would probably survive—
sphinxes were practically impossible to kill—but it would certainly
be slowed down.
Perenelle spotted rusting metal stairs and darted toward them.
She was just about to put her foot on the bottom step when she
noticed the gray thread spilling across the metal. Perenelle froze,
foot raised in the air…and then she slowly and carefully stepped
back. Crouching down, she looked at the metal steps. From this
angle, she could see the threads of spiderwebs crisscrossing and
weaving through the stairs. Anyone who stepped onto the metal
staircase would be caught. She backed away, staring hard into the
gloomy shadows. The threads were too thick to have been made by
any normal spider and were dotted with tiny globules of liquid
silver. Perenelle knew a dozen creatures that could have spun the
webs, and she didn’t want to meet any of them, not here and now,
while she was so drained of her power.
Turning, she darted down a long corridor lit only by a single bulb
at either end. Now that she knew what she was looking for, she
could see the silver webs everywhere, stretched across the ceiling,
spreading across the walls, and there were huge nests knotted in
corners, growing in the deepest shadows. The webs’ presence might
explain why she had encountered no vermin in the prison—no ants,
ies, mosquitoes or rats. Once the nests hatched, the building would
come alive with spiders…if indeed that’s what the spinners were.
Over the centuries, Perenelle had encountered Elders who were
associated with spiders, including Arachne and the mysterious and
terrifying Spider Woman, but as far as she knew, none of them was
aligned with Dee and the Dark Elders.
Perenelle was hurrying past an open door, a perfect spiderweb
framed in the opening, when she caught the hint of a sour bitter
stench. She slowed, then stopped. The smell was new; it wasn’t the
smell of the sphinx. Turning back to the door, she went as close as
she could to the web without touching it and peered inside. It took
her eyes a moment to adjust to the darkness and a moment longer to
make sense of what she was seeing.
Vetala.
Perenelle’s heart began to beat so strongly in her chest that she
could actually feel her esh vibrating. Hanging upside down from
the ceiling were a dozen creatures. Talons that were a cross between
human feet and birds’ claws bit deep into the soft stone, while
leathery bats’ wings wrapped around skeletal human bodies. The
upside-down heads were beautiful, with the faces of young men and
women not yet in their teens.
Vetala.
Perenelle mouthed the word silently. Vampires from the Indian
subcontinent. And unlike Scathach, this clan drank blood and ate
esh. But what were they doing here, and more importantly, how
had they gotten here? Vetala were always linked to a region or
tribe: Perenelle had never known one to leave its homeland.
The Sorceress turned slowly to look at the other open doorways
lining the gloomy corridor. What else lay hidden in the cells beneath
Alcatraz?
What was Dr. John Dee planning?
SUNDAY,
3rd June
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Sophie’s
ragged scream pulled Josh from a deep and dreamless
sleep and rolled him out of bed, leaving him swaying on his feet,
trying to get his bearings in complete darkness.
Sophie screamed again, the sound raw and terrifying.
Josh blundered across the bedroom, banging his knees on a chair
before he discovered the door, visible only because of the thin strip
of light beneath it. His sister was in the room directly across the
corridor.
Earlier, Saint-Germain had escorted them upstairs and given them
their choice of rooms on the top oor of the town house. Sophie had
immediately picked the one overlooking the Champs-Elysées—from
the bedroom window, she could actually see the Arc de Triomphe
over the rooftops—while Josh had taken the room across the hall,
which looked over the dried-up rear garden. The rooms were small,
with low ceilings and uneven, slightly sloping walls, but each had
its own bathroom with a minuscule shower cubicle that had only
two settings—scalding and freezing. When Sophie had run the water
in her room, Josh’s shower stopped working altogether. And
although he’d promised his sister that he would come talk to her
after he’d showered and changed, he’d sat on the edge of his bed
and almost immediately fallen into an exhausted sleep.
Sophie screamed for a third time, a shuddering sob that brought
tears to his eyes.
Josh jerked open his door and ran across the narrow corridor. He
pushed open the door to his sister’s room…and stopped.
Joan of Arc was sitting on the edge of his sister’s bed, holding
Sophie’s hand in both of hers. There were no lights in the room, but
it was not in total darkness. Joan’s hand was glowing with cool
silvery light and it looked like she was wearing a soft gray glove. As
he watched, his sister’s hand took on the same texture and color.
The air smelled of vanilla and lavender.
Joan turned to look at Josh, and he was startled to discover that
her eyes were glowing silver coins. He took a step toward the bed,
but she raised a nger to her lips and shook her head slightly,
warning him not to say anything. The glow faded from her eyes.
“Your sister is dreaming,” Joan said, though he wasn’t sure whether
she had spoken aloud or if he was hearing her voice in his head.
“The nightmare is already passing. It will not return,” she said,
making the sentence into a promise.
Wood creaked behind Josh and he whirled to see the Comte de
Saint-Germain coming down a narrow staircase at the end of the
hall. Francis gestured to Josh from the bottom of the stairs, and
although his lips didn’t move, the boy clearly heard his voice: “My
wife will take care of your sister. Come away.”
Josh shook his head. “I should stay.” He didn’t want to leave
Sophie alone with the strange woman, but he also knew
instinctively that Joan would never harm his sister.
“There is nothing you can do for her,” Saint-Germain said aloud.
“Get dressed and come up to the attic. I have my o ce there.” He
turned away and disappeared back up the stairs.
Josh took a last look at Sophie. She was resting quietly, her
breathing had slowed and he noticed that the dark rings had
disappeared from beneath her eyes.
“Go now,” Joan said. “There are some things I have to say to your
sister. Private things.”
“She’s asleep…,” Josh began.
“But I will still say them,” the woman murmured. “And she will
still hear me.”
In his room, Josh dressed quickly. A bundle of clothes had been
laid on a chair beneath the window: underwear, jeans, T-shirts and
socks. He guessed the clothes belonged to Saint-Germain: they were
about the count’s size. Josh dressed quickly in a pair of black
designer jeans and a black silk T-shirt before slipping into his own
shoes and taking a quick look in the mirror. He was unable to resist
a smile; he’d never imagined himself wearing such expensive
clothes. In the bathroom, he cracked open a new toothbrush from its
packaging, brushed his teeth, splashed cold water on his face and
ran his ngers through his overlong blond hair, pulling it back o
his forehead. Strapping on his watch, he was shocked to discover
that it was a little after midnight on Sunday morning. He’d slept the
entire day and most of the night.
When he left the bedroom, he stopped at the door to his sister’s
room and looked inside. The smell of lavender was so strong it made
his eyes water. Sophie lay unmoving on the bed, her breathing
regular and even. Joan remained beside her, holding her hand,
murmuring softly, but not in any language he could understand. The
woman turned her head slowly to look at him, and he discovered
that her eyes were once again at silver discs, without any hint of
white or pupil. She turned back to Sophie.
Josh stared at them for a moment before turning away. When the
Witch of Endor had instructed Sophie in the Magic of Air, he had
been dismissed; now he’d been dismissed again. He was quickly
realizing that in this new magical world, there was no place for
someone like him, someone without power.
Josh slowly climbed the narrow winding stairs that led up to
Saint-Germain’s o ce. Whatever Josh had been expecting to nd in
the attic, it was not the huge brightly lit white wood and chrome
room. The attic ran the length of the entire house and had been
remodeled into one vast open space, with an arched window looking
over the Champs-Elysées at one end. The enormous room was lled
with electronics and musical instruments, but there was no sign of
Saint-Germain.
Against the right wall, a long table stretched from one end of the
space to the other. It was piled high with computers, both desktops
and laptops, screens of all shapes and sizes, synthesizers, a mixing
desk, keyboards and electronic drum kits.
On the opposite side of the room a trio of electric guitars were
perched on stands, while an assortment of keyboards were arranged
around an enormous LCD screen.
“How do you feel?” Saint-Germain asked.
It took Josh a second to identify where the voice was coming
from. The musician was lying at on his back under the table, a
bundle of USB cables in his hands. “Good,” Josh said, and was
surprised to nd that it was true. He felt better than he had in a
long time. “I don’t even remember lying down….”
“You were both exhausted, physically and mentally. And I
understand the leygates suck every last drop of energy from you.
Not that I’ve ever traveled through one,” he added. “To be truthful, I
was surprised you were still on your feet,” Saint-Germain muttered
as he dropped the cables. “You’ve slept for about fourteen hours.”
Josh knelt alongside Saint-Germain. “What are you trying to do?”
“I moved a monitor and the cable fell out; I’m not sure which one
it is.”
“You should color code them with tape,” Josh said. “That’s what I
do.” Straightening, he caught the end of the cable that was attached
to the wide-screen monitor and jerked it up and down. “It’s this
one.” The cable twitched in Saint-Germain’s hands.
“Thanks!”
The monitor suddenly ickered to life, displaying a screen lled
with sliders and knobs.
Saint-Germain climbed to his feet and dusted himself o . He was
wearing clothes identical to Josh’s. “They t.” He nodded. “And
they look good on you. You should wear black more often.”
“Thanks for the clothes….” He stopped. “I don’t know how we’re
going to be able to pay you back, though.”
Francis laughed quickly. “They weren’t a loan, they were a gift. I
don’t want them back.”
Before Josh could thank him again, Saint-Germain hit the
keyboard and Josh jumped as a series of heavy piano chords
thumped out from hidden speakers. “Don’t worry, the attic is
soundproofed,” Saint-Germain said. “It’ll not wake Sophie.”
Josh nodded at the screen. “Do you write all your music on
computer?”
“Just about.” Saint-Germain looked around the room. “Anyone
can make music now; you don’t need much more than a computer,
some software, patience and a lot of imagination. If I need some real
instruments for a nal mix, I’ll hire musicians. But I can do most
things here.”
“I downloaded some beat-detection software once,” Josh
admitted. “But I could never get it right.”
“What do you compose?”
“Well, I’m not sure you’d call it composing…. I put together some
ambient mixes.”
“I’d love to listen to anything you have.”
“It’s all gone. I lost my computer, my cell phone and my iPod
when Yggdrasill was destroyed.” Even saying it aloud made him feel
sick. And the worst part was that he really had no idea exactly what
he’d lost. “I lost my summer project and all my music, and that was
about ninety gigs. I had some great bootlegs. I’ll never be able to
replace them.” He sighed. “I also lost hundreds of photos; all the
places Mom and Dad took us. Our parents are scientists—they’re
archaeologists and paleontologists,” he added, “so we’ve seen some
amazing places.”
“Lost everything! That’s got to be tough,” Saint-Germain
sympathized. “What about backups?”
The stricken look on Josh’s face was all the answer the count
needed.
“Were you a Mac or a PC user?”
“Both, actually. Dad uses PCs at home, but most of the schools
Sophie and I have gone to use Macs. Sophie loves her Macs, but I
prefer a PC,” he said. “If anything goes wrong, I can usually pull it
apart and x it myself.”
Saint-Germain walked to the end of the table and rummaged
around underneath it. He pulled out three laptops, di erent brands
and screen sizes, and lined them up on the oor. He gestured
dramatically. “Take one.”
Josh blinked at him in surprise. “Take one?”
“They’re all PCs,” Saint-Germain continued, “and they’re no use to
me. I’ve completely switched over to Macs now.”
Josh looked from Saint-Germain to the laptops and back to the
musician again. He’d just met this man, didn’t know him, and here
he was o ering Josh a choice of three expensive laptops. He shook
his head. “Thanks, but I couldn’t.”
“Why not?” Saint-Germain demanded.
And Josh had no answer for that.
“You need a computer. I’m o ering you one of these. I would be
pleased if you took it.” Saint-Germain smiled. “I grew up in an age
when gift giving was an art. I have found that people in this century
really do not know how to accept a gift gracefully.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“How about thank you?” Saint-Germain suggested.
Josh grinned. “Yes. Well…thank you,” he said hesitantly. “Thank
you very much.” Even as he was speaking, he knew which machine
he wanted: the tiny one-inch-thick laptop with an eleven-inch
screen.
Saint-Germain dug around under the table and extracted three
power cords that he dropped onto the oor alongside the machines.
“I’m not using them. They’ll probably never be used again. I’ll end
up reformatting the hard drives and giving the machines to the local
schools. Take whichever one you like. You’ll nd a backpack under
the table too.” He paused, blue eyes twinkling, and tapped the back
of the machine Josh was looking at, then added with a grin, “I’ve a
spare long-life battery for this one. That was my favorite.”
“Well, if you’re really not using them…”
Saint-Germain ran a nger across the back of the small laptop,
tracing a line in the dust, holding it up so that Josh could see the
black mark on his ngertip. “Trust me: I’m not using them.”
“OK…thanks. I mean, thank you. No one’s ever given me a
present like this before,” he said, picking up the small computer and
turning it over in his hands. “I’ll take this one…if you’re really
sure….”
“I’m sure. It’s fully loaded; got wireless, too, and it’ll autoconvert
the power for European and American current. Plus, it’s got all my
albums on it,” Saint-Germain said, “so you can start your music
collection again. You’ll also nd an mpeg of the last concert. Check
it out; it’s really good.”
“I’ll do that,” Josh said, plugging in the laptop to charge the
battery.
“Let me know what you think. And you can be honest with me,”
Saint-Germain added.
“Really?”
The count took a moment to consider, and then he shook his
head. “No, not really. Only tell me if you think I’m good. I don’t like
negative reviews, though you’d think that after nearly three
hundred years, I’d be used to them.”
Josh opened the laptop and turned it on. The machine whined
and ickered to life. Leaning forward, he gently blew dust o the
keyboard. When the laptop booted, the screen ickered and showed
an image of Saint-Germain onstage, surrounded by a dozen
instruments. “You have a picture of yourself for your wallpaper?”
Josh asked incredulously.
“It’s one of my favorites,” the musician said.
Josh nodded toward the screen and then looked around the room.
“Can you play all these?”
“Every one. I started on the violin a long time ago, then moved on
to harpsichord and ute. But I’ve kept up with the times, always
learning new instruments. In the eighteenth century, I was using the
latest technology—the new violins, the latest keyboards—and here I
am, nearly three hundred years later, still doing that. This is a great
time to be a musician. And with technology, I can nally play all
the sounds I hear in my head.” His ngers brushed a keyboard and a
full choir sang from the speakers.
Josh jumped. The voices were so clear that he actually looked
over his shoulder.
“I load up the computer with sound samples, so I can use
anything in my work.” Saint-Germain turned back to the screen and
his ngers danced on the keys. “Don’t you think those reworks
yesterday morning made some great sounds? Crackling. Snapping.
Maybe it’s time for another Fireworks Suite.”
Josh walked around the room, looking at the framed gold records,
the signed posters and CD sleeves. “I didn’t know there was one
already,” he said.
“George Frideric Handel, 1749, Music for the Royal Fireworks.
What a night that was! What music!” Saint-Germain’s ngers moved
across a keyboard, lling the room with a tune Josh thought
sounded vaguely familiar. Maybe he’d heard it on a TV ad. “Good
old George,” Saint-Germain said. “I never liked him.”
“The Witch of Endor doesn’t like you,” Josh said hesitantly.
“Why?”
Saint-Germain grinned. “The Witch doesn’t like anyone. She
especially doesn’t like me because I became immortal through my
own e orts and, unlike Nicholas and Perry, I don’t need any recipe
from a book to remain undying.”
Josh frowned. “You mean there are di erent types of
immortality?”
“Many di erent types, and as many di erent types of immortals.
The most dangerous are those who became immortal because of
their loyalty to an Elder. If they fall from favor with the Elder, the
gift is rescinded, of course.” He snapped his ngers and Josh
jumped. “The result is instant old age. Ancient age. It’s a great way
of ensuring loyalty.” He turned back to the keyboard and his ngers
drew a haunting breathy sound from the speakers. He looked up as
Josh joined him in front of the screen. “But the real reason the
Witch of Endor doesn’t like me is because I—an ordinary mortal—
became the Master of Fire.” He held up his left hand and a di erentcolored ame danced at the tip of each nger. The attic studio
suddenly smelled of burnt leaves.
“And why would that bother her?” Josh asked, staring entranced
at the dancing ames. He wanted—desperately wanted—to be able
to do something like that.
“Maybe because I learned the secret of re from her brother.” The
music changed, becoming discordant and harsh. “Well, when I say
learned, I should really say stole.”
“You stole the secret of re!” Josh said.
The Comte de Saint-Germain nodded happily. “From
Prometheus.”
“And one of these days my uncle will want it back.” Scathach’s
voice made them both jump. Neither had heard her enter the room.
“Nicholas is here,” she said, and turned away.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Nicholas Flamel was sitting at the head of the kitchen table, both
hands wrapped around a steaming mug of soup. In front of him was
a half-empty bottle of Perrier, a tall glass and a plate piled high with
thick-crust bread and cheese. He looked up, nodded and smiled as
Josh and Saint-Germain followed Scathach into the room.
Sophie was sitting on one side of the table, facing Joan of Arc,
and Josh quickly slid into the seat beside his sister while SaintGermain took the seat alongside his wife. Only Scathach remained
standing, leaning against the sink behind the Alchemyst, staring out
into the night. Josh noted that she was still wearing the bandana she
had cut from Flamel’s loose black T-shirt.
Josh turned his attention to the Alchemyst. The man looked
exhausted and old, and there seemed to be a dusting of silver in his
close-cropped hair that hadn’t been there earlier. His skin was also
shockingly pale, emphasizing the bruise-black circles beneath his
eyes and the deep lines in his forehead. His clothes were rumpled
and speckled with rain, and there was a long muddy streak on the
sleeve of the jacket he’d hung o the back of the wooden chair.
Water droplets sparkled on the worn leather.
No one spoke while the Alchemyst nished the soup and then
broke o chunks of the cheese and bread. He chewed slowly and
methodically, then poured water from the green bottle into the glass
and drank in short sips. When he was nished, he wiped his lips on
a napkin and allowed himself a sigh of satisfaction. “Thank you.” He
nodded to Joan. “That was perfect.”
“There is a larder full of food, Nicholas,” she said, her gray eyes
huge and concerned. “You really should have more than soup, bread
and cheese.”
“It was enough,” he said gently. “Right now I need to rest, and I
didn’t want to put a lot of food in my stomach. We shall have a big
breakfast in the morning. I’ll even cook it myself.”
“I didn’t know you could cook,” Saint-Germain said.
“He can’t,” Scathach muttered.
“I thought eating cheese late at night gave you nightmares,” Josh
said. He glanced at his watch. “It’s close to one in the morning.”
“Oh, I don’t need cheese to see nightmares. I’ve seen them in the
esh.” Nicholas smiled, though there was no humor in it. “They’re
not so scary.” He looked from Josh to Sophie. “You’re safe and
well?”
The twins glanced at one another and nodded.
“And rested?”
“They slept all day and most of the night,” Joan said.
“Good,” Flamel nodded. “You’re going to need all your strength.
And I like the clothes.” While Josh was dressed identically to SaintGermain, Sophie was wearing a heavy white cotton blouse and blue
jeans with the ends turned up to reveal ankle-high boots.
“Joan gave them to me,” Sophie explained.
“Almost a perfect t,” the older woman said. “We’ll go through
my wardrobe shortly, get you some changes for the rest of your
journey.”
Sophie smiled her thanks.
Nicholas turned to Saint-Germain. “The reworks on the Ei el
Tower yesterday: inspired, just inspired.”
The count bowed. “Thank you, Master,” he said, looking
tremendously pleased with himself.
Joan’s giggle was a low purr. “He’s been looking for an excuse to
do something like that for months. You should have seen the display
he set o in Hawaii when we were married. We waited until the sun
went down; then Francis lit up the sky for nearly an hour. It was so
beautiful, though the e ort exhausted him for a week,” she added
with a grin.
Two spots of color touched the count’s cheeks and he reached
over to squeeze his wife’s hand. “It was worth it to see the look on
your face.”
“You hadn’t mastered re the last time we met,” Nicholas said
slowly. “If I recall, you had some little ability with it, but nothing
like the power you demonstrated yesterday. Who trained you?”
“I spent some time in India, in the lost city of Ophir,” the count
responded, glancing quickly at the Alchemyst. “They still remember
you there. Did you know they erected a statue to you and Perenelle
in the main square?”
“I didn’t. I promised Perenelle I’d take her back there someday,”
Nicholas said wistfully. “But what has that got to do with your
mastery of re?”
“I met someone there…someone who trained me,” Saint-Germain
said enigmatically. “Showed me how to use all the secret knowledge
I’d gleaned from Prometheus…”
“Stolen,” Scathach corrected.
“Well, he stole it rst,” Saint-Germain snapped.
Flamel’s hand hit the table with enough force to rattle the bottle
of water. Only Scathach didn’t jump. “Enough!” he barked, and for
an instant, the planes and angles of his face altered, cheekbones
suddenly prominent, hinting at the skull beneath the esh. His
almost colorless eyes visibly darkened, turning gray, then brown
and nally black. Resting his elbows on the table, he rubbed his face
with the palms of both hands and took a deep shuddering breath.
There was the faintest hint of mint in the air, but it was a sour bitter
odor. “I’m sorry. That was inexcusable. I should not have raised my
voice,” he said quietly into the shocked silence that followed. When
he took his hands away from his face, his lips moved into a smile
that did not quite reach his eyes. He looked at each of them in turn,
his gaze lingering on the twins’ stunned faces. “You must forgive
me. I’m tired now, so tired; I could sleep for a week. Continue,
Francis, please. Who trained you?”
The Comte de Saint-Germain took a breath. “He told me…he said
that I was never to speak his name aloud,” he nished in a rush.
Flamel placed his elbows on the table, wrapped the ngers of
both hands together and rested his chin on his knotted sts. He
stared at the musician, his face impassive. “Who was it?” he
demanded rmly.
“I gave him my word,” Saint-Germain said miserably. “It was one
of the conditions he imposed when he trained me. He said there was
a power in words and that certain names set up vibrations both in
this world and the Shadowrealms and attracted unwelcome
attention.”
Scathach stepped forward and rested her hand lightly on the
Alchemyst’s shoulder. “Nicholas, you know that is true. There are
certain words that should never be spoken, names that should never
be used. Old things. Undead things.”
Nicholas nodded. “If you gave this person your word, then you
should not go back on it, of course. But tell me”—he paused, not
looking at the count—“this mysterious person, how many hands did
he have?”
Saint-Germain sat back suddenly, and the shocked expression on
his face revealed the truth. “How did you know?” he whispered.
The Alchemyst’s mouth twisted into an ugly grimace. “In Spain,
six hundred years ago, I met a one-handed man who taught me
some of the secrets of the Codex. He too refused to speak his name
aloud.” Flamel suddenly looked at Sophie, eyes wide and staring.
“You have within you the Witch’s memories. If a name comes to you
now—it would be better for all of us if you did not say it aloud.”
Sophie closed her mouth so quickly she bit the inside of her lip.
She knew the name of the person Flamel and Saint-Germain were
talking about. She also knew just who—and what—he was. And she
had been just about to speak the name aloud.
Flamel turned back to Saint-Germain. “You know that Sophie’s
powers have been Awakened. The Witch taught her the basics of the
Magic of Air, and I am determined that both she and Josh be trained
in all the elemental magics as quickly as possible. I know where
there are masters of Earth and Water magic. Only yesterday, I was
thinking we might have to go in search of one of the Elders
associated with re, Maui or Vulcan or even your old nemesis,
Prometheus himself. Now I’m hoping that might not be necessary.”
He paused for a breath. “Do you think you could you teach Sophie
the Magic of Fire?”
Saint-Germain blinked in surprise. He folded his arms across his
chest and looked from the girl to the Alchemyst and started to shake
his head. “I’m not sure I could. I’m not even sure I should….”
Joan reached over and rested her right hand on the back of her
husband’s arm. He turned to look at her and she nodded, almost
imperceptibly. Her lips didn’t move, and yet everyone clearly heard
her say, “Francis, you must do it.”
The count didn’t hesitate. “I’ll do it…but is it wise?” he asked,
serious.
“It is necessary,” she said simply.
“It’ll be a lot for her to take in….” He bowed to Sophie. “Forgive
me. I didn’t mean to talk about you as if you weren’t here.” He
looked back at Nicholas and added doubtfully, “Sophie is still
dealing with the Witch’s memories.”
“Not anymore. I attended to that.” Joan’s grip tightened on her
husband’s arm. She turned her head to look at everyone sitting
around the table, nally stopping at Sophie. “While Sophie slept, I
spoke to her, helped her sort the memories, categorize them,
separate her own thoughts from the Witch’s. I do not think they will
trouble her so much now.”
Sophie was shocked. “You got into my head while I was asleep?”
Joan of Arc shook her head slightly. “I didn’t get into your
mind…I simply talked to you, instructed you what to do and how to
do it.”
“I saw you talking…,” Josh began, and then frowned. “But Sophie
was sound asleep. She couldn’t hear you.”
“She heard me,” Joan said. She looked directly at Sophie and
placed her left hand at on the table. A crackling silver haze
appeared on her ngertips, tiny speckles of light dancing from her
esh to bounce, like mercury droplets, across the table toward the
girl’s hands, which were resting on the polished wood. As they
approached, Sophie’s ngernails began to glow a muted silver, and
then suddenly, the points of light wrapped around her ngers.
“You may be twin to Josh, but we are sisters, you and I. We are
Silver. I know what it is like to hear voices inside my head; I know
what it is like to see the impossible, to know the unknowable.” Joan
looked rst at Josh and then at the Alchemyst. “While Sophie slept,
I spoke directly to her unconscious mind. I taught her how to
control the Witch’s memories, how to ignore the voices, to shut out
the images. I taught her how to protect herself.”
Sophie raised her head slowly, eyes wide with surprise. “That’s
what’s di erent!” she said, both shocked and amazed. “I can’t hear
the voices anymore.” She looked at her twin. “They started when
the Witch poured her knowledge into me. There were thousands of
them, shouting and whispering in languages I almost understood.
It’s quiet now.”
“They’re still there,” Joan explained. “They will always be there.
But now you will be able to call upon them when you need to, to
use their knowledge. I also started the process of teaching you how
to control your aura.”
“But how could you while she was asleep?” Josh pressed. He even
found the thought of it incredibly disturbing.
“Only the conscious mind sleeps—the unconscious is always
aware.”
“What do you mean, control my aura?” Sophie asked, confused. “I
thought it was just this silver-colored electrical eld around my
body.”
Joan shrugged, an elegant movement of her shoulders. “Your aura
is as powerful as your imagination. You can shape it, meld it,
fashion it to your will.” She held out her left hand. “That’s how I
can do this.” A metal glove from a suit of armor clicked into
existence around her esh. Each rivet was perfectly formed, and the
back of the ngers was even dappled with rust. “Try it,” she
suggested.
Sophie held out her hand and looked hard at it.
“Visualize the glove,” Joan suggested. “See it in your
imagination.”
A tiny silver thimble appeared on Sophie’s little nger, then
winked out of existence.
“Well, a little more practice, maybe,” Joan admitted. She glanced
sidelong at Saint-Germain and then looked at the Alchemyst. “Let
me work with Sophie for a couple of hours, teach her a little more
about controlling and shaping her aura, before Francis starts to
teach her the Magic of Fire.”
“This Fire magic. Is it dangerous?” Josh demanded, looking
around the room. He still vividly remembered what had happened
to his sister when Hekate had Awakened her—she could have died.
And the more he’d learned about the Witch of Endor, he’d realized
Sophie could have died learning Air magic as well. When no one
answered him, he turned to look at Saint-Germain. “Is it
dangerous?”
“Yes,” the musician said simply. “Very.”
Josh shook his head. “Then I don’t want—”
Sophie reached out to squeeze her brother’s arm. He looked
down: the hand that gripped his arm was wrapped in a chain-mail
glove. “Josh, I have to do this.”
“No, you don’t.”
“I do.”
Josh looked into his sister’s face. It was set in the stubborn mask
he knew so well. Finally, he turned away, saying nothing. He didn’t
want his sister learning any more magic—not only was it
dangerous…but it would also distance her even further from him.
Joan turned to Flamel. “And now, Nicholas, you must rest.”
The Alchemyst nodded. “I will.”
“We were expecting you back a long time ago,” Scathach said. “I
was thinking I’d have to go out in search of you.”
“The butter y led me here hours ago,” Nicholas said tiredly, voice
mu ed with exhaustion. “Once I knew where you were, I wanted to
wait for night to fall before approaching the house, just in case it is
under observation.”
“Machiavelli doesn’t even know this house exists,” Saint-Germain
said con dently.
“Perenelle taught me a simple cloaking spell a long time ago, but
it only works when it’s raining—it uses water droplets to refract
light around the user,” Flamel explained. “I decided to wait until
nightfall to increase my chances of remaining unseen.”
“What did you do for the day?” Sophie asked.
“I wandered around the city, looking for some of my old haunts.”
“Surely most are gone?” Joan said.
“Most. Not all.” Flamel reached down and lifted an object
wrapped in newspaper from the oor. It made a solid thump when
he dropped it on the table. “The house in Montmorency is still
there.”
“I should have guessed you’d visit Montmorency,” Scathach said
with a sad smile. She looked at the twins and explained, “It is the
house where Nicholas and Perenelle lived in the fteenth century.
We spent some happy times there.”
“Very happy,” Flamel agreed.
“And it’s still there?” Sophie asked, amazed.
“One of the oldest houses in Paris,” Flamel said proudly.
“What else did you do?” Saint-Germain asked.
Nicholas shrugged. “Visited the Musée de Cluny. It’s not every day
you get to see your own gravestone. I guess it’s comforting to know
that people still remember me—the real me.”
Joan smiled. “There is a street named after you, Nicholas: the Rue
Flamel. And one named in honor of Perenelle, too. But somehow, I
don’t think that’s the real reason you visited the museum, is it?” She
said shrewdly, “You never struck me as a sentimental man.”
The Alchemyst smiled. “Well, not the only reason,” he admitted.
He reached into his jacket pocket and plucked out a narrow
cylindrical tube. Everyone around the table leaned forward. Even
Scatty stepped in to look at it. Unscrewing both ends, Flamel
removed and unrolled a length of rustling parchment. “Nearly six
hundred years ago, I hid this within my tombstone, little thinking
that I would ever need to use it.” He spread the thick yellow
parchment on the table. Drawn in red ink faded to the color of rust
was an oval with a circle inside it, surrounded by three lines
forming a rough triangle.
Josh leaned over. “I’ve seen something like that before.” He
frowned. “Isn’t there something like that on the dollar bill?”
“Ignore what it looks like,” Flamel said. “It’s drawn this way to
disguise its true meaning.”
“What is it?” Josh asked.
“It’s a map,” Sophie said suddenly.
“Yes, it’s a map,” Nicholas agreed. “But how did you know? The
Witch of Endor never saw this….”
“No, it has nothing to do with the Witch,” Sophie smiled. She
leaned across the table, her head brushing her brother’s. She pointed
to the top right-hand corner of the parchment, where a tiny, barely
visible cross was etched in red ink. “This de nitely looks like an N,”
she said, pointing to the top of the cross, “and this is an S.”
“North and south.” Josh nodded in quick agreement. “Genius,
Soph!” He looked at Nicholas. “It’s a map.”
The Alchemyst nodded. “Very good. It’s a map of all the ley lines
in Europe. Towns and cities, even borders might change beyond all
recognition, but the ley lines remain the same.” He held up the
square. “This is our passport out of Europe and back to America.”
“Let’s hope we get a chance to use it,” Scatty muttered.
Josh touched the edge of the newspaper-wrapped bundle that sat
in the center of the table. “And what’s this?”
Nicholas furled the parchment back into the tube and slipped it
into his jacket pocket. Then he began to unwrap layers of newspaper
from the object on the table. “Perenelle and I were in Spain close to
the end of the fourteenth century when the one-handed man
revealed the rst secret of the Codex,” he said, speaking to no one in
particular, his French accent now pronounced.
“The rst secret?” Josh asked.
“You’ve seen the text—it changes…but it changes in a strict
mathematical sequence. It’s not random. The changes are linked to
the movements of the stars and planets, the phases of the moon.”
“Like a calendar?” Josh said.
Flamel nodded. “Just like a calendar. Once we had learned that
code sequence, we knew we could nally return to Paris. It would
take us a lifetime—several lifetimes—to translate the book, but at
least we had learned where to start. So I changed some stones into
diamonds, and some at pieces of shale into gold, and we started
out on the long journey back to Paris. By then, of course, we had
come to the attention of the Dark Elders, and Bacon, Dee’s foul
predecessor, was closing in. Rather than take a direct route into
France, we kept to the back roads and avoided the usual passes
across the mountains, which we knew would be watched. However,
winter arrived early that year—I believe the Dark Elders had
something to do with it—and we found ourselves cut o in Andorra.
And that is where I found this….” He touched the object on the
table.
Josh looked at his sister, eyebrows raised in a silent question.
Andorra? he mouthed; she was much better at geography than he
was.
“One of the smallest countries in the world,” she explained in a
whisper, “in the Pyrenees between Spain and France.”
Flamel unwrapped more paper. “Before I ‘died,’ I hid this object
deep within the stone over the lintel of the house on the Rue de
Montmorency. I never thought I would need it again.”
“Within?” Josh asked, confused. “Did you say you hid it within?”
“Within. I changed the molecular structure of the granite, pushed
this into the block of stone and then returned the lintel to its
original solid state. Simple transmutation: like pushing a nut into a
tub of ice cream.” The nal sheet of newspaper tore as he pulled it
away.
“It’s a sword,” Josh whispered in awe, looking at the short narrow
weapon nestled on the paper-strewn table. He guessed it was about
twenty inches long, its simple cross hilt wrapped in strips of stained
dark leather. The blade seemed to be made of a sparkling gray
metal. No, not metal. “A stone sword,” he said aloud, frowning. It
reminded him of something—almost as if he had seen it before.
But even as he was speaking, Joan and Saint-Germain scrambled
away from the table, the woman’s chair falling over in her eagerness
to get away from the blade. Behind Flamel, Scathach hissed like a
cat, vampire teeth appearing as she opened her mouth, and when
she spoke, her voice was shaking, her accent thick and barbaric. She
sounded almost angry…or afraid. “Nicholas,” she said very slowly,
“what are you doing with that lthy thing?”
The Alchemyst ignored her. He looked at Josh and Sophie, who
had remained sitting at the table, shocked motionless by the
reaction of the others, unsure what was happening. “There are four
great swords of power,” Flamel said urgently, “each one linked to
the elements: Earth, Air, Fire and Water. It is said that they predate
even the oldest of the Elder Races. The swords have had many
names through the ages: Excalibur and Joyeuse, Mistelteinn and
Curtana, Durendal and Tyr ng. The last time one was used as a
weapon in the world of men was when Charlemagne, the Holy
Roman Emperor, carried Joyeuse into battle.”
“This is Joyeuse?” Josh whispered. His sister might be good at
geography, but he knew history, and Charlemagne had always
fascinated him.
Scathach’s laugh was a bitter snarl. “Joyeuse is a thing of beauty.
This…this is an abomination.”
Flamel touched the sword’s hilt and the tiny crystals in the stone
sparkled with green light. “This is not Joyeuse, though it is true that
it once belonged to Charlemagne. I also believe the emperor himself
hid this blade in Andorra sometime in the ninth century.”
“It’s just like Excalibur,” Josh said, suddenly realizing why the
stone sword was so familiar. He looked at his sister. “Dee had
Excalibur; he used it to destroy the World Tree.”
“Excalibur is the Sword of Ice,” Flamel continued. “This is its twin
blade: Clarent, the Sword of Fire. It is the only weapon that can
stand against Excalibur.”
“It is a cursed blade,” Scathach said rmly. “I’ll not touch it.”
“Nor I,” Joan said quickly, and Saint-Germain nodded in
agreement.
“I’m not asking any of you to carry it or wield it,” Nicholas
snapped. He spun the weapon on the table until the hilt touched the
boy’s ngers and then he looked at each of them in turn. “We know
Dee and Machiavelli are coming. Josh is the only one amongst us
without the ability to protect himself. Until his powers are
Awakened, he is going to need a weapon. I want him to have
Clarent.”
“Nicholas!” Scathach cried, horri ed. “What are you thinking.
He’s an untrained humani—”
“—with a solid gold aura,” Flamel said coldly. “And I am
determined to keep him safe.” He pushed the sword into Josh’s
ngers. “This is yours. Take it.”
Josh leaned forward and felt the two pages from the Codex press
against his skin in their cloth bag. This would be the second gift the
Alchemyst had given him in as many days. Part of him wanted to
accept the gifts at face value—to trust him and to believe that
Flamel liked him and trusted him in turn. And yet, and yet…even
after the conversation they’d had in the street, somewhere at the
back of his mind, Josh couldn’t forget what Dee had said by the
fountain in Ojai: that half of everything Flamel said was a lie, and
the other half wasn’t entirely truthful either. He deliberately looked
away from the sword and looked into Flamel’s pale eyes. The
Alchemyst was staring at him, his face an expressionless mask. So
what was the Alchemyst up to? Josh wondered. What game was he
playing? More of Dee’s words popped into his head. “He is now, and
has always been, a liar, a charlatan, and a crook.”
“Don’t you want it?” Nicholas asked. “Take it.” He pushed the hilt
right into Josh’s grip.
Almost against his will, Josh’s ngers closed over the smooth
leather-wrapped hilt of the stone sword. He lifted it—though it was
short, it was surprisingly heavy—and turned it over in his hands.
“I’ve never handled a sword in my life,” he said. “I don’t know
how….”
“Scathach will show you the basics,” Flamel said, not looking at
the Shadow, but turning the simple statement into a command.
“How to carry it, simple thrust and parry. Try and avoid stabbing
yourself with it,” he added.
Josh suddenly realized that he was grinning widely and tried to
wipe away the smile, but it was di cult: the sword felt amazing in
his hand. He moved his wrist and the sword twitched. Then he
looked at Scatty, Francis and Joan and saw how their eyes were
xed on the blade, following its every movement, and his smile
faded. “What’s wrong with the sword?” he demanded. “Why are you
so scared of it?”
Sophie put her hand on her brother’s arm, her eyes sparkling
silver with the Witch’s knowledge. “Clarent,” she said, “is an evil,
accursed weapon, sometimes called the Coward’s Blade. This is the
sword Mordred used to kill his uncle, King Arthur.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
In her bedroom at the top of the house, Sophie sat on the deep
window ledge and looked down over the Champs-Elysées. The broad
tree-lined street was wet with rain and shone amber, red and white
in the re ected lights of the cars and buses. She checked her watch:
it was almost two a.m. on Sunday morning, yet tra c was still
heavy. Anytime after midnight, the streets of San Francisco would
be deserted.
The di erence emphasized just how far from home she was.
When she’d been younger, she’d gone through a phase when she’d
decided that everything about herself was boring. She’d made a
conscious e ort to be more stylish—more like her friend Elle, who
changed her hair color on a weekly basis and had a wardrobe that
was always lled with the latest styles. Sophie had collected
everything she could nd about the exotic European cities she read
about in magazines, places where fashion and art were created:
London and Paris, Rome, Milan, Berlin. She was determined that she
wasn’t going to follow fashion; she was going to create her own. The
phase had lasted about a month. Fashion was an expensive business,
and the allowance she and her brother got from their parents was
strictly limited.
She still wanted to visit the great cities of the world, though. She
and Josh had even started talking about taking a year o before
college to go backpacking around Europe. And now here they were
in one of the most beautiful cities on earth, and she had absolutely
no interest in exploring it. The only thing she wanted to do right
now was return to San Francisco.
But what would she return to?
The thought stopped her cold.
Though the family had moved around a lot, and traveled even
more, two days ago, she’d known what to expect in the coming
months. The rest of the year was mapped out in boring detail. In the
fall, their parents would resume their teaching positions at the
University of San Francisco, and both she and Josh would return to
school. In December, the family would take their annual trip to
Providence, Rhode Island, where their father had given the
Christmas lecture at Brown University for the past two decades. On
the twenty- rst of December, their birthday, the twins would be
taken to New York City to see the shops, admire the lights, look at
the tree in Rockefeller Center and then go skating. They would get
lunch in the Stage Door Deli: have matzo ball soup and sandwiches
as big as their heads and one slice of pumpkin pie between them.
On Christmas Eve, they would head out to their aunt Christine’s
house in Montauk on Long Island, where they’d spend the holiday
and then see in the New Year. That had been the tradition for the
past ten years.
And now?
Sophie took a deep breath. Now she possessed powers and
abilities she could barely comprehend. She had access to memories
that were a mixture of truth, myth and fantasy; she knew secrets
that could rewrite history books. But she wished, more than
anything else, that there were some way she could turn back time,
to return to Thursday morning…before all this had happened.
Before the world had changed.
Sophie rested her forehead against the cool glass. What was going
to happen? What was she going to do…not just now, but in the
years to come? Her brother had no career in mind; every year he
announced something di erent—he was going to be a computer
game designer or a programmer, a professional football player, a
paramedic or a reman—but she’d always known what she was
going to do. From the time her rst-grade teacher had asked her the
question—“What do you want to be when you grow up, Sophie?”—
she’d known the answer. She wanted to study archaeology and
paleontology like her parents, to travel the world and catalog the
past, maybe make some discoveries that would help put history in
order. But that was never going to happen now. Overnight, she’d
realized that the study of archaeology, history, geography and
science had been rendered useless…or if not useless, then simply
wrong.
A sudden wash of emotion caught her by surprise, and she felt a
burning at the back of her throat and tears on her cheeks. She
pressed the palms of both hands against her face and brushed the
tears away.
“Knock-knock…” Josh’s voice startled her. Sophie turned to look
at her twin. Her brother was standing at the door, the stone sword
in one hand, a tiny laptop in the other. “Can I come in?”
“You’ve never asked before.” She smiled.
Josh stepped into the room and sat down on the edge of the
double bed. He carefully placed Clarent on the oor by his feet and
rested the laptop on his knees. “A lot’s changed,” he said quietly, his
blue eyes troubled.
“I was just thinking the same thing,” she agreed. “At least that
hasn’t changed.” The twins often found they were thinking the same
thought at the same moment, and they knew one another so well
that they could even nish each other’s sentences. “I was just
wishing we could go back in time, to before all this happened.”
“Why?”
“So I wouldn’t have to be like this…so we wouldn’t be di erent.”
Josh looked into his sister’s face and tilted his head slightly.
“You’d give it up?” he asked very softly. “The power, the
knowledge?”
“In a heartbeat,” she said immediately. “I don’t like what’s
happening to me. I never wanted it to happen.” Her voice cracked,
but she continued. “I want to be ordinary, Josh. I want to be human
again. I want to be like you.”
Josh looked down. He opened the laptop and concentrated on
powering it up.
“But you don’t, do you?” she said slowly, interpreting the long
silence that followed. “You want the power, you want to be able to
shape your aura and control the elements, don’t you?”
Josh hesitated. “It would be…interesting, I think,” he said
eventually, staring at the screen. Then he looked up, his eyes bright
with the re ected image of the log-on screen. “Yes, I want to be able
to do it,” he admitted.
Sophie opened her mouth to snap a response, to tell him that he
didn’t know what he was talking about, to tell him just how sick it
made her feel, how scared she was. But she stopped herself; she
didn’t want to ght, and until Josh had experienced it for himself,
he would never understand.
“Where did you get the computer?” she asked, changing the
subject when the laptop nally blipped.
“Francis gave it to me,” Josh said. “You were out of it when Dee
destroyed Yggdrasill. He stabbed the tree with Excalibur and it
turned to ice and then shattered like glass. Well, my wallet, cell
phone, iPod and laptop were in the tree,” he said ruefully. “I lost
everything. Including all our photos.”
“And the count just gave you a laptop?”
Josh nodded. “Gave it to me, insisted I have it. Must be my day
for presents.” The pale glow from the computer screen lit his face
from below, giving his head a vaguely frightening appearance. “He’s
switched over to Macs; they’ve got better music software,
apparently, and he’s not using PCs anymore. He found this one
dumped under a table upstairs,” he continued, eyes still locked on
the small screen. He glanced quickly at his sister. “It’s true,” he said,
recognizing her silence as doubt.
Sophie looked away. She knew her brother was telling the truth,
and that had nothing to do with the Witch’s knowledge. She’d
always known when Josh was lying to her, though, strangely, he
never knew when she was lying to him…which she didn’t do too
often anyway, and only ever for his own good. “So what are you
doing now?” she asked.
“Checking my e-mail.” He grinned. “Life goes on…,” he began.
“…e-mail stops for no man,” Sophie nished with a smile. It was
one of Josh’s favorite sayings, and it usually drove her crazy.
“There’s loads,” he muttered. “Eighty on Gmail, sixty-two on
Yahoo, twenty on AOL, three on FastMail…”
“I’ll never understand why you need so many e-mail accounts,”
Sophie said. She drew her legs up to her chest, wrapped her arms
around her shins and rested her chin on her knees. It felt good to be
having an ordinary conversation with her brother; it reminded her of
how things were supposed to be…and had been until Thursday
afternoon at two- fteen precisely. She remembered the time; she’d
been talking to her friend Elle in New York when she’d spotted the
long black car pulling up outside the bookshop. She’d checked the
time just before the man she now knew to be Dr. John Dee had
climbed out of the car.
Josh looked up. “We have two e-mails from Mom, one from Dad.”
“Read them to me. Start with the oldest.”
“OK. Mom sent one on Friday, June rst. Hope you’re both
behaving yourselves. How is Mrs. Fleming? Has she fully recovered?”
Josh looked up and frowned, confused.
Sophie sighed. “Remember? We told Mom that the bookshop
closed because Perenelle wasn’t feeling well.” She shook her head.
“Try and keep up!”
“It’s been a little busy,” Josh reminded her. “I can’t remember
everything. Besides, that’s your job.”
“Then we said that Nicholas and Perenelle had invited us to spend
some time with them in their house in the desert.”
“So.” Josh looked at his sister, ngers hovering over the keys.
“What will I tell Mom?”
“Tell her that everything’s OK and Perenelle is feeling a lot better.
Remember to call them Nick and Perry, though,” she reminded him.
“Thanks,” he said, hitting the backspace key, replacing Perenelle
with Perry. His ngers skipped over the keys as he typed. “OK, next
one,” he continued. “From Mom again, dated yesterday. ‘Tried
phoning, but my call goes directly to your voice mail. Is everything OK?
Got a call from your aunt Agnes. She said you didn’t come home to
collect any clothes or toiletries. Give me a number where I can call you.
We’re worried.’ ” Josh looked at his sister. “So what do we tell her
now?”
Sophie chewed on her bottom lip, thinking aloud. “We should tell
her…” She hesitated. “Tell her we had the things with us at the
shop. She knows we have clothes there. That’s not a lie. I hate lying
to her.”
“Got it,” Josh said, typing fast. The twins both kept clothes in his
locker in the back room of the bookshop for the occasional evening
when they went to the movies or walked down to the Embarcadero.
“Tell her we have no cell service here. Just don’t say where here
is,” she added with a smile.
Josh looked disgusted. “You mean we have no cell phones…”
“I’ve still got mine, but the battery is dead. Tell Mom that we’ll
call as soon as we get a signal.”
Josh continued to type. His nger hovered over the Enter key. “Is
that it?”
“Send it.”
He hit Enter. “Sent!”
“And you said there was an e-mail from Dad?” she asked.
“It’s for me.” He opened it, read it quickly and smiled broadly.
“He’s sent a jpeg of some fossil shark teeth he found. They look
pretty good. And he’s got some new coprolites for my collection.”
“Coprolites.” Sophie shook her head in mock disgust. “Fossilized
poo! Why couldn’t you collect stamps or coins like a regular person?
It’s just too weird.”
“Weird?” Josh looked up, suddenly irritated. “Weird! Let me tell
you what’s weird: we’re in a house with a two-thousand-year-old
vegetarian vampire, an immortal alchemist, another immortal who’s
a musician specializing in Fire magic and a French heroine who
should have died sometime in the middle of the fteenth century.”
He nudged the sword on the oor with his foot. “And let’s not forget
the sword that was used to kill King Arthur.” Josh’s voice had been
rising as he spoke and he suddenly stopped and drew in a deep
shuddering breath, calming himself. He started to smile. “Compared
to all that, I think collecting fossil poo is probably the least weird
thing around here!” His smile turned to a grin and Sophie smiled,
and then they were both laughing. Josh laughed so hard he got the
hiccups, and that made them laugh even harder, until tears ran
down their cheeks and their stomachs hurt.
“Oh, stop,” Josh moaned. He hiccupped again, and they both
dissolved into near hysteria.
It took a tremendous e ort of will to control themselves, but for
the rst time since Sophie had been Awakened, Josh felt close to her
again. Usually, they laughed every day; heading into work on
Thursday morning was the last time they’d laughed together as
they’d watched a skinny man in roller skates and running shorts
being pulled along by a huge Dalmatian. All they needed to do was
to keep nding things to laugh at—but unfortunately, there hadn’t
been too many of those over the past few days.
Sophie sobered up rst and turned back to the window. She could
see her brother in the glass and waited until he looked down at the
screen before she spoke. “I’m surprised you didn’t object more when
Nicholas suggested that Francis train me in Fire magic,” she said.
Josh raised his eyes and looked at his sister’s face re ected in the
window. “Would it have made any di erence if I had?” he asked
seriously.
She took a moment to think. “No. I suppose not,” she admitted.
“I didn’t think so. You’d still have done it.”
Sophie turned to look directly at her twin. “I have to. I need to.”
“I know,” he said simply. “I know that now.”
Sophie blinked in surprise. “You know?”
Josh closed the laptop and dropped it on the bed. Then he picked
up the sword and rested it across his knees, absently rubbing the
smooth blade. The stone felt warm. “I was…angry, scared—no,
more than scared—terri ed when Flamel had Hekate Awaken you.
He didn’t tell us about the dangers. He didn’t tell us that you could
have died, or fallen into a coma. I’ll never forgive him for that.”
“He was pretty sure nothing would happen….”
“Pretty sure isn’t sure enough.”
Sophie nodded, not trusting herself to speak.
“And then, when the Witch of Endor passed her knowledge to
you, I was scared again. But not so much scared for you…I was
scared of you,” he admitted very softly.
“Josh, how can you even say that?” Sophie began, genuinely
shocked. “I’m your twin.” The look on his face silenced her.
“You haven’t seen what I’ve seen,” he said earnestly. “I watched
you stand up to the cat-headed woman. I saw your lips move, but
when you spoke, the words were out of sync, and when you looked
at me, you didn’t recognize me. I don’t know what you were—but
you weren’t my twin sister then. You were possessed.”
Sophie blinked and huge tears rolled down her cheeks. She had
only the vaguest memories, little more than dreamlike fragments, of
what her brother was talking about.
“Then, in Ojai, I watched you make whirlwinds, and today—
yesterday—I saw you make fog out of nothing.”
“I don’t know how I do those things,” she murmured.
“I know, Soph, I know.” He stood up and crossed to the window,
looking out over the rooftops of Paris. “I understand that now. I’ve
been thinking about it a lot. Your powers have been Awakened, but
the only way you’ll be able to control them, the only way you’ll be
safe, is by being trained. At the moment they are as much a danger
to you as they are to our enemies. Joan of Arc helped you today,
didn’t she?”
“Yes, she helped a lot. I don’t hear the voices anymore. That’s a
huge help. But there’s another reason too, isn’t there?” Sophie
asked.
Josh turned the sword over in his hand, the blade almost black in
the night, tiny ecks of crystal in the stone winking like stars. “We
have no idea what sort of trouble we’re in,” he said slowly. “But we
do know that we’re in danger…real danger. We’re fteen years old
—we shouldn’t be thinking about being killed…or eaten…or
worse!” He waved vaguely in the direction of the door. “I don’t trust
them. The only person I can trust is you…the real you.”
“But Josh,” Sophie said very gently, “I do trust them. They are
good people. Scatty has fought for humanity for over two thousand
years, and Joan is a kind and gentle person….”
“And Flamel has kept the Codex hidden away for centuries,” Josh
said quickly. He touched his chest and Sophie heard the crackle of
the two pages in the bag Flamel had given him. “There are recipes
in this book that could make this planet a paradise, could cure every
disease.” He saw the icker of doubt in her eyes and pressed on.
“And you know that’s true.”
“The Witch’s memories also tell me that there are recipes in the
book that could destroy this world.”
Josh shook his head quickly. “I think you’re seeing what they
want you to see.”
Sophie pointed to the sword. “But why did Flamel give you the
sword and the Codex pages?” she asked triumphantly.
“I think—I know—they’re using us. I just don’t know what for.
Not yet, anyway.” He saw his twin start to shake her head.
“Anyway, we’re going to need your powers to keep us both safe.”
Sophie reached out and squeezed her brother’s hand. “You know
I’d never let anything hurt you.”
“I know that,” Josh said seriously. “At least, not deliberately. But
what happens if something uses you, like it did in the
Shadowrealm?”
Sophie nodded. “I had no control then,” she admitted. “It was like
I was in a dream, watching someone who looked like me.”
“My football coach says that before you can take control, you
have to be in control. If you can learn how to control your aura and
master the magics,” Josh continued, “no one would be able to do
that to you ever again. You’d be incredibly powerful. And let’s say,
for instance, that my power isn’t Awakened. I can learn how to use
this sword.” He twisted it in his hand, attempting to spin the blade,
but it slipped sideways and cut a deep gouge in the wall. “Oops.”
“Josh!”
“What? You can hardly notice it.” He rubbed his sleeve against
the cut. Paint and plaster aked away, exposing the brickwork
beneath.
“You’re making it worse. And you’ve probably taken a chunk out
of the sword.”
But when Josh held the weapon up to the light, there wasn’t even
a mark on the blade.
Sophie nodded slowly. “I still think—I know—you’re wrong about
Flamel and the others.”
“Sophie, you have to trust me.”
“I trust you. But remember, the Witch knows these people, and
she trusts them.”
“Sophie,” Josh said in frustration, “we don’t know anything about
the Witch.”
“Oh, Josh, I know everything about the Witch,” Sophie said
feelingly. She tapped her temple with her fore nger. “And I wish I
didn’t. Her entire life, thousands of years, are in here.” Josh opened
his mouth to reply, but Sophie held up her hand. “Here’s what I’ll
do: I’ll work with Saint-Germain, learn everything he has to teach
me.”
“And keep an eye on him at the same time; try and nd out what
he and Flamel are up to.”
Sophie ignored him. “Maybe the next time we’re attacked, we’ll
be able to defend ourselves.” She looked across the rooftops of Paris.
“At least we’re safe here.”
“But for how long?” her twin asked.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Dr. John Dee turned o
the light and stepped out of the enormous
bedroom onto the balcony, resting his forearms on the metal railing
and looking out over the city of Paris. It had rained earlier and the
air was damp and chill, tainted with the sour smell from the Seine
and the hint of exhaust fumes.
He hated Paris.
It had not always been that way. Once, this had been his favorite
city in all of Europe, lled with the most wonderful and
extraordinary memories. After all, he had been made immortal in
this city. In a dungeon deep below the Bastille, the prison fortress,
the Crow Goddess had taken him to the Elder who had granted him
eternal life in return for unquestioning loyalty.
Dr. John Dee had worked for the Elders, spied for them,
undertaken many dangerous missions through countless
Shadowrealms. He had fought armies of the dead and undead,
pursued monsters across bitter wastelands, stolen some of the most
precious and magical objects sacred to a dozen civilizations. In time
he had become the champion of the Dark Elders; nothing was
beyond him, no mission was too di cult…except when it came to
the Flamels. The English Magician had failed, over and over, to
capture Nicholas and Perenelle Flamel, several times in this very
city.
It remained one of the greatest mysteries of his long existence:
how had the Flamels evaded him? He commanded an army of
human, inhuman and abhuman agents; he had access to the birds of
the air; he could command rats, cats and dogs. He had at his
disposal creatures from the darkest edges of mythology. But for
more than four hundred years, the Flamels had escaped capture,
rst here in Paris, then across Europe and into America, always
staying one step ahead of him, often leaving town only hours before
he arrived. It was almost as if they were being warned. But that, of
course, was impossible. The Magician shared his plans with no one.
A door opened and closed in the room behind him. Dee’s nostrils
ared, smelling a hint of musty serpent. “Good evening, Niccolò,”
Dee said, without turning around.
“Welcome to Paris.” Niccolò Machiavelli spoke Latin with an
Italian accent. “I trust you had a good ight and that the room is to
your satisfaction?” Machiavelli had arranged for Dee to be met at
the airport and given a police escort to his grand town house o the
Place du Canada.
“Where are they?” Dee asked rudely, ignoring his host’s questions,
asserting his authority. He might have been a few years younger
than the Italian, but he was in charge.
Machiavelli stepped out of the room and stood beside Dee on the
balcony. Unwilling to wrinkle his suit against the metal railing, he
stood with his hands clasped behind his back. The tall, elegant,
clean-shaven Italian with close-cropped white hair was in great
contrast with the small sharp-featured man with his pointed beard
and his gray hair pulled back in a tight ponytail. “They are still in
Saint-Germain’s house. And Flamel has recently joined them.”
Dr. Dee glanced sidelong at Machiavelli. “I’m surprised you were
not tempted to try and capture them yourself,” he said slyly.
Machiavelli looked over the city he controlled. “Oh, I thought I
would leave their nal capture to you,” he said mildly.
“You mean you were instructed to leave them to me,” Dee
snapped.
Machiavelli said nothing.
“Saint-Germain’s house is completely surrounded?”
“Completely.”
“And there are only ve people in the house? No servants, no
guards?”
“The Alchemyst and Saint-Germain, the twins and the Shadow.”
“Scathach is the problem,” Dee muttered.
“I may have a solution,” Machiavelli suggested softly. He waited
until the Magician turned to look at him, his stone gray eyes
blinking orange in the re ected streetlights. “I sent for the Disir,
Scathach’s ercest foes. Three of them have just arrived.”
A rare smile curled Dee’s thin lips. Then he moved back from
Machiavelli and bowed slightly. “The Valkyries—a truly excellent
choice.”
“We are on the same side,” Machiavelli bowed in return. “We
serve the same masters.”
The Magician was about to step back into the room when he
stopped and turned to look at Machiavelli. For a moment, the
faintest rotten-egg hint of sulfur hung in the air. “You have no idea
whom I serve,” he said.
Dagon threw open the tall double doors and stepped back.
Niccolò Machiavelli and Dr. John Dee strode into the ornate booklled library to greet their visitors.
There were three young women in the room.
At rst glance they were so alike that they could have been
triplets. Tall and thin, with shoulder-length blond hair, they were
dressed alike in black tanks under soft leather jackets and blue jeans
tucked into knee-high boots. Their faces were all angles: sharp
cheekbones, deeply sunken eyes, pointed chins. Only their eyes
helped distinguish them. They were di erent shades of blue, from
the palest sapphire to deep, almost purple indigo. All three looked
as if they might have been sixteen or seventeen, but in actuality,
they were older than most civilizations.
They were the Disir.
Machiavelli stepped into the center of the room and turned to
look at each of the girls in turn, trying to tell them apart. One was
sitting at the grand piano, another was lounging on the sofa, while a
third leaned against a window, staring out into the night, an
unopened leather-bound book in her hands. As he got closer to
them, their heads pivoted, and he noticed that their eye colors
matched their nail polish. “Thank you for coming,” he said,
speaking Latin, which, along with Greek, was the one language most
of the Elders were familiar with.
The girls looked at him blankly.
Machiavelli glanced at Dagon, who had stepped into the room
and closed the door behind him. He pulled o his glasses, revealing
his bulbous eyes, and spoke quickly in a language no human throat
or tongue could shape.
The women ignored him.
Dr. John Dee sighed dramatically. He dropped into a high-backed
leather armchair and clapped his small hands together with a sharp
crack. “Enough of this nonsense,” he said in English. “You’re here
for Scathach. Now, do you want her or not?”
The girl sitting at the piano stared at the Magician. If he noticed
that her head was now twisted at an impossible angle, he didn’t
react. “Where is she?” Her English was perfect.
“Close by,” Machiavelli said, moving slowly around the room.
The three girls directed their attention to him, heads turning to
track him, like owls following a mouse.
“What is she doing?”
“She is protecting the Alchemyst Flamel, Saint-Germain and two
humani,” Machiavelli said. “We only want the humani and Flamel.
Scathach is yours.” He paused and then added, “You can have SaintGermain, too, if you want him. He’s no use to us.”
“The Shadow. We just want the Shadow,” the woman sitting at
the piano said. Her indigo-tipped ngers moved across the keys, the
sound delicate and beautiful.
Machiavelli crossed to a side table and poured co ee from a tall
silver pot. He looked at Dee and raised his eyebrows and the pot at
the same time. The Magician shook his head. “You should know that
Scathach is still powerful,” Machiavelli continued, speaking now to
the woman seated at the piano. The pupils of her indigo eyes were
narrow and horizontal. “She knocked out a unit of highly trained
police o cers yesterday morning.”
“Humani,” the Disir almost spat. “No humani can stand against
the Shadow.”
“But we are not humani,” the woman standing at the window
said.
“We are the Disir,” nished the woman sitting across from Dee.
“We are the Shieldmaidens, the Choosers of the Dead, the Warriors
of—”
“Yes, yes, yes,” Dee said impatiently. “We know who you are:
Valkyries. Probably the greatest warriors the world has ever seen—
according to yourselves, anyway. We want to know if you can defeat
the Shadow.”
The Disir with indigo eyes swiveled her body away from the piano
and owed smoothly to her feet. She stalked across the carpet to
stand before Dee. Her two sisters were suddenly by her side, and the
temperature in the room abruptly plummeted.
“It would be a mistake to mock us, Dr. Dee,” one said.
Dee sighed. “Can you defeat the Shadow?” he asked again.
“Because if you cannot, then I’m sure that there are others who
would be only too delighted to try.” He held up his cell phone. “I
can call upon Amazons, Samurai and Bogatyrs.”
The temperature in the room continued to fall as Dee spoke, and
his breath plumed white in the air, ice crystals forming on his
eyebrows and beard.
“Enough of this trickery!” Dee snapped his ngers and his aura
ashed brie y yellow. The room grew warm, then hot, heavy with
the stink of rotten eggs.
“There is no need for these lesser warriors. The Disir will slay the
Shadow,” the girl standing to Dee’s right said.
“How?” Dee snapped.
“We have what those other warriors have not.”
“You’re talking in riddles,” Dee said impatiently.
“Tell him,” Machiavelli said.
The Disir with the palest eyes turned her head in his direction and
then looked back at Dee. Long ngers ickered toward his face.
“You destroyed the Yggdrasill and released our pet creature, which
had been long trapped in the roots of the World Tree.”
Something ickered behind Dee’s eyes and a muscle twitched at
the corner of his mouth. “Nidhogg?” He looked at Machiavelli. “You
knew about this?”
Machiavelli nodded. “Of course.”
The Disir with indigo eyes stepped up to Dee and looked down
into his face. “Yes, you freed Nidhogg, the Devourer of Corpses.”
Still leaning toward Dee, she swiveled her head to look at
Machiavelli. Her sisters also turned in his direction. “Take us to
where the Shadow and the others are hiding, then leave us. Once we
have loosed Nidhogg, Scathach is doomed.”
“Can you control the creature?” Machiavelli asked curiously.
“Once it feeds o the Shadow, consumes rst her memories and
then her esh and bones, it will need to sleep. After a feast like
Scathach, it will probably sleep for a couple of centuries. We will
recapture it then.”
Niccolò Machiavelli nodded. “We didn’t discuss your fee.”
The three Disir smiled, and even Machiavelli, who had seen
horrors, recoiled from the expressions on their faces. “There is no
fee,” the Disir with indigo eyes said. “This we will do to restore the
honor of our clan and avenge our fallen family. Scathach the
Shadow destroyed many of our sisters.”
Machiavelli nodded. “I understand. When will you attack?”
“At dawn.”
“Why not now?” Dee demanded.
“We are creatures of the twilight. In that no-time between night
and day, we are at our strongest,” one said.
“That is when we are invincible,” her sister added.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
“I guess I must still be on American time,” Josh said.
“Why?” Scathach asked. They were standing in the fully equipped
gym in the basement of Saint-Germain’s house. One wall was
mirrored, and it re ected the young man and the vampire,
surrounded by the latest exercise equipment.
Josh glanced up at the clock on the wall. “It’s three a.m…. I
should be exhausted, but I’m still totally awake. It could be because
it’s only six at night back home.”
Scathach nodded. “That’s one of the reasons. Another is because
you are around people like Nicholas and Saint-Germain, and
especially your sister and Joan. Although your powers have not
been Awakened, you are in the company of some of the most
powerful auras on the planet. Your own aura is picking up a little of
their power, and it is energizing you. But just because you don’t feel
tired, that doesn’t mean you should not rest,” she added. “Drink
plenty of water too. Your aura is burning through a lot of liquids.
You need to keep hydrated.”
A door opened and Joan stepped into the gym. While Scathach
was dressed in black, Joan was wearing a long-sleeved white T-shirt
over loose white trousers and white sneakers. Like Scathach,
however, she was carrying a sword. “I wondered if you needed an
assistant,” she said, almost shyly.
“I thought you’d gone to bed,” Scathach said.
“I don’t sleep much these days. And when I do, my dreams are
troubled. I dream of re.” She smiled sadly. “Isn’t it a wonderful
irony: I’m married to a Master of Fire, yet I’m terri ed by dreams of
re.”
“Where is Francis?”
“In his o ce, working. He’ll be there for hours. I’m not sure if he
ever sleeps anymore. Now,” she said, looking at Josh and changing
the subject, “how are you getting on?”
“I’m still learning how to hold the sword,” Josh muttered,
sounding vaguely embarrassed. He’d seen movies; he’d thought he
knew how people fought with swords. He’d never imagined, though,
that just holding one would be so di cult. Scathach had spent the
past thirty minutes attempting to teach him how to hold and move
Clarent without dropping it. She hadn’t had much success; every
time he spun the weapon, the weight dragged it from his grip. The
highly polished wooden oor was scratched and gouged where the
stone blade had struck it. “It’s harder than I thought,” he nally
admitted. “I’m not sure I’ll ever learn.”
“Scathach can teach you how to ght with a sword,” Joan said
con dently. “She taught me. She took a simple farm girl and turned
her into a warrior.” She twisted her wrist, and her sword, which was
almost as tall as she was, moved and curled in the air with an
almost human-sounding moan. Josh attempted to copy the action
and Clarent went spinning from his hand. It buried itself point rst
in the oor, cracking the wood and swaying to and fro.
“Sorry,” Josh muttered.
“Forget everything you think you know about swordplay,”
Scathach said. She glanced at Joan. “He’s watched too much TV. He
thinks he can just twirl a sword around like a cheerleader’s baton.”
Joan grinned. She deftly ipped her longsword and presented it to
Josh, hilt rst. “Take it.”
Josh reached for the sword with his right hand.
“You might think about using both hands,” the small
Frenchwoman suggested.
Josh ignored her. Wrapping his ngers around the hilt of Joan’s
sword, he attempted to lift it from her grasp. And failed. It was
incredibly heavy.
“You can see why we’re still on the basics,” Scatty said. She
plucked the sword from Josh’s grip and tossed it to Joan, who
caught it easily.
“Let’s start with how to hold a sword.” Joan took up a position on
Josh’s right, while Scathach stood to his left. “Look straight ahead.”
Josh looked into the mirror. While he and Scathach were clearly
visible in the glass, the faintest silver haze surrounded Joan of Arc.
He blinked, squeezing his eyes shut, but when he opened them
again, the haze was still there.
“It’s my aura,” Joan explained, anticipating the question he was
just about to ask. “It’s usually invisible to the human eyes, but it’ll
sometimes turn up on photos and in mirrors.”
“And your aura is like Sophie’s,” Josh said.
Joan of Arc shook her head. “Oh no, not like your sister’s,” she
said, surprising him. “Hers is much stronger.”
Joan raised the longsword, spinning it around so that the point of
the blade was positioned between her feet and both hands rested on
the pommel of the hilt. “Now, just do as we do…and do it slowly.”
She stretched out her right arm, holding the long blade steady. On
Josh’s left, the Shadow extended both arms, holding her two short
swords straight out in front of her.
Josh wrapped his ngers around the hilt of the stone sword and
raised his right arm. Even before he had it fully extended, it had
begun to tremble with the weight of the blade. Gritting his teeth, he
attempted to keep his arm steady. “It’s too heavy,” he gasped as he
lowered his arm and rotated his shoulder; his muscles were burning.
It felt a bit like the rst day of football practice after summer
vacation.
“Try it like this. Watch me.” Joan showed him how to grip the
handle with both hands.
Using both hands, he found that it was easier to hold the sword
straight out. He tried it again, this time holding the sword with one
hand. For about thirty seconds the weapon remained still; then the
tip began to tremble. With a sigh, Josh lowered his arms. “Can’t do
it with one hand,” he muttered.
“In time you will,” Scathach snapped, losing patience. “But in the
meantime, I’ll teach you how to wield it using both hands, Eastern
fashion.”
Josh nodded. “That might be easier.” He’d spent years studying
tae kwon do, and had always wanted to study kendo, Japanese
fencing, but his parents had refused, saying it was too dangerous.
“All he needs is practice,” Joan said seriously, looking at
Scathach’s re ection in the mirror, her gray eyes bright and
twinkling.
“How much practice?” Josh asked.
“At least three years.”
“Three years?” Taking a deep breath, he wiped rst one palm and
then the other on his pants and gripped the hilt again. Then he
looked at himself in the mirror and stretched out both arms. “I hope
Sophie is doing better than I am,” he muttered.
The Comte de Saint-Germain had brought Sophie up to the
house’s tiny roof garden. The view of Paris was spectacular, and she
leaned on the balustrade to look down onto the Champs-Elysées.
Tra c had nally faded to little more than a sparse trickle, and the
city was still and silent. She breathed deeply; the air was cool and
damp, the slightly sour smell of the river masked by the herbal
scents coming from the dozens of over owing pots and fancy
containers scattered across the roof. Sophie wrapped her arms
around her body, vigorously rubbed her forearms and shivered.
“Cold?” Saint-Germain asked.
“A little,” she said, though she wasn’t sure if she was cold or
nervous. She knew Saint-Germain had brought her up here to teach
her Fire magic.
“After tonight, you will never feel the chill again,” Saint-Germain
promised. “You could walk across Antarctica wearing shorts and a
T-shirt and feel nothing.” Brushing his long hair o his forehead, he
plucked a leaf from a pot and curled it between the palms of his
hands, then rubbed them together. The crisp odor of spearmint lled
the air. “Joan loves to cook. She grows all her herbs up here,” he
explained, breathing deeply. “There are a dozen di erent types of
mint, oregano, thyme, sage and basil. And of course lavender. She
loves lavender; it reminds her of her youth.”
“Where did you meet Joan? Here, in France?”
“I nally got together with her here, but believe it or not, I rst
met her in California. It was 1849; I was making a little gold and
Joan was working as a missionary, running a soup kitchen and
hospital for those who’d gone west in search of gold.”
Sophie frowned. “You were making gold during the Gold Rush?
Why?”
Saint-Germain shrugged and looked vaguely embarrassed. “Like
just about everyone else in America in ’48 and ’49, I went west in
search of gold.”
“I thought you could make gold. Nicholas said he can.”
“Making gold is a long, laborious process. I thought it would be
far easier to dig it up out of the ground. And once an alchemist has
a little gold, he can use that to grow more. That’s what I thought I’d
do. But the land I bought turned out to be useless. So I started
planting a few fragments of gold on the land and then I’d sell the
property to those people who had just arrived.”
“But that’s just wrong,” Sophie said, shocked.
“I was young then,” Saint-Germain said. “And hungry. But that’s
no excuse,” he added. “Anyway, Joan was working in Sacramento,
and she kept meeting people who had bought useless land from me.
She thought I was a charlatan—which I was—and I took her for one
of those dreadful do-gooders. Neither of us knew the other was
immortal, of course, and we hated one another on sight. We kept
bumping into one another over the years, and then, during the
Second World War, we met again, here in Paris. She was ghting
with the Resistance and I was spying for the Americans. That’s when
we realized that we were di erent. We survived the war, and we’ve
been inseparable ever since, though Joan keeps very much to the
background. None of my fan blogs or the gossip magazines even
know we’re married. We could probably have sold the wedding
pictures for a fortune, but Joan prefers to keep a very low pro le.”
“Why?” Sophie knew that celebrities valued their privacy, but to
remain completely invisible seemed just strange.
“Well…you have to remember that the last time she was famous,
people tried to burn her at the stake.”
Sophie nodded. Suddenly, remaining invisible sounded perfectly
reasonable. “How long have you known Scathach?” she asked.
“Centuries. When Joan and I got together, we discovered that we
knew a lot of people in common. All immortal, of course. Joan’s
known her a lot longer than I have. Though I’m not sure if anyone
really knows the Shadow,” he added with a wry smile. “She always
seems so…” He paused, hunting for the right word.
“Lonely?” she suggested.
“Yes. Lonely.” He gazed out across the city and then shook his
head sadly and looked back over his shoulder at Sophie. “Do you
know how often she has stood alone against the Dark Elders, how
many times she has put herself in terrible danger to keep this world
safe from them?”
Even as Sophie started to shake her head, a series of images
ashed through her consciousness, fragments from the Witch’s
memories:
Scathach, wearing leather and chain mail, standing alone on a
bridge, two blazing swords in her hands, waiting as enormous
sluglike monsters gathered at one end.
Scathach in full armor, standing in the door of a great castle, arms
folded across her chest, her swords stuck into the ground at her feet.
Facing her was an army of huge lizardlike creatures.
Scathach, clad in sealskin and furs, balanced on a shifting ice oe
as creatures that looked as if they had been carved out of the ice
itself surrounded her.
Sophie licked her lips. “Why…why does she do it?”
“Because that is who she is. That is what she is.” The count looked
at the girl and smiled sadly. “And because it is all she knows. Now,”
he said briskly, rubbing his hands together again, sparks and cinders
spiraling up into the night air. “Nicholas wants you to learn the
Magic of Fire. Nervous?” he asked.
“A little. Have you ever taught anyone else?” Sophie asked
hesitantly.
Saint-Germain grinned, showing his uneven teeth. “No one. You
will be my rst student…and probably my last.”
She felt her stomach ip- op, and suddenly this didn’t seem like
such a good idea anymore. “Why would you say that?”
“Well, the chances of coming across another person whose
magical abilities have been Awakened are very slight, and those of
nding someone with as pure an aura as yours, next to impossible.
A silver aura is incredibly rare. Joan was the last humani to have
one, and she was born in 1412. You are very special indeed, Sophie
Newman.”
Sophie swallowed hard; she wasn’t feeling very special.
Saint-Germain sat down on a simple wooden bench set back
against the chimney breast. “Sit here beside me, and I’ll tell you
what I know.”
Sophie sat beside the Comte de Saint-Germain and looked across
the roof, out over the city. Memories that were not hers ickered at
the edge of her consciousness, hinting at a city with a di erent
skyline, a city of low buildings clustered around a massive fortress,
thousands of smoke trails rising into the night. She deliberately
shied away from the thoughts, realizing she was seeing Paris as the
Witch of Endor remembered it, sometime in the past.
Saint-Germain shifted to look at the girl. “Give me your hand,” he
said softly. Sophie put her right hand in his, and immediately a
feeling of warmth coursed through her body, wiping out the chill.
“Let me tell you what my own teacher taught me about re.” As he
was speaking, the count moved his glowing index nger across the
girl’s palm, following the lines and ridges in the esh, tracing a
pattern on her skin. “My teacher said that there are those who will
say that the Magic of Air or Water or even Earth is the most
powerful magic of all. They are wrong. The Magic of Fire surpasses
all others.”
As he was speaking, the air directly in front of them began to
glow, then shimmer. As if through a heat haze, Sophie watched the
smoke twist and dance with the count’s words, creating images,
symbols, pictures. She wanted to reach out and touch them, but she
remained still. Then the rooftop faded and Paris vanished; the only
sound she could hear was Saint-Germain’s softly insistent voice, and
all she could see were the burning cinders. But as he spoke, images
started to form in the re.
“Fire consumes air. It can heat water to mist and can crack open
the earth.”
She watched as a volcano spewed molten rock high into the air.
Red-black lava and white-hot cinders rained down on a town of mud
and stone….
“Fire destroys, but it also creates. A forest needs re to thrive.
Certain seeds depend on it to germinate.”
Flames twisted like leaves and Sophie saw a forest blackened and
battered, the trees scarred with the evidence of a terrible re. But at
the base of the trees, brilliant green shoots poked through the
cinders….
“In ages past, re warmed the humani, allowed them to survive in
harsh climates.”
The re revealed a desolate landscape, rocky and snow-covered,
but she could see that the cave-dotted cli face was lit up with
warm yellow-red ames….
There was a sudden crack and a pencil-thin nger of ame shot
up into the night sky. She craned her neck, following it up, up, up,
until it disappeared amongst the stars.
“This is the Magic of Fire.”
Sophie nodded. Her skin tingled and she looked down to see tiny
yellow-green ames curl o Saint-Germain’s ngers. They ickered
across her skin, coiling around her wrist, feather-soft and cool,
leaving faint black traces on her esh. “I know how important re
is. My mother is an archaeologist,” she said dreamily. “She told me
once that man didn’t begin on the road to civilization until he
started cooking his meat.”
Saint-Germain ashed a smile. “You have Prometheus and the
Witch to thank for that. They brought re to the rst primitive
humani. Cooking made it easier for mankind to digest the meat they
hunted, allowed them to absorb the nutrients more easily. It kept
them warm and safe in their caves, and Prometheus showed them
how to use the same re to harden their tools and weapons.” The
count gripped Sophie’s wrist with his hand, holding it as if he were
taking her pulse. “Fire has driven every great civilization, from the
ancient world right up to the present day. Without the heat of the
sun, this planet would be nothing more than rock and ice.”
As he was speaking, images crackled into existence before
Sophie’s face again, formed from smoke drifting o his hands. They
hung undulating in the still air.
…A gray-brown planet turning in space, a single moon spinning
around it. There were no white clouds, no blue water, no green
continents or golden deserts. Only gray. And the faintest outlines of
land masses cut into the solid rock. Sophie abruptly realized that she
was looking at the earth, perhaps far, far in the future. She gasped
in shock and her breath blew the smoke away, taking the image
with it.
“The Magic of Fire is strongest in sunlight.” Saint-Germain moved
his right hand and traced a symbol with his index nger. It hung
glowing in the air, a circle with spikes radiating from it like a
sunburst. The count blew on it and it dissolved into sparkles.
“Without re, we are nothing.”
Saint-Germain’s left hand was now completely wrapped in ame,
but he still clutched Sophie’s wrist. Red-white ribbons of re curled
around the girl’s ngers and puddled in the palm of her hand. Each
nger burned like a miniature candle—red, yellow, green, blue and
white—yet she felt no pain and no fear.
“Fire can heal; it can seal a wound, can cut out disease,” SaintGermain continued earnestly. Golden cinders of re burned in his
pale blue eyes. “It is unlike any other magic, because it is the only
one directly linked to the purity and strength of your aura. Almost
anyone can learn the basics of Earth, Air or Water magic. Spells and
incantations can be memorized and written down in books, but the
power to ignite re comes from within. The purer the aura, the
stronger the re, and that means, Sophie, that you must be very
careful, because your aura is so pure. When you unleash the Magic
of Fire, it will be incredibly potent. Has Flamel warned you not to
overuse your powers, lest you burst into ame?”
“Scatty told me what might happen,” Sophie said.
Saint-Germain nodded. “Never create re when you are tired or
weakened. If you lose control of this element, it will snap back on
you and burn you to a crisp in a heartbeat.”
A solid ball of ame now burned steadily in Sophie’s right hand.
She became aware that her left hand was tingling and quickly lifted
it o the bench. It left the smoking, blackened impression of a hand
burned into the wood. With a dull pop, a puddle of blue ame
appeared in her left hand and each nger sparked alight.
“Why can’t I feel it?” Sophie wondered aloud.
“You are protected by your aura,” Saint-Germain explained. “You
can shape the re, in the same way that Joan showed you how to
shape your aura into silver objects. You can create globes and spears
of re.” He snapped his ngers and a scattering of thick round
sparks bounced across the roof. He then pointed his index nger and
a little jagged spearlike ame darted toward the nearest spark,
striking it with deadly accuracy. “When you are in full control of
your powers, you will be able to draw upon the Magic of Fire at
will, but until then you will need a trigger.”
“A trigger?”
“Normally it would take hours of meditation to focus your aura to
the point at which you could bring it alight. But sometime in the
very distant past, someone discovered how to create a trigger. A
shortcut. You’ve seen my butter ies?”
Sophie nodded, remembering the dozens of tiny tattooed
butter ies that wrapped around the count’s wrists and coiled up his
arm.
“They are my trigger.” Saint-Germain lifted the girl’s hands. “And
now you have yours.”
Sophie looked down at her hands. The re had gone out, leaving
black sooty streaks on her esh and around her wrists. She brushed
her hands together, but succeeded only in smearing the dust.
“Allow me.” Saint-Germain lifted a watering can and shook it.
Liquid sloshed inside. “Hold out your hands.” He poured water over
her palms—it sizzled as it touched her esh—washing away the
black streaks. The count pulled a spotless white handkerchief from
his back pocket, dipped it into the watering can and carefully wiped
o the remainder of the soot. But around her right wrist, where
Saint-Germain had held it, the soot refused to wash away. A thick
black band encircled her wrist like a bracelet.
Saint-Germain snapped his ngers and his index and little nger
lit up. He brought the light close to Sophie’s hand.
She looked down to discover that a tattoo was burned into her
skin.
Silently lifting her arm, she twisted her wrist to examine the
ornate band twisted around it. Two strands, gold and silver,
entwined and curled around one another to form an intricate,
almost Celtic-looking pattern. On the underside of her wrist, where
Saint-Germain had pressed his thumb, was a perfect gold circle with
a red dot in the center.
“When you wish to trigger the Magic of Fire, press your thumb
against the circle and focus your aura,” Saint-Germain explained.
“That will bring the re alive instantly.”
“And that’s it?” Sophie asked, sounding surprised. “That’s all?”
Saint-Germain nodded. “That’s it. Why, what were you
expecting?”
Sophie shook her head. “I don’t know, but when the Witch of
Endor taught me Air magic, she wrapped me in bandages like a
mummy.”
Saint-Germain smiled shyly. “Well, I’m not the Witch of Endor, of
course. Joan tells me the Witch imbued you with all of her
memories and knowledge. I’ve no idea why she did that; it certainly
wasn’t necessary. But no doubt she had her reasons. Besides, I don’t
know how to do that—and I’m not sure I’d want you knowing all
my thoughts and memories,” he added with a grin. “Some of them
are not very nice.”
Sophie smiled. “I’m relieved—another batch of memories
wouldn’t be that great to deal with.” Holding up her hand, she
pressed the circle on her wrist and her little nger smoked; then the
nail glowed dull orange for a moment before it popped alight with a
slender, wavering ame. “How did you know what to do?”
“Well, I was rst and foremost an alchemist. I suppose you’d call
me a scientist today. When Nicholas asked me to train you in the
Magic of Fire, I’d no idea how to do it, so I just approached this like
any other experiment.”
“An experiment?” Sophie blinked. “Could it have gone wrong?”
“The real danger was that it simply would not have worked.”
“Thank you,” she said nally, and then she grinned. “I was
expecting the process to be a lot more dramatic. I’m really glad it
was so”—she paused, looking for the right word—“ordinary.”
“Well, maybe not that ordinary. It’s not every day you learn how
to master re. How about extraordinary?” Saint-Germain suggested.
“Well, that too.”
“That’s all. Oh, there are tricks I can—and will—teach you.
Tomorrow, I’ll show you how to create globes, donuts and rings of
re. But once you have the trigger, you can call upon re at any
time.”
“But do I need to say anything?” Sophie asked. “Do I need to
learn any words?”
“Like what?”
“Well, when you lit up the Ei el Tower, you said something that
sounded like eggness.”
“Ignis,” the count said. “Latin for re. No, you don’t need to say
anything.”
“Why did you do it, then?”
Saint-Germain grinned. “I just thought it sounded cool.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Perenelle Flamel was puzzled.
Creeping along the dimly lit corridors, she’d discovered that all
the lower cells of the island prison were lled with creatures from
the darker edges of myth. The Sorceress had encountered a dozen
di erent vampire breeds and various werebeasts, as well as
boggarts, trolls and cluricauns. One cell held nothing but a sleeping
child minotaur, while in the cell opposite, two cannibal Windigo lay
unconscious alongside a trio of oni. An entire corridor of cells was
given over to dragon-kin, wyverns and redrakes.
Perenelle didn’t think they were prisoners—none of the cells were
locked—yet they were all asleep, and they were secured behind the
shining silver spider’s web. Still, she wasn’t sure whether that was to
keep the creatures prisoners or keep them apart. None of the
creatures she’d discovered were allies. She passed one cell where the
web hung in ragged tatters. The cell was empty, but the web and
oor were clogged with bones, none of them even vaguely human.
These were creatures from a dozen lands and as many
mythologies. Some—like the Windigo—she had only heard of, but at
least they were native to the American continent. Others, as far as
she knew, had never traveled to the New World and had remained
safe and secure in their homelands or in Shadowrealms that
bordered those lands. Japanese oni should not coexist alongside
Celtic peists.
There was something terribly wrong here.
Perenelle rounded a corner and felt a breeze ru e her hair. She
turned her face to it, nostrils aring, smelling salt and seaweed.
With a quick glance over her shoulder, she hurried down the
corridor.
Dee had to be collecting these creatures, had to be gathering them
together, but why? And more importantly, how? Capturing a single
vetala was unheard of, but a dozen? And how had they managed to
get a baby minotaur away from its mother? Even Scathach, as
fearless and deadly as she was, would never face down one of the
bull-headed race if she could help it.
Perenelle came to a ight of steps. The smell of salt air was
stronger now, the breeze cooler, but she hesitated before putting her
foot down and bent to check the stair for silver strands. There were
none. She still hadn’t spotted whatever had spun the webs that
festooned the lower cells, and it was making her incredibly nervous.
It suggested that the web creators were probably sleeping…which
meant that they would wake up sooner or later. When they did, the
entire prison would be swarming with spiders—or maybe worse—
and she didn’t want to be out in the open when that happened.
A little of her power had returned—certainly enough to defend
herself, though the moment she used her magic, it would draw the
sphinx to her and simultaneously weaken and age her. Perenelle
knew she would only get one chance to face down the creature, and
she wanted—needed—to be as powerful as possible for that
encounter. Darting up the creaking metal stairs, she stopped at the
rust-eaten door. Pushing back her hair, she placed her ear against
the corroded metal. All she could hear was the dull pounding of the
sea as it continued to eat away at the island. Gripping the handle in
both hands, she gently bore down on it and pushed the door open,
gritting her teeth as old hinges squeaked and squalled, the sound
echoing through the corridors.
Perenelle stepped out into a broad courtyard surrounded by
ruined and tumbled buildings. To the right the sun was sinking in
the west, and it painted the stones in a warm orange light. With a
sigh of relief, she spread her arms wide, turned her face to the sun,
threw her head back and closed her eyes. Static crackled and ran
along the length of her black hair, lifting it o her shoulders as her
aura immediately began to recharge. The wind whipping in o the
bay was cool, and she breathed deeply, ridding her lungs of the
stench of rot, mildew and the monsters below.
And then she suddenly realized what all the creatures in the cells
had in common: they were monsters.
Where were the gentler spirits, the sprites and fey, the huldra and
the rusalka, the elves and the inari? Dee had only gathered the
hunters, the predators: the Magician was assembling an army of
monsters.
A savage howling shriek ripped through the island, vibrating the
very stones beneath her feet. “Sorceress!”
The sphinx had discovered Perenelle was missing.
“Where are you, Sorceress?” The fresh sea air was suddenly
tainted with the stink of the sphinx.
Perenelle was turning back to close the door when she spotted
movement in the shadows below. She’d looked into the sun too
long, and the golden ball had left burning afterimages on her retina.
She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment; then she opened them
again to peer into the gloom.
The shadows were moving, owing down the walls, gathering at
the bottom of the steps.
Perenelle shook her head. These were no shadows. This was a
mass of creatures, thousands, tens of thousands of them. They
owed up the stairs, slowing only as they approached the light.
Perenelle knew what they were then—spiders, deadly and
poisonous—and knew why the webs were so di erent. She glimpsed
a seething mass of wolf spiders and tarantulas, black widows and
brown recluses, garden spiders and funnel webs. She knew they
should not exist together…which probably meant that whatever had
called them, and now controlled them, probably lurked below.
The Sorceress slammed the metal door shut and wedged a lump of
masonry against the base. Then she turned and ran. But she had
only taken a dozen steps before the door was ripped o its hinges by
the weight of the massed spiders.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Josh wearily pushed open the door to the kitchen and stepped into
the long low room. Sophie turned away from the sink and watched
her brother slump into a chair, drop the stone sword onto the oor,
lay his arms on the table and rest his head on them.
“How was it?” Sophie asked.
“I can barely move,” he mumbled. “My shoulders ache, my back
aches, my arms ache, my head aches, I have blisters on my hands
and I can barely close my ngers.” He showed her his raw palms. “I
never realized just holding a sword would be so hard.”
“But did you learn anything?”
“I learned how to hold it.”
Sophie slid a plateful of toast across the table and Josh
immediately straightened up, grabbed a piece and shoved it in his
mouth. “At least you can still eat,” she said. Catching hold of his
right hand, she turned it over to look at his palm. “Ouch!” she said
in sympathy. The skin at the base of his thumb was red, bubbling up
in a painful-looking water blister.
“Told you,” he said through a mouthful of toast. “I need a BandAid.”
“Let me try something.” Sophie quickly rubbed her hands
together, then pressed the thumb of her left hand against her right
wrist. Closing her eyes, she concentrated…and her little nger
popped alight, burning with a cool blue ame.
Josh stopped chewing and stared.
Before he could object, Sophie ran her nger over his blistered
esh. He attempted to pull away, but she held his wrist with
surprising strength. When she nally let it go, he jerked his hand
back.
“What do you think you’re…,” he began, looking at his hand.
Then he discovered that the blister had vanished, leaving only the
faint hint of a circle on his skin.
“Francis told me that re can heal.” Sophie held up her right
hand. Wisps of gray smoke curled o her ngers; then they snapped
alight. When she closed her hand into a st, the re extinguished.
“I thought”—Josh swallowed hard and tried again—“I didn’t
know you’d even started to learn about re.”
“Started and nished.”
“Finished?”
“All done.” She brushed her hands together; sparks ew.
Chewing his toast, Josh looked at his sister critically. When she’d
rst been Awakened and when she’d learned the Magic of Air, he’d
seen the di erences in her immediately, especially around her face
and eyes. He’d even noted the new subtle shading of her eye color.
He couldn’t see any changes this time. She looked the same as
before…but she wasn’t. And the Fire magic distanced her even
further from him. “You don’t seem any di erent,” he said.
“I don’t feel any di erent either. Except warmer,” she added. “I
don’t feel cold.”
So this was his sister now, Josh thought. She looked just like any
other teenager he knew. And yet…she was unlike anyone else on
the planet: she could control two of the elemental magics.
Maybe that was the scariest part of all this: the immortal humans
—people like Flamel and Perenelle, Joan, amboyant Saint-Germain
and even Dee: they all looked so ordinary. They were the type of
people you would pass in the street and not give a second glance to.
Scathach, with her red hair and grass green eyes, was always going
to attract attention. But she wasn’t human.
“Did it…did it hurt?” he asked, curious.
“Not at all.” She smiled. “It was almost disappointing. Francis sort
of washed my hands with re…oh, and I got this,” she said, holding
up her right arm and allowing her sleeve to fall back to reveal the
design burned into her esh.
Josh leaned forward to look closely at Sophie’s arm. “It’s a
tattoo,” he said, envy clearly audible in his voice. The twins had
always talked about getting tattoos together. “Mom is going to freak
when she sees that.” Then he added, “Where did you get it? And
why?”
“It’s not ink, it was burned on with re,” Sophie explained,
twisting her wrist to show o the design.
Josh suddenly caught her hand and pointed at the red dot
surrounded by the gold circle on the underside of her wrist. “I’ve
seen something like that before,” he said slowly, and frowned,
trying to remember.
His twin nodded. “It took me a while, but then I remembered that
Nicholas has something like it on his wrist,” Sophie said. “A circle
with a cross through it.”
“That’s right.” Josh closed his eyes. He’d rst noted the small
tattoo on Flamel’s wrist when he’d started working for him in the
bookshop, and though he’d wondered why it was in such an unusual
place, he’d never asked about it. He opened his eyes again and
looked at the tattoo, and he suddenly realized that Sophie was
branded by magic, marked as someone who could control the
elements. And he didn’t like it. “What do you need it for?”
“When I want to use re, I press on the center of the circle and
focus my aura. Saint-Germain called it a shortcut, a trigger for my
power.”
“I wonder what Flamel needs a trigger for,” Josh wondered aloud.
The kettle pinged and Sophie turned back to the sink. She had
asked herself the same question. “Maybe we can ask him when he
wakes up.”
“Any more toast?” Josh asked. “I’m starving.”
“You’re always starving.”
“Yeah, well, the sword training made me hungry.”
Sophie stuck a fork through a slice of bread and held it out in
front of her. “Watch this,” she said. She pressed on the underside of
her wrist and her index nger burst into ame. Frowning hard,
concentrating, she focused the wavering ame into a thin blue re
and then ran it over the bread, gently toasting it. “Do you want this
done on both sides?”
Josh watched with a mixture of fascination and horror. He knew
from science class that bread toasted around 310 degrees
Fahrenheit.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Machiavelli was sitting in the back of his car alongside Dr. John
Dee. Facing them were the three Disir. Dagon sat in the driver’s
seat, eyes invisible behind his wraparound glasses. The car smelled
faintly of his sour shy odor.
A cell phone buzzed, breaking the uncomfortable silence.
Machiavelli ipped it open without looking at the screen. He closed
it again almost immediately. “All clear. My men have pulled back
and there is a security cordon in place around all the connecting
streets. No one will accidentally wander into the area.”
“Whatever happens, do not enter the house,” the Disir with violet
eyes said. “Once we free Nidhogg, we shall have very little control
until it feeds.”
John Dee leaned forward, and for a moment, it looked as if he
was about to tap the young woman on the knee. The look on her
face prevented him. “Flamel and the children must not be allowed
to escape.”
“That sounds like a threat, Doctor,” the warrior sitting on the left
said. “Or an order.”
“And we do not like threats,” her sister sitting to the right added.
“And we don’t take orders.”
Dee blinked slowly. “It is neither a threat nor an order. Simply
a…request,” he said eventually.
“We are here only for Scathach,” the warrior with violet eyes said.
“The rest of them are not our concern.”
Dagon climbed out of the car and opened the door. Without a
backward glance, the Valkyries stepped out into the rst glimmers
of predawn light, spread out and moved slowly down the back
street. They looked like three young women coming home from an
all-night party.
Dee shifted position, taking the seat facing Machiavelli. “If they
succeed, I will ensure that our masters know that the Disir were
your idea,” he said pleasantly.
“I’m sure you will.” Machiavelli didn’t look at the English
Magician and continued to follow the progress of the three girls as
they walked down the street. “And if they fail, you can tell our
masters that the Disir were my idea, and you can absolve yourself of
any blame,” he added. “Shifting the blame: I believe I originally
came up with that concept about twenty years before you were
born.”
“I thought you said they were bringing Nidhogg?” Dee asked,
ignoring him.
Niccolò Machiavelli tapped the window with his manicured
ngernails. “They did.”
As the Disir moved down the narrow, cobbled, high-walled alley,
they changed.
The transformation occurred as they passed through a patch of
shadow. They entered as young women, dressed in soft leather
jackets, jeans and boots…and a moment later they were Valkyries:
warrior maidens. Long coats of ice white chain mail fell to their
knees, knee-high metal boots with spiked toes covered their feet,
and they wore heavy leather-and-metal gauntlets on their hands.
Rounded helmets protected their heads and masked their eyes and
noses but left their mouths free. White leather belts around their
waists held their sword and knife sheaths. The Valkyries each
carried a wide-bladed sword in one hand, but each also had a
second weapon strapped to her back: a spear, a double-headed axe
and a war hammer.
They stopped before a rotting green gate set into the wall. One of
the Valkyries turned to look back at the car and pointed a gloved
hand at the gate.
Machiavelli hit a button and the window rolled down. He raised
his thumb and nodded. Despite its decrepit appearance, it was the
back gate to Saint-Germain’s house.
Each of the Disir reached into a leather pouch that hung from her
belt. Taking out a handful of at stonelike objects, they tossed them
at the base of the door.
“They’re Casting the Runes,” Machiavelli explained. “They’re
calling Nidhogg…the creature you released, a creature the Elders
themselves locked away.”
“I didn’t know it was trapped by the World Tree,” Dee muttered.
“I’m surprised. I thought you knew everything.” Machiavelli
shifted in the seat to look at Dee. In the gloomy half-light, he could
see that the Magician was looking pale and there was the faintest
sheen of sweat on his forehead. Centuries of controlling his
emotions ensured that Machiavelli didn’t smile. “Why did you
destroy the Yggdrasill?” he asked.
“It was the source of Hekate’s power,” Dee said quietly, eyes xed
on the Valkyries, watching them intently. They had stepped back
from the stones they’d dropped on the ground and were talking
quietly amongst themselves, pointing out individual tiles.
“It was as old as this planet. And yet you destroyed it without a
second thought. Why did you do that?” Machiavelli wondered
aloud.
“I did what was necessary.” Dee’s words were ice. “I will always
do whatever is necessary to bring the Elders back to this world.”
“But you didn’t consider the consequences,” Niccolò Machiavelli
said softly. “Every action has a consequence. The Yggdrasill you
destroyed in Hekate’s kingdom stretched into several other
Shadowrealms. The topmost branches reached the Shadowrealm of
Asgard, and the roots stretched deep into Ni heim, the World of
Darkness.” He saw Dee sti en. “Not only did you release Nidhogg,
but you also destroyed at least three Shadowrealms—maybe more—
when you destroyed the World Tree.”
“I didn’t know….”
“You made a lot of enemies,” Machiavelli continued smoothly,
ignoring him, “dangerous enemies. I have heard that the Elder Hel
escaped the destruction of her kingdom. I understand she is hunting
you.”
“She does not frighten me,” Dee snapped, but there was a quaver
in his voice.
“Oh, she should,” Machiavelli murmured. “She terri es me.”
“My master will protect me,” Dee said con dently.
“He must be a powerful Elder indeed to protect you from Hel; no
one has stood against her and survived.”
“My master is all-powerful,” Dee snapped.
“I look forward to learning the identity of this mysterious Elder.”
“When all this is over, maybe I’ll introduce you,” Dee said. He
nodded down the alleyway. “And that could be very soon.”
The runestones hissed and sizzled on the ground.
They were irregular pieces of at black stone, each etched with a
series of angular lines, squares and slashes. Now the lines were
glowing red, crimson smoke coiling into the still predawn air.
One of the Disir used the tip of her sword to move three of the
runestones together. A second nudged a stone out of the way with
the steel toe of her boot and then dragged another into place. The
third found a single runestone at the edge of the pile and eased it
into position at the end of the string of letters with her sword.
“Nidhogg,” the Disir whispered, calling the nightmare whose
name they had spelled out in the ancient stones.
“Nidhogg,” Machiavelli said very quietly. He looked over Dee’s
shoulder to where Dagon sat staring straight ahead, apparently
disinterested in what was happening to his left. “I know what the
legends say about it, but Dagon, what exactly is it?”
“My people called it the Devourer of Corpses,” the driver said,
voice sticky and bubbling. “It was already here before my race
claimed the seas, and we were amongst the rst to arrive on this
planet.”
Dee quickly swiveled in the seat to look at the driver. “What are
you?”
Dagon ignored the question. “Nidhogg was so dangerous that a
council of the Elder Race created a terrible Shadowrealm, Ni heim,
the World of Darkness, to contain it, and then they used the
unbreakable roots of the Yggdrasill to wrap around the creature,
chaining it for eternity.”
Machiavelli kept his eyes xed on the red-black smoke coiling
from the runestones. He thought he saw the outline of a shape
beginning to form. “Why didn’t the Elders kill it?”
“Nidhogg was a weapon,” Dagon said.
“What did the Elders need a weapon for?” Machiavelli wondered
aloud. “Their powers were almost limitless. They had no enemies.”
Although he sat with his hands resting lightly on the steering
wheel, Dagon’s shoulders shifted and his head turned almost
completely around so that he was facing Dee and Machiavelli. “The
Elders were not the rst upon this earth,” he said simply. “There
were…others.” He pronounced the word slowly and carefully. “The
Elders used Nidhogg and some of the other primordial creatures as
weapons in the Great War to completely destroy them.”
A stunned Machiavelli looked at Dee, who looked equally shocked
by the revelation.
Dagon’s mouth opened in what might have been a smile,
revealing his tooth- lled maw. “You should probably know that the
last time a group of Disir used Nidhogg, they lost control of the
creature. It ate all of them. In the three days it took to recapture it
and chain it in Yggdrasill’s roots, it completely destroyed the
Anasazi people in what is now New Mexico. It is said that Nidhogg
feasted o ten thousand humani and still hungered for more.”
“Can these Disir control it?” Dee demanded.
Dagon shrugged. “Thirteen of the nest Disir warriors couldn’t
control it in New Mexico….”
“Maybe we should—” Dee began.
Machiavelli suddenly sti ened. “Too late,” he whispered. “It’s
here.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
“I’m going to bed.” Sophie Newman paused by the kitchen door, a
glass of water in her hand, and looked back to where Josh was still
sitting at the table. “Francis is going to teach me some speci c re
spells in the morning. He promised to show me the reworks trick.”
“Great, we’ll never have to buy reworks again for the Fourth of
July.”
Sophie smiled tiredly. “Don’t stay up too long, it’s nearly dawn.”
Josh shoved another piece of toast into his mouth. “I’m still on
Paci c time,” he said, his voice mu ed. “But I’ll be up in a few
minutes. Scatty wants to continue my sword training tomorrow. I’m
really looking forward to it.”
“Liar, liar.”
He grunted. “Well, you’ve got your magic to protect you…all I
have is a stone sword.”
The bitterness was clearly audible in his voice, and Sophie forced
herself not to comment. She was getting tired of her brother’s
constant whining. She had never asked to be Awakened; she hadn’t
wanted to know the Witch’s magic or Saint-Germain’s, either. But it
had happened and she was dealing with it, and Josh would just
have to get over it. “Good night,” she said. She closed the door
behind her, leaving Josh alone in the kitchen.
When he nished the last of the toast, he gathered up his plate
and glass and carried them both to the sink. He ran hot water over
the plate, then set it to drip dry in the wire dish rack beside the
deep ceramic sink. Re lling his glass from the jug of ltered water,
he crossed to the kitchen door, pulled it open and stepped out into
the tiny garden. Although it was almost dawn, he didn’t feel the
least bit tired, but then again, he reminded himself, he had slept for
most of the day. Over the high wall, he couldn’t see much of the
Parisian skyline except for the warm orange glow from the
streetlights. He looked up, but there were no stars visible in the
heavens. Sitting on the step, he breathed deeply. The air was cool
and damp, just like San Francisco’s, though it lacked the familiar
salt tang that he loved; it was tainted instead with unfamiliar smells,
few of which were pleasant. He felt a sneeze gathering at the back
of his nose and sni ed hard, eyes watering. There was the stench of
over owing trash cans and rotting fruit, and he detected a nastier,
fouler stink that was vaguely familiar. Closing his mouth, he
breathed deeply through his nose, trying to identify it: what was it?
It was something he’d smelled very recently….
Snake.
Josh leapt to his feet. There weren’t snakes in Paris, were there?
Deep in his chest, Josh felt his heart begin to beat faster. He was
terri ed of snakes, a bone-chilling fear that he could trace back to
when he’d been about ten. He’d been camping with his father in
Wupatki National Monument in Arizona when he’d slipped o a
trail and slid down an incline, straight into a rattlesnake nest. When
the dust had cleared, he’d realized he was lying next to a six-footlong snake. The creature had raised its wedge-shaped head and
stared at him with coal black eyes for what was probably no more
than a second—though it felt like a lifetime—before Josh had
managed to scramble out, too terri ed and breathless even to
scream. He’d never been able to work out why the snake hadn’t
attacked him, though his father told him that rattlesnakes were
actually shy and that it had probably just eaten. He’d had
nightmares about the incident for weeks afterward, and after every
one he would wake up with that smell of serpent musk in his
nostrils.
He was smelling it now.
And it was getting stronger.
Josh started backing up the steps. There was a sudden scrabbling
sound, like a squirrel running up the side of a tree. Then, directly in
front of him, on the other side of the small courtyard, claws, each
one the length of his hand, appeared over the top of the nine-foothigh wall. They moved around slowly, almost delicately, questing
for a hold, and then abruptly gripped hard enough for the talons to
bite deep into the old bricks. Josh froze, all the breath leaving his
body in one shocked exhalation.
The arms that followed were covered in thick knobbled hide…and
then the head of a monster appeared over the wall. It was long and
slablike, with two rounded nostrils on the end of a blunt snout
directly over its mouth and solid black eyes sunk deep behind
circular depressions on either side of its skull. Unable to move,
unable to breathe, his heart hammering so hard it was physically
shaking his body, Josh watched the huge head swivel lazily from
side to side, an immensely long, ghastly white forked tongue
ickering in the air. It froze, then slowly, very slowly, shifted its
head and looked down at Josh. The merest tip of its tongue tasted
the air and then it opened its mouth wide—impossibly wide, enough
to swallow him whole—and the boy saw a mouthful of teeth: sharp,
ragged curved daggers.
Josh wanted to turn and run screaming, but he couldn’t. There
was something mesmerizing about the appalling creature
clambering over the wall. All his life he’d been fascinated by
dinosaurs: he’d collected fossils, eggs, bones and teeth—even
dinosaur coprolites. And now he was looking at a living dinosaur.
There was even a part of his brain that identi ed the creature—or at
least, what it resembled. It was a Komodo dragon. They didn’t grow
much longer than ten feet in the wild, but he could already see that
this creature was at least three times that.
Stone cracked. An old brick exploded into dust, and then a
second, a third.
Then there was a crunching, snapping, ripping sound, and—
almost in slow motion—Josh watched as the wall, with the creature
draped over the top, swayed, then crashed to the ground. The metal
door buckled in two, popped o its hinges and shattered against the
water fountain, tearing a huge chunk out of the basin. The monster
smashed to the ground, una ected by the stones raining down
around it. The noise jolted Josh free and he staggered back up the
steps just as the monster lumbered to its feet and shu ed forward,
heading straight for the house. The boy slammed the door closed
and rammed home the bolts. He was turning away when through
the kitchen window he spotted the gure in white, clutching what
looked like a sword, step through the gaping hole that had been the
wall.
Josh grabbed the stone sword o the oor and dashed into the
hall. “Wake up!” he shouted, his voice so lled with terror even he
didn’t recognize it. “Sophie! Flamel! Anyone!”
The door behind him shook in its frame. He snapped a quick
glance over his shoulder in time to see the monster’s white tongue
peel o the wood and glass.
“Help!”
Glass shattered and the tongue shot into the kitchen, sweeping
plates to the oor, scattering pots and pans, knocking over a chair.
Metal hissed where the tongue brushed against it; wood turned
black and burned; plastic melted. A drop of the corrosive saliva
dripped to the oor and bubbled on the tiles, eating into the stone.
Instinctively, Josh lashed out at the tongue with Clarent. The
sword barely touched it, but it suddenly disappeared, darting back
into the creature’s mouth. There was a single still moment, and then
the monster rammed its entire head at the door.
The door crumpled to matchwood; the supporting walls on either
side cracked as stones were knocked out. The creature drew its head
back and slammed it into the opening again, punching a large hole
into the kitchen. The entire house creaked ominously.
A hand fell on Josh’s shoulder, almost stopping his heart. “Now
look what you’ve done: you’ve just gone and made it mad.”
Scathach strode into the wrecked kitchen and stood in the gaping
hole created by the creature’s blows. “Nidhogg,” she said, and Josh
was unsure whether she was talking to him, “which means the Disir
are not far behind.” She sounded almost pleased with the news.
Scathach danced backward as Nidhogg’s head slammed into the
opening again. Its huge nostrils opened wide and its white tongue
slapped against the spot where, an instant before, the Shadow had
been standing. A glob of spittle burned on the tile, turning it to a
liquid sludge. Scathach’s twin swords darted out, ickering gray and
silver, and two long cuts appeared on the white esh of the
creature’s forked tongue.
Without taking her eyes o the creature, Scathach said to Josh,
almost calmly, “Get the others out of the house, I’ll take care of
this….”
And then an enormous claw-tipped arm smashed through the
window, wrapped around the Warrior’s body in a viselike grip and
slammed her back against the wall with enough force to crack the
plaster. The Warrior’s arms were trapped against her body, her
swords useless. Nighogg’s huge head appeared in the ruined side of
the house, and then its mouth opened wide and its tongue darted
out toward Scathach. Once its sticky acid-coated tongue wrapped
around the defenseless Warrior, it would drag her into its cavernous
maw.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Sophie
ew down the stairs, sparks and streamers of blue re
trailing from her outstretched ngers.
She’d been standing in the bathroom brushing her teeth when the
entire house had shaken. She’d heard the rumbling crash of bricks,
which had been followed a heartbeat later by her brother’s scream.
It had ripped through the silent house and was the most terrifying
sound she had ever heard.
She was running down the corridor past Flamel’s room when the
door opened. For a single instant she almost didn’t recognize the
confused-looking old man standing in the doorway. The rings under
his eyes were so dark they looked like bruises, and his skin was an
unhealthy yellowish hue. “What’s happening?” he mumbled, but
Sophie hurried past: she had no answers for him. All she knew was
that her brother was downstairs.
And then the entire house shook again.
She felt the vibration through the oors and walls. All the pictures
on the wall to her left shifted and tilted o center.
Terri ed, Sophie raced down the stairs to the rst oor just as a
bedroom door opened and Joan appeared. One moment the small
woman was wearing shiny blue-green satin pajamas—and the next
she was clad in full metal armor, a long broad-bladed sword in her
gloved hands. “Get back,” Joan snapped, her French accent
pronounced.
“No,” Sophie shouted. “It’s Josh—he’s in trouble!”
Joan fell into step beside her, armor clinking and rasping. “OK
then, but stay behind me and to my right, so I always know where
you are,” Joan commanded. “Did you see Nicholas?”
“He’s awake. But he looked sick.”
“Exhaustion. He daren’t try any more magic in his condition. It
could kill him.”
“Where’s Francis?”
“Probably in the attic. But the room is soundproofed and he’ll
have his headphones on and the bass pumped up; I doubt he’s heard
anything.”
“I’m sure he felt the house shake.”
“Probably thought it was a good bass line.”
“I don’t know where Scatty is,” Sophie said. She was ghting hard
to keep the bubbling panic inside from overwhelming her.
“With any luck, she’s downstairs in the kitchen with Josh. If she
is, then he’s OK,” Joan added. “Now follow me.” Holding the sword
upright in both hands, the woman moved cautiously down the last
ight of stairs and stepped into the broad marbled hallway at the
front of the house. She stopped so suddenly that Sophie almost
walked into her. Joan pointed toward the front door. Sophie spotted
the ghostly white shape behind the stained-glass panels, and then
there was a crunching snap…and the head of an axe appeared
through the door. Then, with a crack, the front door was smashed
open in a shower of wood and glass fragments.
Two gures stepped into the hallway.
In the light of the ornate crystal chandelier, Sophie saw that they
were young women in white chain-mail armor, their faces hidden
behind helmets, one wielding a sword and an axe, the other
carrying a sword and a spear. She reacted instinctively. Gripping her
right wrist with her left hand, she splayed open her ngers, palm
outward. Crackling blue-green ames splashed across the oor
directly in front of the two girls, shooting upward in a solid sheet of
wavering emerald re.
The women stepped through the ames without even pausing but
stopped when they spotted Joan in her armor. They looked at one
another, obviously confused. “You’re not the silver humani. Who are
you?” one demanded.
“This is my house, and I think that’s my question,” Joan said
grimly. She turned sideways, left shoulder toward the women,
holding her sword in both hands, the point moving in a slow gure
eight between the warriors.
“Stand aside. We have no argument with you,” one said.
Joan lifted the sword, bringing the hilt close to her face, the tip of
the longsword pointing straight up. “You come into my home and
tell me to stand aside,” she said incredulously. “Who are you…what
are you?” she demanded.
“We are the Disir,” the woman with the sword and spear said
softly. “We are here for Scathach. Our argument is only with her.
But do not stand in our way or it will become your argument.”
“The Shadow is my friend,” Joan said.
“Then that makes you our enemy.”
Without warning, the Valkyries attacked together, one lunging
with sword and spear, the other with sword and axe. Joan’s heavy
blade shifted, metal clanging, the movement almost too fast to see
as she blocked sword thrusts, turned aside the axe and batted down
the spear.
The Disir backed away and spread out until they were standing on
either side of Joan. She had to keep turning her head to be able to
watch them both.
“You ght well.”
Joan’s lips pulled away from her teeth in a savage smile. “I was
taught by the best. Scathach herself trained me.”
“I thought I recognized the style,” the second Disir said.
Only Joan’s gray eyes moved as she tracked the two warriors. “I
didn’t think I had a style.”
“Neither has Scathach.”
“Who are you?” the Disir on the right asked. “In my lifetime I’ve
known only a handful who could stand against us. And none of
them were humani.”
“I am Joan of Arc,” she replied simply.
“Never heard of you,” the Disir said, and while she was speaking,
her sister, standing to Joan’s left, drew back her arm, poised to
throw the spear…
The weapon burst into white-hot ames.
With a savage howl, the Disir ung the spear to one side; by the
time it hit the ground, the wooden shaft was little more than ash
and the wickedly pointed metal head was melting into a bubbling
puddle.
Standing on the bottom step, Sophie blinked in surprise. She
hadn’t known she could do that.
The Disir to Joan’s right darted forward, sword and axe weaving a
deadly humming pattern in the air before her, battering at Joan’s
sword, driving her back under the vicious onslaught.
The second Disir rounded on Sophie.
Setting the spear shaft alight and melting the head had exhausted
her, and she slumped against the banister. But she needed to help
Joan; she needed to get to Josh. Pressing hard on the underside of
her wrist, Sophie attempted to call upon her Fire magic. Smoke
curled from her hand, but there was no re.
The Disir strode forward until she was standing directly in front of
the girl. Sophie was standing on a step, and the girls’ faces were
almost level. “So, you are the silver humani the English Magician
wants so desperately.” Behind her metal mask, the Valkyrie’s violet
eyes were contemptuous.
Drawing in a deep shuddering breath, Sophie straightened. She
stretched out both arms, ngers closed into tight sts. Closing her
eyes, breathing deeply, trying to calm her thundering heart, she
visualized gloves of ame; she saw herself bringing her hands
together, shaping a ball of re in her sts like dough and then
inging it at the gure standing before her. But when she opened
her eyes, only the merest hints of gossamer blue ames danced over
her esh. She clapped her hands together and sparks danced
harmlessly across the warrior’s chain mail.
The Disir tapped her sword against her gloved hand. “Your petty
re tricks do not impress me.”
A tremendous crash from the kitchen shook the house again. The
ornate chandelier over the center of the hallway started to sway to
and fro, tinkling musically as the shadows danced.
“Josh,” Sophie whispered. Her fear turned to anger: this creature
was preventing her from getting to her brother. And the anger gave
her strength. Remembering what Saint-Germain had done on the
roof, the girl pointed her index nger at the warrior and unleashed
her rage in a single focused beam.
A dirty yellow-black spear of solid re leapt from Sophie’s nger
and exploded against the Disir’s chain mail. Fire splashed all over
the warrior, and the force of the blow drove her to her knees. She
shouted an incomprehensible word that sounded like a wolf’s howl.
Across the hall, Joan took advantage of the distraction and
pressed her attacker hard, pushing her back toward the gaping ruin
of a door. The two women were evenly matched, and while Joan’s
sword was longer and heavier than her opponent’s, the Disir had the
advantage of wielding two weapons. In addition, it had been a long
time since Joan had worn armor and fought with a sword. She could
feel the burn in the muscles of her shoulders, and her hips and knees
were aching from the weight of the metal she was carrying. She had
to nish this.
The fallen Valkyrie climbed to her feet in front of Sophie. The
front of her chain mail had taken the full force of the re bolt, and
the links had melted and run like softened wax. The warrior
grabbed a handful of the mail and ripped it away from her body,
inging it aside. The plain white robe underneath was scorched and
blackened, with sparkling chunks of metal melted into the cloth.
“Little girl,” the Disir whispered, “I am going to teach you never to
play with re.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Nidhogg’s sticky tongue unfurled through the air toward Scathach,
who was still pinned against the kitchen wall, wrapped tightly in the
creature’s claws. The Warrior fought in complete silence, struggling
in the monster’s grip, wrenching herself from side to side, boot heels
scrambling for purchase on the slippery tiled oor. With her arms
pinned to her sides, she was unable to use her short swords.
Josh knew that if he even paused for thought, he was not going to
be able to go through with what he meant to do. The smell of the
creature was making him sick to his stomach, and his heart was
thumping so hard he could barely catch his breath.
The forked tongue brushed across the table, leaving a deep burn
mark on the wood. It punched right through a wooden chair as it
headed straight for the Warrior’s head.
All he had to do, Josh kept reminding himself, was to think of his
sword as a football. Holding Clarent high above his head in the twohanded grip Joan had shown him earlier, he launched himself
forward in a move that the coach at his last school had spent an
entire season trying—and failing—to teach him.
But even as he was jumping, he knew he’d miscalculated. The
tongue was moving too fast, and he was too far away. With a last
desperate e ort, he ung the sword from his hand.
The at of the blade struck the side of Nidhogg’s meaty tongue.
And stuck fast.
Years of tae kwon do training took over as Josh crashed onto the
tiled oor. He hit it hard but still managed to slap it with the palm
of his hand, sending his body forward into a neat roll that brought
him back to his feet…within inches of the meaty acid-dripping
tongue. And the sword.
Catching hold of the hilt, he used all his strength to pull it away
from the tongue—it came free with a sticky Velcro sound, and the
tongue sizzled and hissed as it snapped back into the monster’s
mouth. Josh knew that if he stopped, both he and Scatty were dead.
He plunged Clarent point rst into the serpent’s arm just above the
wrist joint. As the blade sank smoothly into the alligator-like hide, it
began to vibrate, a high-pitched keening sound that set Josh’s teeth
on edge. He felt a rush of warmth owing up his arm and into his
chest. A heartbeat later, a surge of strength and energy wiped away
his aches and pains. His aura blossomed bright blinding gold, and
there was a tracery of light curling around the gray stone blade
when he wrenched it out of the creature.
“The claws, Josh. Cut o a claw,” Scathach grunted as Nidhogg
shook her hard. The two swords fell from her hands and clattered to
the oor.
Josh lashed out at the monster, trying to cut o a claw, but the
heavy stone blade turned at the last moment and bounced
harmlessly o its foot. He tried again, and this time the sword
struck sparks o the creature’s armored hide.
“Hey! Be careful,” Scathach yelped as the swinging blade came
dangerously close to her head. “That’s one of the few weapons that
really can kill me.”
“Sorry,” Josh muttered through clenched teeth. “I’ve never done
anything like this before.” He slashed out at the claw again. Sparks
ew into the Warrior’s face. “Why do we want a claw?” he grunted,
hacking at the iron-hard skin.
“It can only be killed with one of its own claws,” Scathach said,
her voice surprisingly calm. “Look out! Get back!”
Josh turned just as the thing’s huge head lunged forward, pushing
into the side of the ruined house, its white tongue darting forward
again. It was coming for him. It was moving too fast; there was
nowhere to go—and if he did move, it would just hit Scatty.
Planting his feet rmly, both hands wrapped tightly around
Clarent’s hilt, he held the sword before his face. He closed his eyes
at the approaching horror—and immediately opened them again. If
he was going to die, he’d do it with his eyes open.
It was like playing a video game, he thought—except that this
game was deadly. Almost in slow motion, he saw the two ends of
the forked tongue wrap around the blade—as if it was going to
wrench it from Josh’s hand. He tightened his grip, determined not to
let the sword go.
When the esh of the creature’s tongue touched the stone blade,
the e ect was immediate.
The creature froze, then convulsed and hissed, the sound like
escaping steam. The acid from its tongue bubbled on the blade as
the sword trembled in Josh’s hand, vibrating like a tuning fork,
growing warm, then hot, and started to glow with a stark white
light. He squeezed his eyes shut…
…and behind his closed eyes, Josh glimpsed a series of ickering
images: a blasted and ruined landscape of black rock, pockmarked
with pools of bubbling red lava, while overhead, the sky boiled with
lthy clouds that rained ash and cinders. Spread across the sky,
dangling from the clouds, were what looked like the roots of a huge
tree. The roots were the source of the bitter white ash: they were
dissolving, withering, dying….
Nidhogg jerked its blackened tongue free.
Josh gasped and opened his eyes just as his aura ared again,
stronger—brighter—this time, blinding him. Panicked, waving the
sword before him, he backed up until he felt the kitchen wall
against his shoulder blades. He kept blinking furiously, wanting to
rub his eyes, but he didn’t dare loosen his grip on the sword. All
around him, he heard stones fall, plaster split, wood creak and snap,
and he hunched his shoulders, expecting something to come
crashing down on his head. “Scatty?” he called.
But there was no reply.
His voice rose. “Scatty!”
Squinting hard, blinking away the spots dancing before his eyes,
he saw the monster dragging Scathach out of the house. Its tongue,
now black and brown, was hanging loosely out of the side of its
mouth. Holding the Warrior in a crushing grip, it turned on its own
length and pushed through the devastated garden, its long tail
slicing chunks out of the side of the house, smashing through the
only unbroken window. Then the creature rose up on its two hind
legs, like a collared lizard, and clattered down the alleyway, almost
trampling underfoot the gure in white chain-mail armor standing
guard. Without hesitation the gure disappeared after the creature.
Josh stumbled through the gaping hole in the side of the house
and stopped. He glanced over his shoulder. The once-neat kitchen
was a shredded ruin. Then he looked at the sword in his hand and
smiled. He’d stopped the monster. His smile widened to a broad
grin. He’d fought it o and saved his sister and everyone else in the
house…except Scatty.
Taking a deep breath, Josh jumped down the steps and raced
across the garden and out into the alley, following the monster. “I
can’t believe I’m doing this,” he muttered. “I don’t even like Scatty.
Well…not that much,” he amended.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Niccolò Machiavelli had always been a careful man.
He had survived and even thrived in the dangerous and deadly
Medici court in Florence in the fteenth century, a time when
intrigue was a way of life and violent death and assassination was
commonplace. His most famous book, The Prince, was one of the
rst to suggest that the use of subterfuge, lies and deceit was
perfectly acceptable for a ruler.
Machiavelli was a survivor because he was subtle, cautious, clever
and, above all else: cunning.
So what had possessed him to call upon the Disir? The Valkyries
had no word for subtle in their language and didn’t know the
meaning of the word caution. Their idea of clever and cunning was
to bring Nidhogg—an uncontrollable primeval monster—into the
heart of a modern city.
And he had allowed them.
Now the street echoed with the sounds of breaking glass,
snapping wood and tumbling stone. Every car and house alarm in
the district was blaring, and there were lights on in all the other
houses lining the alleyway, though no one had ventured out yet.
“What is going on in there?” Machiavelli wondered aloud.
“Nidhogg is feasting o Scathach?” Dee suggested absently. His
cell had started to buzz, distracting him.
“No, it’s not!” Machiavelli suddenly shouted. He pushed open the
car door, leapt out, grabbed Dee by the collar and dragged him out
into the night. “Dagon! Out!”
Dee attempted to nd his feet, but Machiavelli continued to drag
him backward, away from the car. “Are you out of your mind?” the
doctor shrieked.
There was a sudden explosion of glass as Dagon threw himself
through the windshield. He slithered o the hood and landed
alongside Machiavelli and Dee, but the Magician didn’t even glance
in his direction. He saw what had startled the Italian.
Nidhogg raced down the narrow alley toward them, standing tall
on two powerful hind legs. A limp red-haired gure hung from its
front claws.
“Back!” Machiavelli shouted, inging himself to the ground,
dragging Dee with him.
Nidhogg trampled over the long black German car. One hind paw
landed directly in the center of the roof, crushing it to the
pavement. Windows popped, spraying glass like shrapnel as the car
buckled in the middle, the front and rear wheels lifting o the
ground.
The creature disappeared into the night.
A heartbeat later, a white-clad Disir practically ew over the
remains of the car, clearing it in a single leap, following the
creature.
“Dagon?” Machiavelli whispered, rolling over. “Dagon, where are
you?”
“I’m here.” The driver came smoothly to his feet, brushing shards
of sparkling glass from his black suit. He pulled o his cracked
sunglasses and dropped them on the ground. Rainbow colors ran
across round unblinking eyes. “It was holding Scathach,” he said,
loosening his black tie and popping open the top button of his white
shirt.
“Is she dead?” Machiavelli asked.
“I’ll not believe Scathach is dead until I see it for myself.”
“Agreed. Over the years there have been too many reports of her
death. And then she turns up! We need a body.”
Dee climbed out of a mud- lled puddle; he suspected Machiavelli
might have deliberately pushed him into it. He shook water from his
shoe. “If Nidhogg has her, then the Shadow is dead. We’ve
succeeded.”
Dagon’s sh eye swiveled down to look into the Magician’s face.
“You blinkered, arrogant fool! Something in the house frightened
away Nidhogg—that’s why it’s running, and it can’t be the Shadow
because it’s got her. And remember, this is a creature beyond fear.
Three Disir went into that building—and only one came out!
Something terrible happened in there.”
“Dagon is right: this is a disaster. We need to completely rethink
our strategy.” Machiavelli turned to his driver. “I promised you that
if the Disir failed, then Scathach was yours.”
Dagon nodded. “And you have always kept your word.”
“You have been with me now for close to four hundred years. You
have always been loyal, and I owe you both my life and liberty. I
free you from my service,” Machiavelli said formally. “Find the
Shadow’s body…and if she is still alive, then do whatever you must
do. Go now—and be safe, old friend.”
Dagon turned away. Then he stopped suddenly and looked back
at Machiavelli. “What did you call me?”
Machiavelli smiled. “Old friend. Be careful,” he said gently. “The
Shadow is beyond dangerous, and she’s killed too many of my
friends.”
Dagon nodded. He pulled o his shoes and socks to reveal threetoed webbed feet. “Nidhogg will head for the comfort of the river.”
Abruptly, Dagon’s tooth- lled mouth opened in what might have
been a smile. “And the water is my home.” Then he ran into the
night, bare feet slapping the sidewalk.
Machiavelli glanced back toward the house. Dagon was right;
something had terri ed Nidhogg. What had happened in there? And
where were the other two Disir?
Footsteps clattered on pavement and suddenly Josh Newman
raced out of the alleyway, the stone sword in his hand streaming
wisps of gold re. Glancing neither left nor right, he ran around the
destroyed car and followed the telltale trail of car alarms set o by
the monster’s passing.
Machiavelli looked at Dee. “I take it that was the American boy?”
Dee nodded.
“Did you see what he was holding? It looked like a sword,” he
said slowly. “A stone sword? Surely not Excalibur?”
“Not Excalibur,” Dee said shortly.
“It was de nitely a gray stone blade.”
“It wasn’t Excalibur.”
“How do you know?” Machiavelli demanded.
Dee reached under his coat and pulled out a short stone sword, a
match of the weapon Josh was carrying. The blade was trembling,
vibrating almost imperceptibly. “Because I have Excalibur,” Dee
said. “The boy was holding its twin, Clarent. We always suspected
Flamel had it.”
Machiavelli closed his eyes and raised his face to the sky.
“Clarent. No wonder Nidhogg ed from the house.” He shook his
head. Could this night get any worse?
Dee’s cell buzzed again and both men jumped. The Magician
almost snapped the phone in two opening it. “What?” he snarled. He
listened for a moment, then closed the phone very gently, and when
he spoke again, his voice was barely above a whisper. “Perenelle has
escaped. She’s free on Alcatraz.”
Shaking his head, Machiavelli turned and walked down the
alleyway, heading back toward the Champs-Elysées. His question
was answered. The night had just gotten worse—much worse.
Nicholas Flamel frightened Machiavelli, but Perenelle terri ed him.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
“I’m no little girl!” Sophie Newman was furious. “And I know more
than just Fire magic. Disir.” The name popped into her head, and
suddenly Sophie knew everything the Witch of Endor knew about
the creatures. The Witch despised them. “I know who you are,” she
snapped, her eyes glowing an ugly silver. “Valkyries.”
Even amongst the Elders, the Disir were di erent. They had never
lived on Danu Talis but had kept to the frozen northlands at the top
of the world, at home in the bitter winds and sleeting ice.
In the terrible centuries after the Fall of Danu Talis, the world had
shifted on its axis and the Great Cold had gripped most of the earth.
From the north and south ice sheets owed across the landscape,
pushing humani into the thin unfrozen green belt that existed
around the equator. Entire civilizations vanished, devastated by
changing weather patterns, disease and famine. Sea levels rose,
ooding the coastal cities, altering the landscape, while inland the
encroaching ice wiped away all traces of towns and villages.
The Disir soon discovered that their skills at surviving in the bitter
northern climate gave them a special advantage over races and
civilizations who could not cope with the deadly, never-ending
winter. Gangs of savage female warriors quickly claimed most of the
north, enslaving the cities that had escaped the ice. They ruthlessly
destroyed anyone who stood against them, and soon the Disir had a
second name: Valkyries, the Choosers of the Dead.
Very quickly the Valkyries controlled a frozen empire that
encompassed most of the Northern Hemisphere. They forced their
humani slaves to worship them as gods and even demanded
sacri ces. Uprisings were brutally suppressed. As the Ice Age
gripped harder, the Disir began to look farther south, setting their
sights on the struggling remnants of civilization.
Images tumbling and dancing in her head, Sophie watched as the
reign of the Disir was ended in a single night. She knew what had
happened millennia past.
The Witch of Endor had worked with the repulsive Elder,
Chronos, who could move through time itself. It had been necessary
to sacri ce her eyes in order to see the twisting strands of time, but
it was a sacri ce she had never regretted. Scouring ten thousand
years of time, she had chosen a single warrior from each
millennium, and then Chronos had dipped into each era to pull the
warriors back to the age of the Great Cold.
Sophie knew that the Witch had especially requested that her own
granddaughter, Scathach, be brought back to ght the Disir.
It was the Shadow who had led the attack on the Disir stronghold,
a city of solid ice close to the top of the world. She had slain the
Valkyrie queen, Brynhildr, casting her into the heart of a aming
volcano.
By the time the sun had risen low over the horizon, the power of
the Valkyries had been broken forever, their frozen city had lain in
melted ruins, and less than a handful had survived. They ed into a
terrifying icy Shadowrealm that even Scathach would not venture
into. The surviving Disir called that night Ragnarök, the Doom of
the Gods, and swore eternal vengeance on the Shadow.
Sophie brought her hands together and a miniature whirlwind
appeared in her palms. Fire and ice had destroyed the Disir in the
past. What would happen if she used a little Fire magic to heat up
the wind? Even as the thought crossed Sophie’s mind, the Disir leapt
forward, her sword raised high over her head in a two-handed grip.
“Dee wants you alive, but he didn’t say unharmed…,” she snarled.
Sophie brought her hands to her mouth, pressed the thumb of her
left had against the trigger on her wrist and blew hard. The
whirlwind spiraled onto the oor and grew. It bounced once,
twice…then hit the Disir.
Sophie had superheated the air until it was hotter than a furnace.
The blistering whirlwind grabbed the Valkyrie, spun her around,
rolled her over and tossed her high into the air. She crashed into the
crystal chandelier, smashing all the bulbs save one. In the sudden
gloom, the whirlwind dancing across the oor glowed with
shimmering orange heat. The Valkyrie crashed to the ground but
was immediately on her feet, even as shards of crystal crashed about
her like glass rain. Her pale skin was bright red and looked badly
sunburned, her blond eyebrows completely singed o . Without a
word, she slashed out with her sword, the heavy blade cutting right
through the banister rail at Sophie’s hand.
“Scatty!”
Sophie heard her brother’s voice calling from the kitchen. He was
in trouble!
“Scatty!” she heard him call again.
The Valkyrie surged forward. Another superheated whirlwind
caught her, ripping the sword from her hand and spinning her away,
sending her tumbling into her sister, who had trapped Joan in a
corner and battered her to her knees with a ferocious onslaught. The
two Disir crashed to the oor in a clatter of weapons and armor.
“Joan—get back!” Sophie shouted.
Fog owed from the girl’s ngers and curled across the oor;
thick ribbons and ropes of smoky air wrapped around the women,
swathing them in chains of scalding hot air. It took an enormous
e ort of will, but Sophie managed to thicken the fog, spinning it
faster and faster around the struggling Disir until they were
shrouded in a thick mummylike cocoon, similar to the one the
Witch had enfolded her in.
Sophie could feel herself weakening, leaden exhaustion making
her eyes gritty and her shoulders heavy. Drawing upon the remnants
of her power, she clapped her hands and lowered the temperature of
the air in the foggy cocoon so quickly that it ash-froze into a
crackling lump of solid ice.
“There. You should feel right at home,” Sophie whispered
hoarsely. She slumped, then forced herself to her feet and was about
to dart into the kitchen when Joan stretched out her arm, stopping
her. “Oh no you don’t. Me rst.” The woman took a step toward the
kitchen door, then glanced over her shoulder to the block of ice,
with the two Disir partially visible within. “You saved my life,” she
said softly.
“You would have beaten her,” Sophie said con dently.
“Maybe,” Joan conceded, “and maybe not. I’m not as young as I
once was. But you still saved my life,” she repeated, “and that’s a
debt I’ll never forget.” Stretching out her left hand, she placed it at
against the kitchen door and applied a gentle pressure. The door
clicked open.
And then fell o its hinges.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
The Comte de Saint-Germain strolled downstairs from his studio,
tiny noise-canceling earphones pushed into his ears, eyes xed on
the screen of the MP3 player in his hands. He was trying to create a
new playlist: his top ten favorite sound tracks. Gladiator, naturally…
The Rock…Star Wars, the rst one only…El Cid, of course…The
Crow, maybe…
He stopped at the bottom step and automatically straightened a
picture that was hanging crooked on the wall. He took another step
and realized that a framed gold disc was also slightly askew.
Looking down the corridor, he suddenly noticed that all the pictures
were at odd angles. Frowning, he pulled out his earphones…
And heard Josh call Scatty’s name…
And heard the clatter of metal…
And realized that the air stank of vanilla and lavender…
Saint-Germain raced down the stairs to the next oor. He found
the Alchemyst slumped, exhausted, in the door to his room, and
slowed, but Nicholas waved him on. “Quickly,” he whispered. SaintGermain darted past him and continued down the corridor and on
to the stairs….
The hallway was in ruins.
The remnants of the hall door hung o its hinges. All that
remained of the antique crystal chandelier was a single buzzing
lightbulb. Wallpaper hung in huge curling strips, revealing the
cracked plaster beneath. Banisters were chopped through, tiles
scored and chipped.
And there was a solid lump of ice sitting squarely in the center of
the hall. Saint-Germain approached it cautiously and ran his ngers
down the smooth surface. It was so cold his esh stuck to it. He
could make out two white-clad gures entwined within the block,
faces frozen in ugly snarls; their startling blue eyes followed him.
Wood snapped in the kitchen and he turned and darted toward it,
gloves of solid blue-white ame growing on his hands.
And if Saint-Germain thought that the damage to the hallway was
bad, nothing prepared him for the devastation in the kitchen.
The entire side of the house was missing.
Sophie and Joan stood in the midst of the ruin. His wife was
holding the shaking girl tightly, supporting her. Joan was wearing
shiny blue-green satin pajamas and was still holding her sword in a
metal gauntlet. She turned to look over her shoulder as her husband
stepped into the room. “You missed the fun,” she said in French.
“I heard nothing,” he apologized, in the same language. “Tell
me.”
“It was all over in minutes. Sophie and I heard a disturbance at
the back of the house. We ran downstairs just as two women
smashed their way in through the hall door. They were Disir, they
said they had come for Scathach. One attacked me, the other turned
her attention to Sophie.” Even though she was speaking an obscure
variant of the French language, she dropped her voice to a whisper.
“Francis…this girl. She is extraordinary. She combined the magics:
she used Fire and Air to defeat the Disir. Then she wrapped them in
fog and froze it to a lump of ice.”
Saint-Germain shook his head. “It is physically impossible to use
more than one magic at a time…,” he said, but his voice trailed
away to a whisper. The evidence of Sophie’s powers sat in the center
of the hallway. There was a legend that the most powerful Elders
were able to use all the elemental magics simultaneously. According
to the most ancient myths, this was the reason—one of the reasons
—that Danu Talis sank.
“Josh is gone.” Sophie suddenly shook herself free of Joan’s grip
and spun around to face the count. Then she looked over his
shoulder to where an ashen-faced Flamel stood leaning in the
doorway. “Something’s taken Josh,” she said, desperately frightened
now. “And Scatty’s gone after him.”
The Alchemyst shu ed into the center of the room, wrapped his
hands around his body as if he was freezing and looked around.
Then he bent to scoop up the Shadow’s matching short swords from
where they lay amongst the rubble. When he turned to look back at
the others, they were all startled to see that his eyes were bright
with tears. “I am sorry,” he said, “so terribly, terribly sorry. I have
brought this terror and destruction to your home. It is
unforgivable.”
“We can rebuild,” Saint-Germain said airily. “This will give us the
excuse we needed to remodel.”
“Nicholas,” Joan said very seriously, “what happened here?”
The Alchemyst dragged up the only unbroken chair in the room
and slumped into it. He hunched forward, elbows on his knees,
looking at the Shadow’s gleaming swords, turning them over and
over in his hands. “Those are Disir in the block of ice. Valkyries.
Scathach’s sworn enemies, though she’s never told me why. I know
they have pursued her down through the centuries and have always
allied themselves with her enemies.”
“They did this?” Saint-Germain looked around the ruined kitchen.
“No. But they obviously brought something with them that did.”
“What’s happened to Josh?” Sophie demanded. She shouldn’t
have left him alone in the kitchen, she should have waited with
him. She would have defeated whatever had attacked the back of
the house.
Nicholas held up Scathach’s weapon. “I think you should be
asking what’s happened to the Warrior. In the centuries I’ve known
her, she’s never let her swords out of her grasp. I fear she’s been
taken….”
“Swords…swords…” Sophie pulled away from Joan and began
desperately searching through the rubble. “When I went to bed,
Josh had just come back from sword practice with Scatty and Joan.
He had the stone sword you gave him.” She summoned a wind to
raise a chunk of heavy masonry and toss it aside, revealing the oor
beneath. Where was the sword? She felt a icker of hope. If he’d
been captured, then surely the sword would be on the oor? She
straightened and looked around the room. “Clarent isn’t here.”
Saint-Germain walked to the hole where the back door had been.
The garden was a ruin. A chunk of stone had been ripped out of the
fountain and the bowl cracked in half. It took him a moment to
recognize the U-shaped hunk of metal that had been his back gate.
Only then did it sink in that the entire back wall was missing. The
nine-foot-tall wall was now little more than a stump. There were
powdered and crushed bricks scattered all across the garden, almost
as if the wall had been pushed down from outside.
“Something big—very big—has been in the garden,” he said to no
one in particular.
Flamel looked up. “Can you smell anything?” he asked.
Saint-Germain breathed deeply. “Snake,” he said rmly. “But
that’s not Machiavelli’s odor.” He stepped out into the garden and
drew in a deep lungful of cool air. “It’s stronger out here.” Then he
coughed. “This stench is fouler, much fouler…,” he called. “This is
the stink of something very, very old….”
Drawn by the wailing car alarms, Saint-Germain crossed the
garden, clambered over the broken wall and looked up and down
the alley. House and car alarms were ringing, mainly to his left, and
there were lights on in the houses at that end of the street. In the
mouth of the narrow alleyway, he could see the crushed remains of
a black car.
“Whatever it was attacked this house,” he said, darting back into
the kitchen. “There’s a two-hundred-thousand-euro car at the end of
the street that’s only t for the scrap yard.”
“Nidhogg,” Flamel whispered in horror. He nodded; it made sense
now. “The Disir brought Nidhogg,” he said. Then he frowned. “But
even Machiavelli wouldn’t bring something like that into a major
city. He’s too cautious.”
“Nidhogg?” Joan and Sophie asked simultaneously, looking at one
another.
“Think of it as a cross between a dinosaur and a snake,” Flamel
explained. “But probably older than this planet. I think it’s got
Scathach and Josh went after it.”
Sophie shook her head rmly. “He wouldn’t do that—he couldn’t
—he’s terri ed of snakes.”
“Then where is he?” Flamel asked. “Where is Clarent? It’s the only
explanation: he’s taken the sword and gone in search of the
Shadow.”
“But I heard him calling to her for help….”
“You heard him call her name. He might have been calling out to
her.”
Saint-Germain nodded. “It makes sense. The Disir only wanted
Scathach. Nidhogg grabbed her and ran. Josh must have followed.”
“Maybe it grabbed him and she followed,” Sophie suggested.
“That’s the sort of thing she’d do.”
“It had no interest in Josh. It would have just eaten him. No, he
went of his own accord.”
“That shows great courage,” Joan said.
“But Josh isn’t brave…,” Sophie began. Yet even as she was
saying it, she knew it wasn’t entirely true. He’d always stood up for
her in school and protected her. But why would he go after Scatty?
She knew he didn’t even like her.
“People change,” Joan said. “No one stays the same.”
The noise was louder now, a mingled cacophony of police,
ambulance and re sirens drawing closer. “Nicholas, Sophie, you’ve
got to go,” Saint-Germain said urgently. “I think we’re about to have
police, lots and lots of police with far too many questions. And we
have no answers. If they nd you here—without papers or passports
—I’m afraid they’ll hold you for questioning.” He tugged out a
leather wallet attached to his belt on a long chain. “Here’s some
cash.”
“I cannot…,” the Alchemyst began.
“Take it,” Saint-Germain insisted. “Don’t use your credit cards;
Machiavelli can track your movements,” he continued. “I don’t
know how long the police will be here. If I’m free, I’ll meet you
tonight at six at the glass pyramid outside the Louvre. If I’m not
there at six, I’ll try and get there at midnight, or failing that, at six
tomorrow morning.”
“Thank you, old friend.” Nicholas turned to Sophie. “Grab your
clothes, and Josh’s too, and whatever else you need; we’ll not be
coming back here.”
“I’ll help you,” Joan said, hurrying out of the room with Sophie.
The Alchemyst and his former apprentice stood in the ruins of the
kitchen, listening to the two women run upstairs.
“What are you going to do with the block of ice in the hall?”
Nicholas asked.
“We’ve got a big chest freezer in the cellar. I’ll shove it in there
until the police leave. What about the Disir, are they dead, do you
think?”
“The Disir are practically impossible to kill. Just make sure that
ice doesn’t melt anytime soon.”
“I’ll drive it to the Seine one evening and drop it in the river. With
luck it won’t thaw till Rouen.”
“What are you going to tell the police”—Nicholas waved a hand
at the devastation—“about all this?”
“Gas explosion?” Saint-Germain suggested.
“Lame,” Flamel said with a smile, remembering what the twins
had said when he’d made the same suggestion.
“Lame?”
“Very lame.”
“Then I think I just came home and found it like this,” he said,
“and it’s close enough to the truth. I’ve no idea how it happened.”
He suddenly grinned mischievously. “I could sell the story and
pictures to one of the tabloids. Mysterious Forces Destroy Rock Star’s
House.”
“Everyone would think it was a publicity stunt.”
“Yes, they would, wouldn’t they? And you know what: I just
happen to have a new album out. It’ll be great advertising.”
The kitchen door opened and Sophie and Joan walked into the
room. They had both changed into jeans and sweatshirts and were
wearing matching backpacks.
“I’m going with them,” Joan said before Saint-Germain could ask
the question that had started to form on his lips. “They’ll need a
guide and a bodyguard.”
“Would it be worth my while arguing with you?” the count asked.
“No.”
“Didn’t think so.” He hugged his wife. “Please be careful, be very
careful. If Machiavelli or Dee is prepared to bring the Disir and
Nidhogg into the city, then they are desperate. And desperate men
do stupid things.”
“Yes,” Flamel said simply. “Yes, they do. And stupid men make
mistakes.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Josh kept looking over his shoulder, trying to orient himself. He
was moving farther and farther away from Saint-Germain’s house
and was worried that he was going to get lost. But he couldn’t turn
back now; he couldn’t leave Scatty to the creature. And so long as
he could nd the Arc de Triomphe at the end of the Champs-Elysées,
he gured he’d be able to get back to the house. Alternatively, all he
had to do was to follow the steady stream of police cars, re trucks
and ambulances that were racing down the main street, heading in
the direction he was running from.
He tried not to think too much about what he was doing because
if he thought about it—he was chasing a dinosaur-like monster
through Paris—then he’d stop, and Scatty would…well, he wasn’t
sure what would happen to Scatty. Whatever it was, it wouldn’t be
good.
Following Nidhogg was simplicity itself. The creature ran in a
straight line, crashing through the countless small streets and
alleyways that ran parallel to the Champs-Elysées. It left a trail of
devastation in its wake, trampling through a side street lled with
parked cars, running right over the top of them, leaving them
crumpled, attened wrecks. As it darted down a narrow alleyway,
its wavering tail punched through the steel shutters on the fronts of
shops on either side of the street, shattering the glass they protected.
Burglar and car alarms added to the mayhem.
Suddenly, a ash of white ahead of him caught his attention.
Josh had brie y glimpsed the gure in white standing outside
Saint-Germain’s house. He guessed it was one of the monster’s
keepers. And now it looked as if they were also chasing the
creature…which meant they had lost control. He glanced up, trying
to gauge the time. Directly ahead of him, the sky was already paling
toward the dawn, which meant that he was running east. What was
going to happen when the city woke up to nd a prehistoric
monster rampaging through the streets? There’d be panic; no doubt
the police and army would be brought in. Josh had hacked at it with
his sword and that had done nothing—he had a horrible feeling that
bullets would probably be just as useless.
The streets narrowed to little more than alleyways, and the
creature was forced to slow down as he crashed o the walls. Josh
discovered that he was catching up with the gure in white. He
thought it was a man, but it was hard to be sure.
He was running easily now, not even breathing hard; he guessed
all the weeks and months of football practice were paying o . His
sneakers made no sound on the streets and he assumed that the
gure in white didn’t even suspect they were being followed. After
all, who would be crazy enough to run after a monster with nothing
but a sword for protection? However, as he got closer, he could see
that the gure was also carrying a sword in one hand and what
looked like an oversized hammer in the other. He recognized the
weapon from World of Warcraft: it was a war hammer, a ferocious
and deadly variant of the mace. Drawing nearer still, he discovered
that the person was wearing white chain-mail armor, metal boots
and a rounded helmet with a veil of chain mail covering the neck.
Somehow he wasn’t even surprised.
Then, abruptly, the gure changed.
Right before his eyes, the gure transformed from an armored
warrior into a blond-haired young woman, not much older than
himself, in a leather jacket, jeans and boots. Only the sword and war
hammer in her hands marked her as extraordinary. She disappeared
around a corner.
Josh slowed: he didn’t want to run into the woman with the
sword and hammer. And, thinking about it, he guessed she probably
wasn’t a young woman at all.
There was an explosion of brick and glass ahead of him and Josh
picked up his pace and darted around the corner, then stopped. The
creature was stuck in an alley. Josh moved forward cautiously; it
looked as if the monster had run down what looked like another
arrow-straight street. But this particular street curved at the end and
then narrowed, the upper stories of the two houses on either side
projecting out over the sidewalk below. The monster had slammed
into the opening, tearing a chunk out of both buildings. Attempting
to push ahead, it had suddenly found itself wedged in. It thrashed
from side to side, brick and glass raining down into the street below.
There was a ash of movement in a nearby window, and Josh
caught a glimpse of a man peering from one of the windows, eyes
and mouth round with horror, frozen in place by the monster
directly outside his window. A slab of concrete the size of a sofa fell
on the creature’s head, but it didn’t even seem to notice.
Josh had no idea what to do. He needed to get to Scatty, but that
meant getting around the creature, and there was simply no room.
He watched as the blond woman raced down the alley. Without
hesitation she leapt onto the monster’s back and climbed nimbly
toward its head, arms stretched out on either side, weapons poised.
She was going to kill it, Josh decided, relief washing over him.
Maybe then he could get in and grab Scatty.
Sitting astride the creature’s broad neck, the woman reached
down and lashed out at Scathach’s limp and unmoving body.
Josh’s cry of horror was lost in the wail of sirens.
“Sir, we have a report of an…incident.” The ashen-faced police
o cer handed the phone to Niccolò Machiavelli. “The RAID o cer
asked to speak to you personally.”
Dee caught the man by the arm and spun him around. “What is
it?” he demanded in perfect French as Machiavelli listened intently
to the call, one nger in his ear, trying to drown out the noise.
“I’m not sure, sir. A mistake, certainly.” The police o cer
attempted a shaky laugh. “A few streets down, people are reporting
that there is…a monster stuck in a house. Impossible, I know…” His
voice trailed o as he turned to look toward what had once been a
substantial three-story house that now had a gaping hole plowed
through the side.
Machiavelli tossed the phone back to the police o cer. “Get me a
car.”
“A car?”
“A car and a map,” he snapped.
“Yes, sir. You can take mine.” The police o cer had been one of
the rst on the scene following dozens of calls from alarmed
citizens. He’d spotted Machiavelli and Dee hurrying from the alley
close to the source of the noise and had stopped them, convinced
that they had something to do with what was being reported as an
explosion. His bluster had turned to dismay when he’d discovered
that the mud-spattered older man with white hair in the torn suit
was actually the head of the DGSE.
The o cer handed over his car key and a battered and torn
Michelin map of Paris’s city center. “I’m afraid this is all I have.”
Machiavelli snatched it from his hand. “You’re dismissed.” He
gestured toward the street. “Go and direct tra c; let no press or
public near the house. Is that clear?”
“Yes, sir.” The police o cer raced away, thankful that he still had
his job; no one wanted to upset one of the most powerful men in
France.
Machiavelli spread the map across the hood of the car. “We’re
here,” he explained to Dee. “Nidhogg is heading directly east, but at
some stage, it’s got to cross the Champs-Elysées and make for the
river. If it continues on its present course, I’ve a reasonably good
idea it will come out”—his nger stabbed the map—“close to here.”
The two men climbed into the small car and Machiavelli looked
around for a moment, trying to make sense of the controls. He
couldn’t remember the last time he’d driven a car; Dagon had
always looked after that. Finally, with a grinding crunch of gears, he
got the car moving and made an illegal turn that sent them
shtailing across the road, then roared down the Champs-Elysées,
leaving rubber in their wake.
Dee sat silently in the passenger seat, one hand wrapped around
the seat belt, the other braced against the dashboard. “Who taught
you to drive?” he asked shakily as they bounced o the curb.
“Karl Benz,” Machiavelli snapped. “A long time ago,” he added.
“And how many wheels did that car have?”
“Three.”
Dee squeezed his eyes shut as they roared across an intersection,
barely missing a lumbering road-sweeper truck. “So what do we do
when we get to Nidhogg?” he asked, focusing on the problem, trying
to keep his mind o Machiavelli’s terrible driving.
“That’s your problem,” Machiavelli retorted. “After all, you’re the
one who freed it.”
“But you invited the Disir here. So it’s partially your fault.”
Machiavelli hit the brakes hard, sending the car into a long
screeching slide. The engine cut out and the car jerked to a halt.
“Why have we stopped?” Dee demanded.
Machiavelli pointed out the window. “Listen.”
“I can’t hear anything over the noise of the sirens.”
“Listen,” Machiavelli insisted. “Something’s coming.” He pointed
to the left. “Over there.”
Dee rolled down his window. Over the police, ambulance and re
sirens, they could hear stones grinding, bricks falling and the sharp
snap-crackle of breaking glass….
Josh watched, powerless, as the woman sitting atop the monster
lashed at Scatty with her sword.
At that moment the monster shrugged, still trying to free itself
from the building that encased it, and the blade missed, whistling
dangerously close to the unconscious Warrior’s head. Edging higher
on the monster’s broad neck, the woman gripped a clump of thick
skin, leaned sideways across a huge unblinking eye and jabbed the
point of her sword at Scatty. Again the creature moved and the
sword bit into its arm, close to the claw wrapped around the
Warrior. The monster didn’t react, but Josh saw how close the blade
had come to Scatty. The woman leaned down again, and this time,
Josh knew, she’d hit the Warrior.
He had to do something! He was Scatty’s only hope. He couldn’t
just stand here and watch someone he knew get killed. He started
running. Back at the house, when he’d slashed at the creature,
nothing had happened, but when he’d plunged the sword point rst
into its thick hide…
Holding Clarent in the two-handed grip Joan had taught him,
Josh put on a nal burst of speed and raced up to the creature. He
could feel the sword humming in his hands just before he stabbed it
into the monster’s tail.
Instantly, heat owed up through his arms and blossomed in his
chest. The air lled with the tart smell of oranges in the heartbeat
before his aura ared brie y golden and then faded to the same
reddish-orange glow that was streaming o the sword protruding
from the creature’s thick knobbled skin.
Josh twisted Clarent and pulled it free. In the grayish brown hide,
the wound burned bright red and immediately started to hardened
into a black crust. It took a moment for the sensation to travel
through the creature’s primitive nervous system. Then the monster
abruptly reared up on its hind legs, hissing and squealing in agony.
It wrenched itself free of the house, the sudden rain of bricks, roof
tiles and wooden beams sending Josh scrambling back, out of
harm’s way. He hit the ground, covering his head as debris crashed
about him. He thought it would be just his luck to be killed by a
roof tile. The unexpected movement almost dislodged the woman on
the monster’s back. Swaying, she dropped the war hammer and
desperately grabbed at the creature’s back to prevent herself from
being thrown down directly in front of it. Lying on the ground,
bricks raining around him, Josh watched as the thick black crust
began to spread out from the wound and creep up the monster’s tail.
It reared again and then plowed right through the corner of the
house and out across the Champs-Elysées. Josh was relieved to see
that Scatty’s limp form was still gripped in his front claws.
Taking a deep breath, Josh scrambled to his feet and snatched up
the sword. Instantly, he felt power buzz through his body,
heightening every sense. He stood swaying as raw power energized
him; then he turned and raced after the monster. He felt amazing.
Even though it was still not quite dawn, he could see clearly, though
the colors were slightly o . He could smell the myriad scents of the
city through the rancid serpent-stink of the creature. His hearing
was so acute he could di erentiate the sirens of the many di erent
emergency services; he could even distinguish individual cars. He
could actually feel the irregular indentations in the pavement
beneath his feet through the rubber soles of his sneakers. He waved
the sword in the air before him. It keened and hummed, and
instantly, Josh imagined he could hear distant whispers and make
out words he could almost understand. For the rst time in his life,
he felt truly alive: and he knew then that this was how Sophie had
felt when she’d been Awakened. But whereas she’d been frightened,
confused by the sensations…he felt exhilarated.
He wanted this. More than anything else in the world.
Dagon padded into the alleyway, scooped up the Disir’s fallen war
hammer and raced after the boy.
Dagon had seen the are of the boy’s aura and knew that it was
indeed powerful, though whether the boy and girl were the twins of
legend was a di erent matter. Obviously, the Alchemyst, and Dee,
too, seemed convinced that they were. But Dagon knew that even
Machiavelli—one of the most brilliant humani he’d ever associated
with—was unsure, and the brief glimpse he’d caught of the boy’s
aura wasn’t enough to convince him either way. Gold and silver
auras were rare—though not as rare as the black aura—and Dagon
had encountered at least four sets of twins down through the ages
with the sun and moon auras, as well as dozens of individuals.
But what neither Dee nor Machiavelli knew was that Dagon had
seen the original twins.
He’d been on Danu Talis at the very end, for the Final Battle. He’d
worn his father’s armor on that auspicious day, when all knew that
the fate of the island hung in the balance. Like everyone else, he’d
cowered in terror as silver and gold lights blazed from the top of the
Pyramid of the Sun in a display of primal power. The elemental
magics had lain waste to the ancient landscape and sundered the
island at the heart of the world.
Dagon rarely slept anymore; he didn’t even possess a bed. Like a
shark, he could sleep and continue to move about. He rarely
dreamed, but when he did, the dreams were always the same: a
vivid nightmare of those times when the skies had burned with gold
and silver lights and the world had ended.
He’d spent many years in Machiavelli’s service. He’d seen both
wonders and terrors during those centuries, and together, they’d
been present for some of the most signi cant and interesting
moments in the earth’s recent history.
And Dagon was beginning to think that this night might be one of
the most memorable.
“Now, that’s something you don’t see every day,” Dee muttered.
The Magician and Machiavelli watched Nidhogg burst through a
building on the left side of the Champs-Elysées, trample the trees
that lined the street and career across the road. It still held redhaired Scatty in its claws, and the Disir was clinging to its back. The
two immortals watched the huge swinging tail turn a set of tra c
lights into a mangled ruin as the creature darted down another
street.
“It’s heading for the river,” Machiavelli said.
“But what happened to the boy, I wonder?” Dee mused aloud.
“Maybe he got lost,” Machiavelli began, “or was trampled by
Nidhogg. Or maybe not,” he added as Josh Newman stepped
through the uprooted trees and out into the broad road. He looked
left and right, but there was no tra c, and he didn’t even glance at
the police car badly parked against the curb. He darted across the
wide avenue, the sword in his hand streaming smoky gold threads
behind him.
“The boy’s a survivor,” Dee said admiringly. “Brave, too.”
Seconds later, Dagon burst out of the side street, following Josh.
He was carrying a war hammer. Spotting Dee and Machiavelli in the
car, he raised his other hand in what might have been a greeting, or
a farewell.
“Now what?” Dee demanded.
Machiavelli turned the key in the ignition and wrenched the car
into rst gear. It jerked forward, bouncing a little; then the engine
howled as he put his foot to the oor. “The Rue de Marignan comes
out onto the Avenue Montaigne. I think I can get there before
Nidhogg does.” He hit the sirens.
Dee nodded. “Perhaps you might think about changing gear.” His
lips moved in a barely discernable smile. “You’ll nd the car will go
faster that way.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
“Your
garage isn’t attached to your house?” Sophie asked,
climbing into the back of a small red and black Citroën 2CV, taking
up a position behind Nicholas, who was sitting up front with Joan.
“These are converted stables. In previous centuries, the stables
were never too close to the house. I guess the rich didn’t like living
with the smell of horse manure. It’s not so bad, though it can be a
bit of an inconvenience on a rainy night, knowing you have to run
three blocks home. If Francis and I go out for an evening, we usually
take the Metro.”
Joan eased the car out of the garage and turned right, moving
away from the damaged house, which was quickly being surrounded
by re trucks, ambulances, police cars and press. When they’d left,
Francis had been going upstairs to change; he reasoned that all the
publicity would do wonders for the sale of his new album.
“We’ll cut across the Champs-Elysées and then head down toward
the river,” Joan said, expertly maneuvering the Citroën through the
narrow cobbled alleyway. “Are you sure that’s where Nidhogg will
go?”
Nicholas Flamel sighed. “I’m only guessing,” he admitted. “I’ve
never actually seen it—I don’t know of anyone who has and lived—
but I’ve come across creatures like it in my travels, and they are all
related to the marine lizards, like the mosasaur. It’s scared, maybe
it’s hurt. It’ll head to the water, seeking cool, healing mud.”
Sophie leaned forward between the front seats. She deliberately
focused on Nidhogg, desperately sorting through the Witch’s
memories, looking for something that might help her. But even the
Witch knew little about the primal creature except that it was
locked in the roots of the World Tree, the tree that Dee had
destroyed with…
“Excalibur,” she whispered.
The Alchemyst swiveled in the seat to look at her. “What about
it?”
Sophie frowned, trying to remember. “Josh told me earlier that
Dee had destroyed Yggdrasill with Excalibur.”
Flamel nodded.
“And you told me that Clarent is Excalibur’s twin.”
“It is.”
“Does it share the same powers?” she asked.
Flamel’s cool gray eyes ashed. “And you’re wondering, if
Excalibur could destroy something as ancient as the World Tree,
could Clarent destroy Nidhogg?” He was nodding even as he was
speaking. “The ancient weapons of power predate the Elders. No
one has any idea where they came from, though we do know that
the Elders used some of them. The fact that the weapons are still
around today proves just how indestructible they are.” He nodded.
“I’m sure Clarent could hurt and possibly even kill Nidhogg.”
“And you believe Nidhogg is hurt now?” Joan spotted an opening
in the light early-morning tra c and slotted neatly into it. Car horns
blared behind her.
“Something drove it from the house.”
“Then you know what you’ve just con rmed?” she said.
Flamel nodded. “We know Scatty would never touch Clarent.
Therefore, Josh wounded the creature—enough to send it careering
madly across Paris. And now he’s chasing it.”
“And Machiavelli and Dee?” Joan asked.
“Probably chasing him.”
Joan cut across two lanes of tra c and roared down the ChampsElysées. “Let’s hope they don’t catch up with him.”
A sudden thought struck Sophie. “Dee met Josh….” She stopped,
realizing what she’d just said.
“In Ojai. I know,” Flamel said, surprising her. “He told me.”
Sophie sat back, surprised that her twin had told the Alchemyst.
Color touched her cheeks. “I think Dee made an impression on him.”
She felt almost embarrassed saying this to the Alchemyst, as if she
was betraying her brother, but she pressed on. This was no time for
secrets. “Dee told him some things about you. I think…I think Josh
sort of believed him,” she nished in a rush.
“I know,” Flamel said softly. “The English Magician can be very
persuasive.”
Joan slowed the car to a stop. “This isn’t good,” she muttered.
“There should be virtually no one on the road at this hour.”
They had driven right into a huge tra c jam. It stretched down
the Champs-Elysées directly ahead of them. For the second day in a
row, tra c on Paris’s main thoroughfare had come to a complete
halt. People were standing beside their cars looking at the gaping
hole in the side of the building across the street. Police had just
arrived and were quickly trying to take control, urging tra c to
move on and allow the emergency services to get through to the
building.
Joan of Arc leaned across the steering wheel, cool gray eyes
assessing the situation. “It crossed the street and went this way,”
Joan said, signaling quickly and turning right, into the narrow Rue
de Marignan, driving past a pair of mangled tra c lights. “I don’t
see them.”
Nicholas rose in the seat, trying to see as far as possible down the
long straight street. “Where does this come out?”
“On the Rue François, just before the Avenue Montaigne,” Joan
answered. “I’ve walked, cycled and driven through these streets for
decades. I know them like the back of my hand.” They drove past a
dozen cars, each one bearing the marks of Nidhogg: metalwork
crumpled like tinfoil, windows spiderwebbed and smashed. A ball of
metal that had once been a bicycle was now pressed deeply into the
pavement, still attached to a railing by a length of chain.
“Joan,” Nicholas said very softly, “I think you should hurry up.”
“I don’t like driving fast.” She glanced sidelong at the Alchemyst,
and whatever expression she saw on his face made her push her foot
to the oor. The small engine howled and the car lurched forward.
“What is it?” she demanded.
Nicholas chewed his bottom lip. “I’ve just thought of a potential
problem,” he admitted nally.
“What sort of problem?” Joan and Sophie asked simultaneously.
“A serious problem.”
“Bigger than Nidhogg?” Joan jerked the stick shift and slammed
the car into top gear. Sophie couldn’t see that it made any
di erence; she still felt she could be walking faster. She pounded the
back of the seat, frantic with worry. They needed to get to her
brother.
“I gave Josh the two missing pages from the Codex,” Flamel said.
He twisted around in the seat to look at Sophie. “Do you think your
brother has them with him?”
“Probably,” she said immediately, and then nodded. “Yes, I’m sure
he does. The last time we talked he was wearing the bag under his
shirt.”
“So how did Josh end up guarding the pages of the Codex?” Joan
asked. “I thought you never let the book out of your sight.”
“I gave them to him.”
“You gave them?” she asked, surprised. “Why?”
Nicholas turned away and looked out at the street, now littered
with the evidence of Nidhogg’s passing. When he looked back at
Joan, his face was set in a grim mask. “I gured that since he was
the only person amongst us who was neither immortal, Elder nor
Awakened, he would not be involved in any of the con icts we’d
face, nor would he be a target: he’s just a humani. I thought the
pages would be safe with him.”
Something about the statement bothered Sophie, but she couldn’t
put her nger on it. “Josh wouldn’t give the pages to Dee,” she
announced con dently.
Nicholas twisted around to face the girl again, and the look in his
pale eyes was terrifying. “Oh, believe me: Dee always gets what he
wants,” he said bitterly, “and what he cannot have—he destroys.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Machiavelli slid the car to a stop, half on, half o
the curb. He
pulled up the brake but left the car in gear, and it jerked forward
and cut out. They were in a parking lot on the banks of the river
Seine, close to where he’d anticipated Nidhogg would appear. For a
moment, the only sound was the engine ticking softly, and then Dee
let out his breath in a long sigh. “You are the worst driver I’ve ever
come across.”
“I got us here, didn’t I? You do know that explaining all this is
going to be very di cult,” Machiavelli added, moving o the
subject of his terrible driving. He had mastered the most arcane and
di cult arts, had manipulated society and politics for half a
millennium, was uent in a dozen languages, could program in ve
di erent computer languages and was one of the world’s experts on
quantum physics. And he still couldn’t drive a car. It was
embarrassing. Rolling down the driver’s window, he allowed cold
air to wash into the vehicle. “I can impose a press blackout, of
course, claiming it’s a national security issue, but this is getting too
public and way too messy.” He sighed. “Video of Nidhogg is
probably on the Internet right now.”
“People will dismiss it as a prank,” Dee said con dently. “I
thought we were in trouble when Bigfoot was caught on camera.
But that was quickly rejected as a hoax. If I’ve learned anything over
the years, it is that the humani are masters at ignoring what is right
in front of their noses. They’ve disregarded our existence for
centuries, dismissing the Elders and their times as little more than
myth and legend, despite all the evidence. Besides,” he added
smugly, absently stroking his short beard, “everything is coming
together. We have most of the book; once we get the two missing
pages, we will bring back the Dark Elders and return this world to
its proper state.” He waved a hand airily. “You’ll not have to worry
about minor issues like the press.”
“You seem to be forgetting that we have some other problems,
like the Alchemyst and Perenelle. They are not so minor.”
Dee pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and waved it in the
air. “Oh, I’ve taken care of that. I made a call.”
Machiavelli glanced sidelong at the Magician but said nothing. In
his experience, people often spoke merely to ll a silence in a
conversation, and he knew that Dee was a man who liked to hear
the sound of his own voice.
John Dee stared through the dirty windshield toward the Seine. A
couple of miles downriver, just around the bend, the huge Gothic
cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris would be slowly taking shape in
the early dawn light. “I rst met Nicholas and Perenelle in this city
almost ve hundred years ago. I was their student—you didn’t know
that, did you? That’s not in your legendary les. Oh, don’t look so
surprised,” he said, laughing at Machiavelli’s stunned expression.
“I’ve known about your les for decades. And my copies are even
more up-to-date,” he added. “But yes, I studied with the legendary
Alchemyst, here in this very city. I knew within a very short time
that Perenelle was more powerful—more dangerous—than her
husband. Have you ever met her?” he asked suddenly.
“Yes,” Machiavelli said shakily. He was astounded that the Elders
—or was it just Dee?—knew about his secret les. “Yes. I met her
just the once. We fought; she won,” he said shortly. “She made quite
an impression.”
“She is an extraordinary woman; quite remarkable. Even in her
own time, her reputation was formidable. What she would have
achieved if only she’d chosen to side with us. I don’t know what she
sees in the Alchemyst.”
“You never did understand the human capacity for love, did
you?” Machiavelli asked softly.
“I understand that Nicholas survives and thrives because of the
Sorceress. To destroy Nicholas, all we have to do is kill Perenelle.
My master and I have always known that, but we thought that if we
could capture both of them, their accumulated knowledge was
worth the risk of leaving them alive.”
“And now?”
“It is no longer worth the risk. Tonight,” he added, very softly, “I
nally did something that I should have done a long time ago.” He
sounded almost regretful.
“John,” Machiavelli barked urgently, swiveling in the seat to look
at the English Magician. “What have you done?”
“I’ve sent the Morrigan to Alcatraz. Perenelle will not see another
dawn.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Josh
nally caught up with the monster on the banks of the Seine.
He didn’t know how far he’d run, miles probably—but he knew
that he shouldn’t have been able to do it. He’d sprinted the entire
length of the last street—he’d thought the street sign said Rue de
Marignan—without any e ort, and now, swinging left onto the
Avenue Montaigne, he wasn’t even breathless.
It was the sword.
He’d felt it buzz and hum in his hands as he’d run, heard it
whisper and sigh what sounded like vague promises. When he held
it directly in front of him, toward the monster, the whispers grew
louder and it visibly trembled in his hand. When he moved it away,
they faded.
The sword was drawing him toward the creature.
Following the monster’s trail of destruction down the narrow
street, racing past confused, shocked and horri ed Parisians, Josh
found strange and disturbing thoughts ickering at the very edges of
his consciousness:
…he was in a world without land, swimming in an ocean vast
enough to swallow whole planets, lled with creatures that made
the monster he was chasing look tiny….
…he was dangling high in the air, wrapped in thick roots that bit
into his esh, looking down over a blasted, ery wasteland….
…he was lost and confused, in a place lled with small buildings
and even tinier creatures, and he was in pain, an incredible re
searing the base of his spine….
…he was…
Nidhogg.
The name snapped into his consciousness, and the shock that he
was somehow experiencing the monster’s thoughts almost stopped
him in his tracks. He knew the phenomenon had to be connected to
the sword. Earlier, when the creature’s tongue had touched the
blade, he’d glimpsed a snapshot of an alien world, shocking images
of a bizarre landscape, and now, having stabbed the creature again,
he caught hints of a life completely beyond his experience.
It dawned on him that he was seeing what the creature—Nidhogg
—had seen at some time in the past. He was experiencing what it
was feeling now.
It had to be connected to the sword.
And if this was Excalibur’s twin, Josh suddenly wondered, then
did that ancient weapon also transfer feelings, emotions, and
impressions when it was used? What had Dee felt when he had
plunged Excalibur into the ancient Yggdrasill? What sights had he
seen, what had he experienced and learned? Josh found himself
wondering if that was the real reason Dee had destroyed the
Yggdrasill: had he killed it to experience the incredible knowledge it
contained?
Josh glanced quickly at the stone sword and a shudder ran
through him. A weapon like this gave the wielder unimaginable
powers—and what a frightening temptation it was. Surely the urge
to use it again and again to gain more and more knowledge would
become uncontrollable? It was a terrifying thought.
But why had the Alchemyst given it to him?
The answer came immediately: because Flamel didn’t know! The
sword was a dead lump of stone until it stabbed or cut something—
only then did it come alive. Josh nodded to himself; now he knew
why Saint-Germain, Joan and Scatty would not touch the weapon.
As he raced down the street toward the river, he wondered what
would happen if he managed to kill Nidhogg with Clarent. What
would he feel, what would he experience?
What would he know?
Nidhogg burst through a stand of trees and darted across the road
and down onto the Port des Champs-Elysées. It stopped in the
parking lot on the quayside almost directly in front of Dee and
Machiavelli and dropped onto all fours, huge head swaying from
side to side, tongue lolling out of its mouth. It was so close they
could see Scatty’s limp body caught in its claws and the Disir astride
its neck. Nidhogg’s tail lashed, bu eting parked cars and smashing
into a long tour bus, staving in the engine. A tire popped with a
deep boom.
“I think we should get out of the car…,” Dee began, reaching for
the door, eyes xed on the swinging tail as it ipped a heavy BMW
onto its roof.
Machiavelli’s arm shot out, ngers closing on the Magician’s arm
in a painful viselike grip. “Do not even think about moving. Do
nothing that will attract its attention.”
“But the tail…”
“It’s in pain, that’s why the tail is thrashing about. But it seems to
be slowing down.”
Dee turned his head slightly. Machiavelli was correct: there was
something wrong with Nidhogg’s tail. About one-third of its total
length had turned black—it looked almost stonelike. Even as Dee
watched, tendrils and veins of bubbling black liquid crept over the
creature’s hard esh, slowly encasing it in a solid crust. Dr. John
Dee immediately knew what had happened.
“The boy stabbed it with Clarent,” he said, not even turning his
head to look at Machiavelli. “That’s what caused the reaction.”
“I thought you said Clarent was the Sword of Fire, not the Sword
of Stone.”
“There are many di erent forms of re,” Dee said. “Who knows
how the blade’s energy reacted with something like Nidhogg?” He
stared at the tail, watching as more of the thick black crust grew on
the skin. As it hardened, he caught a brief glimpse of red re. “Lava
crust,” he said, voice hushed in wonder. “It’s lava crust. The re is
burning within the creature’s skin.”
“No wonder it’s in pain,” Machiavelli muttered.
“You sound almost sorry for it,” Dee snapped.
“I never traded my humanity for my long life, Doctor. I’ve always
remembered my roots.” His voice hardened, turned contemptuous.
“You worked so hard to be like your Elder master that you’ve
forgotten what it is like to feel human—to be human. And we
humans”—he stressed the last word—“have the capacity to feel
another creature’s pain. It is what lifted humani above the Elders, it
is what made them great.”
“And it’s the weakness that will ultimately destroy them,” Dee
said simply. “Let me remind you that this creature is not human. It
could crush you underfoot and not even notice. However, let us not
argue now; not when we’re about to be victorious. The boy might
have solved our problem for us,” Dee said. “Nidhogg is slowly
turning to stone.” He laughed delightedly. “If it jumps into the river
now, the weight of its tail will drag it to the bottom—and take
Scathach with it.” He looked slyly at Machiavelli. “I take it your
humanity does not extend to feeling sorry for the Shadow.”
Machiavelli grimaced. “Knowing Scathach is lying at the bottom
of the Seine wrapped in the creature’s claws would make me very
happy indeed.”
The two immortals sat unmoving in the car, watching as the
creature lurched forward, moving more slowly now, the weight of
its tail dragging behind it. All that stood between it and the water
was one of the glass-enclosed boats—the bateaux-mouches—that
took tourists up and down the river.
Dee nodded toward the boat. “Once it climbs onto that, the boat
will sink, and Nidhogg and Scathach will disappear into the Seine
forever.”
“And what about the Disir?”
“I’m sure she can swim.”
Machiavelli allowed himself a wry smile. “So all we’re waiting for
now…”
“…is for it to reach the boat,” Dee nished, just as Josh appeared
through the gaping hole in the tree-lined quayside and darted across
the parking lot.
As Josh raced up to the creature, the sword in his right hand
began to burn, long streamers of orange re curling o the blade.
His aura started to crackle a matching golden color, su using the air
with the smell of oranges.
Abruptly, the Disir slid o the monster’s back, ickering back into
her white chain mail in the instant before her feet touched the
ground. She rounded on Josh, her features locked into an ugly,
savage mask. “You are becoming a nuisance, boy,” she snarled in
barely comprehensible English. Lifting her great broadsword in both
hands, she threw herself toward Josh. “This will just take a
moment.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Huge sweeping banks of fog rolled across San Francisco Bay.
Perenelle Flamel folded her arms across her chest and watched
the night sky ll with birds. A great wheeling ock rose over the
city, gathered in a thick moving cloud, and then, like tendrils of
spilled ink, three separate streams of birds set out across the bay,
heading directly for the island. And she knew that somewhere in the
heart of the great ock was the Crow Goddess. The Morrigan was
coming to Alcatraz.
Perenelle was standing in the burned-out ruins of the warden’s
house, where she’d nally managed to escape the masses of spiders.
Although it had burned more than three decades ago, she could
smell the ghost-odors of charred wood, cracked plaster and melted
piping lingering in the air. The Sorceress knew that if she lowered
her defenses and concentrated, she would be able to hear the voices
of the wardens and their families who had occupied the building
through the years.
Shading her bright green eyes and squinting hard, Perenelle
concentrated on the approaching birds, trying to distinguish them
from the night and work out just how much time she had before
they arrived. The ock was huge, and the thickening fog made it
impossible to guess either size or distance. But she guessed she had
perhaps ten or fteen minutes before they reached the island. She
brought her little nger and thumb close together. A single white
spark cracked between them. Perenelle nodded. Her powers were
returning, just not fast enough. They would continue to strengthen
now that she was away from the sphinx, but her aura would
recharge more slowly at night. She also knew that she was still
nowhere near strong enough to defeat the Morrigan and her pets.
But that didn’t mean she was defenseless; a lifetime of study had
taught her many useful things.
The Sorceress felt a chill breeze ru e her long hair in the instant
before the ghost of Juan Manuel de Ayala ickered into existence
beside her. The ghost hung in the air, taking substance and
de nition from a host of dust particles and water droplets in the
gathering fog. Like many of the ghosts she’d encountered, he was
wearing the clothes he had felt most comfortable in while he was
alive: a loose white linen shirt tucked into knee-length trousers. His
legs tapered away below his knees, and, like a lot of spirits, he had
no feet. While they were alive, people rarely looked down at their
feet. “This was once the most beautiful spot on this earth, was it not?”
he asked, at moist eyes xed on the city of San Francisco.
“It still is,” she said, turning to look across the bay to where the
city sparkled and glittered with countless tiny lights. “Nicholas and I
have called it home for many years.”
“Oh, not the city!” de Ayala said dismissively.
Perenelle glanced sidelong at the ghost. “What are you talking
about?” she asked. “It looks beautiful.”
“I once stood here, close to this very spot, and watched perhaps a
thousand res burning on the shores. Each re represented a family. In
time I came to know all of them.” The Spaniard’s long face grimaced
in what might have been pain. “They taught me about the land, and
about this place, spoke to me of their gods and spirits. I think it was
those people who bound me to this land. All I see now are lights; I cannot
see the stars, I cannot see the tribes or individuals huddling around their
res. Where is the place I loved?”
Perenelle nodded toward the distant lights. “It’s still there. Just
grown.”
“It’s changed out of all recognition,” de Ayala said, “and not for the
better.”
“I’ve watched the world change too, Juan.” Perenelle spoke very
softly. “But I like to believe that it has changed for the better. I am
older than you. I was born into an age when a toothache could kill
you, when life was short and brutal and death was often painful.
Around the same time you were discovering this island, the average
life expectancy of a healthy adult was no more than thirty- ve
years. Now it is double that. Toothaches no longer kill—well, not
usually,” she added with a laugh. Getting Nicholas to go to the
dentist was practically impossible. “Humans have made astonishing
strides in the last few hundred years; they have created wonders.”
De Ayala oated around to hover directly in front of her. “And in
their rush to create wonders, they have ignored the wonders all around
them, ignored the mysteries, the beauty. Myths and legends walk unseen
amongst them, ignored, unrecognized. It was not always so.”
“No, it wasn’t,” Perenelle agreed sadly. She looked across the bay.
The city was fast disappearing into the mist, the lights taking on a
magical, ethereal quality. It was easy now to see what it must have
looked like in the past…and what it might look like again if the
Dark Elders reclaimed the earth. In past ages, mankind had
recognized that there really were creatures and other races—the
Vampire, the Were, the Giants—living in the shadows. Sometimes
beings as powerful as gods lived in the heart of the mountains or
deep in the impenetrable forests. There were ghouls in the earth,
wolves really did roam the forest, and there were creatures much
worse than trolls under bridges. When travelers had returned from
distant lands, bringing with them stories of the monsters and
creatures they had met, the wonders they had seen, no one doubted
them. Nowadays, even with photographs, videos or eyewitness
accounts of something extraordinary or otherworldly, people still
doubted—dismissing everything as a hoax.
“And now one of those terrible wonders is coming to my island,” Juan
said sadly. “I can feel it approach. Who is it?”
“The Morrigan, the Crow Goddess.”
Juan turned to Perenelle. “I’ve heard of her; some of the Irish and
Scottish sailors in my crews feared her. She’s coming for you, isn’t she?”
“Yes.” The Sorceress smiled grimly.
“What will she do?”
Perenelle tilted her head to one side, considering. “Well, they’ve
tried imprisoning me. That’s failed. I imagine Dee’s masters have
nally sanctioned a more permanent solution.” She laughed shakily.
“I’ve been in trickier situations….” Her voice cracked and she
swallowed hard and tried again. “But I’ve always had Nicholas by
my side. Together we were undefeatable. I wish he were here with
me now.” She took a deep breath, steadying her breathing and
raising both hands in front of her face. Smoking wisps of her ice
white aura curled o her ngertips. “But I am the immortal
Perenelle Flamel, and I will not go down without a ght.”
“Tell me how I can help you,” de Ayala said formally.
“You have done enough for me already. Because of you I escaped
the Sphinx.”
“This is my island. And you are under my protection now.” He smiled
ruefully. “However, I’m not sure the birds will be frightened by a few
banging doors. And there’s not a lot else I can do.”
Perenelle carefully picked her way from one side of the ruined
house to the other. Standing in one of the tall rectangular windows,
she stared back at the prison. Now that night had fallen, it was little
more than a vague and ominous outline against the purple sky. She
took stock of her situation: she was trapped on an island crawling
with spiders, there was a sphinx wandering loose in the corridors
below, and the cells were lled with creatures from some of the
darkest myths she had ever encountered. Plus, her powers were
incredibly diminished and the Morrigan was coming. She’d told de
Ayala that she’d been in trickier situations, but right now she
couldn’t remember one.
The ghost appeared alongside Perenelle, its outline distorting the
shape of the building beyond. “What can I do to help?”
“How well do you know this island?” she asked.
“Ha! I know every inch. I know the secret places, the half-completed
tunnels dug by the prisoners, hidden corridors, walled-up rooms, the old
Indian caves cut deep into the rock below. I could hide you and no one
would ever nd you.”
“The Morrigan is resourceful…and then there are the spiders.
They’d nd me.”
The ghost oated around to place himself directly in front of her
again. Only his eyes—a deep rich brown—were visible in the night.
“Oh, the spiders are not under Dee’s control.”
Perenelle took a step back in surprise. “They’re not?”
“They only began to appear a couple of weeks ago. I started to notice
the webs over the doors, coating the stairs. Every morning, there were
more and more spiders. They’d oat in on the wind, carried by strands
of thread. There were humanlike guards on the island then…though they
were not human,” he added quickly. “Terrible blank-faced creatures.”
“Homunculi,” Perenelle said with a shudder. “Creatures Dee
grows in bubbling vats of fat. What happened to them?”
“They were given the task of sweeping clean the spiders’ webs, keeping
the doors clear. One stumbled and fell into a web,” de Ayala said, his
teeth appearing out of the gloom in a quick smile. “All that was left
of it were scraps of cloth. Not even bones,” he told her in a horri ed
whisper.
“That’s because homunculi have no bones,” she said absently. “So
what is calling the spiders here?”
De Ayala turned to look at the prison. “I’m not sure….”
“I thought you knew all there was to know about this island?”
Perenelle said with a smile.
“Far below the prison, cut deep into the bedrock by the waves, is a
series of subterranean caves. I believe the rst native inhabitants of the
island used them for storage. About a month ago, the small Englishman
—”
“Dee?”
“Yes, Dee, brought something to the island in the dead of night. It was
sealed away in those caves, and then he blanketed the entire area with
magical sigils and Wards. Even I cannot penetrate the layers of
protection. But I am convinced that whatever is drawing the spiders to
the island is locked in those caves.”
“Can you get me to the caves?” Perenelle asked urgently. She
could hear the rasp and clatter of thousands of birds’ wings, drawing
ever closer.
“No,” de Ayala snapped. “The corridor is thick with spiders, and who
knows what other traps Dee has put into place.”
Perenelle automatically reached for the sailor’s arm, but her hand
passed right through him, leaving a swirl of water droplets in her
wake. “If Dee has buried something in Alcatraz’s hidden dungeons,
and then protected it with magic so potent that even an
insubstantial spirit cannot get through it, then we need to know
what it is.” She smiled. “Have you never heard the saying ‘the
enemy of my enemy is my friend’?”
“No, but I have heard ‘fools rush in where angels fear to tread.’”
“Come, then—quickly, before the Morrigan arrives. Take me back
into Alcatraz.”
CHAPTER FORTY
The Disir’s sword
ashed toward Josh’s head.
Everything was happening so fast, he didn’t have time to be
afraid. Josh saw the icker of movement and reacted instinctively,
bringing Clarent up and around, holding it horizontally over his
head. The Disir’s broadsword struck the short stone blade and
screamed along it in an explosion of sparks. They rained down over
Josh’s hair, stinging where they touched his face. The pain made
him angry, but the force of the blow drove him to his knees, and
then the Disir stepped back and brought her weapon around in a
wide sweeping cut. It whined as it sliced through the air toward
him…and Josh knew with a sickening feeling in the pit of his
stomach that he would not be able to avoid it.
Clarent trembled in Josh’s palm.
Twitched.
And moved.
A surge of tingling heat shot into his hand, shocking him, the
spasm tightening his ngers around the hilt. Then the sword jerked,
shooting out to meet the Disir’s metal blade, turning it aside at the
last moment in another explosion of sparks.
Blue eyes wide with shock, the Disir danced away. “No humani
possesses such skill,” she wondered aloud, her voice barely above a
whisper. “Who are you?”
Josh got shakily to his feet, not entirely sure what had just
happened, knowing only that it was something to do with the
sword. It had taken control; it had saved him. His eyes went to the
terrifying warrior maid, ickering between her masked face and her
gleaming silver sword. He held Clarent before him in both hands,
trying to mimic the stance he’d seen Joan and Scatty use, but the
sword kept shifting in his grip, moving and shivering of its own
accord. “I am Josh Newman,” he said simply.
“Never heard of you,” the woman said dismissively. She snapped
a quick look over her shoulder to where Nidhogg was crawling
toward the water. Its tail was now so heavily encrusted with black
stone that it could barely move.
“Maybe you’ve never heard of me,” Josh said, “but this”—he
tilted the sword blade upward—“is Clarent.” He watched the
woman’s bright blue eyes widen slightly. “And I see you have heard
of it!”
Spinning her sword loosely in one hand, the Disir began to edge
around Josh. He kept turning to face her. He knew what she was
doing—moving him so that his back would be to the monster—but
he didn’t know how to prevent it from happening. When his back
was almost touching Nidhogg’s stone skin, the Disir stopped.
“In the hands of a master, the sword might be dangerous,” the
Disir said.
“I’m no master,” Josh said loudly, delighted that his voice didn’t
tremble. “But I don’t need to be. Scathach told me that this weapon
really could kill her. I didn’t understand what she meant, but now I
do. And if it could kill her, then I’m guessing it could do the same to
you.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “Look what I did to
this monster with just a single cut. All I have to do is to scratch you
with it.” The blade actually shivered in his hands, humming in what
almost sounded like agreement.
“You could not even get close to me,” the Disir mocked, swooping
in, the broadsword weaving before her in a mesmerizing pattern.
She suddenly attacked with a quick urry of blows.
Josh didn’t even have time to catch his breath. He managed to
stop three of them, Clarent moving to intercept each strike, the
Disir’s metal blade slamming o his stone sword in a shower of
sparks, each blow driving him back, the force vibrating through his
entire body. The Disir was just too fast. The next swipe struck his
bare arm between the shoulder and elbow. Clarent managed to
nudge the sword at the last instant, so it was only the at of the
blade, rather than the razor-sharp edge, that hit him. Instantly, his
entire arm went numb from shoulder to ngertips and he felt a
sudden wash of nausea from the pain, the fear and the sudden
realization that he was going to die. Clarent fell from his grasp and
clattered to the ground.
When the woman smiled, Josh saw that her teeth were thin
needle points. “Easy. Too easy. A legendary sword does not make
you a swordsman.” Hefting the broadsword, she advanced on the
boy, driving him right up against Nidhogg’s stone- esh. Josh
squeezed his eyes shut as she raised her arms high and screamed a
hideous war cry. “Odin!”
“Sophie,” he whispered.
“Josh!”
Two blocks away, stuck in unmoving tra c, Sophie Newman sat
bolt upright in the backseat of the car, a sudden stomach-churning
feeling of terror catching her in her chest, setting her heart
pounding madly.
Nicholas spun around and caught the girl’s hand. “Tell me!”
Tears lled her eyes. “Josh,” she gasped, almost unable to speak
with the lump in her throat. “Josh is in danger, terrible danger.”
The car lled with the overpowering smell of rich vanilla as her
aura blossomed. Tiny sparks danced on the end of her blond hair,
crackling like cellophane. “We’ve got to get to him!”
“We’re going nowhere,” Joan said grimly. Tra c on the narrow
street was at a complete standstill.
A chill settled in Sophie’s stomach: it was the appalling fear that
her brother was going to die.
“Sidewalk,” Nicholas said decisively. “Take it.”
“But the pedestrians—”
“Can get out of the way. Use your horn.” He swiveled back
around to Sophie. “We’re minutes away,” he said as Joan bumped
the small car up o the pavement and roared down the sidewalk,
horn squeaking plaintively.
“That’s going to be too late. There must be something you can
do?” Sophie pleaded desperately. “Anything?”
Looking old and tired, lines etched into his forehead and around
his eyes, Nicholas Flamel shook his head miserably. “There is
nothing I can do,” he admitted.
Sparking, crackling, snapping, a sheet of stinking yellow-white
ame winked into existence between Josh and the Disir. The heat
was so intense it drove him back onto Nidhogg’s clawed feet and
crisped his hair, scorching his eyebrows and eyelashes. The Disir too
staggered back, blinded by the foul ames.
“Josh!”
Someone called his name, but the terrifying ames were roaring
right in front of his face.
The proximity of the re roused the monster. It took a shuddering
step, the movement of its leg thrusting Josh forward onto his hands
and knees, pitching him dangerously close to the ames…which
died as abruptly as they had risen. He hit the ground hard, hands
and knees stinging with the contact. The smell of rotten eggs was
appalling and his eyes and nose were streaming, but through his
tears, he saw Clarent and attempted to reach for it just as someone
shouted at him again.
“Josh!”
The Disir threw herself at Josh once more, sword thrusting at
him. A solid spear of yellow ame struck the woman, exploding
over her chain mail, which immediately started to rust and fall
away. And then another wall of ame roared into existence between
the boy and the warrior.
“Josh.” A hand fell on Josh’s shoulder and he jumped, shouting
aloud with fright and the pain in his bruised shoulder. He looked up
to nd Dr. John Dee leaning over him.
Dirty yellow smoke dribbled from the Magician’s hands, which
were barely covered in torn gray gloves, and his once-elegant suit
was now a ruined mess. Dee smiled kindly. “It would be best if we
left right now.” He gestured toward the ames. “I can’t keep this up
forever.” Even as he was speaking, the Disir’s blade cut blindly
through the re, ames curling around the metal as it sought a
target. Dee hauled Josh to his feet and dragged him backward.
“Wait,” Josh said hoarsely, voice raw with a combination of fear
and the smoke. “Scatty…” He coughed and tried again. “Scatty is
trapped….”
“Escaped,” Dee said quickly, putting an arm around the boy’s
shoulder, supporting him, leading him toward a police car.
“Escaped?” Josh mumbled, confused.
“Nidhogg lost its grip on her when I created the curtain of re
between you and the Disir. I saw her roll away from its claws, jump
to her feet and race down the quay.”
“She ran…she ran away?” That didn’t sound right. She’d been
limp and unconscious the last time he’d seen her. He tried to
concentrate, but his head was throbbing, and the esh on his face
felt tight from the ames.
“Even the legendary Warrior could not stand against Nidhogg.
Heroes survive to ght again because they know when to run.”
“She left me?”
“I doubt she even knew you were there,” Dee said quickly,
bundling Josh into the back of a badly parked police car and sliding
in beside him. He tapped the white-haired driver on the shoulder.
“Let’s go.”
Josh sat up straight. “Wait…I dropped Clarent,” he said.
“Trust me,” Dee said, “you don’t want to return for it.” He leaned
back so that Josh could look out the window. The Disir, her oncepristine white chain mail now hanging in tattered and rotting shreds
about her, strode through the dying yellow ames. She spotted the
boy in the back of the car and raced toward it, shouting
unintelligibly in a language that sounded like wolves howling.
“Niccolò,” Dee said quickly. “She’s rather upset. We really should
be going now, right now.”
Josh looked away from the approaching Disir at the driver and
was horri ed to discover that it was the same man he’d seen on
Sacré-Coeur’s steps.
Machiavelli turned the key in the ignition so savagely that the
starter screeched. The car lurched, jerked forward, then died.
“Oh great,” Dee muttered. “That’s just great.” Josh watched as the
Magician leaned out the window, brought his hand to his mouth
and blew sharply into it. A yellow sphere of smoke rolled from his
palm and dropped onto the ground. It bounced twice like a rubber
ball, then exploded at head height just as it reached the Disir. Thick,
sticky strands the color and consistency of dirty honey splashed over
the Disir, then dripped down in long streamers, gluing her to the
ground. “That should hold her…,” Dee began. The Disir’s
broadsword sliced easily through the strands. “Or maybe not.”
Through his pain, Josh realized that Machiavelli had tried—and
failed—to get the car started again. “Let me,” he muttered,
scrambling over the back of the seat as Machiavelli slid over to the
passenger side. His right shoulder was still aching, but at least
feeling had returned to his ngers, and he didn’t think anything was
broken. He was going to have a massive bruise to add to his
growing collection. Turning the key in the ignition, he oored the
accelerator and simultaneously slammed the car into reverse just as
the Disir reached it. He was suddenly thankful that he’d learned to
drive a stick shift on his father’s old battered Volvo. The warrior’s
ailing sword struck the door, puncturing the metal, the tip of the
blade inches from Josh’s leg. As the car screeched backward, the
Disir set her feet rmly and held on to her sword with both hands.
The blade tore a horizontal rip right across the door and into the
wing over the engine, peeling back the metal as if it were paper. It
also tore apart the front driver’s-side tire, which exploded with a
dull bang.
“Keep going!” Dee shouted.
“I’m not stopping,” Josh promised.
With the engine whining in protest and the front tire apping and
banging o the ground, Josh tore away from the quayside…
…just as Joan wheeled the slightly scratched Citroën in at the
other end.
Joan hit the brakes and the car screeched to a halt on the
morning-wet stones. Sophie, Nicholas and Joan watched in
confusion as Josh reversed a battered police car at high speed away
from Nidhogg and the Disir. They could clearly see Dee and
Machiavelli in the car as he executed a clumsy handbrake turn and
sped from the parking lot.
For a single heartbeat, the Disir stood on the quayside, looking
lost and bewildered. Then she spotted the newcomers. Turning, she
raced toward them, sword held high over her head, screeching a
barbaric war cry.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
“I’ll take care of this,” Joan said, sounding almost pleased at the
prospect. She touched Flamel’s sleeve and nodded to where the
Warrior was still wrapped in Nidhogg’s claws. “Get Scathach.” The
monster was now less than six feet from the edge of the quay and
edging ever closer to the safety of the water.
The tiny Frenchwoman grabbed her sword and leapt out of the
car.
“More humani with swords,” the Disir spat, blade falling toward
the woman.
“Not just any humani,” Joan said, easily turning the weapon
aside, her own sword then icking out to clink against the remains
of the rusted mail on the Disir’s shoulders. “I am Joan of Arc!” The
longsword in her hands twirled and twisted, creating a spinning
wheel of steel that drove the Disir back with the ferocity of its
attack. “I am the Maid of Orléans.”
Sophie and Nicholas moved cautiously toward Nidhogg. Sophie
noted that its entire tail was coated with heavy black stone, which
had now started to creep up its back and down its hind legs. The
weight of the stone tail anchored the creature to the ground, and
Sophie saw its huge muscles bunching and rippling as it tugged
itself toward the water. She could see where its claws and dragging
tail left deep indentations in the pavement.
“Sophie,” Flamel shouted, “I need some help!”
“But Josh…,” she began, distracted.
“Josh is gone,” he snapped. He swooped in to snatch Clarent o
the ground, hissing in surprise at the heat of the weapon. Darting
forward, he slapped at Nidhogg with the sword. The blade bounced
harmlessly o the stone-sheathed skin. “Sophie, help me free Scatty
and then we’ll go after Josh. Use your powers.”
The Alchemyst hacked at Nidhogg again but without any e ect.
His worst fears had been realized: Dee had gotten his hands on
Josh…and Josh had the last two pages from the Codex. Nicholas
looked over his shoulder. Sophie was standing still, looking
frightened and completely bemused.
“Sophie! Help me.”
Sophie obediently raised her hands, pressed her thumb against
her tattoo and tried to call on her Fire magic. Nothing happened.
She couldn’t concentrate; she was too worried about her brother.
What was he doing? Why had he gone with Dee and Machiavelli? It
didn’t look as though they had forced him to—he’d been driving
them!
“Sophie!” Nicholas called.
But she knew he’d been in danger—real and terrible danger. She’d
felt the emotion deep within her, recognized it for what it was.
Whenever Josh was in trouble, she knew. When he’d nearly
drowned o Pakala Beach on Kauai, she’d woken up breathless and
gasping; when he’d broken his ribs on the football eld in
Pittsburgh, she’d distinctly felt the sharp pain in her left side, felt
the sting with every breath she took.
“Sophie!”
What had happened? One moment he was in mortal danger…and
the next…?
“Sophie!” Flamel snarled.
“What?” she snapped, turning on the Alchemyst. She felt a quick
surge of anger; Josh was right—he’d been right all along. This was
the Alchemyst’s fault.
“Sophie,” he said more gently. “I need you to help me. I can’t do
this on my own.”
Sophie turned to look at the Alchemyst. He was crouched on the
ground, cool green vapor puddling around him. A thick emerald
cord of smoke wrapped around one of Nidhogg’s huge legs and
disappeared deep into the earth, where it looked as if Flamel had
attempted to trap it. Another rope of smoke, thinner, less substantial
than the rst, was loosely wrapped around one of the creature’s
hind legs. Nidhogg inched forward and the green cord snapped and
dissolved into the air. Another few steps and it would carry
Scathach—her friend—into the river. Sophie wasn’t going to let that
happen.
Her fear and anger lent her focus. When she pressed her tattoo,
ames popped alight on each nger. She splashed silver re across
Nidhogg’s back, but it had no e ect. Then she peppered the monster
with tiny ery hailstones, but it didn’t even seem to notice. It
continued to edge nearer to the water.
Fire didn’t work, so she tried wind. But the miniature tornados
she threw bounced harmlessly o the creature. Scouring the Witch’s
memories, she tried a trick Hekate had used against the Mongol
Horde. She whipped up a sharp wind that drove stinging grit and
dirt into Nidhogg’s eyes. The creature merely blinked and a second,
protective eyelid slid down over its huge eye.
“Nothing’s working!” she screamed as the monster dragged Scatty
ever closer to the edge. “Nothing’s working!”
The Disir’s sword slashed out. Joan ducked, and the heavy blade
whistled over her head and sliced into the Citroën, turning the
windshield into white powder, popping o the tiny windshield
wipers.
Joan was furious; she loved her 2CV Charleston. Francis had
wanted to buy her a new car for her birthday, in January. He’d
given her a pile of glossy car catalogs and told her to pick one. She’d
pushed the catalogs aside and told him she’d always wanted the
little classic French car. He’d searched all over Europe for the
perfect model and then spent a small fortune having it restored to
its original pristine condition. When he’d presented it to her, it had
been wrapped in three thick ribbons of blue, white and red.
Another wide slash from the Disir scored a rent on the hood of the
car, and then another cut o the small round headlight that perched
over the right front wheel arch like an eye. The light bounced away
and shattered.
“Do you know,” Joan asked, her huge eyes dark with fury,
renewing her attack on the Disir, every word matched by a hammer
blow from her sword, “how di cult it is to nd original parts for
this car?”
The Disir fell back, desperately trying to defend herself from
Joan’s whirling blade, pieces of her rotting chain mail ying away
as the small Frenchwoman’s sword struck closer and closer. She kept
trying di erent ghting styles to defend herself, but nothing was
e ective against the ferocious onslaught.
“You will notice,” Joan continued, pushing the warrior back
toward the river, “that I have no ghting style. That is because I was
trained by the greatest warrior of all. I was trained by Scathach the
Shadow.”
“You may defeat me,” the Disir said grimly, “but my sisters will
avenge my death.”
“Your sisters,” Joan said, with a nal savage cut that snapped the
Disir’s blade in two. “Would they be the two Valkyries currently
frozen into their own personal iceberg?”
The Disir faltered, swaying on the edge of the wall along the
river. “Impossible. We are undefeatable.”
“Everyone can be defeated.” The at of Joan’s blade clanged
against the Disir’s helmet, stunning her. Then Joan darted forward,
her shoulder catching the swaying Disir in the chest, knocking her
backward into the Seine. “Only ideas are immortal,” she whispered.
Still clutching the broken remains of her sword, the Valkyrie
disappeared into the murky river in a huge splash that drenched
Joan from head to toe.
Sophie was puzzled. Her magic had failed against Nidhogg…but
how had Josh…? He had no powers.
The sword: he had the sword.
Sophie snatched Clarent from Flamel’s hand. And instantly her
aura snapped to life, sparking, crackling, long streamers of icy light
spinning around her body. She felt a rush of emotions, a swirling
mess of thoughts, ugly thoughts, dark thoughts, the memories and
emotions of those men and women who had carried the sword in
ages past. She was about to ing the weapon away in disgust, but
she knew it was probably Scatty’s only chance. Nidhogg’s tail was
wounded, so Josh must have cut it there. But she’d seen the
Alchemyst hack at the tough hide with no result.
Unless…
Racing up to the monster, she plunged the weapon point rst into
its shoulder.
The e ect was immediate. Red-black re burned along the length
of the blade, and the monster’s skin immediately started to harden.
Sophie’s aura blazed brighter than it had ever been before, and
instantly her brain was lled with impossible visions and incredible
memories. Then her aura overloaded and winked out in an
explosion that picked her up and sent her sailing through the air.
She managed to scream once before she came crashing down onto
the canvas roof of Joan’s Citroën, which slowly and gently ripped
along its seams and deposited her neatly in the front passenger seat.
Nidhogg spasmed, great claws opening as its esh hardened.
Joan of Arc darted through the monster’s legs, grabbed Scatty
around the waist and jerked her free, oblivious to the creature’s
huge feet stamping inches from her head.
Nidhogg bellowed, a sound that set house alarms clanging across
the city. Every car alarm in the parking lot burst to life. The beast
attempted to turn its head, to follow Joan as she dragged Scatty
away, but its ancient esh was solidifying into thick black stone. Its
mouth opened, revealing its daggerlike teeth.
Abruptly, a huge section of the quayside cracked; rock pulverized
to dust, crumpling to powder beneath the creature’s weight.
Nidhogg tilted forward and crashed down through the moored
tourist boat, snapping it in two, disappearing into the Seine in an
enormous explosion of water that sent a huge wave racing down the
river.
Lying on the quayside, close to the water’s edge, soaked through,
Scathach came slowly, groggily awake. “I haven’t felt this bad in
centuries,” she mumbled, attempting but failing to sit up. Joan
eased her into a sitting position and held her tightly. “The last thing
I remember…” Scatty’s green eyes snapped open. “Nidhogg…Josh.”
“He tried to save you,” Flamel said, limping up to Scatty and
Joan. He snatched Clarent from the quayside. “He stabbed Nidhogg,
slowed it down long enough for us to get here. Then Joan fought the
Disir for you.”
“We all fought for you,” Joan said. She put her arm around
Sophie, who had staggered from the wrecked car, bruised and
battered, with a long scrape along her forearm but otherwise
unharmed. “Sophie nally defeated Nidhogg.”
The Warrior slowly got to her feet, turning her head from side to
side, working her sti neck muscles. “And Josh?” she asked, looking
around. Her eyes went wide with alarm. “Where’s Josh?”
“Dee and Machiavelli have him,” Flamel said, his face gray with
exhaustion. “We’re not sure how.”
“We have to go after them now,” Sophie said urgently.
“Their car’s not in good shape, they cannot have gotten far,”
Flamel said. He turned to look at the Citroën. “I’m afraid yours has
taken a battering as well.”
“And I did so love that car…,” Joan murmured.
“Let’s get out of here,” Scatty said decisively. “We’re about to be
inundated with police.”
And then, like a shark erupting from the waves, Dagon exploded
out of the Seine. Rearing up, more sh now than man, gills open on
his long neck, round eyes bulging, he wrapped webbed claws
around Scathach and dragged her backward into the river. “Finally,
Shadow. Finally.”
They disappeared into the water with barely a splash and didn’t
reappear.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Perenelle followed de Ayala’s ghost as he led her through the maze
of Alcatraz’s ruined buildings. She tried to keep to the shadows,
ducking under shattered walls and empty doorways, constantly alert
for creatures moving in the night. She didn’t think the sphinx would
dare venture out of the prison—despite their terrifying appearance,
sphinxes were cowardly creatures, fearful of the dark. However,
many of the beings she’d seen in the spiderwebbed cells below were
creatures of the night.
The entrance to the tunnel was almost directly under the tower
that had once held the island’s only fresh water supply. Its metal
framework was rusted, eaten away by the salt sea, acid bird
droppings and countless tiny leaks from the huge water tank.
However, the ground directly beneath the tower was lush with
growth, fed by the same dripping water.
De Ayala pointed out an irregular patch of earth close to one of
the metal legs. “You will nd a shaft leading down to the tunnel under
here. There is another entrance to the tunnel cut into the cli face,” he
said, “but it is only accessible by boat at low tide. That is how Dee
brought his prisoner to the island. He doesn’t know about this entrance.”
Perenelle found a rusted length of metal and used it to scrape
away the dirt, revealing broken and cracked concrete beneath the
soil. Using the edge of the metal bar, she began to dig away at the
dirt. She kept glancing up, trying to gauge how close the birds had
come to the island, but with the wind whipping in over the ruined
buildings and keening through the rusted metal struts of the water
tower, it was impossible to make out any other noises. Tendrils of
the thick fog that had claimed San Francisco and the Golden Gate
Bridge had now reached the island, coating everything in a
dripping, salt-smelling cloud.
When she had scraped back the earth, de Ayala drifted over one
particular spot. “Just here,” he said, his voice a breath in her ear.
“The prisoners discovered the existence of the tunnel and managed to dig
a shaft down to it. They understood that decades of water dripping from
the tower had softened the soil and even eaten away at the stones
beneath. But when they eventually broke through to the tunnel below, it
was at high tide, and they found that it was ooded. They abandoned
their e orts.” He showed his teeth in a perfect smile he had not
possessed in life. “If only they had waited until the tide turned.”
Perenelle scraped away more soil, revealing more broken stone.
Jamming the metal bar under the edge of a block, she leaned hard
on it. The stone didn’t budge. She pressed again with both hands,
and then, when that didn’t work, lifted a boulder and hammered
once on the metal bar: the clink rang out across the island, tolling
like a bell.
“Oh, this is impossible,” she muttered. She was reluctant to use
her powers, since it would reveal her location to the sphinx, but she
had no other choice. Cupping her right hand, she allowed her aura
to gather in her palm, where it puddled like mercury. She rested her
hand lightly, almost gently, on the stone, then turned her hand over
and allowed the raw power to pour from her palm and seep into the
granite. The stone turned soft and soapy and then melted like candle
wax. Thick globs of liquid rock fell away and disappeared into the
darkness below.
“I’ve been dead a long time; I thought I’d seen wonders, but I’ve never
seen anything like that,” de Ayala said in awe.
“A Scythian mage taught me the spell in return for saving his life.
It’s quite simple, really,” she said. She leaned over the hole and then
jerked back, eyes watering. “Oh my: it stinks!”
The ghost of Juan Manuel de Ayala hovered directly over the
hole. He turned and smiled, showing his perfect teeth again. “I can’t
smell anything.”
“Trust me, be glad you cannot,” Perenelle muttered, shaking her
head; ghosts often had a peculiar sense of humor. The tunnel reeked
of rotting sh and ancient seaweed, of rancid bird and bat
droppings, of pulped wood and rusting metal. There was another
scent also, bitter and acrid, almost like vinegar. Bending down, she
tore a strip o the bottom of her dress and wrapped it around her
nose and mouth as a crude mask.
“There is a ladder of sorts,” de Ayala said, “but be careful, I’m sure
it’s rusted through.” He suddenly glanced up. “The birds have reached
the southern end of the island. And something else. Something evil. I can
feel it.”
“The Morrigan.” Perenelle leaned over the hole and snapped her
ngers. A slender feather of soft white light peeled o her ngertips
and drifted down the hole, disappearing into the gloom below,
shedding a ickering milky light on the streaked and dripping walls.
The light had also revealed the narrow ladder, which turned out to
be little more than spikes driven at irregular angles into the wall.
The spikes, each no longer than four inches, were thick with rust
and dripping moisture. Leaning over, she caught the rst spike and
tugged hard. It seemed solid enough.
Perenelle twisted around and slid one leg into the opening. Her
foot found one of the spikes and immediately slipped o . Drawing
her leg back out of the hole, she tugged o her sandals and tucked
them into her belt. She could hear the apping of birds—thousands,
perhaps tens of thousands of them—drawing closer. She knew her
tiny expenditure of power to melt the stone and light up the interior
of the tunnel would have alerted the Morrigan to her position. She
had only moments before the birds arrived….
Perenelle put her leg into the shaft again, her bare foot touching
the spike. It was cold and slimy beneath her skin, but at least she
was able to get a better grip. Grasping handfuls of tough grass, she
lowered herself, her foot nding another spike, and then she
reached down and caught a spike in her left hand. She winced. It
felt disgusting, squelching beneath her ngers. And then she smiled;
how she’d changed. When she was a girl, growing up in Quimper in
France all those years ago, she’d gone paddling in rock pools,
picking and eating raw shell sh. She’d wandered barefoot through
streets that were ankle deep in mud and lth.
Testing each step, Perenelle climbed down the length of the shaft.
At one point a spike broke away beneath her foot and went clanging
into the darkness. It seemed to fall for a long time. She lay back
against the foul wall, feeling the damp soak through her thin
summer dress. Holding on desperately, she sought another spike.
She felt the metal nail in her hand shift, and for a heart-stopping
moment, she thought it was going to pull free of the wall. But it
held.
“A close call. I thought you were going to be joining me,” the ghost of
de Ayala said, materializing out of the gloom directly before her
face.
“I’m not that easy to kill,” Perenelle said grimly, continuing to
climb down. “Though it would be funny if, having survived decades
of concentrated attacks from Dee and his Dark Elders, I was to die in
a fall.” She looked at the vague shape of the face before her. “What’s
happening up there?” She jerked her head in the direction of the
opening of the shaft, visible only because of the wisps of gray fog
that curled and dribbled into it.
“The island is covered with birds,” de Ayala said. “Perhaps a hundred
thousand of them; they are perched on every available surface. The Crow
Goddess has gone into the heart of the prison, no doubt in search of the
sphinx.”
“We don’t have much time,” Perenelle warned. She took another
step and her foot sank up to the ankle in thick gooey mud. She had
reached the bottom of the shaft. The mud was icy cold, and she
could feel the chill seeping into her bones. Something crawled over
her toes. “Which way?”
De Ayala’s arm appeared, ghostly white, directly in front of her,
pointing to the left. She realized that she was standing at the mouth
of a tall, roughly hewn tunnel that sloped gently downward. De
Ayala’s ghostly luminescence lit up the coating of spiders’ webs that
sheathed the walls. They were so thick that it looked as if the walls
were painted silver.
“I cannot go any farther,” the ghost said, his voice rasping around
the walls. “Dee has placed incredibly powerful warding spells and sigils
in the tunnel; I cannot get past. The cell you are looking for is about ten
paces ahead and on your left-hand side.”
Although Perenelle was reluctant to use her magic, she knew she
had no choice. She was certainly not going to wander into a tunnel
in pitch-darkness. She snapped her ngers and a globe of white re
winked to life over her right shoulder. It shed a soft opalescent glow
over the tunnel, picking out each spider’s web in intricate detail.
The webs stretched in a thick curtain right across the opening. She
could see webs woven on top of webs and wondered how many
spiders were down here.
Perenelle stepped forward, the light moving with her, and she
suddenly saw the rst of the Wards and protections Dee had placed
along the tunnel. A series of tall metal-tipped wooden spears had
been implanted deep in the muddy oor. The at metal head of
each spear was painted with an ancient symbol of power, a square
hieroglyph that would have been familiar to the ancient Maya
peoples of Central America. She could see at least a dozen spears,
each painted with a di erent symbol. She knew that individually the
symbols were meaningless, but together they set up an incredibly
powerful zigzagging network of raw power that crisscrossed the
corridor with invisible beams of black light. It reminded her of the
complicated laser alarms banks used. The power had no e ect on
humans—all she could feel was a dull buzzing and a tension at the
back of her neck—but it was an impenetrable barrier to any of the
Elder Race, the Next Generation and the Creatures of the Were.
Even de Ayala, a ghost, was a ected by the barrier.
Perenelle recognized some of the symbols on the spearheads; she
had seen them in the Codex and etched onto the walls of the ruins
at Palenque in Mexico. Most of them predated mankind; many of
them were even older than the Elders and belonged to the race that
had inhabited the earth in the far-distant past. They were the Words
of Power, the ancient Symbols of Binding, designed to protect—or
trap—something either incredibly valuable or extraordinarily
dangerous.
She had a feeling this was going to be the latter.
And she also wondered where Dee had discovered the ancient
words.
Sloshing through the thick mud, Perenelle took her rst step into
the tunnel. All the spiderwebs rustled and trembled, a sound like the
whispering rustle of leaves. There must be millions of spiders in
here, she thought. They didn’t frighten her; she’d come up against
creatures much more frightening than spiders, but she was aware
that there were probably poisonous brown recluses, black widows or
even South American hunting spiders amongst the mass of
arachnids. A bite from one of them would certainly incapacitate her,
possibly even kill her.
Perenelle jerked one of the spears out of the mud and used it to
swipe away the web. The square symbol on the spearhead glowed
red and the gossamer webs hissed and sizzled where the spear
touched them. A thick shadow that she knew was a mass of spiders
owed backward into the gloom. Advancing slowly down the
narrow tunnel, she knocked over each spear she came to, allowing
the lthy mud to wash away the Words of Power, gradually
dismantling the intricate pattern of magic. If Dee had gone to all
this trouble to trap something in the cell, it meant that he couldn’t
control it. Perenelle wanted to nd out what it was and free it. But
as she drew nearer, the globe over her shoulder throwing a
ickering light across the corridor, another thought crossed her
mind: had Dee imprisoned something that even she should be afraid
of, something ancient, something horrible? Suddenly, she didn’t
know if she was making a terrible mistake.
The doorposts and the entrance to the cell had been painted with
symbols that hurt her eyes to look at. Harsh and angular, they
seemed to shift and twist on the rock, not unlike the writing in the
Book of Abraham. But whereas the letters in the ancient book
formed words in languages she mostly understood, or at least
recognized, these symbols twisted into unimaginable shapes.
She bent down, scooped up some of the mud and splashed it over
the letters, erasing them. Only when she had completely cleaned
away the primeval Words of Power did she step forward and send
the globe of light twisting and bobbing into the cell.
It took Perenelle a single heartbeat to make sense out of what she
was seeing. And in that moment, she realized that dismantling the
protective pattern of power might indeed have been a terrible
mistake.
The entire cell was a thick cocoon of spiders’ webs. In the center
of the cell, dangling from a single strand of silk no thicker than her
index nger, was a spider. The creature was enormous, easily the
same size as the huge water tower that dominated the island above
her head. It vaguely resembled a tarantula but bristling purple hair
tipped with gray covered its entire body. Each of its eight legs was
thicker than Perenelle. Set in the center of its body was a huge,
almost human head. It was smooth and round, with no ears, no nose
and only a horizontal slash for a mouth. Like a tarantula, it had
eight tiny eyes set close to the top of the skull.
And one by one, the eyes slowly opened, each the color of an old
bruise. They xed on the woman’s face. Then the mouth widened,
and two long spearlike fangs appeared. “Madame Perenelle.
Sorceress,” it lisped.
“Areop-Enap,” she said in wonder, acknowledging the ancient
spider Elder. “I thought you were dead.”
“You mean you thought you’d killed me!”
The web twitched and suddenly the hideous creature launched
itself at Perenelle.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Dr. John Dee leaned across the backseat of the police car. “Turn
here,” he said to Josh. He saw the expression on the young man’s
face and added, “Please.”
Josh hit the brakes and the car slid and screeched, the front tire
now completely torn away and the wheel running on the metal rim,
kicking up sparks.
“Now here.” Dee pointed to a narrow alleyway lined on both sides
with rows of plastic trash cans. Watching him in the rearview
mirror, Josh could see that he kept twisting in the seat to look
behind him.
“Is she following?” Machiavelli asked.
“I can’t see her,” Dee said crisply, “but I think we need to get o
the streets.”
Josh struggled to control the car. “We won’t get much farther in
this,” he began, and then hit the rst trash can, which toppled into a
second and then a third, scattering rubbish across the alley. He
turned the steering wheel sharply to avoid running over one of the
fallen bins and the engine began to bang alarmingly. The car
wobbled and then suddenly stopped, smoke billowing from the
hood. “Out,” Josh said quickly. “I think we’re on re.” He scrambled
out of the car, Machiavelli and Dee exiting on the other side. Then
they turned and ran down the alley, away from the car. They had
taken perhaps half a dozen steps when there was a dull thump and
the car burst into ames. Thick black smoke began spiraling upward
into the sky.
“Wonderful,” Dee said bitterly. “So now the Disir de nitely knows
where we are. And she’s not going to be happy.”
“Well, not with you, that’s for sure,” Machiavelli said with a wry
smile.
“Me?” Dee looked surprised.
“I’m not the one who set re to her,” Machiavelli reminded him.
It was like listening to children. “Enough, already!” Josh rounded
on the two men. “Who was that…that woman?”
“That,” Machiavelli said with a grim smile, “was a Valkyrie.”
“A Valkyrie?”
“Sometimes called a Disir.”
“A Disir?” Josh found that he wasn’t even surprised by the
response. He didn’t care what the woman was called; all he cared
about was that she’d tried to slice him in two with a sword. Maybe
this was a dream, he thought suddenly, and everything that had
happened from the moment Dee and the Golems had stepped into
the bookshop was nothing more than a nightmare. And then he
moved his right arm and his bruised shoulder protested. He winced
in pain. The skin on his burned face felt tight and sti , and when he
licked his dry, cracked lips, he realized that this was no dream. He
was wide awake—this was a living nightmare.
Josh stepped back from the two men. He looked up and down the
narrow alley. There were tall houses on one side, and what looked
like a hotel was on the other. The walls were daubed with layers of
cursive and ornate gra ti, some of which had even been sprayed
onto the trash cans. Standing on his toes, he tried to see the skyline,
looking for the Ei el Tower or Sacré-Coeur, something to give him
an idea where he was. “I’ve got to get back,” he said, edging farther
from the two disheveled men. According to Flamel, they were the
enemy—especially Dee. And yet Dee had just saved him from the
Disir.
Dee turned to look at him, gray eyes twinkling kindly. “Why,
Josh, where are you going?”
“Back to my sister.”
“And Flamel and Saint-Germain too? Tell me; what are they going
to do for you?”
Josh took another step backward. He had seen Dee throw spears
of re on two occasions—in the bookshop and at the Disir—and he
was unsure how far the Magician could actually toss them. Not far,
he gured. Another step or two and he would turn and run down
the alleyway. He could stop the rst person he met and ask
directions to the Ei el Tower. He thought the French for “where is?”
was “où est?” or maybe it was “qui est?” Or did that mean “who is?”
He shook his head slightly, regretting not having paid attention in
French class. “Don’t try and stop me,” he began, turning away.
“What did it feel like?” Dee asked suddenly.
Josh slowly turned to look at the Magician. He knew instantly
what he was talking about. He found that his ngers had
automatically curled, as if he were holding the hilt of a sword.
“What was it like holding Clarent, feeling that raw power running
through you? What was it like knowing the thoughts and emotions
of the creature you’d just stabbed?” Dee reached under his tattered
suit coat and pulled out Clarent’s twin: Excalibur. “It is an aweinspiring feeling, is it not?” He turned the blade in his hand, a blueblack trickle of energy shivering across the stone sword. “I know
you must have experienced Nidhogg’s thoughts…emotions…
memories?”
Josh nodded. They were still fresh—startlingly vivid—in his head.
The thoughts, the sights, were so alien, so bizarre, that he knew he’d
never have been able to imagine them himself.
“For an instant you knew what it was to be godlike: to see worlds
beyond imagination, to experience alien emotions. You saw the past,
the very distant past…you might even have seen Nidhogg’s
Shadowrealm.”
Josh nodded slowly, wondering how Dee knew.
The Magician took a step closer to the boy. “For an instant, Josh,
the merest instant, it was like being Awakened—though nowhere
near as intense,” he added quickly. “And you do want to have your
powers Awakened?”
Josh nodded. He felt breathless, his heart hammering in his chest.
Dee was right; in those moments he’d held Clarent, he’d felt alive,
truly alive. “But it can’t be done,” he said quickly.
Dee laughed. “Oh yes, it can. It can be done here, today,” he
nished triumphantly.
“But Flamel said…,” Josh began, and then stopped, realizing what
he’d just said. If he could be Awakened…
“Flamel says many things. I doubt even he knows what is the
truth anymore.”
“Do you?” Josh snapped.
“Always.” Dee jerked his thumb over his shoulder at Machiavelli.
“The Italian is no friend of mine,” he said quietly, staring directly
into Josh’s troubled eyes. “So ask him the question: ask him if your
powers could be Awakened this very morning.”
Josh turned to regard Niccolò Machiavelli. The tall white-haired
man looked vaguely troubled, but he nodded in agreement. “The
English Magician is correct: your powers could be Awakened today.
I imagine we could probably nd someone to do it within the hour.”
Smiling triumphantly, Dee turned back to Josh. “It’s your choice.
So, give me your answer—do you want to go back to Flamel and his
vague promises, or do you want to have your powers Awakened?”
Even as he was turning to follow the black threads of dark energy
that drifted o Excalibur’s stone blade, Josh knew the answer. He
remembered the feelings, the emotions, the power, that had coursed
through his body when he’d held Clarent. And Dee had said those
feelings were nowhere near as intense as being Awakened.
“I need an answer,” Dee said.
Josh Newman took a deep breath. “What do I have to do?”
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
Joan swung the battered Citroën into the mouth of the alleyway
and eased the car to a halt, blocking the entrance. Leaning over the
steering wheel, she scoured the alley, looking for movement,
wondering if this was a trap.
Following Josh had been remarkably easy; all she’d had to do was
to follow the gouge cut into the street by the metal rim of his car’s
front wheel. She’d had a brief moment of panic when she’d lost him
in a maze of back streets, but then a thick plume of black smoke
rose over the rooftops and she’d followed that: it had led her to the
alley and the burning police car.
“Stay here,” she commanded the exhausted Flamel and the ashenfaced Sophie as she climbed out of the car. She carried her sword
loosely in her right hand as she walked down the alley, tapping the
blade gently against the palm of her left hand. She was fairly sure
that they were too late and that Dee, Machiavelli and Josh were
gone, but she wasn’t prepared to take any risks.
Padding silently down the center of the alley, wary of the piles of
trash cans that could be hiding an assailant, Joan realized she was
still in a state of shock following Scatty’s disappearance. One
moment Joan had been standing in front of her old friend, and the
next, the creature that was more sh than man had reared up out of
the water and dragged Scatty down with him.
Joan blinked away tears. She had known Scathach for more than
ve hundred years. In those early centuries they’d been inseparable,
adventuring together across the world into countries yet to be
explored by the West, encountering tribes that still lived as their
ancestors had thousands of years in the past. They’d discovered lost
islands, hidden cities and forgotten countries, and Scatty had even
taken her into some of the Shadowrealms, where they had fought
creatures that had long been extinct on the earth. In the
Shadowrealms, Joan had seen her friend ght and defeat creatures
that existed only in the darkest human myths. Joan knew that
nothing could stand against the Shadow…and yet Scatty herself had
always said that she could be defeated, that she was immortal but
not invulnerable. Joan had always imagined that when Scatty nally
laid down her life it would be in one nal dramatic and
extraordinary event…not by being dragged into a dirty river by an
overgrown sh-man.
Joan grieved for her friend, and she would weep for her, but not
now. Not yet.
Joan of Arc had been a warrior from the time she was barely a
teenager, riding into battle at the head of a massive French army.
She had seen too many friends fall in battle and had learned that if
she concentrated on their deaths she would be incapable of ghting.
Right now she knew she needed to protect Nicholas and the girl.
Later, there would be time to grieve for Scathach the Shadow, and
there would also be time to go in search of the creature Flamel had
called Dagon. Joan hefted the sword in her hand. She would avenge
her friend.
The petite Frenchwoman walked past the blazing remains of the
police car and crouched on the ground, expertly reading the traces
and signs on the damp stones. She heard Nicholas and Sophie climb
out of the battered Citroën and walk down the alley, stepping
around puddles of oil and dirty water. Nicholas was carrying
Clarent. Joan distinctly heard it buzz as he approached the burning
car, and she wondered if it was still connected to the boy.
“They ran from the car and stopped here,” she said, without
looking up, as they stopped beside her. “Dee and Machiavelli were
facing Josh. He stood over there.” She pointed. “They ran through
the water back there; you can clearly see the outlines of their shoes
on the ground.”
Sophie and Flamel leaned over and looked at the ground. They
nodded, though she knew they could see nothing.
“Now, this is interesting,” she continued. “At one stage Josh’s
footsteps are pointing down the alley, and he’s on the balls of his
feet, almost as if he was thinking about running. But look here.” She
pointed to traces of heel prints on the ground that only she could
see. “The three of them walked o together, Dee and Josh rst,
Machiavelli following behind.”
“Can you track them?” Flamel demanded.
Joan shrugged. “To the end of the alley, maybe, but beyond
that…” She shrugged again and straightened up, dusting o her
hands. “Impossible; there will be too many other prints.”
“What are we going to do?” Nicholas whispered. “How are we
going to nd the boy?”
Joan’s eyes drifted from Flamel’s face to Sophie. “We can’t…but
Sophie can.”
“How?” he asked.
Joan moved her hand in a horizontal line in front of her. It left
the faintest tracery of light in the air, and the foul alley brie y
smelled of lavender. “She’s his twin: she’ll be able to follow his
aura.”
Nicholas Flamel caught both of Sophie’s shoulders, forcing the girl
to look into his eyes. “Sophie!” he snapped. “Sophie, look at me.”
Sophie raised red-rimmed eyes to look at the Alchemyst. She was
completely numb. Scatty was gone, and now Josh had vanished,
kidnapped by Dee and Machiavelli. Everything was falling apart.
“Sophie,” Nicholas said very quietly, his pale eyes catching and
holding hers. “I need you to be strong now.”
“What’s the point?” she asked. “They’re gone.”
“They’re not gone,” he said con dently.
“But Scatty…” The girl hiccupped.
“…is one of the most dangerous women in the world,” he
nished. “She’s survived for over two thousand years and fought
creatures in nitely more dangerous than Dagon.”
Sophie wasn’t sure if he was trying to convince himself or her. “I
saw that thing drag her into the river, and we waited for at least ten
minutes. She didn’t come back up. She must have drowned.” Her
voice caught and she could feel the tears pricking at the back of her
eyes again. Her throat felt as if it were on re.
“I’ve seen her survive worse, much worse.” Nicholas attempted a
wan smile. “I think Dagon is in for a surprise! Scatty’s like a cat: she
hates getting wet. The Seine runs very fast; they were probably
swept downriver. She’ll contact us.”
“But how? She’ll have no idea where we are.” Sophie really hated
the way adults lied. They were just so transparent.
“Sophie,” Nicholas said seriously. “If Scathach is alive, she will
nd us. Trust me.”
And in that moment, Sophie realized that she did not trust the
Alchemyst.
Joan put her arm on Sophie’s shoulder and squeezed gently.
“Nicholas is right. Scatty is…” She smiled, and her entire face lit up.
“She is extraordinary. Her aunt once abandoned her in one of the
Underworld Shadowrealms: it took her centuries to nd her way
out. But she did it.”
Sophie nodded slowly. She knew that what they were saying was
true—the Witch of Endor knew more about Scathach than either the
Alchemyst or Joan—but she could also tell that they were very
worried.
“Now, Sophie,” Nicholas resumed. “I need you to nd your
brother.”
“How?”
“I’m hearing sirens,” Joan said urgently, looking back down the
alley. “Lots of sirens.”
Flamel ignored her. He stared deep into Sophie’s bright blue eyes.
“You can nd him,” he insisted. “You are his twin; it is a connection
that goes even deeper than blood. You’ve always known when he
was in trouble, haven’t you?”
Sophie nodded.
“Nicholas…,” Joan prodded, “we are running out of time.”
“You’ve always felt his pain, known when he was unhappy or
upset?”
Sophie nodded again.
“You are connected to him, you can nd him.” The Alchemyst
turned the girl around so that she was facing down the alleyway.
“Josh was standing here,” he said, pointing. “Dee and Machiavelli
were standing about here.”
Sophie was confused and getting irritated. “But they’re gone now.
They took him away.”
“I don’t think they forced him to go anywhere, I think he went
with them of his own free will,” Nicholas said very softly.
The words hit Sophie like a blow. Josh wouldn’t leave her, would
he? “But why?”
Flamel shrugged slightly. “Who knows? Dee has always been very
persuasive, and Machiavelli is a master manipulator. But we can
nd them, I’m sure of it. Your senses have been Awakened, Sophie.
Look again; imagine Josh standing in front of you, see him….”
Sophie took a deep breath and closed her eyes, then opened them
again. She could see nothing out of the ordinary; she was standing
in a dirty trash-strewn alley, the walls covered with curling ornate
gra ti, with the smoke of the burning car whirling around her.
“His aura is gold,” Flamel continued. “Dee’s is yellow…
Machiavelli’s gray or dirty white….”
Sophie started to shake her head. “I can’t see anything,” she
began.
“Then let me help you.” Nicholas put his hand on her shoulder
and suddenly the stink of the burning car was replaced with the
fresh sharp smell of mint. Instantly, her aura ared around her
body, crackling and spitting like a rework, the pure silver now
tinged with the emerald green of Flamel’s aura.
And then she saw… something.
Directly in front of her she could make out the merest hint of
Josh’s outline. It was ghostly and insubstantial, composed of little
more than threads and sparkling dust motes of gold, and when he
moved he trailed streaked lines of gossamer color in the air behind
him. Now that she knew what she was looking for, she could also
make out the traces of Dee’s and Machiavelli’s outlines in the air.
She blinked slowly, afraid that the images would vanish, but they
remained hanging in the air before her, and if anything, the colors
grew even more intense. Josh’s aura was the brightest of all. She
reached out blindly, her ngers touching the golden edge of her
brother’s arm. The smoky outline twisted away as if blown by a
breeze.
“I see them,” she said in awe, her voice barely above a whisper.
She’d never imagined she’d be able to do anything like this. “I can
see their outlines.”
“Where did they go?” Nicholas asked.
Sophie followed the colored streaks in the air; they led to the end
of the alley. “This way,” she said, and set o down the alleyway
toward the street, with Nicholas close on her heels.
Joan of Arc took one last lingering look at her battered car and
then followed.
“What are you thinking?” Flamel asked.
“I’m thinking that when this is all over, I’m going to return the car
to its former pristine condition. And then never take it out of the
garage again.”
“Something’s wrong,” Flamel said as they wove their way through
the streets.
Sophie was concentrating ercely on following her twin and
ignored him.
“I’ve just been thinking the same thing,” Joan said. “The city is
too quiet.”
“Exactly.” Flamel looked around. Where were the Parisians on
their way to work and the tourists determined to get to see the
sights before the city grew sti ing hot and crowded? The few people
on the street hurried past, talking excitedly together. The air was
lled with sirens, and there were police everywhere. And then
Nicholas realized that Nidhogg’s rampage through the city had
probably hit the news and people were being warned to stay o the
streets. He wondered what excuse the authorities would make to
explain the chaos.
Sophie pushed her way blindly down the street, following the
gossamer threads that Josh’s, Dee’s and Machiavelli’s auras had left
in the air behind them. She kept bumping into people and
apologizing, but she never took her eyes o the sparkles of light.
And then she noticed that as the sun rose higher in the heavens, it
was becoming harder and harder to make out the pinpoints of
colored light. She realized she was running out of time.
Joan of Arc caught up with the Alchemyst. “Can she really see the
afterimages left by their auras?” she asked in archaic French.
“She can,” Nicholas replied in the same language. “The girl is
extraordinarily powerful: she has no idea of the extent of her
powers.”
“Have you any clue where we’re going?” Joan asked, looking
around. She thought they were somewhere in the vicinity of the
Palais de Tokyo, but she’d been concentrating on the marks on the
road left by the police car and hadn’t been paying too much
attention to their whereabouts.
“None,” Nicholas said, frowning. “I’m just wondering why we
seem to be heading into the back streets. I would have thought that
Machiavelli would want to take the boy into custody.”
“Nicholas, they want the boy for themselves, or rather, the Elders
do. What does the prophecy say? ‘The two that are one, the one that
is all.’ One to save the world, one to destroy it. The boy is a prize.”
Without moving her head, her eyes ickered toward Sophie. “And
the girl, too.”
“I know that.”
Joan rested her hand lightly on the Alchemyst’s arm. “You know
that we must never allow both of them to fall into Dee’s hands.”
Flamel’s face hardened into a mask. “I know that, too.”
“What will you do?”
“Whatever is necessary,” he said grimly.
Joan pulled out a black cell phone. “I’m calling Francis; I’ll let
him know we’re OK.” She looked around for a landmark. “Maybe
he’ll know where we are.”
Sophie turned into a narrow alleyway, barely wide enough for
two people to pass side by side. In the gloom, she could see the
threads and speckled light more clearly now. She even caught
ghostly ashes of her brother’s outline. She felt her spirits lift;
maybe they were going to catch up with him.
Then, abruptly, the auras vanished.
She stopped, confused and frightened. What had happened?
Looking back down the alley, she could see the traces of their auras
in the air, gold and yellow—Josh and Dee, side by side—
Machiavelli’s gray following along behind. They reached the center
of the alleyway and stopped, and she could distinctly see the outline
of her brother’s body picked out in gold standing almost directly in
front of her. Squinting, concentrating hard, she attempted to bring
his aura into focus….
He was looking down, mouth open.
Sophie stepped back. Directly under her feet was a large manhole
cover, with the letters IDC pressed into the metal. Tiny speckles of
the three auras were streaked across the cover, outlining each letter
in a di erent color.
“Sophie?” Nicholas began.
She felt a rush of excitement: relief that she hadn’t lost him.
“They’ve gone down,” she said.
“Down?” he asked, turning a sickly pale color. His voice dropped
to little more than a whisper. “Are you sure?”
“Positive,” she said, alarmed at the expression on his face. “Why,
what’s wrong? What’s down there? Sewers?”
“Sewers…and worse.” The Alchemyst suddenly looked very old
and tired. “Below us are the legendary Catacombs of Paris,” he
whispered.
Joan crouched down and pointed to where the mud around the
edge of the manhole cover was disturbed. “This was opened very
recently.” She looked up, her expression grim. “You’re right; they’ve
taken him down into the Empire of the Dead.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
“Oh, stop that!” Perenelle bashed the spider Elder on the top of
the head with the at side of the spear in her hand. The ancient
symbol of power blazed white-hot and the spider darted back into
the cell, the top of its skull sizzling, gray smoke curling upward.
“That hurt!” Areop-Enap snapped, more irritated than wounded.
“You’re always hurting me. You nearly killed me the last time I saw
you.”
“And let me remind you that the last time we met, your followers
attempted to sacri ce me to activate an extinct volcano. Naturally, I
was a little upset.”
“You brought down an entire mountain on top of me,” AreopEnap said in a peculiar lisp caused by its overlong fangs. “You could
have killed me.”
“It was only a small mountain,” Perenelle reminded the creature.
She thought Areop-Enap was female but couldn’t be entirely sure.
“You’ve survived worse.”
All of Areop-Enap’s eyes were on the spear in Perenelle’s hand.
“Can you at least tell me where I am?”
“On Alcatraz. Or rather, below Alcatraz, an island in the San
Francisco Bay on the West Coast of the Americas.”
“The New World?” Areop-Enap asked.
“Yes, the New World,” Perenelle said, smiling. The reclusive
spider Elder often hibernated for centuries and missed huge chunks
of human history.
“What are you doing here?” Areop-Enap asked.
“I am a prisoner—like you.” She stepped back. “If I lower the
spear, are you going to do something stupid?”
“Like what?”
“Like jump at me.”
All the hairs on Areop-Enap’s legs rose and fell in unison.
“Truce?” the spider Elder suggested.
Perenelle nodded. “Truce,” she agreed. “It seems we have a
common enemy.”
Areop-Enap moved to the door of the cell. “Do you know how I
got here?”
“I was rather hoping you would be able to tell me that,” Perenelle
said.
Keeping several wary eyes on the glowing spear, the spider took a
tentative step out into the corridor. “The last place I remember was
Igup Island. It’s part of Polynesia,” it added.
“Micronesia,” Perenelle said. “The name changed more than one
hundred and fty years ago. Just how long have you been asleep,
Old Spider?” she asked, calling the creature by its common name.
“I’m not sure…when did we last meet and have our little
misunderstanding? In humani years, Sorceress,” it added.
“When Nicholas and I were on Pohnpei investigating the ruins of
Nan Madol,” Perenelle said immediately. She had an almost perfect
memory. “That was about two hundred years ago,” she added.
“I probably took a nap sometime about then,” Areop-Enap said,
stepping out into the corridor. Behind it, the cell came alive with
millions of spiders. “I remember waking from a very nice nap,” it
said slowly. “I saw the Magician Dee…but he was not alone. There
was someone else—something else—with him. Instructing him.”
“Who?” Perenelle asked urgently. “Try and remember, Old Spider,
this is important.”
Areop-Enap closed each of its eyes as it tried to recall what had
happened. “Something is preventing me,” it said, all its eyes opening
simultaneously. “Something powerful. Whoever was with him was
protected by an extraordinarily powerful magical shield.” AreopEnap looked up and down the corridor. “That way?” it asked.
“This way.” Perenelle pointed with the spear. Even though AreopEnap had called a truce, Perenelle was not prepared to stand
unarmed before one of the most powerful of the Elders. “I wonder
why he wanted you prisoner.” A sudden thought struck her and she
stopped so quickly that Areop-Enap brushed against her, almost
sending her face- rst onto the muddy oor. “If you had to make a
choice, Old Spider, if you had to choose between returning the
Elders to this world or leaving it in the hands of the humani, who
would you choose?”
“Sorceress,” Areop-Enap said, mouth gaping to reveal its terrifying
teeth in what might have been a smile, “I was one of the Elders who
voted that we should leave the earth to the ape-kin. I recognized
that our time on this planet was over; and in our arrogance we had
almost destroyed it. It was time to step back and leave it to the
humani.”
“So you would not be in favor of the return of the Elders?”
“No.”
“And if there was a ght, who would you stand with—the Elders
or the humani?”
“Sorceress,” Areop-Enap said very seriously, “I’ve stood with the
humani before. Along with my kin, Hekate and the Witch of Endor, I
helped bring civilization to this planet. Despite my appearance, my
loyalties are with the humani.”
“And that’s why Dee had to capture you now. He couldn’t a ord
to have someone as powerful as you ght alongside humankind.”
“Then the confrontation must be very close indeed,” Areop-Enap
said. “But there’s nothing Dee and the Dark Elders can do until they
secure the Book of…” Areop-Enap’s voice trailed away. “They’ve got
the Book?”
“Most of it,” Perenelle con rmed miserably. “And you should
know the rest of it. You are familiar with the prophecy of the
twins?”
“Of course. That old fool, Abraham, was always twittering on
about the twins and scribbling down his indecipherable prophecies
in the Codex. I never believed a word of them myself. And in all the
years I knew him, he never got a single thing right.”
“Nicholas found the twins.”
“Ah.” Areop-Enap was silent for a moment, then shrugged what
shoulders it had, eyes blinking in unison. “So Abraham was right
about something; well, that’s a rst.”
While Perenelle slogged through ankle-deep mud, recounting
what she had discovered in the cells above, she noticed that despite
its enormous size, the spider Elder glided over the top of the muck.
Behind them, the walls and ceilings pulsed with millions of spiders
as they followed the Elder. “I wonder why Dee didn’t kill you.”
“He couldn’t,” Areop-Enap said matter-of-factly. “My death would
send ripples through myriad Shadowrealms. Unlike Hekate, I have
friends, and too many of them would come to investigate. Dee
would not want that.” Areop-Enap stopped when it came to the rst
of the spears Perenelle had pushed down. A huge leg turned it over,
and the spider examined the faint traces of the hieroglyph painted
on the spearhead. “I’m curious,” it lisped. “These Words of Power.
They were ancient when the Elders ruled the earth. And I thought
we had destroyed both them and all record of them. How did the
English Magician rediscover them?”
“I was wondering the same thing,” Perenelle said. She turned the
spear in her hand to look at the single square hieroglyph. “Maybe he
copied the spell from somewhere.”
“No,” Areop-Enap said. “The individual words are powerful, it is
true, but Dee set them up in the particular pattern that kept me
trapped in the cell. Every time I tried to escape, it was as if I ran
into a solid wall. I’ve seen that pattern before, but it was in the days
before the Fall of Danu Talis. In fact, now that I think of it, the last
time I saw that pattern was before we had even created the island
continent and dragged it up from the ocean oor. Someone
instructed Dee; someone knew how to create these magical Wards,
someone who’d seen them.”
“No one knows who Dee’s Elder is, whom he serves,” Perenelle
said thoughtfully. “Nicholas spent decades vainly trying to discover
who, ultimately, controls the Magician.”
“Someone old,” Areop-Enap said. “As old as me, or even older.
One of the Great Elders, perhaps.” All of the spider Elder’s eyes
blinked. “But it cannot be; none of them survived the Fall of Danu
Talis.”
“You did.”
“I’m not one of the Great Elders,” Areop-Enap said simply.
They reached the end of the tunnel and de Ayala winked into
existence directly before them. He had been a ghost for centuries
and had seen wonders and monsters, but he had never seen
anything like Areop-Enap, and the sight of the enormous creature
shocked him speechless.
“Juan,” Perenelle said gently. “Talk to me.”
“The Crow Goddess is here,” he said nally. “She is almost directly
above us, perched on top of the water tower like a huge vulture. She’s
waiting for you to climb out. She had an argument with the sphinx,” the
ghost added. “The sphinx said that the Elders had given you to her; the
Morrigan claimed that Dee said you were hers.”
“So nice to be in demand,” Perenelle said, looking up the length
of the shaft into the darkness. She glanced sidelong at Areop-Enap.
“I wonder if she knows you’re here.”
“Unlikely,” Old Spider said. “Dee would have no reason for telling
her, and with so many magical and mythical creatures on the island,
she’ll not be able to pick out my aura.”
Perenelle’s lips twisted in a quick smile that lit up her face. “Shall
we surprise her?”
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
Josh Newman stopped and swallowed hard. Any moment now, he
was going to throw up. Although it was cool and damp
underground, he was sweating, his hair plastered to his skull, his
shirt lying icy and clinging along the length of his spine. He had
gone beyond frightened, past terri ed and straight to petri ed.
Descending into the sewers had been bad enough. Dee had
wrenched the manhole cover out of the ground without any e ort,
and they’d jerked back as a plume of lthy, foul-smelling gas vented
into the street. When it had drifted away, Dee had slipped into the
opening, followed a moment later by Josh and nally Machiavelli.
They’d climbed down a short metal ladder and ended up standing in
a tunnel that was so narrow they had to march single le and so low
that only Dee could walk upright. The tunnel dipped, and Josh
gasped as ice-cold water suddenly ooded his sneakers. The smell
was appalling, and he desperately tried not to think about what he
might be wading through.
The rotten-egg stink of sulfur brie y masked the smells in the
sewer as Dee created a globe of cold blue-white light. It hovered and
danced in the air about twelve inches in front of the Magician,
painting the interior of the narrow arched tunnel in stark ashen light
and deep impenetrable shadows. As they sloshed forward, Josh
could hear things moving and glimpsed sparkling points of red light
shifting in the blackness. He hoped they were only rats.
“I don’t…,” Josh began, his voice echoing distortedly in the
narrow tunnel. “I really don’t like small spaces.”
“Neither do I,” Machiavelli added tightly. “I spent a little time in
prison, a long time ago. I’ve never forgotten it.”
“Was it as bad as this?” Josh asked shakily.
“Worse.” Machiavelli was walking behind Josh and he leaned
forward to add, “Try and stay calm. This is just a maintenance
tunnel; we’ll get into the proper sewers in a few moments.”
Josh took a deep breath and gagged on the smell. He had to
remember to breathe only through his mouth. “And how is that
going to help?” he muttered through clenched teeth.
“The sewers of Paris are mirrors of the streets above,” Machiavelli
explained, his breath warm against Josh’s ear. “The bigger sewers
are fteen feet high.”
Machiavelli was correct; moments later they came out of the
cramped and claustrophobic service tunnel into a tall arched sewer
wide enough to drive a car through. The high brick walls were
brightly lit and lined with black pipes of various thicknesses.
Somewhere in the distance, water splashed and gurgled.
Josh felt the claustrophobia ease a little. Sophie sometimes got
scared in wide-open spaces; he was afraid of tightly enclosed spots.
Agoraphobia and claustrophobia. He took a deep breath; the air was
still tainted with e uent, but at least it was breathable. He lifted
the front of his black T-shirt to cover his face and breathed in: it
stank. When he got out of here—if he got out of here—he’d have to
burn everything, including the fancy designer jeans Saint-Germain
had given him. He quickly dropped the shirt, realizing that he’d
nearly exposed the bag he wore on the cord around his neck
containing the pages from the Codex. No matter what happened
now, he was determined that he wasn’t going to give up the pages
to Dee, not until he was sure—very, very, very sure—that the
Magician’s motives were honest.
“Where are we?” he wondered aloud, looking back at Machiavelli.
Dee had walked out into the center of the sewer, the solid white ball
now spinning just above the palm of his outstretched hand.
The tall Italian glanced around. “I’ve no idea,” he admitted.
“There are about twenty-one hundred kilometers of sewers—around
thirteen hundred miles,” he amended, seeing the blank look on
Josh’s face. “But don’t worry, we’ll not get lost. Most have their own
street signs.”
“Street signs in the sewers?”
“The sewers of Paris are one of the great wonders of this city.”
Machiavelli smiled.
“Come!” Dee’s voice cracked out, echoing in the chamber.
“Do you know where we’re going?” Josh asked quietly. He knew
from experience that he needed to keep distracted; once he started
thinking about the narrowness of the tunnels and the weight of the
earth above him, his claustrophobia would reduce him to a wreck.
“We’re going down, into the deepest, oldest part of the catacombs.
You’re going to be Awakened.”
“Do you know who we’re going to see?”
Machiavelli’s usually impassive face twitched in a grimace. “Yes.
By reputation only. I’ve never seen it.” He lowered his voice to little
more than a whisper and caught Josh’s sleeve, pulling him back.
“It’s not too late to turn back,” he said.
Josh blinked in surprise. “Dee wouldn’t like that.”
“Probably not,” Machiavelli agreed with a wry smile.
Josh was puzzled. Dee had said Machiavelli wasn’t his friend, and
it had been obvious that the two men didn’t agree. “But I thought
you and Dee were on the same side.”
“We are both in the service of the Elders, it is true…but I have
never approved of the English Magician and his methods.”
Ahead of them, Dee turned into a smaller tunnel and stopped
before a narrow metal door that was secured by a thick padlock. He
pinched through the hasp of the metal lock with ngernails that
stank of foul yellow power and pulled open the door. “Hurry,” he
called back impatiently.
“This…this person we’re going to see,” Josh said slowly, “can they
really Awaken my powers?”
“I have no doubt about it,” Machiavelli said softly. “Is the
Awakening so important to you?” he asked, and Josh was aware
that Machiavelli was watching him closely.
“My sister was Awakened—my twin sister,” he explained slowly.
“I want…I need to have my powers Awakened so we’re alike again.”
He looked at the tall white-haired man. “Does that make sense?”
Machiavelli nodded, his face an unreadable mask. “But is that the
only reason, Josh?”
The boy looked at him for a long moment before he turned away.
Machiavelli was right; it wasn’t the only reason. When he’d held
Clarent, he’d brie y experienced a hint of what it must be like to
have Awakened senses. For a few moments, he’d felt truly alive,
he’d felt complete…and more than anything else, he wanted to
experience that feeling again.
Dee led them into another tunnel, which was, if anything, even
narrower than the rst. Josh felt his stomach clench and his heart
start to thump. The tunnel turned and twisted downward in a series
of slender stairs. The stones here were older, the steps irregularly
shaped, the walls soft and crumbling as they brushed past. In some
places it was so narrow that Josh had to turn sideways to slip
through. He got stuck in a particularly con ned corner and
immediately started to feel breathless panic bubbling in his chest.
Then Dee caught one arm and unceremoniously yanked him
through, tearing a long strip o the back of his T-shirt. “Nearly
there,” the Magician muttered. He raised his arm slightly and the
bobbing ball of silver light rose higher into the air, revealing the
tunnel’s pitted brickwork.
“Hang on a second; let me catch my breath.” Josh bent over,
hands on his knees, breathing deeply. He realized that as long as he
concentrated on the ball of light and didn’t think about the walls
and ceiling closing in on him, he was OK. “How do you know where
we’re going?” he panted. “Have you been here before?”
“I was here once before…a long time ago,” Dee said with a grin.
“Right now, I’m just following the light.” The harsh white light
turned the Magician’s smile into something terrifying.
Josh remembered a trick his football coach had taught him. He
wrapped his hands around his stomach and squeezed hard as he
breathed in and straightened up. The feeling of queasiness
immediately eased. “Who are we going to see?” he asked.
“Patience, humani, patience.” Dee looked past Josh to where
Machiavelli was standing. “I’m sure our Italian friend will agree.
One of the great advantages of immortality is that one learns
patience. There is a saying: ‘good things come to those who wait.’”
“Not always good things,” Machiavelli muttered as Dee turned
away.
At the end of the narrow tunnel was a low metal door. It looked
as if it hadn’t been opened in decades and had rusted solid into the
weeping limestone wall. In the white light, Josh saw that the rust
had stained the o -white stone the color of dried blood.
The ball of light bobbed in the air while Dee ran his glowing
yellow ngernail around the edge of the door, cutting it out of the
frame, the stink of rotten eggs blanketing the odor of sewage.
“What’s through here?” Josh asked. Now that he’d started to get
his fear under control, he was beginning to feel a little excitement.
Once he was Awakened, he’d slip away and get back to Sophie. He
turned to look at Machiavelli, but the Italian shook his head and
pointed to Dee. “Dr. Dee?” Josh asked.
Dee broke open the low door and jerked it out of its frame. Soft
stone crumbled and aked away around it. “If I am correct—and I
almost always am,” the Magician added, “then this will lead us into
the Catacombs of Paris.” Dee leaned the door against the wall and
then stepped through the opening.
Josh ducked to follow him. “I’ve never heard of them.”
“Few people outside Paris have,” Machiavelli said, “and yet, along
with the sewers, they are one of the marvels of this city. Over a
hundred seventy miles of mysterious and labyrinthine tunnels. The
catacombs were once limestone quarries. And now they are lled…”
Josh stepped through the opening, straightened up and looked
around.
“…with bones.”
The boy felt something twist in the pit of his stomach and he
swallowed hard, a sour and bitter taste at the back of his throat.
Directly ahead, as far as he could see in the gloomy tunnel, the
walls, the curved ceiling and even the oor were composed of
polished human bones.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Nicholas had just levered up the manhole cover when Joan’s phone
rang, the high-pitched warbling scale making them all jump with
fright. The Alchemyst dropped the cover back into place with a
clang, dancing back before it fell on his toes.
“It’s Francis,” Joan told them, ipping open the phone. She spoke
to Saint-Germain in rapid- re French and then snapped the cell
closed. “He’s on his way,” she said. “He said that on no account are
we to go down into the catacombs without him.”
“But we can’t wait,” Sophie protested.
“Sophie’s right. We should—” Nicholas started to say.
“We wait,” Joan said rmly in the voice that had once
commanded armies. She placed her tiny foot on the manhole cover.
“They’ll get away,” Sophie said desperately.
“Francis said he knows where they’re going,” Joan said very
softly. She turned to look at the Alchemyst. “He said you do too. Do
you?” she demanded.
Nicholas took a deep breath and then nodded grimly. The earlymorning light washed all the life from his face, leaving it the color
of faded parchment. The circles beneath his eyes were bruise dark
and baggy. “I believe so.”
“Where?” Sophie asked. She tried to stay calm. She’d always been
better at controlling her temper than her brother was, but right now
she was close to throwing back her head and screaming in
frustration. If the Alchemyst knew where Josh was going, why
weren’t they heading there now?
“Dee is taking Josh to have his powers Awakened,” Flamel said
slowly, obviously choosing his words with care.
Sophie frowned, confused. “Is that so bad? Isn’t that what we
wanted?”
“Yes, it’s what we wanted, but not how we wanted it.” Although
his face was expressionless, there was pain in his eyes. “Much
depends on who—or what—Awakens a person’s powers. It is a
dangerous process. It can even be deadly.”
Sophie slowly turned to look at him. “And yet you were willing to
allow Hekate to Awaken both Josh and me.” Her brother had been
right all along: Flamel had put them both in danger. She could see
that now.
“It was necessary for your own protection. There were dangers,
yes, but neither of you was in any danger from the Goddess herself.”
“What sort of dangers?”
“Most of the Elders were never generous toward what they called
humani. Very few of them were prepared to give without attaching
some sort of conditions,” Flamel explained. “The greatest gift the
Elders can bestow is that of immortality. Humans want to live
forever. Both Dee and Machiavelli are in service to their Dark Elders
who gifted them with immortality.”
“In service?” Sophie asked, looking from the Alchemyst to Joan.
“They are servants,” Joan said gently, “some would say slaves. It
is the price of their immortality and powers.”
Joan’s phone rang again with the same ring tone and she ipped
it open. “François?”
“Sophie,” Flamel continued quietly, “the gift of immortality can
be withdrawn from a person at any time, and if that happens then
all of their unnatural years will catch up with them in a matter of
moments. Some Elders enslave the humani they Awaken, turn them
into little better than zombies.”
“But Hekate didn’t make me immortal when she Awakened me,”
Sophie argued.
“Unlike the Witch of Endor, Hekate had no interest in humani for
countless generations. She always remained neutral in the wars
between those of us who defend humanity and the Dark Elders.” A
bitter smile twisted his thin lips. “Perhaps if she had chosen a side,
she would still be alive today.”
Sophie looked into the Alchemyst’s pale eyes. She was thinking
that if Flamel had not gone into Hekate’s Shadowrealm, the Elder
would still be alive. “You’re saying Josh is in danger,” she said
nally.
“Terrible danger.”
Sophie’s gaze never left Flamel’s face. Josh was in danger not
because of Dee or Machiavelli, but because Nicholas Flamel has
placed the two of them in this terrible situation. He was protecting
them, he said, and once she had believed that without question. But
now…now she didn’t know what to think.
“Come.” Joan snapped her phone shut, caught Sophie’s hand and
dragged her down the alleyway toward the street. “Francis is on the
way.”
Flamel took one nal look at the manhole cover, then tucked
Clarent under his coat and hurried after them.
Joan led them out of the narrow side street onto the Avenue du
President Wilson, then quickly turned left onto Rue Debrousse and
headed back toward the river. The air was lled with the sounds of
countless police and ambulance sirens, and in the skies overhead
police helicopters buzzed low over the city. The streets were almost
completely empty, and no one paid any attention to three people
running for shelter.
Sophie shivered; the whole scene was so surreal. It was like
something she’d see in a war documentary on the Discovery
Channel.
At the bottom of the Rue Debrousse, they found Saint-Germain
waiting in a nondescript black BMW badly in need of washing. The
front and rear passenger doors were open slightly, and the tinted
driver’s window hummed down as they approached. Saint-Germain
was grinning delightedly. “Nicholas, you should come home more
often; the city is in chaos. It’s all terribly exciting. I’ve not had so
much fun in centuries.”
Joan slid in beside her husband, while Nicholas and Sophie
climbed into the back. Saint-Germain gunned the engine, but
Nicholas leaned forward and squeezed his shoulder.
“Not so fast. We don’t need to draw any attention to ourselves,”
he warned.
“But with the panic on the streets, we shouldn’t be driving slowly,
either,” Saint-Germain pointed out. He eased the car away from the
curb and set o down the Avenue de New York. He drove with one
hand on the steering wheel, the other draped over the seat as he
kept twisting around to talk to the Alchemyst.
Completely numb, Sophie slumped against the window, staring
out at the river ashing by on her left. In the distance, on the
opposite side of the Seine, she could make out the now familiar
shape of the Ei el Tower rising over the rooftops. She was
exhausted and her head was spinning. She was confused about the
Alchemyst. Nicholas couldn’t be bad, could he? Saint-Germain and
Joan—Scatty, too—obviously respected him. Even Hekate and the
Witch liked him. Flickering thoughts that she knew were not hers
hovered at the very edge of her consciousness, but when she tried to
focus, they drifted away. They were the Witch of Endor’s memories,
and she knew instinctively that they were important. They were
something to do with the catacombs, and the creature who lived in
the depths….
“O cially, the police are reporting that a portion of the
catacombs has caved in and brought down some houses with it,”
Saint-Germain was saying. “They’re claiming that the sewers have
ruptured and that methane, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide
gas have escaped into the city. The center of Paris is being sealed o
and evacuated. People are being advised to remain indoors.”
Nicholas leaned back against the leather seats and closed his eyes.
“Has anyone been injured?” he asked.
“A few cuts and bruises, but nothing more serious has been
reported.”
Joan shook her head in amazement. “Considering what’s just
tromped through the city, that’s a minor miracle.”
“Any sightings of Nidhogg?” Nicholas asked.
“Not on any of the main news channels yet, but some grainy cell
phone images have turned up on blogs, and Le Monde and Le Figaro
are both claiming to have exclusive images of what they are calling
‘The Creature from the Catacombs’ and ‘The Beast from the Pit.’”
Sophie leaned forward, following the conversation. She looked
from Nicholas to Saint-Germain and then back at the Alchemyst.
“Soon the whole world will know the truth. What happens then?”
“Nothing,” the two men said simultaneously.
“Nothing? But that’s not possible.”
Joan swiveled around in the passenger seat. “But that is what is
going to happen. This will be covered up.”
Sophie looked at Flamel. He nodded in agreement. “Most people
simply won’t believe it anyway, Sophie. It will be dismissed as a
hoax or a prank. Those who do think it true will be called
conspiracy theorists. And you can be sure that Machiavelli’s people
are already working to con scate and destroy every image.”
“Within a couple of hours,” Saint-Germain added, “the events of
this morning will simply be reported as an unfortunate accident.
Sightings of a monster will be laughed at and dismissed as hysteria.”
Sophie shook her head in disbelief. “You can’t hide something like
that forever.”
“The Elders have been doing it for millennia,” Saint-Germain said,
tilting the rearview mirror so that he could look at Sophie. In the
dark interior of the car, she thought his bright blue eyes were
glowing slightly. “And you have to remember that humankind really
does not want to believe in magic. They don’t want to know that
myths and legends were almost always based on the truth.”
Joan reached over and laid her hand gently on her husband’s arm.
“But I do not agree; humans have always believed in magic. It is
only in these last few centuries that the belief has fallen away. I
think that they really want to believe, because in their hearts they
know it to be true. They know that magic really exists.”
“I used to believe in magic,” Sophie said very quietly. She had
turned to look out at the city again, but re ected in the glass, she
saw a brightly painted child’s bedroom: her bedroom, ve, perhaps
six years ago. She had no idea where it was—the house in
Scottsdale, maybe, or it might have been Raleigh; they’d moved
around so much then. She was sitting in the middle of her bed,
surrounded by her favorite books. “When I was younger, I read
about princesses and wizards and knights and magicians. Even
though I knew they were just stories, I wanted the magic to be real.
Until now,” she added bitterly. She moved her head to glance at the
Alchemyst. “Are all the fairy tales true?”
Flamel nodded. “Not every fairy tale, but just about every legend
is based on a truth; every myth has a basis in reality.”
“Even the scary ones?” she whispered.
“Especially the scary ones.”
A trio of news helicopters buzzed low overhead, the noise of their
rotors vibrating the interior of the car. Flamel waited until they had
passed and then leaned forward. “Where are we going?”
Saint-Germain pointed straight ahead and to the right. “There’s a
secret entrance to the catacombs in the Trocadéro Gardens. It leads
straight down into the forbidden tunnels. I’ve checked the old maps;
I think Dee’s route will take them through the sewers rst and then
down into the lower tunnels. We’ll make up some time this way.”
Nicholas Flamel sat back in the seat and then reached over and
squeezed Sophie’s hand. “It’s going to be all right,” he said.
But Sophie didn’t believe him.
The entrance to the catacombs was through a rather ordinarylooking metal grate set into the ground. Partially covered in moss
and grass, it was hidden in a stand of trees behind a richly carved
and beautifully painted carousel at one end of the Trocadéro
Gardens. Usually, the stunning gardens would have been overrun
with tourists, but this morning they were deserted, and the
carousel’s empty wooden horses bobbed up and down below their
blue and white striped awning.
Saint-Germain cut across a narrow path and led them into a patch
of grass burned brown by the summer sun. He stopped over an
unmarked rectangular metal grate. “I haven’t used this since 1941.”
He knelt down, grabbed the bars and tugged. It didn’t move.
Joan glanced sidelong at Sophie. “When Francis and I fought with
the French Resistance against the Germans, we used the catacombs
as a base. We could pop up anywhere in the city.” She tapped the
metal grate with the toe of her shoe. “This was one of our favorite
spots. Even during the war the gardens were always full of people,
and we could mingle easily with the crowds.”
The air was suddenly touched with the rich autumnal scent of
burnt leaves, and then the metal bars in Francis’s hands began to
glow with a rich red-hot, then white-hot, heat. The metal turned to
liquid and melted away, thick blobs disappearing down into the
shaft. Saint-Germain wrenched the remainder of the grating out of
the hole and tossed it to one side, then swung himself into the
opening. “There’s a ladder here.”
“Sophie, you go next,” Nicholas said. “I’ll come after you. Joan,
will you take up the rear?”
Joan nodded. She caught the edge of a nearby wooden park bench
and dragged it across the grass. “I’ll pull it over the opening before I
climb down. We don’t want any unexpected visitors dropping in, do
we?” She smiled.
Sophie gingerly climbed into the opening, her feet nding the
rungs of the ladder. She carefully lowered herself. She’d been
expecting it to be foul and horrible, but it just smelled dry and
musty. She started counting the steps but lost count somewhere
around seventy-two, though she could tell by the rapidly
diminishing square of sky above their heads that they were climbing
deep underground. She wasn’t scared—not for herself. Tunnels and
narrow spaces held no fears for her, but her brother was terri ed of
small spaces: how was he feeling now? Butter ies shifted in her
stomach; she felt queasy. Her mouth went dry and she knew—
instinctively, unquestioningly—that this was how her brother was
feeling right at that moment. She knew that Josh was terri ed.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
“Bones,” Josh said numbly, looking up and down the tunnel.
The wall directly before him was created from hundreds of
stained-yellow and bleached-white skulls. Dee strode down the
corridor and his sphere of light sent shadows dancing and twitching,
making it appear as if the empty eye sockets were moving, following
him.
Josh had grown up with bones; he knew they were nothing to be
frightened of. His father’s study was full of skeletons. As children,
both he and Sophie had played in museum storerooms full of
skeletal remains, but they had all been animal and dinosaur bones.
Josh had even helped piece together the tailbone of a raptor that
had gone on display in the American Museum of Natural History.
But these bones…these were…these were…
“Are these all human bones?” he whispered.
“Yes,” Machiavelli said softly, his voice now touched with a trace
of his Italian accent. “There are the remains of at least six million
bodies down here. Maybe more. The catacombs were originally
huge limestone quarries.” He jerked his thumb upward. “The same
limestone used to build the city. Paris is built over a warren of
tunnels.”
“How did they get down here?” Josh’s voice trembled. He
coughed, wrapped his arms tightly around his body and tried to
look nonchalant, as if he weren’t completely terri ed. “They look
ancient; how long have they been here?”
“A couple of hundred years only,” Machiavelli said, surprising
him. “By the end of the eighteenth century, the graveyards of Paris
were over owing. I was in the city then,” he added, mouth twisting
in disgust. “I’d never seen anything like it. There were so many dead
in the city that the graveyards were often just huge mounds of piled
earth with bones visible in them. Paris might have been one of the
most beautiful cities in the world, but it was also the foulest. Worse
than London—and that’s saying something!” He laughed, and the
sound echoed and reechoed o the bone walls and was distorted
into something hideous. “The stink was indescribable, and there
truly were rats as big as dogs. Disease was rife and outbreaks of
plague were common. Finally, it was recognized that the
over owing graveyards must have something to do with the
contagion. So it was decided to empty the graveyards and move the
remains down into the empty quarries.”
Trying not to think about the fact that he was surrounded by the
bones of people who had most likely died from some terrible
disease, Josh focused on the walls. “Who made the patterns?” he
asked, pointing to a particularly ornate sunburst design that had
been created using human bones of various length to represent the
sunbeams.
Machiavelli shrugged. “Who knows? Someone who wished to
honor the dead, perhaps; someone trying to make sense out of what
must have been incredible chaos. Humans are always looking to
make order out of chaos,” he added softly.
Josh looked at him. “You call them…us, ‘humans.’” He turned to
look for Dee, but the Magician had almost reached the end of the
corridor and was out of earshot. “Dee calls us humani.”
“Don’t confuse me with Dee,” Machiavelli said with an icy smile.
Josh was confused. Who was the more powerful here—Dee or
Machiavelli? He’d thought it was the Magician, but he was
beginning to suspect that the Italian was much more in control.
“Scathach told us you were more dangerous and more cunning than
Dee,” he said, thinking aloud.
Machiavelli’s smile turned to a delighted grin. “That’s the nicest
thing she’s ever said about me.”
“Is it true? Are you more dangerous than Dee?”
Machiavelli took a moment to consider. Then he smiled and the
faintest hint of serpent lled the tunnel. “Absolutely.”
“Hurry; this way,” Dr. Dee called back, voice attened by the
narrow walls and low ceiling. He turned and headed o down the
bone-lined tunnel, taking the light with him. Josh was tempted to
run after him, unwilling to be alone in the utter darkness, but then
Machiavelli snapped his ngers and an elegant candle-thin ame of
gray-white light appeared in the palm of his hand.
“Not all the tunnels are like this,” Machiavelli continued,
indicating the neatly set bones in the walls, the regular shapes and
patterns. “Some of the small tunnels are simply piled high with
assorted bits and pieces.”
They rounded a curve in the tunnel and found Dee waiting for
them, tapping his foot impatiently. He turned and marched away
without saying a word.
Josh concentrated on Dee’s back and the globe of light bobbing
over his shoulder as they wound deeper and deeper into the
catacombs; doing that helped him to ignore the walls that seemed to
be closing in with every step. He noticed as he walked along that
some of the bones lining the tunnel had dates scratched on them,
centuries-old gra ti, and he was conscious too that the only
footsteps in the thick layer of dust on the oor were the imprints of
Dee’s small feet. These tunnels had not been used in a very long
time.
“Do people ever come down here?” he asked Machiavelli, making
conversation just for the sake of hearing a sound in the oppressive
silence.
“Yes. Portions of the catacombs are open to the public,”
Machiavelli said, holding his hand high, the thin ame picking out
the ornate patterns of bones set in the walls, dancing shadows
bringing them to ickering life. “But there are many kilometers of
catacombs beneath the city, and vast tracts of it have not been
mapped. Exploring those tunnels is dangerous and illegal, of course,
but people still do it. Those people are called cataphiles. There’s
even a special police unit, the cata ics, that patrols these tunnels.”
Machiavelli waved an arm at the surrounding walls, the ame
dancing wildly but not extinguishing. “But we’ll run into neither
group down here. This area is completely unknown. We are deep
below the city now, in one of the very rst quarries excavated many
centuries ago.”
“Deep below the city,” Josh repeated slowly. He hunched his
shoulders, imagining he could actually feel the weight of Paris over
his head, the many tons of earth, concrete and steel pressing down
on him. Claustrophobia threatened to overwhelm him, and he felt as
if the walls were throbbing, pulsing. His throat was dry, his lips
cracked, and his tongue felt too big in his mouth. “I think,” he
whispered to Machiavelli, “I think I’d like to head back up to the
surface now, if that’s OK.”
The Italian blinked in genuine surprise. “No, Josh, no, it’s not
OK.” Machiavelli reached out and squeezed Josh’s shoulder and the
boy felt a rush of warmth ow through his body. His aura crackled,
and the close air in the tunnel was touched with the scent of orange
and the rank odor of snake. “It’s too late for that,” Machiavelli said
gently. He lowered his voice to a whisper. “We’ve gone too deep…
there’s no turning back. You will leave these catacombs Awakened
or…”
“Or what?” Josh asked, when he realized, with a growing sense of
horror, how the Italian was going to nish the sentence.
“Or you will not leave them at all,” Machiavelli said simply.
They rounded a curve and started down a long arrow-straight
tunnel. The walls here were even more ornately decorated in bone
but with strange square patterns that Josh almost recognized. They
were similar to drawings he’d seen in his father’s study and looked
like Maya or Aztec glyphs; but what were Meso-American
hieroglyphs doing in the Catacombs of Paris?
Dee was waiting for them at the end of the tunnel. His gray eyes
sparkled in the re ected light, which also lent his skin an unhealthy
glow. When he spoke, his English accent had thickened, and the
words tumbled so quickly it was di cult to comprehend what he
was saying. Josh couldn’t tell if the Magician was excited or
nervous, and that made him even more afraid.
“This is now a momentous day for you, boy, a momentous day.
For not only will your powers be Awakened, but you will also meet
one of the few Elders who is still remembered by humanity. It is a
great honor.” He clapped his hands together. Ducking his head, he
raised his hand, bringing up the globe of light, and revealed two tall
arched columns of bones that had been shaped to form a doorframe.
Beyond the opening, there was utter blackness. Stepping back, he
directed, “You rst.”
Josh hesitated and Machiavelli caught his arm and squeezed
tightly. When he spoke, his voice was low and urgent. “Whatever
happens, you must not show fear, and do not panic. Your life, your
very sanity, depends on it. Do you understand?”
“No fear, no panic,” Josh repeated. He was starting to
hyperventilate. “No fear, no panic.”
“Go now.” Machiavelli released the boy’s arm and pushed him
forward toward Dee and the bone doorway. “Have your powers
Awakened,” he said, “and I hope it will be worth it.”
Something in Machiavelli’s voice made Josh look back. There was
a look almost of pity on the Italian’s face, and Josh stopped. Dee
looked at him, gray eyes glittering, lips twisted in an ugly smile. He
raised his eyebrows. “Don’t you want to be Awakened?”
And Josh really had only one answer to that.
Glancing back at Machiavelli again, he half raised a hand in
farewell, took a deep breath and stepped through the arched
doorway into the pitch-black. Light blossomed as Dee followed him,
and the boy discovered that he was standing in a vast circular
chamber that seemed to be carved entirely out of one enormous
bone—the smoothly curved walls, the polished yellow ceiling, even
the parchment-colored oor were the same shade and texture as the
bone- lled walls outside.
Dee put his hand on the small of Josh’s back and urged him
forward. Josh took two steps and stopped. The past few days had
taught him to expect surprises—wonders, creatures and monsters:
but this, this was…disappointing.
The chamber was empty except for a long rectangular raised stone
plinth in the center of the room. Dee’s globe of light bobbed over
the platform, harshly illuminating every carved detail. Lying at on
the top of a pitted slab of limestone was a huge statue of a man in
ancient-looking metal and leather armor, gauntleted hands wrapped
around the thick hilt of a broadsword that was at least six feet long.
Rising up on his toes, Josh could see that the statue’s head was
covered in a helmet that completely concealed the face.
Josh looked around. Dee was standing to the right of the doorway
and Machiavelli had stepped into the room and taken up a position
on the left. They were both watching him intently. “What…what
happens now?” he asked, his voice at and mu ed in the chamber.
Neither man responded. Machiavelli folded his arms and tilted his
head slightly to one side, eyes narrowing.
“Who’s this?” Josh asked, jerking a thumb at the statue. He didn’t
expect to get an answer from Dee, but when he turned to the Italian
he realized that Machiavelli wasn’t looking at him, he was looking
beyond him. Josh spun around…just as two nightmarish creatures
materialized out of the shadows.
Everything about them was white, from their almost transparent
skin to the long ne hair that owed down their backs and brushed
the oor behind them. It was impossible to say whether they were
male or female. They were the size of small children, unnaturally
thin, with bulbous heads, broad foreheads and pointed chins.
Overlarge ears and tiny nubs of horn grew out of the top of their
skulls. Huge circular eyes without any pupils xed on him, and
when the creatures stepped forward, he realized that there was
something wrong with their legs. Their thighs curved backward, and
then the legs jutted forward at the knee and ended in goatlike
hooves.
They separated as they came around the slab, and Josh’s instinct
was to back away from them, but then he remembered Machiavelli’s
advice and stood his ground. Taking a deep breath, he looked
closely at the nearer creature and discovered that it was not quite as
terrifying as it looked at rst: it was so small it appeared almost
fragile. He thought he knew what they were; he’d seen images of
them on fragments of Greek and Roman pottery on the bookshelves
in his mom’s study. They were fauns, or maybe satyrs; he wasn’t
sure what the di erence was.
The creatures slowly circled Josh, reaching for him with icy longngered hands tipped with lthy black nails, stroking his torn Tshirt, pinching the fabric of his jeans. They spoke together,
chattering in high-pitched, almost inaudible voices that set his teeth
on edge. One bone-chilling nger touched the esh of his stomach
and his aura spat and crackled gold sparks. “Hey!” he shouted. The
creatures jumped back, but that single touch had set Josh’s heart
racing. He was abruptly gripped by every nameless fear he’d ever
imagined, and all the nightmares that most terri ed him ooded to
the surface, leaving him gasping and shaking, bathed in a bitter icy
sweat. The second faun darted forward and laid a cold hand on
Josh’s face. Suddenly, his heart was tripping madly, his stomach
churning with mindless panic.
The two creatures held each other and jumped up and down,
shaking with what could only be laughter.
“Josh.” Machiavelli’s commanding voice broke through the boy’s
rising panic and silenced the creatures. “Josh. Listen to me. Hear my
voice, concentrate on it. The satyrs are simple creatures and feed o
the most basic of human emotions: one gorges itself on fear, the
other delights in panic. They are Phobos and Deimos.”
At the mention of their names, the two satyrs started back, fading
into the shadows, until only their huge liquid eyes were visible,
black and shining in the light of the hovering globe.
“They are the Guardians of the Sleeping God.”
And then, with a grinding of ancient stone, the statue sat up and
swiveled its head to look at Josh. Within the helmet, two eyes
blazed bloodred.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
“Is this a Shadowrealm?” Sophie asked in a horri
ed whisper, her
breath catching in her throat.
She was standing at the entrance to a long straight tunnel whose
walls were decorated and lined with what looked like human bones.
A single low-wattage bulb lit the space with a dull yellow light.
Joan squeezed her arm and laughed gently. “No. We’re still in our
world. Welcome to the Catacombs of Paris.”
Sophie’s eyes ickered silver as the Witch’s knowledge owed
through her. The Witch of Endor knew these catacombs well. Sophie
rocked back on her heels as a sudden array of images engulfed her:
men and women wearing little more than rags quarrying stone from
huge pits in the ground, watched over by guards wearing the
uniforms of Roman centurions. “These were quarries,” she
whispered.
“A long time ago,” Nicholas said. “And now it is a tomb for
millions of Parisians and one other….”
“The Sleeping God,” Sophie said, her voice cracking. This was an
Elder the Witch both loathed and pitied.
Saint-Germain and Joan were shocked by the girl’s knowledge.
Even Flamel looked startled.
Sophie started shivering. She wrapped her arms around her body,
trying to stand upright as dark thoughts crashed through her brain.
The Sleeping God had once been an Elder….
…On a burning battle eld, she saw a lone warrior in metal and
leather armor, wielding a sword almost as tall as he, ghting o
creatures straight out of the Jurassic Age.
…At the gates of an ancient city, the warrior in metal and leather
stood alone against a vast horde of apelike beast-men while a
column of refugees escaped through another gate.
…On the steps of an impossibly high pyramid, the warrior
defended a lone woman and child from creatures that were a cross
between serpents and birds.
“Sophie…”
She shivered, ice-cold now, teeth chattering. The images changed;
the warrior’s polished leather and metal armor had turned lthy,
encrusted with mud, streaked and stained. The warrior, too, was
changed.
…The warrior raced through a primitive ice-locked village,
howling like a beast, while fur-wrapped humans ed from him or
cowered in fear.
…The warrior rode at the head of a vast army that was a mongrel
mix of beasts and men bearing down on a sparkling city in the heart
of an empty desert.
…The warrior stood in the middle of an enormous library lled
with charts, scrolls and books of metal, cloth and bark. The library
was burning so intensely that the metal books owed liquid.
Slashing his sword through a series of shelves, he swept more books
onto the ames.
“Sophie!”
The girl’s aura ickered and crackled as the Alchemyst gripped
her shoulders and squeezed hard.
“Sophie!”
Flamel’s voice snapped her out of her trance. “I saw…I saw…,”
she began hoarsely. Her throat felt raw, and she’d bitten down so
hard on the inside of her cheek that there was the disgusting
metallic taste of blood in her mouth.
“I cannot even imagine what you saw,” he said gently. “But I
think I know who you saw….”
“Who was it?” she panted, breathless now. “Who was the warrior
in the metal and leather armor?” She knew if she thought hard
about him, the Witch’s memories would supply his name, but that
would also draw her back into the warrior’s violent world, and she
didn’t want that.
“The Elder, Mars Ultor.”
“The God of War,” Joan of Arc added bitterly.
Without looking or turning her head, Sophie raised her left hand
and pointed down a narrow corridor. “He’s down there,” she said
quietly.
“How do you know?” Saint-Germain asked.
“I can feel him,” the girl said with a shudder. She rubbed her
arms furiously. “It’s like something cold and sticky is running down
my skin. It’s coming from there.”
“This tunnel leads us into the secret heart of the catacombs,”
Saint-Germain said, “into the lost Roman city of Lutetia.” He
brushed his hands briskly together, showering sparks onto the
ground, and then set o down the tunnel, followed by Joan. Sophie
was about to follow them when she stopped and looked at the
Alchemyst. “What happened to Mars? When I saw him rst, I
thought he was the defender of humanity. What changed him?”
Nicholas shook his head. “No one knows. Perhaps the answer lies
in the Witch’s memories?” he suggested. “They must have known
one another.”
Sophie started to shake her head. “Don’t make me think about
him…,” she began, but it was too late. Even as the Alchemyst was
asking the question, a series of terrible images ashed through
Sophie’s mind. She saw a tall, handsome man standing alone on the
top of a dizzyingly high stepped pyramid, arms raised to the
heavens. Across his shoulders he wore a spectacular cloak of
multicolored feathers. Spread out below the pyramid was a huge
stone city, surrounded by a thick jungle. The city was celebrating,
the broad streets thronged with people wearing brightly colored
clothes, ornate jewelry and extravagant feathered cloaks and
headdresses. The only absence of color was in the line of white-clad
men and women stretching down the center of the wide main street.
Looking more closely, she realized that they were chained together
with ropes of leather and vine around their necks. Guards wielding
whips and spears were driving them toward the pyramid.
Sophie drew in a deep shuddering breath and blinked away the
images. “She knew him,” she said coldly. She didn’t tell the
Alchemyst that the Witch of Endor had once loved Mars…but that
had been a long time ago, before he had changed, before he had
become known as Mars Ultor. The Avenger.
CHAPTER FIFTY
“Hail, Mars, the Lord of War,” Dee said loudly.
Completely numb with fright, Josh watched as the huge helmeted
head slowly turned to look at Dee. The Magician’s aura immediately
snapped alight, sizzling yellow and vaporous around him. Within
the god’s helmet, red light glowed. The head turned again with the
sound of grinding stone, and blazing crimson eyes looked at the boy.
The two ghost-white satyrs, Phobos and Deimos, crept out of the
shadows and crouched behind the stone pedestal, watching Josh
intently. Even glancing at them sent waves of panic and fear
coursing through his entire body, and he was sure he saw one of
them lick thin lips with a tongue the color of an old bruise.
Deliberately looking away, he concentrated on the ancient Elder.
“You must show no fear,” Machiavelli had said, “and do not
panic.” But that was easier said than done. Directly in front of him,
close enough to touch, was the Elder the Romans had worshipped as
the God of War. Josh had never heard of Hekate or the Witch of
Endor, and because he knew nothing about them, they hadn’t had
the same e ect on him. This Elder was di erent. Now he knew what
Dee had meant when he said that this was the Elder remembered by
humankind. This was Mars himself, the Elder with a month and a
planet named after him.
Josh tried to draw in a deep breath and settle his thumping heart,
but he was shaking so hard he could barely breathe. His legs were
like jelly, and he felt that a