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 off 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 filled with needle-pointed teeth. He decided against dipping his fingers 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, five elemental forces of magic. The fifth force was the magic of Time, the greatest of all magics. The Elders could control all the other elements, but the secret of the fifth 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 different 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 flee 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 first 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 first 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 different gods, however; they were simply the same Elders called by different 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 fight 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-first 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 flesh. 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 find 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 terrified 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 fish leapt out of the pond and the figure 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 fish leapt again, scattering the wate
r 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 find 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 flesh, 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 coffee shop, the next they were racing across San Francisco in the company of a man who claimed to be a six-hundred-year-old alchemyst and a girl who looked no older than herself and yet who Flamel swore was a two-and-a-half-thousand-year-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 flood 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 effects: the Torc Allta could be trained animals and men in prosthetic makeup, what happened in Scathach’s dojo could be some sort of effect 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 finally 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 flitted 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 flickered 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 forefinger. 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 sniffed 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 find 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 find 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 stuff.”
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 floor, 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 terrified 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 unidentifiable instruments floated 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 first came into the house, I noticed that the walls and floor were dark, but as we moved down the corridors, they became lighter and paler in color. Then I realized that we were walking through different 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 patte
rns 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 finished triumphantly.
The twins fled across the vast open field 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 filled 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 off his hooded sweatshirt and draped it over his sister’s shoulders. “The stars are different,” 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!”