Josh looked hard, squinting against the glare. Then he saw what his sister was talking about. “The surface is…different. 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 flickered 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 finger 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 flesh 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 off 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 fine 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 figure 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 filled with hundreds of tiny white teeth. The head tilted first 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 first, 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 fire 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 fire extinguisher, arming it. He wasn’t sure what would happen if he fired off 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 fire 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 finding it difficult to hold the fire 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 flown in from San Francisco late in the afternoon on his private jet. The limousine, booke
d by his office, 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 traffic he had encountered since he’d lived in Victorian London.
For the first 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 first 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-five years.
Dr. John Dee was also the Queen’s spy.
Dee spied for the English Queen across Europe and was her most influential 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 confidential 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, influence the history of the world.
Nicholas and Perenelle had returned to Paris in the first 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 first 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 flesh 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 finally 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 fires, 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 fired 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 fly like a bird. Dee had not been entirely convinced that the design would work, though he wanted nothing more in the world than to fly. 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 flicker 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 fly 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 figure 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 first met the Morrigan. That night, he learned of the Elder Race and how they h
ad 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-first-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 inflict 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 finally crunched to a halt on the white gravel, a figure 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 figure turned away and strode up the steps.