Howling his rage, Dr. John Dee spun around and flung 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 flat to the floor. The big Hummer lurched forward, kicking up stones and dirt as he spun it in a circle and then set off 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 find 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 off 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 fine. 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 fine 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 offered the job, he’d discovered that Sophie had found a job as well in The Coffee 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 different. 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 different; 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 Oldfield 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 first about the Book of Abraham the Mage.” He saw Josh open his mouth and he pressed on quickly. “Let me finish. 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 different place then. The commonly held view is that mankind appeared in the middle of the Stone Age. But the truth is very, very different. 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 flight, they had vessels that could cross the oceans, they could control t
he 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 first rockets into space. We have electron microscopes that can see individual atoms. We routinely cure diseases that only fifty 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 afford 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 first 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 specifically 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 confirmed 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 first 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 off the road to where a roadside diner sign had flickered 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 terrified 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 flu.” 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 off 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 terrified. “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…different?” He chose the word carefully.
Sophie took a moment to consider. What was wrong with Josh, why was he so concerned? “Different? How?”
“Do you remember Hekate Awakening your powers?”
“I do.”
“What did it feel like?” he asked hesitantly.
For a moment Sophie’s eyes flickered with cold silver light. “It was as if someone had flipped a switch in my head, Josh. I felt alive. For the first 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 finally wiped his mouth with a napkin and brushed bread crumbs off his jeans. It was the first proper meal he’d had since lunchtime the day before. “I feel human again.” He glanced sideways at Scatty. “No offense.”
“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 five-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 flickered 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 office 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….”