“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 controling 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 fifty.”
Nick Fleming crawled around on the floor, pushing through books until he found the one he wanted. England in the Age of Elizabeth. He flipped 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 different, 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 five 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 floor 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 flung 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 different 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 floor, 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 off the floor. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
“Where will you go? What will you do?” Sophie asked.
“What about us?” Josh finished 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 finally, “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 firmly.
Josh nodded. “W
e’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 floor. “I really loved this shop,” Flamel muttered. “It reminded me of my very first 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 Coffee 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 finds 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 Pacific Heights,” Josh added. “Aunt Agony.”
“We can’t just disappear. She’ll be expecting us home for dinner,” Sophie said. “If we’re even five 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 coffee shop with Sophie close behind him.
Josh hesitated before stepping into the cool, sweet-smelling gloom of The Coffee 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 first 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 find themselves in the middle of a battle between two incredibly ancient magicians.
There was no magic in the world. Magic was movie special effects. Magic was stage shows with rabbits and doves and sometimes tigers, and David Copperfield 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 Coffee 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 flourish 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 off 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 coffee 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 figure 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 coffee 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 first 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 fingertips. “Aaah!” She jerked her hand back, fingertips tingling. Now what?
“I’m sorry,” Flamel explained. “That’s an aftereffect of the…well, what you would call magic. My aura—the electrical field 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 fluorescent 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 field surrounds every living organism.”
“What does it look like?” Sophie asked.
Flamel tapped his finger on the shop window. “Just like that: a glow around the body. Everyone’s aura is unique—different colors, different 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.”