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 reflected lights of the cars and buses. She checked her watch: it was almost two a.m. on Sunday morning, yet traffic was still heavy. Anytime after midnight, the streets of San Francisco would be deserted.
The difference 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 effort 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 filled with the latest styles. Sophie had collected everything she could find 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 off 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-first 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 different—he was going to be a computer game designer or a programmer, a professional football player, a paramedic or a fireman—but she’d always known what she was going to do. From the time her first-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 floor 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 finish 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 different.”
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 reflected 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 fight, 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 finally 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 finished 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-fifteen precisely. She reme
mbered 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 first. 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, fingers 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 fingers 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 finger 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 fifteenth century.” He nudged the sword on the floor 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 effort of will to control themselves, but for the first 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 finding things to laugh at—but unfortunately, there hadn’t been too many of those over the past few days.
Sophie sobered up first 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 reflected in the window. “Would it have made any difference 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—terrified 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 flecks 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 fifteen 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 flicker 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 flaked 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.