The Alchemyst (10 page)

“What do you mean, in the days to come?” Josh interrupted, voice rising in alarm. “We’re going home, aren’t we?” But even as he was asking the question, he knew the answer.

“Eventually,” the Warrior Maid said, “but not today, and definitely not tomorrow.”

Sophie laid her hand on her brother’s arm, silencing the question he was about to ask. “What were you saying about myths and legends?” she asked.

Somewhere deep in the house a bell chimed, the sound high and pure. It lingered in the still air.

Scathach ignored it. “I want you to remember that everything you know—or think you know—about myth and legend is not necessarily false, nor is it entirely true. At the heart of every legend there is a grain of truth. I suspect that much of your knowledge comes from movies and TV. Xena and Dracula have a lot to answer for. All minotaurs are not evil, the Gorgon Medusa did not turn every man to stone, not all vampires are blood drinkers, the Were clans are a proud and ancient race.”

Josh attempted a laugh; he was still shaken by the revelation that Scathach was a vampire. “You’ll be telling us next that ghosts exist.”

Scathach’s expression remained serious. “Josh, you have entered the Shadowrealm, the world of ghosts. I want you both to trust your instincts from now on: forget what you know—or think you know—about the creatures and races you will encounter. Follow your hearts. Trust no one. Except each other,” she added.

“We can trust you and Nicholas, though, right?” Sophie said.

The bell rang again, flat and piercing in the distance.

“Trust no one,” Scathach repeated, and the twins realized that she was not answering the question. She turned toward the door. “I think that’s the dinner bell.”

“Can we eat the food?” Josh asked.

“Depends,” Scatty said.

“Depends on what?” he asked in alarm.

“Depends on what it is, of course. I don’t eat the meat myself.”

“Why not?” Sophie said, wondering if there was some particular ancient creature they should avoid.

“I’m a vegetarian,” Scatty answered.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

P
erenelle Flamel sat in a corner of the tiny windowless room and drew her knees up to her chest, then wrapped her arms around her shins. She rested her chin on her knees. She could hear voices—angry, bitter voices.

Perry concentrated on the sound. She allowed her aura to expand a little as she murmured a small spell she had learned from an Inuit shaman. The shaman used it to listen to the fish moving under the arctic ice sheets and the bears crunching across the distant ice fields. The simple spell worked by shutting down all other senses and concentrating exclusively on hearing. Perry watched as the color faded from her surroundings and darkness closed in until she went blind. She gradually lost her sense of smell and felt the pins-and-needles tingle in her fingertips and toes as her sense of touch dulled, then faded completely. She knew that if there were anything in her mouth, she would no longer be able to taste it. Only her hearing remained, but it was enhanced and supersensitive. She heard beetles crawling in the walls behind her, heard the scritch-scratch as a mouse gnawed through wood somewhere above her, knew that a colony of termites was munching their way through distant floorboards. She also heard two voices, high and thin, as if they were being picked up on a badly tuned radio, and coming from a great distance. Perry tilted her head, homing in on the sound. She heard wind whistling, the flap of clothing, the high crying of birds. She could tell that the voices she was hearing were coming from the roof of the building. They strengthened, warbled and bubbled, and then abruptly clarified: they belonged to Dee and the Morrigan, and Perry could clearly hear the fear in the gray man’s voice and the rage in the Crow Goddess’s shrill cries.

“She must pay for this! She must!”

“She is an Elder. Untouchable by the likes of you and me,” Dee said, trying unsuccessfully to calm the Morrigan.

“
No one
is untouchable. She has interfered where she was not wanted. My creatures had almost overwhelmed the car when her Ghost Wind swept them away.”

“Flamel, the warrior Scathach and the two humani have now disappeared,” Dee’s voice echoed, and Perry frowned, concentrating hard, trying to follow every word. She was delighted to discover that Nicholas had sought the assistance of Scathach: she was a formidable ally. “It’s as if they have vanished off the face of the earth.”

“They
have
vanished off the face of the earth,” the Morrigan snapped. “He’s taken them into Hekate’s Shadowrealm.”

Unconsciously, Perry nodded. Of course! Where else would Nicholas have gone? The entrance to Hekate’s Shadowrealm in Mill Valley was closest to San Francisco, and while the Elder was no friend to the Flamels, she was not allied to Dee and his Dark Elders either.

“We must follow them,” the Morrigan stated flatly.

“Impossible,” Dee said reasonably. “I have neither the skills nor the powers to penetrate Hekate’s realm.” There was a pause, and then he added, “Nor do you. She is a First Generation Elder, you are of the Next Generation.”

“But she is not the only Elder on the West Coast.” The Morrigan’s voice was a snap of triumph.

“What are you suggesting?” Fear had touched Dee’s voice with a hint of his original English accent.

“I know where Bastet sleeps.”

Perenelle Flamel sat back against the cold stone and allowed her senses to return. Feeling came first—pins and needles racing through her fingers and toes—then her sense of smell, and finally sight. Blinking, waiting for the tiny colored spots of light to fade, Perry tried to make sense of what she had just discovered.

The implications were terrible. The Morrigan was prepared to awaken Bastet and attack Hekate’s Shadowrealm to retrieve the pages of the Codex.

Perry shuddered. She had never met Bastet—she didn’t know anyone who had in the last three centuries and had lived to tell the tale—but she knew her by reputation. One of the most powerful members of the Elder Race, Bastet had been worshipped in Egypt since the earliest ages of man. She had the body of a beautiful young woman with the head of a cat, and Perry had absolutely no idea of the magical forces she controlled.

Events were moving surprisingly swiftly. Something big was happening. Many years before, when Nicholas and Perry had first discovered the secret of immortality, they had realized that their extra-long lives allowed them to view the world from a different perspective. They no longer planned events days or weeks in advance; often they would make plans decades into the future. Perry had come to understand that the Elders, whose lives were infinitely longer, could make plans that encompassed centuries. And that often meant that events moved with an extraordinarily deliberate slowness.

But now the Morrigan was abroad. The last time she had walked in the World of Men, she had been spotted in the bitter, mud-filled trenches of the Somme; before that she had prowled the bloodstained battlefields of the American Civil War. The Crow Goddess was drawn to death; it hung around her like a foul stench. She was also one of the Elders who believed that humans had been placed on this earth to serve them.

Nicholas and the twins were safe in Hekate’s Shadowrealm, but for how long? Bastet was a First Generation Elder. Her powers had to be at least equal to Hekate’s…and if the Cat Goddess and the Crow Goddess, combined with Dee’s alchemical magic, attacked Hekate, would her defenses hold? Perry didn’t know.

And what of Nicholas, Scathach and the twins?

Perenelle felt tears prickle the back of her eyes, but blinked them away. Nicholas would be six hundred and seventy-seven years old on the twenty-eighth of September, in three months’ time. He was well able to take care of himself, though his mastery of practical spells was very limited, and he could be remarkably forgetful at times. Only the summer before, he had forgotten how to speak English and had reverted to his native archaic French. It had taken her nearly a month to coach him back to speaking English. Before that he had gone through a period when he had signed his checks in Greek and Aramaic characters. Perenelle’s lips curled in a smile. He spoke sixteen languages well and another ten badly. He could read and write in twenty-two of them—though there wasn’t much chance to practice his Linear B, cuneiform or hieroglyphics these days.

She wondered what he was doing right now. He would be looking for her, of course, but he would also need to protect the twins and the pages that Josh had torn from the Codex. She needed to get a message to him, she had to let him know that she was fine and to warn him about the danger they were in.

One of the earliest gifts the young woman known as Perenelle Delamere had discovered when she was growing up was her ability to talk to the shades of the dead. It wasn’t until her seventh birthday that she realized that not everyone could see the flickering black-and-white images she encountered daily. On the eve of her seventh birthday, her beloved grandmother, Mamom, died. Perenelle watched as the withered body was gently lifted from the bed where she had spent the last ten years of her life and laid in the coffin. The small girl had followed the funeral procession through the tiny town of Quimper and out into the graveyard that overlooked the sea. She had watched the little rough-hewn box as it was lowered into the earth, and then she had returned to her home.

And Mamom was sitting up in the bed, eyes bright with their usual mischief. The only difference was that Perenelle could no longer see her grandmother clearly. There was no color to her—everything was in black-and-white—and her image kept flickering in and out of focus.

In that instant Perenelle realized she could see ghosts. And when Mamom turned in her direction and smiled, she knew that they could see her.

Sitting in the small windowless cell, Perenelle stretched her legs out in front of her and pressed both hands to the cold concrete floor. Over the years she had developed a series of defenses to protect herself from the unwanted intrusions of the dead. If there was one thing she had learned early on about the dead—particularly the old dead—it was that they were extraordinarily rude, popping up at the most inopportune and inappropriate moments. The dead particularly liked bathrooms—it was a perfect location for them: quiet and still, with lots of reflective surfaces. Perenelle recalled a time she’d been brushing her teeth when the ghost of an American president had appeared in the mirror in front of her. She’d almost swallowed the toothbrush.

Perenelle had quickly come to understand that ghosts could not see certain colors—blues and greens and some tints of yellow—and so she deliberately encouraged those colors into her aura, carefully creating a shield that rendered her invisible in the particular Shadowrealm where the shades of the dead gathered.

Opening her eyes wide, Perenelle concentrated on her own aura. Her natural aura was a pale ice white, which acted like a beacon for the dead, drawing them to her. But over it, like layers of paint, she had created auras of bright blue, emerald green, and primrose yellow. Now, one by one, Perenelle shut off the colors—yellow first, then green, then the final blue defense.

The ghosts came then, drawn to her ice white aura like moths to a flame. They flickered into existence around her: men, women and children, wearing clothes from across the decades. Perenelle moved her green eyes over the glistening images, not entirely sure what she was looking for. She dismissed women and girls in the flowing skirts of the eighteenth century and men in the boots and gun belts of the nineteenth and concentrated on those ghosts wearing the clothing of the twentieth century. She finally picked out an elderly man wearing a modern-looking security guard’s uniform. Gently easing the other shades aside, she called the figure closer.

Perenelle understood that people—particularly in modern, sophisticated societies—were frightened of ghosts. But she knew that there was no reason to fear them: a ghost was nothing more than the remnants of a person’s aura that remained attached to a particular place.

“Can I help you, ma’am?” The shade’s voice was strong, with a touch of the East Coast in it: Boston perhaps. Standing tall and straight, like an old soldier, the ghost looked about sixty, though he could have been older.

“Could you tell me where I am?” Perenelle asked.

“You’re in the basement of the corporate headquarters of Enoch Enterprises, just to the west of Telegraph Hill. We got Coit Tower almost directly overhead,” he added proudly.

“You seem very sure.”

“Should be. I worked here for thirty years. Wasn’t always Enoch Enterprises, of course. But places like this always need security. Never one break-in on my watch,” he informed her.

“That’s an achievement to be proud of, Mr….”

“It surely is.” The ghost paused, his image flickering wildly. “Miller. That was my name. Jefferson Miller. Been a while since anyone asked for it. How can I help you?” he asked.

“Well, you’ve been of great assistance already. At least I know I am still in San Francisco.”

The ghost continued to look at her. “Did you expect not to be?”

“I think I may have slept earlier; I was afraid I might have been moved out of the city,” she explained.

“Are you being held against your will, ma’am?”

“I am.”

Jefferson Miller drifted closer. “Well, that’s just not right.” There was a long pause while his image flickered. “But I’m afraid I can’t help you—I’m a ghost, you see.”

Perenelle nodded. “I know that.” She smiled. “I just wasn’t sure if you knew.” She knew that one of the reasons ghosts often remained attached to certain places was because they simply did not know that they were dead.

The old security guard wheezed a laugh. “I’ve tried to leave…but something keeps pulling me back. Maybe I just spent too much time here when I was alive.”

Perenelle nodded again. “I can help you leave, if you would like to. I can do that for you.”

Jefferson Miller nodded. “I think I would like that very much. My wife, Ethel, she passed on ten years before me. Sometimes I think I hear her voice calling me across the Shadowrealms.”

Perenelle nodded. “She is trying to call you home. I can help you cut the ties that bind you to this place.”

“Is there anything I can do for you in return?”

Perenelle smiled. “Well, there is one thing…. Perhaps you could get a message to my husband.”