The Alchemyst (25 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

J
osh stepped out of the antiques shop, cheeks flaming red, the Witch’s last words ringing in his ears. “You have to leave. What I teach is not for the ears of a humani.”

Looking around the room, at Flamel and Scatty and finally his twin sister, Josh had suddenly realized that he was the last pure human in the room. Obviously, in the Witch of Endor’s eyes, Sophie was no longer entirely human.

“No problem. I’ll wait…,” he began, voice suddenly cracking. He coughed and tried again. “I’ll wait in the park across the road.” And then, without a backward glance, he left the shop, the jangling of the bell mocking him as he closed the door.

But it was a problem. A huge problem.

Sophie Newman watched her brother leave the shop, and even without her Awakened senses, she knew he was upset and angry. She wanted to stop him, to go after him, but Scatty was standing in front of her, eyes wide in warning, finger raised to her lips, the tiniest shake of her head warning Sophie to say nothing. Catching her shoulder, Scatty led her to stand in front of the Witch of Endor. The old woman raised her hands and ran surprisingly gentle fingers over the contours of Sophie’s face. The girl’s aura shivered and fizzed with each gentle touch.

“How old are you now?” she asked.

“Fifteen. Well, fifteen and a half.” Sophie wasn’t sure if the half year made a difference.

“Fifteen and a half,” Dora said, shaking her head. “I can’t remember back that far.” She dipped her chin, then tilted it toward Scatty. “Can you remember back to when you were fifteen?”

“Vividly,” Scathach said grimly. “Wasn’t that about the time I visited you in Babylon and you tried to marry me off to King Nebuchadnezzar?”

“I’m sure you’re wrong,” Dora said happily. “I think that was later. Though he would have made an excellent husband,” she added. She looked up at Sophie and the girl found herself reflected in the mirrors that were the Witch’s eyes. “There are two things I must teach you. To protect yourself—that is simplicity itself. But instructing you in the magic of Air is a little trickier. The last time I instructed a humani in Air magic, it took him sixty years to master the basics, and even then he fell out of the sky on his first flight.”

“Sixty years.” Sophie swallowed. Did that mean she was destined to spend a lifetime trying to control this power?

“Gran, we haven’t got that sort of time. I doubt we’ve even got sixty minutes.”

Dora glared into a mirror and her reflection looked out from the glass of an empty picture frame. “So why don’t you do this, you’re such an expert, eh?”

“Gran…”
Scathach sighed.

“Don’t ‘Gran’ me in that tone of voice,” Dora said warningly. “I’ll do this my way.”

“We don’t have time to do it the traditional way.”

“Don’t talk to me about tradition. What do the young know about tradition? Trust me, when I’m finished, Sophie will know all that I know about the elemental Air magic.” She turned back to Sophie. “First things first: are your parents alive?”

“Yes,” she said, blinking in surprise, not sure where this was going.

“Good. And you talk to your mother?”

“Yes, almost every day.”

Dora glanced sideways at Scatty. “You hear that? Almost every day.” She took one of Sophie’s hands in hers and patted the back of it. “Maybe you should be teaching Scathach a thing or two. And have you a grandmother?”

“My Nana, yes, my father’s mother. I usually call her on Fridays,” she added, realizing with a guilty start that today was Friday and that Nana Newman would be expecting a call.

“Every Friday,” the Witch of Endor said significantly, and looked at Scatty again, but the Warrior deliberately turned away and concentrated on an ornate glass paperweight. She put it down when she saw that there was a tiny man in a three-piece suit frozen inside the glass. He had a briefcase in one hand and a sheaf of papers in the other. His eyes were still blinking.

“This will not hurt,” the Witch said.

Sophie doubted it could be any worse than what she’d already gone through. Her nose wrinkled at the odor of burnt wood, and she felt a cool breeze wash over her hands. She looked down. A gossamer-thin white spiderweb was twisting and spinning from the Witch of Endor’s fingers and wrapping itself like a bandage around each of Sophie’s fingers. It curled across her palm, completely covering it, then wrapped around her wrist and crept up her arm. She realized then that the Witch had been distracting her with her questions. Sophie looked into the Witch’s mirrored eyes and found that she could not put her questions into words. It was as if she had lost the ability to speak. She was also surprised that instead of feeling frightened, from the moment the Witch had taken her hand, a wave of peace and calm had washed through her body. She glanced sideways at Scatty and Flamel. They were watching the process, wide-eyed with shock and, in Scathach’s case, with something like horror on her face.

“Gran…are you sure about this?” Scathach demanded.

“Of course I’m sure,” the old woman snapped, a note of anger in her voice.

And even though the Witch of Endor was speaking to Scathach, Sophie could hear her voice in her head, talking to her, whispering ancient secrets, murmuring archaic spells, divulging a lifetime of knowledge in the space of heartbeats and breaths.

“This is not a spiderweb,” Dora explained to a stunned and silent Flamel, noticing that he was leaning forward, staring intently at the webs spinning around Sophie’s arms. “It is concentrated air mixed with my own aura. All my knowledge, my experience, even my lore is gathered in this web of air. Once it touches Sophie’s skin, she will begin to absorb that knowledge.”

Sophie breathed deeply, drawing the wood-scented air deep into her lungs. Images flashed impossibly fast in her head, times and places long past, cyclopean walls of stone, ships of solid gold, dinosaurs and dragons, a city carved into a mountain of ice and faces…hundreds, thousands of faces, from every race of mankind, from every time period, human and half human, werebeast and monster. She was seeing everyone the Witch of Endor had ever seen.

“The Egyptians got it wrong,” Dora continued, her hands now moving too fast for Flamel to see. “They wrapped the dead,” she continued. “They did not realize I wrapped the living. There was a time when I put a little of myself into my followers and sent them out into the world to teach in my name. Obviously someone saw this process in the ancient past and tried to copy it.”

Sophie suddenly saw a dozen people wrapped up like her, and a younger-looking Dora moving among them, dressed in a costume from ancient Babylon. Somehow Sophie understood that these were the priests and priestesses in the cult that worshipped the Witch. Dora was passing on a little of her knowledge to them so that they could go out into the world and teach others.

The white weblike air now flowed down Sophie’s legs, binding them together. Unconsciously, she brought her hands up across her chest, right hand on her left shoulder, left hand on her right shoulder. The Witch nodded approvingly.

Sophie closed her eyes and saw clouds. Without knowing how, she knew their names: cirrus, cirrocumulus, altostratus and stratocumulus, nimbostratus and cumulus. All different, each type with unique characteristics and qualities. She suddenly understood how to use them, how to shape and wield and move them.

Images flickered.

Flashed.

She saw a tiny woman under a clear blue sky raise a hand and make a cloud grow directly overhead. Rain irrigated a parched field.

Flashed again.

A tall bearded man standing on the edge of a huge sea raised his hands and a howling wind parting the waters.

And flashed again.

A young woman brought a raging storm to a shuddering stop with a single gesture, freezing it in place, then ran into a flimsy wooden house and grabbed a child. A heartbeat later and the storm ate the house.

Sophie watched the images and learned from them.

The Witch of Endor touched Sophie’s cheek and the girl opened her eyes. The whites were dotted with silver sparkles. “There are those who will tell you that the magic of Fire or Water or even Earth is the most powerful magic of all. They are wrong. The magic of Air surpasses all others. Air can extinguish fire. It can churn water to mist and can rip up the earth. But air can also bring fire to life, it can push a boat across still water, can shape the land. Air can clean a wound, can pluck a splinter from a fingertip. Air can kill.”

The last of the white cobwebbed air closed across Sophie’s face, completely encasing her, wrapping her like a mummy.

“This is a terrifying gift I have given you. Within you now is a lifetime—a very long lifetime—of experience. I hope some will be of use to you in the dire days ahead.”

Sophie stood before the Witch of Endor completely encased in the white bandagelike air. This was not like the Awakening. This was a gentler, subtler process. She discovered that she
knew
things—incredible things. She had memories of impossible times and extraordinary places. But mixed with these memories and emotions were her own thoughts. Already she was beginning to find it hard to tell them apart.

Then the smoke began to curl and hiss and steam.

Dora suddenly turned to look for Scatty. “Come and give me a hug, child. I will not see you again.”

“Gran?”

Dora wrapped her arms around Scathach’s shoulders and put her mouth close to her ear.

Her voice dropped to little more than a whisper. “I have given this girl a rare and terrible power. Make sure this power is used for good.”

Scathach nodded, not entirely sure what the old woman was suggesting.

“And call your mother. She worries about you.”

“I will, Gran.”

The mummylike cocoon suddenly dissolved into steam and mist as Sophie’s aura flared brilliant silver. She stretched out her arms, fingers splayed wide, and the merest whisper of a wind rattled through the shop.

“Careful. If you break anything, you pay for it,” the Witch warned.

Then, suddenly, Scathach, Dora and Sophie turned to look out into the darkening afternoon. An instant later Nicholas Flamel smelled the unmistakable rotten-egg odor of sulfur. “Dee!”

“Josh!” Sophie’s eyes snapped open. “Josh is out there!”

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

D
r. John Dee finally arrived in Ojai as the last light was fading in spectacular shades of pink over the surrounding Topa Topa Mountains. He’d been traveling all day; he was tired and irritable and looking for an excuse to hurt someone.

Hekate’s Shadowrealm had drained his cell battery, and it had taken him over an hour before he could find a phone to contact his office. He’d then been forced to sit, fuming, by the side of the road for another ninety minutes while a team of drivers scoured Mill Valley’s backroads looking for him. It was close to nine-thirty before he finally returned to his offices at Enoch Enterprises in the heart of the city.

There he’d learned that Perenelle had already been moved to Alcatraz. His company had recently purchased the island from the state and had closed it to the public while restoration work was being carried out. There was talk in the papers that it was going to be turned into a living history museum. In reality, the doctor intended to return it to its original use as one of the most secure prisons in the world. The doctor briefly thought about flying out to the island to talk to Perenelle, but dismissed the idea as a waste of time. The missing pages from the Codex and the twins were his priorities. Although Bastet had said to kill them if he couldn’t kidnap them, Dee had other ideas.

Dee knew of the famous prophecy from the Book of Abraham the Mage. The Elders had known that twins were coming, “the two that are one, the one that is all.” One to save the world, one to destroy it. But which one was which? he wondered. And could their powers be shaped and twisted by the instruction they received? Finding the boy was becoming as important as finding the missing pages of the Codex. He had to have that gold aura.

Dr. John Dee had lived in Ojai briefly at the turn of the twentieth century—it was still called the city of Nordhoff then—when he’d been plundering the surrounding Chumash burial grounds for their precious artifacts. He’d hated it: Ojai was too small, too insular and, in the summer months, simply too hot for him. Dee was always happiest in the largest of cities, where it was easier to be invisible and anonymous.

He’d flown from San Francisco down to Santa Barbara in the company helicopter, and rented a nondescript-looking Ford at the small airport. Then he’d driven down from Santa Barbara, arriving in Ojai just as the sun was setting in a spectacular display, painting the town in long, elegant shadows. Ojai had changed dramatically in the hundred or so years since he’d last seen it…but he still didn’t like it.

He turned the car onto Ojai Avenue and slowed. Flamel and the others were close; he could feel it. But he had to be careful now. If he could sense them, then they—especially the Alchemyst and Scathach—would be able to sense him. And he still had no idea what the Witch of Endor was capable of doing. It was extremely worrying that a very senior Elder had been living in California and he’d been totally unaware of her presence. He thought he knew the locations of most of the important Elders and human immortals in the world. Dee wondered if it was significant that he had not been able to contact the Morrigan throughout the day. He’d phoned her with persistent regularity on the drive down, but she wasn’t answering her cell. She was either on eBay or playing one of the interminable online strategy games she was addicted to. He didn’t know where Bastet was and didn’t care. She frightened him, and Dee tended to destroy those people who scared him.

Flamel, Scathach and the twins could be anywhere in the town. But where?

Dee allowed a little energy to trickle into his aura. He blinked as his eyes blurred with sudden tears, and blinked again to clear them. Suddenly, the people in the car next to his, those crossing the road, and the pedestrians on the sidewalk were outlined in shifting multicolored auras. Some auras were just wisps of diaphanous tinted smoke, others were dark spots and sheets of solid muddy colors.

In the end, he found them entirely by chance: he was driving down Ojai Avenue and had gone past Libbey Park when he spotted the black Hummer parked on Fox Street. He pulled in behind it and parked. The moment he got out of his car, he caught the merest hint of a pure gold aura coming from the park, close to the fountain. Dee’s thin lips curled in a humorless smile.

They would not escape this time.

Josh Newman sat by the long, low fountain in Libbey Park directly across from the antiques shop and stared into the water. Two flower-shaped bowls, one larger than the other, were set in the center of a circular pool. Water spouted from the top bowl and flowed over the sides into the larger bowl beneath. This in turn overflowed into the pool. The sound helped drown out the nearby traffic noises.

He felt alone, and more than a little lost.

When the Witch had made him leave the antiques shop, he’d walked beneath the shaded promenade and stopped in front of the ice cream shop, lured there by the odors of chocolate and vanilla. He stood outside, reading the menu of exotic flavors, and wondered why his sister’s aura smelled of vanilla ice cream and his of oranges. She didn’t even really like ice cream; he was the one who loved it.

His finger tapped the menu: blueberry chocolate chip.

Josh shoved his hand in the back pocket of his jeans…and felt a rising moment of panic as realized his wallet was missing. Had he left it in the car, had he…? He stopped.

He knew exactly where he’d left it.

The last place he’d seen his wallet, along with his dead cell, his iPod and his laptop, was on the floor next to his bed in his room in the Yggdrasill. Losing his wallet was bad enough, but losing his computer was a disaster. All his e-mails were on it, along with his class notes, a partially written summer honors project, three years of photos—including the trip to Cancún at Christmas—and at least sixty gigs of MP3s. He couldn’t remember the last time he had backed up, but it definitely wasn’t recently. He actually felt physically ill, and suddenly, the odors from the ice cream parlor didn’t smell so sweet and enticing.

Thoroughly miserable, he walked to the corner and crossed at the lights facing the post office, then turned left, heading toward the park.

The iPod had been a Christmas present from his parents. How was he going to explain to them that he’d lost it? Plus there was close to another thirty gigs of music on the little hard drive.

But worse than losing his iPod, his wallet or even his computer was losing his phone. That was a total nightmare. All his friends’ numbers were on it, and he knew he hadn’t written them down anywhere. Because their parents traveled so much, the twins were rarely more than one or two semesters at the same school. They made friends easily—especially Sophie—and they were still in touch with friends they’d met years earlier in schools scattered across America. Without those e-mail addresses and phone numbers, how was he supposed to get in touch with them, how would he ever find them again?

There was a water fountain in a little nook before the entrance to the park, and he bent his head to drink. An ornamental metal lion’s head was set into the wall over the fountain, and below it there was a small rectangular plaque with the words
Love is the water of life, drink deeply.
He let the icy water splash over his lips and straightened to look over at the shop, wondering what was happening inside. He still loved his sister, but did she love him?
Could
she love him, now that he was…
ordinary
?

Libbey Park was quiet. Josh could hear children racing around the nearby playground, but their voices sounded high and very distant. A trio of old men, identically dressed in sleeveless shirts, long shorts, white socks and sandals, gathered on a shady bench. One of the men was feeding bread crumbs to a quartet of fat and lazy pigeons. Josh sat down on the edge of the low fountain and leaned over to trail his hand in the water. After the oppressive heat, it felt deliciously cool, and he ran his wet fingers through his hair, feeling water droplets roll down his neck.

What was he going to do?

Was there anything he could do?

In just over twenty-four hours, his life—and his sister’s life too—had changed utterly and incomprehensibly. What he had once believed to be merely stories now turned out to be versions of the truth. Myth had become history, legends had become facts. When Scatty had revealed earlier that the mysterious Danu Talis was also called Atlantis, he had almost laughed in her face. To him, Atlantis had always been a fairy tale. But if Scathach and Hekate and the Morrigan and Bastet were real, then so was Danu Talis. And so his parents’ life work—archaeology—was suddenly worthless.

Josh knew deep down that he had also lost his twin, the constant in his life, the one person he could always count on. She had changed in ways he could not even begin to comprehend. Why hadn’t he been Awakened too? He should have insisted that Hekate Awaken him first. What would it be like to have those powers? The only thing he could compare it to was being a superhero. Even when Sophie’s newly Awakened senses were making her sick, he was jealous of her abilities.

From the corner of his eye, Josh became aware that a man had sat down on one of the other edges of the fountain, but he ignored him. He absently picked at a broken fragment of one of the blue tiles that ran around the fountain.

What was he going to do?

And the answer was always the same: what
could
he do?

“Are you a victim too?”

It took him a moment before he realized that the figure sitting to his right was talking to him. He started to stand up, the golden rule with creeps being that you never responded, and you never—ever—entered into any conversation with them.

“It seems we are all victims of Nicholas Flamel.”

Startled, Josh looked up…and found he was staring at Dr. John Dee, the man he’d hoped never to see again. The last time he’d seen Dee had been in the Shadowrealm. Then, he’d held the sword Excalibur in his hands. Now he sat facing him, looking out of place in his impeccably tailored gray suit. Josh looked around quickly, expecting to see Golems or rats, or even the Morrigan lurking in the shadows.

“I am alone,” Dee said pleasantly, smiling politely.

Josh’s mind was racing. He needed to get to Flamel, he needed to warn him that Dee was in Ojai. He wondered what would happen if he simply got up and ran. Would Dee try to stop him with magic in front of all these people? Josh looked over at the three old men again, and it dawned on him that they probably wouldn’t even notice if Dee changed him into an elephant right in the middle of downtown Ojai.

“Do you know how long I’ve been chasing Nicholas Flamel, or Nick Fleming, or any of the hundreds of other aliases he’s used?” Dee continued quietly, conversationally. He leaned back and trailed his fingers through the water. “At least five hundred years. And he’s always given me the slip. He’s tricky and dangerous that way. In 1666, when I was closing in on him in London, he set a fire that nearly burned the city to the ground.”

“He told us you caused the Great Fire,” Josh blurted. Despite his fear, he was curious. And now he suddenly remembered one of the first pieces of advice Flamel had given them: “Nothing is as it seems. Question everything.” Josh found himself wondering if that advice also applied to the Alchemyst himself. The sun had set, and there was a definite chill in the evening air. Josh shivered. The three old men shuffled away, none of them even glancing in his direction, leaving him alone with the magician. Strangely, he didn’t feel threatened by the man’s presence.

Dee’s thin lips flickered in a smile. “Flamel never tells anyone everything,” he said. “I used to say that half of everything he said was a lie, and the other half wasn’t entirely truthful either.”

“Nicholas says you’re working with the Dark Elders. Once you have the complete Codex, you will bring them back into this world.”

“Correct in every detail,” Dee said, surprising him. “Though no doubt Nicholas has twisted the story somewhat. I
am
working with the Elders,” he continued, “and yes, I am looking for the last two pages from the Book of Abraham the Mage, commonly called the Codex. But only because Flamel and his wife stole it from the original Bibliothèque du Roi in the Louvre.”

“He
stole
it?”

“Let me tell you about Nicholas Flamel,” Dee said patiently. “I’m sure he’s told you about me. He has been many things in his time: a physician and a cook, a bookseller, a soldier, a teacher of languages and chemistry, both an officer of the law and a thief. But he is now, and has always been, a liar, a charlatan and a crook. He stole the Book from the Louvre when he discovered that it contained not only the immortality potion, but also the philosopher’s stone recipe. He brews the immortality potion each month to keep Perenelle and himself at exactly the same age they were when they first drank it. He uses the philosopher’s stone formula to turn cheap copper and lead into gold and chunks of common coal into diamonds. He uses one of the most extraordinary collections of knowledge in the world purely for personal gain. And that’s the truth.”

“But what about Scatty and Hekate? Are they Elders?”

“Oh, absolutely. Hekate was an Elder and Scathach is Next Generation. But Hekate was a known criminal. She was banished from Danu Talis because of her experiments on animals. I suppose you would call her a genetic engineer: she created the Were clans, for example, and loosed the curse of the werewolf onto humanity. I believe you saw some of her experiments yesterday, the boar people. Scathach is nothing more than a hired thug, cursed for her crimes to wear the body of a teen for the rest of her days. When Flamel knew I was closing in, they were the only people he could go to.”

Josh was now hopelessly confused. Who was telling the truth? Flamel or Dee?

He was cold now. Night had not yet fully fallen, but a low mist had crept in over the town. The air smelled of damp earth and just the faintest hint of rotten eggs. “What about you? Are you really working to bring back the Elders?”

“Of course I am,” Dee said, sounding surprised. “It is probably the single most important thing I can do for this world.”