The Necromancer (12 page)

“Do we have a choice?” Josh replied.

Perenelle opened her mouth to answer, but Nicholas tugged at her sleeve and shook his head slightly. Looking at the twins, he said, “There are always choices.” He held up three bony fingers. “You can fight with us, you can side with Dee, or you can do nothing.” The expression on his face turned cruel. “If you side with Dee, then this city and ultimately this world are doomed. If you do nothing, then this city and this world are still doomed. But if you fight with us, then there is a chance—a small chance, but a chance nonetheless—for humankind.”

“But—” Josh began.

Sophie reached out and caught her brother’s arm, pinching hard enough to silence his response. “We’re with you,” Sophie said. She looked at her brother and he nodded once. “We’re both with you.” She looked from Nicholas to Perenelle. “Now, what do we do?”

The Sorceress bowed her head slightly, but not before Sophie caught the hint of a smile. “Josh needs to learn at least one more Elemental Magic,” Perenelle said. “If we had time we could find someone to train him in Earth, Air and Fire, but we don’t. I think he will be able to learn one more magic in the time left for us.”

“But which one?” Josh asked.

Perenelle swiveled around to look at the Alchemyst, her fine eyebrows raised in a silent question. No words passed between them, but the Sorceress nodded and turned back with a smile on her face. “We will train Josh in the Magic of Fire,” she said.

Josh looked at Sophie and grinned. “Fire. I like that.” He turned back to Perenelle. “But who’s going to train me?”

Sophie knew the answer even before the Sorceress spoke. “We will go and see Prometheus, the Master of Fire.”

N
iccolò Machiavelli sat in the passenger seat of the stripped-down army surplus jeep, clutching the bar welded onto the dashboard in a white-knuckled grip. Billy sat in the back and whooped delightedly with each bump and dip on the unpaved road. Black Hawk drove the narrow country lanes at high speed, foot pushed hard to the floor, a ferocious grin on his face.

“I think,” Machiavelli said, shouting to be heard over the noise of the engine, “I think that your master would probably prefer us alive so he can kill us himself. He might be irritated if you do the job for him. Slow down.”

“This isn’t fast,” Black Hawk said. The jeep lurched forward, engine howling as all four wheels left the ground. “Now, this is fast.”

“I’ll be sick,” Machiavelli promised, “and when I am, I’m going to be sick in your direction. Yours too,” he added, looking back over his shoulder at Billy the Kid.

Black Hawk reluctantly eased his foot off the accelerator.

“I’ve not lived through more than five hundred years of Europe’s most turbulent history only to die in a car crash.”

“Black Hawk could drive these roads wearing a blindfold,” Billy said.

“I’m sure he could, though why he would want to do something like that is beyond me.”

“Have you never done something purely for the thrill of it?” Black Hawk asked.

“No,” Machiavelli said. “Not for a long time.”

Black Hawk looked shocked. “But that seems like such a waste of immortality. I pity you,” he added.

“You pity me?”

“You are not living, you are surviving.”

Niccolò Machiavelli stared at the Native American immortal for a long time before he finally nodded and looked away. “You may be right,” he murmured.

The house was set back off the road.

At first glance it looked like a small, ordinary timber cottage, similar to so many others scattered across the United States. It was only when one approached closer that the truth was revealed: the house was enormous, much of it built into the side of the hill behind it.

Machiavelli felt his skin prickle and crawl the moment the car turned off the rough track onto a narrow rutted drive: the telltale signs of warding spells. There was old magic here, ancient eldritch power. He caught glimpses of arcane symbols cut into trees, spirals daubed on rocks, stick figures carved into fence posts. The track cut straight across a field of grass that grew as high as the car doors. The blades rasped and hissed against the metal, sounding like a thousand warning whispers. The Italian caught flickers of movement all around him, and glimpses of snakes, toads, and quick, scurrying lizards. A gangling misshapen scarecrow dominated the field on the left-hand side of the track. Its head was a huge gnarled dried pumpkin that had been carved in a round-eyed face with a protruding tongue.

The grassy field stopped abruptly, as if a line had been drawn in the earth, and the rest of the approach to the house was across perfectly flat land. Machiavelli nodded his approval: nothing could get through the field without setting off countless alarms or being attacked by a poisonous lurking guardian. Getting close to the house undetected would be impossible. An enormous lynx, bigger than any he had ever seen before, lay on the ground before the open front door, regarding the car impassively, only the tiny movements of its black-tufted ears betraying that it was real and not a carving.

Black Hawk pulled the jeep up in front of the house, but kept the engine running and made no move to climb out. “End of the road,” he said without a trace of a smile.

Niccolò climbed out gratefully and started to brush the dirt and grit off his expensive handmade suit, then gave up. The suit was ruined. He had a closetful of identical suits in his home in Paris, but he doubted he’d ever get a chance to wear them again.

Looking around, he breathed in the warm grassy air. Whenever he thought about dying—which he did with remarkable regularity—he imagined it would take place in a European city, Paris perhaps, maybe even Rome or his beloved Florence. He’d never thought he was going to end his days in California. However, he wasn’t dead yet, and he wasn’t going down without a fight.

As soon as Billy leapt out of the jeep, Black Hawk put it in gear and skidded away, showering him and Machiavelli in stones and grit, enveloping them in a cloud of dust. Billy grinned. “I knew he was going to do that.”

“You seem remarkably cheerful for someone who may be about to die,” Machiavelli said.

“I’ve seen men go to their deaths laughing, I’ve seen others wail and cry. They all died in the end, but those who were laughing seemed to have an easier time of it.”

“Do you expect to die here today?”

Billy laughed. “Dying’s not something I ever think about,” Billy said. “But no, I don’t think it’s going to happen today. We haven’t done anything wrong.”

The Italian immortal nodded but said nothing.

“Mr. Machiavelli doesn’t think I have the authority to remove his immortality. He’s incorrect.” The man who stepped out of the house was short and slender, his skin the color of brightly polished copper, his face bisected by an enormous hawklike nose and dominated by a full white beard that reached to his chest. His eyes were solid black with no whites showing. He was dressed simply in white linen trousers and shirt and his feet were bare. He smiled, revealing that every one of his teeth had been filed to razor-sharp points. “I am Quetzalcoatl the Feathered Serpent.”

“It is an honor to meet you, Lord Quez … Quet … Quaza …,” Machiavelli began.

“Oh, call me Kukulkan, everyone else does,” the Elder said, and headed back into the house. Machiavelli blinked in surprise: a long serpent’s tail, bright with multicolored feathers, trailed behind the Elder.

Billy caught Machiavelli by the arm. “Whatever you do,” he whispered urgently, “don’t mention the tail.”

T
he ghost of Juan Manuel de Ayala floated silently through the ruins of Alcatraz. The Spanish lieutenant had been the first European to discover the small island in 1775 and had named it after the vast number of pelicans that claimed the rock as their own: La Isla de los Alcatraces. By the time it was sold to the American government in 1854, it was called Alcatraz.

When de Ayala had died, his shade had returned to the island, and he had haunted and protected it ever since.

He’d seen the nature of the island change and change again over the centuries: it was the site of the first lighthouse on the coast of California; then it held a military garrison that soon became a prison, which from 1861 to 1963 was home to some of America’s most violent and dangerous criminals.

More recently it had been a popular tourist attraction, and de Ayala had delighted in drifting unseen through the crowds of visitors, listening to their excited comments. He particularly loved to follow those who spoke his native tongue, Spanish.

In the last couple of months, however, the nature of Alcatraz had changed yet again. The island had been sold to a private company, Enoch Enterprises, which had immediately stopped all tours of the island. And quite soon afterward, new prisoners had arrived. None of which were human. There were creatures de Ayala vaguely recognized from sailors’ tales—werewolves and dragons, wyverns and worms—and some he knew from myth, like the minotaur and the sphinx, but most were completely alien to him.

And then Perenelle Flamel had been incarcerated on the island.

De Ayala had helped her escape her cell and was more delighted when she managed to flee the island altogether, leaving the two dangerous newcomers, Machiavelli and Billy the Kid, stranded with the monsters. He had hoped that they would remain overnight so he and the island’s other ghosts might have a little fun with them. But the two men had been rescued by a Native American, and as de Ayala watched their boat head toward the city, he wondered what would become of his beloved Isla de los Alcatraces. The sphinx still walked the prison’s corridors, the hideous spider Areop-Enap was wrapped in an enormous cocoon in the ruins of the Warden’s House and the Old Man of the Sea and his foul daughters patrolled the waters.

The ghost drifted to the top of the watchtower and turned to look toward the city he could never visit. What was it like, he wondered, this huge city on the edge of the continent? He could see its towers rising into the skies, and the fabulous orange bridge spanning the bay. He watched the boats cruise the waters, saw the metal birds in the skies and could just make out the metallic glitter of cars moving on the shore. When he had discovered Alcatraz, Philadelphia had been the largest city in the United States, with a population of thirty-four thousand. Now, over eight hundred thousand people lived in San Francisco—an inconceivable figure—and more than thirty-six million lived in the state of California. What would happen to them when the monsters were loosed into the city’s streets and sewers?

Unconsciously, de Ayala drifted out over the water toward the city, and then the invisible ties that bound him to Alcatraz drew him back. He protected the island—but for how much longer? he wondered. The forces of the humani and the Elders were gathering, and no matter how it ended, de Ayala did not think his beloved Alcatraz would survive the coming war.

And with no Rock to watch over, he too would finally cease to exist.

“S
ophie, I am going to ask you to do something, something you might find a little … odd,” Perenelle said softly. She had caught Sophie’s arm and drawn her to one side while Josh and Niten were carrying the plastic chairs into the houseboat. Aoife had disappeared belowdecks, and Nicholas sat on the edge of the craft, eyes closed, lined face turned toward the sun.

“What?” Sophie asked cautiously, turning to look at the Sorceress. The late-afternoon sun highlighted the tracery of lines that were beginning to appear on the woman’s face, around her eyes and at the corners of her mouth. Sophie wasn’t sure how she felt about Perenelle. She still liked her—she still wanted to like her—but there was something about the woman that was beginning to trouble her, and she wasn’t sure what it was.

“It would be better if you did not tell Josh what you know—what the Witch knows—about Prometheus.”

At the mention of the Elder’s name, the girl’s eyes blinked—blue, then silver—and the faintest hint of her vanilla odor touched the salty air. “I try not to think about the Witch’s memories,” she said carefully.

“Why not?” Perenelle sounded genuinely surprised.

“Nicholas told me that there is a possibility that her memories could overwhelm mine, that I could become the Witch”—Sophie frowned—“or that she could become me. If I remember all that the Witch knew … would that make me the Witch?”

Perenelle laughed gently. “I have never heard anything more ridiculous in my life.”

“But Nicholas said—”

“Nicholas told you what he believed to be true,” Perenelle said. “He was mistaken.”

Sophie pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes and shook her head, trying to make sense of what she was hearing. “But if the Witch’s memories become stronger than mine …”

“But it is you who are remembering, Sophie. It will always be you. I have lived on this earth for centuries; I can remember the smell of my grandmother’s hair, and she died more than six hundred and sixty years ago. I can recall the address of every house and apartment, hovel, tenement and palace I’ve lived in over the centuries. One memory does not crowd out another. The Witch’s memories have only been added to yours. Nothing more. True, our memories and experiences help make us unique. But if the Witch had wanted to take over your memories, she could have done so immediately, instantaneously, when you were with her in Ojai.”

The Sorceress paused and then added softly, “When Nicholas was imprisoned in the Bastille, I spent the time apprenticed to the Witch of Endor. She lived in the South of France then, and I studied with her for more than a decade. She can be cruel and capricious, and she is dangerous beyond belief, but she is extraordinarily disorganized. She was never able to plan ahead. I’ve often wondered about that. She sacrificed her eyes for the ability to observe the shifting strands of time. She can see years, decades, centuries, even millennia into the future, and can track the curling threads to their possible outcomes. But she is so scattered that she is unable to plan her own day. She often forgets even the simplest things. Yet she is cunning, and if she had wanted to control you, she would have done so when she was Awakening you.”