The Warlock (The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel #5) (12 page)

“Gone where?” Virginia asked.

Dee rubbed his hands together gleefully. “To the last place they will look for us.”

“Alcatraz,” Josh said.

t had been a dream.

Nothing more than a particularly vivid dream. And what a dream it had been!

Sophie Newman lay back in her bed and stared up at the familiar ceiling. A long time ago someone—maybe her mother, who was an extraordinarily accomplished artist—had painted the ceiling a deep rich blue. Silver stars formed the constellations of Sirius and Orion, and a huge luminous half-moon took up the corner directly opposite her bed. The moon had been painted in phosphorescent paint, and its glow lulled her to sleep every night she slept at her aunt’s house. Josh’s room, next door, was in complete contrast: it was a pale eggshell blue with a huge golden sun in the center of the ceiling. Sophie loved nothing more than falling asleep looking up at this ceiling, tracking the patterns of the constellations. Often she
would imagine herself falling
up
into the stars, and then she would dream of flying. She particularly loved those dreams.

Sophie stretched and wondered what the time was. The room was dull, which usually meant that it was just before dawn, but the air didn’t feel still, the way it always did before the city came alive. Her eyes moved down from the ceiling: there was no trace of morning light on the walls. In fact, the room was gloomy, which suggested that it was early afternoon. Had she slept that late? She’d had such crazy dreams. She couldn’t wait to tell Josh about them.

Sophie rolled over … and found Aunt Agnes and Perenelle Flamel sitting on the side of the bed, watching her. And suddenly she felt sick to her stomach: it hadn’t been a dream.

“You’re awake,” Aunt Agnes said.

Sophie squinted at her aunt. She looked exactly the same as always, and yet the girl now knew that this was no ordinary human being.

“We were worried about you,” Agnes said. “Get up, have a shower and get dressed. We’ll be waiting for you in the kitchen.”

“We have a lot to talk about,” Perenelle Flamel added.

“Josh …,” Sophie began.

“I know,” Perry said gently. “But we will get him back. I promise you.”

Sophie sat up in bed, drew her knees to her chin and buried her head in her hands. “There was a second there when I thought it had been a dream.” She drew in a deep
shuddering breath. “And I was going to tell Josh and he was going to laugh at me, and then we’d try and figure out where all the different parts of the dream had come from, and then …” The tears came, and huge wracking sobs that spilled silver drops onto the sheets. “This isn’t a dream. This is a nightmare.”

Showered, dressed in fresh clean clothes and feeling slightly better, Sophie was leaving her room to make her way down to the kitchen when she heard the voices coming from her aunt’s bedroom at the end of the hall.

Her aunt.

The words stopped her cold.

For as long as she could remember, the family had been visiting Aunt Agnes. The twins had their own rooms in the house, and the front bedroom was always set aside for their parents. Sophie and Josh knew Agnes wasn’t really related to them by blood, though she was somehow connected to their grandmother’s sister or a cousin. But they’d always called her aunt: even her mother and father called the old woman Aunt Agnes.

Who was she?
What
was she?

Sophie had seen the white of her aura, smelled the jasmine, heard her speak in Japanese to Niten and address him by his real name. Agnes was Tsagaglalal, who was not an Elder, but was older than the Next Generation. Even Zephaniah, the Witch of Endor, knew very little about her.

Memories suddenly bled into and out of her consciousness.

A shining crystal tower, lashed by huge waves that dissolved into steam when they struck it
.

A golden mask
.

The Codex
.

As quickly as they had arrived, though, the memories faded, leaving her with more questions than answers. All she knew for certain was that the woman she had grown up believing to be her aunt Agnes was Tsagaglalal, She Who Watches. But the chilling questions remained: Who had she been watching? And why?

Sophie walked down the corridor toward Agnes’s bedroom. It took her a moment to recognize the voices coming from behind the closed door. Two men speaking together, slipping easily from Japanese to English and back again: Prometheus and Niten. She was so numbed by events that she wasn’t even surprised that the Master of Fire was there. Sophie knew instinctively that both men were aware that she was in the hallway. Pressing the palm of her hand flat against the white door, she was about to push, but instead she rapped gently.

“Can I come in?”

“Please do,” Prometheus said softly.

Sophie pushed open the door and stepped into the room.

Although she’d been visiting this house for more than a decade, Sophie had never seen the inside of her aunt’s bedroom. Both she and her brother had always been intensely curious about it. The door was always locked, and she remembered once trying to peer through the keyhole, only
to discover that something had been hung on the back of the door, blocking the opening. Josh had even tried climbing the tree in the garden to peer through the windows, but a branch had snapped off beneath him. Luckily, Aunt Agnes’s rosebushes had broken his fall, though he was scratched from head to foot. Agnes had said nothing as she cleaned his wounds with a foul-smelling blue liquid that stank and stung, though the twins both knew that she guessed what they’d been attempting to do. The following day new lace curtains had appeared in her windows.

Sophie had always expected that it would look like something out of the Victorian Age, filled with heavy dark furniture, an ornate large-faced clock on the mantel, the wall crowded with pictures in wooden frames, and a huge four-poster bed, complete with lacy pillows, frilly bedcovers and a hideous quilt.

She was shocked to discover that it was plain almost to the point of austerity. A single bed was positioned in the center of the white-painted room. There were no pictures, only a small rough-hewn and highly polished wooden cabinet against one wall that held a small collection of ancient artifacts Sophie assumed were gifts from her parents to Agnes: spearheads, coins, trinkets, beads and a green stone pendant in the shape of a scarab beetle. The only splash of color in the room besides the scarab was a spectacular dream catcher hung in the window over the head of the bed. Within a delicate circle of turquoise, two hexagons were set one inside the other, held in place by a tracery of gold wire. Each one was beautifully worked in black onyx and gold, and in the center of the inner
hexagon was an emerald-green maze. Sophie guessed that when the sun rose in the morning, the light would illuminate the dream catcher and the white room would come alive with iridescent color.

The room was in shadow now.

Niten and Prometheus stood on either side of Agnes’s narrow bed. Lying motionless on the white sheets was Nicholas Flamel.

Sophie felt her heart lurch. Her hands flew to her mouth.

“He’s not …”

Prometheus shook his huge head and the girl suddenly noticed that his red hair had turned white in the few hours since she’d last seen him. Tears magnified his green eyes, making them huge in his face. “No, he’s not. Not yet.”

“But soon,” Niten whispered. He reached out and pressed his hand gently against the Alchemyst’s forehead. “Nicholas Flamel is dying. He will not survive the day.”

rm in arm, looking like any other ordinary couple enjoying a nighttime stroll, Isis and Osiris walked along the Quai de Montebello on the banks of the river Seine in Paris. To the left, lit up in warm golden spotlights, was their destination, the Cathedral of Notre Dame.

“Pretty,” Isis said, using a language that had been ancient before the pharaohs ruled Egypt.

“Very pretty.” Osiris nodded, the amber light running liquid across his shaven skull. He had taken off his black sunglasses and they were folded onto the neck of his white T-shirt. Isis still wore hers, and two miniature cathedrals were reflected in the black glass.

Although it was close to ten o’clock at night, there were still plenty of tourists milling around the famous landmark—possibly even more than normally would be. The destruction
of the gargoyles earlier in the week had attracted worldwide media attention. Some reports claimed it was an act of terrorism or vandalism, others suggested it was the result of global warming and acid erosion, but most newspapers were beginning to report the story as simple stone fatigue. The gargoyles had been carved onto the building more than six hundred years previously. It was only a matter of time before some broke off.

“I like this Shadowrealm,” Isis said suddenly. “It was always my favorite. It will please me to regain control of it again.”

“Soon,” Osiris agreed. “Everything is falling into place.”

Isis squeezed her husband’s hand for emphasis. “Do you remember when we made this world?”

“We?” he teased.

“Well, you, really. But I did help,” she added.

“You did.”

“This wasn’t our first world, was it?” she asked, her perfectly smooth brow creasing in a frown as she tried to recall.

“No. Don’t you remember … we did make a couple of … well, shall we call them mistakes?”

Isis nodded. “There were some trials and errors.”

“Mostly errors. When Danu Talis fell, we didn’t know about the poisonous wild magic in the air. It took some time before we realized that it tainted everything we had created and we should have waited a few centuries before we started to build the world.” He shrugged. “But how were we to know?” He stopped, suddenly spotting the old woman with
the white stick sitting on a metal bench at the edge of the pavement. She sat with her back to the cathedral, facing up the river. “How did she get here before us?” he breathed. “She was still in the catacombs with Mars Ultor when we left.”

The old woman raised her left hand and, without moving her head, beckoned them over.

“How does she know we’re here?” Isis whispered. “She can’t see us, can she?”

“Who knows what she can do,” Osiris murmured. “My lady Zephaniah,” he said loudly, approaching the bench.