The Warlock (The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel #5) (41 page)

“Let’s go,” she said, strapping herself in. “Let’s get this over and done with. I’ve got a sister to rescue.”

’ve never been here before,” Nicholas Flamel admitted. He stopped and looked up at the sign above his head.

PIER 14

“Oh, Nicholas, I told you, you need to get out of the shop more often.” Perenelle slipped her arm through her husband’s as they walked beneath the blocky gray entrance to the new pier. “It’s been open about a year now. And it is one of my favorite places in the city.”

“You never told me,” he said, sounding surprised.

“So even after all these years, we can still surprise one another,” she teased.

He leaned over and kissed her quickly on the cheek. “Even after all these years,” he said. “So enlighten me—how often do you come to this place?”

“Five, maybe six times a week.”

“Oh?”

“Every morning when I’d leave the shop, I’d usually walk down to the Embarcadero, amble along the promenade and end up walking the length of this pier. Where did you think I was for that hour?”

“I thought you’d popped across the road for coffee.”

“Tea, Nicholas,” Perenelle said in French. “I drink tea. You know I hate coffee.”

“You hate coffee?” Nicholas said. “Since when?”

“Only for the last eighty years or so.”

Nicholas blinked, pale eyes reflecting the blue of the sea. “I knew that. I think.”

“You’re teasing me.”

“Maybe,” he admitted. He looked down the pier. “This is nice. Long, too.”

“Fifteen feet wide and six hundred and thirty-seven feet from the shore,” she said significantly.

“Ah,” Flamel nodded in understanding. “The trick will be to stop the Lotan from even coming ashore.”

“If it gets onto dry land, we’ve lost,” Perenelle said. She pointed off to the left, to where Alcatraz was hidden by the curve of the bay. “The currents run very fast around the island. Anything going into the water will be swept down here, into the bay. I cannot imagine it coming ashore farther up the coast.”

“If it does …,” Nicholas began.

“If it does, we’ll deal with it,” Perenelle finished. Then she smiled to take the sting from her words. “If the current pushes it beyond the bridge, then there’s a good chance it will end up on the other side of the bay, in Alameda, perhaps.
Getting there at this time of the afternoon, in traffic, is going to take a while. It could do immense damage before we reached it.”

“So we have to make sure we stop it here,” he said.

“Exactly. Well, you asked me to get you as close to the water as possible. I presume you have a plan?”

“My love, I always have a plan.”

They heard footsteps rattling behind them and turned as Prometheus and Niten came hurrying up. They were both carrying fishing rods over their shoulders. The slender Japanese man grinned. “Do not ask him how much it cost to hire these,” he said.

“How much?” Nicholas asked.

“Too much,” Prometheus answered furiously. “I could have bought an entire fishing boat, or at least a very good fish dinner, for what it cost to rent them for a couple of hours,” he grumbled. “Plus a deposit in case we don’t bring them back.”

“What’s the plan?” Niten asked. He held out an empty bucket. “We can’t really go fishing. We don’t have bait.”

“Oh, but we do.” Nicholas smiled. “You are our bait.”

Niten and Prometheus stood side by side, leaning over the rail of the semicircular viewing point at the end of Pier 14. With their fishing rods arced out over the water, they looked like any other fishermen, chatting quietly together, ignoring the views of the city, the bridge, Treasure Island and the Embarcadero.

Nicholas and Perenelle sat on seats behind them. The
Alchemyst had discovered that the seats revolved and had been amusing himself by swinging back and forth. His chair squeaked with each turn. Finally Prometheus turned and glared at the immortal. “If you do that one more time, I’m going to feed you to the Lotan myself.”

“And I will help,” Niten added.

Perenelle suddenly stood. “Something’s coming,” she said quietly.

“I don’t see anything …,” the Alchemyst said, and then he spotted it. A curling wave, a dark irregularity in the waters of the bay. He turned back to the Elder and the Swordsman. “You know what you have to do.”

They nodded and returned to their fishing rods.

“Perenelle,” Nicholas said.

The Sorceress nodded. Leaning on the rail, she glanced at the people walking along the pier. Some were obviously tourists—the cameras were always a dead giveaway—while the mother with a toddler in a stroller was probably a local. There were a couple of elderly fishermen who seemed fixed to the rail and a trio of young men who were practicing their juggling skills with oranges and apples.

Perenelle focused and her hair crackled with static sparks.

Immediately the two fishermen packed up their rods and buckets and ambled away, still not speaking. The tourists suddenly lost interest in the views of the city and the bay, and the child in the stroller started wailing, deciding it was time to go home. Only the three jugglers remained.

“They are concentrating on their juggling,” Nicholas muttered. “That is why you cannot influence them.”

“Of course.” Perenelle laughed. “I’m getting slow in my old age.”

A seagull swooped in and snatched an apple from one of the jugglers as he tossed it into the air. A second seagull speared an orange, and suddenly four of the huge birds dived in around the boys, pecking at them, speckling them with stinking bird droppings. The youths tossed the remainder of the fruit into the sea and hurried back down the pier.

“Nicely done,” Nicholas said. “Now make sure no one gets close.”

Perenelle nodded.

The Alchemyst looked at the Elder and the immortal. “Prometheus, Niten. It’s time.”

The air suddenly filled with the sweet odor of green tea, and then the sharper smell of anise. A faint red glow formed around Prometheus’s hands and spiraled out along the length of his fishing rod. It crackled and sizzled and then dipped down along the fishing line and hissed into the water.

Niten’s royal blue aura crept over his hands like a tattoo. It flowed up the length of the carbon-fiber fishing rod, discoloring it, and then dripped like ink down the fishing line to stain the water under the pier a deep navy.

And the dark shape in the water suddenly changed direction.

“The Lotan will be drawn to your auras,” Nicholas said. “It will taste them in the water the same way a shark smells blood. We need to get it close, as close as possible, but you will both have to be careful. We don’t want it consuming you.”

“Here it comes,” Niten said. The whites of his eyes, his teeth and his tongue had turned blue.

“Ready,” Prometheus said.

Nicholas Flamel touched the green scarab he now wore around his neck and felt it grow warm in his hand. The spell was a simple one, something he had performed a thousand times before, though never on such a large scale.

A red-skinned head broke the surface of the water … followed by a second … and a third … and then a fourth head, black and twice as large as the others appeared. Suddenly there were seven heads streaking toward them.

“Let’s hope no one is filming this,” Niten murmured.

“No one would believe it anyway.” Prometheus grinned. “Seven-headed monsters simply do not exist. If anyone saw it, they’d say it was Photoshopped.”

“I can feel it,” Niten said. “It’s sucking the aura from me.”

“Me too,” Prometheus agreed.

“Let it come a little closer,” Nicholas muttered. He placed a hand on each of their shoulders, and their auras were tinged with his green.

“Alchemyst.” Niten’s voice was strained.

“Another few feet. Closer is better.”

“Nicholas,” Perenelle said in alarm.

The red and blue stains in the water were now flowing toward the creature like iron-filings pulled to a magnet. They watched as the Lotan’s long thick body rose higher in the water.

“It’s going to jump!” Prometheus shouted. Niten gritted his teeth and said nothing.

The Lotan sucked one last taste of their auras and then erupted straight up out of the water, rising on its tail, seven mouths gaping wide, hundreds of savage teeth ready to …

Mint flooded the air, heavy, thick and cloying.

There was a pop … followed by an explosion of green, red and blue that covered the three men in a mist of scented colors.

Nicholas shot out his fist and caught a small blue-veined egg that dropped into the palm of his hand.

Prometheus and Niten staggered back and slumped against the metal rails. They were both breathing heavily, and there were new lines on their faces. Strands of gray hair had sprouted in Niten’s dark eyebrows. Nicholas Flamel held up the small egg between thumb and forefinger. “Behold the Lotan,” he said.

Prometheus gasped. “Impressive. What did you do?”

“When your auras had drawn it in to the pier, I allowed it to ingest a little of my own aura. Once that was within its body, I used a simple Transmutation spell, converting one element into another. It is one of the basic principles of alchemy.” He grinned. “I returned the Lotan to its original form.”

“An egg.” Prometheus looked surprised.

“Where we all begin,” Flamel said. He tossed the blue-veined egg into the air … where a seagull snatched it, threw back its head and swallowed it whole.

ust as she was told, Sophie changed into jeans, hiking boots and a red hooded fleece and then returned downstairs. She found Tsagaglalal in the kitchen, putting dishes into the dishwasher.

“Is this okay?”

Tsagaglalal looked her up and down. “Perfect for where you’re going.”

“Is someone coming to pick me up?” Sophie asked.

The old woman ignored the question. “There is a possibility,” Tsagaglalal said, “that I will never see you again.”

Sophie looked at the old woman in shock. She opened her mouth to protest, but Tsagaglalal raised her hand and Sophie noticed that each of the woman’s fingertips was smooth—she had no fingerprints.

“But I want you to know how proud I am of you. And
your brother, too,” she added, “though I always guessed that he would choose a difficult path.” Tsagaglalal slipped her arm through Sophie’s and led her out into the garden. “I have watched over you from the day you were born. I held you in my arms when you were barely an hour old, and I looked into your eyes and I knew that with you—finally—the prophecy was about to come true.”