The Alchemyst (13 page)

CHAPTER NINETEEN

S
cathach stood by the door to Sophie’s room and regarded the twins with her grass green eyes. “Get some rest,” she said, repeating Flamel’s advice. “Stay in your rooms,” she added. “You may hear strange sounds from outside—just ignore them. You are completely safe so long as you remain within these walls.”

“What sort of sounds?” Josh asked. His imagination was working overtime, and he was beginning to regret all those hours he’d spent playing Doom and Quake, scaring himself silly.

Scathach took a moment to consider. “Screams, maybe. Animal howls. Oh, and laughter.” She smiled. “And believe me, you don’t want to find out what’s laughing,” she said, and added, without a trace of irony, “Sleep tight.”

Josh Newman waited until Scathach had rounded the end of the corridor before turning to his sister. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

Sophie chewed her bottom lip hard enough to leave the impression of her two front teeth in the flesh, and then nodded. “I’ve been thinking the same thing.”

“I think we’re in some pretty serious danger,” Josh said urgently.

Sophie nodded again. Events had moved so fast that afternoon that she’d barely had time to catch her breath. One moment she’d been working in the coffee shop, the next they were racing across San Francisco in the company of a man who claimed to be a six-hundred-year-old alchemyst and a girl who looked no older than herself and yet who Flamel swore was a two-and-a-half-thousand-year-old female warrior. And a vampire. “I keep looking for the hidden cameras,” she muttered, glancing around the room.

“Cameras?” Josh looked startled. He immediately picked up on his twin’s thoughts. “You mean like
Candid Camera
?” He looked uncomfortable and felt color flood his face: what if he’d managed to make an idiot of himself in front of the entire nation? He’d never be able to show his face at school again. He peered up into the corners of the room, looking for the cameras. They were usually behind mirrors. There were no mirrors in the room, but Josh knew that didn’t mean anything; the new generation of cameras were so small that they were virtually invisible. A sudden thought struck him. “What about the birds?”

Sophie nodded once more. “I keep coming back to the birds. Everything else could be special effects: the Torc Allta could be trained animals and men in prosthetic makeup, what happened in Scathach’s dojo could be some sort of effect and the rats could have been trained. But not the birds: there were too many of them, and they ripped the car to shreds.” The birds were what had finally convinced her that she and Josh were in very real danger…because if the birds were real, then everything else was real too.

Josh dug his hands into the back pockets of his jeans and stood by the open window. The dense foliage came right up to the window ledge, and although there was no glass in the opening, none of the myriad bugs that flitted through the late-evening air entered the room. He recoiled as a bright blue snake as thick as his wrist appeared out of the canopy of leaves and flickered a tongue that was easily six inches long in his direction. The snake vanished as a ball of tiny buzzing lights appeared, darting smoothly through the trees. As they shot past the window, Josh could have sworn that the entire swarm was composed of about a dozen tiny winged women, none of them bigger than his forefinger. The lights came from within their bodies. He licked dry lips. “Okay, let’s assume that this is real…all of it—the magic, the ancient races—then that brings me back to my original thought: we’ve got to get out of here.”

Sophie walked to the window, stood behind her brother and put her arm on his shoulder. She was older than he was by twenty-eight seconds—less than half a minute, Josh always reminded her—but with their mother and father away so much, she had assumed the role of a much older sister. Although he was already a good two inches taller than she was, he would always be her baby brother. “I agree,” she said tiredly. “We should try and make a run for it.”

Something in his sister’s voice made Josh turn to look at her. “You don’t think we’ll get away,” he said evenly.

“Let’s try,” she said, not answering his question. “But I’m sure they’ll come after us.”

“Flamel said that Dee would be able to track us. I’m sure Flamel—or Scathach—can do that too.”

“Flamel has no reason to follow us,” Sophie pointed out.

“But Dee does,” Josh said. “What happens if we go home and Dee and his people follow us there?” he wondered aloud.

Sophie frowned. “I’ve been thinking about that. Flamel said that we’ll be able to see the magical aura that surrounds people.”

Josh nodded.

“Hekate hasn’t Awakened our magical powers.” She frowned again, trying to remember exactly what Nicholas Flamel had said. “Flamel said we smelled of wild magic.”

Josh sniffed deeply. “But I can’t smell anything. No fruit or oranges or vanilla ice cream. Maybe we don’t smell until that happens.”

“If we managed to make it back home, we could head out to Utah to Mom and Dad. We could stay with them for the rest of the summer until all this blows over.”

“That’s not a bad idea,” Josh said. “No one would find us in the desert. And right now, the hot, boring, sandy desert sounds really attractive.”

Sophie turned to look at the door. “There’s only one problem. This place is a maze. Do you think you can find the way back to the car?”

“I think so.” He nodded. “Actually, I’m sure of it.”

“Let’s go, then.” She checked her pocket for her dead cell phone. “Let’s get your stuff.”

The twins paused by the door of Sophie’s room and peered up and down the corridor. It was deserted and in almost total darkness except where irregular clumps of arm-length crystals emitted a milky white light.

Somewhere in the distance, a sound that was caught between laughter and screaming echoed down the corridors. With their rubber-soled sneakers making no sound on the floor, they darted across the corridor into Josh’s room.

“How did we ever get into this mess?” Josh wondered out loud.

“I guess we were just in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Sophie said. She had remained standing by the door, watching the corridor. But even as she was saying the words, she was beginning to suspect that there was more to it than that. There was something else going on, something to do with the prophecy that Flamel had referred to, something to do with them. And the very idea terrified her.

The twins slipped into the corridor and moved through the circular rooms, taking their time, peering into each one before entering. They kept stopping, listening as snatches of conversations in almost recognizable languages or music played on unidentifiable instruments floated down the corridor. Once, a high-pitched howl of maniacal laughter sent them ducking into the nearest room as it seemed to approach, then disappear again. When they crept back out of the room, they noticed that all the light crystals in the corridor had dimmed to a bloodred glow.

“I’m glad we didn’t see what passed by,” Josh said shakily.

Sophie grunted a response. Her brother was in the lead; she followed two steps behind, her hand on his shoulder. “How do you know where we’re going?” she whispered, bringing her mouth close to his ear. All the rooms looked identical to her.

“When we first came into the house, I noticed that the walls and floor were dark, but as we moved down the corridors, they became lighter and paler in color. Then I realized that we were walking through different shades of wood, like the rings of a tree trunk. All we have to do is to follow the corridor that leads to the dark wood.”

“Smart,” Sophie said, impressed.

Josh glanced over his shoulder and grinned. “Told you those video games weren’t a waste of time. The only way not to get lost in the maze games is to watch for clues, like patterns on the walls or ceilings, and to keep a note of your steps so you can retrace them if you need to.” He stepped out into a corridor. “And if I’m right, the main door should be…there!” he finished triumphantly.

The twins fled across the vast open field in front of the huge tree house, and made their way to the tree-lined pathway that led back to the car. Even though night had fallen, they had no problem seeing. The moon hung bright and low in the heavens, and the sky was filled with an extraordinary number of brilliant stars, which combined with a swirling band of silvery dust high in the sky to give the night a peculiar grayish luminescence. Only the shadows remained pitch black.

Although it wasn’t cold, Sophie shivered: the night
felt
wrong. Josh pulled off his hooded sweatshirt and draped it over his sister’s shoulders. “The stars are different,” she muttered. “They’re so bright.” Craning her neck, she looked up into the heavens, trying to peer through the branches of the Yggdrasill. “I can’t see the Big Dipper, and the North Star is missing.”

“And there was no moon last night,” Josh said, nodding to where the full moon was rising huge and yellow-white over the treetops. “No moon in our world,” he added solemnly.

Sophie stared hard at the moon. There was something about it…something
wrong.
She tried to identify the familiar craters, and then felt her stomach lurch with a sudden realization. Her hand, when she pointed upward, was trembling. “That’s not our moon!”

Josh looked hard, squinting against the glare. Then he saw what his sister was talking about. “The surface is…
different.
Smoother,” he said softly. “Where are the craters? I can’t see Kepler, Copernicus or even Tycho.”

“Josh,” Sophie said quickly, “I think we’re looking at the night sky as it was thousands of years ago, maybe hundreds of thousands of years ago.” Sophie tilted her head and looked up. Josh was startled to see that the moonlight gave her face a skeletal appearance, and he quickly looked away, disturbed. He had always been close to his sister, but the last few hours had served to remind him just how important she was to him.

“Didn’t Scathach say that Hekate had created this Shadowrealm?” Josh asked. “I bet it’s modeled on the world she remembered.”

“So this
is
the night sky and the moon as they were thousands of years ago,” Sophie said in awe. She wished she had her digital camera with her, just to capture the extraordinary image of the smooth-faced moon.

The twins were looking into the heavens when a shadow flickered across the face of the moon, a speck that might have been a bird…except that the wingspan was too wide, and no bird had that serpentlike neck and tail.

Josh grabbed his sister’s hand and pulled her toward the car. “I’m really beginning to hate this place,” he grumbled.

The SUV was where they had left it, parked in the center of the path. The moon washed yellow light across the shattered windshield, the broken patterns in the starred glass picked out in shadow. The brilliance also highlighted the scars on the car’s body, the scratches and gouges in sharp relief. The roof was studded with hundreds of tiny holes where the birds had pecked through the metal, the rear window wiper dangled by a thread of rubber and the two side mirrors were completely missing.

The twins regarded the SUV silently, the full realization of the bird attack beginning to sink in. Sophie ran a finger down a series of scratches in the window on the passenger side of the car. Those few millimeters of glass were all that had protected her flesh from the birds’ claws.

“Let’s go,” Josh said, pulling open the door and sliding into the driver’s seat. The keys were where he had left them, in the ignition.

“I feel a little bad, running out on Nicholas and Scatty without saying anything,” Sophie said as she pulled open the door and climbed in. But the immortal Alchemyst and the Warrior would be better off without them, she reckoned. They were more than able to defend themselves; the last thing they needed was two teenagers slowing them down.

“We’ll apologize if we ever see them again,” Josh said. He privately thought he would be happy never to see either of them again. Playing video games was all fine and well. When you were killed in a game, you just started again. In this Shadowrealm, though, there were no second chances, and a lot more ways to die.

“Do you know how we get out of here?” Sophie asked.

“Sure.” Her brother grinned, his teeth white in the moonlight. “We reverse. And we don’t stop for anything.”

Josh turned the key in the ignition. There was a metallic click and a whining sound, which quickly descended into silence. He turned the key again. This time there was only the click.

“Josh…?” Sophie began.

It took him just a moment to figure out what had happened. “The battery’s dead. Probably drained by the same force that drained our phones,” Josh murmured. He swiveled around in the seat to stare through the scarred rear window. “Look, we came down that path behind us; we didn’t turn left or right. Let’s make a run for it. What do you think?” He turned back to look at his sister, but she wasn’t looking at him, she was staring through the windshield in front of her. “You’re not even listening to me.”

Sophie reached over, took her twin’s face in her hand and turned his head toward the windshield. He looked, blinked, swallowed hard, then reached over to push down the locks on the doors. “What now?” he asked.

Crouching directly in front of them was a creature that was neither bird nor serpent, but something caught in between. It stood about the size of a tall child. Moonlight dappled its snakelike body and shone weakly through outstretched batlike wings, the tiny bones and veins etched in black. Clawed feet dug deeply into the soft ground, and a long tail lashed to and fro behind it. But it was the head that held their attention. The skull was long and narrow, eyes huge and round, the gaping mouth filled with hundreds of tiny white teeth. The head tilted first to one side and then the other, and then the mouth snapped open and closed. The creature took a hop closer to the car.

There was movement in the air behind it, and a second creature, even bigger than the first, dropped from the night skies. It folded its wings and stood upright as it turned its hideous head toward the car.