The Alchemyst (24 page)

“Give me your right hand.”

Sophie immediately stretched out her hand and Scatty took it in both of hers. Then she carefully matched the fingers of her left hand to the girl’s fingers, thumb to thumb, index finger to index finger, little finger to little finger. “Blood drinking vampires,” she said absently, concentrating on aligning their hands, “are really the weakest, the lowliest of our clan. Have you ever wondered why they drink blood? They’re actually dead—their hearts do not beat, they have no need to eat, so the blood provides no sustenance for them.”

“Are you dead?” Sophie asked the question Josh was just about to ask.

“No, not really.”

Josh looked into the mirrors, but he could clearly see Scathach’s reflection in the glass. She caught him looking and smiled. “Don’t believe that old rubbish about vampires not casting a reflection: of course we do; we are solid, after all.”

Josh watched intently as Scathach pressed her fingers to his sister’s. Nothing seemed to be happening. Then he caught a sparkle of silver in a mirror behind Scatty and he realized that in the glass, Sophie’s hand had begun to glow with a pale silver light.

“My race, the Clan Vampire,” Scatty continued very softly, staring at Sophie’s palm, “were of the Next Generation.”

In the mirror Josh saw that the silver light had begun to pool in Sophie’s palm.

“We were not Elders. All of us who were born after the fall of Danu Talis were completely unlike our parents; we were
different
in incomprehensible ways.”

“You’ve mentioned Danu Talis before,” Sophie murmured sleepily. “What is it, a place?” There was a warm, soothing feeling flowing up her arm, not unlike pins and needles, but tingling and pleasant.

“It was the center of the world in the Elder Times. The Elder Race ruled this planet from an island continent known as Danu Talis. It stretched from what is now the coast of Africa to the shores of North America and into the Gulf of Mexico.”

“I’ve never heard of Danu Talis,” Sophie whispered.

“Yes, you have,” Scathach said. “The Celts called it the De Danann Isle; this modern world knows it as Atlantis.”

In the mirror, Josh could see that Sophie’s hand was now glowing silver-white. It looked as if she were wearing a glove. Tiny sparking tendrils of silver wrapped themselves around Scatty’s fingers like ornate rings, and she shuddered.

“Danu Talis was ripped apart because the Ruling Twins—the Sun and Moon—fought on top of the Great Pyramid. The incredible magical forces they released upset the balance of nature. I’ve been told that that same wild magic swirling around the atmosphere caused the changes in the Next Generation. Some of us were born as monsters, others were caught between shapes, a few possessed extraordinary powers of transformation and could become beasts at will. And others, like those of us who eventually formed the Clan Vampire, found that we were unable to feel.”

Josh looked sharply at Scathach. “What do you mean,
feel
?”

The Warrior smiled and looked at him. Suddenly, her teeth seemed very long in her mouth. “We had little or no emotion. We lacked the capacity to feel fear, to experience love, to enjoy the sensations of happiness and delight. The finest warriors are not only those who do not know fear, but those who are without anger.”

Josh stepped back from Scatty and breathed deeply. His legs were beginning to cramp, and pins and needles were tingling in his toes. But he also needed to get away from the vampire. Now all the mirrors and polished glass surfaces in the shop showed the silver light flowing from Sophie’s hand up Scatty’s arm. It disappeared into her flesh before it reached her elbow.

Scatty turned her head to look at Josh, and he noticed that the whites of her eyes had turned silver. “Bloodsucking vampires don’t need the blood. They need the emotions, the sensations carried in the blood.”

“You’re stealing Sophie’s feelings,” Josh whispered, horrified. “Sophie, stop her….”

“No!” his twin snapped, eyes opening wide. The whites of her eyes, like Scatty’s, had turned reflective silver. “I can actually feel the pain flowing away.”

“The sensations are too much for your sister to bear. They are becoming painful, and this makes her afraid. I’m just taking away that pain and fear.”

“Why would anyone want to feel pain or fear?” Josh wondered aloud, both intrigued and repelled by the very idea. It seemed somehow
wrong.

“So they can feel alive,” Scatty said.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

E
ven before she opened her eyes, Perenelle Flamel knew she had been moved to a much more secure prison. Someplace deep and dark and sinister. She could feel the old evil in the walls, could almost taste it on the air. Lying still, she tried to expand her senses, but the blanket of malevolence and despair was too strong, and she found she couldn’t use her magic. She listened intently, and only when she was absolutely sure that there was no one in the room with her did she open her eyes.

She was in a cell.

Three walls were solid concrete, the fourth was metal bars. Beyond the bars she could see another row of cells.

She was in a prison block!

Perenelle swung her legs out of the narrow cot and came slowly to her feet. She noticed that her clothes smelled slightly of sea salt, and she thought she could detect the sounds of the not-too-distant ocean.

The cell was bare, little more than an empty box, about ten feet long by four feet wide, with a narrow cot holding a thin mattress and a single lumpy pillow. A cardboard tray lay on the floor just inside the bars. It contained a plastic jug of water, a plastic cup and a thick chunk of dark bread on a paper plate. Seeing the food made her realize just how hungry she was, but she ignored it for the moment and crossed to the bars and peered out. Looking left and right, all she could see were cells, and they were empty.

She was alone in the cell block. But where…

And then a ship’s horn, plaintive and lost, sounded in the distance. With a shiver, Perenelle suddenly knew where Dee’s men had taken her: she was on the prison island of Alcatraz, The Rock.

She looked around the room, paying particular attention to the area around the metal gate. Unlike in her previous prison, she couldn’t see any magical wards or protective sigils painted on the lintel or the floor. Perenelle couldn’t resist a tiny smile. What were Dee’s people thinking? Once she had recovered her strength, she’d charge up her aura, and then bend this metal like putty and simply walk out of here.

It took her a moment before she realized that the
click-click
she’d first assumed to be dripping water was actually something approaching, moving slowly and deliberately. Pressing herself against the bars, she tried to see down the corridor. A shadow moved. More of Dee’s faceless simulacra? she wondered. They would not be able to hold her for long.

The shadow, huge and misshapen, moved out of the darkness and stepped down the corridor to stand before her cell. Perenelle was suddenly grateful for the bars that separated her from the terrifying entity.

Filling the corridor was a creature that had not walked the earth since a millennium before the first pyramid rose over the Nile. It was a sphinx, an enormous lion with the wings of an eagle and the head of a beautiful woman. The sphinx smiled and tilted her head to one side, and a long black forked tongue flickered. Perenelle noticed that her pupils were flat and horizontal.

This was not one of Dee’s creations. The sphinx was one of the daughters of Echidna, one of the foulest of the Elders, shunned and feared even by her own race, even the Dark Elders. Perenelle suddenly found herself wondering who, exactly, Dee was serving.

The sphinx pressed her face against the bars. Her long tongue shot out, tasting the air, almost brushing Perenelle’s lips. “Do I need to remind you, Perenelle Flamel,” she asked in the language of the Nile, “that one of the especial skills of my race is that we absorb auric energy?” Her huge wings flapped, almost filling the corridor. “You have no magical powers around me.”

An icy shiver ran down Perenelle’s spine as she realized just how clever Dee was. She was a defenseless and powerless prisoner on Alcatraz, and she knew that no one had ever escaped The Rock alive.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

T
he bell jangled as Nicholas Flamel pushed open the door and stepped back to allow a rather ordinary-looking elderly woman in a neat gray blouse and gray skirt to precede him into the shop. Short and round, her hair tightly permed and touched faintly with blue, only the overlarge black glasses covering much of her face set her apart. A white cane was folded in her right hand.

Sophie and Josh immediately realized that she was blind.

Flamel cleared his throat. “Allow me to introduce…” He stopped and looked at the woman. “Excuse me. What do I call you?”

“Call me Dora, everyone else does.” She spoke English with a decided New York accent. “Scathach?” she suddenly said. “Scathach!” And then her words dissolved into a language that seemed to consist of a lot of spitting sounds…which Sophie was surprised to find she could understand.

“She wants to know why Scatty hasn’t come to see her in the past three hundred and seventy-two years, eight months and four days,” she translated for Josh. She was staring intently at the old woman and didn’t see the fear and envy that flickered across his face.

The old woman moved quickly around the narrow room, head darting left and right, never looking directly at Scatty. She continued to speak, seemingly without stopping for breath.

“She’s telling Scatty that she could have been dead and no one would have known. Nor cared. Why, only last century she was desperately ill, and no one called, no one wrote…”

“Gran…,” Scatty began.

“Don’t ‘Gran’ me,” Dora said, dropping into English again. “You could have written—any language would have done. You could have phoned….”

“You don’t have a phone.”

“And what’s wrong with e-mail? Or a fax?”

“Gran, have you got a computer or a fax machine?”

Dora stopped. “No. What would I need one of them for?”

Dora’s hand moved and suddenly her white stick extended to its full length with a snap. She tapped against the glass of a simple square mirror. “Have you got one of these?”

“Yes, Gran,” Scatty said miserably. Her pale cheeks were flushed red with embarrassment.

“So you couldn’t find the time to look in a mirror and talk to me. You’re so busy these days? I’ve got to hear it from your brother. And when was the last time you spoke to your mother!”

Scathach turned to the twins. “This is my grandmother, the legendary Witch of Endor. Gran, this is Sophie and Josh. And you’ve met Nicholas Flamel.”

“Yes, such a nice man.” She kept turning her head, her nostrils flaring. “Twins,” she said finally.

Sophie and Josh looked at each other. How did she know? Did Nicholas tell her?

There was something about the way the woman kept moving her head that intrigued Josh. He tried to follow the direction of her gaze…and then he realized why the old woman’s head kept moving left and right: she was somehow seeing them
through
the mirrors. Automatically, he touched his sister’s hand and nodded to the mirror. She glanced at it, back at the old woman, then back at the mirror, and then she nodded at her brother, silently agreeing with him.

Dora stepped up to Scathach, her head turned to one side as she stared hard at a tall length of polished glass. “You’ve lost weight. Are you eating properly?”

“Gran, I’ve looked like this for two and a half thousand years.”

“So you’re saying I’m going blind now, eh?” the old woman asked, then burst into surprisingly deep laughter. “Give your old Gran a hug.”

Scathach carefully hugged the old woman and kissed her cheek. “It’s good to see you, Gran. You’re looking well.”

“I’m looking old. Do I look old?”

“Not a day over ten thousand.” Scatty smiled.

The Witch pinched Scathach’s cheek. “The last person who mocked me was a tax inspector. I turned him into a paperweight,” she said. “I still have it here somewhere.”

Flamel coughed discreetly. “Madame Endor…”

“Call me Dora,” the old woman snapped.

“Dora. Are you aware what happened in Hekate’s Shadowrealm earlier today?” He had never met the Witch before—he knew her only by reputation—but he knew she needed to be treated with the utmost caution. She was the legendary Elder who had left Danu Talis to live with and teach the humani centuries before the island sank beneath the waves. It was believed that she had created the first humani alphabet in ancient Sumeria.

“Get me a chair,” Dora said to no one in particular. Sophie pulled up the chair she’d been sitting on and Scatty eased her grandmother into it. The old woman leaned forward, both hands resting on the top of her white cane. “I know what happened. I’m sure every Elder on this continent felt her death.” She saw their looks of shocked surprise. “You didn’t know?” She turned her head sideways and stared into a mirror, directly facing Scatty. “Hekate is dead and her Shadowrealm is no more. I understand an Elder, one of the Next Generation and an immortal human were responsible for her death. Hekate will need to be avenged. Not now, and maybe not soon: but she was family, and I owe her that. See to it.” Scatty bowed.

The Witch of Endor had delivered the death sentence calmly, and Flamel suddenly realized that this woman was even more dangerous than he had imagined.

Dora turned her face in another direction and Flamel found himself looking at her reflection in an ornate silver-framed mirror. She tapped the glass. “I saw what happened this morning a month ago.”

“And you didn’t warn Hekate!” Scatty exclaimed.

“I watched one thread of a possible-future. One of many. In some of the others, Hekate killed Bastet and the Morrigan slew Dee. In another, Hekate killed you, Mr. Flamel, and was in turn killed by Scathach. All versions of the future. Today I discovered which came to pass.” She looked around the room, turning her face from mirror to polished vase to picture-frame glass. “So I know why you’re here, I know what you want me to do. And I’ve thought long and hard about my response. I’ve had a month to think about it.”

“What about us?” Sophie asked. “Were we in your threads?”

“Yes, in some,” the Witch said.

“What happened to us in the others?” The question was out of Josh’s mouth before he had time to think about it. He
really
didn’t want to know the answer.

“Dee and his Golems or the rats and birds killed you in most of the threads. You crashed the car in others. You died with the Awakening or fell with the Shadowrealm.”

Josh swallowed hard. “We only survived in one thread?”

“Just one.”

“That’s not good, is it?” he whispered.

“No,” the Witch of Endor stated flatly. “Not good at all.” There was a long pause while Dora looked sidelong into the polished surface of a silver pot. Then she spoke suddenly. “First you should know that I cannot Awaken the boy. That must be left to others.”

Josh looked up quickly. “There are others who could Awaken me?”

The Witch of Endor ignored him. “The girl has one of the purest silver auras I’ve encountered in many an age. She needs to be taught some spells of personal protection if she is to survive the rest of the Awakening process. The fact that she’s still sane and whole these many hours later is testament to her strength of will.” Her head tilted back and Sophie caught the old woman’s face looking at her from a mirror suspended from the ceiling. “This I will do.”

“Thank you,” Nicholas Flamel said with a deep sigh. “I know how difficult the last few hours have been for her.”

Josh found that he could not look at his sister. There was
more
to the Awakening. Did that mean she would have to suffer more pain? It was heartbreaking.

Scathach knelt by her grandmother’s chair and laid a hand on her arm. “Gran, Dee and his masters are chasing the two missing pages from the Codex,” she said. “I would imagine that by now they know—or at least suspect—that Sophie and Josh are the twins mentioned in the Book of Abraham.”

Dora nodded. “Dee knows.”

Scathach stole a glance at Flamel. “Then he knows that not only does he have to retrieve the pages, but he has to either capture or kill the twins.”

“He knows that, too,” Dora confirmed.

“And if Dee succeeds, then this world ends?” Scathach said, turning the simple sentence into a question.

“The world has ended before,” the Witch answered, smiling. “I’m sure it will end many times before the sun turns black.”

“You know that Dee intends to bring back the Dark Elders?”

“I know.”

“The Codex says that the Dark Elders can only be stopped by Silver and Gold,” Scatty continued.

“The Codex also says, if my memory serves me true, that apples are poisonous and frogs can turn into princes. You don’t want to believe everything you read in that Codex,” the witch snapped.

Flamel had read the piece in the Codex about apples. He thought it was possibly referring to apple seeds, which were indeed poisonous—if you ate several pounds of them. He hadn’t come across the section about frogs and princes, though he’d read the Book hundreds of times. There were countless questions he wanted to ask the Witch, but that wasn’t the reason they were there. “Dora, will you teach Sophie the principles of Air magic? She needs to learn enough to at least be able to protect herself from attack.”

Dora shrugged and smiled. “Do I have a choice?”

Flamel had not been expecting that answer. “Of course you have a choice.”

The Witch of Endor shook her head. “Not this time.” She reached up and took off her dark glasses. Scatty didn’t move, and only the muscle twitching in Flamel’s jaw betrayed his surprise. The twins, however, backed away in horror, their faces registering their shock. The Witch of Endor had no eyes. There were just hollow empty sockets where eyes should have been, and nestled in the sockets were perfect ovals of reflective glass. Those mirrors turned directly to the twins. “I gave up my eyes for the Sight, the ability to see the patterns of time—time past, present and possible-future. There are many patterns, many versions of possible-future, though not so many as people think. In the past few years, the patterns have been coming together, weaving ever closer. Now there are only a few possible futures. Most of them are terrifying,” she added grimly. “And they are all linked to you two.” Her hand moved unswervingly to point to Sophie and Josh. “So what choice do I have? This is my world too. I was here before the humani, I gave them fire and language. I’ll not abandon them now. I’ll train the girl, teach her how to protect herself and instill in her how to control the magic of Air.”

“Thank you,” Sophie said carefully into the long silence that followed.

“Do not thank me. This is not a gift. What I give you is a curse!”