he Alchemyst, Josh and Shakespeare saw Perenelle start to nod … and then the image shattered into pixels, but not before they had all seen the flash of curled claws. Instinctively, all three jerked back from the screens.
“What … what happened?” Josh asked, confused. The left screen was completely black, but the right was speckled with clumps of sparkling red and green spots.
Flamel’s left hand locked into a white-knuckled fist around the silver bracelet. Mint green fire danced across the metal as the fingertips of his right hand pressed against the monitor. The LCD cycled through a rainbow of colors, and then ten narrow and irregular colored streaks appeared on the blackness, long wavering vertical strands that gave tantalizing glimpses of an empty corridor on the other side of the world. But there was no sign of Perenelle.
“What was that?” Josh asked.
Shakespeare shook his head. “I have no idea.” Then he curled his right hand into a claw and reached toward the screen. Five of the narrow colored bands matched up with his fingers. “Something leapt at Madame Perenelle and slashed at her. It must have come at her through the web.” He tapped the glass with a fingernail. “It looks like we’re still connected through the torn shreds of web. I can try again.”
“Is she … is she OK?” Josh asked, worried. He noticed that the silver bracelet was now in two halves; its center had melted into flat silver droplets. “Nicholas?”
Flamel said nothing. He was trembling, his face bloodless and gaunt, lips outlined in blue. The word Perenelle formed on his lips, but he didn’t say it aloud.
The screen image wavered … and then they saw Perenelle.
She was backing away from them, hands spread protectively before her. A long scratch ran across her bare shoulder and down one arm, the flesh red and angry-looking.
“Perenelle,” Flamel whispered, the sound escaping in a ragged gasp.
And then they saw it. A creature was moving slowly down the stone corridor, advancing on the Sorceress. Josh had never seen anything like it before: it was both beautiful and horrific in equal measure. The creature was about his height, and while the plump red-cheeked face was that of a young man, the body was skeletal, bones and ribs clearly visible through gray-white skin. Talons that were a cross between human feet and birds’ claws click-clacked across the floor, and although it had human hands, its nails were long and black, sharply curled, like a cat’s. Huge leathery bat’s wings grew out of its bony spine and dragged along the floor behind it.
And then a second figure appeared. It was a female. Gossamer black hair framed her delicately beautiful face. But if anything, her body was even more emaciated than the boy’s. Her wings were ragged and torn, and she dragged her left leg behind her.
“Vetala,” Flamel whispered in horror. “Blood drinkers, flesh eaters.”
Another figure appeared before Perenelle. Vague and insubstantial, this one looked human and male. His hands rose into threatening fists and he moaned.
Flamel’s aura bloomed bright green around his body, and the smell of mint was overpowering. “I’ve got to help her,” he said desperately.
Suddenly, Palamedes burst through the door into the hut. “Your aura—douse it now!” he commanded.
Wide-eyed, Sophie was at the knight’s heels, while behind her the red-eyed dogs crowded in the doorway and began to bark and growl.
“Perenelle’s in trouble,” Josh said, looking at Sophie. He knew his sister really liked the woman.
“Flamel: stop!” the knight shouted.
But the Alchemyst ignored him. Rolling the halves of the ruined silver bracelet into the palm of his left hand, he closed his fingers over them and brilliant emerald green light engulfed his fist. Then he pressed his right hand to the LCD screen. “Perenelle!” he called.
Flamel’s mint odor was blanketed by the warmer spice of cloves as the knight clamped his hands onto the Alchemyst’s shoulders. “You’ve got to stop, Nicholas. You’ll bring destruction down on top of us!”
Abruptly, the Alchemyst’s aura flared even brighter, flaming first to brilliant emerald, then luminescent jade and finally a deep olive green. The knight was flung backward away from Nicholas, a suit of chain mail forming over his body even as he crashed against the wall with enough force to dent the metal. Green fire crawled across the links of his armor. “Will—stop him!” Palamedes shouted, his accent thick with fear. “Break the link!”
“Master, please …” Shakespeare grabbed the Alchemyst’s sleeve and tugged. Tiny bitter-green flames immediately coursed up his arm, sending him staggering back, beating at the cold fire.
Josh crouched beside the Alchemyst, staring at the screen. “What are you trying to do?” he demanded.
“Strengthen Perenelle’s aura with my own,” Nicholas said desperately. “The vetala will tear her apart. But I fear I’m not strong enough.” The terror in his voice was clear.
Josh looked up at his sister, saw her head move in the tiniest of nods and then turned to Nicholas. “Let me help,” he said.
“Let us help,” Sophie added.
The twins took up positions on either side of the Alchemyst, Sophie on his right, Josh on his left, and each placed a hand on his shoulder. Josh looked at his sister and asked, “Now what do we do?”
And then the mixture of scents in the room became overpowering, almost nauseating: orange and vanilla, clove and mint, mingling with the odors of fried food, stale body odor and the ripe smell of damp dogs.
The Saracen Knight shouted, but his words were lost as the twins’ auras crackled around them, gold and silver, sizzling and spitting as they touched the Alchemyst’s now dull green aura, which immediately flared and brightened, sparkling with gold motes and silver threads.
“Alchemyst,” Palamedes shouted desperately, “you have doomed us all!”
“Perenelle!” Nicholas cried, splaying his fingers against the working monitor. Coiling threads of green, yellow and silver spiraled down his arm, wrapped around each finger and disappeared into the screen.
The screen to the right cracked down the middle, thick black smoke curling upward, and then Perenelle’s voice, thin and high, was clearly audible.
“Nicholas! Stop! Stop now!” She sounded terrified.
In the left-hand monitor they saw her ice white aura shimmer into existence around her and then quickly wink out.
“Nicholas!” Perenelle screamed. “You have killed me!”
And then the screen melted into a stinking puddle of bubbling plastic and molten glass.
r. John Dee strolled into the arrivals concourse in London City Airport. He was unsurprised to see a man in a two-piece black suit, white shirt and dark glasses, holding a card with the name DEE neatly printed on it. The Magician had phoned ahead and let the London offices of Enoch Enterprises know he was arriving.
“I am Dr. John Dee,” he said, handing the man his small overnight bag but holding on to his laptop bag. “Yes, sir, I recognized you. Follow me, please.” Dee thought he could hear a trace of the Middle East in the man’s accent; he was almost positive it was Egyptian. He followed the man to an anonymous black limousine parked directly outside arrivals in the no-parking zone. The driver pulled open the rear door and stepped back, and in that instant, Dee’s nostrils caught a familiar scent and he abruptly realized that this car and driver had not come from his company. For a heartbeat he thought about turning and running … but then he realized he had nowhere to go. “Thank you,” he said politely, sliding into the darkened interior. The door shut with a soft pneumatic click. The odor in the enclosed compartment was enough to take his breath away. He sat quietly and heard the thump when his suitcase was put into the trunk; moments later, the car pulled smoothly and silently away from the curb.
The Magician put his laptop bag beside him, then turned to look at the hooded figure he knew would be sitting at the other end of the leather seat. Forcing a smile to his face, he bowed slightly. “Madam, I must say I am surprised—and delighted, of course—to see you
here.”
The shape in the gloom moved and cloth rustled. Then the interior light clicked on, and Dee, though he had been alerted by the smell to what he was going to see, started at the terrifying sight of the huge lioness’s head inches from his own. The light gleamed off vicious-looking incisors and glistened off thick whiskers. The Dark Elder Bastet raised her head and glared at him with her huge yellow slit-pupiled eyes. “I am really beginning to dislike you, Dr. John Dee,” she growled.
The doctor forced himself to smile, then lowered his gaze from the sharp teeth and brushed an invisible speck of dust off his sleeve. “You are in the majority, then; a lot of people dislike me. But fair is fair,” he added lightly, “I dislike a lot of people. In fact, most people. But, believe me, madam, I have nothing but your best interests at heart.”
The light clicked off and Bastet became invisible in the gloom.
A thought struck Dee and he asked, “I thought your aversion to iron prevented you from using modern conveniences like cars.”
“Iron is not toxic to me, unlike some of the other Elders. I can tolerate it for short periods of time. And much of this vehicle is carbon fiber.”
Dee nodded gravely, filing away the information that iron was not toxic to all Elders. He’d always assumed that it was the coming of iron that had driven the Elders out of this world. After more than four hundred years in their service, there was still so much he did not know about them.
The car slowed, then stopped. Through the dark tinted window Dee could just about make out the glowing red traffic light. He waited until the light changed to green before trusting himself to speak again. “Can I ask what I have done to anger you?” he murmured, pleased that he’d managed to keep his voice from trembling. Bastet was a First Generation Elder and one of the original rulers of Danu Talis. After the sinking of the island, she had been worshipped for generations in Egypt, and countries and peoples from the Incas to the Chinese honored cats in memory of the time she had walked the ancient humani world.
Dee heard paper rustle and pages turn and he realized that the Elder was reading in complete darkness.
“You are trouble incarnate, Dr. Dee. I can smell it coming off you like that ridiculous sulfur aura you prefer.” There was the sound of paper being slowly and methodically shredded. “I have perused your file. It does not make for inspiring reading. You may be our premier agent in this world, but I would argue you have been particularly useless. You have failed again and again in your mission to capture the Flamels, and have left a trail of death and destruction in your wake. You are tasked with protecting the Elders’ existence, and yet three days ago you destroyed not just one but three interlinked Shadowrealms. This latest adventure in Paris has come close—dangerously close—to revealing our presence to the humani. You even permitted the Nidhogg to rampage through the streets.”
“Well, that really was Machiavelli’s idea …,” the Magician began.
“Many Elders have called for your destruction,” Bastet continued in a deep growl.
The sentence shocked Dee into silence. “But I serve the Dark Elders loyally. I have done so for centuries,” he argued plaintively.
“Your methods are crude, antiquated,” the cat-headed Elder went on. “Consider Machiavelli: he is a scalpel, neat and precise; you are a broadsword, crude and blundering. You once almost burned this very city to the ground. Your creatures killed a million humani in Ireland. One hundred and thirty thousand died in Tokyo. And despite this loss of humani life, you still failed to secure the Flamels.”
“I was told to capture the Flamels and the Codex by any means possible. That was the priority,” Dee snapped, anger making him reckless. “I did what I had to do to achieve that goal. And three days ago, let me remind you, I delivered the Book of Abraham the Mage.”
“But even there you failed,” Bastet whispered coldly. “The Codex was incomplete, lacking the final two pages.” The Elder’s breathing changed and Dee was suddenly aware in the darkness that her meat-tainted breath was dangerously close to his face. “Magician, you enjoy the protection of a powerful Elder—perhaps the most powerful of us all—and that has kept you alive thus far,” Bastet pressed on. Huge glowing yellow eyes appeared out of the gloom, the pupils as narrow as knife blades. “When others called for your punishment or death, your master has protected you. But I wonder—and I am not alone in this—why does an Elder use such a flawed tool?”
The words chilled him. “What did you call me?” he finally managed to whisper. His mouth was dry and his tongue felt huge in his mouth.
Bastet’s eyes blazed. “A flawed tool.”
Dee felt breathless. He tried to calm his thundering heart. It had been more than four hundred years since he’d last heard those three words, but they’d remained vividly etched in his memory. He’d never forgotten them. In many ways they had shaped his life.
Turning his face away from the stink of Bastet’s breath, Dee rested his forehead against the cool glass and looked out into the night flashing past in streaks of light. He was driving through the heart of twenty-first-century London, and yet when he closed his eyes and remembered the last time he had felt this way, the last time he had heard those words, he felt as if he were back in the city of Henry VIII.
Memories, long buried but never forgotten, came flooding back, and he knew the Elder’s use of those three bitter words could not have been accidental. She was letting him know just how much she knew about him.
It was April 23, 1542, a cold showery day in London, and John Dee was standing before his father, Roland, in their house on Thames Street. Dee was fifteen years old—and looked older than his years—but at that moment he felt like a ten-year-old. He had locked his hands into fists behind his back and was unable to move, afraid to speak, breathless, heart thundering so hard it was actually shaking his entire body. He knew if he moved he would fall over, or turn and run like a child from the room, and if he spoke he would break down and weep. But he would not show any weakness in front of Roland Dee. Over his father’s right shoulder, through the tiny diamond-paned window, John could see the top of the nearby Tower of London. Standing still and silent, he allowed his father to continue reading.
John Dee had always known he was different.
He was an only child, and it had been obvious from an early age that he was gifted with an extraordinary ability for mathematics and languages; he could read and write not only English, but also Latin and Greek, and had taught himself French and a little German. John was entirely devoted to his mother, Jane, and she always sided with him against his domineering father. Encouraged by his mother, John had set his sights on attending St. John’s College, Cambridge. He had thought—had hoped—that his father would be delighted, but Roland Dee was a textile merchant who held a minor position in Henry’s court and was almost fearful of too much education. Roland had seen what happened to educated men at court: it was too easy to upset the king, and men who did that too often ended up in prison or dead, stripped of their lands and fortune. John knew his father wanted him to take over the family business, and for that he needed no further education than the abilities to read and write and add up a column of figures.
But John Dee wanted more.
On that April day in 1542, he had finally plucked up the courage to tell his father he was attending college, with or without his permission. His grandfather, William Wild, had agreed to pay the fees, and Dee had enrolled without his father’s knowledge.
“And if you go to this school, what then?” Roland demanded, bushy beard bristling with rage. “They will fill your head with useless nonsense. You will learn your Latin and Greek, your mathematics and philosophy, your history and geography, but what use is that to me, or to you? You will not be content with that. You will seek more knowledge, and that will send you down some dark paths, my boy. You will never be satisfied, because you will never know enough.”
“Say what you will,” the fifteen-year-old boy had managed to answer. “I am going.”
/> “Then you will become like a knife that is sharpened so often it becomes blunt: you will become a flawed tool … and what use have I for a flawed tool?”
Dr. John Dee opened his eyes and focused once more on the streets of modern London.
He had rarely spoken to his father after that day, even when the old man was locked up in the Tower of London. Dee had gone to Chelmsford, and then to the newly founded Trinity College, and quickly established a reputation for himself as one of the most brilliant men of his age. And there were times when he remembered his father’s words and realized that Roland Dee had been right: his quest for knowledge was insatiable, and it had taken him down some very dark and dangerous paths. It had ultimately led him to the Dark Elders.
And somewhere at the back of his mind, in that dark and secret place where only the most hurtful memories are buried, lurked those three bitter words.
A flawed tool.
No matter what he achieved—his extraordinary successes, his amazing discoveries and uncannily accurate predictions, even his immortality and his association with figures who had been worshipped by generations as gods and myths—those three words mocked him, because he was secretly afraid that his father had been correct about that too. Perhaps he was a flawed tool.
Clearing his throat, he lifted his forehead from the window, fixed a quizzical smile on his face and turned back to the dark interior of the car. “I was not aware that you had a file on me.”
Leather squeaked as Bastet changed position. “We have files on every immortal and mortal humani who is in our service. Yours happens to be bigger than all the rest combined.”
“I’m flattered.”
“Don’t be. It is, as I have said, a litany of failures.”
“I am disappointed that you should view it that way,” Dee said softly. “Luckily, I do not answer to you. I answer to a higher authority,” he added, with the smile still fixed on his face.
Bastet hissed like a cat with its tail caught.
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