alarm. We re going home, aren't we? But even as he was asking the question,
he knew the answer.
Eventually, the Warrior Maid said, but not today, and definitely not
tomorrow.
Sophie laid her hand on her brother s arm, silencing the question he was
about to ask. What were you saying about myths and legends? she asked.
Somewhere deep in the house a bell chimed, the sound high and pure. It
lingered in the still air.
Scathach ignored it. I want you to remember that everything you know or
think you know about myth and legend is not necessarily false, nor is it
entirely true. At the heart of every legend there is a grain of truth. I
suspect that much of your knowledge comes from movies and TV. Xena and
Dracula have a lot to answer for. All minotaurs are not evil, the Gorgon
Medusa did not turn every man to stone, not all vampires are blood drinkers,
the Were clans are a proud and ancient race.
Josh attempted a laugh; he was still shaken by the revelation that Scathach
was a vampire. You ll be telling us next that ghosts exist.
Scathach s expression remained serious. Josh, you have entered the
Shadowrealm, the world of ghosts. I want you both to trust your instincts
from now on: forget what you know or think you know about the creatures and
races you will encounter. Follow your hearts. Trust no one. Except each
other, she added.
We Can'trust you and Nicholas, though, right? Sophie said.
The bell rang again, flat and piercing in the distance.
Trust no one, Scathach repeated, and the twins realized that she was not
answering the question. She turned toward the door. I think That'sthe
dinner bell.
Can we eat the food? Josh asked.
Depends, Scatty said.
Depends on what? he asked in alarm.
Depends on what it is, of course. I don't eat the meat myself.
Why not? Sophie said, wondering if there was some particular ancient
creature they should avoid.
I m a vegetarian, Scatty answered.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
P erenelle Flamel'sat in a corner of the tiny windowless room and drew her
knees up to her chest, then wrapped her arms around her shins. She rested her
chin on her knees. She could hear voices angry, bitter voices.
Perry concentrated on the sound. She allowed her aura to expand a little as
she murmured a small spell she had learned from an Inuit shaman. The shaman
used it to listen to the fish moving under the arctic ice sheets and the
bears crunching across the distant ice fields. The simple spell worked by
shutting down all other senses and concentrating exclusively on hearing.
Perry watched as the color faded from her surroundings and darkness closed in
until she went blind. She gradually lost her sense of smell and felt the
pins-and-needles tingle in her fingertips and toes as her sense of touch
dulled, then faded completely. She knew that if there were anything in her
mouth, she would no longer be able to taste it. Only her hearing remained,
but it was enhanced and supersensitive. She heard beetles crawling in the
walls behind her, heard the scritch-scratch as a mouse gnawed through wood
somewhere above her, knew that a colony of termites was munching their way
through distant floorboards. She also heard two voices, high and thin, as if
they were being picked up on a badly tuned radio, and coming from a great
distance. Perry tilted her head, homing in on the sound. She heard wind
whistling, the flap of clothing, the high crying of birds. She could tell
that the voices she was hearing were coming from the roof of the building.
They strengthened, warbled and bubbled, and then abruptly clarified: they
belonged to Dee and the Morrigan, and Perry could clearly hear the fear in
the gray man s voice and the rage in the Crow Goddess s shrill cries.
She must pay for this! She must!
She is an Elder. Untouchable by the likes of you and me, Dee said, trying
unsuccessfully to calm the Morrigan.
No one is untouchable. She has interfered where she was not wanted. My
creatures had almost overwhelmed the car when her Ghost Wind swept them
away.
Flamel, the warrior Scathach and the two humani have now disappeared, Dee s
voice echoed, and Perry frowned, concentrating hard, trying to follow every
word. She was delighted to discover that Nicholas had sought the assistance
of Scathach: she was a formidable ally. It s as if they have vanished off
the face of the earth.
They have vanished off the face of the earth, the Morrigan snapped. He s
taken them into Hekate's Shadowrealm.
Unconsciously, Perry nodded. Of course! Where else would Nicholas have gone?
The entrance to Hekate's Shadowrealm in Mill Valley was closest to San
Francisco, and while the Elder was no friend to the Flamels, she was not
allied to Dee and his Dark Elders either.
We must follow them, the Morrigan stated flatly.
Impossible, Dee said reasonably. I have neither the skills nor the powers
to penetrate Hekate's realm. There was a pause, and then he added, Nor do
you. She is a First Generation Elder, you are of the Next Generation.
But she is not the only Elder on the West Coast. The Morrigan s voice was a
snap of triumph.
What are you suggesting? Fear had touched Dee s voice with a hint of his
original English accent.
I know where Bastet sleeps.
Perenelle Flamel'sat back against the cold stone and allowed her senses to
return. Feeling came first pins and needles racing through her fingers and
toes then her sense of smell, and finally sight. Blinking, waiting for the
tiny colored spots of light to fade, Perry tried to make sense of what she
had just discovered.
The implications were terrible. The Morrigan was prepared to awaken Bastet
and attack Hekate's Shadowrealm to retrieve the pages of the Codex.
Perry shuddered. She had never met Bastet she didn't know anyone who had in
the last three centuries and had lived to tell the tale but she knew her by
reputation. One of the most powerful members of the Elder Race, Bastet had
been worshipped in Egypt since the earliest ages of man. She had the body of
a beautiful young woman with the head of a cat, and Perry had absolutely no
idea of the magical forces she controlled.
Events were moving surprisingly swiftly. Something big was happening. Many
years before, when Nicholas and Perry had first discovered the secret of
immortality, they had realized that their extra-long lives allowed them to
view the world from a different perspective. They no longer planned events
days or weeks in advance; often they would make plans decades into the
future. Perry had come to understand that the Elders, whose lives were
infinitely longer, could make plans that encompassed centuries. And that
often meant that events moved with an extraordinarily deliberate slowness.
But now the Morrigan was abroad. The last time she had walked in the World of
Men, she had been spotted in the bitter, mud-filled trenches of the Somme;
before that she had prowled the bloodstained battlefields of the American
Civil War. The Crow Goddess was dra
wn to death; it hung around her like a
foul stench. She was also one of the Elders who believed that humans had been
placed on this earth to serve them.
Nicholas and the twins were safe in Hekate's Shadowrealm, but for how long?
Bastet was a First Generation Elder. Her powers had to be at least equal to
Hekate's and if the Cat Goddess and the Crow Goddess, combined with Dee s
alchemical magic, attacked Hekate, would her defenses hold? Perry didn't
know.
And what of Nicholas, Scathach and the twins?
Perenelle felt tears prickle the back of her eyes, but blinked them away.
Nicholas would be six hundred and seventy-seven years old on the
twenty-eighth of September, in three months time. He was well able to take
care of himself, though his mastery of practical spells was very limited, and
he could be remarkably forgetful at times. Only the summer before, he had
forgotten how to speak English and had reverted to his native archaic French.
It had taken her nearly a month to coach him back to speaking English. Before
that he had gone through a period when he had signed his checks in Greek and
Aramaic characters. Perenelle s lips curled in a smile. He spoke sixteen
languages well and another ten badly. He could read and write in twenty-two
of them though there wasn't much chance to practice his Linear B, cuneiform
or hieroglyphics these days.
She wondered what he was doing right now. He would be looking for her, of
course, but he would also need to protect the twins and the pages that Josh
had torn from the Codex. She needed to get a message to him, she had to let
him know that she was fine and to warn him about the danger they were in.
One of the earliest gifts the young woman known as Perenelle Delamere had
discovered when she was growing up was her ability to talk to the shades of
the dead. It wasn't until her seventh birthday that she realized that not
everyone could see the flickering black-and-white images she encountered
daily. On the eve of her seventh birthday, her beloved grandmother, Mamom,
died. Perenelle watched as the withered body was gently lifted from the bed
where she had spent the last ten years of her life and laid in the coffin.
The small girl had followed the funeral procession through the tiny town of
Quimper and out into the graveyard that overlooked the sea. She had watched
the little rough-hewn box as it was lowered into the earth, and then she had
returned to her home.
And Mamom was sitting up in the bed, eyes bright with their usual mischief.
The only difference was that Perenelle could no longer see her grandmother
clearly. There was no color to her everything was in black-and-white and her
image kept flickering in and out of focus.
In that instant Perenelle realized she could see ghosts. And when Mamom
turned in her direction and smiled, she knew that they could see her.
Sitting in the small windowless cell, Perenelle stretched her legs out in
front of her and pressed both hands to the cold concrete floor. Over the
years she had developed a series of defenses to protect herself from the
unwanted intrusions of the dead. If there was one thing she had learned early
on about the dead particularly the old dead it was that they were
extraordinarily rude, popping up at the most inopportune and inappropriate
moments. The dead particularly liked bathrooms it was a perfect location for
them: quiet and still, with lots of reflective surfaces. Perenelle recalled a
time she d been brushing her teeth when the ghost of an American president
had appeared in the mirror in front of her. She d almost swallowed the
toothbrush.
Perenelle had quickly come to understand that ghosts could not see certain
colors blues and greens and some tints of yellow and so she deliberately
encouraged those colors into her aura, carefully creating a shield that
rendered her invisible in the particular Shadowrealm where the shades of the
dead gathered.
Opening her eyes wide, Perenelle concentrated on her own aura. Her natural
aura was a pale ice white, which acted like a beacon for the dead, drawing
them to her. But over it, like layers of paint, she had created auras of
bright blue, emerald green, and primrose yellow. Now, one by one, Perenelle
shut off the colors yellow first, then green, then the final blue defense.
The ghosts came then, drawn to her ice white aura like moths to a flame. They
flickered into existence around her: men, women and children, wearing clothes
from across the decades. Perenelle moved her green eyes over the glistening
images, not entirely sure what she was looking for. She dismissed women and
girls in the flowing skirts of the eighteenth century and men in the boots
and gun belts of the nineteenth and concentrated on those ghosts wearing the
clothing of the twentieth century. She finally picked out an elderly man
wearing a modern-looking security guard s uniform. Gently easing the other
shades aside, she called the figure closer.
Perenelle understood that people particularly in modern, sophisticated
societies were frightened of ghosts. But she knew that there was no reason to
fear them: a ghost was nothing more than the remnants of a person s aura that
remained attached to a particular place.
Can I help you, ma am? The shade s voice was strong, with a touch of the
East Coast in it: Boston perhaps. Standing tall and straight, like an old
soldier, the ghost looked about sixty, though he could have been older.
Could you tell me where I am? Perenelle asked.
You re in the basement of the corporate headquarters of Enoch Enterprises,
just to the west of Telegraph Hill. We got Coit Tower almost directly
overhead, he added proudly.
You seem very sure.
Should be. I worked here for thirty years. wasn't always Enoch Enterprises,
of course. But places like this always need security. Never one break-in on
my watch, he informed her.
That'san achievement to be proud of, Mr .
It surely is. The ghost paused, his image flickering wildly. Miller. That
was my name. Jefferson Miller. Been a while since anyone asked for it. How
can I help you? he asked.
Well, you've been of great assistance already. At least I know I am still in
San Francisco.
The ghost continued to look at her. Did you expect not to be?
I think I may have slept earlier; I was afraid I might have been moved out
of the city, she explained.
Are you being held against your will, ma am?
I am.
Jefferson Miller drifted closer. Well, That'sjust not right. There was a
long pause while his image flickered. But I m afraid I Can't help you I m a
ghost, you see.
Perenelle nodded. I know that. She smiled. I just wasn't sure if you
knew. She knew that one of the reasons ghosts often remained attached to
certain places was because they simply did not know that they were dead.
The old security guard wheezed a laugh. I ve tried to leave but something
keeps pulling me back. Maybe I just spent too much time here when I was
alive.
Perenelle nodded again. I can help you leave, if you would like to. I
can do
that for you.
Jefferson Miller nodded. I think I would like that very much. My wife,
Ethel, she passed on ten years before me. Sometimes I think I hear her voice
calling me across the Shadowrealms.
Perenelle nodded. She is trying to call you home. I can help you cut the
ties that bind you to this place.
Is there anything I can do for you in return?
Perenelle smiled. Well, there is one thing . Perhaps you could get a message
to my husband.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
S ophie and Josh followed Scathach through Hekate's house. There were
reminders everywhere that they were inside a tree: everything floors, walls
and ceilings was wooden, and in places, little buds and shoots of green
leaves dappled the walls, as if the wood was still growing.
With her hand resting lightly on her brother s shoulder, Sophie looked
around. The house seemed to be composed of a series of circular rooms that
flowed, almost imperceptibly, into one another. She caught glimpses as she
and Josh passed them; almost all the rooms were bare, and most of them had
tall red-barked trees growing through the center of the floor. One room, off
to the side and much larger than the rest, had a large oval-shaped pool in
the middle of the floor. Startlingly large white-flowered water lilies
clustered in the center of the pool, giving it the appearance of a huge
unblinking eye. Another room was filled entirely with wooden wind chimes
dangling from the branches of its red tree. Each set of chimes was a
different size and shape, some etched and carved with symbols, others
unadorned. They hung still and quiet until Sophie looked into the room, and
then they slowly, melodically began to rattle together. It sounded like
distant whispers. Sophie squeezed Josh s shoulder, trying to attract his
attention, but he was staring straight ahead, forehead creased in
concentration.
Where is everyone? Josh finally asked.
There is only Hekate, Scathach said. Those of the Elder Race are solitary
creatures.
Are there many still alive? Sophie wondered aloud.
Scathach paused by an open door and turned to look back over her shoulder.
More than you might think. The majority of them want nothing to do with the
humani and rarely venture from their individual Shadowrealms. Others, like
Nicholas Flamel 1 - The Alchemyst sotinf-1 Page 12