The Alchemyst (22 page)

“What do you mean, faceless men?”

Sophie’s eyes were wide and terrified. “They had no faces.”

“Like masks?”

“No, Josh, not masks. Their faces were smooth—no eyes, no nose, no mouth, just smooth skin.”

The image that formed in his head was deeply disturbing, and he deliberately changed the subject. “Do you feel…different?” He chose the word carefully.

Sophie took a moment to consider. What was wrong with Josh, why was he so concerned? “Different? How?”

“Do you remember Hekate Awakening your powers?”

“I do.”

“What did it feel like?” he asked hesitantly.

For a moment Sophie’s eyes flickered with cold silver light. “It was as if someone had flipped a switch in my head, Josh. I felt alive. For the first time in my life I felt alive.”

Josh felt a sudden inexplicable pang of jealousy. From the corner of his eye, he spotted Flamel and Scatty leaving the diner, arms piled high with bags. “And how do you feel now?”

“Hungry,” she said. “Extremely hungry.”

They ate in silence: breakfast burritos, eggs, sausage, grits and rolls, washed down with soda. Scatty had fruit and water.

Josh finally wiped his mouth with a napkin and brushed bread crumbs off his jeans. It was the first proper meal he’d had since lunchtime the day before. “I feel human again.” He glanced sideways at Scatty. “No offense.”

“None taken,” Scatty assured him. “Believe me—I’ve never wanted to be human, though there are, I believe, some advantages,” she added enigmatically.

Nicholas bundled up the remains of their breakfast and shoved them into a paper bag. Then he leaned forward and tapped the screen of the satellite navigation system set into the dashboard. “Do you know how this works?”

Josh shook his head. “In theory, I guess. We put in a destination and it tells us the best way to get there. I’ve never used one before, though. My dad’s car hasn’t got one,” he added. Richard Newman drove a five-year-old Volvo station wagon.

“If you looked at it, could you make it work?” Flamel persisted.

“Maybe,” Josh said doubtfully.

“Of course he can. Josh is a genius with computers,” Sophie said proudly from the backseat.

“This is hardly a computer,” her twin muttered, leaning forward and hitting the On button. The large square screen flickered to life, and an incredibly patronizing voice warned them about typing addresses into the system while driving, then instructed Josh to hit the OK button, acknowledging that he’d heard and understood the warning. The screen blinked and immediately showed the position of the Hummer on an unnamed backroad. Mount Tamalpais appeared as a little triangle at the top of the screen, and arrows pointed south to San Francisco. The little track that led to Hekate’s Shadowrealm wasn’t shown.

“We need to go south,” Flamel continued.

Josh experimented with the buttons until he got the main menu. “Okay. I need an address.”

“Put in the post office at the corner of Signal Street and Ojai Avenue in Ojai.”

In the backseat, Scatty stirred. “Oh, not Ojai. Please tell me we’re not going there.”

Flamel twisted in his seat. “Perenelle told me to go south.”

“L.A. is south, Mexico is south, even Chile is south of here. There are
lots
of nice places that lie to the south….”

“Perenelle told me to take the children to the Witch,” Flamel said patiently. “And the Witch is in Ojai.”

Sophie and Josh looked quickly at each other, but said nothing.

Scatty sat back and sighed dramatically. “Would it make a difference if I told you I didn’t want to go?”

“None at all.”

Sophie crouched between the seats to stare at the little screen. “How long will it take? How far away are we?” she wondered out loud.

“It’s going to take most of the day,” Josh said, leaning forward to squint at the screen. Where his hair brushed his sister’s, a tiny spark crackled between them. “We need to get to Highway One. We go across the Richmond Bridge…” His fingers traced the colored lines. “Then to I-580, which eventually turns into I-5.” He blinked in surprise. “We stay on that for over two hundred and seventy miles.” He hit another button, which calculated some totals. “The entire trip is just over four hundred miles, and will take at least six and a half hours. Before today, the farthest I’ve ever driven is about ten miles!”

“Well, this will be great practice for you, then,” the Alchemyst said with a smile.

Sophie looked from Flamel to Scatty. “Who is this Witch we’re going to see?”

Flamel snapped his seat belt into place. “We’re going to see the Witch of Endor.”

Josh turned the key in the ignition and started the car. He glanced in the rearview mirror at Scatty. “Someone else you’ve fought with?” he asked.

Scathach grimaced. “Worse than that,” she muttered. “She’s my grandmother.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

T
he Shadowrealm was breaking down.

In the west, the clouds had vanished and huge patches of the sky had already disappeared, leaving only the blinking stars and the overlarge moon in the black sky. One by one the stars were winking out of existence, and the moon was beginning to fray at the edges.

“We don’t have much time,” the Morrigan said, watching the sky.

Dee, who was crouching on the ground, gathering as many icy fragments of Hekate as he could find, thought he could hear a note of fear in the Morrigan’s voice. “We have time,” he said evenly.

“We can’t afford to be here when the Shadowrealm disappears,” she continued, looking down at him, her face expressionless. But he knew by the way she hugged the cloak of crow feathers about her shoulders that she was nervous.

“What would happen?” Dee wondered aloud. He’d never seen the Crow Goddess like this before, and he took pleasure in her discomfiture.

The Morrigan raised her head to look at the encroaching darkness, her black eyes reflecting the tiny spots of stars. “Why, we’d disappear also. Sucked away into the nothingness,” she added softly, watching the mountains in the distance turn to something like dust. The dust then spiraled up into the black sky and vanished. “A true death,” the Morrigan murmured.

Dee was crouched among the melting remains of the Yggdrasill, while all around him Hekate’s elegant and beautiful world was turning to dust and blowing away on invisible winds. The goddess had created her Shadowrealm out of nothingness, and now, without her presence to hold it together, it was returning to that once more. The mountains had vanished, blown away like grains of sand, whole swathes of the forest were slowly fading and blinking out of existence like lights being turned off and the overlarge moon hanging low in the sky was losing shape and definition. Already it was nothing more than a featureless ball. In the east, the rising sun was a golden orb of light and the sky was still blue.

The Crow Goddess turned to her aunt. “How long before it all disappears?” she asked.

Bastet growled and shrugged her broad shoulders. “Who knows? Even I have never witnessed the death of an entire Shadowrealm. Minutes perhaps…”

“That’s all I need.” Dee laid the sword Excalibur on the ground. The smoothly polished stone blade reflected the blackness creeping in from the west. Dee found three of the largest chunks of ice that had once been Hekate and placed them on the blade.

The Morrigan and Bastet leaned over his shoulders and stared at the sword, their reflections rippling and distorted. “What is so important that you must do it here?” Bastet asked.

“This was Hekate’s home,” Dee replied. “And here, right here, at the place of her death, the connection to her will be strongest.”

“Connection…,” Bastet growled, and then nodded. She suddenly knew what Dee was about to attempt: the darkest and most dangerous of all the dark arts.

“Necromancy,” Dee whispered. “I’m going to talk to the dead goddess. She spent so many millennia here that it is part of her. I’m wagering her consciousness remains active and attached to this place.” He reached out and touched the handle of the sword. The black stone glowed yellow and the carved snakes around the hilt came briefly alive, hissing furiously, tongues flickering, before they solidified once again. As the ice melted, the liquid ran over the black stone, covering it in a thin oily sheen. “Now we shall see what we shall see,” he muttered.

The water on the blade began to bubble and pop, sizzling and crackling. And a face appeared in each bubble: Hekate’s face. It kept flickering through her three guises, only the eyes—butter-colored and hateful—remaining the same as she glared at him.

“Talk to me,” Dee shouted, “I command you. Why did Flamel come here?”

Hekate’s voice was a bubbling, watery snap.
“To escape you.”

“Tell me about the human children.”

The images that appeared on the sword blade were surprisingly detailed. They were all from Hekate’s perspective. They showed Flamel arriving with the twins, showed the two children sitting, fearful and pale, in the battered and scratched car.

“Flamel believes they are the twins of legend mentioned in the Codex.”

The Morrigan and Bastet crowded closer, ignoring the rapidly encroaching nothingness. In the west, there were no longer any stars in the heavens, the moon was gone and huge portions of the sky had completely vanished, leaving just blackness in its wake.

“Are they?” Dee demanded.

The next image on the sword showed the twins’ auras flaring silver and gold.

“Moon and sun,” Dee murmured. He didn’t know whether to be horrified or elated. His suspicions were confirmed. From the first moment he’d seen them together, he’d started to wonder if the teens were, in fact, twins.

“Are these the twins foretold in legend?” he demanded again.

Bastet brought her massive head down next to Dee’s. Her foot-long whiskers tickled his face, but he didn’t risk brushing them away, not with her teeth so close. She smelled of wet cat and frankincense; Dee felt a sneeze building at the back of his nose. The Cat Goddess reached out for the blade, but Dee caught her hand in his. It was like grasping a lion’s paw, and her retracted claws suddenly appeared dangerously close to his fingers. “Please don’t touch the blade; this is a delicate spell. There is time for perhaps one or two more questions,” he added, nodding toward the western horizon, to where the edges of the earth were crumbling, blowing away like multicolored dust.

Bastet glared at the black blade, her slit-pupiled eyes flaring. “My sister has—or should I say
had
—a very special gift. She could Awaken powers in others. Ask her if she did that with these humani twins.”

Dee nodded in sudden understanding; he had been wondering why Flamel had brought the twins to this place. He remembered now: in the ancient world, it was believed Hekate had power over magic and spells. “Did you Awaken the twins’ magical abilities?” he asked.

A single bubble popped. “No.”

Dee rocked back on his heels, surprised. He had been expecting her to say yes. Had Flamel failed, then?

Bastet growled. “She’s lying.”

“She cannot,” Dee said. “She answers what we ask.”

“I saw the girl with my own eyes,” the Egyptian goddess growled. “I saw her wield a whip of pure auric energy. I’ve never seen such power in my life, not since the Elder Times.”

Dr. John Dee glanced at her sharply. “You saw the girl…but what of the boy? What was he doing?”

“I did not notice him.”

“Ha!” Dee said triumphantly. He turned back to the sword.

The Morrigan’s cloak rustled warningly. “Make this your last question, Doctor.”

The trio looked up to see that the utter blackness was almost upon them. Less than ten feet ahead of them, the world ended in nothingness. Dee turned back to the sword. “Did you Awaken the girl?”

A bubble popped and the sword ran with images of Sophie rising off the ground, her aura blazing silver. “Yes.”

“And the boy?”

The sword showed Josh cowering in a corner of a darkened chamber. “No.”

The Morrigan’s clawlike hands gripped Dee’s shoulders and jerked him to his feet. He caught his sword and shook the bubbling water droplets into the rapidly encroaching void.

The mismatched trio—towering Bastet, dark Morrigan and small human—raced away as the world crumbled into nothingness behind them. The last remnants of their army—the birdmen and cat-people—remained, wandering aimlessly. When they saw their leaders fleeing, they turned to follow. Soon every creature was racing to the east, where the last of the Shadowrealm remained. Senuhet limped after Bastet, calling out her name, begging her to stop and help him.

But the world dissolved too quickly. It swallowed birds and cats, it took the ancient trees and rare orchids, the magical creatures and the mythical monsters. It consumed the last of Hekate’s magic.

Then the void claimed the sun and the world went dark and was no more.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

T
he Morrigan and Bastet burst through the tangled hedges, carrying John Dee between them. In the next instant the wall of foliage vanished and one of the many winding paths leading to Mount Tamalpais appeared. They stumbled, and Dee fell sprawling in the dust.

“What now?” Bastet growled. “Have we lost, have they won? We have destroyed Hekate, but she has Awakened the girl.”

John Dee staggered to his feet and brushed off his ruined coat. There were scrapes and tears in the sleeve, and something had ripped a fist-sized hole through the lining. Carefully wiping Excalibur clean, he slid it back into its concealed sheath. “It’s not the girl we need to concentrate on now. It’s the boy. The boy is the key.”

The Morrigan shook her head, feathers rustling. “You talk in riddles.” She glanced up into the clear morning skies, and almost directly overhead a wisp of gray cloud appeared.

“He has seen his sister’s tremendous magical powers Awakened; how do you think the boy is feeling now? Frightened, angry, jealous? Alone?” He looked from the Morrigan to the Cat Goddess. “The boy is at least as powerful as the girl. Is there anyone else on this continent to whom Flamel could take the boy to have his talents Awakened?”

“Black Annis is in the Catskills,” the Morrigan suggested, the note of caution clearly audible in her voice.

“Too unpredictable,” Dee said, “she’d probably eat him.”

“I heard that Persephone was in northern Canada,” Bastet said.

Dee shook his head. “Her years in the Underworld Shadowrealm have driven her insane. She is dangerous beyond belief.”

The Morrigan drew her cloak tighter around her shoulders. The cloud above her head thickened and drifted lower. “Then there is no one in North America. I came across Nocticula in Austria, and I know that Erichtho still hides out on Thessaly—”

“You’re wrong,” Dee interrupted. “There is one other who could Awaken the boy.”

“Who?” Bastet growled, frowning, her snout wrinkling.

Dr. John Dee turned to the Crow Goddess. “You could.”

The Morrigan stepped away from Dee, black eyes wide with surprise, pointed teeth pressing against the bruise-colored flesh of her thin lips. A ripple ran through her black cloak, ruffling all the feathers.

“You are mistaken,” Bastet hissed. “My niece is Next Generation, she hasn’t got the powers.”

Dee turned to face the Crow Goddess. If he knew he was playing a dangerous—possibly even deadly—game, he showed no sign of it. “At one time, perhaps that would have been true. But the Morrigan’s powers are more, much, much more, than they were.”

“Niece, what is he talking about?” Bastet demanded.

“Be very, very careful, humani,” the Crow Goddess cackled.

“My loyalty is not in question here,” Dee said quickly. “I have served the Elders for half a millennium. I am merely looking for a way to achieve our aim.” He stepped up to the Morrigan. “Once, like Hekate, you wore three faces: you were the Morrigan, the Macha and the Badb. Unlike Hekate, though, you and your two sisters occupied three bodies. It was your consciousnesses that were linked. Individually you were powerful, but together you were invincible.” He paused and seemed to be taking a moment to gather his thoughts, but in actuality, he was ensuring he had a firm grip on Excalibur beneath his coat. “When did you decide to kill your sisters?” he asked casually.

With a terrible screech the Morrigan leapt for Dee.

And stopped.

In a flash Excalibur’s black stone blade had appeared at her throat, blue light fizzing and sparking down the blade. The serpent hilt came to life and hissed at her.

“Please”—Dee smiled, a chilling twist of his lips—“I’ve been responsible for the death of one Elder today. I’ve no wish to add a second to my total.” As he spoke, he watched Bastet, who was moving around behind him. “The Morrigan has the power to Awaken the boy,” he said quickly. “She possesses the knowledge and power of her two sisters. If we can Awaken the boy and turn him to our side, we have gained ourselves an extraordinarily powerful ally. Remember the prophecy: ‘the two that are one, the one that is all.’ One to save the world, one to destroy it.”

“And which one is the boy?” Bastet asked.

“Whatever we make him,” Dee said, eyes darting from the Morrigan to Bastet and back to the Crow Goddess.

Abruptly, Bastet was beside him, her huge claw around his throat. She lifted him slightly, forcing him to rise on his toes and look into her chilling eyes. For a single heartbeat, he thought about swinging the sword around, but he knew that the Cat Goddess was faster, so much faster than he would ever be. She’d see the twitch of his shoulders and simply snap his head clean off.

Bastet glared at her niece. “Is it true? Are Macha and the Badb dead?”

“Yes.” The Morrigan glared at Dee. “But I did not kill them. They died willingly, and live inside me still.” For a moment her eyes blazed yellow, then red, then solid black, the colors of the three ancient goddesses.

Dee was tempted to ask how they had gotten inside her, then decided that he really didn’t want to know the answer and now probably wasn’t a good time to ask anyway.

“Could you Awaken the boy?” Bastet demanded.

“Yes.”

“Then do it, Niece,” the Cat Goddess ordered. She turned her attention back to Dee. Pressing her thumb under his chin, she pushed his head back. “And if you ever raise a weapon to one of the Elder Race again, I will see that you spend the next millennia in a Shadowrealm of my own special creation. And trust me, you will not like it.” She released her grip and flung him away, sending him sprawling in the dirt. He was still clutching the sword.

“Tell me,” Bastet commanded, towering over him. “Where are Flamel and the twins now? Where have they gone?”

Dee climbed shakily to his feet. He brushed dirt off his coat, and discovered yet another tear in the soft leather; he was never buying leather again. “He will need to start training the girl. Hekate Awakened her, but didn’t get a chance to teach her any protective spells. She’ll need to be taught to protect herself and control her powers before the stimuli from the physical world drive her mad.”

“So where will they go?” Bastet growled. She wrapped her arms around her body and shivered. The cloud the Morrigan had summoned had grown thick and dark as it drifted-lower, and now hovered just over the treetops. There was moisture in the air, and the hint of unidentifiable spices.

“He’ll not stay in San Francisco,” Dee continued, “he knows we have too many agents in and around the city.”

The Morrigan closed her eyes and turned slowly, then she raised her arm. “They’re heading south; I can just about make out the silver traces of her aura. It’s incredibly powerful.”

“Who is the most powerful Elder south of here?” Dee asked quickly. “Someone proficient in elemental magic?”

“Endor,” Bastet answered immediately, “in Ojai. The deadly Witch of Endor.”

“Mistress of the Air,” the Morrigan added.

Bastet leaned down, her breath foul in the small man’s face. “You know where you have to go. You know what you have to do. We must have the pages of the Codex.”

“And the twins?” he asked tightly, trying not to breathe.

“Capture them if you can—if not, then kill them to prevent Flamel from using their powers.” Then both she and the Crow Goddess stepped into the thickening cloud and were gone. The damp grayness swirled away, leaving Dr. John Dee alone on the isolated path.

“How do I get to Ojai?” he called.

But there was no response.

Dee shoved his hands in the pockets of his ruined leather coat and set off down the narrow path. He hated it when they did that, dismissed him as if he were nothing more than a child.

But things would change.

The Elders liked to think that Dee was their puppet, their tool. He had seen how Bastet had abandoned Senuhet, who had been with her for at least a century, without a second glance. He knew they would do exactly the same to him, given the chance.

But Dr. John Dee had plans to ensure that they never got that chance.