The Enchantress (The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel #6) (7 page)

Dee attempted to turn his head, but he could no longer move.

There was a shadow.

It was a monster, come to eat him.

So this was his destiny: to be eaten alive, alone and friendless….

He attempted to call upon his aura. If he could just gather enough of it, maybe he could frighten the creature away. Or burn himself to a crisp in the process of trying. That wouldn’t be so bad. At least he’d avoid being eaten.

The shadow moved closer.

But why would he want to frighten it away? It would only
return. He was merely delaying the inevitable. Better to surrender to it, to remember all the good things he had done during his long life … but there were few enough of those.

The shadow darkened.

And now that the end was upon him, old fears and almost forgotten doubts washed over him. He found himself humming a line from a song. “Regrets, I’ve had a few …” Well, he had more than a few. He could have—should have—been a better father to his children and a kinder husband to his wives. Perhaps he should not have been so greedy—not just for money, but for knowledge—and certainly he should never have accepted the gift, the curse, of immortality.

The realization struck him like a blow, making his breath catch in his chest. Immortality had doomed him.

The shadow stretched over him and he caught a glimpse of metal.

No animal, then. A human. A brigand. He wondered if there were cannibals on Danu Talis. “Make it quick,” he whispered. “Give me that mercy.”

“Was that a mercy you offered others?” Suddenly he was scooped up in strong arms. “I’ll not kill you yet, Dr. Dee. I have use for you.”

“Who are you?” Dee gasped, desperately trying to make out the face of the man towering over him.

“I am Marethyu. I am Death. But today, Doctor, I am your savior.”

I
t was time for Aunt Agnes to die.

The old woman stood before the bathroom mirror and looked at her reflection. An elderly human stared back, a face that was all angles and planes, sharp cheekbones, jutting chin and pointed nose. Iron-gray hair was combed off her face and held in a tight bun at the nape of her neck. Slate-gray eyes were sunken deep in her head. She looked like an eighty-four-year-old woman. But she was Tsagaglalal, She Who Watches, and her age was beyond reckoning.

Tsagaglalal had adopted the Aunt Agnes disguise for most of the twentieth century. She’d grown fond of this body, and it would be a shame to let it go. But then, she had worn many guises over the millennia. The great trick was knowing when to move on, when to
die
.

Tsagaglalal had lived through ages when anyone who was different—in any way—was suspect. The humans had many
wonderful characteristics, but they had always been and would continue to be suspicious and fearful of those who stood out from the crowd. Even in the best of times, they were constantly alert for something wrong, or on the lookout for someone who seemed a little out of the ordinary. And there had been a time when a person who remained far too young-looking was always going to be suspect.

Tsagaglalal had lived during the decades when men and women were burned as witches simply for looking odd or being outspoken and independent. But long before those terrible years in Europe, and later, briefly, in America, she had learned that if she was to survive, she had to blend in, to be such a part of the humans that she became invisible.

Tsagaglalal learned to age appropriately.

Every century had a different perception of what was right and proper. There were eras when thirty was old and forty was ancient. In some of the more primitive and isolated cultures, in which old age was revered as a sign of wisdom, she could become sixty or seventy before she “died” and moved on.

And when she aged, she did it completely, altering her skin texture, her posture, even her muscle mass, to mimic the passage of time. Generations ago—in Egypt, or was it Babylon?—she had perfected the technique of making her knuckles, wrists and knees swell to indicate arthritis. Later she’d learned to adjust her flesh so that her veins stood out thick and blue against paper-thin skin. She’d mastered techniques that turned the skin of her neck soft and loose and even
managed to yellow her teeth. To complete the illusion, she had deliberately allowed her hearing to dull and her eyesight to fade. She
became
old, and therefore did not spend every waking moment pretending. It was safer that way.

Staring at her reflection in the bathroom mirror, Tsagaglalal lifted her hands to her head, fiddled with the antique pins that held her bun in place and shook loose her gray hair.

The latter half of the twentieth century had been the easiest to live in. This was the era of cosmetics and plastic surgery. This was the era when people worked hard
not
to age, when movie and pop stars looked younger with the passing years.

Tsagaglalal pushed upward and the wig came off her head. She dropped the mess of gray hair into the bath and ran her hands vigorously across her smooth skull. She hated the wig; it always itched.

There were dangers particular to this century, of course. This was the age of the camera—personal cameras, street cameras, security cameras, and now most cell phones had cameras too. This was also the age of photo identification: passports, driver’s licenses, identity cards. Everything had a photo, and the immortal in those photos had to change, to subtly alter and age. A mistake brought attention from the authorities, and immortals were particularly vulnerable to any investigation that questioned their past. Tsagaglalal hadn’t left the country in decades and her American passport had lapsed. However, there was an immortal human working in New York who had once specialized in forged Renaissance
masterpieces. He had a little sideline business in forged passports and driver’s licenses. She’d need to visit him when this was over. If she survived.

Tsagaglalal ran the tap hot, then cold, and filled the sink. Bending her head, she scooped water into her hands and washed her face with L’Occitane Shea Butter Soap, wiping away the makeup she’d put on for the gathering of immortals and Elders who’d picnicked in her backyard earlier that day.

Dying was always the hard part. There was always so much to do in the weeks and months leading up to dying: making sure all the bills were paid and the life insurance was up to date, canceling any newspaper and magazine subscriptions and, of course, making a will leaving everything to a “relative.” Male immortals usually bequeathed everything to a nephew, female immortals to a niece. Others, like Dr. John Dee, willed everything to a series of corporations, and Tsagaglalal knew that Machiavelli had left all his worldly goods to his “son.” The Flamels willed everything to one another and a nephew named Perrier, whom she doubted had ever existed.

Tsagaglalal looked into the mirror again. Without hair and with her face wiped clean of makeup, she thought she looked even older than usual. Leaning closer to the glass, she allowed a little of her rarely used aura to blossom deep in her chest. The faintest hint of jasmine filled the small bathroom, mingling with the rich warmth of the shea butter. Heat flowed up her body, across her neck and into her face. She stared at her gray eyes. The sclera—the whites of her eyes—were yellow, threaded with veins, the right eye slightly milky with the
hint of a cataract. She’d always thought that was a really nice touch.

The scent of jasmine strengthened. Heat flowed into Tsagaglalal’s throat and mouth, up across her cheeks and into her eyes: and the sclera turned white.

The woman breathed in, filling her lungs, then holding her breath. The skin of her face rippled and smoothed, soft plump flesh flowing along the hard bony lines of her cheeks, filling out her nose, rounding out her chin. Lines vanished, crow’s-feet filled in, the deep bruise-colored shadows beneath her eyes disappeared.

Tsagaglalal was immortal, but she was not human. She was clay. She had been born in the Nameless City on the edge of the world when Prometheus’s fiery aura had imbued ancient clay statues with life and consciousness. Deep within her she carried a tiny portion of the Elder’s aura: it kept her alive. She and her brother, Gilgamesh, were the first of the First People to be born or achieve a consciousness. Every time she renewed herself, she could remember with absolute clarity the moment she had opened her eyes and drawn her first breath.

She laughed. It began as the cracked cough of an elderly woman and ended with the high pure sound of a much younger person.

Powered by her aura, the transformation continued. Flesh tightened, bones straightened, teeth whitened, hearing and sight grew sharp once more. A thin fuzz of jet-black hair pushed through her scalp, then thickened and streamed past her shoulders. She opened and closed her hands, wriggled her
fingers and rotated her wrists. Placing her hands on her hips, she twisted her body from side to side, then bent at the waist and touched the floor with the palms of her hands.

Standing before the mirror, Tsagaglalal watched age fall away from her body, saw herself grow young and beautiful again. She had forgotten what it was like to be young, and it had been a long time since she’d been beautiful. The last time she looked like this was the day when Danu Talis had fallen ten thousand years ago.

And if the world was going to end today, she was determined not to spend her last few hours on earth as an old woman.

Tsagaglalal made her way down the hall to the tiny spare bedroom at the back of the house on Scott Street. She strode swiftly and easily, delighting in her new freedom of movement. She twirled in the center of the landing purely for the joy of being able to spin.

Almost from the moment she’d bought the house, the spare bedroom had been used for storage. It was stuffed with a hundred years of clutter: suitcases, books, magazines, bits of furniture, a cracked leather chair, an ornamental writing desk and a dozen black plastic sacks stuffed with old clothes that she’d once thought about dumping until she’d realized they’d become fashionable again. There was an antique American flag with a circle of stars on it alongside a framed original
King Kong
movie poster signed by Edgar Wallace. At the back of the room, tucked away in a corner, half buried behind a stack of yellow-spined National Geographic magazines, was a hideous eighteenth-century Louis XV cherrywood armoire.

Tsagaglalal pushed her way through the room and heaved stacks of magazines aside to get to the wardrobe. The armoire’s door was locked and there was no key in the scrolled metal keyhole. Standing on her toes, Tsagaglalal reached over the door behind an ornamental curl of wood and her questing fingers found the large brass key hung on a bent nail. Lifting the key off the nail, she experienced a sudden wash of memories: the last time she’d opened this armoire was when she’d returned from Berlin at the end of the Second World War. There was a sudden prickle of tears at the backs of her eyes, a burning in her throat. On the way back to New York, she had stopped in London and met with her brother, Gilgamesh. He’d had no idea who she was, didn’t even remember that he had a sister, though he had recognized that he should know her. She had sat with him in the ruins of a bombed-out house in the East End of London and gone through the tens of thousands of papers he was storing there. They had spent the afternoon working backward, going from paper to parchment, then vellum, and finally on to bark and wafer-thin sheets of almost transparent gold, until she was able to point out her name written in a script and language still undiscovered by the humans. They had wept together as she reminded him of all they had once been. “I will never forget you,” he said as she’d stood to leave. She watched him scribble her name on his scraps of paper but knew that he would not be able to recall her face or name within the hour. Tsagaglalal was cursed with a memory that forgot nothing; Gilgamesh was doomed never to remember.

Fitting the key in the lock, she opened the armoire door.

There was a wash of musty stale air, a hint of old leather, bitter spices, the whiff of long-withered mothballs and the merest suggestion of jasmine.

A nurse’s uniform was on a hanger facing Tsagaglalal and she reached out to touch it, running her fingers across the thin cloth. The memories it evoked left her shaking. She’d been a nurse in both of the great wars, and in just about every war for the previous hundred years. She was one of the thirty-eight volunteers who had nursed with Florence Nightingale in the Scutari barracks in the Crimea. Tsagaglalal had seen—and caused—so much death over the centuries; serving as a nurse had been her small way of trying to repair all the hurt she had done.

Behind the uniform were the clothes of half a dozen centuries: costumes in leather and linen, silk and synthetics, fur and wool. Here were the shoes given to her by Marie Antoinette, the pearl-strewn dress she’d sewn for Catherine the Great of Russia, the bodice Anne Boleyn had worn the day she’d married Henry. Lifetimes of memories. Tsagaglalal smiled, showing perfect teeth. Museums and collectors would pay a fortune for these clothes.

At the back of the wardrobe was a thick burlap bag.

Effortlessly Tsagaglalal hauled out the sack and dragged it from the spare room into her own bedroom. She heaved it up onto the bed and tugged at the leather drawstring. It resisted for a moment; then the ancient leather snapped and crumbled to dust and the bag fell open.

Reaching in, Tsagaglalal lifted out a suit of white ceramic armor and laid it on the bed. Elegant yet unadorned, it had
been designed to fit her body like a second skin. She ran her fingers across the smooth breastplate. The armor was pristine, gleaming as if it were new. The last time she’d worn it, it had been slashed and scored by metal and claws, but the armor could heal and repair itself. “Magic?” she’d asked her husband, Abraham.

“Earthlord technology,” he’d explained. “We will not see its like again for millennia, or hopefully, never.”

At the bottom of the bag, she found two ornate wood and leather scabbards. They each held a metal kopesh, the curved sickle-like sword favored by the Egyptians, though its origins were much older. She pulled one of the kopesh from its sheath. The blade was so sharp it whistled as she moved it through the air.