The Magician (The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel #2) (8 page)

“In America, Black Annis or Persephone could do it.”

Josh and Scatty turned to look at her.

Sophie blinked in surprise. “I know the names, but I don’t even know who they are.” Suddenly, her eyes filled with tears. “I have all these memories that aren’t even mine.”

Josh took his sister’s hand and squeezed it gently.

“They are all the Witch of Endor’s memories”, Scathach said softly. “And be glad you don’t know who Black Annis or Persephone is. Especially Black Annis”, she added grimly. “I’m surprised that if my grandmother knew where she was, she let her live.”

“She’s in the Catskills”, Sophie began, but Scathach reached over and pinched the back of her hand. “Ouch!”

“I just wanted to distract you”, Scathach explained. “Don’t even
think
about Black Annis. There are some names that should never be spoken aloud.”

“That’s like saying don’t think of elephants”, Josh said, “and then all you can think of are elephants.”

“Then let me give you something else to think about”, Scathach said softly.

“There are two police officers in the window staring at us. Don’t look”, she added urgently.

“Too late.” Josh turned to look, and whatever expression crossed his face shock, horror, guilt or fear brought both officers racing into the cafe, one pulling his automatic from its holster, the other speaking urgently into his radio as he drew his baton.

W
ith hands pushed deep in the pockets of his leather jacket, still wearing his none-too-clean black jeans and scuffed cowboy boots, Nicholas Flamel didn’t look out of place with either the early-morning workers or the homeless beginning to appear on the streets of Paris. The gendarmes gathered in small groups on the corners were talking urgently together or listening to their radios and didn’t even give him a second glance.

This wasn’t the first time he had been hunted in these streets, but it was the first time without allies and friends to help him. He and Perenelle had returned to their home city at the end of the Seven Years War in 1763. An old friend needed their help, and the Flamels never refused a friend. Unfortunately, however, Dee had discovered their whereabouts and had chased them through the streets with an army of black-clad assassins, none of whom was entirely human.

They had escaped then. Escaping now might not be so easy. Paris had changed utterly. When Baron Haussmann had redesigned Paris in the nineteenth century, he had destroyed a huge portion of the medieval section of the city, the city Flamel was so familiar with. All the Alchemyst’s hiding places and safe houses, the secret vaults and hidden attics, were gone. He had once known every street and alley, each twisting lane and hidden courtyard of Paris; now he knew as much as the average tourist.

And at that moment, not only did he have Machiavelli chasing them, the entire French police force was also on the lookout for them. And Dee was on his way. Dee, as Flamel well knew, was capable of just about anything.

Nicholas breathed in the cool predawn Parisian air and glanced at the cheap digital watch he wore on his left wrist. It was still set to Pacific time, where it was now twenty minutes past eight in the evening, which meant he did a quick calculation in his head that it was five-twenty a.m. in Paris. He thought briefly about resetting the watch to Greenwich Mean Time, but quickly decided against it. A couple of months ago, when he’d tried resetting the watch for daylight savings, it had started madly blipping and flashing. He’d worked on it for over an hour without any success; it had taken Perenelle thirty seconds to fix it. He only wore it because it came with a countdown timer. Every month, when he and Perenelle created a new batch of the immortality potion, he reset the counter to 720 hours and allowed it to countdown to zero. With the passing of years, they had discovered that the potion was timed to a lunar cycle and lasted roughly thirty days. Over the course of the month, they would age slowly, almost imperceptibly, but once they drank the potion, the effects of the aging process would quickly reverse hair would darken, wrinkles soften and disappear, aching joints and stiff muscles become supple again, eyesight and hearing sharpen.

Unfortunately, it was not a recipe that could be copied down; each month the formula was unique, and each recipe only worked once. The Book of Abraham the Mage was written in a language that predated humanity, and in a never-changing, always-moving script, so that entire libraries of knowledge were held within the slender volume. But every month, on page seven of the copper-bound manuscript, the secret of Life Eternal appeared. The crawling script remained static for less then an hour before it shifted, twisted and trickled away.

The one and only time the Flamels had tried using the same recipe twice, it had actually sped up the aging process. Luckily, Nicholas had taken only a sip of the colorless, rather ordinary-looking potion when Perenelle noticed that lines were appearing around his eyes and on his forehead and that the hair from his full beard was falling away from his face. She’d knocked the cup from his hand before he’d taken another mouthful. However, the lines remained etched on his face, and the thick beard he had been so proud of had never grown again.

Nicholas and Perenelle had brewed the most recent batch of the potion at midnight the past Sunday, just under a week ago. He pressed the left-hand button on the watch and called up the stopwatch function: 116 hours and 21minutes had passed. Another press of the button brought up the time remaining: 603 hours, 39 minutes, or about 25 days. As he watched, another minute ticked away: 38 minutes. He and Perenelle would age and weaken, and of course, every time either of them used their powers, that would only quicken the onset of old age. If he did not retrieve the Book before the end of the month and create a new batch of the potion, then they would both rapidly age and die.

And the world would die with them.

Unless

A police car roared past, siren howling. It was followed by a second and a third. Like everyone else on the street, Flamel turned to follow their progress. The last thing he needed to do was to attract attention to himself by standing out from the crowd.

He had to retrieve the Codex. The
rest
of the Codex, he reminded himself, his hand absently touching his chest. Hidden beneath his T-shirt, dangling on a leather cord, he wore a simple square cotton bag that Perenelle had stitched for him half a millennium ago, when he had first found the Book. She had created it to hold the ancient volume; now all it contained were two pages Josh had managed to tear out. The book was still incredibly dangerous in the hands of Dee, but it was the last two pages, which contained the spell known as the Final Summoning, that Dee needed to bring his Dark Elder masters back to this world.

And Flamel would not could not allow that.

Two police officers turned a corner and strolled down the center of the street. They stared hard at some of the pedestrians and peered into the shop windows, but they walked past Nicholas without even looking at him.

Nicholas knew that his priority now was to find a safe haven for the twins. And that meant he had to find an immortal living in Paris. Every city in the world had its share of humans with life spans that extended into centuries or even millennia, and Paris was no exception. He knew that immortals liked the big anonymous cities, where it was easier to disappear amongst a never-changing population.

Long ago, Nicholas and Perenelle had come to realize that at the heart of every myth and legend was a grain of truth. And every race told stories of people who lived exceptionally long lives: the immortals.

Over the centuries, the Flamels had come into contact with three entirely different types of immortal humans. There were the Ancients of whom there were now perhaps no more than a handful still alive who hailed from earth’s very distant past. Some had witnessed the entire span of human history, and it had made them more, and less, than human.

Then there were a few others who, like Nicholas and Perenelle, had discovered for themselves how to become immortal. Down through the millennia, the secrets of alchemy had been discovered, lost and rediscovered countless times. One of the greatest secrets of alchemy was the formula for immortality. And all alchemy and possibly even modern science had one single source: the Book of Abraham the Mage.

Then there were those who had been given the gift of immortality. These were humans who had, either accidentally or deliberately, come to the attention of one or other of the Elders who had remained in this world after the Fall of Danu Talis. The Elders were always on the lookout for people of exceptional or unusual ability to recruit to their cause. And in return for their service, the Elders granted their followers extended life. It was a gift very few humans could refuse. It was also a gift that ensured absolute, unswerving loyalty because it could be withdrawn as quickly as it had been given. Nicholas knew that if he encountered immortals in Paris even if he had known them in the past there would now be a very real danger that they were in the service of the Dark Elders.

He was passing an all-night video store that advertised high-speed Internet when he noticed the sign in the window, written in ten languages: NATIONAL &INTERNATIONAL CALLS. CHEAPEST RATES. Pushing open the door, he suddenly breathed in the sour odor of unwashed bodies, stale perfume, greasy food and the ozone of too many computers packed tightly together. The store was surprisingly busy: a group of students who looked like they d been up all night clustered around three computers displaying the World of Warcraft logo, while most of the other machines were taken up by serious-faced young men and women staring intently at the screens. As he made his way to the counter at the back of the shop, Nicholas could see that most of the young people were e-mailing and instant-messaging. He smiled briefly; only a few days ago, on Monday afternoon, when the bookshop was quiet, Josh had spent an hour explaining to him the difference between the two methods of communication. Josh had even set him up with his own e-mail account which Nicholas doubted he would ever use though he could see a use for the instant-messaging programs.

The Chinese girl behind the counter was dressed in ragged and torn clothes that Nicholas thought looked fit only for the trash but that he guessed had probably cost a fortune. She was in full goth makeup and was busy painting her nails when Nicholas stepped up to the desk.

“Three euro for fifteen minutes, five for thirty, seven for forty-five, ten for an hour”, she rattled off in atrocious French without looking up.

“I want to make an international call.”

“Cash or credit card?” She still hadn’t raised her head, and Nicholas noticed that she was blackening her nails not with polish but with a felt-tip marker.

“Credit card.” He wanted to conserve the little cash he had to buy some food. Although he rarely ate, and Scathach never ate, he would need to feed the children.

“Use booth number one. Instructions are on the wall.”

Nicholas slipped into the glass-fronted booth and pulled the door closed behind him. The shouts of the students faded, but the booth smelled strongly of stale food. He quickly read the instructions as he fished the credit card he’d used to buy hot chocolate for the twins from the back of his wallet. It was in the name of Nick Fleming, the name he’d been using for the past ten years, and he briefly wondered whether Dee or Machiavelli had the resources to track him through it. He knew that of course they did, but a quick smile curled Flamel’s thin lips; what did it matter? All it would tell them was that he was in Paris, and they already knew that. Following the instructions on the wall, he dialed the international access code and then the number Sophie had recalled from the Witch of Endor’s memories.

The line crackled and clicked with transatlantic static, and then, more than five and a half thousand miles away, the phone started ringing. It was answered on the second ring. “
Ojai
Valley
News;
how can I help?” The young woman’s voice was surprisingly clear.

Nicholas deliberately affected a thick French accent. “Good morning or rather, good evening to you. I’m delighted to find you still at the office. This is Monsieur Montmorency, phoning you from Paris, France. I’m a reporter with
Le Monde
newspaper. I’ve just seen online that you’ve had quite an exciting evening there.”

“Gosh news does travel fast, Mr …”

“Montmorency.”

“Montmorency. Yes, we’ve had quite an evening. How can we help?”

“We would like to include a piece in this evening’s paper I was wondering if you had a reporter on the scene?”

“Actually, all our reporters are downtown at the moment.”

“Would it be possible to put me through, do you think? I can get a quick on-the-spot description of the scene and a comment.” When there was no immediate response, he added quickly, “There would be a proper credit for your newspaper, of course.”

“Let me see if I can patch you through to one of our reporters on the street, Mr. Montmorency.”

“Merci.
I am very grateful.”

The line clicked again, and there was a long pause. Nicholas guessed that the receptionist was talking to the reporter before transferring the call. There was another click, and the girl said, “Putting you through”. He was saying thank you when the phone was answered.