She turned to look at her husband. He hadn’t moved from the door and was staring around the shop with a stricken expression on his face. “Nicholas,” she said softly, and when he looked up, she realized just how much the last week had aged him. For centuries, his appearance had changed very little. With his close-cropped hair, unlined face and pale eyes, he’d always looked around fifty years old, which was the age he’d been when they started to make the immortality potion. Today, he looked at least seventy. Much of his hair was gone, and there were deep wrinkles on his forehead; more lines were etched into the corners of his sunken eyes, and there were dark spots on the back of his hands.
The Alchemyst caught her looking at him and smiled ruefully. “I know. I look old—but still, not too bad for someone who’s lived for six hundred and seventy-seven years.”
“Seventy-six,” Perenelle corrected him gently. “You’re not seventy-seven for another three months.”
Nicholas stepped forward and gathered Perenelle into his arms, hugging her close. “I don’t think that’s a birthday I’ll be celebrating,” he said very softly, his mouth close to her ear. “I’ve used more of my aura in the past week than I’ve done in the last two decades. And without the Codex …” His voice trailed away. He didn’t need to finish the sentence. Without the immortality spell that appeared once a month on page seven in the Codex, he and Perenelle would both begin to age, and death would follow quickly afterward as their accumulated years caught up with them.
Perenelle suddenly pushed her husband away from her. “We’re not dead yet!” she snapped, anger making her revert to the provincial French of her youth. “We’ve been in bad situations before—we survived.” The merest suggestion of her aura crackled around her, icy tendrils smoking off her flesh.
Nicholas stepped back and folded his arms across his narrow chest. “We’ve always had the Codex,” he reminded her in the same language.
“I am not talking about immortality now,” Perenelle said, her Breton accent thickening. “We have lived centuries, Nicholas, centuries. I am not afraid to die because I know that when we go, we will go together. It is living without you that would be unbearable.”
The Alchemyst nodded, not trusting himself to speak. He could not imagine a life without Perenelle.
“We need to do what we have always done,” she insisted, “fight for the survival of the human race.” Perenelle reached out and caught her husband’s arms, her fingers biting painfully into his flesh. “For six hundred years we have protected the Codex and kept the Dark Elders off the earth. We will not stop.” Her face turned hard. “But now, Nicholas, we have nothing to lose. Instead of running and hiding to protect the book, we should attack,” she said fiercely. “We should take the fight to the Dark Elders.”
The Alchemyst nodded uncomfortably. It was at times like these that Perenelle frightened him. Although they had been married for centuries, there was still so much he didn’t know about his wife and the extraordinary gift that allowed her to see the shades of the dead. “You’re right, we have nothing to lose,” Nicholas said softly. “We have lost so much already.”
“This time we have the advantage of the twins,” Perenelle reminded him.
“I am not sure they will entirely trust us,” the Alchemyst said. He took a deep breath. “In London, they learned about the existence of the previous twins.”
“Ah,” Perenelle said. “From Gilgamesh?”
The Alchemyst nodded. “From the King. Now I’m not sure they will believe anything we tell them.”
“Well then,” Perenelle said with a grim smile. “We tell them the truth. The whole truth,” she added, looking hard at her husband.
Nicholas Flamel held her eyes for a moment and then nodded and looked away. “And nothing but the truth.” He sighed. He waited until she had left the room and then added softly, “But the truth is a double-edged sword; it is a dangerous thing.”
“I heard that,” she called.
CHAPTER THREE
“You phone your parents right now.” Aunt Agnes glared nearsightedly at Sophie and then turned to Josh, who was closer. “They’ve been worried sick about you. Phoning me every day, twice, three times a day. Only this morning they said if you weren’t home today they were going to contact the police and report you as missing.” She paused and then added dramatically, “They were going to say you’d been kidnapped.”
“We weren’t kidnapped. We talked to Mom and Dad a couple of days ago,” Josh muttered. He was desperately trying to remember just when he’d talked to his parents. Was it Friday … or was it Saturday? He glanced sideways at his sister, looking for help, but she was still staring at the woman in black who looked so astonishingly like Scathach. He turned back to face his aunt. He knew he’d gotten an e-mail from their parents on … was it Saturday when they were all in Paris? Now that he was back in San Francisco, the last few days were beginning to blur together. “We just got back,” he said finally, settling on the truth. He kissed his aunt quickly on both cheeks. “How have you been? We missed you.”
“You could have called,” the tiny woman snapped. “You should have called.” Flint-gray eyes magnified behind enormous spectacles glared up at the twins. “Worried sick, I’ve been. I phoned the bookshop a dozen times looking for you, and you never answered your cell. Not much point in having a cell if you don’t answer it.”
“We had no reception most of the time,” Josh said, sticking to the truth, “and then I lost my phone,” he added, which was also the truth. His phone and most of his belongings had disappeared when Dee had destroyed the Yggdrasill.
“You lost your good phone?” The old woman shook her head in disgust. “That’s the third phone this year.”
“Second,” he muttered.
Aunt Agnes turned and climbed slowly up the steps. She waved away Josh’s offer of help. “Just leave me be; I’m not helpless,” she said, and then reached out to grip his arm. “You could help me, young man.” When they reached the door, she turned and looked down to where Sophie was still standing in front of the red-haired woman. “Sophie, are you coming?”
“In a minute, Aunty.” Sophie looked at her brother, then her eyes drifted toward the open door. “I’ll be there in a minute, Josh. Why don’t you take Aunt Agnes inside and make her a cup of tea?”
Josh started to shake his head, but the old woman’s fingers bit into his arm with surprising strength. “And while the kettle is boiling, you can phone your parents.” She squinted at Sophie again. “Don’t be long.”
Sophie Newman shook her head. “I won’t be.”
As soon as Josh and Aunt Agnes had disappeared inside the house, Sophie turned to the stranger. “Who are you?” she demanded.
“Aoife,” the woman said, pronouncing the name “E-fa.” She bent and ran black-gloved hands over the limo’s punctured tire, then spoke in a language Sophie recognized as Japanese. The young-looking man Josh had encountered in the house took off his jacket, flung it onto the front seat and then popped the trunk and pulled out a brace and jack. Fitting the jack under the heavy car, he levered it up with ease and started to change the tire.
Aoife brushed her gloved hands together, then folded her arms across her chest and tilted her head to look at Sophie. “There was no need to do that.” There was a hint of a lilting foreign accent in her voice.
“We thought you were kidnapping our aunt,” Sophie said quietly. The name Aoife had sent a dozen strange thoughts and images whirling through her brain, but Sophie was finding it hard to distinguish between memories of Scathach and those of Aoife. “We wanted to stop you.”
Aoife smiled without showing her teeth. “If I had wanted to kidnap your aunt, would I have turned up here in the middle of the day?”
“I don’t know,” Sophie said, “would you?”
Aoife pushed her small dark glasses up her nose, covering her green eyes, and considered for a moment. “Perhaps. Perhaps not. But,” she added with a smile that exposed her vampire teeth, “if I h
ad wanted your aunt, I would have taken her.”
“You are Aoife of the Shadows,” Sophie said.
“I am Scathach’s sister. We are twins. I am the elder.”
Sophie took a step back, the Witch’s memories of Aoife finally falling into place. “Scathach told me about her family, but she didn’t say anything about a sister,” she said, unwilling to reveal to the woman that she knew about her.
“No, she wouldn’t. We had a falling-out,” Aoife muttered.
“A falling-out?” Sophie asked although she already knew they had fought over a boy, and even knew his name.
“Over a boy,” Aoife said, with just a hint of sadness in her voice. She looked up and down the street before turning back to Sophie. “We’ve not spoken in a very long time.” She shrugged, a quick roll of her shoulders. “She disowned me. And I her. But I’ve always kept an eye out for her.” She smiled again. “I’m sure you know what it is like to look out for your sibling.”
Sophie nodded. She knew exactly what Aoife was talking about. Even though Josh was bigger and stronger than she was, she still thought of him as her baby brother.
“He’s my twin.”
“I did not know that,” Aoife said slowly. Dipping her head slightly, she looked at Sophie over the top of her dark glasses. “And you are both Awakened, too,” she added.
“What brought you here?” Sophie asked.
“I felt Scathach … go.”
“Go?” Sophie didn’t understand.
“Vanish. Leave this particular Shadowrealm. We are connected, my twin and I, by bonds similar to those which undoubtedly exist between you and your brother. I have always known when she was in pain, when she was hurt or hungry or frightened.…”
Sophie found herself nodding. She had felt her brother’s pain at times: when he had broken his ribs playing football, she’d felt the sting in her side, and when he’d nearly drowned in Hawaii, she’d woken up breathless and gasping. When she’d dislocated her shoulder in tae kwan do, her brother’s shoulder had swelled up and discolored with a bruise that matched hers precisely.
Aoife barked a question in rapid-fire Japanese, and the driver answered with a single syllable. Then she turned to Sophie. “We can stand here and talk in the street,” she said, smiling, flashing the tips of her canines, “or you can invite me inside and we can talk in comfort.”
A tiny alarm bell went off at the back of Sophie’s head. Vampires could not cross a threshold unless they’d been invited to do so, and she instantly knew she was not going to invite this vampire into her aunt’s house. There was something about her.… Slowly and deliberately, Sophie allowed the remainder of the memories that had been crowding at the back of her head to come surging forward. Suddenly—shockingly—she knew everything the Witch of Endor knew about Aoife of the Shadows. The images and memories were terrifying. Eyes wide with horror, Sophie took a step back, away from the creature, realizing just in time that the driver was behind her. Immediately, she reached for the trigger tattoo on her wrist, but the man caught her arms, holding them to her sides, before she could make the connection. Aoife stepped forward, caught Sophie’s wrists and twisted them to expose the design Saint-Germain had burned into her flesh. Sophie tried to struggle, but the driver held her tightly, squeezing her arms so hard that she could feel her fingers begin to tingle. “Let me go! Josh will—”
“Your twin is powerless.” Aoife pulled off one leather glove and took the girl’s hand in her cold fingers. Filthy gray smoke coiled off the vampire’s pale skin. She rubbed her thumb across the ornate Celtic-looking band that wrapped around Sophie’s wrist, and stopped on the underside at the gold circle with a red dot in the center. “Ah, the sign of tine. The Mark of Fire,” Aoife said softly. “So you would have tried to burn me?”
“Let me go!” Sophie tried to kick out at the man holding her, but his grip on her arms tightened and she suddenly grew frightened. Even the Witch of Endor was wary of Aoife of the Shadows. The vampire turned Sophie’s wrist painfully and bent forward to examine the tattoo. “This is the work of a master. Who gave you this … gift?” Her lips curled in disgust as she said the word.
Sophie pressed her lips together. She wasn’t telling this woman anything.
Aoife’s glasses slipped down her nose, revealing eyes that were like chips of green glass. “Maui … Prometheus … Xolotl … Pele … Agni …” Aoife shook her head quickly. “No, none of those. You have just returned from Paris, so it is someone in that city.…” Her voice trailed away. She looked over Sophie’s shoulder at the black-suited driver. “Is there a Master of Fire in the French capital?”
“Your old adversary, the count, lives there,” the man said softly in English.
“Saint-Germain,” Aoife snapped. She saw Sophie’s eyes widen and she smiled savagely. “Saint-Germain the liar. Saint-Germain the thief. I should have killed him when I had the chance.” She looked at the driver. “Take her. We will continue this conversation in private.”
Sophie opened her mouth to scream, but Aoife pressed her forefinger to the bridge of the girl’s nose. The vampire’s gray aura leaked from her fingers, the smoke curling around the girl’s head, seeping into her nostrils and mouth.
Sophie tried to bring her own aura alight. It crackled faintly about her body for a single heartbeat before she slumped unconscious.
CHAPTER FOUR
Agnes hit a speed-dial number on the phone and handed it to Josh. “You speak to your parents, right now,” she ordered. “And where is Sophie? Who is that girl she’s talking to outside?”
“The sister of someone we know,” Josh said, pressing the phone to the side of his face. The line rang only once before it was answered.
“Agnes?”
“Dad! It’s Josh.”
“Josh!”
The boy found himself smiling—the relief in his father’s voice was clearly audible—and then a wave of embarrassment washed over him and he felt guilty for not getting in touch with his parents sooner.
“Is everything all right?” Richard Newman’s voice was almost lost in a crackle of burbling static.
Josh pressed his finger to his ear and concentrated hard on the sounds. “Everything is fine, Dad. We’re OK. We just got back to San Francisco.”
“Your mother and I were starting to get worried about you. Seriously worried.”
“We were with the Fla—Flemings,” Josh quickly corrected himself. “There was no cell-phone reception,” he added truthfully, “though we did manage to get your e-mail on Sunday night. I got the jpeg of the shark teeth. I didn’t recognize the type, but from the size, I’m guessing a freshwater shark?” he asked quickly, deliberately changing the subject.
“Well done, son. It’s a Lissodus from the Upper Cretaceous period. It’s in very nice condition too.”
“Is everything OK with you?” Josh pressed on, trying to keep his father talking. He glanced at the door, wishing his sister would come in. He could distract his father with questions, but the same trick wouldn’t work with his mother, and he guessed that she was hovering at his father’s shoulder and would pluck the phone from his fingers at any moment. “How’s the dig going?”
“It’s been great.” Wind howled at the other end of the line, and dust and grit crackled against the phone. “We discovered what we think is a new ceratopsid.”
Josh frowned. The name was familiar. When he’d been younger, he used to know the names of hundreds of dinosaurs. “Is that a horned dinosaur?” he asked.
“Yes, from the Cretaceous, about seventy-five million years old. We also found a small and possibly untouched Anasazi site in one of the canyons, and some extraordinary Fremont-culture petroglyphs outside of the Range Creek Canyon site.”
Smiling at his father’s bubbling enthusiasm, Josh walked toward the window. “Which race are called the Ancient Ones in Navajo?” he asked, although he already knew the answer. “Fremont or Anasazi?” He wanted to keep his father talking, to give Sophie more time.
“Anasazi,” Richard Newman said. “And actually, the proper translation is ‘Enemy Ancestors.’”
The two words shocked Josh to a standstill. A couple of days ago, the name would have meant nothing to him, but that was before he’d learned of the existence of the Elders, the race who had ruled the world in the distant past. He had come to realize that there was more than a grain of truth to every myth and legend. “Enemy Ancestors,” he repeated, trying to keep his voice steady. “What does that mean?”
“I don’t know,” Richard Newman said, “but I prefer the term Ancient or Ancestral Pueblo or Hisatsinom.”
“But it’s such a strange name,” Josh persisted. “Who do you think used it? They wouldn’t have referred to themselves that way.”
“Probably another tribe. Strangers, outsiders.”
“And who came before them, Dad?” Josh said quickly. “Who came before the Anasazi and the Fremont?”
“We don’t know,” his father admitted. “That’s known as the Archaic period. Why the sudden interest in ancient America? I thought archaeology bored you.”