“I feel sick,” Josh said. He nodded toward the hut, where a plume of gray-black smoke was curling from the crooked chimney, leaking the stink of bubbling fat and rancid oil into the air. “And that’s not helping. I wonder, would it smell as bad if our senses weren’t Awakened?”
“Probably not.” She attempted a joke. “Maybe this was why human senses dulled over time. It was all just too much to handle.”
Flamel suddenly looked over at the twins and raised an arm. “Stay close; don’t wander off,” he called. Then, followed by Palamedes, he climbed the remainder of the steps and jerked open the door. The two immortals disappeared into the gloomy interior and slammed the door behind them.
Sophie glanced at her twin. “Looks like we’re not invited.” Although she kept her voice carefully neutral, Josh could tell she was angry; she always sucked in her lower lip when she was irritated or upset.
“Guess not.” Josh pulled the neck of his T-shirt up over his nose and mouth. “What do you think’s going on in there? You think if we got closer we’d be able to hear what they’re talking about?”
Sophie looked quickly at him. “I’m sure we would, but do you really want to get any closer to that stink?”
Josh’s eyes narrowed as a thought struck him. “I wonder …”
“What?”
“Maybe that’s why the smell is so bad,” he said slowly. “They must know we won’t be able to take it and it’ll keep us away.”
“You really think they’d go to all that trouble? What—so they can talk about us?” Sophie looked at her brother again and her eyes winked briefly silver. “That’s not your idea, Josh.”
“What do you mean it’s not my idea?” he demanded. “I thought of it.” He paused and then added, “Didn’t I?”
“For one, it’s too smart,” Sophie argued. “And it sounds like something Mars would think. From what I can tell from my memories—or the Witch’s—there was a time when he thought everyone was after him.”
“And were they?” Josh asked. Although the Elder was terrifying, he couldn’t help feeling incredibly sorry for him. When Mars Ultor had touched him, Josh had felt the smallest bit of the warrior’s unending pain. It was unbearable.
“Yes,” Sophie said, eyes blinking silver, her voice now little more than a whisper. “Yes, they were. By the time he became Mars Ultor—the Avenger—he was one of the most hated and feared men on the planet.”
“Those are the Witch’s memories,” Josh said. “Try not to think about them.”
“I know.” She shook her head. “But I can’t help it. It all sort of creeps in around the edges of my mind.” She shuddered and wrapped her arms around her body. “It’s scaring me. What happens … what happens if her thoughts take over mine? What happens to me?”
Josh shook his head. He had no idea. Even the thought of losing his twin was terrifying. “Think about something else,” Josh insisted. “Something the Witch couldn’t know.”
“I’m trying, but she knows so much,” Sophie said miserably. She spun around, trying to focus on their surroundings and ignore the strange and foreign thoughts at the back of her mind. She knew she should be strong, she needed to be strong for her brother, but she couldn’t get past the Witch’s memories. “Everyone I look at, everything I see, reminds me how things have changed. How am I supposed to think of something ordinary when all this is happening? Look at us, Josh: look at where we are, look at what’s happened to us. Everything has changed … changed completely.”
Josh nodded. He shifted the map tube on his shoulder, the heavy sword rattling inside. From that very first moment back in the bookshop when he’d popped his head up over the edge of the cellar and seen Flamel and Dee fighting with spears of green and yellow energy, he’d known the world would never be the same again. That had been—what?—four days ago, but in those four days, the world had turned upside down. Everything he’d thought he knew was a lie. They had met myths, fought legends; they had traveled halfway around the world in the blink of an eye to fight a primeval monster and watch stone carvings come to lumbering life.
“You know,” Sophie said suddenly, “we really should have taken last Thursday off.”
Josh couldn’t resist a grin. “Yeah, we should have.” He’d spent weeks trying to talk Sophie into taking a day off so they could visit the Exploratorium, the science museum close to the Golden Gate Bridge. Ever since he’d heard about it, he’d desperately wanted to see Bob Miller’s famous Sun Painting, a creation of sunlight, mirrors and prisms. Then his smile faded. “If we’d done that, then none of this would have happened.”
“Exactly,” Sophie said. She looked at the towering metal walls of rusting cars, the pockmarked muddy landscape and the red-eyed dogs. “Josh, I want things the way they were. Ordinary.” She turned back to her twin, her eyes catching and holding his. “But you don’t,” she said flatly.
Josh didn’t even bother trying to deny it. His sister would know he was lying; she always did. And she was right: even though he was exhausted and barely able to cope with his Awakened senses, he didn’t want things to go back to the way they’d been; he didn’t want to go back to being ordinary. He’d been ordinary all his life—and when people did notice him, they only saw him as half of a set of twins. It was always Josh and Sophie. They went to summer camp together, went to concerts and movies together and had never spent a holiday apart. Birthday cards were always addressed to the two of them; party invitations came with both of their names on them. Usually, it didn’t really bother him, but over the past few months, it had all started to grate on him. What would it be like to be seen as an individual? What if there were no Sophie? What if he was just Josh Newman, not half of the Newman twins?
He loved his sister, but this was his chance to be different, to be an individual.
He’d been jealous of Sophie when her senses had been Awakened and his hadn’t. He’d been scared of her when he’d seen her do battle, in control of impossible powers. He’d been terrified for her when he’d seen the pain and confusion the Awakening had caused. But now that his own senses were Awakened and the world had turned sharp and brilliant, he’d had a momentary glimpse of his potential and he was beginning to understand what he might become. He’d experienced the Nidhogg’s thoughts and Clarent’s impressions, he’d caught fleeting glimpses of worlds beyond his imagination. He knew—beyond any shadow of a doubt—that he wanted to go to the next stage and be trained in the elemental magics. He just wasn’t sure he wanted to do it with the Alchemyst. There was something wrong with Nicholas Flamel. The revelation that there had been other twins before them had been shocking and disturbing, and Josh had questions—hundreds of questions—but he knew he wasn’t going to get a straight answer from the Alchemyst. Right now he didn’t know who to trust—except Sophie—and the realization that she would prefer not to have her powers was a little frightening. Even though his Awakened senses had given him a pounding headache and a sick sour stomach, had made his throat raw and his eyes gritty, he wouldn’t give them up. Unlike his twin, he realized, he was glad he hadn’t taken Thursday off.
Josh pressed his hand to his chest. Paper rustled under his T-shirt, where he still wore the two pages he’d snatched from the Codex. A thought occurred to him. “You know,” he said softly, “if we had gone to the Exploratorium, then Dee would have kidnapped Nicholas and Perenelle and he’d have the entire Codex. He probably would’ve already brought the Dark Elders back from their Shadowrealms. The world might have already ended. There’s no ordinary to go back to, Soph,” he finished in an awed whisper.
The twins stood in silence, trying to comprehend it all. The very idea was terrifying: it was almost incomprehensible that the world they knew could end. Back on Wednesday they would have laughed at the idea. But now? Now they both knew that it could have happened. And worse—they knew it might still happen.
“Or at least, that’s what Nicholas says,” Josh added, unable to keep the bitterness out of his voice.
?
??And you believe him?” Sophie asked, curious. “I thought you didn’t trust him.”
“I don’t,” Josh said firmly. “You heard what Palamedes said about him. Because of Flamel, because of what he did and didn’t do, hundreds of thousands of people have died.”
“Nicholas didn’t kill them,” Sophie reminded him. “Your friend,” she said sarcastically, “John Dee, did that.”
Josh turned away and looked at the metal hut. He had no answer to that because it was the truth. Dee himself had admitted to setting fire and plague loose on the world in an attempt to stop the Flamels. “All we know is that Flamel has lied to us right from the very beginning. What about the other twins?” he asked. “Palamedes said Flamel and Perenelle had been collecting twins for centuries.” Even saying the word collecting made him feel queasy and uncomfortable. “Whatever happened to them?”
A gust of icy wind whipped across the junkyard, and Sophie shivered, though not because of the cold air. Staring hard at the metal hut, not looking at her brother, she spoke very slowly, picking her words with care. She could feel herself growing angry. “Since the Flamels are still looking for twins, that means all the others … what?” She spun around to look at her brother and found he was already nodding in agreement.
“We need to know what happened to the other twins,” he said firmly, voicing exactly what she was thinking. “I hate to ask, but does the Witch know?” he said carefully. “I mean, do you know if the Witch knew?” He still found it hard to grasp that the Witch of Endor had somehow passed all her knowledge on to his sister.
Sophie paused for a second, then shook her head again. “The Witch doesn’t seem to know a lot about the modern world. She knows about the Elders, the Next Generation and some of the oldest human immortals. She’d heard about the Flamels, for instance, but she’d never met them before Scatty brought him there with us. All I know is that she’s been living in and around Ojai for years, without a phone, a TV or radio.”
“OK, then forget about it, don’t even think about her again.” Josh picked up a pebble and tossed it against the wall of crushed cars. It rattled and bounced and a shape flickered behind the metal. The red-eyed dogs raised their heads and watched him carefully. “You know, I just had a thought …,” he said slowly.
Sophie watched him, silent.
“How did I end up working for the Flamels, a couple who collect twins, and you end up in the coffee shop across the road? It can’t be a coincidence, can it?”
“I guess not.” Sophie nodded, the tiniest movement of her head. She’d started thinking the same thing the second Palamedes had mentioned the other twins. It couldn’t be a coincidence. The Witch didn’t believe in coincidence, nor did Nicholas Flamel, and even Scatty said she believed in destiny. And then of course there was the prophecy …. “Do you think you got the job because he knew you had a twin?” she asked.
“After the battle in Hekate’s Shadowrealms, Flamel told me that he’d only started to suspect that we were the twins mentioned in the prophecy the day before.”
Sophie shook her head. “I hardly remember anything about that day.”
“You were asleep,” Josh said quickly, “exhausted after the battle.” The memory of the fight chilled him; it was the first time he had seen how alien his sister had become. “Scatty said that Flamel was a man of his word and told me that I should believe him.”
“I don’t think Scatty would lie to us,” Sophie said but even as she was speaking, she wondered if these were her thoughts or the Witch’s.
“Maybe she didn’t.” Pressing both hands to his face, Josh rubbed his fingers over his forehead, pushing back his overlong blond hair. He was trying to remember exactly what had happened last Thursday. “She wasn’t agreeing with him when he said he hadn’t known who we were. He said that everything he’d done had been for our own protection: I’m thinking she was agreeing with that,” he finished. “And the last thing Hekate said to me before the World Tree burned was ‘Nicholas Flamel never tells anyone everything.’”
Sophie closed her eyes, trying to blank out the sights and sounds of the junkyard, concentrating hard now, thinking back to early April, when they’d both started the part-time jobs. “Why did you go for that particular job?” she asked.
Josh blinked in surprise, then frowned, remembering. “Well, Dad saw an ad in the university newspaper. Assistant Wanted, Bookshop. We don’t want readers, we want workers. I didn’t want to do it, but Dad said he’d worked in a bookshop when he was our age and that I’d enjoy it. I sent in a résumé and was called for an interview two days later.”
Sophie nodded, remembering. While Josh was in the bookshop, she’d gone across the road to wait for him in a small coffee shop. Bernice, the owner of The Coffee Cup, had been there talking to a striking-looking woman who Sophie now knew was Perenelle Flamel. “Perenelle,” Sophie said so suddenly that Josh looked around, half expecting to see the woman behind him. He would not have been surprised.
“What about her?”
“On the day we got our jobs. You were being interviewed in the bookshop and I was having a drink. Bernice was talking to Perenelle Flamel. While Bernice was making my chai latte, Perenelle started a conversation with me. I remember her saying that she hadn’t seen me in the neighborhood before, and I told her I’d come along because you’d been called for an interview in the bookshop.” Sophie closed her eyes, thinking back. “She didn’t say then that she was one of the owners of the shop, but I remember her asking me something like, ‘Oh, I saw you with a young man outside. Was that your boyfriend?’ I told her no, it was my brother. Then she said, ‘You look very alike.’ When I told her we were twins, she smiled, then she quickly finished her drink and left. She crossed the street and went into the bookstore.”
“I remember when she came in,” Josh agreed. “I didn’t think the interview was going particularly well. I got the impression that Nicholas—or Nick … whatever his name is—was looking for someone older for the job. Then Perenelle came in, smiled at me, and called him to the back of the shop. I saw them both looking at me. Then she left the store as quickly as she’d arrived.”
“She came back into The Coffee Cup,” Sophie murmured. Then she stopped as memories and events slotted into place. When she spoke again, her voice was barely above a whisper. “Josh, I just remembered something. She asked Bernice if she was still looking for staff. She suggested that if my brother was working across the street, it would be perfect if I was working at The Coffee Cup. Bernice agreed and offered me the job on the spot. But you know what, when I turned up for work the next day it was the strangest thing. I could swear that Bernice looked a little surprised to find me there. I even had to remind her that she’d offered me the job the day before.”
Josh nodded. He remembered his sister telling him that. “Do you think Perenelle somehow made her give you the job? Could she do that?”
“Oh yes.” Sophie’s eyes turned briefly silver. Even the Witch of Endor acknowledged Perenelle as an extraordinarily powerful Sorceress. “So do you think we got the jobs because we’re twins?” she asked again.
“I have no doubt about it,” Josh said angrily. “We were just another set of twins to be added to the Flamels’ collection. We’ve been tricked.”
“What are we going to do, Josh?” Sophie asked, her voice as hard as her brother’s. The thought that the Flamels had somehow used them made her feel sick to her stomach. If Dee hadn’t showed up in the shop, then what would have happened to them? What would the Flamels have done to them?
Catching Sophie’s hand, Josh pulled his sister behind him toward the stinking metal hut, stepping carefully around the potholes. The dogs sat up, heads swiveling to follow them, red eyes glowing. “There’s no going back. We have no choice, Soph: we have to see this through to the end.”
“But what is the end, Josh? Where does it end … how does it end?”
“I have no idea,” he said. He stopped and turned to look directly into his sister’s blue eyes.
He took a deep breath, swallowing his anger. “But you know what I do know? This is all about us.”
Sophie nodded. “You’re right. The prophecy is about us, we’re gold and silver, we’re special.”
“Flamel wants us,” Josh continued, “Dee wants us. It’s time to get some answers.”
“Attack,” Sophie said, hopping over a muddy puddle. “When I knew him—I mean, when the Witch knew him—Mars always said that attack was the best form of defense.”
“My football coach says the same thing.”
“And your team didn’t win a single game last season,” Sophie reminded him.
They had almost reached the hut when a wild-eyed William Shakespeare appeared, a blazing frying pan clutched in both hands.
ithout a second thought Josh shrugged the map tube off his shoulder and shook out the sword. It settled easily into his hand, his fingers wrapping around the stained leather hilt. He took a step forward, putting himself between Shakespeare and his sister.
The immortal didn’t even look at them. He turned the blazing pan upside down and shook out the contents. What looked like half a dozen blackened sausages dropped onto the muddy ground. They hissed and sizzled but continued to burn, spiraling sparks into the air. One of the red-eyed dogs came out from beneath the hut, and a long forked tongue snatched up a chunk of still-burning meat and swallowed it whole. The flames turned its eyes to rubies, and when it licked its lips, curls of gray smoke leaked from the corner of its mouth.
Shakespeare bent down and roughly patted the dog’s head. He was about to turn and climb the steps when he spotted the twins. The dull evening light reflected off his overlarge glasses, turning them to silver mirrors. “There was a little mishap with our evening meal,” he said, a quick smile revealing his bad teeth.
“That’s OK. We weren’t that hungry,” Sophie said quickly. “And I’m trying to give up meat.”
“Vegetarians?” Shakespeare asked.
“Sort of,” Sophie said, and Josh nodded in agreement.