The Alchemyst (7 page)

CHAPTER TWELVE

J
osh spotted an opening between two cars—a VW Beetle and a Lexus. He pushed his foot to the floor and the heavy car shot forward. But the gap wasn’t quite wide enough. The SUV’s grill struck the side mirrors on the other two cars and snapped them off. “Oops…” Josh immediately took his foot off the gas.

“Keep going,” Flamel ordered firmly. He had Sophie’s phone in his hand and was talking urgently in a guttural, rasping language that sounded like nothing the twins had ever heard before.

Deliberately not looking in the rearview mirror, Josh roared across the bridge, ignoring the honks and shouts behind him. He shot along the outside lane, then cut into the middle lane, then back out again.

Sophie braced herself against the dashboard, peering through half-closed eyes. She saw the car hit another side mirror; it came spinning, almost slowly, up onto the hood of their SUV, scoring a long scrape in the black paint before it bounced away. “Don’t even think about it,” she muttered as a tiny open-topped Italian sports car spotted the same gap in the traffic that Josh was aiming for. The driver, an older man with far too many gold chains around his neck, put his foot down and raced for the gap. He didn’t make it.

The heavy SUV caught the right front edge of the little car, just tapping it on the bumper. The sports car was flung away, spinning in a complete 360-degree turn on the crowded bridge, bouncing off four other cars in the process. Josh tore through the opening.

Flamel twisted around in the seat, looking through the rear window at the chaos they had left in their wake. “I thought you said you could drive,” he murmured.

“I
can
drive,” Josh said, surprised that his voice sounded so calm and steady, “I just didn’t say I was good at it. Do you think anyone got our license plates?” he asked. This was nothing like one of his driving games! The palms of his hands were slick and wet and beads of sweat were running down the sides of his face. A muscle twitched in his right leg from the effort of keeping the accelerator pressed hard to the floor.

“I think they’ve got other things to worry about,” Sophie whispered.

The crows had descended on the Golden Gate Bridge. Thousands of them. They came in a black wave, cawing and screaming, wings cracking and snapping. They hovered over the cars, darting low, occasionally even landing on car roofs and hoods to peck at the metal and glass. Cars crashed and sideswiped one another along the entire length of the bridge.

“They’ve lost focus,” Scathach said, watching the birds’ behavior. “They’re looking for us, but they’ve forgotten our description. They have such tiny brains,” she said dismissively.

“Something distracted their dark mistress,” Nicholas Flamel said. “Perenelle,” he said delightedly. “I wonder what she did. Something dramatic, no doubt. She always did have a sense of the theatrical.”

But even as he was speaking, the birds rose into the air again, and then, as one, their black eyes turned in the direction of the fleeing black SUV. This time when they cawed, it sounded like screams of triumph.

“They’re coming back,” Sophie said quickly, breathlessly. She realized that her heart was pumping hard against her rib cage. She looked at Flamel and the Warrior for support, but their grim expressions gave her no comfort.

Scathach looked at her and said, “We’re in trouble now.”

In a huge black-feathered mass, the crows took off after the car.

Most of the traffic on the bridge was now stalled. People sat frozen in terror in their cars as the birds flowed, foul and stinking, over the roofs. The SUV was the only car moving. Josh had his foot pressed flat to the floor, and the needle on the speedometer hovered close to eighty. He was becoming more comfortable with the controls—he hadn’t hit anything for at least a minute. The end of the bridge was in sight. He grinned; they were going to make it.

And then the huge crow landed on the hood.

Sophie screamed and Josh jerked the wheel, attempting to knock the evil-looking creature off, but it had hooked its feet into the raised ridges on the hood. It cocked its head to one side, looking first at Josh, then Sophie, and then, in two short hops, it came right up to the windshield and deliberately peered inside, black eyes glittering.

It pecked at the glass…and a tiny starred puncture mark appeared.

“It shouldn’t be able to do that,” Josh said, trying to keep his eyes on the road.

The crow pecked again and another hole appeared. Then there was a thump, followed by a second and a third, and three more crows landed on the roof of the car. The metal roof pinged as the birds began to peck at it.

“I hate crows.” Scathach sighed. She rooted through her bag and pulled out a set of nunchaku—two twelve-inch lengths of ornately carved wood linked by four and a half inches of chain. She tapped the sticks in the palm of her hand. “Pity we haven’t got a sunroof,” she said. “I could get out there and give them a little taste of this.”

Flamel pointed to where a long shaft of sunlight was coming through a pinhole in the roof. “We may soon have. Besides,” he added, “these are not normal crows. The three on the roof and the one on the hood are Dire-Crows, the Morrigan’s special pets.”

The huge bird on the hood tapped the windshield again, and this time, its beak actually penetrated the glass.

“I’m not sure what I can do…,” Scathach began, and then Sophie leaned over and hit the windshield wiper switch. The heavy blades activated…and simply swept the bird off the hood in a flurry of feathers and a shrill croak of surprise. The red-haired warrior grinned. “Well, there is that, of course.”

Now the rest of the birds had reached the SUV. They settled on the vehicle in a great blanket. First dozens, then hundreds gathered on the roof, the hood, the doors, clutching every available opening. If one fell off or lost its grip, dozens more fought for its place. The noise inside the car was incredible as thousands of birds pecked and tapped at the metal, the glass, the doors. They tore into the rubber molding around the windows, ripped into the spare tire on the back of the SUV, tearing it to shreds. There were so many on the hood, pressed up against the windshield, that Josh couldn’t see where he was going. He took his foot off the accelerator and the car immediately started to slow.

“Drive!” Flamel shouted. “If you stop, we are truly lost.”

“But I can’t see!”

Flamel leaned through the seats and stretched out his right hand. Sophie suddenly saw the small circular tattoo on the underside of his wrist. A cross ran through the circle, the arms of the cross extending over the edges of the circle. For a single instant it glowed…and then the Alchemyst snapped his fingers. A tiny ball of hissing, sizzling flame appeared on his fingertips. “Close your eyes,” he commanded. Without waiting to see if they obeyed, he flicked it toward the glass.

Even through their closed lids, the twins could see the searing light that lit up the interior of the car.

“Now drive,” Nicholas Flamel commanded.

When the twins opened their eyes, most of the crows were gone from the hood, and those few that remained looked dazed and shocked.

“That’s not going to hold them for long,” Scatty said. She looked up as a razor-sharp beak punched a hole straight through the metal roof. She snapped out the nunchaku. She held one stick in her hand, while the other, attached to the short chain, shot out with explosive force and cracked against the beak embedded in the roof. There was a startled shriek and the beak—slightly bent—disappeared.

Sophie turned her head to peer in her side mirror. It was dangling off the car, barely held on by a shred of metal and some wire. She could see more birds—thousands of them—flying in to replace those that had been swept away, and she knew then that they were not going to make it. There were simply too many of them.

“Listen,” Nicholas Flamel said suddenly.

“I don’t hear anything,” Josh said grimly.

Sophie was just about to agree with him when she heard the sound. And she suddenly felt the hairs on her arms prickle and rise. Low and lonely, the noise hovered just at the edge of her hearing. It was like a breeze, one moment sounding soft and gentle, the next louder, almost angry. A peculiar odor wafted into the car.

“What is that smell?” Josh asked.

“Smells like spicy oranges,” Sophie said, breathing deeply.

“Pomegranates,” Nicholas Flamel said.

And then the wind came.

It howled across the bay, warm and exotic, smelling of cardamom and rosewater, lime and tarragon, and then it raced along the length of the Golden Gate Bridge, plucking the birds off the struts, lifting them off the cars, pulling them out of the air. Finally the pomegranate-scented wind reached the SUV. One moment the car was surrounded by birds; the next, they were gone, and the car was filled with the scents of the desert, of dry air and warm sand.

Sophie hit a button and the scarred and pitted window jerked down. She craned her neck out the SUV, breathing in the richly scented air. The huge flock of birds was being pulled high into the sky, borne aloft on the breeze. When one escaped—one of the big Dire-Crows, Sophie thought—it was quickly caught by a tendril of the warm breeze and pushed back into the rest of the flock. From underneath, the mass of birds looked like a dirty cloud…and then the cloud dispersed as the birds scattered, leaving the sky blue and clear again.

Sophie looked back along the length of the bridge. The Golden Gate was completely impassable; cars were pointed in every direction, and there had been dozens of minor accidents, which blocked the lanes…and of course, effectively prevented anyone from following them, she realized. Every vehicle was spattered and splotched with white bird droppings. She looked at her brother and saw with a shock that there was a tiny smear of blood on his bottom lip. She pulled a tissue from her pocket. “You’re cut!” she said urgently, licking the edge of the tissue and dabbing at her twin’s face.

Josh pushed her hand away. “Stop. That’s disgusting.” He touched his lip with his little finger. “I must have bit it. I didn’t even feel it.” He took the tissue from his sister’s hand and rubbed his chin. “It’s nothing.” Then he smiled quickly. “Did you see the mess the birds left back there?” Sophie nodded. He made a disgusted face. “Now,
that
is going to smell!”

Sophie leaned back against the seat, relieved that her brother was fine. When she’d seen the blood she’d been truly frightened. A thought struck her and she turned around to look at Flamel. “Did you call up the wind?”

He smiled and shook his head. “No, I’ve no control over the elements. That skill rests solely with the Elders and a very few rare humans.”

Sophie looked at Scatty, but the Warrior shook her head. “Beyond my very limited abilities.”

“But you
did
summon the wind?” Sophie persisted.

Flamel handed Sophie back her phone. “I just phoned in a request,” he said, and smiled.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

“T
urn here,” Nicholas Flamel instructed.

Josh eased his foot off the accelerator and turned the battered and scarred SUV down a long narrow track that was barely wide enough to accommodate the car. They had spent the last thirty minutes driving north out of San Francisco, listening to the increasingly hysterical radio reports as a succession of experts gave their opinions about the bird attack on the bridge. Global warming was the most commonly cited theory: the sun’s radiation interfering with the birds’ natural navigation system.

Flamel directed them north, toward Mill Valley and Mount Tamalpais, but they quickly left the highway and stuck to narrow two-lane roads. Traffic thinned out until there were long stretches where they were the only car in sight. Finally, on a narrow road that curved and turned with sickening complexity, he had Josh slow almost to a crawl. He rolled down his window and peered out into a thick forest that came right up to the edge of the road. They had actually driven past the unmarked path before Flamel spotted it. “Stop. Go back. Turn here.”

Josh looked at his sister as he eased the car onto the rough, unpaved and rutted track. Her hands were folded in her lap, but he could see that her knuckles were white with tension. Her nails, which had been neat and perfect only a few hours previously, were now rough and chewed, a sure sign of her stress. He reached over and squeezed her hand; she squeezed tightly in return. As with so much of the communication between them, there was no need for words. With their parents away so much, Sophie and Josh had learned from a very early age that they could only really depend on themselves. Moving from school to school, neighborhood to neighborhood, they often found it difficult to make and keep friends, but they knew that whatever happened, they would always have each other.

On either side of the overgrown path, trees rose high into the heavens and the undergrowth was surprisingly thick: wild brambles and thorn bushes scraped at the side of the car, while furze, gorse, and stinging nettles, wrapped through with poison ivy, completed the impenetrable hedge.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Sophie murmured. “It’s just not natural.” And then she stopped, realizing what she’d just said. She swiveled around in the seat to look at Flamel. “It’s
not
natural, is it?”

He shook his head, suddenly looking old and tired. There were dark rings under his eyes, and the wrinkles on his forehead and around his mouth seemed deeper. “Welcome to our world,” he whispered.

“There’s something moving through the undergrowth,” Josh announced loudly. “Something big…I mean really big.” After everything he’d seen and experienced so far today, his imagination started working overtime. “It’s keeping pace with the car.”

“So long as we stay on the track, we shall be fine,” Flamel said evenly.

Sophie peered into the dark forest floor. For a moment she saw nothing, then she realized that what she’d first taken for a patch of shadow was, in fact, a creature. It moved, and sunlight dappled its hairy hide. She caught a glimpse of a flat face, a pug nose and huge curling tusks.

“It’s a pig—a boar,” she corrected herself. And then she spotted three more, flanking the right-hand side of the car.

“They’re on my side too,” Josh said. Four of the hulking beasts were moving through the bushes to his left. He glanced in the rearview mirror. “And behind us.”

Sophie, Scatty and Nicholas turned in their seats to stare through the rear window at the two enormous boars that had slipped through the undergrowth and were trotting along on the path behind them. Sophie suddenly realized just how big the creatures were—each one was easily the size of a pony. They were hugely muscled across the shoulders, and the tusks jutting up from their lower jaws were enormous, starting out as thick as her wrist before tapering to needle-sharp points.

“I didn’t think there were any wild boars in America,” Josh said, “and certainly not in Mill Valley, California.”

“There are wild boars and pigs all over the Americas,” Flamel said absently. “They were first brought over by the Spanish in the sixteenth century.”

Josh shifted gears, eased off the accelerator and allowed the car to move forward at a crawl. The road had come to a dead end. The barrier of bushes, thorns and trees now stretched across the path. “End of the road,” he announced, putting the car into park and setting the emergency brake. He looked left and right. The boars had also stopped moving, and he could see them, four to a side, watching. In the rearview mirror, he could see that the two larger boars had stopped too. They were boxed in. What now, he wondered, what now? He looked at his sister and knew she was thinking exactly the same thing.

Nicholas Flamel leaned forward between the seats and looked at the barrier. “I believe this is here to discourage the foolhardy who have traveled this far. And if one were exceptionally foolish, one might be tempted to get out of one’s vehicle.”

“But we are neither foolhardy nor foolish,” Scatty snapped. “So what do we do?” She nodded at the boars. “I haven’t seen this breed in centuries. They look like Gaulish war boars, and if they are, then they are virtually impossible to kill. For every one we can see, there are probably at least three more in the shadows, and that’s not counting their handlers.”

“These are not Gaulish; this particular breed has no need of handlers,” Flamel said gently, the merest hint of his French accent surfacing. “Look at their tusks.”

Sophie, Josh and Scatty turned to look at the tusks of the huge creatures standing in the middle of the track behind them. “They’ve got some sort of carvings on them,” Sophie said, squinting in the late-afternoon light. “Curls.”

“Spirals,” Scatty said, a touch of wonder in her voice. She looked at Flamel. “They are Torc Allta?”

“Indeed they are,” Flamel said. “Wereboars.”

“By wereboars,” Josh said, “do you mean like werewolves?”

Scatty shook her head impatiently. “No, not like werewolves…”

“That’s a relief,” Josh said, “because for a second there I thought you were taking about humans who changed into wolves.”

“Werewolves are Torc Madra,” Scatty continued, as if she hadn’t heard him. “They’re a different clan altogether.”

Sophie stared hard at the nearest boar. Beneath its piglike features, she thought she could begin to see the shapes and planes of a human face, while the eyes—cool and bright, bright blue—regarded her with startling intelligence.

Josh turned back to the steering wheel, gripping it tightly. “Wereboars…of course they are different from werewolves. Different clan entirely,” he muttered, “how silly of me.”

“What do we do?” Sophie asked.

“We drive,” Nicholas Flamel said.

Josh pointed at the barrier. “What about that?”

“Just drive,” the Alchemyst commanded.

“But…,” Josh began.

“Do you trust me?” Flamel asked for the second time that day. The twins looked at each other, then back at Flamel, and nodded, heads bobbing in unison. “Then drive,” he said gently.

Josh eased the heavy SUV into gear and released the emergency brake. The vehicle crept forward. The front bumper touched the seemingly impenetrable barrier of leaves and bushes…and vanished. One moment it was there; the next, it was as if the bushes had swallowed the front of the car.

The SUV rolled into the bushes and trees, and for a single instant everything went dark and chill, and the air was touched with something bittersweet like burnt sugar…and then the path appeared again, curving off to the right.

“How…,” Josh began.

“It was an illusion,” Flamel explained. “Nothing more. Light twisted and bent, reflecting the images of trees and bushes in a curtain of water vapor, each drop of moisture acting as a mirror. And just a little magic,” he added. He pointed ahead with a graceful motion. “We’re still in North America, but now we’ve entered the domain of one of the oldest and greatest of the Elder Race. We’ll be safe here for a while.”

Scatty made a rude sound. “Oh, she’s
old,
all right, but I’m not so sure about
great.
”

“Scathach, I want you to behave yourself,” Flamel said, turning to the young-looking but ancient woman sitting beside him.

“I don’t like her. I don’t trust her.”

“You’ve got to put aside your old feuds.”

“She tried to kill me, Nicholas,” Scatty protested. “She abandoned me in the Underworld. It took me centuries to find my way out.”

“That was a little over fifteen hundred years ago, if I remember my mythology,” Flamel reminded her.

“I’ve got a long memory,” Scatty muttered; for an instant she looked like a sulky child.

“Who are you talking about?” Sophie demanded, and then Josh hit the brakes, bringing the heavy car to a halt.

“Wouldn’t be a tall woman with black skin, would it? windshield” Josh asked.

Sophie spun around to look through the cracked, while Flamel and Scatty leaned forward.

“That’s her,” Scatty said glumly.

The figure stood in the path directly in front of the car. Tall and broad, the woman looked as if she had been carved from a solid slab of jet-black stone. The merest fuzz of white hair covered her skull like a close-fitting cap, and her features were sharp and angular: high cheekbones; straight, pointed nose; sharply defined chin; lips so thin they were almost nonexistent. Her pupils were the color of butter. She was wearing a long, simple gown made of a shimmering material that moved gently in a wind that didn’t seem to touch anything around her. As it shifted, rainbow colors ran down its length, like oil on water. She wore no jewelry, though Sophie noticed that each of her short blunt fingernails was painted a different color.

“Doesn’t look a day over ten thousand years old,” Scatty muttered.

“Be nice,” Flamel reminded her.

“Who is it?” Sophie asked again, staring hard at the woman. Although she looked human, there was something
different,
something otherworldly about her. It showed in the way she stood absolutely still and in the arrogant tilt of her head.

“This,” Nicholas Flamel said, a note of genuine awe in his voice, “is the Elder known as Hekate.” He pronounced the name slowly,
“HEH-ca-tay.”

“The Goddess with Three Faces,” Scatty added bitterly.