The Necromancer (2 page)

“N
ever thought I’d see this place again,” Nicholas Flamel said, pushing open the rear door to the Small Bookshop.

“Nor I,” Perenelle agreed.

The bottom of the door stuck and Nicholas pressed his shoulder against it and shoved hard. The door scraped on the stone floor and the stench hit them immediately: the slightly sweet stink of rotten wood and moldering paper mixed with the cloying rancid odor of decay. Perenelle coughed and pressed her hand to her mouth, blinking sudden tears from her eyes. “That’s foul!”

Nicholas inhaled cautiously. He could still smell traces of Dee’s brimstone odor on the dry air, the rotten-egg smell of sulfur. The couple moved down a dark corridor piled high on both sides with boxes of secondhand books. The cardboard boxes were streaked with black rot and the tops had started to curl. Some had burst apart, spilling their contents onto the floor.

Perenelle brushed a fingertip against one and it came away black with mold. She held it up for her husband to see and said, “Tell me?”

“The doctor and I fought,” he said softly.

“I can see that,” Perenelle said with a smile. “And you won.”

“Well, winning is a relative term.…” Nicholas opened the door at the end of the corridor and stepped into the bookshop. “I’m afraid the shop did not fare too well.” Reaching back, he took his wife’s hand and led her into the large book-filled room.

“Oh, Nicholas …,” Perenelle breathed.

The bookshop was ruined.

A thick layer of furry green-black mold covered everything, and the smell of sulfur was overwhelming. Books lay everywhere—pages torn, covers shredded, spines broken—among the crushed and splintered tables and shelves that had held them. A huge swath of the ceiling was missing, the plaster hanging like tattered cloth, revealing wooden joists and trailing wires, and where the entrance to the cellar had been was now a gaping hole, the wood around it rotted to a foul black mess speckled with mushrooms. Tiny wriggling white maggots crawled through the muck. The brightly colored rug that had once covered the center of the floor had shriveled to an ugly gray threadbare cloth.

“Destruction and decay,” Perenelle murmured, “Dee’s calling card.” The tall elegant woman picked her way carefully into the room. Everything she touched either crumbled to dust or dissolved into a powder that gave off spores. The floorboards were spongy and sticky and creaked ominously with each step, threatening to send her into the basement below. Standing in the middle of the room, she put her hands on her hips and turned slowly. Her huge green eyes filled with tears. She had loved this bookshop; it had been their home and their life for a decade. They had worked at many careers through the centuries, but this bookshop more than any other reminded her of her early life with Nicholas, when he had been a scrivener and bookseller in Paris in the fourteenth century. Then, they had been simple, ordinary people, living unremarkable lives, until that fateful day when Nicholas had bought the Codex, the Book of Abraham the Mage, from the hooded man with astonishingly blue eyes. That was the day their mundane lives ended and they entered the world of the extraordinary, where nothing was as it seemed and no one could be trusted.

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.

“Y
ou 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 had 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—”