The Magician Read online

  “You asked her to create fog,” Josh said quickly, accusingly.

  Nicholas spread his arms. “What else could I do?”

  “I…I don’t know,” Josh admitted. “There must have been something you could do. I’ve seen you throw spears of green energy.”

  “The fog allowed us to escape without harming anyone,” Flamel said.

  “Except Sophie,” Josh replied bitterly.

  Flamel looked at him for a long moment and then turned away. “Let’s go.” He nodded toward a side street that sloped sharply downward, and they hurried into the night, Scathach effortlessly carrying Sophie, Josh struggling to keep up. He was not going to leave his sister’s side.

  “Where to?” Scathach asked.

  “We need to get off the streets,” Flamel murmured. “It looks like every gendarme in the city has descended on Sacré-Coeur. I also saw special forces and plainclothes police that I guess are secret service. Once they realize we’re not in the church, they’ll probably cordon off the area and do a street-by-street search.”

  Scathach smiled quickly, her long incisors briefly visible against her lips. “And let’s face it: we’re not exactly inconspicuous.”

  “We need to find a place to—” Nicholas Flamel began.

  The police officer who came racing around the corner looked to be no more than nineteen—tall, thin and gangly—with bright red cheeks and the fuzzy beginnings of a mustache on his upper lip. One hand was on his holster; the other was holding on to his hat. He skidded to a halt directly in front of them and managed a quick yelp of surprise as he fumbled for the gun in its holster. “Hey! Arrêtez!”

  Nicholas lunged forward and Josh actually saw the green mist flow from the Alchemyst’s hand before his fingers brushed against the gendarme’s chest. Emerald light flared around the police officer’s body, outlining it in brilliant green, and then the man simply folded to the ground.

  “What did you do?” Josh asked in a horrified whisper. He looked at the young police officer lying still, and was suddenly chilled and sickened. “You didn’t…you didn’t…kill him?”

  “No,” Flamel said tiredly. “Just overloaded his aura. Bit like an electric shock. He’ll awaken shortly with a headache.” He pressed his fingertips to his forehead, massaging just over his left eye. “I hope it’ll not be as bad as mine,” he added.

  “You do know,” Scathach said grimly, “that your little display will have alerted Machiavelli to our position.” Her nostrils flared and Josh breathed deeply; the air around them stank of peppermint: the distinctive odor of Nicholas Flamel’s power.

  “What else could I do?” Nicholas protested. “You had your hands full.”

  Scatty curled her lips in disgust. “I could have taken him. Remember, who got you out of Lubyanka Prison with both hands manacled behind my back?”

  “What are you talking about? Where’s Lubyanka?” Josh asked, confused.

  “Moscow.” Nicholas glanced sidelong at Josh. “Don’t ask; it’s a long story,” he murmured.

  “He was going to be shot as a spy,” Scathach said gleefully.

  “A very long story,” Flamel repeated.

  Following Scathach and Flamel through the winding streets of Montmartre, Josh thought back to how John Dee had described Nicholas Flamel to him only the day before.

  “He has been many things in his time: a physician and a cook, a bookseller, a soldier, a teacher of languages and chemistry, both an officer of the law and a thief. But he is now, and has always been, a liar, a charlatan and a crook.”

  And a spy, Josh added. He wondered if Dee knew that. He peered at the rather ordinary-looking man: with his close-cropped hair and his pale eyes, in his black jeans and T-shirt under a battered black leather jacket, he would have passed unnoticed on any street in any city in the world. And yet he was anything but ordinary: born in the year 1330, he claimed to be working for the good of humanity, by keeping the Codex away from Dee and the shadowy and terrifying creatures he served, the Dark Elders.

  But whom did Flamel serve? Josh wondered. Just who was the immortal Nicholas Flamel?

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Keeping a tight rein on his temper, Niccolò Machiavelli strode down the steps of Sacré-Coeur, the fog curling and swirling behind him like a cloak. Although the air was beginning to clear, it was still touched with the odor of vanilla. Machiavelli threw his head back and breathed deeply, drawing the smell into his nostrils. He would remember this scent; it was as distinctive as a fingerprint. Everyone on the planet possessed an aura—the electrical field that surrounded the human body—and when that electrical field was focused and directed, it interacted with the user’s endorphin system and adrenal glands to produce a distinctive odor unique to that person: a signature scent. Machiavelli took a final breath. He could almost taste the vanilla on the air, crisp, clear and pure: the scent of raw untrained power.

  And in that moment, Machiavelli knew beyond a doubt that Dee was correct: this was the odor of one of the legendary twins.

  “I want the entire area sealed off,” Machiavelli snapped to the semicircle of high-ranking police who had gathered at the bottom of the steps in the Square Willette. “Cordon off every street, alleyway and lane from the Rue Custine to the Rue Caulaincourt, from the Boulevard de Clichy to the Boulevard de Rochechouart and the Rue de Clignancourt. I want these people found!”

  “You are suggesting closing down Montmartre,” a deeply tanned police officer said in the silence that followed. He looked to his colleagues for support, but none of them would meet his eye. “It’s the height of the tourist season,” he protested, turning back to Machiavelli.

  Machiavelli rounded on the captain, his face as impassive as the masks he collected. His cold gray eyes bored into the man, but when he spoke his voice was even and controlled, barely above a whisper. “You know who I am?” he asked mildly.

  The captain, a decorated veteran of the French Foreign Legion, felt something cold and sour at the back of his throat as he looked into the man’s stony eyes. Licking suddenly dry lips, he said, “You are Monsieur Machiavelli, the new head of the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure. But this is a police matter, sir, not an external security matter. You have no authority—”

  “I am making this a DGSE matter,” Machiavelli interrupted softly. “My powers come directly from the president. I will shut down this entire city if necessary. I want these people found. Tonight, a catastrophe was averted.” He waved his hand vaguely in the direction of Sacré-Coeur, now beginning to appear out of the thinning mist. “Who knows what other terrors they have planned? I want a progress report on the hour, every hour,” he finished, and without waiting for a response turned and marched over to his car, where his dark-suited driver waited, arms folded across his massive chest. The driver, face half hidden behind wraparound mirrored sunglasses, opened the door and then closed it gently behind Machiavelli. After he had climbed into the car, the driver sat patiently, black gloved hands resting lightly on the leather steering wheel, and awaited instructions. The sheet of privacy glass that separated the driver’s section from the back of the car buzzed down.

  “Flamel is in Paris. Where would he go?” Machiavelli asked without preamble.

  The creature known as Dagon had served Machiavelli for close to four hundred years. It was the name by which he had been known for millennia, and despite his appearance, he had never been even remotely human. Turning in the seat, he pulled off his mirrored sunglasses. In the dim car interior, his eyes were bulbous and fishlike, huge and liquid behind a clear, glassy film: he had no eyelids. When he spoke, two rows of tiny ragged teeth were visible behind his thin lips. “Who are his allies?” Dagon asked, shifting from deplorable French to appalling Italian before dropping back to the bubbling, liquid language of his long-lost youth.

  “Flamel and his wife have always been loners,” Machiavelli said. “That is why they have survived for so long. To the best of my knowledge, they have not lived in this city since the e
nd of the eighteenth century.” He pulled out his slender black laptop and ran his index finger over the integrated fingerprint reader. The machine blipped and the screen blinked to life.

  “If they came through a leygate, then they came unprepared,” Dagon said wetly. “No money, no passports, no clothes other than those they were wearing.”

  “Exactly,” Machiavelli whispered. “So they’re going to need to find themselves an ally.”

  “Humani or immortal?” Dagon asked.

  Machiavelli took a moment to consider. “An immortal,” he said finally. “I’m not sure they know many humani in this city.”

  “So which immortals are currently living in Paris?” Dagon asked.

  The Italian’s fingers hit a complicated series of keystrokes and the screen scrolled to reveal a directory called Temp. There were dozens of .jpg, .bmp and .tmp files in the directory. Machiavelli highlighted one and hit Enter. A box appeared in the center of the screen.

  Enter Password.

  His slender fingers clicked across the keyboard as he typed in the password Del modo di trattare i sudditi della Val di Chiana ribellati, and a database encoded with unbreakable 256-bit AES encryption, the same encryption used by most governments for their top-secret files, blinked open. Over the course of his long life, Niccolò Machiavelli had amassed a huge fortune, but he considered this single file to be his most valuable treasure. It was a complete dossier on every immortal human still living in the twenty-first century, compiled by his network of spies across the globe—most of whom didn’t even know they were working for him. He scrolled through the names. Not even his own Dark Elder masters knew he possessed this list, and he was sure some would be very unhappy if they were to discover that he also knew the locations and attributes of almost all the Elders and Dark Elders still walking the earth or in the Shadowrealms that bordered this world.

  Knowledge, as Machiavelli well knew, was power.

  Although there were three screens devoted to Nicholas and Perenelle Flamel, hard information was scarce. There were hundreds of entries, each one a reported sighting of the Flamels since their supposed deaths in 1418. They had been seen on just about every continent in the world—except Australia. For the past 150 years, they had lived on the North American continent, with the first confirmed and verified sighting of the last century taking place in Buffalo, New York, in September 1901. He skipped to the section marked Known Immortal Associates. It was blank.

  “Nothing. I have no records of the Flamels’ associating with other immortals.”

  “But now he is back in Paris,” Dagon said, bubbles of liquid forming on his lips as he spoke. “He will seek out old friends. People behave differently at home,” he added; “their guard comes down. And no matter how long Flamel has lived away from this city, he will still consider it his home.”

  Niccolò Machiavelli looked over the top of the computer screen. He was reminded yet again of how little he knew about his faithful employee. “And where is your home, Dagon?” he asked.

  “Gone. Long gone.” A translucent skin flickered across the huge globes of his eyes.

  “Why have you remained with me?” Machiavelli wondered aloud. “Why have you not sought out others of your kind?”

  “They too are gone. I am the last of my kind, and besides, you are not that dissimilar to me.”

  “But you are not human,” Machiavelli said softly.

  “Are you?” Dagon asked, eyes wide and unblinking.

  Machiavelli took a long moment before finally nodding and returning to the screen. “So we’re looking for someone the Flamels would have known when they were still living here. And we know they haven’t been in the city since the eighteenth century, so let us limit our search to immortals who were around then.” His fingers tapped the keys, filtering the results. “Seven only. Five are loyal to us.”

  “And the other two?”

  “Catherine de Medici is living off the Rue du Dragon.”

  “She’s not French,” Dagon mumbled stickily.

  “Well, she was the mother of three French kings,” Machiavelli said with a rare smile. “But she is loyal only to herself….” His voice trailed away and he straightened. “But what do we have here?”

  Dagon remained unmoving.

  Niccolò Machiavelli swiveled the computer screen so that his servant could see the photograph of a man staring directly at the camera in what was obviously a posed publicity shot. Thick curling black hair tumbled to his shoulders, framing a round face. His eyes were startlingly blue.

  “I do not know this man,” Dagon said.

  “Oh, but I do. I know him very well. This is the immortal human once known as the Comte de Saint-Germain. He was a magician, an inventor, a musician…and an alchemist.” Machiavelli closed the program and shut down the computer. “Saint-Germain was also the student of Nicholas Flamel. And he’s currently living in Paris,” he finished triumphantly.

  Dagon smiled, his mouth a perfect O filled with razor teeth. “Does Flamel know that Saint-Germain is here?”

  “I have no idea. No one knows the extent of Nicholas Flamel’s knowledge.”

  Dagon pushed his sunglasses back in place. “And I thought you knew everything.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “We need to rest,” Josh said finally. “I can’t go any farther.” He stopped and leaned against a building, bent over and wheezing. Every breath was an effort, and he was beginning to see black spots dancing in front of his eyes. Any moment now he was going to throw up. He felt this way sometimes after football practice, and he knew from experience that he needed to sit and get some liquids into his system.

  “He’s right.” Scatty turned to Flamel. “We need to rest, even if only briefly. She was still carrying Sophie in her arms, and with gray glimmers of light illuminating the Parisian rooftops toward the east, the first of the early-morning workers had begun to appear. The fugitives had kept to the dark side streets, and so far no one had paid any attention to the strange group, but that would quickly change as the street filled first with Parisians, then with tourists.

  Nicholas stood outlined at the mouth of the narrow street. He glanced up and down before turning to look over his shoulder. “We have to push on,” he protested. “Every second we delay brings Machiavelli closer to us.”

  “We can’t,” Scatty said. She looked at Flamel, and for a single instant, her bright green eyes glowed. “The twins need to rest,” she said, and then added softly, “And so do you, Nicholas. You’re exhausted.”

  The Alchemyst considered her and then he nodded and his shoulders slumped. “You’re right, of course. I’ll do as you say.”

  “Maybe we could check into a hotel?” Josh suggested. He was achingly tired, his eyes and throat gritty, head throbbing.

  Scatty shook her head. “They would ask for our passports….” Sophie stirred in her arms, and Scathach gently eased her to the ground and leaned her up against the wall.

  Josh was immediately by her side. “You’re awake,” he said, relief in his voice.

  “I wasn’t really asleep,” Sophie answered, her tongue feeling too big for her mouth. “I knew what was going on, but it was as if I was looking at it from the outside. Like watching something on TV.” She pressed her hands into the small of her back and pushed hard as she rotated her neck. “Ouch. That hurt.”

  “What hurts?” Josh asked immediately.

  “Everything.” She attempted to straighten, but aching muscles protested and a sick headache pulsed behind her eyes.

  “Is there anyone here you can call for help?” Josh looked from Nicholas to Scathach. “Are there any more immortals or Elders?”

  “There are immortals and Elders everywhere,” Scatty said. “Few are as friendly as we are, though,” she added with a humorless smile.

  “There will be immortals in Paris,” Flamel agreed slowly, “but I’ve no idea where to find one, and even if I did, I would have no idea where their allegiances lay. Perenelle would know,” he added, a hint
of sadness in his voice.

  “Would your grandmother know?” Josh asked Scatty.

  The Warrior glanced at him. “I’m sure she would.” She turned to look at Sophie. “Amongst all of your new memories, can you recall anything about immortals or Elders living in Paris?”

  Sophie closed her eyes and tried to concentrate, but the scenes and images that flashed by—fire raining from a bloodred sky, a huge flat-topped pyramid about to be overwhelmed by a gigantic wave—were chaotic and terrifying. She started to shake her head, then stopped. Even the simplest of movements hurt. “I can’t think,” she sighed. “My head is so full, it feels like it’s going to burst.”

  “The Witch might know,” Flamel said, “but we have no way of getting in touch with her. She has no phone.”

  “What about her neighbors, friends?” Josh asked. He turned back to his sister. “I know you don’t want to think about this, but you have to. It’s important.”

  “I can’t think…,” Sophie began, looking away and shaking her head.

  “Don’t think. Just answer,” Josh snapped. He took a quick breath and lowered his voice, speaking slowly. “Sis, who is the Witch of Endor’s closest friend in Ojai?”

  Sophie’s bright blue eyes closed again and she swayed as if she was about to faint. When her eyes opened, she shook her head. “She has no friends there. But everyone knows her. Maybe we could call the store next to hers…,” she suggested. Then she shook her head. “It’s too late there.”

  Flamel nodded. “Sophie’s right; it’ll be closed at this time of night.”

  “It’ll be closed, all right,” Josh agreed, a touch of excitement entering his voice, “but when we left Ojai, the place was in chaos. And don’t forget, I drove a Hummer into the fountain in Libbey Park; that had to have caught someone’s attention. I’ll bet the police and the press are there right now. And the press might answer some questions if we ask the right ones. I mean, if the Witch’s shop was damaged they’re sure to be looking for a story.”