Nicholas Flamel 1 - The Alchemyst

And we don't stop for anything.

Josh turned the key in the ignition. There was a metallic click and a whining

sound, which quickly descended into silence. He turned the key again. This

time there was only the click.

Josh ? Sophie began.

It took him just a moment to figure out what had happened. The battery s

dead. Probably drained by the same force that drained our phones, Josh

murmured. He swiveled around in the seat to stare through the scarred rear

window. Look, we came down that path behind us; we didn't turn left or

right. Let s make a run for it. What do you think? He turned back to look at

his sister, but she wasn't looking at him, she was staring through the

windshield in front of her. You re not even listening to me.

Sophie reached over, took her twin s face in her hand and turned his head

toward the windshield. He looked, blinked, swallowed hard, then reached over

to push down the locks on the doors. What now? he asked.

Crouching directly in front of them was a creature that was neither bird nor

serpent, but something caught in between. It stood about the size of a tall

child. Moonlight dappled its snakelike body and shone weakly through

outstretched batlike wings, the tiny bones and veins etched in black. Clawed

feet dug deeply into the soft ground, and a long tail lashed to and fro

behind it. But it was the head that held their attention. The skull was long

and narrow, eyes huge and round, the gaping mouth filled with hundreds of

tiny white teeth. The head tilted first to one side and then the other, and

then the mouth snapped open and closed. The creature took a hop closer to the

car.

There was movement in the air behind it, and a second creature, even bigger

than the first, dropped from the night skies. It folded its wings and stood

upright as it turned its hideous head toward the car.

Maybe they re vegetarians, Josh suggested. Leaning over the driver s seat,

he rummaged in the back of the car, looking for something he could use as a

weapon.

Not with those teeth, his sister said grimly. I think they re pterosaurs,

she said, remembering the huge suspended skeleton she had seen in the Texas

Natural Science Center.

Like pterodactyls? Josh asked, turning back. He had found a small fire

extinguisher.

Pterosaurs are older, Sophie said.

A third pterosaur dropped from the night sky, and like three hunched old men,

the creatures began to advance on the car.

We should have stayed in the tree, Sophie muttered. They d been warned,

hadn't they? Stay in your rooms, don't leave and after everything they d seen

so far, they should have guessed that Hekate's Shadowrealm at night was a

dangerous and deadly place. Now they were facing something out of the

Cretaceous period.

Josh opened his mouth to reply, then closed it again. He pulled the retaining

pin out of the fire extinguisher, arming it. He wasn't sure what would happen

if he fired off a blast of the gas at them.

The three creatures split up. One approached from the front of the car; the

remaining two moved toward the driver and passenger windows.

Wish we knew some magic now, Sophie said fervently. She could feel her

heart tripping in her chest and was aware that her tongue seemed far too

large for her mouth. She felt breathless and light-headed.

The largest pterosaur leaned across the hood of the car, resting its huge

wings on the scarred metal to support itself. Its long, snakelike head darted

forward to peer into the body of the car, and it slowly looked from Sophie to

Josh and then back to Sophie. Seen this close, its mouth was enormous, its

teeth endless.

Josh positioned the nozzle of the fire extinguisher against one of the many

holes in the windshield and aimed it at the pterosaur. His eyes were darting

left and right, watching the approach of the other two creatures, and his

hands were sweating so heavily that he was finding it difficult to hold the

fire extinguisher.

Josh, Sophie whispered, do something. Do something now!

Maybe the gas in the extinguisher will scare them away, Josh replied,

unconsciously lowering his voice to a whisper. Or poison them or something

And why would you want to do that? The pterosaur tilted its head to look at

Josh, mouth working, teeth glinting. The words were full of clicking pops and

stops, but the language was English. We are not your enemy.

CHAPTER TWENTY

E ven for Bel Air, the area of L.A. renowned for its extravagant properties,

the house was extraordinary. Vast and sprawling, built entirely of white

travertine marble, and accessible only by a private road, it occupied a

sixty-acre estate surrounded by a twelve-foot wall topped by an electric

fence. Dr. John Dee had to wait for ten minutes outside the closed gates

while an armed security guard checked his identity and another guard examined

every inch of the car, even scanned beneath it with a small camera. Dee was

glad he d chosen a commercial limousine service, with a human driver; he

wasn't sure what the guards would have made of a mud Golem.

Dee had flown in from San Francisco late in the afternoon on his private jet.

The limousine, booked by his office, had picked him up from Burbank now

renamed Bob Hope Airport, he noted and driven him down to Sunset Boulevard

through some of the most appalling traffic he had encountered since he d

lived in Victorian London.

For the first time in his very long life, Dee felt as if events were slipping

out of his control. They were moving too quickly, and in his experience, that

was when accidents happened. He was being rushed by people well, not people,

exactly, more beings too eager for results. They had made him move against

Flamel today, even though he d told them he needed another few days of

preparation. And he d been right. Twenty-four more hours of planning and

surveillance would have enabled him to snatch Nicholas as well as Perenelle,

and the entire Codex. Dee had warned his employers that Nicholas Flamel could

be tricky indeed, but they hadn't listened to him. Dee knew Flamel better

than anyone. Over the centuries he had come close to catching him very