"I don't know," Josh said truthfully.

The old woman folded her arms and squinted up at him. "You mean she just left without even stopping in to say h.e.l.lo?"

"Something important must have come up," Josh said, plastering a smile on his face, even though he felt sick inside.

"I don't know what's gotten into the pair of you," Aunt Agnes was muttering. "Staying away from home for days... not even bothering to call... The young people of today have no respect..."

Josh started to climb the stairs.

"And where do you think you're going?"

"To my room," Josh said. He knew he needed to walk away from his aunt before he said something he was going to regret.

"Well, you can just stay there, young man. I've got a feeling you're both going to be grounded for quite some time! You need to learn some respect for your elders."

Josh tried to ignore his aunt as he continued up to his bedroom and closed the door behind him. He leaned back against the cool wood, then closed his eyes and took a deep breath, trying to calm the queasy feeling in his stomach.

Sophie was gone. She was in danger.

Aoife had his sister and he had no idea why-though he knew it couldn't be good. Was Aoife working for the Dark Elders? Why had she taken Sophie-and then why had she run from him? Even though he was scared and exhausted, Josh couldn't prevent a wry smile from forming on his lips. When he'd run out of the house, Aoife hadn't appeared scared, she had looked arrogant, and when he'd asked her to return his sister, she had been quick to say no. But then something had frightened the vampire. Maybe it was the way his aura had started to form a golden armor around his body. Josh lifted his hands and looked at them. They were flesh and blood now, the skin on his palms sc.r.a.ped and bruised where he'd fallen, his fingernails chipped and dirty. But only a short while ago they had been encased in golden gloves. He remembered how the gold had flowed down his hands to cover the two halves of the broken walking stick, turning them to bars of metal. When he'd struck the car, they had ripped through the gla.s.s and steel with ease. But the moment he'd thrown the stick after the car, the instant it had left his hand, it had returned to wood. Josh suddenly remembered the story of the Greek king Midas. Everything he touched turned to gold. Maybe the ancient king had possessed a gold aura.

And then Josh's smile faded. He had failed his sister. He should have kept running; he might have caught up with the car. Maybe if he'd somehow managed to focus his aura, he would have been able to do something... though he wasn't really sure what.

He would find her, he vowed.

Dropping to his hands and knees, he pulled his backpack out from under his bed. He then stood and began opening drawers, dragging out clothes and shoving them into the bag: socks and underwear, a spare pair of jeans, a couple of T-shirts. He stripped off the grimy clothes he'd been wearing since Paris, dumped them into the wicker basket at the end of the bed and pulled out clean clothes. Before he tugged on his red 49ers Faithful T-shirt, he removed the cloth bag hanging around his neck and sat down on the edge of his bed. He opened the bag and peered inside. It held the two pages he'd torn from the Codex last week. According to the Alchemyst, they contained the Final Summoning, which Dee needed to bring back the Dark Elders.

Josh shook the pages out onto the bed beside him. Then he lined them up side by side. They were about six inches across by nine inches tall and looked as if they had been made out of pressed bark and leaf fibers.

The last time he'd really looked at the pages they had been on the floor of the ruined bookshop and both he and his sister had been dazed and confused by everything they'd just witnessed. When he'd looked at the pages then, he could have sworn that the words were moving, but now they weren't.

Both pages were covered front and back with jagged writing. He'd seen similar carvings on ancient artifacts in his father's office, and he believed that the writing looked a lot like Sumerian. One letter-which he thought might be the initial letter-was beautifully colored in vivid golds and reds, while the rest was in black ink that was still crisp even after countless centuries. Picking up a page, he held it to the light.

And blinked in astonishment.

The words were moving. They slowly crawled, shifted and rearranged themselves on the page, forming words, sentences, paragraphs in countless languages. Some of the letters were almost recognizable-he saw pictographs and runes and he was able to pick out individual Greek letters, but most were completely alien.

A phrase in Latin caught his eye: magnum opus. He knew it meant "great work." He traced the words with his index finger... and the moment his flesh touched the page, heat blossomed deep in his stomach and his finger started to smoke with a warm orange glow. He then noticed that while all the other letters around the simple phrase changed into a score of other scripts and languages, the ten letters beneath his fingertip remained fixed. The moment he lifted his hand away, the letters disappeared. Running his fingertips lightly over the pages, he watched in awe as whole sentences shifted and formed beneath his flesh. He wished his mother or father were here: they would be able to translate some of the ancient languages. There were hints of Latin and Greek scattered in the text, and he recognized a few Egyptian hieroglyphs and one of the square Mayan glyphs.

Mindful of the Flamels' warning about using his aura, Josh carefully lifted his hand and the text flowed in chaos again. He slipped the pages back into the hand-sewn cloth bag and draped it around his neck. It felt warm against his skin. He wasn't entirely sure what he'd just discovered, but he recalled that when Flamel had touched the page the previous week, the words hadn't stopped moving for him. Josh flexed his fingers: it was obviously something to do with his aura. He kicked his ruined sneakers under the bed, then opened the wardrobe and pulled out the walking boots he used when he went hiking with his father, and pulled them on. Then he slung the backpack over his shoulder and pressed his ear against the bedroom door, listening intently.

He could hear his aunt in the kitchen... could hear water boiling in the kettle... the fridge door opening... the clink of a spoon against the side of a china cup... the radio tuned to NPR.

Josh jerked his head back. The kitchen was at the very rear of the house; there was no way he should be able to hear those things. And then he realized that the faintest wisp of golden smoke had gathered in his palm. Bringing his hand to his face, he wondered at the physical evidence of his aura. It looked like the dry ice he'd seen in chemistry cla.s.s, except that it was a faint golden color and smelled strongly of oranges. As he watched, the foglike vapor sank back into his palm and disappeared. Josh closed his hand into a fist, squeezing hard. He'd watched his sister create a silver glove around her hand, and in the street, only a few minutes earlier, he'd seen a similar gauntlet appear over his own without even thinking about it. But what would happen if he deliberately focused on seeing his left hand encased in a gauntlet? Immediately, his skin sparked, glittering with speckles. The faintest impression of a golden glove surrounded his hand. As he watched, a studded metal gauntlet formed around his flesh, the fingers tipped with pointed golden nails. Josh made a fist again. The glove closed with the sound of metal rasping on metal.

"Josh Newman!"

Aunt Agnes's voice on the other side of the door made him jump. He'd been concentrating so hard on creating the glove that he hadn't heard her come up the stairs. His aura dissipated, the glove drifting away in curls of golden smoke.

Agnes pounded on the door. "Didn't you hear me calling you?"

Josh sighed. "No," he said truthfully.

"Well, I've made some tea. Come down now before it gets cold." She paused and added, "I made some fresh m.u.f.fins this morning also."

"Great." Josh felt his stomach rumble; Aunt Agnes made the best m.u.f.fins. "I'm just getting changed. I'll be right down." He waited until he heard his aunt shuffle away, her flat-soled shoes rubbing the carpet. Then he looked at his hand again and smiled broadly at a sudden thought. If he was able to mold his aura without training, then that meant he had to be more powerful than his sister.

Settling his backpack over both shoulders, he inched open the door and listened with his enhanced senses. He could actually hear his aunt pouring tea from the pot into a cup, could smell the tannin of fresh black tea and the richer odor of warm pastry. His stomach rumbled again and he felt his mouth fill with saliva: he could almost taste the b.u.t.tery cake. He wondered if he could stop for just one... but that would mean sitting down with Aunt Agnes, and she'd want to know all the details of the past few days. He'd be there for an hour-and he couldn't afford to waste the time.

He padded silently down the stairs, cracked open the front door and slipped out into the cool San Francisco morning. "Sorry, Aunty," he muttered, pulling the door silently closed behind him. She was going to be furious when she discovered he'd left. She'd probably call his parents, and he had no idea what explanation he was going to give them.

What he did know was that he was not returning to the house in Pacific Heights without his sister.

CHAPTER EIGHT.

Agnes heard the hall door close and padded out of the kitchen. She blinked at the door and then tilted her head to one side, listening. "Josh?" she called.

The house was silent.

"Josh?" she called again, her voice cracking with the effort. "Where is that boy?" she muttered. "Josh Newman, you come down here right this minute!" she shouted.

There was no response.

Shaking her head, the old woman prepared to climb the stairs again when something crunched under her slippers. She bent painfully to lift it off the carpet. It was a chunk of dried and hardened mud. Agnes squinted at the stairs. They'd been spotless when she'd walked down them only a few moments earlier, but now, all the way up to the second floor, they were covered in fragments of mud. Someone had followed her down, wearing old muddy boots. Turning her head sharply, she spotted the telltale traces of mud on the floor leading straight to the door.

"Josh Newman," she whispered, very softly, "what have you done?"

Moving as quickly as her arthritic hips would allow, she hurried upstairs and pushed open the door to Josh's room without knocking. She immediately spotted the dirty clothes tossed in the basket and the filthy sneakers shoved under the bed. She opened the wardrobe and found the s.p.a.ce where the walking boots had been.

Standing in the center of the room, she turned slowly, conscious that there was something odd in the atmosphere. Her senses were no longer as sharp as they had once been; age had robbed her sight and hearing of their acuity... but her sense of smell remained strong. The still, dry air of the room was touched with the sweet odor of oranges.

The old woman sighed and fished her cell phone out of her pocket. She wasn't looking forward to telling Richard and Sara Newman that their children had vanished. Again.

Some guardian she'd turned out to be!

CHAPTER NINE.

"I can smell Dee's stink on everything," Perenelle complained. She had showered and changed into fresh clothes: stonewashed blue jeans, a beautifully embroidered Egyptian cotton shirt and a pair of boots that had been handmade for her in New York in 1901. Her still-damp hair was pulled back off her face and tied into a thick ponytail. Lifting a heavy woolen sweater from a carved chest of drawers, she pressed it to her face and breathed deeply. "Ugh! Rotten eggs."

Nicholas nodded. He too had showered and changed into one of his almost identical combinations of black jeans and T-shirts. This shirt had the iconic Dark Side of the Moon design on the front. "Everything organic is starting to rot," he said. He held up a hideously tie-dyed T-shirt. It was dusted with mold spores, and much of the bottom half of the shirt had decayed to curling threads. Even as he held it up for inspection, one of the arms tore away. "I got that at Woodstock," he complained.

"No, you didn't," Perenelle corrected him. "You bought it in a vintage store on Ventura Boulevard about ten years ago."

"Oh." Nicholas held the destroyed shirt up again. "Are you sure?"

"Positive. You didn't go to Woodstock."

"I didn't?" Nicholas sounded surprised.

"You didn't go when Jethro Tull decided not to attend and Joni Mitch.e.l.l pulled out. You said it would be a waste of time." Perenelle smiled. She was busy with the lock on a heavy steamer trunk at the foot of the bed. "In fact, you said that several times."

"Something else I was wrong about, then." He looked around the bedroom and then pressed his foot against the floorboards. "I don't think we should hang around here. I've a feeling the floor could give way at any moment."

"I just need a minute." The fist-sized lock clicked open and the woman heaved the lid back. The faint odor of roses and exotic spices filled the air. Nicholas joined his wife and watched as she carefully brushed dried rose petals off the leather-wrapped bundle within. "Do you remember when we last packed up this box?" she asked softly, unconsciously slipping back into French.

"New Mexico, 1945," he said immediately.

Perenelle nodded. Peeling back the leather covering, she revealed an ancient-looking carved wooden box. "You wanted to bury it at the Trinity Site so that the first atomic bomb would destroy it."

"And you would not let me," he said reminding her.

Perenelle looked up at her husband and a shadow moved behind her eyes. "I am the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter. I know..." She paused, and a look of terrible sadness touched her face. "I know certain things."

Nicholas rested his hand lightly on her shoulder and squeezed. "And you knew we would need these items?"

Perenelle looked back at the box without answering and then lifted the lid. Inside lay a thick coiled silver and black leather whip. She wrapped her long fingers around the dark handle and lifted it, the leather rasping and creaking softly together. "Now, here's an old friend," she murmured.

Nicholas shuddered. "It is detestable."

"Ah, but it saved our lives on more than one occasion," Pernelle said, winding it around her waist, threading it through the loops on her jeans like a belt. The handle hung down by her right leg.

"It is woven from snakes you pulled from the Medusa's hair," Nicholas reminded her. "Do you know how close we came to dying that day?"

"Well, technically, we would not have died," Perenelle said. "She would have solidified our auras..."

"... turning us to stone," Nicholas finished.

"Besides," Perenelle added with a grin, patting the wooden box, "we got what we wanted, and it was worth it to see the expression on the Gorgon's face when we escaped." Reaching into the chest, she pulled out another box. "And this is yours," she said.

Nicholas rubbed suddenly damp palms on the legs of his trousers, but made no move to take the box from his wife. "Perry," he said quietly, "are you sure about this?"

The Sorceress's green eyes turned hard and brittle. "Sure about what?" she snapped. She came gracefully to her feet, the wooden box cradled in her arms. "Sure about what?" she asked again, anger clearly audible in her voice. "What are we waiting for, Nicholas? We have waited so long now that we have run out of time. You have weeks to live..."

"Don't say that," he said quickly.

"Why not? It's true. If I survive a week or ten days after you, then I'll be lucky. But do you know something: we are both going to live long enough to see the end of the world as we know it. The Dark Elders have most of the Codex, and Litha is fast approaching. There are Dark Elders moving freely through the world, and you told me that there was an Archon in London." She pointed in the direction of the bay. "And Alcatraz is full of monsters ready to be loosed on the city. There are creatures there I have not seen in centuries."

Nicholas held up his hands in surrender, but Perenelle was not finished.

"What will happen, do you think, if San Francisco is overrun by nightmares from the dark edges of human mythology? Tell me," she demanded. "You've studied history and human nature, tell me what would happen." Anger sent static crackles running along her hair. "Tell me!"

"There would be chaos," he admitted.

"How long before the city fell?" The elastic band holding her ponytail in place snapped and her mane of silver-streaked dark hair rose in a crackling sheet around her head. "Weeks, days or hours? And once this city is a smoking ruin, you know the creatures will spread out across America like a disease. How long do you think the humani-even with all their weapons and sophisticated technology-would be able to survive against the monsters?"

The Alchemyst shook his head and shrugged.

"They have brought down civilizations before," Perenelle said. "The last time the Dark Elders released monsters onto this world, the Elders were forced to destroy Pompeii."

Nicholas reached out and silently took the wooden box from his wife's arms.

"The last thing we do, Nicholas, before old age and death claim us, is to destroy the army on Alcatraz. And for that, we need allies." She tapped the lid of the box with the palm of her hand. "We need this."

The Alchemyst turned and placed the box on the bed. Its sides had been etched with a triple spiral, and he allowed his fingers to trace the curls. He'd bought the box in a backstreet in Delhi in India, just over three hundred years ago, and then sketched the spiral design on it with a stick of charcoal. A local craftsman had cut the shape into the four sides of the box, and then on the lid and the base. "In my country, this is an ancient powerful symbol of protection," the tiny wizened man had muttered in Hindi, not expecting the foreigner to understand him. He had been shocked when the Westerner had lifted the box from his hands and replied in the same language, "In mine too."

There was neither lock nor clasp on the box, and Nicholas carefully lifted off the carved lid and placed it on the bed. A hint of jasmine and exotic spices touched the air: the unmistakable odor of India. He was reaching into the cloth-packed interior, when Perenelle suddenly grabbed his arm, her fingers biting into his flesh. He watched as she carefully lifted her hair and tilted her head to one side. She was listening.

And then Nicholas heard it: someone was moving stealthily through the shop below.

CHAPTER TEN.

None of the late-evening tourists crowding noisily into Covent Garden in London paid any attention to the tall slender woman with the cascade of jet-black hair. She had taken up a position between two of the pillars in front of the Punch & Judy Pub and placed a square of soft leather painted with red curling spirals on the cobbles at her feet. Finally, she unwrapped a carved wooden flute from a leather cover, put the flute to her lips, closed her eyes, and blew gently.

The sound was extraordinary.

Magnified by the stone pillars, the haunting, ethereal music drifted out across Covent Garden, washing over the cobbles stopping everyone in their tracks. Within minutes a crowd had gathered in a half circle around the woman.

Standing perfectly still, she played with her eyes closed. It was a tune none of the listeners recognized, though many found it vaguely familiar and discovered that their fingers or toes were tapping along with the beat. A few were even moved to tears.

Then, finally, the ancient-sounding wordless music ended with a single high-pitched note that sounded like distant birds flying overhead. There was a long moment of silence and the musician opened her eyes and bowed slightly. The crowd applauded and cheered, and most immediately started to drift away toward the Apple Market. A few dropped money-British sterling, American coins and euros-onto the leather cloth and two people asked if the musician had a CD of her music for sale, but she shook her head and explained that every performance was different and unique. She thanked them for their interest in a soft whispering voice that had just the hint of an American East Coast accent.

Finally, only one listener remained: an older man who watched her intently, gray eyes following her every movement as she wiped down the flute and slid it back into what was obviously a handmade leather case. He waited until she had stooped to gather up the red leather cloth with its scattering of coins and then stepped forward and dropped a fifty-pound note onto the ground. The woman picked it up and looked at the man, but he had positioned himself so that the light was behind his head, leaving his face in shadow. "There is another fifty if you'll spare me a few minutes of your time."

The woman straightened. "Now, there's a voice from my past." She was taller than the man, and while her elegant fine-boned face remained expressionless, her slate-gray eyes danced with amus.e.m.e.nt. "Dr. John Dee," she murmured in an accent that had not been heard in England since the time of Queen Elizabeth in the sixteenth century.

"Miss Virginia Dare," Dee replied, slipping easily into the same accent. He moved his head and the evening light ran across his face. "It is good to see you again."

"I cannot say the same." The woman glanced quickly left and right, nostrils flaring. Her tongue flickered, like a snake's, almost as if she was tasting the air. "I'm not sure I want to be seen with you. You have been marked for death, Doctor. The same mercenaries who only yesterday hunted the Alchemyst are now looking for you." There was nothing friendly about the smile that curled her lips. "How do you know I will not kill you and claim the reward?"

"Well, two reasons, really. First, I know my masters want me alive, and second, because there is little our Dark Elder masters could offer you that you do not already have," Dee said, smiling easily. "You are already immortal, and you have no one to call master."