Michael Scott - The Necromancer

And facing her: the figure of a hooded man who had a hook in place of his left hand, and alongside him, a red-haired pale-skinned female warrior.

“Coat-” he began, but his voice faltered.

Dee stepped forward out of the shadows. “Josh, is everything all right?”

“I’m… I’m not sure,” he said, pressing his hand to his forehead. “I suddenly have a splitting headache. This Coatlicue…” He licked his lips. “What is she like?”

“When she was an Archon, she was considered extraordinarily beautiful,” Dee said carefully. “Why do you ask?”

“I keep thinking about snakes, and I hate snakes, I really do.” Josh pressed both hands to his throbbing head and squeezed his eyes shut. He’d never experienced agony like it before. It felt as if his head were about to explode. Was this a migraine? Even doing something as simple as moving his eyes sent daggers of pain into his skull.

“How bad is the headache?” Dee asked, glancing at Virginia. “Have you any painkillers?”

“I am an Awakened immortal, don’t be ridiculous,” she said with a roll of her eyes. “I’ll wager that headache is not natural.”

“Migraine,” Josh whispered. “I’ll have to stop. Can you take over?” he gasped.

“Coatlicue will only deal with whoever calls her,” Dee muttered. He put his hand under Josh’s chin and tilted it up so that he could look into the boy’s eyes. “You can trust me. I am a doctor.” The boy’s eye color had started to change, the red beginning to fade, traces of white and the original blue returning. “Do you suffer from migraines normally?”

“No. Never had one before in my life. Aunt Agnes gets them all the time. But these aren’t normal times, are they?” Josh said through gritted teeth. His stomach had started to turn and he thought he might throw up.

“No, they’re certainly not,” Dee said very softly, looking deep into Josh’s eyes…

Seventy miles away, in Point Reyes, Nicholas and Perenelle reared back as Dee looked directly at them.

Prometheus had pressed both hands onto the crystal skull, which was now pulsing like a giant beating heart. The Elder’s eyes were squeezed tightly shut; his lips moved, and they heard him whisper in a dozen languages, “I can see wonders… and horrors… wonders and horrors.”

Nicholas and Perenelle looked at Dee and watched his lips move. Half a second later, they heard him speak as if he were standing in the same room.

“Josh,” Dee said. “I think I have a cure for your headache. Say goodbye, Nicholas; goodbye, Perenelle,” he directed.

The Alchemyst and the Sorceress heard Josh numbly repeat the words. “Goodbye, Nicholas; goodbye, Perenelle.”

And abruptly the image vanished.

The skull went black and Prometheus shuddered and slid off his chair to lie in a heap on the floor. Perenelle looked at her husband. They were both haggard and exhausted. “What happened?”

“Dee knew we were watching. He must have thrown up a Warding spell. Josh is on his own now. Let’s hope he can hold out until the others get there.”

A uniformed guard came to the door and looked at the odd trio standing outside. A slender, impeccably dressed Japanese man in a black suit, a red-haired woman, also in a tailored black suit, and a wild-haired teenager. Behind them, an antique Volkswagen van was haphazardly parked at the curb.

The blond teenager had her finger on the intercom, and the incessant chiming was starting to get on the guard’s nerves. He jabbed a stubby finger at the sign pasted to the door.

NO ADMITTANCE WITHOUT APPOINTMENT.

The girl took her finger off the bell and rummaged through her pockets. She produced a tube of lip balm and wrote in greasy letters across the glass:

YCNEGREME

The guard shook his head, turned his back and stepped over to his desk in the foyer of Enoch Enterprises. Tourists. Every day, people knocked on the door, looking for directions, wondering if they could get onto the roof to take photos. No one got in. Ever.

Before he was able to sit, however, a blast of heat seared all the small hairs on the back of his neck, and he caught the fleeting impression of the heavy door sailing across the lobby and smashing into the wall before something struck him at the base of the skull and the world turned black.

“You could have just opened the door,” Aoife suggested, looking at the smoldering ruin of metal and glass. “Or even melted the lock.”

Sophie shook her hands to cool them. “Sometimes I don’t know my own strength.”

Niten shrugged out of his black suit coat and strapped two swords, a katana and the shorter wakizashi, around his waist, so that they hung over his left hip.

Aoife settled two matched short swords over her shoulders on her back, and a pair of nunchaku dangled from each hand. She wore her broad-bladed knife strapped to her leg.

And Sophie uncoiled the silver and black leather whip Perenelle had given her before they had left Prometheus’s Shadowrealm. “This is woven from snakes pulled from the Medusa’s hair,” the Sorceress had explained. “It will slice through stone and cut metal. Be careful with it.”

Two guards raced into the foyer, drawn by the noise, and stopped abruptly at the sight of the ruined door and their colleague lying in a crumpled heap on the floor. One went for his weapon, the other for his radio… and a heartbeat later they were both unconscious on the floor as well. Aoife rubbed her hands together as she slipped her nunchaku back into her belt. “This could be fun.”

There was an explosion of sparks as Niten drove his short sword through the computer server and the cables in the small office behind the front desk. “Phones and Internet are down,” he announced.

Aoife laughed delightedly. “Good. We’ve got a few minutes before someone notices the door is missing and calls the police. Let’s find your brother.”

“If he’s still here,” Niten said quietly.

“Oh, he’s here,” Sophie said. She pressed her hand to her stomach. “I can feel him. He’s…” She jabbed her finger upward. “Upstairs.”

The smoke rising off the Swords of Power had turned foul, mixing into a dark miasma that hung in the air.

“Coatlicue is coming,” Dee said quietly, standing behind Josh. “Stay focused. Stay strong. You have been Awakened. You have learned the Magic of Water and the Magic of Fire. But these are not entirely practical magics. Soon you will know the rarest magic of all, the dark art of necromancy-and then there is nothing you cannot achieve. You will learn wonders. I did.”

The column of filthy smoke almost reached the ceiling. It was the color of mud streaked with rusty red. A rancid smell seeped into the room: the distinctive stink of serpents.

“Coatlicue…”

Josh tried to concentrate, but the serpent odor sickened him and the images of the snake-headed creature had returned. He wasn’t sure where the images were coming from-from the Flamels, maybe? Were they trying to distract him? They knew he was terrified of snakes. Dee had told him that Nicholas and Perenelle had caused his migraine and had probably been trying to control his thoughts. The doctor had protected him with what he called a Warding spell, and the moment he’d activated it, all traces of the terrible headache and the stomach-churning nausea had vanished, so he’d obviously been right about the Flamels attacking Josh. But what Josh didn’t understand was why? The only reason he could come up with was that they didn’t want him to become a necromancer, and he was beginning to suspect that it was because they were afraid of what he might discover-about them, about the Elders.

Light.

And heat.

And flesh.