Michael Scott - The Magician

Paris had changed since he’d last been in the city, and though he now called San Francisco home, this was the city of his birth and would always be his city. Only a couple of weeks ago, Josh had loaded Google Earth onto the computer in the bookshop’s back room and shown him how to use it. Nicholas had spent hours looking down on the streets he’d once walked, finding buildings he’d known in his youth, even discovering the location of the Church of the Holy Innocents, where he’d supposedly been buried.

He had been particularly interested in one street. He’d found it on the map program and virtually walked down it, never realizing that he would soon do so in reality.

Nicholas Flamel turned left off the Rue Beaubourg onto the Rue de Montmorency-and stopped as suddenly as if he had walked into a wall.

He drew a deep shuddering breath, conscious that his heart was pounding. The wash of emotions was extraordinarily powerful. The street was so narrow that the morning sunlight didn’t reach it, leaving it in shadow. It was lined on both sides with tall, mostly white-and-cream-colored buildings, many of them with hanging baskets spilling flowers and greenery across the walls. Round-topped black metal poles had been inserted into the sidewalk on both sides of the street to prevent cars from stopping.

Nicholas walked slowly down the street, seeing it as it had once been. Remembering.

More than six hundred years ago, he and Perenelle had lived on this street. Images of medieval Paris flickered behind his eyes, a jumbled mismatched mess of wooden and stone houses; narrow winding lanes; rotten bridges; tumbled listing buildings and streets that were little better than open sewers. The noise, the incredible, incessant noise, and the foul miasma that hung over the city-a mixture of unwashed disease-ridden humans and filthy animals-were things he would never forget.

At the bottom of the Rue de Montmorency, he found the building he had been looking for.

It hadn’t changed much. The stone had once been cream; now it was ancient, chipped and weathered, stained black with soot. The three wooden windows and doors were new, but the building itself was one of the oldest in Paris. Directly above the middle door was a number in blue metal-51-and above that was a tired-looking stone sign announcing that this had once been the MAISON DE NICOLAS FLAMEL ET DE PERENELLE, SA FEMME. A red sign in the shape of a shield announced that this was the AUBERGE NICOLAS FLAMEL. Now it was a restaurant.

Once it had been his home.

Stepping up to the window, he pretended to read the menu as he peered inside. The interior had been completely remodeled, of course, countless times probably, but the dark beams that stretched across the white ceiling appeared to be the same beams he’d so often looked up at more than six hundred years ago.

He and Perenelle had been happy here, he realized.

And safe.

Their lives had been simpler then: they hadn’t known about the Elders or the Dark Elders; they’d known nothing of the Codex, or of the immortals who guarded and fought over it.

And both he and Perenelle had still been fully human.

The ancient stones of the house had been carved with an assortment of images, symbols and letters that he knew had puzzled and intrigued scholars down through the ages. Most were meaningless, little more than the shop signs of their day, but there were one or two that had special significance. Quickly glancing left and right and finding the narrow street empty, he reached up with his right hand and traced the outline of the letter N, which was cut into the stone to the left of the middle window. Green power curled around the letter. Then he traced the ornate F on the opposite side of the window, leaving a shimmering outline of the letter in the air. Catching hold of the window frame with his left hand, he hauled himself up onto the ledge and reached over his head with his right hand, his fingers finding the shapes of letters in the ancient stone. Allowing the tiniest trickle of his aura to flow through his fingers, he pressed a sequence of letters…and the stone beneath his flesh turned warm and soft. He pushed…and his fingers sank into the stone. They wrapped around the object he had secreted within the solid block of granite back in the fifteenth century. Pulling it free, he stepped off the window ledge and dropped lightly to the ground, quickly wrapping his copy of Le Monde around the object. Then he turned and headed down the street without so much as a backward glance.

Before he stepped out onto the Rue Beaubourg, Nicholas turned over his left hand. Nestled in the center of his palm was the perfect impression of the black butterfly Saint-Germain had pressed into his skin. “It will lead you back to me,” he’d said.

Nicholas Flamel brushed his right forefinger over the tattoo. “Take me back to Saint-Germain,” he murmured. “Bring me to him.”

The tattoo shivered on his skin, black wings rippling. Then it suddenly peeled away from his flesh and hung flapping in the air before him. A moment later, it danced and wove down the street. “Clever,” Nicholas muttered, “very clever.” And he set off after it.

P erenelle Flamel stepped out of the prison cell.

The door had never been locked. There was no need: nothing could get past the sphinx. But now the sphinx was gone. Perenelle breathed deeply: the sour odor of the creature, the musty combination of snake, lion and bird, had lessened, allowing the usual smells of Alcatraz-salt and rusting metal, seaweed and crumbling stone-to take over. She turned to the left, moving swiftly down a long cell-lined corridor. She was on the Rock, but she had no idea where she was within the huge crumbling complex. Although she and Nicholas had lived in San Francisco for years, she had never been tempted to visit the ghost-haunted island. All she knew was that she was deep below the surface of the earth. The only light came from an irregular scattering of low-wattage bulbs set behind wire cages. Perenelle’s lips twisted in a wry smile; the light was not for her benefit. The sphinx was afraid of the dark; the creature came from a time and place where there really were monsters in the shadows.

The sphinx had been lured away by the ghost of Juan Manuel de Ayala. She had gone in search of the mysterious noises, the rattling bars and slamming doors that had suddenly filled the building. Every moment the sphinx was away from her cell, Perenelle’s aura recharged. She wasn’t back up to full strength-she would need to sleep and eat first-but at least she was no longer defenseless. All she had to do was to keep out of the creature’s way.

A door slammed somewhere high above her, and Perenelle froze as claws click-clacked. Then a bell began to toll, slow and solemn, lonely and distant. There was a sudden clatter of iron-hard nails on stone as the sphinx raced off to investigate.

Perenelle folded her arms across her body and ran her hands up and down them, shivering slightly. She was wearing a sleeveless summer dress, and normally she’d be able to regulate her temperature by adjusting her aura, but she had very little power left and she was reluctant to use it in any way. One of the sphinx’s special talents was her ability to sense and then feed off magical energy.

Perenelle’s flat sandals made no sound on the damp stones as she moved down the corridor. She was wary, but not frightened. Perenelle Flamel had lived for more than six hundred years, and while Nicholas had been fascinated with alchemy, she had concentrated on sorcery. Her research had taken her into some very dark and dangerous places, not only on this earth, but also in some of the adjoining Shadowrealms.

Somewhere in the distance, glass shattered and tinkled to the ground. She heard the sphinx hiss and howl in frustration, but that sound too was far away. Perenelle smiled: de Ayala was keeping the sphinx busy, and no matter how hard she looked, she would never find him. Even a creature as powerful as a sphinx had no power over a ghost or a poltergeist.