Michael Scott - The Magician

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?

K eeping a tight rein on his temper, Niccolo Machiavelli strode down the steps of Sacre-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 Generale de la Securite Exterieure. 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 Sacre-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 end 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, Niccolo 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.