can think of are elephants.
Then let me give you something else to think about, Scathach said softly.
There are two police officers in the window staring at us. don't look, she
added urgently.
Too late. Josh turned to look, and whatever expression crossed his
face shock, horror, guilt or fear brought both officers racing into the caf ,
one pulling his automatic from its holster, the other speaking urgently into
his radio as he drew his baton.
CHAPTER NINE
W ith hands pushed deep in the pockets of his leather jacket, still wearing
his none-too-clean black jeans and scuffed cowboy boots, Nicholas Flamel
didn't look out of place with either the early-morning workers or the
homeless beginning to appear on the streets of Paris. The gendarmes gathered
in small groups on the corners were talking urgently together or listening to
their radios and didn't even give him a second glance.
This wasn't the first time he had been hunted in these streets, but it was
the first time without allies and friends to help him. He and Perenelle had
returned to their home city at the end of the Seven Years War in 1763. An
old friend needed their help, and the Flamels never refused a friend.
Unfortunately, however, Dee had discovered their whereabouts and had chased
them through the streets with an army of black-clad assassins, none of whom
was entirely human.
They had escaped then. Escaping now might not be so easy. Paris had changed
utterly. When Baron Haussmann had redesigned Paris in the nineteenth century,
he had destroyed a huge portion of the medieval section of the city, the city
Flamel was so familiar with. All the Alchemyst s hiding places and safe
houses, the secret vaults and hidden attics, were gone. He had once known
every street and alley, each twisting lane and hidden courtyard of Paris; now
he knew as much as the average tourist.
And at that moment, not only did he have Machiavelli chasing them, the entire
French police force was also on the lookout for them. And Dee was on his way.
Dee, as Flamel well knew, was capable of just about anything.
Nicholas breathed in the cool predawn Parisian air and glanced at the cheap
digital watch he wore on his left wrist. It was still set to Pacific time,
where it was now twenty minutes past eight in the evening, which meant he did
a quick calculation in his head that it was five-twenty a.m. in Paris. He
thought briefly about resetting the watch to Greenwich Mean Time, but quickly
decided against it. A couple of months ago, when he d tried resetting the
watch for daylight savings, it had started madly blipping and flashing. He d
worked on it for over an hour without any success; it had taken Perenelle
thirty seconds to fix it. He only wore it because it came with a countdown
timer. Every month, when he and Perenelle created a new batch of the
immortality potion, he reset the counter to 720 hours and allowed it to count
down to zero. With the passing of years, they had discovered that the potion
was timed to a lunar cycle and lasted roughly thirty days. Over the course of
the month, they would age slowly, almost imperceptibly, but once they drank
the potion, the effects of the aging process would quickly reverse hair would
darken, wrinkles soften and disappear, aching joints and stiff muscles become
supple again, eyesight and hearing sharpen.
Unfortunately, it was not a recipe that could be copied down; each month the
formula was unique, and each recipe only worked once. The Book of Abraham the
Mage was written in a language that predated humanity, and in an
ever-changing, always-moving script, so that entire libraries of knowledge
were held within the slender volume. But every month, on page seven of the
copper-bound manuscript, the secret of Life Eternal appeared. The crawling
script remained static for less then an hour before it shifted, twisted and
trickled away.
The one and only time the Flamels had tried using the same recipe twice, it
had actually sped up the aging process. Luckily, Nicholas had taken only a
sip of the colorless, rather ordinary-looking potion when Perenelle noticed
that lines were appearing around his eyes and on his forehead and that the
hair from his full beard was falling away from his face. She d knocked the
cup from his hand before he d taken another mouthful. However, the lines
remained etched on his face, and the thick beard he had been so proud of had
never grown again.
Nicholas and Perenelle had brewed the most recent batch of the potion at
midnight the past Sunday, just under a week ago. He pressed the left-hand
button on the watch and called up the stopwatch function: 116 hours and 21
minutes had passed. Another press of the button brought up the time
remaining: 603 hours, 39 minutes, or about 25 days. As he watched, another
minute ticked away: 38 minutes. He and Perenelle would age and weaken, and of
course, every time either of them used their powers, that would only quicken
the onset of old age. If he did not retrieve the Book before the end of the
month and create a new batch of the potion, then they would both rapidly age
and die.
And the world would die with them.
Unless
A police car roared past, siren howling. It was followed by a second and a
third. Like everyone else on the street, Flamel turned to follow their
progress. The last thing he needed to do was to attract attention to himself
by standing out from the crowd.
He had to retrieve the Codex. The rest of the Codex, he reminded himself, his
hand absently touching his chest. Hidden beneath his T-shirt, dangling on a
leather cord, he wore a simple square cotton bag that Perenelle had stitched
for him half a millennium ago, when he had first found the Book. She had
created it to hold the ancient volume; now all it contained were two pages
Josh had managed to tear out. The book was still incredibly dangerous in the
hands of Dee, but it was the last two pages, which contained the spell known
as the Final Summoning, that Dee needed to bring his Dark Elder masters back
to this world.
And Flamel would not could not allow that.
Two police officers turned a corner and strolled down the center of the
street. They stared hard at some of the pedestrians and peered into the shop
windows, but they walked past Nicholas without even looking at him.
Nicholas knew that his priority now was to find a safe haven for the twins.
And that meant he had to find an immortal living in Paris. Every city in the
world had its share of humans with life spans that extended into centuries or
even millennia, and Paris was no exception. He knew that immortals liked the
big anonymous cities, where it was easier to disappear amongst an
ever-changing population.
Long ago, Nicholas and Perenelle had come to realize that at the heart of
every myth and legend was a grain of truth. And every race told stories of
people who lived exceptionally long lives: the immortals.
Over the centuries, the Flamels had come into contact with three entirely
different types of immortal humans. There were the Ancients of whom there
were now perhaps no more than a handful still alive who hailed from earth's