The Enchantress (The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel #6) (17 page)

Death’s blue eyes crinkled. “You are, but sometimes you—and they—are working for me.”

W
hen he’d been a very young child, Josh had suffered from a series of bizarre and terrifying nightmares.

He’d dreamt he was standing alongside his sleeping body, looking down at it. Sometimes he was sitting on the end of the bed staring at himself, but often, he was floating close to the ceiling, looking down on his body. Never once did he feel that he was in any danger, but the confusing images had still brought him awake screaming. Sleep had always been a long time coming after one of those dreams.

As Josh got older, the dreams almost completely disappeared. During periods of extreme stress—usually around finals—they returned, but time had robbed them of their power to frighten him. Now they were little more than strange images. Sometimes, when he drifted in that twilight zone between sleep and wakefulness, he caught the vaguest impression of the old dream, and would find himself for a single
moment standing outside his body looking at himself, asleep. He was browsing the Internet one day when, by accident, he discovered there was a term for this—
an out-of-body-experience.

And he felt like he was having one right now.

It was just like one of his dreams.

He was looking at himself sitting at a table with his parents and sister. Everything was normal: there was fruit on a plate in front of him, a glass of orange juice beside it. Large bowls filled with salad were in the center of the table, and there were two jugs of water—one with ice for his father and Sophie and a second without ice, which he and his mother preferred.

Everything was so familiar.

Except that it was
wrong
.

The couple sitting at the table looked like his parents, Richard and Sara Newman. They had the same eye color, identical lines on their faces, wrinkles at the corners of their mouths and eyes. This man who looked like his father even had a tiny half-moon scar on top of his shaven head, a pale semicircle standing out against his deeply tanned skin.

But these were not his parents.

The woman who looked like his mother was wearing the robes and jewelry of ancient Egypt.

There was nothing wrong with that. When they had gone to Egypt a few years before, she’d worn similar clothes on the boat they’d sailed in down the Nile.

But both the woman’s and the man’s nails were painted black.

That was odd—he’d never known his father to paint his
toenails, and black wasn’t exactly a color his mother would ever have chosen.

When these people smiled, their teeth seemed too long, and although he hadn’t had a close look, so he couldn’t be certain, he thought their tongues looked dark purple instead of pink.

Nowhere had he seen
that
before.

And now that he looked at them, even the food and table itself didn’t feel quite right.

The table was a circle of gold and silver, wrapped together like a yin and yang symbol. He and Osiris were sitting side by side at the gold curve, while his sister and Isis sat in front of the silver sections.

Josh?

The plates before him were gold, piled high with a spectacularly vivid selection of fruits—but, upon closer inspection, he only recognized a few of them. And the glass filled with juice was solid gold.

And his sister …

Josh looked across the table at Sophie. His twin was staring down at a silver plate heaped with cherries and grapes far too large to be natural. A silver cup brimmed with water, and the blunt knife and two-tined fork were also silver. She noticed him looking at her and raised her head, and in that instant he saw the same confusion in her eyes.

Josh?

Josh felt the world slip and shift again and he realized that this was no dream. His heart started to hammer painfully, and he could feel his lungs tightening. His subconscious was
telling him something important. He just wasn’t sure what that was yet.

Josh!

Isis’s voice was sharp.

He drew in a deep shuddering breath and felt the world shift and settle. Looking around, he discovered that everyone was looking at him, and he rolled his shoulders and twisted his head from side to side. Color flushed his cheeks. “Sorry, I sort of zoned out for a minute there. Might have even dozed off.” He turned to look at his father. “What did you once call them?”

Osiris stared at him blankly for a long moment.

“Oh yes, I remember now: a microsleep. I must have been having a microsleep.”

“Focus, Josh,” Isis snapped. “This is important.”

He was about to snap a response when he felt his sister’s foot tap against his. He took a deep breath. “Sure. Sorry, Isi—sorry, Mom. I guess we’re just exhausted by everything that’s happened. I know I am.”

“Me too. It’s been a lot to take in,” Sophie said. She speared one of the huge grapes with her fork and popped it in her mouth, then drained her glass. As soon as she placed it back on the table one of the cat-faced women silently appeared by her side and refilled it.

“Maybe we could get some sleep?” Josh suggested.

“I’m afraid that will have to wait. Our schedule has altered somewhat,” Osiris said. “Eat, restore your energies. You have a long night ahead of you.”

Josh looked at his sister, eyebrows moving fractionally upward in a silent question. She shook her head.

“You are aware by now that you are in the possession of extraordinary powers,” Isis said. She turned to look first at Sophie, then across the table at Josh. “You don’t need me to tell you that you are both remarkable people. In a week you’ve both been Awakened and trained in most of the Elemental Magics. In a week,” she said to her husband, shaking her head. “It’s truly astonishing.”

“Ordinarily, it is a process that takes decades,” Osiris agreed.

“Why didn’t you Awaken us?” Sophie asked, and then immediately answered her own question without having to resort to the Witch’s knowledge. “Because you can’t.”

Osiris’s smile was icy. “We have other skills, Sophie, but no, we are not able to stimulate the Awakening process.”

“So it’s not a family trait?” Josh asked, confused.

“Not immediate family, no. But it is definitely clan related,” Osiris said.

“Are we related to those Elders? The ones who Awakened us, who taught us: Hekate and Mars, Prometheus, Gilgamesh, Saint-Germain and the Witch?” Sophie asked.

“Distantly,” Osiris muttered

“But they’re not your friends, are they,” Josh stated more than asked.

Isis and Osiris shook their heads simultaneously. “No, they are not.”

Everything that had happened over the last several days
suddenly started to make sense to Josh. “Since no one knew you were related to us, you somehow got your enemies to Awaken and then train us because they thought we’d be working against you,” Josh murmured, almost to himself.

“Yes, and we’re quite proud of that strategy.” Isis smiled at her husband.

“That’s just great,” Josh muttered.

“Thank you,” Osiris said. “I see all those chess lessons weren’t entirely wasted on you.”

Josh dipped his head and concentrated on pushing the fruit around on his plate. He was thinking furiously, remembering a thousand tiny details from the past. Suddenly they took on a new meaning. He finally speared a segment of orange and popped it in his mouth. “So everything that’s happened over the past week—”

“Don’t speak with your mouth full!” Isis snapped.

“Sorry, Mom. Sorry, Isis,” he deliberately amended. He swallowed hard. “So you’ve been behind everything that’s happened over the past week?”

“Not just the past week,” Osiris said. “Over the past fifteen years of your lives, and the ten thousand years leading up to that. From the first moments of your birth, we have been training both of you for this, your destiny. We taught you history and mythology so that when you did discover the truth, it would not be such a terrifying revelation, and so you would have some familiarity with the characters and creatures you’d encounter. We even insisted that you take up a martial art so that you could protect yourselves.”

The twins nodded. Neither of them had ever wanted to
do Tae Kwon Do, but their parents had insisted, and no matter what city they lived in or school they attended, they had always been enrolled in a dojang to continue their training.

“We showed you the world,” Isis said. “Exposed you to other cultures so that when you came here it would not be such a shock.”

Osiris leaned forward. “And then, when all was in readiness, when you were both as prepared as you could be, I suggested you go for that job in the bookshop with the Flamels.”

Josh blinked in surprise, then frowned, remembering. His father had showed him an ad in the university newspaper:
Assistant Wanted, Bookshop. We don’t want readers, we want workers.

“And I didn’t want to do it,” Josh whispered.

“And I told you I’d worked in a bookshop when I was your age. You wrote the letter and résumé, but never sent them in.”

“I did,” Isis said.

“And you were called for an interview two days later.”

“You knew where the Flamels were hiding?” Sophie asked.

“We’ve always known where they are. We’ve been very careful to keep a close watch on the Codex.”

“And you knew that when they saw me, they’d recognize me as a Gold,” Josh whispered. “And Sophie as a Silver.”

Isis’s smile was bitter. “Those arrogant fools, the Flamels, have been seeking Golds and Silvers across the centuries. We simply gave them what they were looking for.”

Osiris nodded. “The Alchemyst and his wife came to believe that they were far more important in the grand scheme of things than they really were. They were pawns. Just like Dee, and all the other humani.”

“And us?” Sophie asked. “Are we pawns too?” She looked over at her brother and saw him nod.

“You are Gold and Silver,” Osiris said quietly. “And yes, we have manipulated you, but not to use you as pawns. To protect you. Everything we have done was to keep you safe,” he insisted. “You are like the king and queen on the chessboard: right now, in this time and place, you are the most valuable and important people on this world.”

Isis leaned forward, metal bracelets pinging off the silver table. “None of this was by chance: millennia of careful planning went into ensuring that this exact sequence of events would unfold.”

“You planned everything?” Sophie asked. Every new revelation made her feel slightly more sick to her stomach. “Even the bad parts?”

“Were there bad parts?” Isis asked. She looked at her husband and he shook his head. “What are you referring to?”

“I think she means the parts where we were almost killed,” Josh answered for his twin. “I was almost eaten by a Nidhogg in Paris.”

Isis waved a ringed hand as if Paris meant nothing. “You were never really in that much danger, Josh,” she said. “You were in the company of some of the finest warriors of any generation. They protected you.”

“I fought the Disir,” Sophie said. She was unwilling to let
this go so easily. “I got the impression that they were trying really hard to kill me.”

“And don’t forget the Awakening process,” Josh added.

Isis let out a light, musical laugh that sounded strangely false and practiced. “You were never in any danger from that. You are Gold and Silver,” she said. “True Gold, pure Silver. Only the impure are damaged by the Awakening.”

“And what about the attack by the undead in Ojai?” Josh pressed.

Isis tried another laugh. It sounded as false as the first. “Dee was not powerful enough to sustain them for very much longer. You destroyed them minutes before they would have collapsed of their own accord.”

“And Coatlicue?” Sophie asked. “She was ready to feast on Josh.”

“And I barely escaped the burning building,” Josh added. “And then there was that thing with horns in London.”

“Enough!” Isis clapped her hands, the rings on her fingers sparking as they snapped together. “This was all planned.”

“Including Dee betraying you?” Sophie asked defiantly. “Because I got the clear impression that that was not in the cards.”

The table fell silent.

Josh stared at his twin closely. “Dee went out on his own, didn’t he?” He hadn’t known for sure until she’d said it out loud.

Sophie nodded. “He grew tired of being a servant. He wanted to be the master.”

Osiris held up his hand. “No plan is entirely foolproof.
There will always be some tiny unforeseen factors. Variables. Toward the end, Dee became a variable.” He flashed a smile, and like his wife’s laughter, it was practiced and false. “But we should balance that with the fact that he was a true and loyal servant for centuries.”

“But he was your agent on earth,” Josh protested. “That’s not a tiny factor. That’s a fairly major error.”

“Enough,” Osiris snapped. “He has paid the price. As does everyone who defies us. He was not our first servant. He will not be our last. Indeed, I believe Miss Dare is already moving into a position to replace him. I have made her an offer she’s really not in any position to refuse.”

“And she has accepted this offer?” Josh demanded.

“She has.”

Josh couldn’t believe what the Elder had just said. Virginia Dare? A servant to Isis and Osiris? To
anyone
? “I think you’ll find that Virginia Dare is not John Dee,” he said quietly.

“I know what she is,” Osiris snarled.

Isis reached over and placed a hand on her husband’s arm, stopping him before he could say anything else. “Josh is right.” She looked at her husband carefully. “Dare is dangerous. And the flute makes her … unmanageable. I think you should withdraw your offer. We can easily find another human agent.”

“Of course,” he agreed immediately.

“But what will you do with her?” Sophie asked.

“That depends,” Isis said.

“Depends on what?” Sophie demanded. Thoughts flickered at the corner of her mind, and she had a sudden image
of Virginia falling from a great height into a bubbling volcano.

“On how cooperative she is.”