The Alchemyst Read Online Free PDF

minutes late, she gets in a tizzy. Last week, when the trolley car broke down and we were an hour late, she’d already phoned our parents by the time we got there.” Aunt Agnes was eighty-four, and although she drove the twins to distraction with her constant fussing, they were very fond of her.
    “Then you’ll need to give her an excuse too,” Flamel said bluntly, sweeping into the coffee shop with Sophie close behind him.
    Josh hesitated before stepping into the cool, sweet-smelling gloom of The Coffee Cup. He stood on the sidewalk, his backpack slung over his shoulder, looking up and down. If you ignored the sparkling glass littering the sidewalk in front of the bookshop, everything looked perfectly normal, an ordinary weekday afternoon. The street was still and silent, the air was heavy with just a hint of the ocean. Across the bay, beyond Fisherman’s Wharf, a ship’s horn sounded, the deep noise lost and lonely in the distance. Everything looked more or less as it had half an hour earlier.
    And yet…
    And yet it was not the same. It could never be the same again. In the last thirty minutes, Josh’s carefully ordered world had shifted and altered irrevocably. He was a normal high school sophomore, not too brilliant, but not stupid either. He played football, sang—badly—in his friend’s band, had a few girls he was interested in, but no real girlfriend yet. He played the occasional computer game, preferred first person shooters like Quake and Doom and Unreal Tournament, couldn’t handle the driving games and got lost in Myst. He loved
The Simpsons
and could quote chunks of episodes by heart, really liked
Shrek,
though he’d never admit it, thought the new Batman was all right and that X-Men was excellent. He even liked the new Superman, despite what other people said. Josh was ordinary.
    But ordinary teens did not find themselves in the middle of a battle between two incredibly ancient magicians.
    There was no magic in the world. Magic was movie special effects. Magic was stage shows with rabbits and doves and sometimes tigers, and David Copperfield sawing people in half and levitating over the audience. There was no such thing as real magic.
    But how then could he explain what had just happened in the bookshop? He had watched shelves turn to rotten wood, seen books dissolve into pulp, smelled the stink of rotten eggs from Dee’s spells and the cleaner scent of mint when Fleming—
Flamel
—worked his magic.
    Josh Newman shivered in the bright afternoon sunshine and ducked into The Coffee Cup, pulling open his backpack and reaching in for his battered laptop. He needed to use the café’s wireless Internet connection; he had names he wanted to look up: Doctor John Dee, Perenelle and especially Nicholas Flamel.
             
    Sophie scribbled a quick note on the back of a napkin, then chewed the end of the pencil as she read it.
    Mrs. Fleming unwell. Gas leak in the shop. Gone to hospital. Mr. Fleming with us. Everything else OK. Will phone later.
    When Bernice came back and found the shop closed just before the late-afternoon rush, she was not going to be happy. Sophie guessed that she might even lose her job. Sighing, she signed the note with a flourish that tore through the paper, and stuck it to the cash register.
    Nicholas Flamel peered over her shoulder and read it. “That’s good, very good, and it explains why the bookshop is closed too.” Flamel glanced over his shoulder to where Josh was tapping furiously at his keyboard. “Let’s go!”
    “Just checking my mail,” Josh muttered, powering off the machine and closing it.
    “At a time like this?” Sophie asked incredulously.
    “Life goes on. E-mail stops for no man.” He attempted a smile, and failed.
    Sophie grabbed her bag and vintage denim jacket, taking a last look around the coffee shop. She had the sudden thought that she would not be seeing it again for a long time, but that was ridiculous, of course. She turned out the