The Alchemyst Read Online Free PDF Page B

lights, ushered her brother and Nick Fleming—Flamel—through the door ahead of her and hit the alarm. Then she pulled the door shut, turned the key in the lock and dropped the key chain through the letter box.
    “Now what?” she asked.
    “Now we get some help and we hide until I figure out what to do with you both.” Flamel smiled. “We’re good at hiding; Perry and I have been doing it for more than half a millennium.”
    “What about Perry?” Sophie asked. “Will Dee…harm her?” She’d come to know and like the tall, elegant woman over the past few weeks as she came into the coffee shop. She didn’t want anything to happen to her.
    Flamel shook his head. “He can’t. She’s too powerful. I never studied the sorcerous arts, but Perry did. Right now all Dee can do is contain her, prevent her from using her powers. But in the next few days she
will
start to age and weaken. Possibly in a week, certainly within two weeks, he would be able to use his powers against her. Still, he’ll be cautious. He will keep her trapped behind Wards and Sigils….” Flamel saw the look of confusion on Sophie’s face. “Magical barriers,” he explained. “He’ll only attack when he is sure of victory. But first he will try to discover the extent of her arcane knowledge. Dee’s search for knowledge was always his greatest strength…and his weakness.” He absently patted his pockets, looking for something. “My Perry can take care of herself. Remind me to tell you the story sometime of how she faced down a pair of Greek Lamiae.”
    Sophie nodded, though she had no idea what Greek Lamiae were.
    As Flamel strode down the street, he found what he was looking for: a pair of small round sunglasses. He put them on, stuck his hands in the pockets of his leather jacket and began to whistle tunelessly, as if he hadn’t a care in the world. He glanced back over his shoulder. “Well, come on.”
    The twins looked at each other blankly, then hurried after him.
    “I checked him out online,” Josh muttered, looking quickly at his sister.
    “So that’s what you were doing. I didn’t think e-mail could be that important.”
    “Everything he says checks out: he’s there on Wikipedia and there are nearly two hundred thousand results for him on Google. There are over ten million results for John Dee. Even Perenelle is there, and it mentions the book and everything. It even says that when he died, his grave was dug up by people searching for treasure and they found it empty—no body and no treasure. Apparently, his house is still standing in Paris.”
    “He sure doesn’t look like an immortal magician,” Sophie murmured.
    “I’m not sure I know what a magician looks like,” Josh said quietly. “The only magicians I know are Penn and Teller.”
    “I’m not a magician,” Flamel said, without looking at them. “I’m an alchemyst, a man of science, though perhaps not the science you would be familiar with.”
    Sophie hurried to catch up. She reached out to touch his arm and slow him down, but a spark—like static electricity—snapped into her fingertips. “Aaah!” She jerked her hand back, fingertips tingling. Now what?
    “I’m sorry,” Flamel explained. “That’s an aftereffect of the…well, what you would call magic. My aura—the electrical field that surrounds my body—is still charged. It’s just reacting when it hits your aura.” He smiled, showing perfectly regular teeth. “It also means you must have a powerful aura.”
    “What’s an aura?”
    Flamel strode on a couple of steps down the sidewalk without answering, then turned to point to a window. The word TATTOO was picked out in fluorescent lighting. “See there…see how there is a glow around the words?”
    “I see it.” Sophie nodded, squinting slightly. Each letter was outlined in buzzing yellow light.
    “Every human has a similar glow around their body. In the distant past, people could see it clearly and they named it the
aura.
It