The Warlock (The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel #5) Read Online Free PDF Page A

above the noise of the converging fire trucks and police sirens.
    “To see Tsagaglalal.”
    “Tsagaglalal,” the girl repeated, the name triggering the Witch of Endor’s memories. “She Who Watches.”

eserve your anger for those who deserve it,” Perenelle Flamel snapped. “This is not my husband’s fault.”
    “He is the catalyst,” Prometheus said.
    “That has always been his role.” Perenelle was sitting in the backseat of the car, Nicholas stretched out beside her. She was stroking her husband’s forehead. The Alchemyst was unconscious, his skin ashen, cheeks speckled with broken veins and purple threads. The bags beneath his eyes were bruised purple, and each time her hand ventured over his skull, strands of his short hair came away beneath her fingers. Nicholas was unmoving, his breathing so shallow it was barely perceptible. The only way the Sorceress could tell that he was still alive was by pressing her fingertips lightly against his throat to feel the weak pulse.
    Nicholas was dying and she felt …
    She
felt …
    Perenelle shook her head; she wasn’t sure how she felt. She had met and fallen in love with this man in the middle of the fourteenth century, in Paris. They had married on the eighteenth of August in 1350, and she could probably count on the fingers of one hand the number of months they’d been apart over the following centuries. She was ten years older than Nicholas and he was not her first husband, though they had been married for a century before she’d told him she was a widow.
    She’d loved him from the moment she’d met him and she loved him still, so surely she should feel more … surely she should be more upset … angry … saddened that he was now dying?
    But she didn’t.
    She felt …
relieved
.
    Unconsciously, she nodded. She was relieved that it was coming to an end.
    The bookseller who had become an alchemist—almost by accident—had taught her wonders and shown her marvels. They had traveled all across this world and into the adjacent Shadowrealms. Together they had fought monsters and creatures that should not have existed outside of nightmares. And although they had made many friends—humani and immortal, some Elders and even a few Next Generation—bitter experience had taught them that they could only depend on one another. They could only fully trust one another. Perenelle’s fingers gently traced the lines of her husband’s cheekbones and the shape of his jaw. If he was to die now, he would die in her arms, and it was some consolation that she would notsurvive very much longer, because she did not think that after more than six hundred years living with him, she could bear to live without him. But he couldn’t die yet—she would not allow it; she would do everything she could to keep him alive.
    “I apologize,” Prometheus said suddenly.
    “You have nothing to apologize for,” Perenelle said. “Scathach was correct: death and destruction have followed us through the centuries. People have died because of us—died saving us, protecting us, died because they knew us.” Her face suddenly creased in pain. Over the years she had created a shell around herself to keep her from feeling all the death and suffering, but there were times—like now—when the shell cracked and she felt responsible for every single loss.
    “But you saved many, Perenelle, so very many.”
    “I know that,” the Sorceress agreed, her eyes on Nicholas’s face. “We kept the Dark Elders at bay, we frustrated Dee and Machiavelli and the others like them for centuries.” She twisted in the seat to watch the roiling nothingness race ever closer to the car. “And we are not done yet. Prometheus, you cannot allow us to die here.”
    “I’m driving as fast as I can.” A light sheen of blood-colored sweat covered the Elder’s face. “If I can only hold the world together for just a few moments longer …” Outside, the salty-smelling clouds thickened, wrapping the car in a