“N ever thought I’d see this place again,” Nicholas Flamel said, pushing open the rear door to the Small Bookshop.
“Nor I,” Perenelle agreed.
The bottom of the door stuck and Nicholas pressed his shoulder against it and shoved hard. The door scraped on the stone floor and the stench hit them immediately: the slightly sweet stink of rotten wood and moldering paper mixed with the cloying rancid odor of decay. Perenelle coughed and pressed her hand to her mouth, blinking sudden tears from her eyes. “That’s foul!”
Nicholas inhaled cautiously. He could still smell traces of Dee’s brimstone odor on the dry air, the rotten-egg smell of sulfur. The couple moved down a dark corridor piled high on both sides with boxes of secondhand books. The cardboard boxes were streaked with black rot and the tops had started to curl. Some had burst apart, spilling their contents onto the floor.
Perenelle brushed a fingertip against one and it came away black with mold. She held it up for her husband to see and said, “Tell me?”
“The doctor and I fought,” he said softly.
“I can see that,” Perenelle said with a smile. “And you won.”
“Well, winning is a relative term…” Nicholas opened the door at the end of the corridor and stepped into the bookshop. “I’m afraid the shop did not fare too well.” Reaching back, he took his wife’s hand and led her into the large book-filled room.
“Oh, Nicholas…,” Perenelle breathed.
The bookshop was ruined.
A thick layer of furry green-black mold covered everything, and the smell of sulfur was overwhelming. Books lay everywhere-pages torn, covers shredded, spines broken-among the crushed and splintered tables and shelves that had held them. A huge swath of the ceiling was missing, the plaster hanging like tattered cloth, revealing wooden joists and trailing wires, and where the entrance to the cellar had been was now a gaping hole, the wood around it rotted to a foul black mess speckled with mushrooms. Tiny wriggling white maggots crawled through the muck. The brightly colored rug that had once covered the center of the floor had shriveled to an ugly gray threadbare cloth.
“Destruction and decay,” Perenelle murmured, “Dee’s calling card.” The tall elegant woman picked her way carefully into the room. Everything she touched either crumbled to dust or dissolved into a powder that gave off spores. The floorboards were spongy and sticky and creaked ominously with each step, threatening to send her into the basement below. Standing in the middle of the room, she put her hands on her hips and turned slowly. Her huge green eyes filled with tears. She had loved this bookshop; it had been their home and their life for a decade. They had worked at many careers through the centuries, but this bookshop more than any other reminded her of her early life with Nicholas, when he had been a scrivener and bookseller in Paris in the fourteenth century. Then, they had been simple, ordinary people, living unremarkable lives, until that fateful day when Nicholas had bought the Codex, the Book of Abraham the Mage, from the hooded man with astonishingly blue eyes. That was the day their mundane lives ended and they entered the world of the extraordinary, where nothing was as it seemed and no one could be trusted.
She turned to look at her husband. He hadn’t moved from the door and was staring around the shop with a stricken expression on his face. “Nicholas,” she said softly, and when he looked up, she realized just how much the last week had aged him. For centuries, his appearance had changed very little. With his close-cropped hair, unlined face and pale eyes, he’d always looked around fifty years old, which was the age he’d been when they started to make the immortality potion. Today, he looked at least seventy. Much of his hair was gone, and there were deep wrinkles on his forehead; more lines were etched into the corners of his sunken eyes, and there were dark spots on the back of his hands.
The Alchemyst caught her looking at him and smiled ruefully. “I know. I look old-but still, not too bad for someone who’s lived for six hundred and seventy-seven years.”
“Seventy-six,” Perenelle corrected him gently. “You’re not seventy-seven for another three months.”
Nicholas stepped forward and gathered Perenelle into his arms, hugging her close. “I don’t think that’s a birthday I’ll be celebrating,” he said very softly, his mouth close to her ear. “I’ve used more of my aura in the past week than I’ve done in the last two decades. And without the Codex…” His voice trailed away. He didn’t need to finish the sentence. Without the immortality spell that appeared once a month on page seven in the Codex, he and Perenelle would both begin to age, and death would follow quickly afterward as their accumulated years caught up with them.
Perenelle suddenly pushed her husband away from her. “We’re not dead yet!” she snapped, anger making her revert to the provincial French of her youth. “We’ve been in bad situations before-we survived.” The merest suggestion of her aura crackled around her, icy tendrils smoking off her flesh.
Nicholas stepped back and folded his arms across his narrow chest. “We’ve always had the Codex,” he reminded her in the same language.
“I am not talking about immortality now,” Perenelle said, her Breton accent thickening. “We have lived centuries, Nicholas, centuries. I am not afraid to die because I know that when we go, we will go together. It is living without you that would be unbearable.”
The Alchemyst nodded, not trusting himself to speak. He could not imagine a life without Perenelle.
“We need to do what we have always done,” she insisted, “fight for the survival of the human race.” Perenelle reached out and caught her husband’s arms, her fingers biting painfully into his flesh. “For six hundred years we have protected the Codex and kept the Dark Elders off the earth. We will not stop.” Her face turned hard. “But now, Nicholas, we have nothing to lose. Instead of running and hiding to protect the book, we should attack,” she said fiercely. “We should take the fight to the Dark Elders.”
The Alchemyst nodded uncomfortably. It was at times like these that Perenelle frightened him. Although they had been married for centuries, there was still so much he didn’t know about his wife and the extraordinary gift that allowed her to see the shades of the dead. “You’re right, we have nothing to lose,” Nicholas said softly. “We have lost so much already.”
“This time we have the advantage of the twins,” Perenelle reminded him.
“I am not sure they will entirely trust us,” the Alchemyst said. He took a deep breath. “In London, they learned about the existence of the previous twins.”
“Ah,” Perenelle said. “From Gilgamesh?”
The Alchemyst nodded. “From the King. Now I’m not sure they will believe anything we tell them.”
“Well then,” Perenelle said with a grim smile. “We tell them the truth. The whole truth,” she added, looking hard at her husband.
Nicholas Flamel held her eyes for a moment and then nodded and looked away. “And nothing but the truth.” He sighed. He waited until she had left the room and then added softly, “But the truth is a double-edged sword; it is a dangerous thing.”
“I heard that,” she called.