The Enchantress (The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel)

curiosity or amusement. “Satisfied, Doctor?”
    Dee frowned. “I
have
met you,” he said slowly. “You are almost familiar to me.”
    “We have met many times. You simply did not know that it was me. I was the face in the mirror, the voice in the shadows, the shape in the night. I was the author of those unsigned notes you received, and later, the anonymous emails. I was the voice on your answering machine, the badly spelled texts on your phone.”
    Dee stared at the figure in horror. “I thought it was my Elder masters speaking to me.”
    “Sometimes it was. Not always.”
    “But you are not associated with them?”
    “I have spent millennia thwarting them.”
    “You manipulated me,” Dee accused him.
    “Oh, come now, don’t look so shocked. You’ve spent lifetimes manipulating other people.”
    Dee came slowly to his feet. He was still elderly. He guessed his body was probably that of a spry eighty-year-old, but his sight and hearing were those of a youth. He climbed out of the vimana and looked around.
    They were standing on a broad platform close to the top of a scarred crystal tower. The ground was strewn with the remains of weapons and pieces of armor, and the stones were awash with black and green liquids, but there were no bodies.
    Marethyu strode toward a doorway in the tower, his black hooded cloak flapping behind him. The frame and stones around the door were pocked and chipped, and the ground was slippery with more of the sticky green and black fluids. There were speckles of what looked like human blood spattered on the ground and splashed onto the torn white crystal walls.
    “What happened here?” Dee asked.
    “There was a fight. A massacre, really. Recently.” Marethyu’s voice was a hoarse whisper. “Don’t slip,” he called back over his shoulder. “It’s a long way down.”
    Dee bent and picked up what he thought might be a broken spear. The head was missing—it looked like it had been sliced clean off. Using the length of wood as a walking stick, he followed Death through the door and into a small circular room. The chamber was empty. “Where are you?” the Magician asked, his voice echoing as he looked around. He noticed that there was more blood on the floor, and when he ran his toe across it, the liquid smudged. It was fresh.
    “Up here.” The answer came from a concealed stairwell.
    “Where?”
    “Here!” Dee followed the sound of Marethyu’s voice and found the stairway. He balanced the broken spear on the first step and looked up into the gloom. “Where are we going?” he called.
    “Up.”
    The Magician heaved himself onto the step. “Where? Why?”
    Marethyu’s face appeared above Dee, and even though his mouth was concealed, Dee knew that he was smiling. “Why, Doctor, we’ve come to see Abraham the Mage. You do know the name, of course?”
    The Magician’s mouth opened and closed in astonishment.
    “I see you do.” Death’s blue eyes crinkled. “He wants his book back.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN
    THE ROOM WAS enormous.
    Sophie Newman sat on a bed that was bigger than her room in Aunt Agnes’s house in San Francisco. In fact, she thought it might be bigger than the entire top floor of the house. She had no doubt that this room had been specially prepared for her. Everything—from the huge sunken bathtub to the deep walk-in wardrobes to the flagstones on the floor—was either silver metal, silver cloth or burnished with silver. Even the bed frame was cast from a solid hunk of metal. Three of the walls were polished to a gleaming sheen; the fourth was a sliding wall of glass opening onto an enormous courtyard. An ornate silver frame sat on top of a silver bedside table. It held one of her favorite photographs—a snapshot of the entire Newman family standing in the ruins of Machu Picchu high in the Peruvian mountains. Everyone was laughing, because Josh had stepped in a pile of llama dung and it had squirted into his shoe and sock.
    Without even having to see it, she knew Josh’s room was going to be decorated and outfitted in pure gold.
    But what convinced her that this room had been prepared in advance for her was the ceiling. It was painted a deep, rich blue. Leaning back on the bed, she looked up. Silver stars formed the constellation of Orion, and a huge luminous half-moon filled the corner directly opposite her bed.
    Her mother had painted an identical ceiling in her bedroom at Aunt Agnes’s house.
    Sophie walked the length of the silver room