The Enchantress (The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel)

life. I knew where each buckle and clip was, where all the straps went, how to cinch it.”
    Sophie nodded. “Me too.” She tapped his shoulder where the empty sheaths were visible. “It looks like they don’t trust us with the final part of our costumes.”
    “I bet these are for the four Swords of Power. Two for me, two for you.”
    “I wonder which two you’ll get,” Sophie asked lightly, though somewhere in the deepest part of her consciousness, she already knew the answer.
    “Dee used the swords to create the leygate on Alcatraz.” Josh stopped examining himself and looked up at his sister. “Did the swords fall through the gate with us? I don’t remember seeing them.”
    “I do,” Sophie said. “When I jumped in after you, they tumbled through. I saw them when I opened my eyes. I thought they were rusted spars of metal, but then Osiris collected them just before we took off and I realized they were important.”
    “What happens now?” Josh asked.
    Sophie caught her brother’s arm and led him over to the glass wall. Pushing it back, she stepped out into the garden. The perfumed air was touched by the rotten-egg stench of sulfur from the volcano, and tiny speckles of black grit and gray ash swirled in the air. The garden was deserted, and Sophie led Josh to a fountain where a carved mammoth shot water into the air from its upraised trunk. The tinkling sound of the water created a low musical buzz.
    “What are we going to do?” she asked in an urgent whisper. “Every time I start to think about what’s been going on I feel sick. These people . . .” She waved her gloved hand in the direction of the house. “. . . These people—and I’m not even sure if they’re our parents—they’re different.”
    “They
are
different,” Josh agreed. “For a while there I thought Mom and Dad had been kidnapped and replaced by look-alikes, like in
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
.”
    “And now?” Sophie asked.
    “I think they’re the same people we grew up with. They look like them, walk and talk like them, even have their little mannerisms, but they’re not the people we know.”
    “They’re not,” Sophie agreed.
    “And obviously now that they have us here, under their control, they’ve dropped whatever act they had on earth. We’re seeing them as they really are.” He dipped his glove into the water and watched as the water turned golden. The air suddenly smelled of citrus. “Look! It’s orange juice!”
    “Josh. Focus!”
    “You sound just like Mom or Isis or whatever her name is. They’re different,” he repeated. “But you know what: when they were at home, they were always a little strange. They weren’t like normal parents.”
    Sophie nodded. “I’m not sure what normal parents are like,” she said.
    “Think about it. They didn’t encourage us to have friends. We never had sleepovers, we weren’t allowed to stay over at anyone’s house. We never went on field trips.”
    “And we kept changing schools,” Sophie whispered. “They isolated us.”
    “Exactly.”
    “But we
did
have friends.”
    “Casual friends, but not best friends. Who’s your best friend?” Josh gave his sister a challenging look.
    “Well, there’s Elle. . . .”
    “Who’s in New York, and who you haven’t seen in how long?”
    Sophie nodded. “A long time.”
    “We never had a regular childhood,” Josh continued. “Dad—Osiris. Oh, I’m just going to call him Osiris from now on—is right: we were trained in amazing things. And don’t get me wrong. Some of it was fun. But is visiting an ancient archaeological site a normal family outing? The year I wanted to go to Disneyland, we ended up at Machu Picchu.”
    “Where you stepped in the . . .”
    “I know. We learned about history, archaeology, we were shown ancient languages, taken to museums to look at weapons and armor.” He tapped his metal fingers against his chest. “When I first looked at this, it was so familiar to me. How many other sixteen-year-olds—”
    “Fifteen and a half,” Sophie corrected.
    “—fifteen-and-a-half-year-olds would know that this is Gothic-style armor from the late fifteenth century?”
    Sophie laughed. “I didn’t know that.”
    “But I did.”
    “You are kind of a geek,” she reminded him.
    “What are your shoes called?” he asked.
    Sophie looked down at her spike-toed metal boots. “Sabatons,” she said immediately.
    Josh grinned. “I’m sure every