The Alchemyst Read Free

It’ll take Dee only a few moments to realize what’s happened.”
    Josh Newman nodded; he knew the shop. The dry cleaner’s had been empty all summer. He had a hundred questions, and none of the answers that ran through his mind was satisfactory, since most of them contained that one awful word in them:
magic.
He had just watched two men toss balls and spears of something—of
energy
—at each other. He had witnessed the destruction those energies had caused.
    Josh had just witnessed magic.
    But of course, everyone knew that magic simply did not and could not exist.

CHAPTER THREE
    W hat was that disgusting smell?
    Sophie Newman was just about to press the Bluetooth headset back into her ear when she breathed deeply and paused, nostrils flaring. She’d just smelled something awful. Closing her phone and pushing her headset into a pocket, she leaned over the open jar of dark tea leaves and inhaled.
    She had been working in The Coffee Cup since she and her brother had arrived in San Francisco for the summer. It was an OK job, nothing special. Most of the customers were nice, a few were ignorant and one or two were downright rude, but the hours were fine, the pay was good, the tips were better and the shop had the added advantage of being just across the road from where her twin brother worked. They had turned fifteen last December and had already started to save for their own car. They estimated it would take them at least two years—if they bought no CDs, DVDs, games, clothes or shoes, which were Sophie’s big weakness.
    Usually, there were two other staff on duty with her, but one had gone home sick earlier, and Bernice, who owned the shop, had left after the lunchtime rush to go to the wholesalers’ to stock up on fresh supplies of tea and coffee. She had promised to be back in an hour; Sophie knew it would take at least twice that.
    Over the summer, Sophie had grown used to the smells of the different exotic teas and coffee the shop sold. She could tell her Earl Grey from her Darjeeling, and knew the difference between Javanese and Kenyan coffee. She enjoyed the smell of coffee, though she hated the bitter taste of it. But she loved tea. In the past couple of weeks she had been gradually sampling all the teas, particularly the herbal teas with their fruity tastes and unusual aromas.
    But now something smelled foul and disgusting.
    Almost like rotten eggs.
    Sophie brought a tin of loose tea to her face and breathed deeply. The crisp odor of Assam caught at the back of her throat: the stench wasn’t coming from there.
    “You’re supposed to drink it, not inhale it.”
    Sophie turned as Perry Fleming came into the shop. Perry Fleming was a tall, elegant woman who could have been any age from forty to sixty. It was clear that she had once been beautiful, and she was still striking. Her eyes were the brightest, clearest green Sophie had ever seen, and for a long time she had wondered if the older woman wore colored contact lenses. Perry’s hair had once been jet-black, but now it was shot through with strands of silver, and she wore it in an intricate braided ponytail that lay along her back almost to the base of her spine. Her teeth were small and perfect, and her face was traced with tiny laugh lines at the corners of her eyes. She was always much more elegantly dressed than her husband, and today she was wearing a mint green sleeveless summer dress that matched her eyes, in what Sophie thought was probably pure silk.
    “I just thought it smelled peculiar,” Sophie said. She sniffed the tea again. “Smells fine now,” she added, “but for a moment there, I thought it smelled like…like…like rotten eggs.”
    She was looking at Perry Fleming as she spoke. She was startled when the woman’s bright green eyes snapped wide open and she whirled around to look across the street…just as all the little square windows of the bookshop abruptly developed cracks and two simply exploded into dust. Wisps of green and