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

statues of the satyrs. “He betrayed you. He betrayed us all.”
    Mars hissed in pain. “I should never have trusted him. He asked me to Awaken a boy, a Gold.”
    “And then he used the Gold to summon Coatlicue to this Shadowrealm,” Isis whispered.
    Red-black smoke curled from Mars Ultor’s eyes. A spasm wracked his body and huge chunks of hardened aura fell off, only to instantly re-form. The dry air stank of burnt meat. “Coatlicue: I fought the Archon the last time she ravaged the Shadowrealms,” he gasped through the pain of his burning aura. “I lost many good friends.”
    The woman in white nodded. “We all lost friends andfamily to her. The doctor somehow discovered her location and summoned her.”
    “But why?” Mars rumbled. “There are not enough Elders in this earth Shadowrealm to satisfy her appetite?”
    Osiris rapped on the Elder’s back with his knuckle, as if testing its strength. “We believe he wanted to loose her into the Shadowrealms. We have declared Dee
utlaga
for his many failures. Now he wants revenge, and there is a danger that his vengeance will destroy all the Shadowrealms and ultimately this world. He seeks to end us all.”
    Isis and Osiris had walked full circle around the Elder and now stood facing him again. “But by following his stink, we were able to track him here … to you,” Isis said.
    “Free me,” Mars pleaded. “Let me hunt the doctor.”
    The couple shook their heads in unison. “We cannot,” Isis said sadly. “Zephaniah bound you using Archon lore and Earthlord spells that are unknown to us. Something Abraham taught her, no doubt.”
    “Then why are you here?” Mars growled. “What brings you from your island Shadowrealm?”
    A shape moved in the doorway. “I asked them here.”
    An elderly-looking woman in a neat gray blouse and skirt stepped into the cave. She was short and round, and her blue-tinged hair was tightly permed. Overlarge black glasses covered much of her face, and she held a white cane in her right hand. Tapping her cane before her, she stepped up to the trapped Elder, stopping when the white stick struck stone.
    “Who are you?” Mars demanded.
    “Do you not recognize me?” Wisps of brown aura rosefrom the old woman’s flesh, and the air was touched with the bittersweet odor of woodsmoke.
    Mars drew in a deep shuddering breath as long-forgotten memories came flooding back. “Zephaniah!”
    “Husband,” the Witch of Endor said very softly.
    Mars’s eyes flickered red to blue to red again, and smoke poured from beneath his helmet. His stone-hard skin ran with countless burning cracks and began to fall away in stinking sheets. The trapped Elder managed to inch forward before his new skin hardened once more. The Elder howled and screamed until the cave stank of his rage and fear, a fetid mixture that reeked of burnt meat and seared bone. Finally, when he was exhausted, he looked at the woman who had been his wife, the woman he had loved above all others and the woman who had bound him to this eternity of suffering. “What do you want, Zephaniah?” he asked in a ragged whisper. “Have you come to mock me?”
    “Why, husband,” the old woman said with a gap-toothed smile. “I have come to free you. It is time: this world needs a warlock again.”

wo San Francisco police officers stopped as the odd trio—a woman, followed by a teenage boy and then an older man—burst through a set of side doors into the ruined glass and marble foyer of the burning building.
    “Anyone else in the buil—” one of the officers began, and then saw that the man facing him was holding a short sword in his hand and had a second sword shoved into his belt. Even as the officer was reaching for his gun he saw that the boy also had two short swords in his belt, one on each hip. Bizarrely, the long-haired woman was carrying what looked like a wooden flute.
    “Hold it right there,” the second officer ordered. “Drop those weapons.” Both policemen