01_-_The_Alchemyst

The implications were terrible. The Morrigan was prepared to awaken
Bastet and attack Hekate’s Shadowrealm to retrieve the pages of the Codex.
Perry shuddered. She had never met Bastet—she didn’t know anyone
who had in the last three centuries and had lived to tell the tale—but she
knew her by reputation. One of the most powerful members of the Elder
Race, Bastet had been worshipped in Egypt since the earliest ages of man.
She had the body of a beautiful young woman with the head of a cat, and
Perry had absolutely no idea of the magical forces she controlled.
Events were moving surprisingly swiftly. Something big was happening.
Many years before, when Nicholas and Perry had first discovered the secret
of immortality, they had realized that their extra-long lives allowed them to
view the world from a different perspective. They no longer planned events
days or weeks in advance; often they would make plans decades into the
future. Perry had come to understand that the Elders, whose lives were
infinitely longer, could make plans that encompassed centuries. And that
often meant that events moved with an extraordinarily deliberate slowness.
But now the Morrigan was abroad. The last time she had walked in the
World of Men, she had been spotted in the bitter, mud-filled trenches of the
Somme; before that she had prowled the bloodstained battlefields of the
American Civil War. The Crow Goddess was drawn to death; it hung around
her like a foul stench. She was also one of the Elders who believed that
humans had been placed on this earth to serve them.
Nicholas and the twins were safe in Hekate’s Shadowrealm, but for
how long? Bastet was a First Generation Elder. Her powers had to be at
least equal to Hekate’s…and if the Cat Goddess and the Crow Goddess,
combined with Dee’s alchemical magic, attacked Hekate, would her defenses
hold? Perry didn’t know.
And what of Nicholas, Scathach and the twins?
Perenelle felt tears prickle the back of her eyes, but blinked them away.
Nicholas would be six hundred and seventy-seven years old on the twentyeighth
of September, in three months’ time. He was well able to take care of
himself, though his mastery of practical spells was very limited, and he could
be remarkably forgetful at times. Only the summer before, he had forgotten