01_-_The_Alchemyst

how to speak English and had reverted to his native archaic French. It had
taken her nearly a month to coach him back to speaking English. Before that
he had gone through a period when he had signed his checks in Greek and
Aramaic characters. Perenelle’s lips curled in a smile. He spoke sixteen
languages well and another ten badly. He could read and write in twenty-two
of them—though there wasn’t much chance to practice his Linear B,
cuneiform or hieroglyphics these days.
She wondered what he was doing right now. He would be looking for
her, of course, but he would also need to protect the twins and the pages that
Josh had torn from the Codex. She needed to get a message to him, she had to
let him know that she was fine and to warn him about the danger they were
in.
One of the earliest gifts the young woman known as Perenelle Delamere
had discovered when she was growing up was her ability to talk to the
shades of the dead. It wasn’t until her seventh birthday that she realized that
not everyone could see the flickering black-and-white images she
encountered daily. On the eve of her seventh birthday, her beloved
grandmother, Mamom, died. Perenelle watched as the withered body was
gently lifted from the bed where she had spent the last ten years of her life
and laid in the coffin. The small girl had followed the funeral procession
through the tiny town of Quimper and out into the graveyard that overlooked
the sea. She had watched the little rough-hewn box as it was lowered into the
earth, and then she had returned to her home.
And Mamom was sitting up in the bed, eyes bright with their usual
mischief. The only difference was that Perenelle could no longer see her
grandmother clearly. There was no color to her—everything was in blackand-white—and
her image kept flickering in and out of focus.
In that instant Perenelle realized she could see ghosts. And when
Mamom turned in her direction and smiled, she knew that they could see her.
Sitting in the small windowless cell, Perenelle stretched her legs out in
front of her and pressed both hands to the cold concrete floor. Over the years
she had developed a series of defenses to protect herself from the unwanted
intrusions of the dead. If there was one thing she had learned early on about