01_-_The_Alchemyst

and felt color flood his face: what if he’d managed to make an idiot of
himself in front of the entire nation? He’d never be able to show his face at
school again. He peered up into the corners of the room, looking for the
cameras. They were usually behind mirrors. There were no mirrors in the
room, but Josh knew that didn’t mean anything; the new generation of
cameras were so small that they were virtually invisible. A sudden thought
struck him. “What about the birds?”
Sophie nodded once more. “I keep coming back to the birds. Everything
else could be special effects: the Torc Allta could be trained animals and
men in prosthetic makeup, what happened in Scathach’s dojo could be some
sort of effect and the rats could have been trained. But not the birds: there
were too many of them, and they ripped the car to shreds.” The birds were
what had finally convinced her that she and Josh were in very real danger…
because if the birds were real, then everything else was real too.
Josh dug his hands into the back pockets of his jeans and stood by the
open window. The dense foliage came right up to the window ledge, and
although there was no glass in the opening, none of the myriad bugs that
flitted through the late-evening air entered the room. He recoiled as a bright
blue snake as thick as his wrist appeared out of the canopy of leaves and
flickered a tongue that was easily six inches long in his direction. The snake
vanished as a ball of tiny buzzing lights appeared, darting smoothly through
the trees. As they shot past the window, Josh could have sworn that the entire
swarm was composed of about a dozen tiny winged women, none of them
bigger than his forefinger. The lights came from within their bodies. He
licked dry lips. “Okay, let’s assume that this is real…all of it—the magic, the
ancient races—then that brings me back to my original thought: we’ve got to
get out of here.”
Sophie walked to the window, stood behind her brother and put her arm
on his shoulder. She was older than he was by twenty-eight seconds—less
than half a minute, Josh always reminded her—but with their mother and
father away so much, she had assumed the role of a much older sister.
Although he was already a good two inches taller than she was, he would
always be her baby brother. “I agree,” she said tiredly. “We should try and
make a run for it.”