01_-_The_Alchemyst

moonlight gave her face a skeletal appearance, and he quickly looked away,
disturbed. He had always been close to his sister, but the last few hours had
served to remind him just how important she was to him.
“Didn’t Scathach say that Hekate had created this Shadowrealm?” Josh
asked. “I bet it’s modeled on the world she remembered.”
“So this is the night sky and the moon as they were thousands of years
ago,” Sophie said in awe. She wished she had her digital camera with her,
just to capture the extraordinary image of the smooth-faced moon.
The twins were looking into the heavens when a shadow flickered
across the face of the moon, a speck that might have been a bird…except that
the wingspan was too wide, and no bird had that serpentlike neck and tail.
Josh grabbed his sister’s hand and pulled her toward the car. “I’m really
beginning to hate this place,” he grumbled.
The SUV was where they had left it, parked in the center of the path.
The moon washed yellow light across the shattered windshield, the broken
patterns in the starred glass picked out in shadow. The brilliance also
highlighted the scars on the car’s body, the scratches and gouges in sharp
relief. The roof was studded with hundreds of tiny holes where the birds had
pecked through the metal, the rear window wiper dangled by a thread of
rubber and the two side mirrors were completely missing.
The twins regarded the SUV silently, the full realization of the bird
attack beginning to sink in. Sophie ran a finger down a series of scratches in
the window on the passenger side of the car. Those few millimeters of glass
were all that had protected her flesh from the birds’ claws.
“Let’s go,” Josh said, pulling open the door and sliding into the driver’s
seat. The keys were where he had left them, in the ignition.
“I feel a little bad, running out on Nicholas and Scatty without saying
anything,” Sophie said as she pulled open the door and climbed in. But the
immortal Alchemyst and the Warrior would be better off without them, she
reckoned. They were more than able to defend themselves; the last thing they
needed was two teenagers slowing them down.