01_-_The_Alchemyst

Dora glanced sideways at Scatty. “You hear that? Almost every day.”
She took one of Sophie’s hands in hers and patted the back of it. “Maybe you
should be teaching Scathach a thing or two. And have you a grandmother?”
“My Nana, yes, my father’s mother. I usually call her on Fridays,” she
added, realizing with a guilty start that today was Friday and that Nana
Newman would be expecting a call.
“Every Friday,” the Witch of Endor said significantly, and looked at
Scatty again, but the Warrior deliberately turned away and concentrated on an
ornate glass paperweight. She put it down when she saw that there was a tiny
man in a three-piece suit frozen inside the glass. He had a briefcase in one
hand and a sheaf of papers in the other. His eyes were still blinking.
“This will not hurt,” the Witch said.
Sophie doubted it could be any worse than what she’d already gone
through. Her nose wrinkled at the odor of burnt wood, and she felt a cool
breeze wash over her hands. She looked down. A gossamer-thin white
spiderweb was twisting and spinning from the Witch of Endor’s fingers and
wrapping itself like a bandage around each of Sophie’s fingers. It curled
across her palm, completely covering it, then wrapped around her wrist and
crept up her arm. She realized then that the Witch had been distracting her
with her questions. Sophie looked into the Witch’s mirrored eyes and found
that she could not put her questions into words. It was as if she had lost the
ability to speak. She was also surprised that instead of feeling frightened,
from the moment the Witch had taken her hand, a wave of peace and calm had
washed through her body. She glanced sideways at Scatty and Flamel. They
were watching the process, wide-eyed with shock and, in Scathach’s case,
with something like horror on her face.
“Gran…are you sure about this?” Scathach demanded.
“Of course I’m sure,” the old woman snapped, a note of anger in her
voice.
And even though the Witch of Endor was speaking to Scathach, Sophie
could hear her voice in her head, talking to her, whispering ancient secrets,