01_-_The_Alchemyst

In the end, he found them entirely by chance: he was driving down Ojai
Avenue and had gone past Libbey Park when he spotted the black Hummer
parked on Fox Street. He pulled in behind it and parked. The moment he got
out of his car, he caught the merest hint of a pure gold aura coming from the
park, close to the fountain. Dee’s thin lips curled in a humorless smile.
They would not escape this time.
Josh Newman sat by the long, low fountain in Libbey Park directly
across from the antiques shop and stared into the water. Two flower-shaped
bowls, one larger than the other, were set in the center of a circular pool.
Water spouted from the top bowl and flowed over the sides into the larger
bowl beneath. This in turn overflowed into the pool. The sound helped
drown out the nearby traffic noises.
He felt alone, and more than a little lost.
When the Witch had made him leave the antiques shop, he’d walked
beneath the shaded promenade and stopped in front of the ice cream shop,
lured there by the odors of chocolate and vanilla. He stood outside, reading
the menu of exotic flavors, and wondered why his sister’s aura smelled of
vanilla ice cream and his of oranges. She didn’t even really like ice cream;
he was the one who loved it.
His finger tapped the menu: blueberry chocolate chip.
Josh shoved his hand in the back pocket of his jeans…and felt a rising
moment of panic as realized his wallet was missing. Had he left it in the car,
had he…? He stopped.
He knew exactly where he’d left it.
The last place he’d seen his wallet, along with his dead cell, his iPod
and his laptop, was on the floor next to his bed in his room in the Yggdrasill.
Losing his wallet was bad enough, but losing his computer was a disaster.
All his e-mails were on it, along with his class notes, a partially written
summer honors project, three years of photos—including the trip to Cancún
at Christmas—and at least sixty gigs of MP3s. He couldn’t remember the last
time he had backed up, but it definitely wasn’t recently. He actually felt