01_-_The_Alchemyst

to turn and scuttle away. It just raised its head and looked at him, its mouth
opening to reveal pointed teeth. Josh shuddered. Snakes and rats: he hated
them equally…though not as much as he hated spiders. And scorpions.
“Rats don’t have red eyes, do they?” he asked, looking at his sister,
who, as far as he knew, was afraid of nothing.
“Not usually,” she said.
When he turned back, he discovered that there were now two jet-black
rats standing still in the alleyway. A third scuttled out of the gloom and
settled down to watch them.
“OK,” Josh said evenly, “I’ve seen men made of mud, I guess I can
accept spying rats. Do they talk?” he wondered aloud.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Flamel snapped. “They’re rats.”
Josh really didn’t think it was such a ridiculous suggestion.
“Has Dee sent them?” Sophie asked.
“He’s tracking us. The rats have followed our scent from the shop. A
simple scrying spell allows him to see what they see. They are a crude but
effective tool, and once they have our scent they can follow us until we cross
water. But I’m more concerned about those.” He tilted his chin upward.
Sophie and Josh looked up. Gathering on the rooftops of the surrounding
buildings were an extraordinary number of black-feathered birds.
“Crows,” Flamel said shortly.
“That’s bad?” Sophie guessed. From the moment Dee had stepped into
the shop, there hadn’t been a whole lot of good news.
“It could be very bad. But I think we’ll be OK. We’re nearly there.” He
turned to the left and led the twins into the heart of San Francisco’s exotic
Chinatown. They passed the Sam Wong Hotel, then turned right into a
cramped back street, then immediately left into an even narrower alleyway.
Off the relatively clean main streets, the alleyways were piled high with
boxes and open bins that stank with that peculiarly sweet-sour odor of rotten
food. The narrow alley they had turned into was especially foul-smelling, the