01_-_The_Alchemyst

slow. He called up Altavista and typed in a dozen versions of Scathach
before he finally got a hit with the correct spelling. “Here she is: twentyseven
thousand hits for Scathach, the shadow or the shadowy one,” he said,
then added offhandedly, “I think she’s cool.”
Sophie picked up on the too-casual tone immediately. She smiled
broadly and her eyebrows shot up. “Who? Oh, you mean the two-thousandyear-old
warrior maid. Don’t you think she might be a little too old for you?”
A wash of color rose from beneath the neck of Josh’s T-shirt, painting
his cheeks bright red. “Let me try Google,” he muttered, fingers rattling
across the keyboard. “Forty-six thousand hits for Scathach,” he said. “Looks
like she’s real too. Let’s see what Wiki has to say about her,” he went on, and
then realized that Sophie wasn’t even looking at him. He turned to her and
discovered that she was staring fixedly through the window.
There was a rat standing on the rooftop of the building across the alley,
staring at them. As they watched, it was joined by a second and then a third.
“They’re here,” Sophie whispered.
Dee concentrated on keeping his lunch down.
Looking through the rat’s eyes was a nauseating experience. Because of
their tiny brain, it required a huge effort of will to keep the creature
focused…which, in an alleyway filled with rotten food, was no easy task.
Dee was momentarily grateful that he had not used the full force of the
scrying spell, which would have allowed him to hear, to taste and—this was
a terrifying thought—to smell everything the rat encountered.
It was like looking at a badly tuned black-and-white television. The
image shifted, pitched and lurched with the rat’s every movement. The rat
could go from running horizontally on the ground, to running vertically up a
wall, then upside-down across a rope, all within a matter of seconds.
Then the image stabilized.
Directly in front of Dee, outlined in purple-tinged gray and glowing in
grayish black, were the two humans he had seen in the bookshop. A boy and
a girl—in their midteens, perhaps—and similar enough in appearance for