The Alchemyst and the Sorceress heard Josh numbly repeat the words. “Goodbye, Nicholas; goodbye, Perenelle.”

And abruptly the image vanished.

The skull went black and Prometheus shuddered and slid off his chair to lie in a heap on the floor. Perenelle looked at her husband. They were both haggard and exhausted. “What happened?”

“Dee knew we were watching. He must have thrown up a Warding spell. Josh is on his own now. Let’s hope he can hold out until the others get there.”

CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE

CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE

A uniformed guard came to the door and looked at the odd trio standing outside. A slender, impeccably dressed Japanese man in a black suit, a red-haired woman, also in a tailored black suit, and a wild-haired teenager. Behind them, an antique Volkswagen van was haphazardly parked at the curb.

The blond teenager had her finger on the intercom, and the incessant chiming was starting to get on the guard’s nerves. He jabbed a stubby finger at the sign pasted to the door.

NO ADMITTANCE WITHOUT APPOINTMENT.

The girl took her finger off the bell and rummaged through her pockets. She produced a tube of lip balm and wrote in greasy letters across the glass:

YCNEGREME

The guard shook his head, turned his back and stepped over to his desk in the foyer of Enoch Enterprises. Tourists. Every day, people knocked on the door, looking for directions, wondering if they could get onto the roof to take photos. No one got in. Ever.

Before he was able to sit, however, a blast of heat seared all the small hairs on the back of his neck, and he caught the fleeting impression of the heavy door sailing across the lobby and smashing into the wall before something struck him at the base of the skull and the world turned black.

“You could have just opened the door,” Aoife suggested, looking at the smoldering ruin of metal and glass. “Or even melted the lock.”

Sophie shook her hands to cool them. “Sometimes I don’t know my own strength.”

Niten shrugged out of his black suit coat and strapped two swords, a katana and the shorter wakizashi, around his waist, so that they hung over his left hip.

Aoife settled two matched short swords over her shoulders on her back, and a pair of nunchaku dangled from each hand. She wore her broad-bladed knife strapped to her leg.

And Sophie uncoiled the silver and black leather whip Perenelle had given her before they had left Prometheus’s Shadowrealm. “This is woven from snakes pulled from the Medusa’s hair,” the Sorceress had explained. “It will slice through stone and cut metal. Be careful with it.”