Dropping to his hands and knees, he pulled his backpack out from under his bed. He then stood and began opening drawers, dragging out clothes and shoving them into the bag: socks and underwear, a spare pair of jeans, a couple of T-shirts. He stripped off the grimy clothes he’d been wearing since Paris, dumped them into the wicker basket at the end of the bed and pulled out clean clothes. Before he tugged on his red 49ers Faithful T-shirt, he removed the cloth bag hanging around his neck and sat down on the edge of his bed. He opened the bag and peered inside. It held the two pages he’d torn from the Codex last week. According to the Alchemyst, they contained the Final Summoning, which Dee needed to bring back the Dark Elders.

Josh shook the pages out onto the bed beside him. Then he lined them up side by side. They were about six inches across by nine inches tall and looked as if they had been made out of pressed bark and leaf fibers.

The last time he’d really looked at the pages they had been on the floor of the ruined bookshop and both he and his sister had been dazed and confused by everything they’d just witnessed. When he’d looked at the pages then, he could have sworn that the words were moving, but now they weren’t.

Both pages were covered front and back with jagged writing. He’d seen similar carvings on ancient artifacts in his father’s office, and he believed that the writing looked a lot like Sumerian. One letter-which he thought might be the initial letter-was beautifully colored in vivid golds and reds, while the rest was in black ink that was still crisp even after countless centuries. Picking up a page, he held it to the light.

And blinked in astonishment.

The words were moving. They slowly crawled, shifted and rearranged themselves on the page, forming words, sentences, paragraphs in countless languages. Some of the letters were almost recognizable-he saw pictographs and runes and he was able to pick out individual Greek letters, but most were completely alien.