“You are overtired,” Nicholas said quietly. “You have only recently been Awakened and have not had a chance to deal with that. Maybe a little of Mars’s knowledge leaked into you, confusing you, and,” he added, nodding to the sword, “you are carrying the Coward’s Blade. I know what it can do, the dreams it brings, the promises it makes. It can even make a boy think he’s a man.” He stopped and took a quick breath and changed his tone, forcing the bitterness from his voice. “Josh, you’re not thinking clearly.”

“I disagree,” Josh retorted. “For the first time I’m thinking very clearly. This-all this-is because of us.” He looked over the Alchemyst’s shoulder, concentrating on the Wild Hunt.

Flamel followed Josh’s gaze and glanced behind him. “Yes,” he agreed. “But not because of you, not because of Sophie and Josh Newman. This is because of what you are, and what you can become. This is just another battle in a war that has raged for millennia.”

“Winning battles wins wars,” Josh said. “My father once told me it’s always best to fight one battle at a time. We’re fighting this one.”

“Maybe you should ask your sister,” Flamel countered.

“He doesn’t need to,” Sophie said quietly. Drawn by the argument, she had come to stand behind her brother.

“So you’re in agreement about this?” Flamel demanded.

“The two that are one,” Sophie said, watching the Alchemyst’s face. “Isn’t that what we are?”

Josh turned to focus on the attack. The Gabriel Hounds had thrown their spears and fired the last of their crossbow bolts. The metal corridor was now thick with swirling, cloying dust. Vague shapes moved in the cloud, but none of the enemy had broken through yet. Palamedes and Shakespeare had come down from the walls and were marshaling the hounds around the entrance to the alleyway. Josh suddenly looked up, realizing that the walls were vulnerable, and was unsurprised to see the first of the wolf heads appear over the parapets.

“If anything happens to either of you now,” Flamel said desperately, turning away from Josh, concentrating on Sophie, “then everything we have done, everything we have achieved will have been for naught. Sophie, you have the Witch’s memories. You know what the Dark Elders did to humanity in the past. And if they capture you and your brother and retrieve the last two pages of the Codex, then they will do that, and worse-much worse-to this world.”

The immortal’s words stirred horrible memories within Sophie, and she blinked away nightmare images of a devastated flooded earth. She took a deep breath and nodded. “But before they can do anything, the Dark Elders have to capture us.” She held out her left hand and it turned into a solid silver glove. “And we’re no longer ordinary, no longer entirely human, either,” she added bitterly.