“Admit it, I’m looking old,” she said. Then her green eyes moved across his face, noting the new lines and deep creases in his skin. Her index finger trailed white aura across his numerous cuts and bruises, healing them. “Though not as old as you. You are a decade younger,” she reminded him, “though today”-she smiled-“for the first time in all our years together, you do look older than me.”

“It has been an interesting few days,” Flamel admitted. “But how did you get here? The last time we spoke you were a prisoner on Alcatraz.”

“I can now claim to be one of the very few prisoners to have escaped the Rock.” Slipping her arm into his, she walked him down the mountain through the early-afternoon mist, the twins following a few steps behind. “You should be very proud of me, Nicholas,” she said. “I drove here all by myself.”

“I’m always proud of you.” He paused. “But we don’t have a car.”

“I borrowed a rather nice Thunderbird convertible I found at the pier. I knew the owner wouldn’t be using it anytime soon.”

EPILOGUE

EPILOGUE

Dr. John Dee lay in the soft grass and looked up at the night sky, watching the gold and silver glow fade from the heavens and smelling, even from this distance, the hint of vanilla and orange. Police helicopters vibrated in the air, and sirens sounded everywhere.

So the twins and Flamel had escaped.

And they’d taken with them his life and his future. He had been living on borrowed time since the failed attack the previous night; now he was a dead man walking.

The Magician sat up slowly, cradling his right arm. It felt numb from fingertip to shoulder, where it had taken the full force of the blow from Clarent. He thought it might be broken.

Clarent.

He’d seen the boy throw the sword… but he hadn’t seen him pick it up. Dee rolled over in the mud and discovered the blade lying on the ground next to him. Gently, almost reverently, he lifted it out of the dirt and then lay back on the earth, the blade flat on his chest, both hands resting across the hilt.

Five hundred years he had been searching for this weapon. It was a quest that had taken him all over the world and into the Shadowrealms. He laughed, the sound high-pitched, almost hysterical. And he had finally found it back almost where it started. One of the first places he’d looked for the blade was under the Altar Stone at Stonehenge; he’d been fifteen years old at the time, and Henry VIII had been on the throne.