Nicholas hit the Off button and handed the phone back to Sophie without a word. “He said-”

“We heard.” The twins’ Awakened senses had allowed them to clearly hear both sides of the conversation. “A gas explosion?” Sophie asked.

“Well, he could hardly say the damage was caused by some sort of primeval dinosaur, could he?” Josh teased. “Who’d believe him?” Shoving his hands in his pockets, he hurried after Flamel, who was already striding down the street. “Come on, sis.”

Sophie nodded. Her brother had a point. But she was also beginning to see how the Elders had managed to keep their existence a secret for so long. Mankind simply didn’t want to believe that there was magic in the world. Not in this age of science and technology. Monsters and magic belonged to the primitive uncivilized past, and yet in the last few days she’d seen that every day there was evidence for magic. People reported impossibilities all the time; they saw the strangest things, the most bizarre creatures… and no one believed them. They couldn’t all be wrong, lying, confused or misguided, could they? If the Dark Elders and their servants were in positions of power, then all they would have to do was dismiss the reports, ignore them or-as had just happened in Paris-ridicule them in the media. Soon even the people who had made the reports, the very people who had seen something out of the ordinary, would begin to doubt the evidence of their own senses. Just yesterday the Nidhogg, a creature that supposedly existed only in legend, had rampaged through Paris’s narrow streets, leaving a trail of devastation. It had crashed across the Champs-Elysées and ripped apart a section of the famous quayside before plunging into the river. Dozens of people must have seen it; but where were their stories, their statements? The press had reported the event as a gas explosion in the ancient catacombs.

And then all the gargoyles and grotesques on Notre Dame had come alive and crawled down the building. Using Josh’s aura to enhance her own, Sophie had used Fire and Air magic to reduce the creatures to little more than shattered stone… and yet how had it been reported in the press?

The effects of acid rain.

As they’d sped through the French countryside on the Eurostar, they’d read the online coverage on Josh’s laptop. Every news organization in the world had some story about the events, but they’d all told versions of the same lie. It was only on the wilder conspiracy Web sites and blogs that sightings of Nidhogg had been reported, along with shaky mobile-phone footage of the monster. Dozens of postings dismissed the videos and stills as fake, comparing them to images of Sasquatch and the Loch Ness monster that had been proven false. Only now, of course, Sophie was beginning to suspect that both of those creatures were probably real too.