The Warlock (The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel #5) Read Online Free

still parked on the street. The roof of the car was now dusted with cinders and ash, glittering beneath a fine coating of broken glass. “We need to get out of here—now!”
    Dee slid into the rear of the car next to Dare, and Josh pulled both swords from his belt and laid them on the floor in front of the passenger seat before climbing into the driver’s seat. “Where to?” he asked.
    Virginia Dare leaned forward. “Just get off the Hill first.” Even as she was speaking, a plume of green-tinged smoke erupted from the roof of the building. Immediately, all three of their auras flickered—yellow, pale green and gold. “Weneed to get out of this city. That will have alerted everything on the West Coast of America. Everything is coming.”
    The morning air came alive with the sounds of approaching sirens.
    “And I wasn’t including the police,” she added.

he world was ending.
    A dirty white 1963 Jeep Wagoneer raced across a landscape that was rapidly losing every vestige of color. Prometheus sat in the driver’s seat, huge hands locked onto the steering wheel, holding it tightly enough to crack the plastic and metal. Perenelle Flamel sat behind him, with Nicholas stretched out beside her, his head in her lap.
    Prometheus’s Shadowrealm was collapsing. The robin’s-egg-blue sky had paled to chalk; clouds had taken on the appearance of curled tissue and faded to monochromatic smudges. In the space of a single heartbeat, the sea had stopped moving. Waves had peaked and frozen, blue-green dissolving to white before turning to cascades of gray dust, while the golden sands and polished pebbles had taken on the appearance of burnt paper and charred lumps of coal. A ghost wind scattered the ashes, spiraling them up into the air. Theyfell on trees and grasses already losing form and definition, turning them the color of parchment; anything that grew was fading to the yellow of brittle bone before finally dissipating into chalky gray powder.
    And when all traces of color had vanished, the shades of gray started to fade, and the horizon fractured into a million sparkling dust motes that fell like a dirty snow, leaving nothing but a solid impenetrable blackness behind it.
    The Wagoneer bounced along a narrow coast road, engine howling, tires spinning to find purchase on the rapidly fading roadway. The interior of the car stank of anise and the Elder’s aura glowed around him, bright red and hot enough to scorch the seats and melt the roof over his head. He was desperately attempting to hold his Shadowrealm together long enough to get the car back into the earth Shadowrealm at Point Reyes. But it was a losing battle; the world he had created millennia ago was dying, returning to its Unmade state.
    The events of the previous hours had exhausted Prometheus, and using the vampire-like crystal skull to help the Flamels track Josh into San Francisco had sapped his energy. He had known how dangerous the skull was—his sister, Zephaniah, had warned him about it often enough—but he’d chosen to help the Alchemyst and his wife. Prometheus had always sided with the humani.
    And so he had laid his hands on the ancient object and used its powers … and in return the skull had drunk his memories and feasted off his aura. He was weakened now,desperately weakened, and he knew he was dangerously close to being overwhelmed by his own aura, reduced to flame and ashes. In a matter of a few hours, the Elder’s oncered hair had turned snow-white, and even his brilliantly green eyes had paled.
    He was close, so close to the edge of his world … but even as the thought was forming, an opaque gray mist abruptly enveloped the car.
    Prometheus’s startled reaction almost sent the car off the narrow road. For a moment he thought the dissolution of the Shadowrealm had caught up with him; then he breathed in cold air and the odor of salt and realized the mist was only the natural sea fog that regularly rolled into Point Reyes in the earth