The Magician (The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel #2) by Michael Scott Page A

long pause, “that you’ve been talking to Dr. Dee. And the only place you could have encountered him was in Ojai, since that was the only time you were out of my sight.”
    Josh didn’t even think about denying it. “I met Dee when the three of you were busy with the Witch”, he admitted defiantly. “He told me a lot about you.”
    “I’m quite sure he did”, Flamel murmured. He waited by the curb as a dozen students on bicycles and mopeds sped past; then he strolled across the street. Josh hurried after him.
    “He said that you never tell anyone everything.”
    “True”, Flamel agreed. “If you tell people everything, you take away their opportunity to learn.”
    “He said you stole the Book of Abraham from the Louvre.”
    Nicholas walked for half a dozen steps before nodding. “Well, I suppose that is true too”, he said, “though it’s not quite so straightforward as he would like to paint it. Certainly, in the seventeenth century, the book briefly fell into the hands of Cardinal Richelieu.”
    Josh shook his head. “Who’s that?”
    “Have you never read The Three Musketeers ?” Flamel asked in astonishment.
    “Nope. Didn’t even see the movie.”
    Flamel shook his head. “I’ve got a copy in the shop”, he began, and then stopped. When he’d walked away from the bookshop on Thursday, it had been a trashed ruin. “Richelieu appears in the books and the movies, too. He was a real person and was known as the l Eminence Rouge the Red Eminence so named after his cardinal s red robes”, he explained. “He was King Louis XIII’s chief minister, but in reality he ruled the country. In 1632, Dee managed to trap Perenelle and me in a part of the old city. His inhuman agents had surrounded us; there were ghouls in the earth beneath our feet, Dire-Crows in the air, and Baobhan Sith were tracking us through the streets.” Nicholas shrugged uncomfortably at the memory and looked up and around, almost as if he expected to see the creatures appear again. “I was beginning to think that I was going to have to destroy the Codex rather than see it fall into Dee’s hands. Then Perenelle suggested one last option: we could hide the book in plain sight. It was simple and brilliant!”
    “What did you do?” Josh asked, curious now.
    Flamel’s teeth flashed in a quick smile. “I sought an audience with Cardinal Richelieu and presented him with the book.”
    “You gave it to him? Did he know what it was?”
    “Of course he did. The Book of Abraham is famous, Josh or maybe infamous might be a better word. Next time you go online, look it up.”
    “Did the cardinal know who you were?” he asked. Listening to Flamel talk, it was easy so easy to believe everything he said. And then he remembered how believable Dee had been back in Ojai.
    Flamel smiled, remembering. “Cardinal Richelieu believed I was one of the descendants of Nicholas Flamel. So we presented him with the Book of Abraham and he put it in his library.” Nicholas laughed softly as he shook his head. “The safest place in all of France.”
    Josh frowned. “But surely when he looked at it, he saw that the text moved?”
    “Perenelle put a glamour over the book. It’s a particular type of spell astonishingly simple, apparently, though I could never master it so when the cardinal looked at the book, he saw what he expected to see: pages of ornate Greek and Aramaic writing.”
    “Did Dee catch you?”
    “Almost. We escaped down the Seine on a barge. Dee himself stood on the Pont Neuf with a dozen musketeers and fired scores of shots at us. They all missed; despite the musketeers reputation, they were terrible shots”, he added. “And then, a couple of weeks later, Perenelle and I returned to Paris, broke into the library and stole our book back. So I suppose you could say that Dee is right”, he concluded. “I am a thief.”
    Josh walked on in silence; he had no idea what to believe. He wanted to believe Flamel; working in the bookshop