Free The Alchemyst by Michael Scott Page B

crossing her mind. She looked from Flamel to Scatty and back again. Then she took a moment to formulate her question. Staring hard at the man, she asked, “You
are
human, aren’t you?”
    Nicholas Flamel grinned. “Yes. Perhaps a little more than human, but yes, I was born and will always be one of the human race.”
    Sophie looked at Scathach. “But you’re…”
    Scathach opened her green eyes wide, and for a single instant, something ancient was visible in the planes and angles of her face. “No,” she said very quietly. “I am not of the race of humani. My people were of different stock, the Elder Race. We ruled this earth before the creatures who became humani climbed down from the trees. Nowadays, we are remembered in the myths of just about every race. We are the creatures of legend, the Were clans, the Vampire, the Giants, the Dragons, the Monsters. In stories we are remembered as the Old Ones or the Elder Race. Some stories call us gods.”
    “Were you ever a god?” Sophie whispered.
    Scatty giggled. “No. I was never a god. But some of my people allowed themselves to be worshipped as gods. Others simply became gods as humani told tales of their adventures.” She shrugged. “We were just another race, an older race than man, with different gifts, different skills.”
    “What happened?” Sophie asked.
    “The Flood,” Scatty said very softly, “amongst other things.”
    “The earth is a lot older than most people imagine,” Flamel said quietly. “Creatures and races that are now no more than myth once walked this world.”
    Sophie nodded slowly. “Our parents are archaeologists. They’ve told us about some of the inexplicable things that archaeology sometimes reveals.”
    “Remember that place we visited in Texas, Taylor something…,” Josh said, carefully easing the heavy SUV into the middle lane. He’d never driven anything so big before, and was terrified he was going to hit something. He’d had a couple of near misses and was convinced he’d actually clipped someone’s side mirror, but he’d kept going, saying nothing.
    “The Taylor Trail,” Sophie said, “at the Paluxy River in Texas. There are what look like dinosaur footprints and human prints in the same fossilized piece of stone. And the stone is dated to one hundred million years old.”
    “I have seen them,” Flamel replied, “and others like them all across the world. I have also examined the shoe print that was found in Antelope Springs in Utah…in rock about five hundred million years old.”
    “My dad says things like that can be easily dismissed as either fakes or misinterpretation of the facts,” Josh said quickly. He wondered what his father would say about the things they had seen today.
    Flamel shrugged. “Yes, that is true. But what science cannot understand, it dismisses. Not everything can be so easily brushed aside. Can you dismiss what you’ve seen and experienced today as some sort of misinterpretation of the facts?”
    Sophie shook her head.
    Beside her, Josh shrugged uncomfortably. He didn’t like the direction this conversation was taking. Dinosaurs and humans living together at the same time was simply inconceivable. The very idea went against everything his parents had taught them, everything they believed. But somewhere at the back of his mind, a small voice kept reminding him that every year archaeologists—including his parents—kept making extraordinary discoveries. A couple of years earlier, it was
Homo floresiensis,
the tiny people in Indonesia, nicknamed Hobbits; then there was the species of dwarf dinosaur discovered in Germany, and the hundred-and-sixty-five-million-year-old dinosaur tracks found in Wyoming and, only recently, the eight new prehistoric species discovered in a cave in Israel. But what Flamel was suggesting was staggering in its implications. “You’re saying that humans and dinosaurs existed on the earth at the same time,” Josh said, surprised that he sounded so