“ So let me get this straight, “ Yang Seungho said, trying to keep his voice perfectly level, “You don’t know how to drive ? Neither of you ?”

Seungho & Soyeon were sitting in the front seats of the SUV Fei had borrowed from one of her martial arts students. Seungho was driving, and his sister had a map on her lap. Jihoon and Fei were sitting in the back.

“Never learned, “ Jihoon said, with an expressive shrug.

“Never had the time, “ Fei said shortly.

“But Jihoon told us you’re more than two thousand years old, “ Soyeon said, looking at the girl.

“Two thousand five hundred and seventeen, as you humani measure time with your current calendar, “ Fei mumbled.

She looked into Jihoon’s clear eyes.

“And how old do I look ?”

“Not a day over seventeen, “ he said quickly.

“Couldn’t you have found time to learn how to drive ?” Soyeon persisted.

She’d wanted to learn how to drive since she was ten.

One of the reasons the twins had taken summer jobs this year, rather than go on the dig with their parents, was to get the money for a car of their own.

Fei shrugged, an irritated twitch of her shoulders.

“I’ve been meaning to, but I’ve been busy, “ she protested.

“You do know, “ Seungho said to no one in particular, “that I’m not supposed to be driving without a licensed driver with me. “

“We’re nearly fifteen and a half and we both can drive, “ Soyeon said. “Well, sort of, “ she added.

“Can either of you ride a horse ?” Jihoon asked , “or drive a carriage, or a coach-and-four?”

“Well, no …,” Soyeon began.

“Handle a war chariot while firing a bow or launching spears ?” Fei added. “Or fly a lizard-nathair while using a slingshot ?”

“I have no idea what a lizard-nathair is … and I’m not sure I want to know either. “

“So you see, you are experienced in certain skills, “ Jihoon said, “whereas we have other, somewhat older, but equally useful skills. “ He shot a sidelong glance at Fei.

“Though I’m not so sure about the nathair flying anymore. “

Seungho pulled away from a stop sign and turned right, heading for the Golden Gate Bridge.

“I just don’t know how you could have lived through the twentieth century without being able to drive. I mean, how did you get from place to place ?”

“Public transportation,” Jihoon said with a grim smile.

“Trains and buses, mainly. They are completely anonymous method of travel, unlike airplanes and boats. There is far too much paperwork involved in owning a car, paperwork that could be traced directly to us, no matter how many aliases we used. “

He paused and added, “And besides, there are other, older methods of travel. “

There were a hundred questions Seungho wanted to ask, but he was concentrating furiously on controlling the heavy car.

Although he knew how to drive, the only vehicles he’d actually driven were battered Jeeps when they accompanied their parents on a dig.

He’d never driven in traffic before, and he was terrified.

Soyeon had suggested that he pretend it was a computer game.

That helped, but only a little.

In a game, when you crashed, you simply started again.

Here, a crash was for keeps.

Traffic was slow across the famous bridge.

A long grey stretch limo had broken down in the inside lane, causing a bottleneck.

As they approached, Soyeon noticed that there were two dark-suited figures crouched under the hood on the passenger’s side.

She realized she was holding her breath as they drew close, wondering if the figures were Golems.

She heaved a sigh as they pulled alongside and discovered that the men looked like harassed accountants.

Seungho glanced at his sister and attempted a grin, and she knew he had been thinking the same thing.

Soyeon twisted in her seat, and turned to look back at Jihoon and Fei.

In the darkened, air-conditioned interior of the SUV, they seemed so ordinary.

Jihoon looked like a fading hippy, and Fei, despite her rather military dress sense, wouldn’t have looked out of place behind the counter at The Coffee Cup.

The brown-haired girl had propped her chin on her fist and was starring through the darkened glass across the bay toward Alcatraz.

Jung Jihoon dipped his head to follow the direction of her gaze.

“Haven’t been there for a while. “ he murmured.

“We did the tour,” Soyeon said.

“I liked it. “ Seungho said quickly. “Soyeon didn’t.”

“It was creepy.”

“And so it should be. “ Jihoon said quietly. “it is home to an extraordinary assortment of ghosts and unquiet spirits. Last time I was there, it was to put to rest an extremely ugly Snakeman. “

“I’m not sure I even want to know what a Snakeman is. “ Soyeon murmured, then paused.

“You know, a couple of hours ago, I could never have imagined myself saying something like that?”

Jung Jihoon sat back in the comfortable seats and folded his arms across his chest.

“Your lives-you and your brother’s- are now forever altered. You know that, don’t you?”

Soyeon nodded. “That’s beginning to sink in now. It’s just that everything’s happening so fast that it’s hard to take it all in. Mud men, magic, book of spells, rats …”

she looked at Fei. “Ancient warriors..”

Fei dipped her head in acknowledgment.

“And of course, a six-hundred-year-old alchemist …”

Soyeon stopped, a sudden thought crossing her mind.

She looked from Jihoon to Fei 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 ?”

Jihoon grinned. “Yes. Perhaps a little more than human, but yes. I was born and will always be one of the human race. “

Soyeon looked at Fei. “But you’re ..”

Fei opened her brown eyes wide, and for a single instant, a 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 Vampie, 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?” Soyeon whispered.

Fei 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 ?” Soyeon asked.

“The Flood,” Fei said very softly, “amongst other things.”

“The earth is a lot older than most people imagine,” Jihoon said quietly. “creatures and races that are now no more than myth once walked this world. “

Soyeon 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 …,” Seungho 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 ,” Soyeon 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, “ Jihoon replied, “and other 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,” Seungho said quickly.

He wondered what his father would say about the things they had seen today.

Jihoon 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 ?”

Soyeon shook her head.

Beside her, Seungho 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 tracs found in Wyoming and, only recently, the eight new prehistoric species discovered in a cave in Israel.

But what Jihoon was suggesting was staggering in its implications.

“You’re saying that humans and dinosaurs existed on the earth at the same time,” Seungho said, surprised that he sounded so angry.

“I’m saying that humans have existed on the earth with creatures far stranger, and much older than the dinosaurs,” Jihoon said seriously.

‘How do you know ?” Soyeon demanded. He claimed to have been born in 1330, he couldn’t have seen dinosaurs … could he ?

“It’s all written down in the Codex … and, in the course of my long life, I’ve seen beasts that are considered myths, I’ve fought beings from legend, I’ve face down creatures that looked like they crawled from a nightmare. “

“We did Shakespeare in school last term … There’s a line from Hamlet. “ Soyeon frowned, trying to remember. “There are more things in heaven and earth … “

Jung Jihoon nodded delightedly. “ … than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” he finished the quotation. “Hamlet, act one, scene five. I knew Will Shakespeare, of course. Now, Will could have been an alchemist of extraordinary talent … but then he fell into Junhyung’s clutches. Poor Will. Do you know that he based the character of Prospero in The Tempest on Junhyung ?”

“I never liked Shakespeare, “ Fei muttered. “He smelled. “

“You knew Shakespeare ?” Seungho was unable to keep the disbelief out of his voice.

“He was my student briefly, very briefly, “ Jihoon said.

“I’ve lived a long time. I’ve had a lot of students-some made famous by history, most forgotten. I’ve met a lot of people, human and unhuman, mortal and immortal. People like Fei. “ Jihoon finished.

“There are more like you .. more of the Elder Race ?” Soyeon asked, looking at the brown-haired girl.

“More than you might think, though I try not to associate with them, “ Fei said uneasily. “There are those amongst the Elders who cannot accept that our time is past, that this age belongs to the humani. They want to see a return to the old ways, and they believe that their puppet Junhyung and others like him are in a position to bring that about. They are called the Dark Elders. “

“I don’t know if anyone has notice, “ Seungho interrupted suddenly, “but would you say there are a lot of birds gathering ?”

Soyeon turned to stare through the windshield, while Jihoon and Fei peered through the back window.

The spars and pylons, the braces, ropes and wires of the Golden Gate Bridge were slowly filling with birds. Thousands of them. Mainly blackbirds and crows, they covered all available surfaces, with more arriving every moment.

“They’re coming from Alcatraz,” Seungho said, dipping his head to look across the choppy waters toward the island.

A dark cloud had gathered above Alcatraz. It rose out of the abandoned prison in a dark curl and hung in the air looking like smoke, but this smoke didn’t dissipate. It moved and circled in a solid mass.

“Birds. “ Seungho swallowed hard. “There must be thousands of them. “

‘Tens of thousands, “ Soyeon corrected him. She turned to look at Jihoon. “what are they ?”

“The Davichi’s children, “ he said enigmatically.

“Trouble,” Fei added. “Big trouble. “

Then, as if driven by a single command, the huge flock of birds moved away from the island and headed across the bay, directly toward the bridge.

Seungho hit his window button and the tinted glass hummed down.

The noise of the birds was audible now, a raucous cawing, almost like high-pitched laughter. Traffic was slowing, some people even stopping to get out of their cars to take photographs with digital cameras and cell phones.

Jung Jihoon leaned forward and placed his left hand on Seungho’s shoulder.

“You should drive,” he said seriously. “Do not stop … whatever happens, even if you hit something. Just drive. As fast as you can. Get us off this bridge. “

There was something in Jihoon’s unnaturally controlled voice that frightened Soyeon even more than if he had shouted.

She glanced sidelong at Fei, but the young woman was rummaging through her backpack.

The warrior pulled out a short bow and a handful or arrows and placed them on the seat beside her.

“Roll up your window, Seungho, “ she said calmly. “We don’t want anything getting in. “

“We’re in trouble, aren’t we ?” Soyeon whispered, looking at the Alchemyst.

‘Only if the crows catch us, “ Jihoon said with a tight smile. ‘Could I borrow your cell phone ?”

Soyeon pulled her cell out of her pocket and flipped it open.

“Aren’t you going to work some magic ?” she asked hopefully.

“No, I’m going to make a call. Let’s hope we don’t get an answering service. “

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Quite a boring chapter. I'm sorry T__T

Promise the next chapter would be better <3 xD

Comments, please ? xD