The Enchantress (The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel)

against the fog, searing it away, creating a hole in the swirling damp around her. She raced through the opening between the two lines of cars and knew immediately what Niten and Prometheus had tried to do. She saw the broken spears on the ground and then spotted the blood: they had fought here and been injured. She caught the scent of their auras on the night air where they had healed themselves, but the auras were slightly soured and bitter—a sure sign that they were desperately weakened.
    A Spartoi warrior lurched out of the fog to her left. “What’s this?” he asked with a giggle. “Fresh meat . . .”
    Tsagaglalal’s wicked kopesh flashed and he fell without ever finishing the sentence.
    Shapes moved ahead of her: two Spartoi racing down the bridge toward her, swords and spears jabbing. The Spartoi were fast, inhumanly fast, but Tsagaglalal cut them down without breaking stride. A long time ago, when the world had been a very different place, and before the Fall of Danu Talis, she had been trained by some of the finest warriors in all creation. Later, when she had been called Myrina and commanded the most fearsome warriors on any of the Shadowrealms, she had passed those skills on to two girls under her command: Scathach and Aoife.
    Tsagaglalal ran past the last of the cars. There were deep grooves in the bridge where the metal wall had been pulled apart. She guessed that when Niten and Prometheus had realized the creatures were disassembling the barrier, the Elder and immortal had taken the battle to the enemy rather than standing and allowing themselves to be overrun.
    There was the hint of green tea in the air, the suggestion of anise, and then, directly ahead of her, the merest touches of blue and red on the blanketing fog. Tsagaglalal raced toward it. A wounded Spartoi staggered toward her, a look of absolute surprise on his face, obviously astonished that he’d been injured. Her kopesh rose and fell and the creature died with the same shocked expression on his face.
    Tsagaglalal could hear weapons clashing ahead of her, metal ringing off metal, the meaty slap of wood against flesh, the hissing of the Spartoi and the grunts of the two men. She burst out of the fog to see the Elder and the immortal standing back to back against almost ten times their number. The Elder’s armor was a blaze of red light, but it was fading fast, and the immortal shimmered with gossamer tendrils of his blue aura. Both men were badly wounded, but half a dozen of the creatures lay still at their feet.
    Abruptly, at some unheard command, all the Spartoi swarmed forward, spears and swords jabbing.
    Tsagaglalal saw Niten go down beneath a dozen blows. Prometheus stepped back to stand over the immortal’s body, guarding it, sword blurring, but the Spartoi were just too many, and they were too fast. Prometheus fell, stabbed in the back by those afraid to face him.
    She Who Watches screamed.
    The sound was ancient and primal, a raw ululation that should never have come from a human throat. But Tsagaglalal was not, and had never been, human. The sound cut into the fog and lanced through the night, stopping all movement. The Spartoi turned toward the howl and began to move in the direction of the figure in white ceramic armor.
    The air abruptly filled with the rich, thick scent of jasmine.
    “The Elemental Magics,” Tsagaglalal snarled, hammering a creature to the ground without even looking at it. “Equal and identical. None greater than the other. Water . . .”
    An entire section of the bridge turned to dirty liquid. Six of the Spartoi were immediately swallowed up, falling through the aqueous bridge to tumble into the sea far below.
    “Air . . .”
    Another portion of the bridge vaporized. Three of the creatures barely had time to scream before they too disappeared to fall through the suddenly empty space into the unforgiving waters of the bay.
    “Fire . . .”
    A six-foot stretch of the metal structure turned white-hot, blazing to incandescence. Three unlucky warriors were crisped to cinders in a heartbeat.
    A handful of the Spartoi remained. Hissing nervously, they backed away from the small woman in white.
    “And Earth.”
    The section of bridge where the Spartoi stood turned to quicksand. The warriors did not even have time to scream before it swallowed them. Then it instantly hardened and re-formed, leaving vague impressions of their bodies in the rippled surface.
    Tsagaglalal dusted off her hands. She