The Enchantress (The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel)

her neck and into her face. She stared at her gray eyes. The sclera—the whites of her eyes—were yellow, threaded with veins, the right eye slightly milky with the hint of a cataract. She’d always thought that was a really nice touch.
    The scent of jasmine strengthened. Heat flowed into Tsagaglalal’s throat and mouth, up across her cheeks and into her eyes: and the sclera turned white.
    The woman breathed in, filling her lungs, then holding her breath. The skin of her face rippled and smoothed, soft plump flesh flowing along the hard bony lines of her cheeks, filling out her nose, rounding out her chin. Lines vanished, crow’s-feet filled in, the deep bruise-colored shadows beneath her eyes disappeared.
    Tsagaglalal was immortal, but she was not human. She was clay. She had been born in the Nameless City on the edge of the world when Prometheus’s fiery aura had imbued ancient clay statues with life and consciousness. Deep within her she carried a tiny portion of the Elder’s aura: it kept her alive. She and her brother, Gilgamesh, were the first of the First People to be born or achieve a consciousness. Every time she renewed herself, she could remember with absolute clarity the moment she had opened her eyes and drawn her first breath.
    She laughed. It began as the cracked cough of an elderly woman and ended with the high pure sound of a much younger person.
    Powered by her aura, the transformation continued. Flesh tightened, bones straightened, teeth whitened, hearing and sight grew sharp once more. A thin fuzz of jet-black hair pushed through her scalp, then thickened and streamed past her shoulders. She opened and closed her hands, wriggled her fingers and rotated her wrists. Placing her hands on her hips, she twisted her body from side to side, then bent at the waist and touched the floor with the palms of her hands.
    Standing before the mirror, Tsagaglalal watched age fall away from her body, saw herself grow young and beautiful again. She had forgotten what it was like to be young, and it had been a long time since she’d been beautiful. The last time she looked like this was the day when Danu Talis had fallen ten thousand years ago.
    And if the world was going to end today, she was determined not to spend her last few hours on earth as an old woman.
    Tsagaglalal made her way down the hall to the tiny spare bedroom at the back of the house on Scott Street. She strode swiftly and easily, delighting in her new freedom of movement. She twirled in the center of the landing purely for the joy of being able to spin.
    Almost from the moment she’d bought the house, the spare bedroom had been used for storage. It was stuffed with a hundred years of clutter: suitcases, books, magazines, bits of furniture, a cracked leather chair, an ornamental writing desk and a dozen black plastic sacks stuffed with old clothes that she’d once thought about dumping until she’d realized they’d become fashionable again. There was an antique American flag with a circle of stars on it alongside a framed original
King Kong
movie poster signed by Edgar Wallace. At the back of the room, tucked away in a corner, half buried behind a stack of yellow-spined National Geographic magazines, was a hideous eighteenth-century Louis XV cherrywood armoire.
    Tsagaglalal pushed her way through the room and heaved stacks of magazines aside to get to the wardrobe. The armoire’s door was locked and there was no key in the scrolled metal keyhole. Standing on her toes, Tsagaglalal reached over the door behind an ornamental curl of wood and her questing fingers found the large brass key hung on a bent nail. Lifting the key off the nail, she experienced a sudden wash of memories: the last time she’d opened this armoire was when she’d returned from Berlin at the end of the Second World War. There was a sudden prickle of tears at the backs of her eyes, a burning in her throat. On the way back to New York, she had stopped in London and met with her brother, Gilgamesh. He’d had no idea who she was, didn’t even remember that he had a sister, though he had recognized that he should know her. She had sat with him in the ruins of a bombed-out house in the East End of London and gone through the tens of thousands of papers he was storing there. They had spent the afternoon working backward, going from paper to parchment, then vellum, and finally on to bark and wafer-thin sheets of almost transparent gold, until she was able to point out her