The Enchantress (The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel)

talons that were a cross between human feet and birds’ claws. They fought with leathery bats’ wings, which were tipped with one long hooked finger. The vetala were blood drinkers and had the enormous savage teeth of their kind.
    “Wish I had my wolves with me now,” Odin muttered. “They’d make short work of these filthy things.” He hissed in pain as a spike-tipped wing ripped his arm open from wrist to elbow.
    And then Mars’s sword sliced apart the attacking vetala’s wings as if they were paper, and Hel’s whip punctured holes through another.
    Odin called up his aura. The air buzzed with ozone, and gray smoke shimmered over his flesh. He focused on the wound in his arm. The blood stopped pumping out, but the wound didn’t heal. “My aura is almost completely depleted,” he muttered. The Elder slumped back against a wall, exhausted.
    Hel pressed her claws to her uncle’s torn arm and squeezed. Her bloodred aura flickered once, then faded to pink smoke. “Nothing. Something is draining us,” she said.
    A shiver ran through the assembled monsters, but instead of crowding in, they started to pull back. The minotaur pointed to Hel and deliberately licked his thick lips. She bared her fangs and stuck out her tongue at him.
    “They’re backing away,” Odin said. He tried to raise his aura again, but only the merest veil of gray danced over his skin.
    “I’ll wager that is not good news,” Mars said. A shadow danced along the wall. “Something’s coming,” he said.
    The monsters parted and a sphinx stepped forward. The body was that of an enormous lion with the wings of an eagle. The head belonged to a young woman who was beautiful until she opened her mouth to reveal her sharp teeth and serpent’s tongue. The sphinx smiled and tilted her head to one side. Her long black forked tongue flickered, tasting the air. “Oh, I can taste all your auras. They are very sweet.” She licked her lips as she approached, her claws digging into the stones at her feet. “I’ve waited my entire lifetime to eat an Elder’s memories and suddenly three Elders come along together. What wonders will you reveal to me?”
    “I knew something was draining our auras,” Hel muttered. The sphinx had the ability to drink any aura and drain its energy.
    “So you are Mars, Odin and Hel. My mother sometimes spoke of you. She did not like any of you. But you,” she said to Hel. “She especially disliked you: she said you were ugly.”
    The Elder laughed. “You think
I
look ugly . . .” She moved her mouth, and the fangs jutting up from beneath her bottom lip made her look astonishingly like the boar she had just eaten. “I knew your mother both before and after the Change took her. She was ugly before and, let me tell you, there was little difference afterward. Your mother was so ugly that even the magic mirrors would not talk to her. Your mother was so ugly, she—” Hel was about to continue, but Odin leaned a hand on her arm and shook his head.
    “Enough!”
    “But, it’s true,” Hel protested. “Her mother was so ugly—”
    “You are a daughter of Echidna,” Mars said evenly. He planted his sword point-first in the ground and rested his arms across the pommel. “We knew her. She was kin to us. Which makes you kin to us also.” He spread one arm. “I wonder if you are not fighting on the wrong side?”
    The sphinx shook her beautiful human head. “I am on the right side. The winning side.”
    “Dee is gone,” Mars said.
    “I do not work for Dee,” the sphinx said quickly. “Dee is a fool, a dangerous fool. He attempted to betray us and was declared
utlaga
. No, I am working with Quetzalcoatl.”
    “Be careful of him,” Odin advised. “He is not to be trusted.”
    “Oh, I don’t know. He told me he could give me a proper human body.” She took a step forward, lion’s claws scratching on the stone. “Could he do that?”
    “Probably,” Mars said.
    “Could you?”
    Mars shook his head.
    “What about you, Odin, or you, Hel? Could you give me a human body?”
    Hel shook her head, but the one-eyed Elder said, “I could not, but I know some people who could. I could take you to a Shadowrealm where we could grow you the most perfect body and implant your consciousness and memories into it.”
    “Quetzalcoatl said he can morph this body to a new shape. Can he?” she demanded.
    “Probably,” Odin said. “Who knows what that monster can do?”
    “So why are you here?” Mars