The Enchantress (The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel)

salt and meat.
    Metal scraped in the fog, the sound high-pitched and grating.
    The Elder visibly aged before the Japanese immortal’s eyes as he healed, his hair turning snow-white, lines etching into his forehead, deep grooves forming alongside his nose and at the corners of his mouth.
    Out in the night, glass cracked and the bridge vibrated as more metal clanged.
    Niten held out his hand and helped the Elder to his feet. Prometheus rubbed his hand over his armor, repairing the holes, filling out the metal. “I doubt I can do that again. What about you?” he asked, squinting at Niten.
    “I have a little aura left. Not much. Perhaps enough for one more healing if the wound is not too bad.”
    “At least your hair has not turned gray.”
    “Oh, I think mine will be black till the day I die. And by the way, your hair is not gray anymore,” Niten said. “It’s white.”
    “I’ve always been fond of red.”
    Metal screamed again.
    Niten reached out to rest his hand against the nearest car. It was vibrating. “They’re pulling the barricade apart,” he said.
    “That’s what I would do.” Prometheus nodded. “I wonder if they will fight or bypass us and swarm into the city?”
    “They’ll fight,” Niten said confidently. “We have offended them.”
    “Offended them—how?”
    “By not dying quickly. These are professional warriors; I have fought their like all my life. They believe they are invincible. It makes them arrogant, and stupid, too. And I have found that stupid people make mistakes. A sensible commander would leave a few here to engage us and move the rest of his forces into the city. But pride will keep them here. Now they have to kill us. And there will be great honor given to the one who brings us down.” He stopped. “Why are you smiling, Elder?”
    “I’ll wager that somewhere out in the fog is a Spartoi commander telling his Drakon troops almost exactly the same thing.”
    “He would be mistaken,” Niten said. “We are far more deadly than the Spartoi.”
    Prometheus’s smile turned rueful. “I’m not sure I agree.”
    “Oh, but we are. We have a reason to be here. We have a cause. In my experience, a warrior with a cause is the most dangerous soldier of all. We must make a choice now. We can stand here and fight . . .”
    “. . . or we can take the fight to them.” The Elder looked up into the sky, trying to gauge the time, but the stars were invisible behind the fog. “I only regret that we didn’t manage to delay them longer.”
    “They are still here, aren’t they? Every moment we keep them from the city is a victory for us. If we stand here, they will pull the barricades apart and flank us. But if we move now, we have the element of surprise on our side: in their arrogance, they would never believe we might attack,” Niten said. Pins and needles tingled in the fingertips of his left hand and he shook it to get the circulation going again.
    “Agreed: we’ll attack. But we have to stick together,” Prometheus said quickly. “If we separate, they will easily overwhelm us. We’ll try and cut right through them to the other side of the bridge. That will make them turn away from the city. We’ll see if we can hold them till the dawn.”
    Niten flashed a bright smile in the gloom as they began to walk the length of the bridge.
    “You seem cheerful for a man heading for sure and certain doom,” Prometheus remarked.
    “The last few years have been uneventful,” the Swordsman admitted. “Boring, even. Aoife’s reputation was so fearsome that no one dared challenge her. Most sensible people simply avoided us. Even when we went into the deadliest Shadowrealms we were usually left alone.”
    “What did you do to pass the time?”
    “I spent a lot of time painting a houseboat in Sausalito.”
    “What color?”
    “Green, always green. I could never find just the right green, though. Apparently there are more than forty shades of green.”
    “Green’s a good color,” Prometheus said, his broadsword resting lightly on his right shoulder. “Don’t get me wrong: I like red. But I’ve always been partial to green.”
    They walked on in silence, watching shapes flicker and move through the fog around them.
    “Have you any regrets?” Prometheus suddenly asked.
    Niten smiled shyly and a touch of color bloomed on his cheeks.
    “You’re blushing,” Prometheus said, astonished.
    “One regret. One regret only. I am sorry Aoife is not with us now. How she