01_-_The_Alchemyst

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Dee waited until the last of the birds and cats had disappeared into
Hekate’s Shadowrealm before he left the car and strolled toward the hidden
opening. Senuhet, Bastet’s servant, had left earlier, eagerly following his
mistress into the Shadowrealm, but Dee had not been quite so enthusiastic. It
was always a bad idea to be first into battle. The soldiers in the rear were
the ones who tended to survive. He was guessing that Hekate’s guards had
massed just beyond the invisible wall, and he had no inclination to be first
through the opening. It didn’t make him a coward, he reasoned; it just made
him careful, and being careful had kept him alive for many hundreds of years.
But he couldn’t hang around out there forever; his inhuman masters would
expect to see him on the battlefield. The small man drew his two-thousanddollar
leather coat tightly around his shoulders the moment before he stepped
into the opening, leaving behind the chill early-morning air and stepping
into…
…a battlefield.
There were bodies everywhere, and none of them were human.
The Morrigan’s birds had changed when they entered Hekate’s
Shadowrealm: they had become almost human…though not entirely so. They
were now tall and thin like their mistress; their wings had stretched,
becoming long and batlike, connected to human-shaped bodies by translucent
skin and tipped with deadly claws. Their heads were still those of birds.
There were a few cats scattered among the field of feathers. They too
had become almost human when they stepped into the Shadowrealm, and like
Bastet, they had retained their cat heads. Their paws were a cross between
human hands and cat claws, tipped with curved, razor-sharp nails, and their
bodies were covered in a fine down of hair.