01_-_The_Alchemyst

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Dr. John Dee was becoming frantic. Everything was falling apart, and
now there was every possibility that he was going to have to take an active
part in the battle.
Flamel, Scatty and the twins had managed to escape from the interior of
the Yggdrasill and were now fighting on the opposite side of the field, no
more than two hundred yards away, but he couldn’t get to them—it would
mean crossing a battlefield. The last of the Torc Allta, both in their human
and boar form, fought running battles with the cat-and birdmen. The nathair
had already been defeated. Initially, the winged serpents had brought chaos
and confusion to the cats and birds, but they were lumbering and awkward on
the ground, and most had been killed once they’d landed. The massive army
of Torc Allta had thinned considerably, and he guessed that within the hour,
there would be no more wereboars left in North America.
But he could not afford to wait that long. He had to get to Flamel now.
He had to retrieve the pages of the Codex as soon as possible.
From his hiding place behind a clump of bushes, Dee watched the
Elders. Hekate was standing in the doorway to her tree home, surrounded by
the last of her personal Torc Allta guard. While the boars fought the cats and
birds, Hekate alone faced down the combined forces of the Morrigan and
Bastet.
The three ignored the half-human animals fighting around them. To the
casual observer it would have seemed as if the three Elders were simply
staring at one another. Dee, however, noted the purple-gray clouds that
gathered only above the Yggdrasill; he saw how the delicate white and gold
flowers strewn around the huge tree withered and died, turning to black paste
in an instant; he had seen the unsightly sheen of fungus that appeared on the