01_-_The_Alchemyst

She looked around the room, paying particular attention to the area
around the metal gate. Unlike in her previous prison, she couldn’t see any
magical wards or protective sigils painted on the lintel or the floor. Perenelle
couldn’t resist a tiny smile. What were Dee’s people thinking? Once she had
recovered her strength, she’d charge up her aura, and then bend this metal
like putty and simply walk out of here.
It took her a moment before she realized that the click-click she’d first
assumed to be dripping water was actually something approaching, moving
slowly and deliberately. Pressing herself against the bars, she tried to see
down the corridor. A shadow moved. More of Dee’s faceless simulacra? she
wondered. They would not be able to hold her for long.
The shadow, huge and misshapen, moved out of the darkness and
stepped down the corridor to stand before her cell. Perenelle was suddenly
grateful for the bars that separated her from the terrifying entity.
Filling the corridor was a creature that had not walked the earth since a
millennium before the first pyramid rose over the Nile. It was a sphinx, an
enormous lion with the wings of an eagle and the head of a beautiful woman.
The sphinx smiled and tilted her head to one side, and a long black forked
tongue flickered. Perenelle noticed that her pupils were flat and horizontal.
This was not one of Dee’s creations. The sphinx was one of the
daughters of Echidna, one of the foulest of the Elders, shunned and feared
even by her own race, even the Dark Elders. Perenelle suddenly found
herself wondering who, exactly, Dee was serving.
The sphinx pressed her face against the bars. Her long tongue shot out,
tasting the air, almost brushing Perenelle’s lips. “Do I need to remind you,
Perenelle Flamel,” she asked in the language of the Nile, “that one of the
especial skills of my race is that we absorb auric energy?” Her huge wings
flapped, almost filling the corridor. “You have no magical powers around
me.”
An icy shiver ran down Perenelle’s spine as she realized just how
clever Dee was. She was a defenseless and powerless prisoner on Alcatraz,
and she knew that no one had ever escaped The Rock alive.