“An hour. Maybe two.” He turned his face to the skies, gauging the time. “Maybe till midnight, but that’s not long enough.” He shrugged. The knight’s black armor was streaked with mud and dirt and smelled of oil. It squeaked and creaked with every movement. “We built this fortress more for privacy than protection, though it has kept us safe from some of the less savory creatures that haunt this land. It was never designed to keep something like Cernunnos away.” He suddenly looked sidelong at Sophie as a thought struck him, his eyes liquid in the reflected firelight. “You have mastered Fire. You could keep the flames alive.”

“No,” Josh said immediately, instinctively moving in front of his sister. “Even attempting something like that could kill her, burn her up.”

The Alchemyst nodded. “Sophie would need to keep the fires burning till dawn; she’s not strong enough for that. Not yet. We need to find an alternative.”

“I know some spells…,” Shakespeare began. “You too, Palamedes. And what of you, Nicholas? Working together, surely we three could-” And then the Bard’s head snapped around, nostrils flaring, eyes narrowing.

“What is it?” Palamedes asked, turning to squint through the wall of fire.

“Dee,” Shakespeare and Flamel said together. Even as they were speaking, the figure of a small man standing alongside the Archon was outlined in sulfurous yellow. He was holding a smoldering blue sword.

“With Excalibur,” Flamel added.

As the group watched, the Magician plunged Excalibur into the fiery wall and twisted the blade. Hissing and sizzling, the stone sword pierced the fire, and then a sudden down-draft of icy wind opened a perfectly circular hole, like a window, in the raging flames. Dee peered through the opening and smiled, the fire reflecting off his teeth, bloodred. “Well, well, well, what have we here? Master Shakespeare-apprentice to both the Alchemyst and the Magician. Why, it is practically a family reunion. And Palamedes, the Black Knight, reunited-almost-with the swords that ruled and ruined your master’s life. And the twins, of course. So nice of you to bring them home to me, Nicholas, though it would have been so much more convenient if we had concluded this business on the West Coast. Now I’ll have to return them to the States. However, surrender them now and we can avoid a lot of unpleasantness.”

The Alchemyst laughed, though there was nothing humorous in the sound. “Aren’t you forgetting something, John?”

The Magician tilted his head to one side. “You seem to be trapped, Nicholas, behind flames, and surrounded by the Wild Hunt.” He jerked his thumb at the huge figure standing by his side. “And, of course, Cernunnos. This time, there is no escape. Not even for you.”

“We three immortals are not without power,” Flamel said quietly. “Can you stand against all of us?”