Behind the gauze web, Perenelle smiled. For her five hundredth birthday on the thirteenth of October in 1820, Scathach had presented her with a spectacular pendant, a single piece of jade carved into the shape of a scarab beetle. More than three thousand years previously, the Shadow had brought it back from Japan for the boy king Tutankhamen, but he’d died a day after she’d presented it to him. Scathach had despised Tutankhamen’s wife, Ankhesenamen, and hadn’t wanted her to have it, so she’d broken in to the royal palace late one night just before the boy king was embalmed and taken it back. When Scathach had given her the jade, Perenelle had joked, “You’re giving me a dung beetle.”

Scathach had nodded seriously. “Dung is more valuable than any precious metal. You cannot grow food in gold.”

And flies were attracted to dung.

But there was no dung pile on the island, and to catch the flies’ attention, she would have to create an exceptionally strong odor. Perenelle immediately thought of the beautiful plants of the arum family. Some of them stank abominably of dung. There was the cactuslike desert herb the carrion flower: beautiful to look at, but it reeked of something long dead. And there was skunk cabbage, and the world’s largest flower, the giant rafflesia, the stinking corpse lily, with its putrid odor of rotting meat. If she could replicate that scent, she might be able to lure the flies away.

Perenelle knew that at the heart of all magic and sorcery was imagination. It was this gift for intense concentration that characterized the most powerful magicians; before attempting any great piece of magic, they had to clearly see the end result. So before she concentrated on creating the smell, she needed to think about a location that she could see in every detail. Places flickered at the edges of Perenelle’s consciousness. Places she had lived, places she knew. In her long life she’d had the opportunity to visit so much of the world. But what she needed now was someplace reasonably close, a location she knew well, and one where there was not a huge human population.

The San Francisco Dump.

She’d only been to the dump on one previous occasion. Months ago, she’d helped one of the bookshop’s employees move to a new apartment. Afterward, they’d driven south toward Monster Park and the dump on Recycle Road. Always sensitive to smells, Perenelle had caught the distinctively acrid-though not entirely unpleasant-smell of the dump when they’d turned onto Tunnel Avenue. As they’d got closer, the stink had become eye-watering and the air had filled with the sound of countless seabirds calling.