Perenelle Flamel stood framed in the doorway and stared down into the gloom. The heavy metal door that had once sealed this opening lay on the ground behind her, battered and twisted, ripped off its hinges by the weight of the spiders that had surged out of the prison cells below. With Areop-Enap’s retreat to its cocoon, the surviving arachnids had vanished, and all that remained on the surface of Alcatraz were the dried-up husks of dead flies and the shells of spiders. She wondered who-or what-had sent the flies. Someone powerful, certainly; someone who was probably even now plotting their next move.

Perenelle tilted her head to one side and pushed her long black hair back over her ear, closed her eyes and listened. Her hearing was acute, but she could pick up nothing moving. And yet the Sorceress knew the cells were not empty. The island’s prison was full of blood drinkers and flesh eaters, vetala, minotaur, Windigo and oni, trolls and cluricauns-and, of course, the deadly sphinx. The sunlight had recharged Perenelle’s aura, and she knew she could handle the lesser creatures-though the minotaur and the Windigo would give her some problems-but she was fully aware that she could not deal with the sphinx. The eagle-winged lion fed off magical energy; just being close to it would drain her aura, leaving her helpless.

Perenelle pressed her hand to her growling stomach. She was hungry. The Sorceress rarely needed to eat anymore, but she recognized that she was burning a lot of energy and needed calories to fuel it. If Nicholas were there it would not be a problem; many times on their travels, he had used his alchemical skills to transmute stones into bread, and water into soup. She knew a couple of horn-of-plenty spells she’d learned in Greece that would give her enough to eat, but casting them would mean using her aura, whose distinctive signature would draw the sphinx upon her.

She’d encountered no humans on the island-she doubted any could have survived a single night on Alcatraz with their sanity or body intact. She remembered reading a newspaper report recently-about six months ago-that had said Alcatraz had been acquired by a private corporation and was closing to the public. The state park was going to be turned into a multimedia living history museum. Now that she knew Dee owned the island, she guessed that that wasn’t the truth. Worse, though, with no humans having been on the island for at least six months, it was looking less and less likely she’d discover anything edible left behind. It wouldn’t be the first time she’d gone hungry in her long life.