All That Lives Must Die (24 page)

               25               

STONES THAT WEEP

Fiona stepped off the bus with the rest of Team Scarab.

It had been an awkward hour-long ride from Paxington through hills of central California.

First, on this small bus, she had had to sit behind Miss Westin—not the ideal location for gossiping or discussing with Eliot the politics of their Immortal relatives.

Second, Miss Westin had segregated the boys from the girls. Amanda was on Fiona’s right, face plastered to the window, alternately too shy to speak, and then exploding in rapid bursts of enthusiasm over her new clothes and Aunt Dallas, and when was she going to show up again after school?

Behind her sat Sarah Covington and Jezebel, who exuded icy silence at one another.

Thank goodness Mitch Stephenson had the seat across the aisle—and while not daring to cross the gender boundary that ran down the center of the bus, he nonetheless managed to occasionally communicate with her with a smile and roll of his eyes as Jeremy Covington went on and on next to him about his life and exploits in the nineteenth century and how the twenty-first century had gone to the dogs without servants and a rigid social order.

Robert and Eliot seemed to be having a normal conversation in back. Fiona caught only snatches of what they said. She thought they might have been talking about a video game because there were lots of gesticulations with fists and karate chops.

Sometimes they could be so foolish.

Eventually Fiona opened her copy of Homer’s
Odyssey
. She read (or rather tried), managing to reread the same paragraph about Circe about twenty times over the bumpy roads.

She gave up when the bus pulled onto a dirt road. They bumped along for a few more minutes and eased to a halt.

The door folded open, and Fiona stepped off after Miss Westin.

There was nothing here, just rolling hills, golden grass, and the occasional orange poppy that trembled in the breeze. The bent black oaks seemed to wave to her.

“Clear the bus,” Miss Westin instructed. “We have another group coming through.”

Fiona marched out the door, to the rear of the bus, and leaned against it. Another group of students marched toward them, escorted by Mr. Ma, who held his usual clipboard. It was Team White Knight. They queued in front of the bus’s doors.

The Knights glared at Fiona and the rest of Team Scarab; Fiona returned the favor.

Tamara Pritchard still sported a black eye from their match. Good.

Miss Westin and Mr. Ma carefully checked off names in her black book and on his clipboard, comparing notes . . . as if someone was going to get lost in all this open expanse of nowhere.

Fiona wanted to ask again what this was all about. She’d tried before when they’d been herded onto this bus from Miss Westin’s classroom earlier that morning.

Miss Westin had told her:
“Words are . . . insufficient
.”

Eliot was last to tromp off the bus.

Miss Westin then instructed Team White Knight to board the bus.

Mr. Ma moved between the two groups and crossed his arms (Fiona suspected, to make sure there was no trouble of outside of gym class between Team Scarab and the Knights).

Tamara Pritchard snorted as she passed Jezebel. “We told the Wolves all about your little tricks.” She sneered. “They’ll be ready for you.”

“Oh, really now?” Jeremy quipped. “We face Team Wolf next?” He tilted his head in mock appreciation. “Thank you very much, lassie, for the information. We’ll be well prepared, then.”

Tamara’s face contorted into a scowl as she got onto the bus.

The slightest smile appeared on Jezebel’s lip, and she told Jeremy, “I am so glad you are on
our
side.”

Fiona wished the freshman teams weren’t kept so isolated. Surely they could all learn better together.

Why make
everything
so competitive?

Or was there a reason? What if the mortal magical families were just as aggressive outside school? Then it made sense that Paxington had to prepare its students not only for magic—but also for cutthroat business and political realities.

It all seemed endlessly Machiavellian.

She sighed and made a mental note, however, to find out more on this Team Wolf.

Mr. Ma and Miss Westin spoke in hushed tones. The two teachers couldn’t look more different.

The Headmistress had on a black dress with a lacy collar. She wore a hat with mesh across her face, held a tiny black parasol, and had donned dark sunglasses.

Mr. Ma wore slacks and a polo shirt, and looked like he had spent his entire life playing golf, with dark golden skin and a picture-perfect physique (even at his advanced age).

Eliot sidled next to her. “Hey,” he whispered.

“You hear what this is about?”

He shook his head.

Fiona was relieved that Eliot wasn’t holding a grudge for this morning. Something had felt a little “off” between them for the last couple of days—actually since their first gym match. This morning hadn’t helped matters.

Fiona had had to try on all six uniforms that Aunt Dallas couriered over. Each fit, but had been designed for a different look . . . some scandalous, with how short the skirt had been raised and the jacket engineered to push up her chest. She settled on a “normal” uniform that simply fit. It was a huge improvement over her too-small uniform, and gave her an enormous confidence boost. She hadn’t realized how little she’d been able to breathe.

Also, she got a bit distracted with all the other clothes that Dallas had sent: dresses and new jeans and twenty pairs of shoes (none of which Fiona seemed to be able to balance in).

It’d been fun to look at them, even try a few on, but it all reminded her how trivial her aunt could be.

Weren’t Immortals supposed to do heroic, important things? Why was Aunt Dallas wasting time and money on that stuff?

“About me being late this morning,” she murmured to Eliot. “Won’t happen again.”

“It’s cool,” he whispered back.

He sounded like he meant it, too. No quips. No vocabulary insults.

“We have a special All Hallow’s Eve treat for you,” Miss Westin said to them. She tilted her parasol so her pale face revealed itself. “Today we conjure the dead.”

Fiona shivered.

“Not a literal summoning of the deceased,” Mr. Ma added. “But a recreation of memories. We shall watch the last great battle between the Infernals and a collection of Immortals that would precipitate the founding of the League of Immortals—circa 336
C.E
.”

Fiona’s heart jumped. They were actually going to see Immortals fighting?

Robert raised his hand and asked, “It’s like a movie, then?”

“No.” Miss Westin pointed to the hill behind her. “We have transported stones from the ancient battlefield. They remember all that occurred, and on All Hallow’s Eve, we can coax them to share their recollections.” She nodded to Mr. Ma.

“Let us talk as we walk,” Mr. Ma said, and strode up the hill along a faint path.

Grasshoppers took to the air and whined about him.

Fiona and the others fell in behind him.

Mr. Ma explained, “The stones are said to be ancient beings, petrified and set to guard some priceless treasure—or some unspeakable horror—from ages long past. Or maybe they are just stones, who can say?”

She squinted. There were yellow rocks on the hilltop, nothing extraordinary like the monolithic Easter Island carvings, although some were the size of a car, and a few did stand upright.

“We will stand in the center to start,” Mr. Ma said. “Then I shall awaken our friends, and the battle will occur on the far side of this hill. We shall watch and
not
interfere.”

They mounted the hilltop.

“Feel free to examine the stones,” Mr. Ma told them.

Fiona noted that the stones made a rough ring. No grass grew between them. The earth there was hard and cracked. It reminded her of the sterilized dirt in Hell, and she suppressed a shudder.

Jeremy went to one stone and reached out to touch it . . . hesitated, then pulled his hand back.

Mitch took out an art pad and, and examining one severely cracked stone, started sketching. Amanda stood close and admired his work.

Jezebel bowed to one of the monoliths with grave solemnity.

Fiona and Eliot inspected one that stood upright, a pillar that could have been a sandblasted termite mound.

“I feel something,” Eliot whispered.

Fiona took a deep breath and inched closer. There
was
something. Almost not there . . . something . . . sleeping?

She held out her hand.

She had no intention of actually touching the stone, and yet her fingertips pulled closer and did just that.

The rough texture became smooth like polished marble, then yielding like flesh. For a moment, Fiona could make out features, faded and forgotten and dreamlike: the suggestion of a cheek and eye where she touched, and there a leg, part of an armored chest, the barest outline of a broken, square-tipped sword.

This felt
older
than stone.

She blinked, and the stone was just rough sandstone. And she wasn’t touching it, either.

Yet the feeling of its different smoothness lingered on her fingertips.

“Weird,” she murmured.

“You heard it, too?” Eliot whispered. “The crying?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Never mind,” Eliot whispered. He looked pale in the sunlight.

Before she could ask him to explain, Mr. Ma came to them. He smelled of exotic black tea. “I ask that you keep your violin in its case,” he said to Eliot in a hushed voice. “These memories need no further coaxing.” Although his voice was friendly, his eyes were dark and deadly earnest.

“Yes, sir,” Eliot immediately replied.

“You are a good boy,” he said.

Fiona and Eliot shared a confused look.

Mr. Ma went to center of the circle. “We begin,” he announced. “Stay within the circle as I awaken them.” His spread wide his callused hands.

Team Scarab gathered closer around Mr. Ma.

Fiona noted that Robert stood opposite her, trying not to look her way. With his hair wind-tousled and in his eyes, he appeared every bit the rebel despite the Paxington uniform.

Was this where they were now—not even looking at each other?

She had done everything this week to avoid thinking about Robert—even reorganized the books in her room thematically instead of alphabetically.

Maybe there wasn’t a solution to the problem of her being in the League of Immortals and Robert being an outcast from the League.

Best to rip their relationship apart—quick, like a Band-Aid off a fresh scrape.

Sarah Covington moved closer to Robert. “How exciting,” she whispered to him with that slight Scottish accent that all the guys went crazy over (and Fiona bet wasn’t even real). She was standing way too close to him.

But if Fiona was letting go of Robert, then what did that matter? She narrowed her eyes and gritted her teeth. Sarah took no notice.

Mr. Ma inhaled and held his breath. The wind stilled.

A sound started from the inside of Mr. Ma, a deep bass hum that he twisted into some eastern Indian dialect that was part song, part funeral dirge, part wail. It made the hairs on her arm stir.

Clouds covered the sky. They boiled away and left night overhead, stars shining, but not the ones Fiona recognized in the normal summer sky; these were brighter and a hundred times more numerous.

Fiona heard crying. She cast about to see who it was, but it was no one from Team Scarab.

The sound came from the stones.

She felt their sorrow and the pain wash through her. It was the first time in months since she had felt so much or so deeply. Droplets of rain appeared and trickled down the sides of the rocks.

Fiona wanted to go to them, touch the stones, and comfort them . . . but she felt to do so would break the spell.

So she waited and watched.

The sky lightened. The sun broke over the horizon.

Mr. Ma ceased his chant and drew in a long breath. “We now share their dream,” he whispered. He went to the edge of the circle of stones and pointed. “The memory of the memory of the Great Battle at Ultima Thule.”
26
,
27

In the valley stood rows and ranks of a thousand men in ancient armor. There were chariots and phalanxes, their long spears gleaming in the dawn. There were armored elephants, companies of archers, and catapults.

Standing front and center of all this was a man—even at this distance, unmistakable to Fiona, his breastplate dull rusted iron, his thick mustache drooping, just as it had been when she last saw him.

“Uncle Aaron,” she whispered.

There were others she recognized. Cousin Gilbert wore a robe of gold and carried a gold shield that caught the sun’s warmth.

She squinted. Three women stood together at the far edge of the army. One had long glowing golden hair that flowed from her helmet. One held three lions on the leashes. The last wore armor made of bones; her white hair fell to her waist, and she wielded curved knives.

“Dallas?” she murmured so softly that only Eliot heard.

“And Lucia,” Eliot breathed.

And together they whispered, “Mother?”

Fiona struggled to make sense of this. Intellectually, she understood the possibility that their mother and their relations were old, even ancient. But to see her here like this—in this page from history come to life—it was more than she could fathom.

“Observe.” Mr. Ma pointed to the far side of the valley. “The opposition takes the field.”

A crack parted the earth. Steam hissed forth as a dozen figures emerged.

They looked like men and women . . . although it was hard to tell because they were obscured by the mist.

Jeremy said with a little laugh, “A dozen against hundreds? Those unfortunate souls are going to be trounced.”

“Incorrect on many counts,” Jezebel replied. “Those are the Infernal Lords of Eld.”

“How can the Immortals lose?” Amanda asked Jezebel and Mr. Ma, twisting the ends of her hair. “I mean . . . they are gods down there, aren’t they?”