All That Lives Must Die (62 page)

Meanwhile, the dragons decimated Jezebel’s knights—but even as they were ripped to pieces, Jezebel took a lance and stabbed one in its throat.

Fiona moved to join her. She had to help her. Sealiah couldn’t stop her this time.

Eliot, however, did.

The mesa shifted . . . the
whole
mesa.

The ground under her dropped six feet. Fiona tumbled, and Robert caught her.

Dust exploded from the cracks about them.

The mesa tilted. The outer wall on the other side of the courtyard crumbled.

Then all motion stopped.

And so did Eliot. His hand rested on his guitar strings to still them. He sank to one knee and hung his head.

Fiona, Robert, and Mr. Welmann went to his side. Louis looked at the destruction and nodded appreciatively.

The knights fighting rallied, reorganized, and drove many of the shadows off the edge of the plateau.

“Should . . . do . . . it,” Eliot said, exhausted. “All the tunnels are sealed.”

But after he said this—an acre of ground of the far side of the courtyard fell away, taking tents and knights and shadows along with it.

“Okay . . .” Fiona held her breath waiting for more of the mesa to disintegrate . . . there were cracklings under her feet . . . but they slowed . . . and settled . . . and stopped. “Okay,” she told Eliot. “That was pretty good.”

There was a whoop of triumph, and Fiona looked up and found the source: Jezebel.

The Protector of the Burning Orchards and Handmaiden to the Mistress of Pain lifted the severed head of the last dragon over her head with both hands. She was drenched in black blood, her torso crisscrossed with claw marks, and a wild grin split her face. She let loose with another cry—part cheerleader whoop and part Viking war cry.

Behind her, the Tower Grave collapsed.

There were so many femurs and hips and ribs, so many skulls, it looked like the millions of bones fell in slow motion . . . even the large, fossilized, horned, several-ton dinosaur skulls from the apex tumbled through the air with a semblance of grace.

Eliot lunged forward.

Jezebel was so close. Any one of them could have crossed the distance between them in a few seconds.

But there wasn’t a few seconds.

Fiona and Robert grabbed Eliot and held him back.

“No!” He struggled in their grasps.

Bones impacted and shattered about Jezebel. She looked surprised—whirled this way and that . . . and then realized what was happening. Too late.

One massive fossilized stone skull crushed Jezebel.

“No . . . ,” Eliot whispered, and gripped Fiona tighter.

Fiona hadn’t known how she felt about Jezebel. Was she a pawn of the Infernals? Or had she participated in their schemes to get Eliot with willful glee?

Fiona knew how Eliot had felt about her, though.

And seeing Jezebel killed in front of him while he could do nothing—that was the worst thing she could imagine happening to one person who loved another.

“Eliot,” she said. “I—I’m sorry. So sorry.”

She held him.

Louis came to them. “Alas,” he murmured, “such is the agony of love and—”

Fiona glared at her father for his callousness. The look on his face, however, halted her from giving him the chewing out he deserved.

Louis’s eyes were wide now. He was scared.

Not even when Fiona’s mother had confronted him in that Del Sombra alley (and had been ready to kill him) had she seen her father scared.

What could possibly scare Lucifer, the Prince of Darkness?

She followed his gaze across the courtyard to where the wall had tumbled away.

Fiona saw the river valley beyond . . .

. . . and she instantly understood that the nightmare creatures that had crawled up through those tunnels and attacked them had been a diversion.

Covering the valley was a seething mass of shadow at least a hundred thousand strong, the full force of the enemy’s army. Fiona’s mind reeled at what she saw in the center of this: standing a hundred feet tall, a tower of blackness and blazing red eyes, was the shadows’ lord and master—Mephistopheles.

               75               

BROKEN HEARTS OF HELL

The entirety of Hell and everyone in it—Fiona, Robert, Sealiah, Louis, and Mr. Welmann . . . along with the thousands of surviving knights upon the plateau—all of them blurred. Eliot’s vision narrowed to a pinpoint on the girl he’d risked everything for.

He watched as the giant fossilized skull of the
Tyrannosaurus rex
plummeted toward where Jezebel stood unaware, smiling, her arms uplifted in her moment of triumph.

Eliot smiled. She looked so happy.

And then she was gone.

The skull had hit her and she vanished.

No. That was a lie his brain told him to keep him from going insane—but Eliot had learned to detect lies (even when lying to himself).

He
had
seen every moment: her arms and body crumpled and compacted, armor straps exploded, and bones snapped as the stone skull crushed her into the ground.

Eliot faltered and slumped into Fiona and Robert’s grasp.

Where his heart had been, there was a hole now, gaping in his chest, crushed, cold, and empty, too. More agony than he thought he could feel poured forth from it, acrid and burning.

Jezebel was Infernal, though. She was in that impervious-looking armor. Maybe she was still alive.

Eliot’s heart pounded with new hope. He had to get to her. He struggled free from Fiona and Robert and ran toward the ruins of the Grave Tower.

He kicked through the piles of femurs and ribs and stones and rusted metal supports and halted before the giant skull. It wasn’t like any T.
rex
he’d ever read about. This one had horns. Its teeth curved up past the eye sockets. It was solid fossilized agate and the size of a small house.

It had impacted the paving stones with force enough to embed two feet. Completely unmovable.

Eliot saw a hand, too. At first he thought it was just another bone . . . but with horror he realized it was actually the articulations and the joints of an armored gauntlet.

Jezebel’s hand. The only part of her not crushed under the stone.

He threw his body against the skull. It didn’t budge.

He hammered on it with his fists. Useless.

Eliot fell to his knees by her hand and tried to remove the gauntlet, but all did was cut his hands on the serrated metal. Her blood oozed through the armored scales and mingled with his. It was still warm.

He had to get this thing off her. Maybe blast it off with Lady Dawn.

He didn’t have the control for that, though. He could shatter the rock, sure, but the force would kill her if she was still alive.

His hands clenched and unclenched, his frustration building. He’d wanted that power. He had enjoyed destroying things in Costa Esmeralda. But at this moment, he would’ve dashed the Lady Dawn guitar to a million splinters to get back his old violin.

He didn’t know what to do. A genius IQ and he couldn’t think of a single thing.

Robert came to his side. “Whoa . . . ,” he murmured, seeing the protruding limb.

He pulled Eliot away. “Let me try,” Robert told him, and then he drew back his brass-knuckled fist.

Robert punched the skull three times, and when the dust cleared, he’d broken the upper jaw and wrenched it away. He paused, seeing what was there underneath . . . and the color drained from his features.

Eliot stepped closer, unsure of what he was seeing. There was so much dust and dirt. The smell of vanilla and cinnamon and blood was thick in the air.

Jezebel lay in the crater, unearthed from the waist up. Her armor had protected her from the initial impact, but it hadn’t been strong enough to withstand the full weight of the stone; the metal had been squished to half its former width . . . and bones and softer tissues poked out.

Eliot wanted to scream—but there was no air in his lungs.

Her arms and neck were at the wrong angles. Her skull was cracked. Like a doll that had been dashed to the ground, all the pieces were there, jumbled and wrong, and yet she was still somehow lovely to him.

Her hand twitched.

Eliot’s shock vanished. He found he could breathe again. “Help me! She’s alive!”

He knelt by her and, this time starting further up her arm, worked off her gauntlet.

Eliot took her hand in his.

There was a pulse. Faint and weak. But there. She
had
survived.

Her hand tightened about this. Her eyes fluttered open. Her mouth parted and blood spilled from her lips.

“Eliot . . .” The sound was so faint that he had to move so their faces almost touched to hear.

“I’m not going anywhere,” he said. It took all his resolve to keep his voice from cracking. “Don’t worry.”

“You came back for me? I can’t believe how stubborn . . . You are a fool. My fool.”

She tried to laugh, but it came out as a ragged breath.

“Listen to me,” she said. “They all want you. And if they can’t get you, they will destroy you.”

Eliot nodded. She was talking about the Infernals. Maybe the League, too. He knew all that. It didn’t matter. Nothing did but her.

“We’ll worry about that after we get you out.”

Her split lips formed a smile. Her grip weakened.

“Nothing can save me, Eliot. My soul is rotten and belongs here in this darkness. I am part of this place—dead when I met you. Twice damned now.”

“I don’t care.” He grasped her hand tighter. “Just stay with me.”

“No . . . ,” she mouthed. “No soul deserves a
third
chance. I’d just mess it up. I always have.”

“But
I
need that chance with you,” Eliot protested. “Us together, we can be stronger than all the others.”

“No. Let me do this one thing for you. Let me go to my oblivion.”

“I can’t.”

But even as Eliot held on tighter, her hand went limp. Her green eyes stared upward and reverted to their mortal blue as the animation faded from them . . . and she was dead.

Eliot shook her hand gently. “I’d do anything,” he told her. “Please?” His vision blurred with tears. “Jezebel? Julie?”

He felt nothing . . . except the desire to lie next to her and die—so he wouldn’t have to feel the pain he knew was coming . . . pain, heavy and cold, already filling the hollow spaces inside him . . . pain that would consume him.

How had this happened? They’d come so far—lost Amanda—risked everything to save Jezebel . . . and now she was gone?

Eliot refused to accept it.

But
was
she gone? What happened to the damned in Hell? They didn’t die.

He blinked away the tears that threatened to spill down his face. There had to be a way to make her whole. Like jigsaw puzzle pieces jumbled in his mind—he knew there was an answer, he just had to look hard enough to find it. He couldn’t give up.

The pain in his chest lightened. Hope. There was always hope, wasn’t there?

He’d had seen Sealiah’s soldiers blasted to bits, still moving. And those pieces tried to gather themselves back together. Why couldn’t Jezebel come back?

Eliot reluctantly extracted his hand from hers, and with the greatest care folded it upon her chest.

Robert covered Jezebel with a knight’s cloak. It was red with roses embroidered about the edges.

The others gathered about him. Fiona looked like she wanted to hug Eliot again—and as comforting as that might have been, Eliot needed answers more than anything else.

“What happens to the damned and Infernals when they get hurt?” he demanded of Sealiah.

Sealiah glanced at Jezebel with no expression, as if she looked at a piece of trash that needed sweeping up, beneath her consideration.

Eliot kept his anger in check, though, and asked, “They heal, don’t they? No matter how bad their injuries?”

“Of course the damned come back,” she told him. “Their torment
must
be eternal. But Jezebel is neither one of the damned dead nor a true Infernal. She is an elevated creature, born of my power, and as there is so little land and power left to me, her existence has been . . . snuffed.”

Eliot took a step closer to the Poppy Queen. “There has to be a way.”

Sealiah smiled at the challenge in his tone.

His blood burned and he struggled to keep his anger from rising. He took a deep breath, held it, and slowly exhaled.

He realized Sealiah hadn’t answered his question about what happened to dead Infernals—but he had to keep his focus on Jezebel. She was the only thing that mattered.

“She’s gone,” Eliot whispered to her, “but there
is
a way to get her back, isn’t there?”

Sealiah’s smile vanished. “As I said, she is tied to my power and lands. Help me recover them.”

Eliot pursed his lips. “I’ve already agreed to help you fight.”

“You must do more than that, Eliot. You must fight
and
win. Do that and only then can I restore her.”

He nodded. As if he had any choice now.

Sealiah moved off and shouted orders for her knights to gather weapons, ready artillery, and prepare for battle.

Eliot looked at Fiona. He needed his sister more than ever.

Fiona still looked uncertain. He didn’t blame her. This was all part of a complicated Infernal plot—and they both knew it. For his part, however, it was a plot he’d walked into with open eyes to save Jezebel. For him there was no turning back.

He glanced at his father, who looked like he had something to say, but remained silent. He’d probably tell Eliot that there is no difference from someone in love and someone damned in Hell—eternal torment for both. Maybe he’d be right.

Fiona stood straighter and finally nodded.

She didn’t have to say a thing. He knew she’d made up her mind to stay and help. Fiona would always be there for him.

He’d never take her for granted again. He’d never forget what he owed her.

Mr. Welmann ran his hand over his unshaven chin. A dozen expressions passed over his face and his forehead crinkled in deep thought. He caught Eliot’s gaze, however, and nodded, too.

Robert wiped dirt and blood off his face and then spit. “This sucks,” he told Eliot. “Let’s just do it and get out of here.” He glanced at the covered form of Jezebel. “Get you both out of here.”

Eliot marveled at Robert’s bravado as his friend assumed that they even had a chance outnumbered ten to one, and facing a fully powered Infernal Lord on the battlefield.

He gazed at where Jezebel lay. He wanted to sit next to her. But that wasn’t going to get her back. Fighting—with as much power and ruthlessness as he could muster—smashing Sealiah’s enemy and recapturing her lands—that brutal act was ironically the only way he’d be healed and whole once more.

Louis stepped forward. He smiled sympathetically as if it were an afterthought. He set his hands on Eliot’s shoulders. “May we speak? Alone? Father to son?”

Eliot glanced over the edge of the plateau. Mephistopheles’ armies moved closer. Eliot swallowed, trying to be brave as he listened to the enemy’s thunderous approach.

“Make it quick,” he said Louis.

Eliot braced himself for what he expected to be a speech from Louis about love, and lost love, and how all these things were parts of life, and he was really better off without women—like he needed a lecture in
that
, right now.

Instead Louis removed an envelope from the folds of his shirt. It was so worn, the paper was fuzzy. He handed it to Eliot.

Eliot accepted it. “What’s this?”

“It is for your mother, should I not survive.” Louis glanced about. “It was something that she ought to have taken from me in the first place.”

The envelope was unsealed, and Louis hadn’t said he couldn’t look, so Eliot did.

Within were shreds of paper: newsprint and cereal-box cardboard and old phone bills.

Eliot cocked his head, uncertain what they were.

“My heart,” Louis explained. “At least all that’s left after your mother ripped it out and tore it to bits.” He closed the envelope and set his hand over Eliot’s. “I have a feeling you’ll be seeing her after this . . . and I will not. Please.”

Eliot didn’t get it. Was this a metaphor? Or Louis playing another cruel joke on his mother?

He looked serious. Eliot detected no outright lie, either.

Eliot tucked the envelope into his pocket.

He had a million things to tell his father. He didn’t know how to say them with any eloquence. But there was no time left.

“Look,” Eliot whispered, “I just wanted to say you haven’t been the world’s greatest father. I wish you’d been there when we were growing up. I guess I wish a lot things that will never happen now. Just be careful so there a chance we can get to know each other . . . after.”

“I am always careful, Eliot,” Louis whispered. “Especially in the matters of my own skin.” He leaned closer. “Now, allow me to instruct you in the thirteen ways to avoid getting hit in battle. First there is the classic
Secret Principle of Cowardly Misdirection
. . . .”

Louis’s voice faded as Sealiah approached them. Five people trailed behind her.

Louis cleared his throat, and continued, “As I was saying, be brave and give the enemy no quarter.”

The people with Sealiah wore no armor and carried no weapons. There was a man with a guitar, a man holding a bass guitar, and one carrying bagpipes. (Eliot had only ever seen pictures of that instrument.) The last two, a man and a woman, had long wild hair and carried no instruments.

Sealiah halted before Eliot and gestured to these people with a wave of her hand. “Eliot, allow me to introduce Kurt, Sid, Bon, James, and Janis.”

They bowed low before him.

“Uh, hi,” Eliot said, and waved. “Who are they?” he asked.

The Queen of Poppies arched a long delicate eyebrow as if this were the stupidest question ever asked in all of Hell. “I would not send you into battle ill-prepared, my young Dux Bellorum. They are your band.”
65

65
. Fans have speculated for decades who precisely composed Eliot’s original band. While the surnames commonly mentioned match famous personas, one must not forget that Sealiah, the Queen of the Poppy Lands, was at that time responsible for the souls of those who had died from overdoses—a very large number of musicians, indeed. Eliot remained tight-lipped about the identities of his band members, not wanting their fans or families to unduly suffer, knowing they were in Hell. Still, fans wonder, and most would have “sold their souls” to hear them perform together. Having heard the band play firsthand, I can tell you that price would’ve been a bargain.
The Secret Red Diaries of Sarah Covington, Third Edition
, Sarah Covington, Mariposa Printers, Dublin.