by Eric Nylund
As they neared the gate, Eliot saw that it was shut. Had they let everyone inside already and locked the place up?
A man with a stern look on his face stepped out of the gatehouse. He wore a navy blue suit with an embroidered Paxington crest. His blond hair was buzz-cut, and his beard was trimmed square, save the two braids that dangled from his chin.
He towered over Eliot and Fiona, but more impressive than his height was his girth. It would’ve taken three muscular men standing side by side to occupy the same space where he stood. His biceps flexed and stretched taut the fabric of his jacket.
He raised a clipboard and made two checks. “Master Eliot Post,” he muttered, “and the Lady Fiona Post. Good morning.”
“Yes, sir.” Eliot panted. “Good morning. Sorry.” He gave this man a short bow, unsure what the protocol was, but very sure that he deserved respect.
Fiona curtsied.
“Congratulations on passing the entrance exam,” the man said.
“Entrance exam?” Eliot echoed.
“A test to see if you have a spark. You’d be surprised how many potential freshmen wander just outside this street, sometimes for days, never giving up, but never having what it takes to get inside, either. So sad.”
The man’s iron stance relaxed a notch. “I am Harlan Dells,” he said. “Head of security at Paxington. Mind you two break no rules while on school grounds or you will answer to me.”
Eliot swallowed.
Harlan Dells glared at Eliot’s backpack.
Eliot felt his violin case shift inside. His hand tingled where Lady Dawn’s snapped string had cut and infected him. . apparently not so healed as he had thought.
Harlan Dells turned and opened the gate.
Something about the man was familiar. It was like when they had met Uncle Henry; Eliot felt an instinctual fear and some déjà vu. He sensed that Mr. Dells was related in some way. He was an Immortal.
Mr. Dells faced them. “I can hear the grass grow on the other side of the world. I can see the farthest shore, the most distant star. . and I can be in more than one place at a time, so I can easily spot and catch two troublemakers. Understand?”
“Yes, sir,” Eliot and Fiona said together.
“Good.” Mr. Dells pointed past the gates-over manicured lawns and marble fountains, across the courtyard to the clock tower and a domed building next to it. “Bristlecone Hall,” he told them. “That’s where your placement exams are this morning.”
The minute hand of the tower clock ticked into the straight-up position, and bells tolled.
“I suggest,” Mr. Dells said, “that you run for it.”
They did.
4. WHAT WE DO BEST
Louis Piper, often called the Prince of Darkness, Lucifer, or the Morning Star, mused on the nature of time. . how when one doted upon a beautiful woman, a moment stretched into days. . or like now, when one waited for his cousins to deliberate on their endless scheming-it took an eternity.
Louis shifted on the vinyl couch.
This waiting room was devoid of comfort. Windowless, the only ornamentation on the water-stained walls was a USA AS SEEN FROM LAS VEGAS poster. The odor of urinal cake wafted from the adjacent restroom.
Aside from the door marked EXIT, the only other egress was the door leading to the recently relocated Las Vegas Boardroom.
“They should’ve called me in already,” he told Amberflaxus. “Something is wrong.”
Next to him on the couch, his cat ceased licking its iridescent black fur and blinked.
“Yes, yes, I know,” Louis replied. “One cannot go from King of the Panhandlers to Chairman of the Board in a single season, can one?”
Louis reached to stroke Amberflaxus.
The cat, lightning quick, batted his hand away and gave a look of offense.
“No? You’re saying what right do I have to make such claims? I, who have wandered homeless and clueless as a mortal for sixteen years, his power severed and heart ripped asunder by the woman he loved?”
Had he really loved? Louis had forgotten. Perhaps it was just a bad dream.
His cat returned to licking himself.
Louis leaned closer. “You make perfect sense. Consider, though, my friend, that in the span of a few days, I have regained my Infernal status, killed our loathsome cousin Beelzebub, and absorbed his power. What stops me from marching in there and demanding a seat on the Board?”
Amberflaxus tore into the vinyl couch-shredding wildly as if the plastic were alive.
His sentiments were obvious: Louis was a fool.
Any of Louis’s relations had the power to slay hero or demon. But without land, Louis was a pale imitation of a real Infernal. Land made them what they were.
The door to the Boardroom eased open.
No one emerged to invite Louis in, a sign of his lower-than-dirt status. So be it.
He stood, brushed cat hair from his charcoal gray suit, and straightened his bloodred tie.
Amberflaxus bit into the couch’s stuffing, shaking nubs of fluff.
“Wait here,” he told the animal.
Louis turned, donned his armored smile, and entered.
The Boardroom had been a private gambling den during Prohibition. Six billiard lamps hung from the rafters, making cones of dust-filled light. On the far wall hung a gigantic computer screen showing the local news coverage of the Babylon Garden Hotel and Casino as preparations were made to demolish the place in one well-engineered implosion. That was Beelzebub’s nightclub, the last of his old bones being scattered in a final act of well-deserved degradation.
In the center of the room was a craps table padded with green felt, its lines and numbers worn smooth with age where bets were placed with chips, gold coins, or souls.
About the table stood the Infernal Board of Directors.
Louis bowed without taking his eyes off any of them.
Sealiah turned to face Louis. She stood at the foot of the table. She wore an evening gown of opal-flecked orchids and clinging copper vines that wrapped her sinuous curves for a predictable effect upon his libido. Her hair flashed red gold, her sharp smile, pure white, and her eyes, slits of emerald.
“We welcome the glorious Morning Star,” Sealiah told him (although from her icy tone, Louis was sure welcome was the last thing she meant).
“Greetings to you, Cousin, Queen of Poppies and Mistress of the Many-Colored Jungles.”
Louis stared past her to the head of the table at the Board’s new Chairman, Ashmed, the Master Architect of Evil.
Ashmed was the most careful among their kind. His friends remained loyal. . and those who did not lived short lives. The Chairman was all business-crew-cut hair, clean shaved, and in a black business suit.
“Welcome, Louis.” Ashmed puffed on a Sancho Panza Belicoso cigar and blew a trail of serpentine smoke. “Kind of you to appear on short notice.”
“Anything for the Board,” Louis replied.
Lev, called Leviathan by some, the Master of the Endless Abyssal Seas, stood on Ashmed’s right. A hundred strands of Mardi Gras beads coiled about his throat, which almost covered his straining-to-the-bursting-point wife-beater tank top. His corpulence matched his endless strength.
“Really?” Lev asked, and his beady eyes widened. “If you’d do ‘anything’-then cut off your right arm. You owe me for that business in Mozambique.”
Lev was too powerful to insult directly, but thankfully his intellect was as dull as his doughy features.
“Almost anything for you, Cousin, would I not do,” Louis told him.
Lev’s fat forehead crinkled as he puzzled this grammatical knot.
The doors behind Louis shut. . which was not a good sign.
“Please, Lev,” a girl whispered, “do not play with your food.”
Louis spied a slender form standing between Sealiah and Leviathan.
“Abigail,” Louis cooed. “I did not see you.” He bowed to her. “A thousand apologies. Destroy everything you touch.”
“Lies and salutations to you, dear Cousin,” Abby replied.
She was so quiet, so lithe-her delicate childlike features artfully covered in translucent gauze and seed pearls-so enticing that Louis could almost forget she was the Destroyer, Handmaiden of Armageddon, and Mistress of the Palace of Abomination.
However, those who underestimated Abby found their guts trailing from their torsos.
Abby held a locust in the palm of her white hand. It shivered and made the most unpleasant buzzing sound imaginable. She stroked the insect and it calmed. “Did you hear? Oz has retired, poor thing. Allow me to introduce our newest Board member.” She tilted her chin to the other side of the table.
Oz had crossed Lev and Abby earlier this year. He was lucky to have escaped with most of his skin intact, a tribute to his eel slipperiness.
Louis peered into the shadows and saw a silhouette on the other side of the table, one he had failed to detect earlier. . which, when you considered that all Infernals lived, breathed, and were part darkness themselves, made this a masterwork of deception indeed.
“Mephistopheles,” Louis said.
Naturally, Louis was disappointed. He had hoped the Board brought him here to offer him a seat.
But why should they? He was dirt, worthless and landless, having the barest scraps of power to his name. Only his reputation for being the Great Liar enabled him to hold his head high among them.
Yet why Mephistopheles? Irritation prickled Louis. After his scandalous behavior at the end of the Dark Ages with that fop Dr. Faustus-and then the operas-all the fame and the paparazzi. This sparked a hundred imitators trying to summon “the Devil” to sell their souls for trinkets. It had been a public relations nightmare.
Mephistopheles had retired, eschewing his family, claiming he had to strengthen his lands and borders.
Sulking, Louis called it.
Or could the rumors have been true? That he actually enjoyed the company of mortals. . perhaps enjoyed them too much? Louis’s smile faltered a split second. If that were the case, if he had fallen in love, had his heart broken as Louis had, he deserved pity.
“So good to. . well. . not see you, Lord of the House of Umbra, Ruler of the Hysterical Kingdom, and Prince of the Mirrored City,” Louis told the darkness.
“Toy not with me, Louis,” Mephistopheles rumbled. A taloned hand extended from the shadows and rested upon the table’s railing, claws dimpling the green felt.
Sealiah cleared her throat. “Gentlemen, let us avoid tearing Louis into bits before we’re done with him, as tempting as that may be. We have business.”
“Yes,” Ashmed said, setting down his cigar. “The business of the twins. We have called you among us to serve as consultant. You’re close to the boy?”
“And the girl,” Louis added. “I am, after all, their father.”
He put on a brave face, but inside, Louis was wounded. They had summoned him here for the children’s sake? Yes, yes, they were important: the key to unraveling the neutrality treaty with the League of Immortals.
But could someone, just once, want him for his own sparkling self?
This was the problem with being a narcissist: No one appreciated you as much as you knew you deserved.
“How can I be of service today?” Louis asked.
“This Board’s previous efforts position the children on a knife’s edge,” Mephistopheles said from his shadows, and his hand chopped down onto the table for emphasis. “Half Immortal, half Infernal. We must bring them into our jurisdiction.”
“Temptations backfired on us,” Lev said. “Those chocolates, the Valley of the New Year. Who knew the kids could use them to their advantage so quickly?”
“I believe,” Abby interrupted, “that Sealiah’s seductress-this new Jezebel-had some success?”
Sealiah betrayed no emotion on her beautiful features. A sign of deception, to be certain.
“Jezebel’s real influence has yet to be seen,” she said.
“And Beelzebub’s attempt to force a solution,” Ashmed continued, “proved disastrous.”
Indeed. Louis had been there when his darling Fiona had parted the head of the Lord of All That Flies from his body.
“We need a new deception to bring them into the family,” Abby said. “And since your blood runs through their veins, Louis, we had hoped you had a suggestion.”
There it was, the one shred of truth in this maneuvering: They needed him.
The universe spun around Louis. He, who was a second ago more common than dirt, was suddenly the golden key to the ambitions of the Infernal clans. This was his chance, but to do what? Place his only two children in danger to gain advantage and power? And land. . one could not forget the land to be gained.
But Eliot was so talented, playing his Lady Dawn.
And Fiona was so beautiful and so strong, and she didn’t even know it.
Poisonous fatherly concern coursed through his veins and muddled his thinking.
This weakness-the vestiges of Louis’s human form, no doubt-would destroy him if he allowed such a cancerous influence to run its full course.
Thankfully, rational thinking prevailed.
Louis was many things, perhaps even a father to his children, but he had never been a fool in the face of opportunity.
“Yes,” Louis replied to the Board, “I know how this might be accomplished.”
The shadow form of Mephistopheles chuckled, and the subsonic noise made Louis’s teeth rattle.
“Doubt if you will,” Louis said, “but I know their weakness: They have been brought up to be ‘good’ children.”
They stared at him, rapt. Louis had them now.
“A good little boy and girl, with all the ingredients that lead to moral downfall, including the most important: good intentions.”
Ashmed nodded, picked up his cigar, and puffed, greatly pleased with this.
“Go on,” Abby said, her eyes sparkling.
“We require a theater of Shakespearean proportions to draw the twins closer. . as they have proved themselves highly susceptible to familial drama.”
“Shakes-whos-its?” Lev asked. “You lost me.”
“Shakespeare: the basis for all those Mexican soap operas you so love, Cousin,” Louis explained.
“How, specifically, would one engineer this ‘drama’?” Sealiah asked.
“We shall do what we do best,” Louis said, and spread his arms wide. He congratulated himself on a smooth transition to using we to refer to himself and the Board as partners on this venture. “We shall do it by fighting amongst ourselves. A war, just a little one, should do the trick.”
Of course, he was telling them all this because wars had their winners and losers. . and where there were losers, there would be pieces of land and power for Louis to scavenge.
Ashmed’s dark gaze was light-years distant. “A sanctioned Civil War could destroy many clans,” he said. “Are these two children worth that?”
“It need not be a full Civil War,” Sealiah said. “Two clans would suffice. Something intimate. With only two involved, the loss to us would be trivial-negligible after we reabsorb the power base of the loser. Naturally, the specifics of how to draw Eliot and Fiona into the conflict would be left up to the individuals with the most at stake.”
Despite this coming from Sealiah, Louis liked the addendum to his plan. With only two factions involved, he would not have to personally risk doing any of the dirty work.
“The destruction, however, of even a single clan,” Ashmed reminded them, “is still a considerable tactical liability, since we are on the eve of war with the Immortals.”
Lev laughed. “Terrible for the loser. Which wouldn’t be me. Sign me up.”
“I, too, want the chance to play,” Abby whispered. “It has been too long since we had such sport. I volunteer my clan to go to war.” Her hand clutched her pet locust, and it squealed.
“As do I,” Sealiah stated.
Mephistopheles hammered a fist upon
the railing, and the entire table jumped. “Fools-we all want blood on our hands. I propose we dispense with the usual discussion and move directly either to violence or dice to settle this.”
“Excellent motion,” Ashmed said. “Do we have a second?”
Louis took a step back from the table, feeling gravity condense about the Board members. He weighed who would fight whom. . and who would survive. Lev was powerful but slow. Abby was unstoppable but gullible. Sealiah was ever full of tricks. Ashmed, he had never seen fight. And Mephistopheles? Perhaps the most dangerous here, with his pitchfork of shadow smoke.
With one wrong twitch, Louis could be caught in the middle of the mayhem.
“I will second the motion,” Sealiah breathed, “for dice.”
Louis exhaled.
Sealiah rubbed her palms, and a die appeared: a Naga of Dharma.
The last few times Louis had seen one of the legendary dice, they had decided Charlemagne would become Emperor, that they’d test-fire Mount Krakatoa in the fifth, sixth, and seventeenth centuries, and that some utterly forgettable film would win the Academy Award.
It was a cube of scrimshawed ivory carved from the spine of the world serpent. Only five such dice existed. On the faces were etched six crows, five hands (each making its own rude gesture), four stars, three crossed swords, two prancing dogs, and a single head-eating-tail asp.
Ashmed called for a vote.
Ashmed raised his hand-as did Sealiah and, curiously, even Mephistopheles. Abby and Lev did not.
This shocked Louis. Usually there was at least a minor brawl and a few broken bones on the Board to settle even trivial matters. The civilized approach left him with an uneasy feeling.
“Dice it is,” Ashmed announced. “For such a weighty decision, I will require a broader probability distribution.”
From his pocket, he produced a second of the remarkable Nagas. Sealiah graciously let him borrow her die.
“Highest and lowest numbers shall have sanction to wage open war,” Ashmed explained. “The victor shall have all the usual rights of spoils.”
“Fine,” Lev grumbled. “Just let me roll those bones.”
Ashmed raised an eyebrow at his impudence. The Chairman rolled first, the dice tumbling onto the table. They came to rest neatly on the pass line. A five and a four-hands touching stars-nine total.