by Eric Nylund
He pulled out Lady Dawn and stroked her amber grain. “This time,” he whispered to her, “we work together.”
“Eliot?” Uncle Henry said, a slight unease creeping into his voice. “What are you doing?”
Eliot held his violin bow between Henry and himself, brandishing it like a conductor’s baton. “You said you wanted me to ‘step up to the plate’ and ‘knock it out of the park.’ That’s what I’m going to do.”
Eliot turned his back to him and focused.
He’d only been able to make little things happen on purpose: finding the crocodile, Sobek, in the sewers and Amanda Lane in that burning carnival-that dissonant chord he’d struck and sent a Team Knight student flying backwards.
The big things he’d done. . summoning the dead, battling Beelzebub, and calling forth an army. . those were from songs already written: “Mortal’s Coil,” “The Symphony of Existence,” and “The March of the Suicide Queen.”
He closed his eyes and set his bow to Lady Dawn’s strings. Under his fingertips, she pulsed.
For what he wanted to do now, Eliot would have to use bits and pieces of songs he knew, and invent new musical phrases as well.
He took a deep breath. He could do this.
First, the poisonous air, the layers and lakes of toxic chemicals-they had to go.
But not merely moved somewhere else. That would just poison another place. Eliot had to destroy the stuff. . unmake it.
There was only one thing that would do: “The Symphony of Existence.” There was a bit toward the end about the death of the universe-where matter compressed and heated, atoms disassociated into mist and void.
It was powerful music to start with, perhaps too powerful.
Eliot banished that thought. There would be no room for doubt.
He played notes so low, they trembled on the subsonic threshold, notes so terrible and bloodcurdling, the earth cracked in a spiderweb pattern about him. Clouds covered the sky and cycloned about Eliot. Lightning flashed.
Eliot felt poison drawn from the air, water, and the earth. Rivers of the stuff flowed into the freshly created fissures, steaming and hissing and dissolving soil as it went.
He pushed the notes deeper and darker, pulled the material down-past surface layers and bedrock-he bowed faster, and the heat and subterranean pressure rose-burning and decomposing what it could, oxidizing the remaining toxic metals.
The music wanted Eliot to keep playing. . to the very end. . like a swimmer caught in a river rushing toward a waterfall.
He resisted, though, and deftly transitioned to a major key.
Lady Dawn heated under his fingers. He felt tiny crackles along her length.
The notes sweetened as he wove in strands of “Julie’s Song.”
The land had to be cleaned, but it also needed more. It had to be nurtured. “Julie’s Song” was the only thing he knew that so sounded full of love and light and hope.
He’d composed that song, however, when he was a different person. A boy in love.
He tried to be that again and gave his heart to the land, felt its suffering, and soothed its wounds.
It started to rain, pelting dust and sand, washing away debris, and extinguished distant jungle fires.
Eliot’s thoughts drifted from the land. . to Julie. . and then to what she had become. . Jezebel.
The music shifted, a subtle dissent into a minor key, something that spoke of wild growth and decay, jungle loam and running creepers and opening blossoms-a cycle of life and death.
Eliot smelled fresh vegetation, rich turned earth, and honeysuckle.
He pulled the song back. . sensing something diabolical in the mix.
He was angry. Eliot didn’t want to depend on trivial musical phrases, silly love songs, and music others had written. He wanted his own grand music-sonatas where air and light and birds mixed in fantastical aerobatics, symphonies that touched the stars and spoke of love and loss and the redemption of gods and angels.
He played with fury-the notes nothing he’d ever dreamed of before.
He put his soul into his music.
Live, he urged the land.
And the lands that had once been beautiful called back to him: the phantom songs of a hundred birds and a million insect chirps and whines, the breeze and every rustling leaf that had once lived beckoned, wanting to be once more.
Eliot mourned it all, and he knew then that he had to bring it back.
Somehow. No matter what it took.
He felt a part of himself slip into the land. . and made a connection.
He lost himself, played until he turned everything he was inside out-cast it forth-gave it all.
And then he slowed. . and plunked out the last notes. . and stopped.
Eliot fell to his knees.
Sweat dripped from him, tears streamed from his eyes. . and all mingled with the blood that ran freely from his fingers.
Eliot barely felt Henry’s hand on his shoulder.
The earth was black, and mangrove trees sprouted and grew as he watched, vines wrapped around trunk and branch. There was a rich scent of cut grass. Orchids bloomed. Beetles buzzed. With a rainbow of fluttering feathers, flocks of birds alighted in the treetops, twittering with excitement. Shadow and sunlight angled under the rising jungle.
The factory had changed as well. Rust and corruption had become gleaming stainless steel and green plastic.
Workers ran out and looked with fascination, many making the sign of the cross.
“That. . should. . do,” Eliot breathed, barely able to get out the words, he was so exhausted.
He fell and Henry caught him.
“Do?” Henry’s voice was full of wonder. “Indeed that shall.”
Eliot tried to laugh, but ended up coughing.
He had done something the entire League had been unable-or more likely, unwilling-to do. They were all too selfish to act beyond their personal interests.
And Eliot, at that very moment, realized he would never be one of them.
SECTION IV. FRESHMAN MIDTERMS
35. FATHER-DAUGHTER CHAT
Fiona walked alone down the street. She loved the blinking Christmas lights. In the early morning fog, they glowed like the ghosts of fireflies. There were no such lights on their house. That was covered by her mother’s Rule 52.
RULE 52: No Christmas, Easter, St. Valentine’s Day, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or any other religious or mass-market orchestrated celebrations that include the rituals of unnecessary gift-giving and/or decorations.
That’s what she and Eliot called the “no holiday” rule. They’d never had a Christmas tree or been on an Easter egg hunt, and they were forbidden to wear green on St. Patrick’s Day.
Her mother didn’t even like those holidays mentioned. What history was there between the League and the world’s religions to make Audrey dislike them so?
Fiona could pretty much guess what the Catholic Church would think of her father. .
Fiona frowned and focused her thoughts on a problem within her control-like why being popular was not what she had expected.
She was glad to be walking to school by herself this morning. As soon as she got to Paxington, all the students would want to small talk their way around what they really wanted to know: What was it like to be in the League? Did she know this god or that goddess?
Fiona had quickly learned she could use the League’s rules of secrecy to hide behind. She really didn’t know anything about the League. Nor did she know who most of its members were, with their ever-shifting aliases. She hadn’t even known her who mother truly was until a few months ago.
Still, it was nice that everyone wanted to get to know her.
Fiona had always dreamed of that kind of attention. Did it matter that it was only because of her League connections?
She knew the answer and shuffled her feet on the sidewalk.
Those people didn’t want to get to know her, share her problems or her feelings; they just wanted to be friends with
a “goddess.” They just wanted to be friends with her fame.
Complicating this fame-and she was still mad at Jezebel for outing her without asking-was that now Fiona hardly saw the people she considered her real friends, like Mitch and Amanda.
And then there was Eliot.
He’d done his best to hide on campus. And lately, she didn’t even see him at home. He’d come home late from Robert’s, go straight to his room to read or practice with Lady Dawn (now with his door shut and locked). He spoke only in monosyllables. . if at all.
Eliot hadn’t even responded when she called him a Fuligo septica.[34]
This morning she’d wanted to talk to Eliot, waited for him to drag himself to the breakfast table, only to find that he’d already left the house.
Eliot getting up early had to be a sign of impending disaster. The way the universe was supposed to work was that he was always late for everything.
Fiona wondered if Eliot’s evasiveness had something to do with Jezebel.
In the last few weeks, the Infernal had been to school only two or three times-and then, only to turn in her homework before she vanished again. When Jeremy asked, she had told him to mind his own business, and that it was an “internal Infernal affair.”
Fiona almost stumbled into a man. She’d been so absorbed in her thoughts, she hadn’t seen him.
Blushing, she looked up to apologize-and stopped.
“You!” she said.
Louis wore a soft camel-hair coat, which on this foggy morning made his outline a blur. He stood tall and confident. His long dark hair was streaked with sliver. He had a smile that would have disarmed her. . had she not known him.
“Me.” Her father held up his hands in a gesture of peace.
Fiona’s blush of embarrassment turned into a flush of anger. “I’ve got nothing to say to you-not after you stole Eliot’s phone! And certainly not now.” She maneuvered around him and kept walking. “I have midterms today.”
Louis strode alongside her. “Have I told you lately how much you remind me of your wonderful mother? But yes, midterms, precisely what I came to discuss.”
He waved at the fog ahead and it curled and spiraled like the ocean surf. . hypnotic.
Fiona blinked.
“Stop it,” she hissed.
She touched her wrist and the rubber band there. Louis’s silver bracelet was still safely tucked into her bag. It seemed to have a mind of its own, and she no longer trusted it.
“Just leave me alone,” she said.
“I wanted to talk about your potential,” Louis said, ignoring her request, “within the League. . and outside of it.”
She scoffed. “You mean with your side of the family. No thanks.”
She thought about Jezebel, so effortlessly stunning and confident, and she also remembered how she really looked as an Infernal: those inhuman eyes and claws-a monster.
“We’ve been over this,” Fiona said. “The League’s declared me an Immortal-not Infernal. Everyone knows that.”
But something in her words rang hollow in her ears.
“Yes, I’ve heard. And how do you like your new fame at school?”
There was a sarcastic edge to his tone that made the back of Fiona’s neck prickle with irritation.
“How did you know. .?”
“I hear things. Like how you dealt with that trifling duel, so wonderfully ruthless and humiliating to the Van Wyck boy. A very Infernal thing. But as much fun as it might have been, you should have cut off his head. Now you have an enemy for life.”
Fiona slowed. Donald Van Wyck had vowed never to come after Team Scarab. Well, of course, except in gym-where she suddenly remembered there weren’t rules about first blood. . where he and the rest of Team Wolf could kill them.
The ire drained from her as she realized her miscalculation.
But what alternative was there? She wasn’t about to just kill someone.
Louis held out an arm in her path.
She halted, only now noticing she had almost walked off the curb into a busy intersection.
“Red light, my dear.” He waggled a finger. “Mustn’t jaywalk. What would your mother say?”
Fiona pursed her lips at this taunt. She shouldn’t let Louis get to her so easily. But he did. Just as Audrey always got under her skin. It must be a skill they teach parents.
Well, she couldn’t do anything if Louis wanted to walk on this sidewalk. It was a public place. She just wished he would shut up.
“Enough niceties, eh?” Louis’s smile faded a bit. “I came to warn you about midterms. Some Paxington students will do whatever they must to pass. . even cheat.”
Fiona dismissed this notion. She imagined Plato Hall, the entire class bent over their tests-all under the unnerving gaze of Miss Westin. There was no way anyone was cheating. The Headmistress had made a special announcement about her zero-tolerance cheating policy last week-all the time looking at Jeremy and Sarah Covington.
“Let them try,” Fiona said. “They’ll get caught.”
“But there are other ways to influence Paxington’s precious grading curve,” Louis murmured. “For my sake, please keep your eyes and ears open for danger. What harm could that do?”
“I suppose. . ”
Fiona got the feeling that Louis knew more than he was telling, and just as important, that his concern for her was genuine.
She sighed. “I want to believe you. I want to trust you. You’re just so. . untrustworthy! Why did you steal Eliot’s phone? He got into massive trouble.”
Louis’s smile entirely vanished and his gaze dropped to the ground. “Oh, yes. . that. It was the only way I could reach your mother. She is good at covering her tracks, and I needed to know where you lived.”
He took a deep breath and continued. “So when I saw Eliot’s phone. . I borrowed it.” Louis looked up, and there was none of the usual mocking in his eyes. “I had planned on returning it the very next time I saw him. . but that never quite happened. His phone, though, it had your address programmed into its tiny brain. That’s how I sent the Fabergé egg. I had hoped Audrey might remember how it was between her and me once. . and perhaps. .”
Louis shook his head, and his hand curled over his heart. “But I supposed she has already dashed the lovely thing into a million pieces, hasn’t she?”
Fiona didn’t have the heart to answer. She stared at him, which was enough to communicate all that had happened.
He stood mute.
She knew a little of how this must feel-not being able to be with the one you felt the most for. But she couldn’t imagine what it would feel like to have that person utterly reject you.
“Maybe I could talk to her,” Fiona said.
Louis chuckled. “Oh no, my dear. Audrey would never hear of it. And I’m sure she would find some suitable punishment for speaking on the behalf of such a disreputable character.”
“But if you still love her-?”
“Some things are beyond the reach of even love,” he whispered. He hesitated, opened his mouth, stopped, but then finally said, “Just one more thing before I leave you this morning. About Eliot. The boy should not be alone. Things will be tricky for him. Stay close.”
Fiona believed that Louis truly cared for Eliot.
Quite possibly her, too.
And most especially Audrey.
They were so close to being a real family. . and yet it felt like they were light-years apart. Why was it so hard?
Yes, Louis was the Infernal Prince of Darkness, and yes, he was truly a monster with bat wings and horns and talons, and utterly disgusting. But he was also her father, wasn’t he? That had to count for something.
Louis leaned closer, gingerly took her chin, and tilted her head down. He kissed her on the forehead.
It felt like a warm autumn breeze, like sleeping on soft blankets, like. . like coming back to a home she had only dreamed of before.
Fiona looked up
Only the fog remained.
To her
disappointment-and her relief-her father was gone.
36. CRAMMING FOR THE MIDTERM
Robert focused on the five two-by-fours he’d duct-taped together and set on cinder blocks. He knelt before them as if in prayer.
One such board, even two would have been easy to break if you were trained or even if you wanted to “brute force” it and bruise your hand.
Sure, it was a stupid test. In their sparring sessions, Aaron had disdained such tricks. “Breaking wood-fah! Useless. How many boards ever fight back?”
Robert struck.
The boards broke like eggshells.
He gathered the pieces and stacked them again, ten high.
He hit once more without hesitation.
The boards shattered-so did the cinderblock. The floor cracked, too.
Now that was more than a stupid test.
Robert flexed his fist and examined it. Red, but otherwise not a mark.
There was a lot more to Aaron’s lessons and Mr. Mimes’s Soma liquor than he’d first guessed. He knew he was part of some larger scheme they’d hatched-and he hated being used by them. . but he couldn’t complain about the results.
That had been the deal, too, when he was a Driver for Mr. Mimes. There’d been danger and intrigue, but a heck of a benefits package that included near total freedom and an unlimited expense account.
His gaze fell on the stack of books by his futon. He should have been reading and taking last-minute notes for today’s midterm. That stuff was so dry, though. So many dates and facts to memorize. Besides, he figured he knew everything he was going to. Five more minutes wouldn’t. .
Something was near. He sensed it in his apartment.
Robert whirled about, standing, and raised his hands. . and found Mr. Henry Mimes leaning against the wall.
“Shall I send a carpenter to fix that?” Mr. Mimes nodded at the broken floor.
“No, thanks,” Robert said, hiding his astonishment at yet another of Mr. Mimes’s miraculous entrances. “There’s leftover bamboo from the remodel. I can handle it.”