by Eric Nylund
The Queen gave Fiona a look that could have melted tungsten.
Fiona shrugged it off. If dirty looks, divine or diabolical, could have killed her, she would have been stone dead years ago from Audrey’s withering gazes.
One canon on the wall had been turned-it blasted down in the courtyard-and destroyed as many knights as shadow creatures.
Fiona cringed. “It’s like the battle of Ultima Thule,” she explained to the Queen. “Lots of inferior forces fighting a handful of superior ones-that’s you.” That last comment seemed to mollify Sealiah. “Only this time, there are too many opponents, and more coming every second.”
The answer of what to do came to Fiona. Not the how of it, but what had to be done.
“We’ve got to seal their tunnels.”
“They must have been digging through solid rock for days,” Jezebel said. “Started beyond our outer defenses at the river.”
“The entire plateau is riddled then,” Sealiah replied. “With our power diminished, they cannot be sealed in time.”
Eliot stepped forward. “I can do it, I think.” He touched Lady Dawn and the ground trembled.
Sealiah looked at her brother and ate him up with her savage eyes. “My Dux Bellorum.”
“An excellent idea.” Louis set a hand on Eliot’s shoulder. The smile on his face, however, dried up as he took a long look at the Lady Dawn guitar. “What have you done to my violin?” he said, horrified.
“Later-” Eliot shrugged off Louis’s touch. “And she’s mine now. You gave her to me, remember?”
Louis narrowed his eyes and continued to stare at the instrument, looking as if he’d been betrayed by it.
“Sure, you can collapse those tunnels,” Fiona whispered to Eliot, “but can you do it without bringing down the entire mesa and killing us, too?” Fiona had seen Eliot’s power unleashed firsthand: He’d leveled downtown Costa Esmeralda.
Eliot pursed his lips, thinking. “I just need to concentrate.”
She gave his arm a squeeze. This was prohibited by their mutually agreed on “never touch each other” rule, but surrounded, about to be overwhelmed by bloodthirsty shadows, in the middle of Hell-it seemed like the right thing.
Eliot gave her an awkward smile.
“Give him some room,” Sealiah commanded. “Let nothing distract him.”
They spread out to defend Eliot.
And he played.
At first, even though Eliot’s fingers strummed and the strings blurred, Fiona didn’t hear a thing over the clash of steel and shouts and roars in the courtyard. . but she did feel something. It started in her toes, a tingle that traveled through the bones in her legs and into her stomach, and grew into a rumble that made her teeth buzz.
Dust rose into the air.
Three oversized wolves howled at the subsonic noise, whirled, and charged. Fiona braced and swung her chain. Robert picked up a lance. He moved closer, but not too close to her, and held the lance high.
Robert threw the lance; it struck and impaled one wolf.
Fiona cut another down-but the third bit into her arm.
Robert punched the wolf and broke its skull.
Fiona shook the animal off, wincing as teeth pulled out of her flesh with sucking sounds. She winced again at the sight of her blood trickling down her arm.
She looked up at Robert and tried to communicate her thanks.
He met her eyes with a steady gaze.
Eliot’s music ascended into an audible range: it was heavy and ponderous and classical, but older than anything truly “classical.” It spoke of layers of stone and how they rumbled over one another, rising into hills and ridges and mountains, others plunging deeper, under the ocean floor, and into an endless molten sea.
The thick wall behind them cracked.
Eliot’s song layered chords of bass notes over one another.
The earth beneath Fiona’s feet shifted and plumes of dust shot up from the fissures.
“He’s doing it,” Jezebel whispered, her eyes wide with wonder.
Sealiah did not look so enthusiastic, frowning as she nodded at her Tower Grave. “My personal guards have failed us,” she said.
A dragon within the tower poked its snout though the hole, and then pushed through the tower’s wall, demolishing that section. The tower shuddered-base to steeple-and a thousand skulls rained down, clattering and shattering.
Another dragon pushed out after the first, casting its head about, and then fixed its dark stare at them.
Fiona braced, and drew her chain between her hands, ready to fight that thing. . although not quite sure how she was going to fight something that big. . let alone two such monsters at once.
“I will go,” Jezebel said. She drew in a breath, trembled, and then she whispered to her Queen, “It is time.”
Sealiah gazed at her protégée with what might have been called “pity” on a normal person, but on the Infernal’s perfect features it looked alien.
Fiona was about to interrupt this little moment between them-those dragons were slinking closer, moving faster, sniffing and snorting, growing excited.
The Queen, however, stroked Jezebel’s face and kissed her on the cheek. Whatever trace of pity that had been on Sealiah’s features vanished. “Do what you must.”
Jezebel looked over at Eliot once-then whirled about and strode toward the dragons.
Despite the eminent danger, Fiona paused. The skin at the base of her spine crawled. Something just occurred between Jezebel and Sealiah that had zero to do with this fight-something wrong.
“Hey!” Fiona said, and started after Jezebel.
Sealiah held out a slender arm to block her. “You belong by your brother’s side. He is the only thing that matters now.”
Jezebel crossed the courtyard toward the Tower Grave. She called to a dozen knights finishing off a squad of patchwork men. They came to her, lances at the ready, and together approached the shadow dragons.
Jezebel shifted form, tiny curled horns pushed out of her head, wings sprouted though slits on her armor, and claws grew out holes in the tips of her gauntlets, but it wasn’t like gym class. She remained human size.
Eliot’s fingers danced up in scale, the notes came faster, and he transitioned from a major key and an orderly Baroque cadence to a minor, insistent beat.
The ground splintered. Deep within the mesa came a grinding as stone stressed and then shattered with an agonizing noise that was oddly in harmony with Eliot’s song.
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 Hand
maiden 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?”