by Eric Nylund
He plunked out the notes slow and smooth, thinking about Julie’s life and her pain and how it all ended.
Sid and Kurt joined him, adding a bittersweet rhythm. Bon let the bagpipe sigh with remorse, and James and Janis let loose a lamentable wail.
Eliot wanted to cry. They’d gotten it. It was so sad.
Would it work, though? Julie was long gone. And even Jezebel existed no more-she’d been “snuffed.” But that didn’t mean Eliot’s hope for her and him together had to die as well, did it? Could hope survive in Hell? Or was it supposed to be annihilated here the instant it was created?
No. He felt it-warmth and pain and longing that churned in his heart
In fact, he’d never felt more than he had now-maybe because it was impossible and doomed. Those things just made his hope stronger.
He turned her song around, struggled to move the notes upscale, bringing the story of Julie and her life back to the light.
The sky brightened.
Eliot played louder, building in complexity, building until he thought his heart would fill and burst.
Sid and Kurt belted out this new tune; Bon trilled triumph on his bagpipes; Janis and James cried tears of joy.
Over the battlefield, clouds dissolved, and a beam with sunlight cut through the air. Where it struck the ground, the ice thawed. Where the light touched the shadow creatures-it obliterated them.
Mephistopheles paused from his slaughter.
He turned his red gaze at the sky, blinked, and nodded as if in appreciation.
He then stretched one hand toward the horizon.
A cracked moon rose over the distant hills, smoothly and silently crossed the cloud-covered sky. . and interposed itself between the sun and the land. The sun’s brilliance danced about the moon’s circumference in a coronal display-and then dimmed.
Eliot stared, stunned.
An eclipse? He had to be kidding.
The Infernal Lord had the power to move planets in this world? How could any of them stand against that?
Fiona stopped her charge and gaped up in awe.
Robert, though, kept running. He screamed and closed in on Mephistopheles, Saliceran raised to strike him down.
The Infernal Lord of the House of Umbra narrowed his eyes with disdain. He tossed his pitchfork. The lance struck Robert-impaled him, and pinned him to the ground.
Robert lay there limp. . and dead.
78 JUST THE TWO OF THEM
Fiona involuntarily clutched her stomach as if she’d been stuck. “No,” she whimpered. Something that size impaling a human body-it would’ve shattered internal organs, broken the spine.
Robert was still. His blood pulsed out onto the ice.
Mephistopheles had killed him.
Robert had been her friend (although she hadn’t let him be much of one). . and he’d so much more than a friend last summer. She’d only wanted to protect him and had pushed him away, replaced him with Mitch.
He’d been the one. The first boy she’d kissed and the first one she had had feelings for. The only one for her, hadn’t he been? Now there’d never be a chance to explain any of this to him.
The hate and heat came, spreading through her-blood on fire, boiling into her extremities.
She’d see Mephistopheles dead at her feet.
Fiona pulled her chain taut. The air between its links crackled and screamed.
Mephistopheles turned back to her. His army moved toward Fiona, but he growled at them, and instead of charging her they spread out in a wide circle around them.
His meaning was clear: they’d fight, just the two of them.
Fiona barred her teeth. Perfect.
From the swirling smoke, a new pitchfork materialized in Mephistopheles’ hands and he swiped at Fiona. It was huge. He couldn’t miss.
She braced and held her cutting edge before her like a shield. It sliced though the first and second tine-but the last tine twisted under her edge and swept out her legs.
Fiona tumbled, bounced, but rolled to her feet. That blow should have snapped her shins like matchsticks, but her Infernal hate made her invulnerable.
Her vision tinged red with pulsing blood and rage. One thought throbbed in her mind with each heartbeat: Kill.
She swung her chain. It grew a dozen feet longer, links now the size of hubcaps and sharpening to twists of razor. She scrambled toward Mephistopheles.
He had a formed a new pitchfork and thrust it at her.
Fiona grasped her chain in the center and whirled both ends back and forth and cut his weapon to bits.
She gloated over that maneuver-for a split second.
Mephistopheles spun the shaft around and hammered her with the blunt end.
Fiona barely blocked with her forearm. The force sent her skittering back.
But it didn’t even hurt.
She ran toward him, got close, and whipped her chain, letting it out to this full length. It wrapped about his leg. She pulled.
It cut and came free.
The appendage fell away.
But Mephistopheles stepped onto a new leg that formed from the amputated stump; smoke and shadows becoming solid as Fiona watched. He seemed to shrink a tiny bit-not that that mattered: he was still ten times her size.
She stared, not believing it. Her rage cooled to confusion. . and then fear.
He clubbed her with a gauntleted fist.
Fiona slammed into the ground, face first. Ice cracked and she struggled to rise from a spreading pool of her own spit and blood.
That she felt.
She shook her head and stood-
— in time for Mephistopheles to hit her again.
She’d done this before, though, fighting Mr. Ma, and her hands remembered, even if she didn’t: they raised her chain-cut metal and flesh and the bones of Mephistopheles’ armored hand.
Fiona grinned and felt satisfaction pulse though her. Ha! Let’s see him hit her now without a weapon or a hand to wield it.
But in a heartbeat a fresh pitchfork appeared in Mephistopheles’ other hand-and he jabbed-caught her square in her gut.
Ribs shattered. Fiona fell.
Pain blotted out everything: her rage. . her grief. . and her consciousness wavered.
He stood over her and set the butt end of his pitchfork on her body, immobilizing her against the ground.
“GO HOME,” the Infernal Lord rumbled down at her.
He snagged her chain and flicked it far away.
Mephistopheles shrank to the size of a man.
“Whh-what?” she managed, although this brilliant reply took the last of her breath. Did she hear right? Was he telling her to leave and not killing her?
“This is not your fight, noble born,” Mephistopheles said. “You are used and know it not.”
Fiona didn’t have her chain anymore-but her rubber band was still on her wrist.
She pull it out into a line, squirmed, turned and-
Mephistopheles slapped her square in the face.
Sensation left her body in a flash of black stars. . until throbbing pain returned her to the shadowy world.
“Do not try my patience,” Mephistopheles whispered. “Take your brother and withdraw.”
Fiona’s vision cleared.
The shadows and clouds and smoke about Mephistopheles were now wisps. He wore Maximilian armor of thick cast iron, encrusted with spikes and scratched by countless claws. His helmet had horns and a stylized hawk’s beak.
“Why would you let us go?”
“Question not the quality of my mercy,” he told her.
Fiona should have marched off the battlefield, grateful for any mercy, but she felt a flicker of her old anger. “You killed Robert. And Jezebel.”
“I tried not to,” he said. “I know what they meant to you and Eliot. It was never my intention for you to suffer.”
Wait. . He knew who they were? That Eliot had a thing for Jezebel?
His voice was different, too. It no longer rumbled with thunder.
It was kind of. . ordinary.
Mephistopheles removed his horned helmet.
Fiona felt as if she’d been struck again-this time right between her eyes-because she found herself unable to understand what she saw. Standing before her, looking sad and tired, but just as she’d seen him last a few weeks ago with his tousled brown hair and perpetual smile. . was Mitch Stephenson.
79 ONE IN A MILLION
Robert! Wake up!”
“Five more minutes,” Robert muttered. He’d gotten twisted in the bedsheets; they’d wrapped around him like a python. He’d deal with that when he got up for work.
“Robert! Now-unless you want to die in Hell!”
Robert remembered. Hell. The kind with lava and armies of damned souls.
His eyes snapped open, and he was wide awake.
Marcus stood over him. He held a saber in one hand, and flintlock pistol in the other-slashing one of Mephistopheles’ sewn-together soldiers-blasting another guy in the face.
Shouts and screams and explosions rang out around him.
“Rise and shine,” Marcus yelled.
Robert blinked and straightened the facts out in his buzzing brain. Not in bed. Not in sixth grade, as he was dreaming. He was in Hell fighting a war. . which he’d thought they were winning when the tables suddenly turned. Got it.
He tried to stand, but a giant fork pinned him to the frozen ground. The haft was the size of a telephone pole. It was cast iron and must have weighed a ton.
And Mephistopheles had tossed that thing like it was a cardboard tube.
Robert wriggled; that hurt, and the pitchfork didn’t budge. The outer and middle tines had torn into his sides, a tight fit-right up to the rib cage.
Only then did Robert see how close a fit it’d been. A smidge to the right or left and those pitchfork tines would have skewered his liver, heart, and spine.
Had it been a one-in-a-million lucky shot? Or had the Infernal missed on purpose?
Luck, he decided.
He grimaced at his wounds. They were two deep slices on his sides, but no arteries or organs had been punctured. He brought his blooded fingers to his nose.
The stuff smelled of brimstone and spice. It reeked of Mr. Mime’s Soma.
He looked back at the cuts. They’d sealed. The skin had scarred over. . and those scars already fading.
What had Henry done to him? And how did Robert get more of that Soma stuff?
His gaze lit on the broken sword on ground. Saliceran. The Sword of Sealiah’s champion.
He tried to grab it-just out of his reach.
He stretched. . ripped open his wounds. . and touched it.
The blade flared with light and dripped fire.
He set the sword on the cast iron and the pitchfork turned to ash as if it were paper under a blowtorch.
“A hand here?” Marcus said as he tried to pull his saber from the chest of a patchwork soldier. The soldier, however, held on to blade with both hands.
Marcus’s AD/DC T-shirt was ripped down to his love handles, and he had cuts on his arm, but he laughed as he twisted the saber free, and kicked the soldier down.
He was enjoying this, but he wasn’t watching: three more guys and a pair of gorillas charged him from behind.
Robert jumped to his feet.
He slashed in a wide circle. The flames of Saliceran were so hot, the patchwork soldiers burst into flames without being touched. Shadow creatures winked out of existence with hissing screams.
“Looks like you got it all under control,” Robert told his former mentor.
Around them, knights fought from horseback and on foot against soldiers and black elephants, velociraptors, giant crabs, and armored centipedes.
“No sweat,” Marcus muttered.
Robert figured he was going to die here. It was one of those things that just came to you with complete certainty-like knowing who was calling on the phone or betting the bank on that inside straight. That was okay. . as long as his death meant getting Fiona and Eliot getting out of here in one piece.
Saliceran burned brighter than ever, magnesium-white hot in his gasp, but it didn’t singe a hair on his body.
He turned to Marcus. “Where is she?”
Marcus understood exactly who he meant. He nodded across the field.
Past a hundred soldiers and a dozen of Sealiah’s knights fighting to stay on their horses, there was a ring of those shadow gorillas-and past them stood Mephistopheles in a clearing. He had his back to Robert. He wasn’t so tall as Robert remembered, but still three time the size of a professional wrestler.
And through the fighting and bodies and bloodshed, Robert caught a glimpse of Fiona on the ground, struggling to get to her knees. . as Mephistopheles strode toward her.
He couldn’t believe she’d been stupid enough to fight that thing without his help. She always thought she was better than him-than everyone.
Robert would show her, though; he’d save her. . and what?
Nothing. He wouldn’t say a word. He had nothing to prove to Fiona.
He just wanted her safe.
Marcus grabbed Robert’s shoulder. “You can’t,” he said, guessing his intention. “That’s an Infernal Lord on his own land. Fiona might have a chance. Maybe Lucifer or Sealiah or even Eliot. But you? No way.”
Robert shrugged off Marcus’s hand.
He was about to tell him what he could do with his warning when he heard Eliot’s music. . close. . swelling through the air and up to the sun.
Robert looked-blinked as he saw the sun in eclipse, blinked again as solar flares lanced from the edge of the dark disk, and the star swelled along with Eliot’s song, growing larger and orange, then became a red giant star, flooding the battlefield with its blood-colored light.
Eliot did that.
Robert stared dumbstruck, trying to figure what kind of power that took.
Across the battlefield Mephistopheles’ soldiers panicked and the shadows cringed.
And Robert knew he had his chance.
He charged, slashing and burning through the soldiers and blasting any shadow that stood between him and Fiona. A spear grazed his back, but he ignored it, ran forward-and broke into the clearing.
Twenty paces away, Mephistopheles stood over Fiona, his back to Robert.
The Infernal reached for Fiona.
She was on her knees, one had outstretched before her to ward him off. She wasn’t fighting. She looked frail and beaten.
One quick grab, and Mephistopheles would snap Fiona’s neck.
Robert couldn’t cross the distance between them in time. He hefted Saliceran and hoped it was his day for one-in-a-million shots.
With both hands, he raised the jagged, broken blade over his head.
As hard as he could, he threw it.
80 THE LAST MOMENT WHEN EVERYTHING WAS STILL POSSIBLE
Knights and shadow creatures hacked one another to pieces, but Mephistopheles’ army had encircled and guarded him and Fiona (a relatively easy thing. . because they were trouncing Sealiah’s soldiers).
Fiona sat with in a clearing twenty paces across: a spot of peace among the chaos and bloodshed-not that that made figuring out what she was seeing any easier.
“This is a trick,” she whispered to the thing that looked like Mitch.
Mitch was from the Stephenson family, wielders of white magic, and enemies of the Infernals. How could he be in Hell? He’d told her that he had to deal with “family matters. .” that was back in Germany, wasn’t it?
“It was a trick,” Mitch-or Mephistopheles-or whatever he was said. “At least in the beginning.” He held up a hand and indicated the war. “All this, a plan concocted by the Infernal Board of Directors to draw the offspring of Atropos and Lucifer into our influence.”
Fiona heard the words but they didn’t make any sense. Her face contorted with confusion.
“It was actually your father’s suggestion.”
“Louis!”
Of course that made sense: hi
m being the cause of their trouble. With all the restraint she could muster, however, she focused back on Infernal Lord standing in front of her. Fiona was going to ask how a war-of all stupid things-was supposed to get her and Eliot to like the Infernals.
Her mouth hung open, however, as the answer slammed into her brain.
She’d seen it happen: Eliot enraptured with Jezebel from day one at Paxington-her injuries during the school year calculated to yield the maximum sympathy-his rushing to her rescue like an idiot-Eliot almost gambling his life and soul away for her-and her “tragic” loss an hour ago at the tower.
The heroic drama would be irresistible to Eliot; that, and the honey-dipped, platinum-bleached bait.
Mephistopheles nodded as he saw her get it.
“What about me?” she asked.
If Jezebel had pulled Eliot into this, how was Mitch supposed to have gotten her involved? They’d been friends. . he’d taken her on those wondrous walks. . and there’d been that kiss. There could have been a lot more, too. Fiona had been willing and ready, but it’d been Mitch who’d stopped.
“I was supposed to bring you in,” he told her with a sigh. “Everything fell into place. The Stephenson boy was going to Paxington. I have a connection with their clan from the time of Dr. Faustus, so I approached him.”67
“You killed him?”
“No. . and yes,” Mephistopheles said slowly as if he were explaining this to a child. “Young Master Stephenson saw the wisdom of an alliance. I could help him in school and he would succeed beyond his wildest expectations.”
Fiona shook her head. Mitch would have never done that.
But what Paxington student wouldn’t have jumped at the chance at passing their classes-guaranteed? Mitch had been the only boy at school not obsessed with winning. . but maybe that’s because he knew he already would.
“All he had to do was let me possess him-but as deep a possession as our kind can commit to with mortals to avoid detection of the other Immortals. It is a melding of personality and souls.”
“So you’re Mephistopheles and Mitch?”