All That Lives Must Die

SECTION VII. WAR IS HELL

Eliot banged on the gate. The gears of locking mechanism, the web of filigree, and the impenetrable mass of bronze-none of it budged.

And why should it? It had withstood the frenzied pounding of damned souls on this side for countless millennia.

He had a feeling it would stand until the end of time.

“Tell me you jammed the lock,” he whispered to Mr. Welmann.

“Sorry, kid.” Mr. Welmann wiggled his fat fingers. “I was lucky to get my arm out in time.”

Why had Jeremy slammed the gate on them? It didn’t make sense. Eliot turned. Still, they had gotten here. . and this is where he wanted to be, wasn’t it?

Not quite. This place was as different from Jezebel’s Poppy Lands as you could get. The horizon wavered in the raw heat. There was no sun. Dull red light shone from below the edge of the cliff a dozen paces from the gate.

Eliot shucked off his Paxington jacket, already drenched in sweat.

Robert had his off, too. Amanda had her arms crossed protectively over her chest, jacket and all, as if she were cold. . or maybe in shock.

The air had an iron taste and it made his lungs burn. The ground was ash and dust and pumice. There were footprints. . lots of them, and Eliot swallowed, remembering the dozens on this side that had stormed the gate the first time he and Fiona had been here.

Where were all those dead now?

“W-what do we do now?” Amanda whimpered. She stood next to Fiona, her back to the gate, trying to stay close to the edge of Hell, as if she stood right on the line, maybe no one would notice she was on the wrong side.

Fiona pounded on the gate. Her jaw clenched. “I’ll tell you what we’re going to do,” she said. “We’re going to kill them when we get back to school.”

“We don’t know why Jeremy shut the gate,” Eliot said. It felt wrong to defend Jeremy, but Fiona’s reaction was so violent. “Maybe he saw Kino coming and closed it to protect us.”

“Sarah looked so”-Amanda search for the right words-“surprised. I don’t think she knew why, either.”

“Doesn’t matter why,” Robert said. “The Covingtons will either get caught by Kino, get away clean, or. . if I know Jeremy, he’ll talk his way out of trouble. But they’re on the other side. We’re here.” He hucked a rock over the edge of the cliff. “On our own.”

“Better scout around,” Mr. Welmann told him.

Robert nodded. He pulled out his Glock 29 and inched toward the cliff.

“I know why he did it,” Fiona said. “He’d wanted to reorganize Team Scarab. Now he can go back and say there is no more Team Scarab. He and Sarah can transfer to a team with a better ranking. Smart-in a cold-blooded killer sort of way.”

“Jeremy is crazy competitive,” Eliot replied, “but he wouldn’t. .”

He couldn’t finish that thought, because it felt like a lie. What wouldn’t Jeremy do to make sure he graduated? Suddenly Eliot wasn’t so sure he was beyond murdering them.

Fiona turned, the color rising in her cheeks. “We’re done,” she said to Eliot. “This mission to get Jezebel, I’m calling it. We’re down two people. I don’t care if Uncle Kino pounds us flat”-she nodded at the cliff and the lava fields beyond-“there’s no way we’re crossing that.”

“But we haven’t even tried.”

Eliot hated this: him pleading like he was her “little” brother. Like she was in charge of everything all the time. Why couldn’t she just believe in him?

Fiona pulled the rubber band off her wrist. She stretched it into a line, staring at it until it was so slender that it flickered, half invisible. She let go. The stretched band stayed elongated and she held it like a rapier.

She plunged it into the gate.

Bronze sparked and squealed, protesting. Fiona pushed all the way in, grunting from the effort. With both hands, she dragged her edge in a large circle, slicing the metal.

The bronze heated, became molten. . and sealed behind her cut.

Fiona withdrew and stared as the last bit repaired itself. “Huh,” she said.

“You can’t force the Gates of Perdition open,” Mr. Welmann told her. “No one ever has, not even the Titans.”

“We’ll just see about that.” Fiona rummaged in her book bag and took out the silver bracelet Louis had given her. It lengthened and its links swelled to the size of her fist. She narrowed her gaze, focusing. The edges of the rusty metal tapered and sharpened to glistening razors.

She swung it at the gate.

The bronze shrieked and sparks fountained like fireworks. Fiona became a blurry outline against the light.

Eliot had to look away and blink furiously.

The light faded and he looked back.

Fiona stood there, chain in hand. . a slender bracelet once more.

She sighed at this failure and scrutinized the fence on either side of the gate. The bones and concertina wire curved along the edge of the land-and then over-spines and rib bones sticking out from the cliff.

“Wouldn’t try that either,” Mr. Welmann remarked. “Those bones are some of the exposed bits of the World Serpent. Start messing with that. . it might wake up.”⁶¹

They’d learned about the world serpent in Miss Westin’s Mythology 101 class. That thing was supposedly strong and venomous enough to kill even gods.

Fiona chewed her lower lip. She turned to Eliot. “I know you think you need to do this,” she whispered, “but it’s crazy. I’m not helping anymore.” She glanced at Amanda. “I’m hoping you’re not going to force us to come along.”

Eliot couldn’t look her in the eye.

How could she even think that? Sure, he may have not told them the entire truth to get them to come. . but he wasn’t going to make any of them risk their lives.

“You know what I’m asking you to do,” she murmured.

“Yeah,” Eliot said. “I know. I’ll do it.”

He wasn’t sure what hurt more: Fiona’s accusation. . or the fact that she was abandoning him when he needed her the most.

He unslung Lady Dawn and stepped toward the gate.

How to charm open something that looked like it could withstand a nuclear blast? Not with head-on force. The gate had shrugged off Fiona’s attempt.

This required subtlety.

Eliot strummed Lady Dawn and picked out the notes of the “Mortal’s Coil” nursery rhyme. He let the notes wander as he found his way to a new tune: a precise clockwork song with a metronome steady heartbeat. This was the song of the gate. Eliot heard the echo of the song in the gears and cogs, the wound springs, in every rivet and bolt. He picked his way over the notes, and felt blocks and tumblers-and with the tiniest of flourishes, he tickled one of those tumblers into place.

He smiled. This would be easier than he thought.

The gate, however, vibrated of its own accord-the barest rumble that flipped the tumbler back into place.

“It’s fighting me,” he whispered to Fiona.

“Then play harder-or faster-or louder,” she said. “Whatever it takes.”

Robert walked back from the edge of the cliff, his face drawn tight with worry. “Eliot, I wouldn’t play any louder, if I were you. Look.”

Eliot stopped playing. He put on his glasses and then he, Fiona, Mr. Welmann, and Amanda followed Robert back the edge.

The cliff dropped a mile straight down. Switchbacks started from the top and descended into smog. Rivers of lava snaked around mesas of black basalt-their bases eroded by the molten stone. Meteors streaked across the sky, so did the occasional on-fire, out-of-control airline jet.

Eliot winced as one plane crashed and burst into a fireball.

He’d gotten a glimpse of the Blasted Lands at the beginning of the school year. It’d scared him then. . still did. But something was different.

Fiona said, “It’s quieter.”

Eliot knew there were damned souls here-dozens had rushed the gate and tried to escape last time-but Eliot hadn’t expected to see thousands of them down there. . and all of them quiet.

They formed lines that stretched to the horizon. Each person carried a large stone that, when they got to the end of the line, they dropped into the lava below. . and then went back for more. The stones disappeared in flame, but elsewhere, they’d actually started to pile up, making jumbled shorelines, and in some places damming the lava altogether.

“What are they doing?” Eliot whispered.

Mr. Welmann wiped the sweat off his face with a red handkerchief. “Something, that’s for sure. Since Beelzebub died, the Blasted Lands were taken over by a new Infernal boss. Looks like he’s put everyone to work.”

Eliot remembered with Louis had told him: “We are monarchs of the domains of Hell, the benevolent kings and queens over the countless souls who are drawn there to worship us.”

But not everything was different under the new management. In some areas, people fought one another, full-scale wars waged atop a few mesas, the losers tossed over the side into the fire.

“You see them now?” Robert asked Eliot. “The crazy ones? I don’t think we want them hearing you playing and coming up here.”

Eliot imagined tens of thousands rushing the gates. . and him and the others fighting, trapped with their backs against the wall.

He turned to Amanda, worried she might freak out.

But she wasn’t; instead, she stared with open fascination at the lakes of lava and burning mountains. She took a step closer-and Eliot set a hand on her arm, pulling her back from the edge.

“Hey,” he told her.

She blinked, breaking whatever weird trance she’d fallen into, and nodded at him. Amanda’s eyes, though, still glimmered as if they’d absorbed the heat of this place.

Mr. Welmann dug into the pack that Aunt Dallas had given them. He took out a pair of binoculars and gazed through them. “Hmm.” He handed them to Eliot and pointed between two mesas.

Eliot squinted into the binoculars, his gaze traveling over jagged obsidian, and smoldering fissures, and then saw what Mr. Welmann had: A simple suspension bridge swayed across the chasm. It was made of rusted cables and black metal. . an arc a half-mile long that swung in the heat.

It looked amazingly untrustworthy.

He moved his view left and right, and spotted more of these bridges. They linked one mesa to another, and then to fields beyond the lava. The Blasted Lands leveled out there into plains of ash.

Eliot then spotted a fine straight black line-no, two parallel lines-that ran over the plain and vanished in the distance.

“The Night Train’s railroad tracks.” Eliot handed the binoculars to Fiona. “That’s how we’ll get out. We can use those bridges to cross, and then follow the tracks right into the Poppy Lands.”

She looked and snorted and said, “The Poppy Lands are not the way out.”

“They’re our only way now,” Eliot said. “I’ve been on those tracks. Nothing touches them-not people, flaming meteors, falling planes-even the ash stays off them. They’re protected somehow.”

Mr. Welmann nodded, believing him. The others, though, looked unconvinced.

“And they run straight to the Poppy Lands,” he said. “Even if you don’t want to help me with Jezebel, there’s a station house there with a private train. I’m sure it’ll take you guys back.”

“You’re sure, huh?” Fiona crossed her arms. “More likely we’ll have to steal it.”

“You have a better idea?”

She looked back at the shut Gates of Perdition and pursed her lips. “No. . I don’t.” She thought for a moment, and then asked, “Can you play a few notes and clean up the air like you did in the gym match? We don’t want to choke along the way.”

Eliot nodded. He took a deep breath and plucked a few Spanish flamenco notes on Lady Dawn, imagining a coastal breeze. The temperature dropped twenty degrees, and the air sweetened.

“Then okay,” Fiona told him. “We’ll give it a try. Robert, take point. Eliot after him-Amanda and me. Mr. Welmann, bring up the rear, please.”

She was using her “team leader” commanding voice that was really getting on Eliot’s nerves.

Robert must have felt the same way, because he hesitated and looked like he wanted to give Fiona his own version of vocabulary insult. Eliot gave him a slight nod. Robert nodded back and headed down the switchbacks.

Fiona pulled Eliot aside. “We’ll catch up in a second,” she told Mr. Welmann and Amanda.

She whispered to Eliot, “Are you sure about this? I mean, I’m your sister. . I’ve got to help you, no matter what.” She looked extremely awkward saying this. “I think I know what Jezebel means you. . but it’s not just you and me at risk. Robert, he can take care of himself. And Mr. Welmann, well, he’s already dead, but if his soul gets trapped in Hell. .” She hesitated and swallowed. “But Amanda. . I wish I could leave her somewhere safe. She has no idea what she’s gotten into.”

Eliot understood her frustration. Fiona was taking all the responsibility for this onto her shoulders-like she really was captain and this was another match. The responsibility must be driving her crazy.

“This isn’t turning out like I thought,” Eliot told her. “But it’s still my plan-not yours. Whatever happens out there, I know you’re doing your best to protect everyone, but it’s my responsibility, and my fault, if anything goes wrong.”

She stared at him, confused, as if it were an alien concept that Eliot could take leadership and responsibility for something, but then she nodded.

They tromped down the switchbacks, catching up with the others.

“Hey, cool air is back.” Mr. Welmann turned as Eliot got close. “That’s nice.” He sweated profusely, which was weird, considering he was dead.

Eliot kept playing quietly as they walked. He didn’t look back.

It took a while to get to the bottom of the switchbacks. How long, Eliot wasn’t sure. Time felt “slippery,” as if no time had passed, but simultaneously, it felt like it took forever, too.

No one spoke, heeding Robert’s warning not to attract any undue attention.

That was a good thing, too. On a nearby mesa, a battle raged as hundreds of people screamed and hurled rocks at one another, clawing, biting, and punching. There weren’t two sides; it was everyone against everyone else. It was like they had all lost their minds.

The trail ended. Here the first simple suspension bridge arced to an adjacent plateau (one with no obvious war waging upon it). The bridge dangled a half mile above a raging river of molten stone.

Eliot felt his resolve evaporate.

Robert leaned over the cliff’s edge and spit. It sizzled into vapor the instant it was outside Eliot’s protective musical bubble. “Whoa,” he said, impressed.

But Robert, being Robert, stepped onto the bridge without another thought. . and Eliot had to keep up with him or his friend would fry. The really strange thing was that Amanda, who had always been scared, walked right onto the bridge after Eliot.

The heat was terrific and the smell of sulfur and copper overwhelming. Eliot held his breath and played faster and louder so they wouldn’t die from the fumes.

He didn’t want to look down, but he had to see where he set his feet.

Far below, orange and red liquid boiled and churned and popped. Drifting by were tiny dots of smoldering solid stone crust.

They passed the low midpoint of the bridge and started climbing back up. Eliot spied the top of the plateau again. There were people there-not the crazy fighting ones, but the working ones.

The damned formed a line, shuffled along with rocks, dragging, rolling, and shoving them along until they got to the edge. . where they pushed the stones into the river.

Then they turned back, presumably to get another rock.

And much to his relief, not one of them gave Eliot or the others a second glance; in fact, they seemed to be going out of their way not to look at them.

Some wore rags, but most wore nothing. Their nude bodies were gaunt and reddened from the heat. They were bruised and scraped, and they all had burns-mostly on their hands and bare feet, but a few of them were completely covered in burn scars.

It reminded Eliot of Perry Millhouse, whom he and Fiona had killed in their second heroic trial. Perry Millhouse, who Eliot knew had actually been the Titan Prometheus, long fallen from power.

That’s where they’d met Amanda. Perry had kidnapped her and used her as bait.

He glanced back at Amanda. Her hair was plastered to her forehead and her cheeks flushed.

Funny, you’d think that someone who’d been the prisoner of a homicidal maniac whose preferred method of killing enemies was burning them alive would look a little less fascinated with fire.

They trod up the rest of bridge and stepped onto the plateau. From here, two bridges led to other mesa tops-both, more or less, getting them closer to the plains of the Blasted Lands.

“Which way?” Fiona asked.

Eliot stood on his tiptoes for a better look, which was when he saw the top of the adjacent plateau.

A thousand people crowded its edge-pushing and shoving to get onto the suspension bridge-running across, screaming and snarling. . straight toward them.

61. An intriguing Chimera Heresy penned by Sildas Pious in the thirteen century pertains to Jörmungandr (aka the World Serpent). In Norse mythology, the giant snake is prophesied to emerge from the ocean, poison the sky, and then battle Thor (the god and the monster slay each other). This event supposedly occurs at end of the world, Ragnarök. In the Pious’s legend, however, valkyries with flaming swords and Christian angels fight the beast, chain it, and bury it under the earth. One of the chain links was forged into the Gates of Perdition. Centuries later, when Jesus Christ is said to have arisen and opened the gates of Hell, Pious explains these were the Dolorous Gates, not the Gates of Perdition. He claims that on the day the Gates of Perdition are destroyed, the Beast will rise, and it will signal both Ragnarök and the Christian Judgment Day, when the dead will be released from Hell. Gods of the First and Twenty-first Century, Volume 5, Core Myths (Part 2). Zypheron Press Ltd., Eighth Edition.

Eliot didn’t understand why there were so many people-all angry at him.

What had he done?

Thousands crowded along the edge of the distant plateau. They raised fists, threw rocks, and hurled insults in a dozen languages.

Was it because he was alive? Or because he’d willingly entered Hell, and they’d all probably wanted out? Or maybe like Robert said: they were crazy.

Eliot faced the bridge connecting the two plateaus and turned up the gain on Lady Dawn to the halfway point.

Mr. Welmann’s eyes widened, and he reached to stop him.

Eliot couldn’t waste time talking. Mr. Welmann didn’t know what he was capable of. In fact, it’d be simple to stop them. If anything, that was the scary thing: how easy it’d be. . and how much Eliot had enjoyed the destruction before in Costa Esmeralda.

He blasted out a power chord.

The other bridge wobbled and the slack stretched taut from the onslaught of sound. The damned on the bridge held up their hands to protect themselves-but were flung off like rag dolls.

Eliot belted out three more chords, and that felt good.

The rusty iron of the bridge heated and twisted like taffy. . stretched apart and fell into the chasm.

Mr. Welmann clamped a hand on Eliot’s arm over and pulled it away from the guitar.

“Let go,” Eliot told him, annoyed. “I got rid-”

But Mr. Welmann wasn’t even looking at Eliot; instead, he scanned the horizons. He lifted a finger indicating silence, and cocked his head, straining to hear.

“No,” Mr. Welmann whispered. “Listen.”

The sound was, at first, barely audible over the rumble of the distant volcanoes. Eliot heard one cry, then a shout of discovery, and then a combined wail of rage that spread over the land.

From the cliffs they’d traversed, the damned poured out of caves and crannies. Thousands and thousands of torches flared to life upon the slopes. And from every plateau and mesa, the shouts of not thousands-but tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of angry souls combined into a thunderous roar.

Eliot let the magnitude of his mistake sink in. He’d messed up in a big, big way.

“Nice,” Fiona muttered, shaking her head.

“What’d you want me to do?” he asked. “Let them get to us? Fight them all? Don’t you think that would’ve made a little noise, too?”

He started coughing, the air once again hot and reeking of metal. His hand drifted back to Lady Dawn’s strings, instinctively plunking the notes that cleared the atmosphere.

Fiona started to say something, but her mouth stayed open, gaping, as she stared past Eliot.

He turned and saw what had shut his sister up.

Where the bridge he’d just destroyed had been, a thin line appeared in the chasm. It was spiderweb fine, but it thickened and buds appeared that turned into chain links-then another line stretched next to it, and strands of metal wove between them.

Like the Gates of Perdition that had sealed after Fiona had cut into them, this bridge was growing back.

The damned across the chasm cheered and jeered.

“We can’t fight,” Mr. Welmann said. “No matter how strong you kids think you are, they’ll always be more of them to fight.” He nodded toward the other suspension bridge that led to the Blasted Lands. “We go that way. Fast.”

Without any argument, they raced for that bridge, their only escape.

A cluster of the working damned gathered at the bridge, all crowding to get on the thing and get away, too.

Robert sprinted ahead. He plowed into them, knocking six over with one blow, and clearing a path for him and the others to run ahead.

Eliot and Mr. Welmann jogged onto the bridge after him. Amanda was right after them. Fiona lingered, and came last.

And Eliot knew why.

As they tromped off the bridge and onto the next mesa, Fiona turned and severed the chains.

It fell into the lava.

If it was like the other bridge, though, it’d grow back. Destroying it would buy them only a minute or so.

The working damned here scattered, abandoning their rocks. Eliot jumped onto a boulder and looked around. Five bridges radiated off this plateau, connecting to others. . only now, from every direction, the angry damned came. So many, he couldn’t count them. They flowed across the land. The only thing preventing the damned from quickly overwhelming them were the bridges-they let them across only a few at a time.

If Eliot and the others didn’t get out of here, they’d have no choice: they’d have to fight and fight-and against a few hundred. . maybe even against the first thousand, they’d win.

But after an hour of battling, he and Fiona, Robert and Amanda would falter. They’d need food and water and sleep.

There was one way, though. One bridge clear for now. It led to another plateau, which in turn had a single bridge to the Plains of Ash.

“There’s a way out of lava fields,” Eliot told them, jumping down. “I can get us onto solid ground.”

Robert had his brass knuckles on one hand, held his Glock in the other. “How many are coming?” he asked.

“All of them,” Eliot replied.

“Just run,” Fiona told everyone. “There’s no time left to think this through.”

So Eliot ran. He ran before the fear could catch him and stop him cold.

But as he and the others got onto the bridge, he couldn’t stop thinking that this plan didn’t make any sense.

So what if they got onto the plains? That eliminated the danger of them falling into lava, but if they wouldn’t stop the bridges from reforming, and it wouldn’t stop the damned from pursing them. How long could they all run?

At the midpoint of the bridge, Amanda halted.

Eliot turned and grabbed her hand. “It’s okay,” he said, not at all convinced of this. “Don’t be afraid.”

But as he saw the look on Amanda’s face, he knew the word afraid didn’t apply.

At least to her.

Amanda’s lips pursed together and trembled with emotion. Her eyes still smoldered with fascination-for real. They glowed and flickered with mirage heat.

Amanda dropped his hand.

“I can stop them,” she said. “You go on.”

“What?. .” Fiona almost ran into her-and halted, seeing her burning eyes, too. She stepped around her next to Eliot.

“You have to go.” Amanda’s hands gripped either side of the chain railing. Where they touched the iron it heated. . dull red. . orange. . and then yellow and smoldering.

“I can’t hold it in much longer,” Amanda said, struggling to get her words out. “It’s this place. It’s so hot. And their anger. I can feel it all burning.”

Eliot reached out to touch her, but the heat was too great.

The heat. The fire. Eliot had seen one person with this power before. And so had Amanda.

“Perry Millhouse?” Eliot asked. “He did this to you?”

Tears welled in the corners of Amanda’s blazing eyes, but they didn’t get the chance to spill upon her cheeks; instead, they sizzled and steamed away.

Robert and Mr. Welmann came back to see what the trouble was, stopping, astonished at the sight of her.

“I can’t even tell you,” Amanda whimpered. “It hurts to even think about him. But after you saved me, everything changed. That night I had to get the heat out. I let it go. I had to. . and I burned everything-my house-my dog-my parents. . none of them survived.”

She looked away, unable to meet their horrified gazes.

Eliot felt sick, but everything made sense about Amanda now. Perry Millhouse had had something planned for her all along. Maybe he’d wanted to pass his power on to another generation, or maybe it was some revenge thing aimed at the League-but whatever his reason, the Immortal fire of Prometheus pulsed through Amanda Lane.

And when Eliot and Fiona had rescued her, taken her home, no one understood the power inside her. Uncle Henry and the others in the League of Immortals must’ve felt sorry for her and sent her to Paxington.

All those little fires on the obstacle course and when the dorms had burned over semester break: that had been Amanda.

She looked back at them, her eyes slits into a blazing furnace.

“I can’t hold it much longer,” she whispered. “And that’s okay. Whatever’s inside me, it’s never done me any good, but now, I can at least save my friends.”

Amanda inhaled sharply and winced.

“Don’t,” Robert told her. “Even if you melt the bridge, it’ll just come back.”

“You’re so noble, Robert,” she said, her voice stronger than Eliot had ever heard. “How I wish you were my hero.” She didn’t look at Robert, though, as she said this, rather her gaze firmly fixed on Eliot. “Don’t worry. I will stop them.”

The metal bars under Eliot’s feet got too hot to stand on. He took two steps back.

“There has to be another way,” Eliot told her. “Just give us some time to think.”

Her hair lifted, charged with static electricity, turning to dull red and then orange. The metal she touched heated to white and sagged. “There’s no time for me,” she said.

Amanda Lane turned and walked back they way they’d come.

Flames licked her legs and arms and spiraled about her in jets of gold and green plasma. The heat from her body was tremendous.

Eliot and the others jumped back.

The army of the damned reached the edge of the plateau and streamed onto the bridge. . pausing at the sight of her.

“Amanda!” Eliot called.

She kept walking, the air about her wavering, her footprints melting metal.

“We’ve got to move.” Mr. Welmann pointed down.

The lava in the chasm boiled and churned. Geysers showered molten rock into the air. Waves rebounded and crashed against the plateaus, crumbling their bases.

A whirlpool formed beneath Amanda, following her as she moved along the bridge; the swirling lava glowed hotter until it hissed silver vapor and blazed a blue-white too painful to look at.

Eliot had to play her something, a song to cool her spirit.

How had she managed to keep all that heat inside for an entire year? She should’ve told them.

Or had been his fault? Eliot had been so wrapped up in his own problems, that he’d never really been a friend for her.

He focused, thought about her, and started to strum his guitar.

“No way, man.” Robert grabbed him and pulled him back.

“Don’t,” Eliot growled. “I can do this.”

Fiona shook her head. “Not this time,” she told him. “Go! Before you get us all killed, you idiot.”

So he ran, half pushed along by Robert and Fiona, and he didn’t look back until he got to the other side of the bridge.

When he finally turned, he saw the damned running along the bridge toward Amanda.

They couldn’t get close. The ones in front screamed and burst into flame, floundered, and blasted back into dust. The ones in back kept pushing forward, though. . dooming those ahead of them.

Amanda blazed like a sun fallen to the earth.

The bridge melted and fell apart. She hovered in midair.

The lava under her erupted-plumes and gouts of molten rock and metal exploded. A tidal wave of lava surged in all directions, consuming the mesas and plateaus in its path.

Eliot turned and ran.

He no longer wondered how, or if, there was a way to save Amanda. He just ran. The encyclopedia part of his mind had nothing to say. Faced with a towering wall of pure fire, the only thing left was animal instinct.

They ran over the broken land, scrambled up dunes of ash, and crunched over a dry lakebed. . until he and the others were out of breath and his legs felt like lead. (Even dead Mr. Welmann was panting and exhausted.)

They stopped and looked.

A volcano pushed upward where Amanda had made her stand. It spewed fire and rock upon the land and hissed clouds that blackened the sky.

Nothing would get through that-dead or alive.

As Amanda had promised.

Eliot watched for a moment. Lightning flashed among the clouds, but there was no rain.

He wished he’d been there for her at school. But he’d just complained about her and treated her like a weakling. . when in fact, she had been just struggling to contain a power that, if she’d unleashed it, could have killed them all.

The words Eliot spoke not an hour ago echoed in his head: “It’s my responsibility. And my fault, if anything goes wrong.”

He’d gotten her killed.

Coming here and bringing her along had been his idea. But worse, even if he had known about her unstable power, if he’d had a choice to make between Amanda and Jezebel. . he still might have made a choice, and it would’ve been Jezebel, not her.

That made him, what?

Was he like his father? Evil?

Eliot sank to one knee. He was dizzy. . and unsure of everything.

He threw up.

Fiona came to him and set her hand on his shoulder. “It wasn’t your fault,” she whispered.

She didn’t understand. Yes, he felt guilty over Amanda’s death, but what he really felt terrible about was that along with Amanda dying, something had been burned out inside him, too.

Eliot hunched over and threw up again.

Coughing, he stood up straight. “I’m okay now,” he told them, and then pointed. “That’s the direction I saw the train tracks.”

And then, one foot in front of the other, he started moving again.

Eliot walked down the center of the Night Train tracks.

He had Lady Dawn slung over his shoulder, and the instrument banged along his back. For the first time since Louis had given him the instrument, he didn’t feel like lugging it around.

It was quiet here and merely hot (compared with the furnace temperatures elsewhere on the plains). Occasionally a meteor would slam into the dust and leave a crater, but they never hit the train tracks. Even whirlwinds that sprang up vanished before they crossed the tracks.

But quiet was the last thing he wanted because he kept thinking about Amanda, and how she’d died to save them, so Eliot could get the girl he really cared for.

Would he have done the same for Amanda? Or was Paxington making him selfish? Or was it his Infernal blood?

How had this all gotten so out of control?

Fiona walked next to him, and for once in her life, she had nothing to say.

That was driving him nuts, too. If she’d just yell at him-tell him how stupid his plan had been. . something. . then he could’ve defended himself.

The silence was like a knife slowly twisting in his brain.

Mr. Welmann took point, on the lookout for mobs of angry damned or onrushing trains. Robert walked on Eliot’s right side, balancing on the railroad track. He’d unbuttoned his shirt all the way, and dirty shirttails flapped about him.

They were quiet, too.

More condemnation by the lack of conversation.

It was hard to tell how long they walked. The light from the furnace-orange sun was always behind clouds, and never changed. Robert’s watch was busted. Fiona’s phone displayed jumbled characters when she’d tried calling Mitch, and she got a “caller unavailable” message.

Mr. Welmann scanned the horizon. “Uphill grade,” he told them.

Eliot nodded, not caring. It was as if this place evaporated his ability to think straight and all he could do was walk on these tracks.

There were channels and riverbeds alongside the rails now, bone dry as if there had been running water in them a million years ago. As the plains sloped up, black rocks jutted from the ash and seared red clay. There were even a few spots of lichen.

Eliot’s mind cleared a bit when he spotted stunted sagebrush. There were scrub pines, too, twisted and tortured, but alive.

As they neared the summit of this hill, a breeze carried a hint of moisture.

He got to the top, and it was as if someone had drawn a line along the ridge-splotches of moss appeared on the other side, the earth was black loam, pine forests sprouted and thickened into a jungle that blanketed the valley beyond, and a ribbon of muddy river snaked down its center. The sunlight turned from blazing orange to a cool silver overcast.

Eliot took a deep breath, and smelled a “compost” scent mixed with honey and the perfume of a million flowers.

“The Poppy Lands,” he said.

“Duh,” Fiona muttered.

Despite her sarcasm, despite the fact they’d just lost one of their team, Fiona’s eyes were wide, taking it all in and gleaming with curiosity. She’d always wanted to travel and see exotic places. This was about as exotic as you could get.

Flowers grew everywhere: fleshy orchids with inviting petals, drooping wisteria cones that dangled nectar-sticky stems, and carpets of pinhead-sized blossoms the color of cotton candy.

The train tracks continued down the slope-cutting through forest and jungle.

They followed them.

Whatever chemicals or magic protected the train tracks, it also kept the vegetation off. Still, as they entered the jungle, the trees crossed overhead and formed a tunnel.

The bugs left them alone, too. That was a good thing. There were clouds of metal wasps, giant beetles that bored into hardwood like it was Styrofoam, and butterflies that fumed acid vapor trails in the air.

“Doesn’t look like there’s a war going on here,” Robert said.

Fiona took a few pictures with her cell phone camera.

Mr. Welmann held a hand, indicating they halt. “Don’t be too sure,” he said, and pointed ahead.

The train tracks ended. Jungle blocked their way.

“Line’s been cut,” Mr. Welmann said. “That’s one of the first things you do in the war. Sever your enemy’s supply routes and communication. Get them alone. Wear them down.” He frowned.

Fiona stepped up to the jungle. “Everyone back.” She pulled out her chain and spun it over her head. She turned the whirling mass flat, and walked into the jungle where the tracks used to run.

Branches, vines, and roots sheared about her in a circular path.

Eliot and the others followed-at a respectable distance, but not too far back, because as soon as Fiona passed, tendrils wormed back and new braches extruded.

Thirty more paces like that and they emerged back onto clear tracks.

Ahead was a train station that looked like a gigantic hothouse, one that someone had taken a baseball bat to and busted every pane of glass.

Standing outside the station were six knights in mirror-polished steel plate mail embellished with gold and emerald inlay. Foot-long thorns bristled from their armor. They held weapons that looked part hunting rifle, part medieval execution ax.

Robert drew his gun. Fiona touched the chain on her wrist, but then instead pulled off a rubber band and stretched it.

The knights saw them, and they sank to one knee.

“Well,” Fiona whispered, “that’s. . different.”

“Huh,” Robert said. He lowered his gun, but didn’t holster it.

“It will be okay,” Eliot told them, and plodded ahead.

Like the Ticket Master who had bowed before Eliot on the Night Train, these guys had to have mistaken him for an Infernal Lord.

As Eliot and the others approached, the knight in front stood, and with his head still bowed, he said, “Most noble Master Post, and Miss Post, son and daughter of the Prince of Darkness, we are your honor escorts, the Knights of the Thorned Rose, Queen Sealiah’s personal guards.”⁶²

These guys knew exactly who they were.

“Honor guard, right,” Robert said with a snort. “Why should we believe you guys?”

Fiona shot him a look for being so rude.

The knight standing turned his stilted visor to Robert, and stared at him a long moment.

“Because, sir,” that knight said, “the dismembered bodies of three hundred of the finest soldiers and knights litter the road from here to the Twelve Towers-proof enough that we have fought and bled and suffered long to clear a way so you may proceed unmolested to our Queen.”

“Do we even really need to go any farther?” Fiona asked Eliot. She turned to the knight and inquired, “Is Jezebel with you? Or close? She’s the one we want to talk with.”

“No, great Lady,” the knight said, and ducked his head apologetically. “The Duchess of the Burning Orchards is at the side of our Queen.”

Fiona sighed. “Figures.”

“A second, please?” Eliot said the knight in charge.

Eliot stepped back with the others and they huddled. “We have three options,” he whispered. “Steal a train and get out of here.”

“I’m betting the tracks are cut in both directions,” Mr. Welmann told him.

Eliot nodded in agreement. “We go ahead, but on our own.”

He gazed down the road and saw the burning remains of soldiers, twisted armor and broken lances, smoldering napalm, and torn bits of shadow slithering. . a swath of ruin and battle for miles. Here and there, however, body parts twitched and moved.

What happened to the dead in Hell when they-what was the right word for it-died? Did they slowly come back together? Or did they just lie there in pieces forever?

Eliot swallowed, trying not to get sick again.

“Or,” Eliot said, “we let these guys take us to their Queen.”

“Into what might be a trap,” Fiona reminded them.

“I think they’re telling the truth about them fighting and dying just to help us,” Eliot said.

Fiona chewed on her lower lip. “Well, they don’t seem like they want to immediately kill us. That’s progress.”

“I don’t want to go back through those Blasted Lands,” Robert murmured.

“Or hoof it through the rest of Hell,” Mr. Welmann added.

Fiona sighed and shook her head. “I guess we go with the welcoming committee. . for now.”

Eliot returned to the knights. “Please,” he told them, “show us the way, sir.”

The head knight motioned to his men. They rose and formed a loose circle around them. Eliot didn’t particularly like being surrounded by armed warriors, but they seemed okay; none of them looked directly at them, and their weapons pointed away.

Still, instinct told Eliot not to trust anyone in Hell.

The Poppy Lands were worse than Eliot remembered from his previous trip on the Night Train. The earth was scorched in spots, frozen in others, and heaps of salt scattered everywhere so nothing could grow-some regions so blasted and broken that it didn’t look like either Queen Sealiah or the attacking shadows controlled it.

These lands felt abandoned and wrong.

They hurried over terrain that looked like the surface of the moon-and over a half-burned bridge that spanned a river choked with vegetation and oil slicks and bodies and chunks of ice.

On the horizon glowed the Twelve Towers of Queen Sealiah. They perched upon the edge of a cliff. Each tower was different: one was an ancient tree with only a crown of a few spare branches; one was ghostly white and taller than all others; one flickered with lines of phosphorescing fungus. Searchlights played through the air. Cannon and cauldrons smoldered atop the outer walls. Industrial cranes stood among the towers, casting their long steel arms back and forth.

As they neared, one crane lowered a platform.

With a wave of his gauntlet, the head knight indicated that they get on.

Eliot hesitated. Once they got on this thing and were inside those walls, it would be harder to turn around and leave if they wanted to.

Queen Sealiah was more than just the monarch of this domain of Hell. She was also part of his family. And Eliot had met only one of his father’s relations, Beelzebub. He’d tried to kill him and Fiona. Eliot didn’t think that’s what Sealiah had in mind, though.

He looked around, took a deep breath, and stepped onto the platform.

His sister, Robert, and Mr. Welmann got on, too, and it rose into the air.

He saw the land for miles around-desolate, burning, and shattered. Oddly, there was no fighting. If this was a war. . where was everyone?

The platform lifted up and over the outer wall, where there were hundreds of artillery pieces poised ready to fire, archers, and knights peering through telescopes. Clouds of insects and bats swarmed around them in formations.

Within the great courtyard were tens of thousands of armored knights and soldiers. They hurried to reinforce the walls, sharpen weapons, and load rifles.

Before Eliot and the others they parted like a retreating tide, all falling to one knee in supplication.

This was completely weird.

One day, Eliot was a social zero at school, practically invisible. And here? He was treated like royalty.

He tried to smooth out his scorched and ripped school jacket, but it didn’t work.

Their escorts led them to the tallest tower on the plateau. It was as large as a skyscraper and bone white, which Eliot saw was actually made from bones: dinosaur; elephant; whale; and countless grinning human skulls. Upon the top of the tower sat the three largest skulls, something Eliot had only seen in books, the teeth-filled fossilized remains of Tyrannosaurus rex.⁶³

As they mounted the hundreds of steps, a lone figure appeared at the top to greet them. Jezebel.

Eliot halted in his tracks.

It felt like he’d been struck in the head.

Part of him had thought he’d never see her again. . thinking her dead, or captured. . or a million other things that could have happened to her that would have kept them apart. They seemed fated never to be together.

Seeing her now. Here. Finally. He didn’t know what to do but stare.

Her face was unblemished and luminescent, and her lips parted as she saw him. She was different from when he’d last seen her on the Night Train. Her features were too smooth and perfect. . almost otherworldly. It was as if her face had been recast and fired and ground to a mirror finish, like that of a porcelain doll.

While her face was enchanting, the way she was dressed was anything but inviting. She wore a platinum breastplate the same color as her hair, and it was enameled with roses and orchids, and covered in black metal thorns. A chain mail skirt the color of dried blood hung about her hips and covered high studded combat boots.

She took a step toward him.

Eliot couldn’t resist; he started toward her again. His heart beat so hard, he thought it would explode in his chest. All he wanted to do was take her by the hand, turn around, and get out of here.

With every step, his blood warmed, heated. . burned.

He felt intoxicated. Yes. He wanted to taste her again-even if her kisses were poisoned. He was addicted to how he felt when she was around.

Their escort knights halted on the steps ahead of Eliot. They bowed before Jezebel, and she, in turn, inclined her head to recognize them.

“You are dismissed, Captain,” Jezebel said, her tone icy.

The knights retreated down the steps.

Eliot jogged up to Jezebel. He would have thrown his arms about her or taken her hand at least, but with her in that thorned armor, he’d get impaled if he tried.

Jezebel hovered near him; her gauntleted hand reached out for him, and then pulled back.

Her gaze darted past Eliot to take in Fiona, Robert, and Mr. Welmann as they walked up. Her eyes narrowed a bit-and then softened again as she looked back to Eliot.

“You came,” she whispered to him, voice trembling. “After I tried so hard to push you away. Eliot, you will never know what that means to me.” In an even lower voice, she said, “But there is more danger here than you can imagine.”

Fiona was close enough to hear to this. “We’re not getting involved in any Infernal thing, if that’s what you mean. We just came to get you out of here.”

Jezebel snorted and dismissed Fiona with a single glance.

“I’d show a little gratitude,” Robert muttered, moving alongside Fiona. “We lost Amanda getting here.”

That got her attention.

Jezebel blinked. “The little girl? Lost? You mean-?”

“She died,” Fiona told her flatly. “Burned.”

“A human sacrificed in Hell. . I am sorry for her.” Jezebel looked away and took a deep breath, appearing for a split second like normal, flawed Julie Marks-then her features hardened. “But there is nothing to be done. We must see to our own lives now.”

“You want to save lives?” Fiona stepped forward, clenching her fists. “Then get back to the train station and help us find a way back to school.”

Eliot held up a hand to calm her.

“We came to get you,” Eliot told Jezebel. “We need you back at school. . gym class and finals.” He faltered. “No. . it’s not that. . well, only a small part. I need you, too.”

Jezebel took a tiny step closer so they were almost touching.

He felt her heat and their mutual magnetic attraction. He wanted to take her in his arms-even if it cut him to ribbons.

“My hero,” Jezebel whispered, a slight edge of sarcasm to her honeyed voice. “If only things were so simple.”

Fiona set a hand on Eliot’s shoulder and pulled him back. “Okay, you tried. She said no. We’re out of here. We had a deal, remember?”

Eliot shrugged her off. He couldn’t leave. How could he after Amanda had died so he could get here? And how could he now that he stood before Jezebel?

But he had made a deal with his sister, and he knew how crazy it’d be to stay.

He couldn’t have it both ways. He had to decide.

Eliot had had to make this choice before. Back in Del Sombra, he had impulsively decided to go with the then Julie Marks-run away to Hollywood (which had been part of an Infernal trap).

And he’d made the wrong choice then, saved only because Julie hadn’t followed through with the plan.

As he looked at Jezebel, Eliot knew he had to make the right choice now, because no one was going to save him this time.

Jezebel stepped back three paces, before he could tell her anything, though. “I cannot help you. . and none of you can leave.”

A hundred knights in the courtyard moved to encircle the steps. A dozen more knights appeared behind Jezebel, their rifle-lances at the ready.

Robert reached for his gun.

Mr. Welmann set a restraining hand on Robert’s arm and stepped between them. “I believe, young lady, you were going to take us to your Queen?” He glanced back at Fiona, giving her a warning shake of his head. “Might as well hear what she had to say, after coming all this way, right?”

“That’s just wonderful,” Fiona said through gritted teeth.

“Don’t do this,” Eliot told Jezebel.

With a gesture, she indicated that they come with her. The guards aimed their lances at them.

Eliot marched forward and Jezebel walked by his side.

“There is no choice,” she whispered to him, “for any of us. Be careful. Your next words may kill us all.”

62. A universal symbol of beauty and romance, the rose has also been associated with power and secret societies formed to wield that power. Ancient Romans placed a rose on the door where secret societies would meet (the phrase sub rosa, or “under the rose,” means to keep a secret). Examples of such societies are the Order of the Celestial Rose (League of Immortals), the Knights of the Thorned Rose (Infernals), and the Holy Rose Hunters (vampire killers among the Mortal Magical Families ca. sixteenth century). Mythohistorians claim to trace these groups to prehistoric pagan cults, worshippers of fertility and warrior spirits, which may suggest a common root origin. Secret Societies in a Secret World. Lucy Westin, Paxington Institute Press LLC, San Francisco.

63. The Tower Grave is said to be built from the bones of those who offended the Queen of the Poppies. Even for an Infernal, this seems unlikely, due to the sheer volume of materials required and the prehistoric, fossilized nature of the larger specimens. Rough calculations indicate construction began prior to the War in Heaven, and may have been started by entities older than the fallen angels. It must also be noted that the size of Sealiah’s Twelve Towers varies by account, seeming to swell and strengthen in times of conflict and constricting to modest dimensions in peaceful times (see also the mutable nature of the Infernal Realms, section 6). Gods of the First and Twenty-first Century, Volume 13, Infernal Forces. Zypheron Press Ltd., Eighth Edition.

Fiona wondered if her brother had another supernatural talent beside his music, one where no matter how hard she tried, he got them both deeper into trouble.

And now it wasn’t just him and her anymore. It was Robert and Mr. Welmann. And it had been Amanda, too.

Fiona was going to have a long talk with Eliot about responsibility when they got out of here.

If they got out of here.

They walked down a gigantic hallway you could’ve taxied a jumbo jet through-the arching walls made from skulls, all of them staring. Luminescent mushrooms sprouted from grinning mouths and eye sockets. It was super creepy.

Eliot strolled alongside Jezebel as if they were going to get some coffee at Café Eridanus.

His crush and the resulting lack of intelligence reminded her of the way she’d felt last summer for Robert.

Fiona cast a sideways glance at Robert. He pulled on his Paxington jacket, tucked in his shirttails, and smoothed his wild hair. He caught her gaze and smiled like everything was going to be all right.

She quickly looked away.

There was no sense mooning over that lost cause now.

She wished Mitch were here. What wouldn’t she give to hold his hand-and jump back home or some exotic location (anywhere not in the middle of a war zone).

She turned back to Eliot. He looked like a dope walking next to his girlfriend. Fiona felt a flash of jealousy, but decided to let him be. Wherever Jezebel was taking them, it wasn’t going to be the happy ending Eliot was hoping for.

The hallway opened into a room as large as a stadium filled with hundreds of guards (all with those deadly looking rifle lances). In the center on a raised dais was a throne of bones, held together with vines and sprouting blossoms.

Queen Sealiah sat there. She wore armor with scales beaten into the shapes of phalaenopsis orchid petals. On her hips were curved daggers, and a sheathed sword with a cracked hilt and ragged leather handle that looked oddly familiar.

But all this was secondary to Sealiah herself. Her hair was copper red and her skin the color of molten bronze. Her eyes flashed as if they were faceted emerald as her gaze swept over them.

And beautiful? She was way beyond beauty.

Fiona couldn’t compare her to any other person or even goddess she’d seen. Not even Dallas came close.

This was an Infernal queen in her lair. And like some big fat spider, Fiona sensed countless threads of power radiating to her from the land around them.

Despite the contempt she felt for this side of her family, Fiona knew she had to show respect, and keep her fear and ever-shortening temper in check, or this could be a very brief audience.

“Greetings to you, son and daughter of the Prince of Darkness,” Sealiah said. Her voice was liquid velvet. “Destroy everything you touch.”

Fiona didn’t understand the reference, but nonetheless she bowed her head. Eliot had the good sense to do the same.

But Fiona didn’t bow too low. She sensed that showing too much respect would be just as bad as not showing any (and she wasn’t about to take her eyes off the Infernal even for a second).

Jezebel fell to her knees and lay prostrated before her Queen. Jezebel, of all creatures-always proud and strong and never bending an inch-acting like a slave girl?

Eliot fidgeted and looked torn between wanting to pull her up and knowing this would be a breach of protocol.

It was so degrading.

Sealiah nodded at them, which Fiona guessed was a huge concession of respect, given the circumstances. The Queen rose and strode down to their level. She was a lot shorter up close-not even as tall as Fiona.

There was a smell from her, too: the perfume of every flower. . with something toxic mixed in. Fiona tried not to gag.

Sealiah halted, scrutinizing them.

Fiona tried to meet the Queen’s gaze, but she had to look away. The depth of the Infernal’s stare was like her mother’s-but worse because there didn’t seem to be any soul reflected behind her eyes.

Could she be related by blood to something this evil? Miss Westin had lectured on the Infernals and told them the relationships between the fallen angels were not well understood by mortals. So Sealiah could be Louis’s cousin, aunt, or even his daughter. She and Sealiah could be sisters for all Fiona knew. Ick.

She didn’t imagine, however, that they’d have sleepovers or talk about boys anytime soon.

Eyes downcast, Fiona once more noticed the Queen’s sword. She had seen it before somewhere. Part of her wanted to reach out and touch it-but she squelched that wild impulse, knowing it would be suicidal.

Sealiah moved to stand before Eliot, and her gaze lingered long, a look Fiona had seen before on hungry dogs.

“So wonderful to finally meet you in the flesh, Eliot.”

He nodded, face flushing.

The Queen passed Mr. Welmann like he wasn’t there.

She stopped before Robert and stroked his cheek with a long fingernail. He inhaled deeply, shocked at her touch. “And Mr. Farmington,” Sealiah murmured. “An honor to have a true hero in our midst.”

Hero? Robert? Fiona had no idea what Sealiah was thinking, but she definitely didn’t like her lascivious smile as she looked Robert over-or her touching him.

Fiona cleared her throat.

Sealiah cocked an eyebrow at her. “Speak.”

Fiona managed to sound as respectful as if she were addressing the League Council: “I beg pardon, Your Majesty, but we’re not looking for trouble. We just came to get Jezebel and get her back to school.”

“Oh?” Sealiah strode back to her throne, sinking upon it with a great flourish. “You’re not looking for trouble? Then why do you look ready to do battle?”

Sealiah beckoned to Jezebel before Fiona replied, however, and said, “Rise, my protégée, and speak. What do you say to this request?”

Jezebel got to her feet. Even after degrading herself, she still looked regal and proud, without a speck of dust on her.

How did she do that? When Fiona couldn’t keep one lousy school uniform clean to save her life.

“Nothing would please me more, my Queen,” Jezebel said.

Eliot straightened and practically floated next to her at this.

“But,” she said, “I cannot. My place is fighting by your side.”

Eliot deflated.

“And even if you sent me,” Jezebel continued, glancing at Eliot, “I could not live. The Poppy Lands are torn asunder. My power ebbs. If I were to leave, I would perish before I could cross the train tracks.”

Every hint of an expression drained from Eliot’s features and he stared straight ahead, thinking.

Fiona psst’d at him and he looked back at her.

She shot him a glance that said: Okay-we tried again-let’s go.

The Queen’s previous amusement cooled and her features hardened. “We fight for our lives against an ancient enemy. If we lose, Jezebel will, if lucky, die. If not, she will be captured by Mephistopheles and tortured for all eternity.”

Eliot paled, but in a level voice, he asked, “What can we do to help?”

“Fight with us,” Sealiah told him, leaning forward. “If you battle at Jezebel’s side, our chances greatly improve. With your sister’s strength and that of your hero companion added to that, victory would be assured.” Her eyes gleamed, and Fiona saw a spark behind them now: the flickering green fires of bloodlust.

Whose blood, and whose lust, however, Fiona wasn’t sure of.

“Excuse me a second, Your Majesty.” Fiona held up a finger. “Eliot and I need to talk.”

She pulled him six steps back. Robert and Mr. Welmann joined them.

“I’m staying,” Eliot whispered to her.

Like she couldn’t have guessed that, and yet, that didn’t stop her from hissing back, “Are you crazy!”

Eliot shrugged.

“She’s right,” Robert said, looking physically pained to admit this. “I’m all for helping, but this side has its back against the wall. They’re going to lose.”

Eliot frowned and shook his head. . but nonetheless looked uncertain.

Fiona had seen this before. Eliot knew he was wrong, but he was about to dig in his heels anyway and never give up.

She felt like slugging him, which actually had some appeal. She bet she could knock Eliot out, and then, as she’d promised herself, drag him back to San Francisco for his own good.

She glanced at the Queen and the hundreds of soldiers surrounding them. She wasn’t sure how well walking out of here was going to go over with the Flower Queen, though.

She had to take charge before Eliot redoubled his resolve and went beyond being a mere idiot-and became a suicidal idiot.

“We can’t help you,” Fiona told Sealiah. She nodded at Jezebel, and said, “I’m sorry.”

Jezebel gave her a curt nod. Not even a flicker of hate. . as if she wanted them (okay, probably just Eliot) safe and far from here, no matter what it’d cost her.

Sealiah appeared unruffled.

Fiona didn’t like that one bit.

“Perhaps,” the Queen said as her predator smile reappeared, “I may offer some other incentive?”

“I really doubt it,” Fiona said.

Sealiah arched one brow and gestured. Two guards dragged a man forward. He was bound in silver chains and a metal band covered his mouth.

It was Louis.

Fiona blinked and looked again. It was her father.

“Let him go,” she and Eliot said together.

“Louis is my prisoner.” Sealiah walked behind their father and yanked on his chain, pulling him to his knees. “We will do as we please with him.”

Eliot unslung his guitar.

Fiona found that her bracelet was loose in her hand.

Around them, hundreds of knights leveled their rifles.

“Cool it, kids,” Mr. Welmann whispered. “There are other ways to make deals-especially with them.”

Fiona didn’t get what he meant, but Eliot seemed to because he nodded, stepped forward, and asked, “So, you’re saying if we fight for you, you’ll let our father go?”

“I do not know about ‘letting him go,’ ” Sealiah said with a theatrical wave of her hand, “but I will let him live, which is better than the fate that awaits him if Mephistopheles wins.”

Fiona locked gazes with her father-he couldn’t speak because of the gag-but something in his eyes said that there was a lot more going on here, and a lot more at stake than just his life.

“No deal,” Eliot said.

The guards around them crowded closer.

Sealiah smile deepened and fang tips protruded. Bloodred claws appeared from her fingertips.

“Then,” she purred, “we are at an impasse. Unless you wish to roll for terms?”

Louis gave Fiona and Eliot an almost invisible nod of his head yes.

Understanding dawned on Eliot’s face. “You mean dice?”

“Yes,” Sealiah said. “Just name the terms you wish.”

“My terms. .?” Eliot pondered. “I’ll fight for you-for Jezebel’s sake,” he said, “but I want you to let my father go immediately.”

Sealiah tapped her full lips, thinking, and her claws retracted. “Agreed, as long as he is willing to fight for my side as well.”

Louis gave a lamentable sigh.

“And,” Eliot said. “You let my sister and my friends go back.” He looked at them. “If, that’s what they want.”

“If you win the roll,” Sealiah said. “Of course.”

“Wait, I’m not agreeing to any of this,” Fiona protested.

Sealiah held up her hand indicating silence, and Fiona thought she better shut her mouth.

Eliot had a plan-what precisely she wasn’t sure-but if she lost her temper now, things would get bloody fast.

“And if I win,” Sealiah told Eliot, “you fight for me and also pledge your life and soul with an unbreakable oath.”

“No way!” Fiona shouted.

The thought of her brother bowing and scraping before this creature was too much. She started forward, her bracelet chain in her hand, growing and lengthening, links sharpening to circles of razor.

Could she even fight Sealiah and her knights? Would the Pactum Pax Immortalus neutrality treaty between the fallen angels and the League prevent her from interfering? Or was she enough her father’s daughter. . enough Infernal, to cut the Queen’s head off as she had Beelzebub’s?

Maybe it was time to put that to the test once more.

Eliot turned to her-and the look on his face stopped her dead in her tracks.

His eyes were cold and dark and resolute. Despite everything they’d been through, he looked like, for once in his life, he knew exactly what he was doing.

On the other hand, Eliot always-and she meant always, without fail-got them into more trouble.

But that look. .

She finally blinked. “Okay,” she murmured. “Just don’t screw this up.”

“You’ll be the first to know,” he told her.

Fiona figured it couldn’t hurt to let Eliot try whatever it was he had up his sleeve-because if it didn’t work, she planned on getting out of here anyway, Eliot in tow, even if that meant cutting down everything in her way.

“I offer you one in six odds,” Sealiah told Eliot.

“Even odds.” Eliot said. “Or no deal. Take or leave it.”

Sealiah shrugged as if this were a trivial matter. She passed one hand over another, and as if by sleight of hand, a small white cube appeared. It was a six-sided die, with tiny symbols on its faces.

She descended the stairs to meet Eliot and offered it to him.

He accepted the die and examined the sides. Etched onto the faces was a scrimshaw head-eating-tail snake, two prancing dogs, three crossed scimitars, four stars, five hands (each making a different rude gesture), and six ravens on the wing.

“Odd or even?” Sealiah asked.

“Even, if your Majesty pleases.” Eliot turned the die so six scrimshawed black birds faced up.

Eliot closed his hand and shook the die. He concentrated, blew on his fist, and cast the die onto the steps.

It rolled and bounced and spun up on one corner like a top.

Eliot leaned forward, his gazed fixed upon the die.

Sealiah, too, stared at it.

The spinning cube gyrated back and froth.

Dots of sweat appeared on the Queen’s brow. Eliot’s hands clenched and whitened.

The die tumbled, popped, and skittered to a halt. .

. . Six crows.

Even.

Eliot exhaled. He’d won.

Louis shrugged off the chains and gag and stretched. “Well rolled, my boy. A pleasure to see you.” He smiled at Fiona. “Thank you, too, my dear.”

Sealiah seemed pleased. And why shouldn’t she? Even losing she had Fiona’s brother and father to fight in her war.

“You can go,” Eliot whispered to Fiona. “This doesn’t have to be your fight anymore.”

“Don’t tell me what to do,” she told him.

Eliot was being so magnanimous and noble (and that positively irked her). There was no way she could just walk out on him. But there was no way she was fighting for the Queen of Poppies, either.

Louis rubbed his hands. “Before we go any further,” he said. “I insist that if my son and I are to fight, it be as your Dux Bellorum with full honors and rights.”

“Ducks Bell-what?” Eliot asked Fiona.

“Latin maybe?” she whispered. “Duke of war?”

She was pretty good with foreign languages, but this was a new one on her.⁶⁴

Sealiah looked at Louis. “If you have something to fight for, I suppose you might actually risk your pretty skin. And since there will be much of the Hysterical Kingdom to divide should we win. . I would throw you a scrap.”

He bowed as deep as possible without taking his eyes off of her. “Your wisdom is exceeded only by your beauty.”

Sealiah scoffed, drew one of her curved daggers, and pricked her thumb. She went to Louis and smeared his forehead with the shape of a little star. “By the bond of blood and war so joined,” she murmured, and lingered close to his face a moment.

She withdrew.

Louis beckoned to Eliot and he came and got the same treatment.

Louis then turned to Fiona. “Come my daughter, join us, and fight by our side.” He opened his arms as if he wanted to embrace her.

Fiona had often dreamed of a moment of reconciliation with her father. Her forgiving him. Him accepting her. It was something she’d never get from Audrey.

But it couldn’t happen like this. . in Hell. Right in the middle of a war.

Fiona had to decide, though. Leave or stay. Fight or not. Get drawn into a war that was none of her business, or just walk away and go back to school where she belonged.

She took a step toward them.

There was a crack. The earth rumbled. The tower shook and skulls rained down.

The floor split, caved in, and from tunnels below-the shades of damnation poured forth.

64. Dux is Latin for “leader.” The earliest usage of Dux Bellorum appears in the literatures of King Arthur, where he is described as the “dux of battles” among the kings of the Romano-Britons in their wars against the Anglo-Saxons. The military title survived until the Fall of Constantinople in 1453 (although, the Italian Fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, used the title of Dux [Duce in Italian]). The term also rarely appears among the Infernals and Fairies, most notable was the Green Knight, the Dux Bellorum of the Fey. War Immortalus, Benjamin Ma, Paxington Institute Press LLC, San Francisco.

Fiona fell back, knocked over by an emerging serpent the size of a bus.

Her adrenaline surged. Worries and thoughts of Infernal politics and family vanished as the snake’s scales flashed before her eyes: jet black, mirror smooth, rippling muscle.

The snake circled, its body uncoiling from the tunnel below.

Fiona jumped to her feet, her blood pounding and her chain once more in her hands. There was no time to be afraid.

The snake hissed and struck.

Fiona held her chain before her-severed fang and sinew and flesh.

The serpent’s head tumbled from its body. Venom and black blood pooled at her feet.

Shadow creatures wormed from the earth and fought Sealiah’s knights everywhere in the enormous chamber. There were snakes, lizards, and crabs-part flesh and part shade. They tore and bit, and in turn, were shot and hacked by the knights.

Like the shadows Fiona and Eliot had fought in the alley by Paxington.

Not quite. These weren’t changing shape. . and they felt solid. Real. More dangerous.

Eliot held Lady Dawn and blasted a giant scorpion that squeezed out from between the rocks (although he just blasted it into a bazillion tiny black scorpions).

Soldiers crawled from the cracks in the tower’s foundation as well. These damned souls had been stitched together with parts missing, or extra parts added, or blades riveted in place of hands. Robert pummeled two headless patchwork soldiers wielding obsidian knives.

Part of Fiona’s mind rebelled. This was every nightmare she’d had come to life.

An overgrown black mantis that could’ve eaten a horse lunged at her-she whirled her chain-and it splattered into a mass of chitin and ichor.

So gross.

And so much for deciding if she was going to fight this fight.

The still-thinking part of her mind, though, thought this was like gym class: the tension. . the ever-present danger. . the urge to fight or run and not even think.

She knew what to do. She had to cool down and assess the tactical situation.

A thrall of Sealiah’s knights encircled their Queen and leveled rifle lances at a horde of onrushing men. There were thunder and flashes and smoke-and the shadow soldiers were blasted into bits. . but still they crawled forward.

Robert struggled and grappled with a black tiger.

Eliot strummed Lady Dawn and the air rippled; the light from the nearby glowing mushrooms on the walls dazzled to magnesium brilliance.

The cat withered in the light-and Robert snapped its neck.

Fiona moved toward them to help.

But the cracks in the floor between her and them widened.

A reptile hand pushed aside massive stones. . with claws as big as scythe blades.

A limb thrust through, and then a smooth lizard head emerged from the earth-hissing and snapping; it devoured five knights with one bite.

This dragon pulled its hindquarters free and its tail whipped about, crushing everything in its wake, impacting the tower wall, and blasting skulls and stones and metal supports-making a hole to the outside.

Through it Fiona glimpsed flashes and motion. The battle wasn’t just in here.

Queen Sealiah advanced on the great beast, and as she did, she grew talons and fangs, and flowers sprouted in her footsteps. She was as pale as the dragon was ebon. She drew her sword, its tip broken and jagged and dripping poison.

Fiona had seen that sword. Her father had skewered Beelzebub with it.

The dragon slashed at Sealiah; she stabbed its claw.

The beast cried out and the limb went lame. It hobbled and snapped at her.

Sealiah punched it in the snout.

The dragon had scraped her arm, however, and came away with her blood on its teeth. It reared back and roared. The veins in its neck bulged, turning a nacreous green with poison.

Sealiah laughed as the creature thrashed and fell. . shivered, and became still.

But her laughter died as she saw three more dragons push forth from the fissures.

How many more of these things were there? Fiona had seen hundreds of these shadows in the alley near Paxington. If that many of these now more-solid shadows caught them in here. . she and Eliot and Robert would get slaughtered.

Skulls and stones fell from the top of the tower and shattered on the floor.

Or they’d be buried alive.

“Outside!” Fiona shouted to Eliot, and pointed at the breach in the wall.

Eliot and Robert and Mr. Welmann moved toward the hole. Eliot hesitated, looking back at her, but Mr. Welmann hustled him through.

Sealiah and Jezebel lingered, though, fighting on.

And Louis? Her father was nowhere to be seen among the knights battling hand to hand, slashing with swords, or hacking with lances. . and in turn, being bitten, crushed, and stung to death by the things boiling from the earth.

This was a losing battle.

They had to regroup and get some maneuvering room.

Fiona felt cold and her feet went numb. Should she stay and look for Louis? He wasn’t even armed. Could he survive this carnage?

Eliot, Robert, and Mr. Welmann, however, were already outside-and that decided it. She’d stick with her brother.

She pushed soldiers out of her way, swung her chain, cleared a path, and jumped through the hole in the tower wall.

It was worse out here.

Fissures radiated from the tower of bone across the mesa. From them it looked like every shadow creature in Mephistopheles’ army pushed through into the melee. The ten thousand knights and soldiers camped in the castles’ inner courtyard had expected an attack from the outside, not from within their own walls. . and they’d been caught unawares.

Thousands of men lay torn to pieces on the flagstones. Officers shouted orders-but few soldiers had the wits to listen as giant centipedes, and oily protozoa, and legions of patchwork men slithered from the earth and swept through their ranks.

Sealiah and Jezebel emerged behind Fiona.

“We must hurry,” Sealiah said. “My knights in the Tower Grave pay for our escape. They will not last long.”

The Queen of Poppies sounded irritated, as if those men dying for her were letting her down by merely getting eaten alive while she made small talk.

Fiona was about to tell the queen that there was no “we” to hurry, and to also ask her what the heck she was going to “hurry” up and do against a force of this size-when she heard Eliot.

“Fiona!” Eliot shouted, and waved to her to join him.

Eliot and Robert and Mr. Welmann had cleared a patch of solid ground by the far wall.

Louis was there, too. He leaned against the wall, brooding as he watched the slaughter. . or maybe he was bored; it was hard to tell.

Fiona ran to them. Sealiah and Jezebel trailed behind her.

“This is where we shall make our stand against the Droogan-dors,” Sealiah declared. She looked absolutely majestic, a queen defending the last of her land.

“Dad,” Fiona said. “Grab a sword-some weapon. Do something!”

Louis smiled. “I am using my deadliest weapon, daughter.” He tapped the side if his head. “I am thinking. As you should be if you care at all about your pretty head.”

“Form a circle about me,” Sealiah ordered. “I shall summon my power.”

“I don’t think so,” Fiona told Her Regalness. “We’re not going to be your body shields. Your strategy of brute force verse brute force hasn’t worked so great against Mephistopheles thus far. It’s probably not going to work now.”

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 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.

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.

Eliot felt broken inside and that broken part didn’t care about anything anymore. But part of him wanted to scream and toss caution to the winds and play the heck out of Lady Dawn and smash Mephistopheles’ armies to atoms.

. . And maybe then Jezebel would be by his side.

Or was it being in Hell that made him feel that way? Maybe after this was over, he and Fiona and Robert should just go back to Paxington, hit the books, and figure out how to get through the rest of the school year without being killed, maimed, or flunking.

Eliot shook his head clear of those thoughts. He stood on a stage that had been set up near the edge of the mesa.

To the left, the land sheared away where he’d collapsed the tunnels. That now provided a way to the top of the plateau, a treacherously steep slope, but one soldiers and shadow creatures could rush up. He flushed with embarrassment that he’d caused this, but better that than letting the enemy crawl up through the middle of their defenses.

This was where Mephistopheles’ armies would try to overwhelm Sealiah’s forces-and it was where the Queen had concentrated her armies and artillery.

Archers and cannon had been positioned along the walls on either side of the slope. Industrial cranes dangled platforms piled with rubble-ready to release those loads and start an avalanche. Five hundred soldiers with rifle lances and tower shields formed a phalanx in the center of a breach. To either side, two thousand foot soldiers waited with ax and crossbow, net and pike. Mr. Welmann was there, too, with saber in hand and flintlock pistols tucked into his camo sweatpants. Behind them were the Poppy Queen’s Calvary-three hundred mounted knights who could rush through the line and knock the enemy back. . although Eliot thought this a measure of last defense, because once they charged down that steep hill, getting back up wouldn’t be an easy option.

Eliot had read about every important battle, thanks to Audrey and Cee’s homeschooling: Thermopylae, Waterloo, and Gettysburg. He remembered how high the casualties had been even for so-called victories.

Sealiah’s defensive line looked solid, though.

But enough to win?

At the base of the Twelve Towers Mesa, shadows flitted, crisscrossed, and grew longer and darker until they reached the river in the valley. Beyond those riverbanks was a solid mass of black. Clouds the color of coal covered the sky and plunged this world into night.

Eliot put on his glasses, squinted, and caught glimpses of what moved in that darkness: large forms with haunches and pointed insect legs and blinking eyes that crawled over one another like it was all part of the same thing. The dark stretched to the horizon, endless and impenetrable.

Mephistopheles stood at the head of his ranks. The Infernal Lord rumm-bled within a swirling thunderhead that rose a hundred feet into the air. He was a giant flickering in and out of sight: an armored leg, a muscular arm, a barbed pitchfork the size of a telephone pole.

A pair of eyes, red and unblinking, stared back at Eliot from those clouds, two concentrated points of fury that meant to destroy them all.

Yeah. . whatever.

As if Eliot hadn’t seen that look a million times before from almost every relative he’d met since his fifteen birthday.

But this bravado was another lie. The truth was, he was scared.

It wasn’t like when he had Fiona had fought Beelzebub. The Lord of All That Flies had been holding back because he’d wanted to take them alive. And he’d trounced them. . up until Fiona had decapitated him with his own necklace.

This was entirely different: an Infernal Lord ready to battle, not holding anything back, with the full strength of an army at his back and drawing upon all the power of his lands in Hell.

Something inside Eliot wanted to curl up and hide.

He glanced at Fiona and Robert. They stood nearby onstage. Maybe they all wanted to be close before the battle started. Of maybe it was because the stage had the best view. Or maybe it was because Fiona wanted to be far from the Queen. (He had a feeling that if his sister wasn’t about to fight Mephistopheles, she’d be going at it with Sealiah.)

Fiona talked strategy with Robert-well, actually, they argued about the hows and whys of the upcoming war like it was another gym match.

Eliot stroked Lady Dawn, his fingers magnetically drawn to her strings. . feather touches that make the lightest of notes. That steadied his nerves, and he got a weird feeling it calmed Lady Dawn as well.

He took off his glasses and carefully put them away.

“Hey, man. .”

Eliot turned. The guitarist Sealiah had called Kurt nodded through his long hair at Lady Dawn. “That was cool, but you better plug in.” He hitched his thumb at the wall of amplifiers behind him.

Eliot shook his head.

Kurt looked confused; then he glanced at Lady Dawn and this gaze wandered over her polished wood and brass fittings. “Got it,” he whispered. “You’re the man. We’ll jump in as soon as you go.”

“Thanks,” Eliot replied.

Kurt went back to the guy on bass, Sid, and the one with the bagpipe, Bon. They murmured to one another, Sid looked at Eliot and then Lady Dawn, and his upper lip curled in a half snarl and he nodded appreciatively.

Meanwhile, the singers, James and Janis, sauntered up to the microphones on either side of Eliot. James took off his shirt, tapped the mic, and said, “Do your thing with the Lizard King.” Janis smiled at Eliot and mouthed, It’s cool, baby.

He smiled back at him, but inside his stomach churned.

How was he supposed to play with these people when he had a hard enough time just controlling his own music?

Fiona came to him, sparing a few uncertain glances at Eliot’s band.

“Here’s the plan,” she whispered, all business. “Robert and I are going to try a blitz to get to the rear of their lines after the initial clash. There should be enough confusion for us to move quickly.”

Eliot imagined his sister and Robert strolling casually past the thousands that would be trying to hack one another to bits.

“That’s crazy,” he told her.

“Sure it is,” she replied, and frowned. “But I’m betting this is like any other gym match.”

Eliot gave her that special you’ve hit your head look that he saved for occasions like this. (Okay, there had never been an occasion like this before. . but he gave her that look anyway.)

“I mean, there’s a goal,” Fiona said, exasperated that she had to spell it out for him. She nodded at the towering clouds that shrouded Mephistopheles.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Eliot said.

“We take him out and we’re betting his army falls apart. It’s simple.”

“Okay, that makes a microscopic amount of sense,” he told his sister. “If you don’t consider that Mephistopheles is probably a bazillion times as powerful as Beelzebub was, has an army. . and that we almost lost to Beelzebub back in Del Sombra.”

Fiona crossed her arms and frowned. “Got a better plan? I’m listening.”

Eliot thought about it. Yeah, sure, if Robert or Fiona could stop Mephistopheles, his army would scatter, scared by anything that could kill their Lord and Master. So it was a fine plan. . provided they had a small tactical nuclear weapon with which to take out the Infernal.

But Eliot finally said, “I guess we go with your plan.”

He resisted the urge to say stupid plan.

“I’ll need your help,” Fiona said. She bit her lip and glanced at his guitar. She always got weird when she talked about his music, as if it was something she didn’t like or understand but nonetheless had to tolerate it. Like Cee’s cooking.

Eliot guessed he felt the same way about her cutting. He suppressed a shiver.

“You’re going to have to do something to help us get close to Mephistopheles,” she said. “And when we get there, you’ll have to weaken him. . but in a way that doesn’t blow us up or anything.”

Eliot wasn’t sure how it was to accomplish any of that; he was making this up as he went along. He just hoped he didn’t get her or Robert killed.

“I’ll do my best,” he said.

They stood there. There was a long moment, awkward silence.

Eliot then looked Fiona square in the eyes. “I’m really sorry.”

How to explain it? He wasn’t sorry he’d come to save Jezebel. But he was sorry he had risked their lives. And he was sorry he’d gotten them into a jam with no way out except a bloody fight that might end get them tortured for all eternity if they lost.

She punched him in the shoulder. “What else was I going to do on Wednesday night except study for finals?”

Eliot tried to smile, failed, and shrugged. “Trogium pulsatorium?” he muttered.

That was the soft-bodied, wingless insect commonly called a “bookworm” (although technically it was a louse). This was a poor attempt at vocabulary insult, but it was all he had at the moment.

It was nice to have a moment of something normal between them. Maybe the last time that’d happen.

“Good one,” she replied, and uncharacteristically offered no counter-insult. Instead she looked around and sobered. “Have you seen Louis?”

“Just a second ago. He was at the back of the lines.”

Louis was no longer there, though, and Eliot wondered if his father would be fighting. . or hiding?

Sealiah mounted the stairs to his stage and joined them. Tiny star-shaped orchids sprouted from the links in her armor and drizzled pollen, a cloak of wisteria-laden vines flowed behind her, and clouds of wasps circled high over her head.

Her perfume was intoxicating. Eliot felt dizzy and drowning, but he didn’t mind.

She looked more beautiful than before, like a carving by Michelangelo, as if the impending battle and bloodshed brought out the best in the Infernal queen.

Eliot’s band fell to their knees, and even Eliot felt obliged to give her a short bow.

Fiona stood with her hands on her hips.

“Soon it starts,” Sealiah said to them. “There is a final detail to attend to. Mr. Farmington?”

Robert shucked on his Paxington jacket, came over, and gave her a short bow as well.

“While Eliot and Fiona have more formidable weapons than I could ever provide,” Sealiah said as her gaze slid over the length of Robert. “You, my young hero, have only that toy.” She nodded at the brass knuckles on his hands (the ones that could punch through solid stone).

Robert cupped his fist. “Yes ma’am.” He flushed, but then recovered. “But I know how to use them.”

“No doubt.” She drew her broken sword and held it at an angle so Robert could see its jagged tip, the length of its patterned Damascus steel, and the poison that flowed and dripped onto the stage. “But would you accept the sword Saliceran and wield it in my name?”

Robert’s eyes drank in the weapon, and his hand drifted toward the handle.

It was terrible. And powerful. Eliot didn’t meet any special sense of magic to understand that. It was also something old. Something never meant to be touched by human hands.

“Don’t,” Fiona whispered.

Robert pursed his lips, and purposely didn’t look at Fiona. “Thank you, ma’am. I’ll take you up on that.”

“Then kneel, hero,” Sealiah commanded. Robert did. The Queen passed the sword down his left side, over his head (without touching the poisoned blade to his shoulders as was traditional) and then down his right side. “I declare you my champion on this battlefield. Rise, Sir Robert Farmington, Captain of the Legion of Lotus, and wielder of Saliceran, the God-Broken.”

She gingerly turned the sword and Robert took it. He stared into the pattern of light and dark metal, fascinated.

Sealiah unbuckled the sword’s sheath and handed it over. She then stood on her tiptoes and kissed Robert on both cheeks. . and as she did so, looked at Fiona.

Fiona glowered and her hands clenched.

Sealiah then stiffened and looked across the Valley. “Ready yourselves,” she told them. “Destroy everything you touch.”

And with that, she strode back to her army.

“Why’d you take that thing?” Fiona rasped at Robert.

Robert turned from her. “Why not?”

Fiona’s mouth opened and she stared at him. “Why? Let try: it’s evil? A gift from an Infernal? Come on, Robert! It’s a trick.”

“Is it a trick,” Robert said, “that the Queen gave me something that might save my life out there?” He turned back and met Fiona’s eyes. “Maybe it bugs you because it levels the playing field between you and me, huh?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means you’ve enjoyed bossing everyone around all year. That now that I have some power of my own”-he shook the sword-“you don’t like it.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said through clenched teeth.

Eliot wanted to step between them, say something, and fix this. He knew better, though. They’d just focus all their unresolved issues on him-and that wouldn’t do anyone any good.

It was so obvious they cared for each other. Equally obvious that they didn’t understand each other.

Fiona had all this power, but more than that, she had all the responsibility that went with that power and being Team Captain and a goddess in the League of Immortals. She felt like she had to protect everyone and win every fight. She’d forgotten that she wasn’t alone.

And Robert? He just wanted to be near Fiona. Surrounded by Immortals and magical families, Eliot could only guess how inadequate he must feel-especially after he’d been fired by the League.

Eliot felt sorry for them.

Robert loved his sister. Fiona probably loved Robert, too, despite her recent dates with Mitch Stephenson. Mitch was nice, had magic, prestige, and was the most well-mannered guy Eliot had ever met. . but he wasn’t Robert. He’d never be the first person Fiona had fallen for.

Robert ducked his head as if he was about to apologize-but the poison dripping off Saliceran smoldered and bust into crackling blue flames.⁶⁶

Fiona backed off three steps. Robert, too, as he held out the sword at arm’s length.

“That’s different,” he whispered.

He sheathed the broken, flaming blade. It extinguished with a sizzle.

Robert and Fiona looked at one another, their anger suddenly quenched as well.

Fiona reached out for Robert. Her brow scrunched together, as she tried to say something.

Which was when Eliot heard the roar of the Mephistopheles’ army-a hundred thousand strong-as they charged across the valley.

66. The magical nature of the God-broken sword, Saliceran, mirrors the heart of its wielder. When held by Infernals, it drips poisons with a wide variety of effects (most involve a painful, lingering death). In the hands a true hero with a noble purpose, it glows or flames. Other accounts have the weapon singing, and even fighting on its own. Of course, it’s most unspeakable incarnation manifested at the end of the Fifth Celestial Age when wielded by one of the Immortal-angel hybrid Post progeny. Gods of the First and Twenty-first Century, Volume 13, Infernal Forces. Zypheron Press Ltd., Eighth Edition.

Eliot almost dropped Lady Dawn. Nothing had prepared him for tens of thousands of screaming patchwork men, roaring beasts, and buzzing insects that filled the valley and echoed off the mesa.

Robert and Fiona took a step toward that battle cry. How could they be so brave? Was that courage or crazy?

This was Eliot’s fight, if anyone’s, and he felt shaken to the core by that sound. . not drawn to the battle. His cheeks heated with shame.

Fiona turned to him. “We have to go. Do what you can.”

Her face was lined with worry, but then it hardened as her thoughts focused to what Eliot’s had come to know as her “cutting” mind-set.

Robert clasped Eliot’s forearm, said nothing-just gave him a nod.

Fiona and Robert raced toward Sealiah’s defensive lines and vanished in the crowds.

Eliot took a deep breath to steady himself. They were counting on him. He faced his band. “Just follow me,” he said.

Kurt, Sid, and Bon nodded. James and Janis cleared their throats and grabbed their microphones.

Eliot would try something soft to start with, try to quell the violent noise from the opposing army and drain their fury. He wasn’t sure how to do that, though; so he tried a few simple notes to feel his way forward.

Sid jumped in right after him on his bass, the beat too fast.

Kurt followed, then stopped as their notes clashed and he realized that wasn’t where Eliot was headed.

Bon released his bagpipe’s mouthpiece, looking disgusted.

“Hang on,” Eliot said. “This isn’t working.”

And why should it? They’d never played together before. Eliot had never played with anyone before.

He looked over the edge of the mesa. In the vanguard of Mephistopheles’ charging army were black-and-blue splotched dinosaurs-velociraptors, an Allosaurus, and a Tyrannosaurus that sprinted ahead. A good (if not terrifying) choice. If Eliot could have formed anything from the shadows, a few hundred tons of razor-clawed killing machines would have been his pick as well. They’d tear though Sealiah’s phalanx.

Behind the extinct reptiles ran centaurs (patchwork men stitched together with their own horses), legions of axmen, sinuous panthers, and truck-sized ants with huge mandibles.

The giant Mephistopheles extended his hand from the thunderheads swirling about him. He stabbed with his massive pitchfork into the river, and the water froze about it-the river crackling and turning to ice along its entire length.

The Infernal Lord left his weapon there. Smoke in the air materialized into a new pitchfork, and he led his reserve forces across the now-solid river.

Eliot blinked and forced himself to look from the monster. He ran his hand over Lady Dawn’s smooth wood grain. He had to focus on what he was good at: Making things happen with his music.

His band looked worried, but also eager to try.

“Follow this,” he told them. “Sid, you first.”

Sid’s lip curled back, half smile, half grimace.

Eliot started with the first music he’d learned: the simple “Mortal’s Coil.”

Five notes in and Sid jumped in with the beat. He got it perfect and bobbed his head to the rhythm.

Eliot imagined six kids running around a Maypole, laughing and singing. He took it as a good sign.

He nodded at Kurt, who joined him, perfectly matching Eliot’s notes.

Then Bon added to the song with a low moan from his bagpipes.

Janis and James start to sing, both a little dissonant, but together harmonizing:

Girls and boys run too fast

wheel o’ life never lasts

grown up and knowing sin

that’s when fun really begins!

Eliot picked up the pace, changed the tone from light to dark-and his band followed as neatly as if they were linked and he’d yanked them along.

The image of a Maypole danced in his mind, and all of them pranced around it, the colored ribbons tangled about the pole and their hands.

Eliot felt like they had been bound to his music and his will.

That was creepy. But okay, for now, because it was also extraordinarily useful.

He glanced at Sealiah’s defenders bracing on the edge of the mesa. The phalanx tightened their formation. Archers clustered about lit braziers and readied bows.

At the very edges of her army, Eliot spied his father, dressed in black leather and holding two curved swords. He grinned, stepped to the shadows, and could no longer be seen.

So Louis wasn’t a complete cheater and coward. He was going to fight. There was more to his father that Eliot had realized.

The Queen’s personal knights made a ring about her as she knelt and touched the earth. The ground moved; roots appeared from her fingertips. A shudder ran through the mesa.

Several men on the walls shouted and pointed below.

Along the steep slope and about the base of the mesa, vines wormed to the surface, coiled and uncoiled and sprouted fleshy leaves that split into Venus flytraps large enough to snap up a cow. Along every branch extruded spikes that oozed sap. The vegetation grew and piled up on itself until it was high as a man and wider than a two-lane highway.

Sealiah collapsed, one hand forestalling her fall. Her knights came to help her, but she waved them off and shakily got to her feet.

The shadow dinosaurs hit this wall of thorns-impaled on the living spikes, they died there. But more came, and leaped upon the backs of their fallen numbers-and hurtled over the barrier.

Behind them, the centaurs and axmen hacked at the vegetation, some throwing themselves on the tangles to become bridges.

“Light arrows!” Sealiah cried.

Her archers lit arrows, notched them, and pulled back their long bows.

“Fire!” she commanded.

A cloud of spiraling flame rose into the air, over the defenders, and down the slopes-hitting the charging dinosaurs, felling them by the dozens-and more arrows plunking farther down the steep banks-lighting the wall of vines.

The sap ignited and flared like napalm, sputtering from the plants. The coils of vegetation blazed.

A thousand of Mephistopheles’ warriors writhed and cooked in the tangles. Their screams mingled with the smoke filling the air.

There were, however, thousands more behind them, all pushing forward. They threw themselves on fire by the hundreds to smother the flames; others slashed at the vines while hands and arms blistered and burned.

The enemy breached the wall of flaming thorns, streamed though, pushing and cutting, and made the way larger.

Eliot cranked the gain on Lady Dawn to the sixth notch. He nodded with grim determination at his band. They nodded back, understanding they had to do more.

He belted out the opening chord of “The March of the Suicide Queen,” curdling the notes with a heavy metal edge.

After a beat, his band joined him. A wall of sound erupted from the amplifiers.

James and Janis sang:

Show no mercy

Ask no quarter.

Rivers of blood

blade and mortar.

Eliot pumped his arm, feeling the hoofbeats of his summoned cavalry; the bass punctuated the air with the echoes of cannon shot, sustained by a long wail from Bon’s bagpipes and James and Janis. . that became the battle cry of the dead Napoleonic soldiers-

— as they materialized, marching forth upon the steep slopes between Sealiah and Mephistopheles’ forces.

French horsemen lowered their visors and set their lances; riflemen stopped in an orderly line and leveled their muskets, men wheeled cannons into place, aimed high, and lit fuses. Musket shot and cannonball and flashing hooves and sabers cut down the onrushing hordes of darkness.

They clashed and fought and died-on both sides-by the hundreds. The slope grew muddy and slick with blood.

Eliot and his band played on.

More soldiers appeared and fought, and screamed, and died for him.

Not enough, though.

Mephistopheles and the vast bulk of his remaining army reached the base of the mesa. The clouds darkened.

Patchwork soldiers and giant ants tore through Eliot’s exhausted army.

Eliot stopped playing. His arm was numb, and he felt as if he’d run out of notes in the song. There had to be some limit on how many ghosts he could raise.

A hundred centaurs broke though and charged Sealiah’s phalanx.

The Queen’s warriors set their rifle lances.

The centaurs fell upon them, hacked and clawed-but their assault was thrown back and they tumbled down the slope.

Archers rained death on the enemy as their ranks slipped and struggled in the mud.

The glowing red eyes of the Infernal Lord surveyed the terrain, and his terrible tactical situation. Mephistopheles thrust his pitchfork into the ground and it crackled and frosted, spreading up the hillside, freezing bodies and streams of blood in place, turning the landscape into a gruesome collection of solid shadow, contorted anatomy, and broken weapons.

The Infernal shouted, and it sounded like thunder.

His army roared in response-and charged up the hill with renewed strength.

Sealiah ordered the howitzers that squatted upon her walls to fire, and commanded the industrial cranes to tip their loads.

Eliot gaped as Mephistopheles’ armies stumbled and faltered. Shells exploded about them; tumbling rocks and debris crushed them; clouds of arrows pierced them.

Ten thousand lay destroyed before Sealiah’s final defenses.

Mephistopheles raised his pitchfork, and with a low growl, motioned them away from the Twelve Towers Mesa.

His scattered forces, stopped, turned, and retreated.

Had Sealiah won?

Eliot had never imagined the tide of battle could have turned so fast.

The Queen of the Poppies moved to the front of her line. She called for a horse and an Andalusian mare was brought to her. She hoisted herself into the saddle and took up a rose-twinned lance.

“Trample their bones!” she shouted.

A cheer rose from her army. Sealiah’s cavalry, the Knights of the Thorned Rose, joined her, and they charged at breakneck speed down the hillside. Soldiers and archers followed.

Eliot spied Mr. Welmann on horseback, too, a gun in one hand, a cutlass in the other.

He also spotted Robert and Fiona moving more cautiously down the treacherous slope, straight for Mephistopheles.

This was wrong. How had Mephistopheles, who had steadily won battle after battle and gained so much land, power, and troops. . so badly miscalculated?

Sealiah should have stayed put, reloaded her artillery, and shored up her defenses.

But she’d sensed victory. She’d smelled blood.

Eliot smelled it as well and his pulse pounded. Bloodlust. It was intoxicating. It clouded his thinking.

And he bet Mephistopheles knew that, too.

Sealiah and her knights rode down and trampled everything in their path.

Mephistopheles and his armies retreated to the river’s edge. The Infernal Lord grasped the pitchfork embedded in the ice, the one he had used earlier to freeze the river. With a crack, he pulled it free, shattering the frozen layer, sending a massive ripple up and down the length of the waterway.

Eliot didn’t get it. He’d just blocked his own retreat.

Unless. .

. . this had been a lure to draw Sealiah out.

From the depths of the river for miles in both directions, shadow creatures and dripping patchwork men emerged onto the bank. Thousands of them appeared from their murky underwater hiding place-and they kept coming, drenched and nearly frozen. . but ready to fight as they swelled the enemy’s ranks.

Mephistopheles laughed. It was the sound of bones shattering and metal wrenching.

It made Eliot want to hide and close his eyes. It was as if everything he’d been through in the last year vanished; he was a little kid again hiding under the covers, afraid of the dark.

The two armies met on the slopes.

Sealiah’s forces had momentum, but they were now vastly outnumbered.

They fought valiantly, slashing and shooting. The Poppy Queen’s warriors pulled back into defensive circles-but they were no match for Mephistopheles as he laid waste to scores of knights with a single swipe of his pitchfork.

Queen Sealiah touched the earth and screamed her frustration.

It was frozen. Nothing could grow here.

Eliot snapped out of the terror that gripped him.

He shifted his mental gears and prepared to play his most powerful piece of music, “The Symphony of Existence.” He’d jump to the last movement about the end of the world; he’d bring earthquake and floods.

And while he was sure that would work. . wouldn’t that destroy both sides down there? He had nowhere near the control he’d need to keep from killing Robert and Fiona, too.

Fiona, chain in hand, sliced her way through the shadow legions, moving toward the Infernal Lord.

All about her Eliot glimpsed flashes of silver-the lighting fast motions of two curved blades. It was Louis. He was there. Then not. Then back-stepping from shadow to shadow and never appearing in the between spaces. His father cut down patchwork soldier, panther, and the countless nameless things that rose from the dark to strike from behind at Fiona.

Without Fiona ever noticing.

She fought her way forward-to within a hundred yards of Mephistopheles.

Robert, however, got to him first. Saliceran blazed in his hand, and he didn’t even have to touch the shadows to make them wither and die. Robert looked strong and courageous. He was the real hero here-not Eliot-no matter what pronouncements the League had made.

With that flaming sword, Robert might have a chance against a creature that was part shadow.

Eliot knew then how he could help.

He turned to his band. “I’ve got to play something. . personal,” he whispered.

“You play it, baby,” Janis murmured and set her hands over her chest. “Go ahead and I’ll sing my heart out for you.”

The others in his banded nodded.

Eliot played “Julie’s Song.”

More than anything now he wanted to hear the hope in that song. . and with luck, see the light that’d come with that hope. Light enough maybe to weaken the shadowy Mephistopheles.

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.

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.

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.

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: him 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?”

“Yes.” Mephistopheles examined his bare hand. “But in truth, very much more of one. . and very little of the other.”

Her stomach twisted. She had kissed him! The thing that had fangs and claws and had been a hundred-foot tall monster. She struggled to push down her rising bile.

Months ago Mitch had used white magic in that alley by Paxington to repel shadows creatures. He’d looked pained, and she’d thought then it had been the strain of producing such a powerful magic. But that hadn’t been it at all. The white magic had burned him because he was part, or mostly, Infernal.

Fiona wasn’t strong enough to stand. . so she scooched back from him. “Was everything you said to me this past year a lie?”

She bet normal girls didn’t have to go through this when they broke up with their boyfriends. A little shouting, some hurt feelings, and it was over. Not a full-scale war; fighting with your about-to-be-ex until he almost kills you; and having thousands of broken, damned souls lament along with you.

Lucky her.

Mephistopheles looked as if she’d struck him. “I have never lied to you, Fiona.”

Fiona looked into his smoky brown eyes. She didn’t believe that. .

He took a step closer. “Everything changed once I knew you. I could not use you and I would never endanger you.” He glanced away. “So I left school to finish this war without your involvement, even if that meant losing my lands. . and my life.”

Fiona snorted. “Looks like you did okay to me.”

Mitch smiled. It was the same smile that made her feel warm and loved, but there was an edge to it, something that reminded Fiona of a wolf.

Mitch’s voice became deeper. “Sealiah lost focus on the war, obsessed with wooing Eliot to her side. She succeeded, but his help was too little, too late.”

Eliot. And Robert.

Fiona had almost forgotten them, she was so engrossed in her own drama.

“Then why kill Robert?” she said, struggling to keep her voice from breaking with sorrow. “And why fight me if you cared so much?”

“I didn’t realize it was you and Robert until too late. I mean, I knew. . but the blood. . when it burns. .” Mephistopheles looked exasperated as he tried to explain. “I would have never consciously harmed you.”

Fiona had felt that way before. When her blood ran hot-she could have killed without thinking.

But what about Robert? Dead on the field somewhere. How could she ever forgive that?

She couldn’t. But she couldn’t think about Robert anymore. Her blood would demand revenge. . and that mustn’t happen now-not when she was on the verge of being able to accept Mitch’s mercy and get Eliot and herself out of here in one piece.

Oh, but Eliot! He’d never leave without his stupid Jezebel.

“Okay,” she said, lost for a moment as she struggled to hold her anger in check. “You were attacked. You got hot. You defended yourself. I get that. But winning isn’t everything.”

Mephistopheles gazed down at her, suddenly wary. “What do you mean?”

“Can’t you stop? Leave Sealiah one scrap of land so she can fix Jezebel?”

Mephistopheles looked like this was a bad joke-then his face fell. “For Eliot. Yes, as he goes, so do you.”

Was that true? Would she stay and fight even now for Eliot? After she had been so badly beaten? Amanda and Robert were gone, and she was tired of always fighting. There’d been so much bloodshed. She was sometimes even tired of being Eliot’s sister.

But that was the right thing to do. Family stuck together. No matter what.

Fiona looked up into Mitch’s face. Even if it was Mephistopheles. . it was Mitch Stephenson, too. She couldn’t stop thinking of him as the boy she knew.

Eliot was playing his music again, that same song, the one full of hope.

The sky brightened.

Mephistopheles winced, but he didn’t notice the strange orange half light as he continued to stare into her eyes.

“Yes,” Mephistopheles told her. “For you I would leave on the brink of my victory.” He blinked, surprised by his own words. “What an impossible thing you have made possible.”

An impossible thing: hope in Hell, and mercy in the depths of darkness.

“Thanks,” she whispered.

The battle continued about them-shouts and gunfire and screams.

“I will leave,” Mephistopheles said, “if you let me take you back to school. And if we can go back to being friends. . perhaps growing into something more in time.”

Him and her? Friends? More than that? After he had revealed what he was? After she’d seen him murder Robert? Taking his mercy and escaping Hell was one thing. Going back to the way things were? No way.

But would she have done any different in his place? Her Infernal blood on fire? She didn’t know.

Fiona’s head swam. This was so confusing. There were too many feelings to sort through. . and since she’d cut herself, she didn’t trust her feelings anymore. She actually felt as if she were balancing on her tiptoes-one tiny push either way and she’d land. . but which way? Give in to her burning hate and avenge Robert? Or stay collected, make peace, and live to fight another day?

This was the same decision she’d been struggling with all year: choosing between Robert and Mitch (although right now neither seemed like the correct choice, because one was dead, and the other was evil).

But while she was trying to figure this out, Eliot and others were dying around her.

She could stop the fighting. She had to stop it. For all their sakes.

So she decided. She and Eliot would get out of here alive.

It was funny-she was about to make peace with an Infernal Lord, one who’d been part of a plot to get her on their side, one who’d walked away from those schemes to save her. . and they’d both ended up exactly where the Infernals had originally wanted them to be.

“Delicious irony is ripe in the air,” Mephistopheles whispered. “Let us not waste the moment.” He offered her his hand. It was the hand without the gauntlet, the one she’d cut off, the one that had grown back-flesh and shadow: white smooth skin and long articulated fingers, reaching for hers.

“Come with me, Fiona. Come and we will walk and talk and be together.”

The last thing in the world she wanted was to touch him. . but something in her blood called to his blood. Like the bloodlust she’d felt before in battle. . only this was far more passion than rage.

Fiona couldn’t help herself.

Her hand was drawn to his. She dared to reach for him, fingers outstretched.

They touched and he pulled her up to stand with him.

There was heat and life and the world around them stilled.

All other thoughts of the battle and her exhaustion and grief stilled. This was everything she’d wanted: a way to survive this war she’d been dragged into, and a way for Eliot to get his rotten girlfriend back so he wouldn’t make everyone miserable for the rest of his life.

And Fiona would be with Mitch.

Her suspicions slipped away. Her pulse hammered in his chest and throat.

In her haze she saw them together-not because of any tricks, but because he’d been noble and protected her when everyone else in her life only wanted to use her. With their powers combined they could leave-go anywhere-do anything. . even if that was simply go back to school and figure things out, one slow step at a time.

Fiona felt hope and happiness and knew everything was possible for them. It would be a moment she’d treasure and reflect upon every day for the rest of her life.

A sound intruded on their moment: a helicopter whoop-whoop of blades slicing the air-then metal screeching against metal.

Mitch stiffened. His face contorted with agony. A dent popped in the center of his chest plate-pushed out from the inside.

His hand jerked from hers. He turned.

A sword stuck out from his back.

Fiona stared, shocked, dumbfounded. . as she recognized the weapon. It was the broken sword her father had tried to kill Beelzebub with, the same one Sealiah had given Robert. It penetrated Mitch’s spine between his shoulder blades, and the Damascus steel dripped fire that transformed his black plate mail to ash.

He fell.

She caught him.

Robert stood at the edge of the clearing, staring at her and Mitch. . looking triumphant. . perplexed. . and then shocked.

Robert was alive? But she’d seen him impaled.

Every shadow creature on the battlefield fell and dissolved under the brightening red sunlight.

Mitch coughed out smoke and embers. He and Fiona together sank to the ground. She turned him so he lay on his side in her lap.

Flames crackled and spread around the blade.

Fiona, horrified, reached for the handle to pull it out.

“No,” Mitch rasped. “That blade destroys whatever it touches-using the power of its wielder, whatever that may be. Touch it and you will cut me to my core and kill me. I would not have that weight upon your soul.”

“But you’re going to die with that thing in you,” she whispered.

The flames spread across his back. He shuddered with pain. He clutched her tighter. “Assassination,” he said. “Backstabbing. It is our way. Even you, Fiona, played your unwitting part.”

“Me?” She never wanted this. Fire licked Fiona’s arm and she didn’t feel it.

How had this happened? They had made their peace. It was all fixed. They’d be together and happy. But that one moment when nothing else mattered, when everything was still possible. . now burned before her eyes.

“Sealiah found a hero and his lady in need of protecting,” Mephistopheles whispered. “With the sun coaxed by hope, and with the God-broken Blade, she concocted a brilliant last-minute gambit.” He chuckled. “Or perhaps she had it planned all along-the intricate, devious machinations of an Infernal. I have lost to a superior opponent.”

“No!” Fiona cried. “Don’t give up! Someone else can take the blade out.”

The last shadow on the field dissolved under the sun as it fully emerged from the moon. The ice on the ground steamed.

“Too late,” he told her. “The light has won this day. My time is over. Yours is just beginning, fair goddess. And our time, alas, was never to be.” He reached up and touched the tears that streamed onto her cheeks. “Still. . a fine death if it be in your arms.”

“Fiona!” Robert cried.

She ignored him and held Mitch close. The flames rose higher and engulfed them both. Mitch held her. They burned together.

This wasn’t happening. She wouldn’t let go. Not ever.

The flames crackled with renewed intensity, they flared and sputtered and sparked. Fiona felt his strength fade. . and his very touch dissolve to dust.

The fire guttered and died.

Mephistopheles’ shadows were gone. His patchwork soldiers stumbled and fell apart. A mighty cheer rose from Sealiah’s knights.

Fiona had nothing but an armful of ashes. She tried to hold them; they blew away. When she looked up, her vision blurry with tears, she saw Robert standing near.

Louis sauntered up, and his smile faded as he beheld Fiona and her blackened hands.

Eliot ran up to her as well-stopped short, seeing the sword and the ashes-having no clue what had happened, but able to read Fiona’s pain.

And finally Sealiah and a retinue of knights approached. Where she stepped the soil churned with worms and roots and covered with flowering moss. She nodded at each of them, practically glowing with pleasure, and looking more regal and lovely than ever.

“The war is over,” the Queen of Poppies announced. “The House of Umbra has fallen. We are victorious.”

Fiona glared at them all-hating them more than she had anything, most of all Robert. She wanted to get up and cut them to pieces. The rage built within her until all she saw were red pulses.

But she held back.

Fighting without thinking-what had it cost her in blood and pain and the people she’d loved? That’s how she’d gotten here in the first place. She vowed she wouldn’t repeat that mistake.

It’d take time, but she had to consider what this meant to her. She wasn’t sure what exactly she had to do first. . but Fiona knew with all her heart and soul that her war with the Infernals had just begun.

67. The first printed Faust legend is Historia von D. Johann Fausten (1587) written by an anonymous German author. The publisher Johann Spies (1540–1623), however, claimed the chapbook was culled from the journal of the original Dr. Faustus. He explains that Faustus ritualistically invited the Devil to reside within him, so that the Devil could share mortal experiences (such as love), while he would gain Infernal knowledge. In a note scribbled on his first draft-Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593), author of the English The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, claimed to have used the same ritual. Marlowe was reputedly an atheist, and while awaiting trial for heresy, Marlowe died. Numerous accounts say that he was killed in a drunken brawl, assassinated, while some claim that he stepped into a shadow and was never seen again. Marlowe was buried in an unmarked grave at St. Nicholas, Deptford, so this later assertion cannot be disproved. The Journal of Dr. Faustus resides in the Beezle Collection, part of the Taylor Institution Library Rare Book collection, Oxford University, and may be viewed only by special permission from the Stephenson Family Trust. Golden’s Guide to Extraordinary Books, Victor Golden, 1958, Oxford.

By the time Eliot pushed and shoved his way past Sealiah’s knights, all he saw was Fiona. Mephistopheles was gone.

Sealiah, Robert, Mr. Welmann, and even Louis were all there, staring at his sister.

Fire burned in Fiona’s lap. The coals disintegrated to ash even has Eliot watched. The heat didn’t seem to hurt Fiona or even scorch the shreds of her school skirt.

Eliot was about to ask her what had happened-but shut his mouth as his eyes met hers. They were red from crying and full of pain. . and utter contempt for all of them.

Across the battlefield shadows dissolved and vanished; patchwork soldiers either fell apart, or they came to their senses and rejoined Sealiah’s army.

The war was over.

Eliot wanted to shout in triumph, but his elation died as he glanced at Robert, who looked like he’d been hurt, covered in blood. . but more than that, hurt on the inside. Mr. Welmann held him back from Fiona.

Eliot couldn’t stand it. “Fiona,” he whispered. “What happened?”

The fire in her lap guttered and went out. Fiona examined her ash-covered hands. She finally looked up at Eliot. He’d never seen her in such agony.

“It was Mitch,” she said.

She had to be dazed. Eliot shook his head. “That’s not possible. It was Mephistopheles.”

In hushed tones, she explained exactly how it was possible. How Mephistopheles approached Mitch, the distant progeny of Dr. Faustus-how Mitch had let him in-how Mephistopheles purposely had not dragged them into this war. . as it had been planned by Sealiah and Louis and the rest of the Infernal Board.

As she related this last bit, she glared at their father.

Louis rolled his eyes and made a gesture with his hands as if to say, What exactly did you expect?

Eliot had never suspected Mitch. He’d studied and fought by an Infernal all year and hadn’t even sensed it? Eliot had known about Sealiah’s part in this, though. Jezebel had admitted as much. That little truth and trust between them had made it all the more difficult to abandon her.

But the thing that really got to Eliot was how connected it at all been. The Infernal Board had been involved? His father?

“Mephistopheles had just agreed to leave Sealiah a bit of land,” Fiona continued in a whisper. “He would have withdrawn. There could have been peace between everyone.”

There was more to this she wasn’t telling. Eliot picked up on it: how Fiona had liked Mitch. . and how she’d been reaching out to him before Robert had struck him down. Things had been strained and awkward between Fiona and Robert before this. Now? There’d be a rift between them that’d never heal. . because it wasn’t just Mephistopheles who had been ready to leave the battle-Fiona had been ready to go with him.

“There would have been peace?” Sealiah said with a toss of her coppery hair. “Then disaster has been averted. An ignoble death for our opponent, and all’s well that ends well.”

Eliot felt Sealiah’s power return in a tidal rush. Her connection reestablished to her lost domains. . as well as Mephistopheles’ now-conquered lands. A crown of woven thorns snaked through her hair and blossomed.

Fiona glared daggers at the Queen, which Sealiah ignored as she turned Robert. “And our thanks to you, my Champion. You have Our favor.”

Robert nodded, accepting this “honor,” and handed Sealiah back her sword’s scabbard. All the color, however, drained from him as he took in Fiona’s pained expression.

Sealiah retrieved Saliceran from where it lay in the dirt. She flicked the blade and char sloughed off. The Damascus steel once more wept poison, and fumed where this dripped upon the earth.

Sealiah put the sword away. Eliot shuddered at the wet scraping sound as it slid back into its sheath.

“There is still much to do,” Sealiah told them, a smile spreading across her face. “There are the spoils of war. Celebrations. Honors and treasures to take!”

Fiona stood with great deliberation. She looked at them. Behind her gaze was unstoppable death. Hate rolled off her in waves.

She blinked, however, and looked away.

“You celebrate.” She turned and walked off. “I’ve lost. . everything.”

No one followed her. No one said a thing.

Eliot knew that he should let her be. In her current emotional state, one wrong word could set her off. Better to let her cool and then they would talk.

But as much as he knew that was the logical thing to do, he couldn’t let her suffer alone. He had to stand by her side as he always had for him. Cee had always said: they were stronger together.

“Fiona,” he whispered, catching up to her. “Talk to me. Please.”

She turned and examined him. There was no hate or pain in her eyes anymore, just a long thoughtful glance. She shook her head.

Had this been his fault? Certainly part of it had. If they hadn’t come to Hell, Amanda would be alive, that’s for sure. Sealiah would’ve lost the war, though, which meant Jezebel would’ve been dead-or worse. And Mitch. . wasn’t it better that they found out about him?

Either way, no matter what he would have done, someone lost.

And either way, one of the Infernals gained something: either Eliot helping Sealiah, or Fiona unknowingly falling in love with Mephistopheles.

“It’s not your fault,” Fiona whispered, guessing what he was thinking. “It’s theirs.” She nodded at the Queen and Louis. “The Infernals have used us from the start.”

“Yeah,” Eliot whispered back. “Maybe.”

“They are evil,” Fiona said. “We have to stop them.”

He nodded.

And yet, Eliot wondered how different the Infernals were from the League. The Immortals manipulated them; they manipulated the entire world. What had happened in Costa Esmeralda had to be the tip of the iceberg.

“Eliot,” Louis called. He made a come-hither gesture and pursed his lips tight to indicate some urgency.

“I better go see what he wants. Are you going to be okay?”

Fiona considered a moment. “No,” she said. “But I’m not going to do anything rash. This is going to take a lot of thinking to figure out.”

Eliot reached out and gave her elbow a squeeze. The corner of Fiona’s mouth worked into a microscopic smile, then faltered and collapsed.

Something inside Eliot wanted to take his sister’s hand and run as far and fast away from this place as he could. Everything was changing around them. Literally. The land thawed and grass pushed up from the earth. The sun shrank to a golden orb. Iron gray thunderheads lightened and spread across the sky in a silver layer of overcast.

There was more. He felt it. But he couldn’t understand any of it yet.

“Eliot,” Louis called.

Against his better instincts, Eliot jogged to his father.

Robert met him halfway. “How is she?” he asked. “I didn’t know it was him.”

He meant Mitch, or rather, Mephistopheles. Every trace of Robert’s cool was gone. He looked worried and guilty and more than a little angry that he had supposedly delivered the winning blow in this war. . and lost Fiona in the process.

“It looked like he was going to. .” Robert’s forehead creased. “I didn’t know what he was going to do. I just knew that I had to stop him.”

Eliot wondered for a split second-if Robert had known it was Mitch, would he have stopped and let him take Fiona? Or would he have still thrown the sword and killed him? No-he dismissed that idea. Robert didn’t work like that.

“Fiona will be okay,” Eliot told him. “She just has a lot to think about.”

Robert took a step toward her.

“I wouldn’t talk to her yet, though. Seriously.”

Robert considered that, nodded, and wandered off.

Eliot finally got to Louis, who arched an eyebrow at how long it had taken him. He motioned for Eliot to stand before him, and Louis set his hands on Eliot’s shoulders and angled him at Sealiah.

The Queen gave rapid orders to her knights: “Release any souls in thrall-those loyal to Mephistopheles grind up to replenish the land-send runners for engineers and gardeners-strengthen our borders or we may lose the edges.”

Louis cleared his throat.

Sealiah turned and regarded Louis with distain.

“You,” she murmured, “. . are still here. Why?” Her gaze softened as she took in Eliot. “And my young Dux Bellorum who coaxed out the sun out and won the day. Worry not. Our Jezebel shall be reconstructed, lovelier than ever.”

“I believe you said something about the ‘spoils of war’?” Louis said.

Her face grew cold. “Did I?”

“As one of your generals,” Louis said, “I claim my share in land.”

Sealiah laughed. “Why not wish for the moon, Louis? You barely fought. It was Eliot, Fiona, and Robert who deserve the glory.”

Louis shrugged. “Nonetheless, I played my part as your Dux Bellorum. It matters not the state of my cowardice or the quantity of blood spilled. I was here. I participated. I claim my right.” His sly smile returned. “Unless you wish to renege? I could take my dispute to the Board.”

Sealiah’s red lips turned white. “Name the domain from our conquered enemy,” she said. “But try not my patience, Deceiver.”

“I would never dare such a thing,” Louis replied with a nod. “I claim. .” He cupped his crooked chin, thinking. “Just an acre or two from the Hysterical Kingdom-far from here, I assure you. The Mirrored City?”

Louis’s gaze traveled to the ground and he licked his lips. He bent over and found a mass of twisted, charred cloth at their feet. “The small bit as well,” he said to her. “After all, it was mine to begin with.” He shook the tangle out and ashes filled the air. Eliot thought it might have been the remains of a black velvet cloak. Mephistopheles’? It was hard to tell.

“Done,” Sealiah declared. “But take great care, Louis, not to push your city limits farther into the Hysterical Kingdom. . which is now mine.”⁶⁸

Louis bowed low-but not so low that he took his eyes off her.

Sealiah blinked and turned back to her knights.

Louis cleared his throat again and gestured to Eliot, as if presenting him to the Queen for the first time.

Sealiah seemed to understand this and smiled.

Eliot shifted, uncomfortable under her smoldering gaze.

Sealiah said, “And what treasure do you wish, my young noble born?”

“What do I want? I don’t-”

Louis poked a sharp fingernail into Eliot’s back.

Eliot stood straighter. That hurt, but it’d been a clear warning. Something was going on here that he did not understand. . something Infernal.

What did Eliot want? Sealiah had already told him she would heal Jezebel. That’s what this had all been about: him and her. Right?

But it wouldn’t just be him and Jezebel; she would always be Sealiah’s protégée-her slave, actually.

Eliot felt sorry for Jezebel. He loved her, too. But the magnitude of political intrigue and her Infernal ties meant that they could never have a normal boyfriend-girlfriend relationship. If Sealiah ordered her later to stab Eliot in the back, he wasn’t sure Jezebel could refuse.

Why was it so complicated?

He was missing something, though, right in front of him. He could feel it just out of his mental reach. . at his fingertips. . in the air around him. . in the dirt under his sneakers.

Yes, the land.

He cocked his head back to his father. “Why did you want land?”

Louis smile seemed to melt from its usual mocking crookedness to something genuine. “Land is everything.” He gave a theatrical wave of his hand. “If I were you, I would pick a Dolorous Archipelago on the Mirrored Sea, next to my city.”

“Quiet your wagging tongue, Louis.” Sealiah’s hand rested on the pommel of Saliceran. “Or I shall cut it out and feed it to my dogs.”

Louis shut his mouth with an audible clack of teeth.

“You do not want land, Eliot,” Sealiah told him as if he were a child about to stick his finger into a light socket. “It’s a tremendous responsibility, one that would be impossible to manage while you were at school.” She tapped her lower lip, considering. “Why not let me give you a mansion in San Francisco? One with swimming pools, game rooms, a kitchen, and a full staff?”

She sounded worried. Eliot had definitely stumbled onto something.

“Or a yacht,” Sealiah continued. “Or a real, living band and a recording deal. You would be the next big thing. The whole world would flock to your concerts.”

While Eliot had grown to appreciate having a band to play with, the thought of tens of thousands of people in an audience made his stomach churn.

What was he missing? Was what it about land that had everyone so worked up?

He knew it’d look strange, but was drawn to the earth, so he knelt and touched the dirt. There were worms and beetles and tiny bell-shaped flowers with blue veins that uncurled in the soil.

He remembered when he had touched the dirt through the Gates of Perdition-when Uncle Kino had ditched him and Fiona there. That earth had been dead, lifeless for a billion years. . but there had been a “malleable” quality to it. It was hard to explain, just a feeling that he could make something out of it if he put his mind to it.

What Louis had said about land came rushing back to him: “We are monarchs of the domains of Hell, the benevolent kings and queens over the countless souls who are drawn there to worship us. Without land, we would be the lowest of the low.”

“So,” Eliot said, “if you own land in Hell, you’re the king or queen of it? You control the souls there?”

“Land,” Sealiah replied, “is what defines an Infernal Lord. And yes, the souls belong to you. . but the damned are far more trouble and time than they are worth.”

Fiona wandered back to where they stood.

“What’s going on?” Fiona asked, concerned. She must have sensed the same “something” about to happen as Eliot had. The change in the land, and more than that, the change about to happen in Eliot.

He almost had all the pieces put together. What he wanted. How to save Jezebel. And, unfortunately, a string of consequences that he was sure he would have to pay for later.

“I can claim any piece of land?” he asked the Queen.

“Eliot,” Fiona said, a warning edge to her voice. “If you’re doing what I think you’re doing-”

Sealiah held up one hand indicating that Fiona be quiet.

Louis’s grip on his shoulders tightened, and Eliot was glad for the extra support as he felt his knees tremor. He was about to do the smartest and bravest thing-and possibly also the stupidest thing-he’d ever done.

“You may claim any land that belonged to the enemy,” Sealiah corrected. Her tone was deadly serious.

“But,” Eliot countered, “Mephistopheles conquered all these lands-right up to your Twelve Towers. So every piece of land here belonged to him.”

“That is technically accurate,” Sealiah said.

Eliot inhaled and then let out all the air, trying to steel himself.

The land. The power. The souls attached to the land. All dominoes set up and directed toward one inevitable conclusion-one that if he set in motion could not be undone.

But what else could he do? Not take the chance?

Not be the hero he’d always dreamed of?

No. He had to do this.

“Then,” Eliot said, “I claim for my part in this war as your Dux Bellorum the realm of the Burning Orchards.”

Sealiah’s gaze held steady, but the slightest flicker of irritation crossed her eyes. “You have that right.”

If Eliot had that land, he’d control all the souls therein. . including Jezebel’s, the Duchess of the Burning Orchards. He could set her free.

“No,” Fiona whispered, horrified. “Eliot, you can’t. That’d make you one of them.”

“There’s no other way,” he said.

Fiona’s features hardened. She looked at him as she had looked at their father, like Sealiah-like he was the enemy.

Sealiah crooked a half smile. “You have all that you could ever wish for now,” she said. “Well played, Eliot Post. . our newest Infernal Lord.”

68. Tectonic Theory of Infernal Dominions. The word tectonic normally pertains to either (1) construction or building or (2) relation to, causing, or resulting from structural deformation of the earth’s crust. Infernal tectonics incorporates both definitions. The mythohistorical record provides evidence that the borders of Infernal Lords’ domains expand and contract with their masters’ power. The nature and reality of those realms are plastic, subject to the personal tastes (some would argue the psychosis) of their rulers; their borders, however, are not. These boundaries are subject to the counterpressure exerted by surrounding Infernal lands. Additionally, which realm borders which is not fixed, but dependent on political treaties, alliances, and vendettas. See additional entries on the higher-dimensional nature of the Infernal spaces for details. Gods of the First and Twenty-first Century, Volume 13, Infernal Forces. Zypheron Press Ltd., Eighth Edition.