All That Lives Must Die (72 page)

Fiona grabbed Eliot’s hand and dragged him across the room. “We forgot someone—or rather,
something
.”

“What are you talking about?” Eliot pulled away from her and halted.

Fiona glanced back at Jezebel. “One day your girlfriend is going to go too far.” She then strode off without Eliot. “Come on. We have an appointment to keep.”

“Hey, wait up. I still don’t—”

Fiona marched straight to the Covingtons.

Eliot hurried after her.

“Ah, my dearest Miss Post,” Jeremy said, bowing with a flourish and shaking his hair into a golden mane. He held a flask in one hand, and the smell of whiskey hung in the air. The others in the group (Eliot assumed they were Covingtons, too, from their similarly freckled sardonic features) backed up a pace at the sight of Fiona.

Sarah, however, moved to Jeremy’s side. Her hair was pulled back into a tight bun and her uniform was freshly pressed. She looked wary and apologetic at the same time.

Fiona asked Sarah, “You said before you wanted to make amends?”

Jeremy looked at his cousin, and his stupid drunken grin faded.

“Aye, I did,” Sarah whispered.

“You have a car?” Fiona asked. “We need you to drive us someplace.”

“Of course,” Sarah said. “Where?”

“Del Sombra.”

               86               

ALL THAT LIVES MUST DIE

Fiona kicked through the sand and watched tumbleweeds roll by. She wasn’t sure she could find the place again among this suburb that had never been. There were cinder block walls, ribbons of faded asphalt, and the fragments of house foundations.

“What are we looking for again?” Sarah asked. She put on sunglasses and a baseball cap to protect her freckled skin from the raw sun.

“Manhole cover,” Fiona told her.

“Do I want to know why?” Sarah wrinkled her nose.

“Not really.” Eliot grunted as he carried all their equipment: a backpack picked up at their Pacific Heights house on the way out here—filled with flashlights, Fiona’s old shotgun, shells, and rubber waders. He also had his guitar slung on his back.

Fiona heard the resentment in her brother’s voice.

Yeah—she knew he wanted to be with Jezebel (she practically gagged thinking of them kissing)—but he had been just as curious about this . . . once he remembered.

Fiona glanced up. To the east was the Del Oro Recycling Plant, shuttered and closed. To the west was Del Sombra, at least what was left of it.

She felt a pang of grief as she saw dust devils spinning down what had been Midway Avenue, where their apartment building had been . . . and Ringo’s All-American Pizza Parlor . . . and the Pink Rabbit. A few skeletal building supports stood erect, but everything else had been burned down.

And while some agro-entrepreneur had planted fields of grapevine between here and there, the city had been left alone.

She asked Eliot, “A little help?”

Eliot sighed like she’d asked for six pints of blood, but relented and dropped the backpack and pulled his guitar around. He plunked the strings and the notes sounded like drops of water.

The sands shifted.

He plucked out more three chords that reminded her of running trickles and currents and something alive snaking through that water.

A line in the sand traced from Eliot, curved thirty paces straight ahead, until it spiraled to a stop.

Fiona strode toward the spot. She knelt, brushed aside the sand, and found the steel underneath. There was a tiny hole in the manhole cover, and she stuck her finger in it and tugged. No way. It weighed too much—and the thought of being stopped by such a trivial thing made her anger flare.

She ripped the thing out and tossed the solid metal disk like it was a Frisbee.

Eliot handed her a flashlight and a pair of rubber boots.

“What’s down there?” Sarah asked.

“Sewer,” Fiona replied, pulling on the too-tight boots.

“I can see that. But why are
we
going down there?”

“There’s no ‘we.’ You’re staying up here.” Fiona regretted the commanding tone she used. Sarah was trying to do right by them. “Look,” she added, “it’s going to be dangerous. There’s something . . . well, not evil, more . . .”

“Hungry,” Eliot finished for her.

Sarah arched an eyebrow. “I can take care of myself.”

She meant it. But why would anyone want to crawl into a sewer with them?

Then Fiona understood: Sarah wanted to prove she was their friend and would have followed them into danger . . . even into Hell,
if
she’d been given the chance.

But that was stupid. This could really be dangerous.

On the other hand, Fiona wanted her to come and prove her sincerity. She knew that was wrong: Friends didn’t do that to each other.

But had Sarah truly ever been her friend?

“Suit yourself,” Fiona told her. “But if you chicken out halfway there—you’re finding your own way back. Eliot and I have business to take care of.”

“Hey,” Eliot said. “That’s not right.”

“It’s okay,” Sarah said, casting an uncertain glance down the hole. “I’ll be fine.”

Fiona clambered into the sewer hole and down the ladder. Last time she’d plunked into the water. This time, she found the ledge by the channel and stepped onto it.

She played her flashlight beam over the cinder blocks of the intersection. Mats of slick algae covered everything, hanging down from the ceiling like boogery stalactites. She imagined herself slipping on the stuff and going headfirst into the slimy water.

Sarah came down next and then Eliot.

Eliot plucked a note and it echoed down a single passage only. “That way.”

Sarah tested her foot on the ledge. “Hang on.” She knelt and touched the concrete ledge. The cinder blocks shifted; a ripple in the stone spread outward and raised into a waffle pattern. “A bit of traction, courtesy of Covington conjuration.”

“Thanks,” Fiona murmured, and plodded ahead.

No rats this time . . . although Fiona almost wished there were. She spotted a pile of algae-covered rodent bones. Ick.

They spiraled down, and the water gurgled faster in the channel next to them. Cinder block was replaced by ancient brick and rusted supports, and the air was thick with humidity and the scent of blood.

Ahead was the chamber they were looking for. It was bigger than Fiona recalled, half a block wide with three holes in the roof where sunlight filtered through from the surface. The room was flooded; in the center of this lake was an island of bones—all chewed and broken.

Sitting upon the island was Sobek, oracle crocodile, the once–Egyptian god of the passages to the Underworld.

It had been their first heroic trial to “vanquish” the forty-foot-long reptilian beast that lived in the Del Sombra sewers. It was all part of some weird urban legend about alligators flushed down toilets that Fiona had never understood.

A year ago, Sobek could have easily killed them. It had even pinned Fiona to the ground and opened its maw as if to devour her . . . and she’d gotten a look into the black oblivion inside the creature. It had been injured, however—a spike driven through its shoulder, and they had made friends with it by pulling the thing out.

She and Eliot had been weak and naïve then, and survived only because the crocodile had been convinced by his prophetic powers that
they
were going to kill
it
.

Maybe it hadn’t been wrong. She and Eliot were young gods now, tested in battle.

Everything had changed.

But so had Sobek.

Its body was as big as an eighteen-wheel semitruck, and its thick tail sinewed about the island of bones. Its armored scales were glossy ebon black flecked with green and gold.

A pair of slitted eyes opened and stared.

Fiona’s stomach sank. It was like something she might’ve seen in a science book on the Permian period, something that lived before even the dinosaurs . . . something primeval, instinctively cunning, and utterly savage.

There was a pull from the creature, and she felt her feet involuntarily shuffle forward through the water.

Eliot set his hand on Lady Dawn strings and the light vibration snapped her out of the reptile’s hypnotic sway.

Sarah, who had put on a brave face all the way down here, now stood locked with terror.

“Stay here,” Fiona whispered to her.

Sarah gave a nod, and remained frozen in place.
71

Fiona and Eliot waded through the water to Sobek.

Its tail uncurled, slid into the murky pool, and swished with irritation. “You have returned too early,” he told them with a voice so resonant that it shook Fiona’s bones and made ripples dance on the water.

“Only—” Fiona’s voice broke.

Sobek had told them to return in a year . . . when he’d answer questions for them. A year in which the crocodile had said it needed to eat and replenish his strength. Fiona had thought that exaggeration at the time, but looking at the jumble of bones and its increased mass . . . she wondered.

She cleared her throat and tried again. “Only twenty-six days until the year is up,” she managed.

“We need to know what’s going to happen,” Eliot added.

A snort exploded through the reptile’s snout. “I have foreseen your early return. So I’m here. And ready. Come closer.”

Fiona swallowed and moved toward the island of bones, careful not to slip on the slimy remains and impale herself. She touched her rubber band always on her wrist in case she needed it.

She and Eliot halted thirty paces from Sobek, close enough to speak, but, she hoped, out of the crocodile’s lunging strike range. How easily could such a monster just snap them up? They might not even get a chance to fight back.

It smelled of blood and rotten meat, and a musky scent that her primitive brain defined as “reptilian.”

“So much has happened,” she whispered.

“I have watched the water and read your futures,” it said. “Come and see with thine own eyes.”

Was this a trick to lure them closer?

Fiona didn’t think so. How could this thing
still
be hungry? And yet she hesitated because the animal part of her brain was rightfully afraid and suspected the creature had a supernatural hunger that was
never
sated.

Eliot, however, stupidly brave as always, walked forward.

So Fiona followed.

One foot in front of the other she moved until they felt Sobek’s stinking, moist breath on their faces.

There was a rivulet between them and the crocodile—a stream through which water burbled along with strings of algae and floating bits of paper.

“Look,” it commanded.

Fiona squinted into the water (one hand still on her rubber band). Her eyes defocused, and she saw the waves and currents blur into lines of light and shadow that crossed and fluttered and stretched from here and now . . . farther downstream and off in the future.

As Aunt Dallas had showed her how to do so long ago.

Her lifeline stretched on and on as far as she could see. It pulsed like quicksilver. There were many others in the surrounding weave: golden threads and silver lines and coarse flax fiber and taut leather cords. Some wound about her thread. Some snapped and fell away. Some new strands joined with hers farther on—ones that glimmered like emerald and ruby and sapphire and threw off sparks of light.

It seemed normal, she guessed. Was it possible everything was going to be okay?

Farther along, however, she saw new threads: concertina barbed wire and battered chains. Her line cut through those, leaving snapped and severed lives in the wake of her destiny.

She smelled brimstone and fire and blood.

There were smaller fibers, too: thousands of fine ordinary cotton threads that were broken or burned away by the larger lines pushing forward and distorting the pattern.

War. There was going to be a war, and Fiona would lead the charge.

How many would die because of her?

Or was the right question, How many would she
save
?

It was so obvious now—Immortal versus Infernal. Good versus evil.

And where was Eliot’s thread? There was nothing there that felt like him.

Far off, though, waves and melodies rebounded through the fabric, ripples and blurs that had to be his music . . . but it was not bound to her thread.

She blinked and looked up.

Sobek had crept so close that Fiona could have reached up and touched its snout.

Eliot shook his head. “I don’t see anything. It’s all tangled ahead.”

But Sobek’s slitted eyes locked with Fiona’s. “
You
saw.”

“Yes,” she breathed. “A war.”

“Not
just
a war,” Sobek rumbled. “
The
war. Among the gods and the angels . . . war among everyone . . . everywhere. Armageddon.” The reptile looked at Eliot and then back to her. “And you will choose sides.”

Deep down, Fiona had known this was coming. She had once hoped that both sides of her family could get along—that there’d even be some sort of corny reunion between her mother and father and all their relatives.

But now that they’d gone to Hell and come back?

It was clear how evil the Infernals were . . . that given a chance, they wouldn’t stop at fighting for
just
their lands . . . they’d come to mortal realms. And the only thing that had been stopping them was the League of Immortals and the
Pactum Pax Immortalus
. . . until she and Eliot had come along.

“It’ll be like Ultima Thule all over again,” Fiona murmured. “We’ll need someone to lead us in battle. Is he still alive?”

“He?” Sobek held her gaze a long time, and then said, “Ah, Zeus? Odin, Ra, Titan Slayer, and Dux Bellorum of all Battles? I cannot see him. Not since long ago.”

“But is he alive?” Fiona whispered.

“I cannot say.”

That wasn’t an answer—but it didn’t matter. There were answers enough here for Fiona. She knew what she had to do.

“I’m going to find him,” she said, stood tall, and took in a deep breath, despite the stench. “And if I can’t find Zeus, or if he’s really dead, then I’ll find another to lead the Immortals.”

And if she couldn’t find a leader among them? She wasn’t sure. She’d cross that bridge if she came to it.

“Don’t,” Eliot said. “Hasn’t there been enough fighting? There’s got to be another way. Let me try to talk to Dad and Sealiah.”

Fiona laughed. “Talk? That’s not what they do! All they do is lie and backstab and take whatever they are strong enough to take.”

She heard the truth in her statement ring like a silver bell in the air.

“There
will
be war,” Sobek declared. “That much is clear. Many will die . . . though you should not grieve. All that lives must die—the gods—the angels—all must move on.”

Fiona felt a stab of sorrow as she thought about Mitch and all the other people she might know who could be killed. But how many more would die if she did nothing and let the Infernals have their way?

Eliot, however, went on as if he hadn’t heard Sobek’s prophecy. “Just give me a chance to fix things,” he said. “I can do it.”

“You can’t fix Mom and Dad,” she spat. “You can’t fix any of them. They all
want
this. And they want you, too.” She stared into his eyes, pleading. “Don’t go over to their side. Come with me to the Council. They can help us. And give up Jezebel—she’s nothing but poison.”