All That Lives Must Die

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?”