All That Lives Must Die - Eric Nylund [244]
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