All That Lives Must Die - Eric Nylund [298]
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,