All That Lives Must Die - Eric Nylund [60]
She told Sealiah how Fiona and Eliot reacted to it all. How they were so naïve about everything. It was pathetic.
“You think your Eliot Post is weak, then?”
“No, my Queen. There is something still to the boy. I can feel it growing within him. Something that . . .”
Jezebel couldn’t find the words. She wasn’t sure how she felt about him . . . something no doubt left over from her weaker, mortal self.
“You are drawn to the boy?” Sealiah narrowed her eyes at Jezebel as she searched her heart. “Beyond his mere power?”
Jezebel opened her mouth to deny any attraction.
But that would be a lie. One her Queen would instantly detect. Such simple deceptions were the greatest insult one Infernal could give to another.
So she said nothing.
Sealiah inspected her nails: bloodred and pointed. She then set a handful of white cubes upon the Towers game mat. “Does he suspect who you were?”
“He may.” Jezebel fidgeted. “He looks at me—I mean, like all the boys, of course. But, I think he sees a shadow of . . . she who I was.” Jezebel couldn’t speak her former name aloud. She loathed the weak creature she had been. “It shall not be a problem. It will be child’s play to deflect his questions.”
Sealiah stroked Jezebel’s cheek with one fingernail, cutting the flesh. The sensation sent shivers through Jezebel. “You will tell him the truth if he asks,” Sealiah said. “All of it. Even, and especially, about Julie Marks.”
Jezebel inhaled and took an involuntary step back.
“I don’t understand,” she said. “I thought I was to get close to the twins. Help them so they would be sympathetic to our cause. Wasn’t I going to be friends with Fiona? With Eliot? How will the truth help that?”
Jezebel realized too late that withdrawal from her Queen’s presence, questioning her orders—either could be reason to be annihilated.
Sealiah, however, merely smiled and tilted her head. “These are still our goals, my pet. But Eliot is far more Infernal than any yet suspect. I have reports of his music quelling the borders of the disputed Blasted Lands.”
Eliot had been to Hell? Jezebel wanted to ask how and when and what he had played.
For a terrible moment, she was Julie Marks again, yearning to hear her song once more. Her heart filled with hope and love and light.
She quickly snuffed those weaknesses before Sealiah saw them—and ripped them from her chest.
Still . . . she didn’t understand.
Sealiah must have seen the confusion on her face, because she said, “If the boy continues to develop his stronger, Infernal nature, then he will certainly be able to do what any young lord of Hell can: sort lies from truth.”
Jezebel wrestled with her Queen’s command to tell the truth. Deception had been the entire basis of her relationship with Eliot. He had fallen for sweet, innocent, and vulnerable Julie Marks, the new manager at Ringo’s Pizza—not runaway, died-of-a-heroin-overdose Julie Marks from the alleyways of Atlanta, not Julie Marks who had made a deal for her life and soul in exchange for seducing him into damnation everlasting.
“Shhh,” Sealiah said, “quiet your thoughts.” She looked down upon her, her features a mix of pity and disgust. “Since you have yet to be trained on the higher arts of trickery, our young Eliot will sense any attempt to hide the truth—so do not. It would backfire and further alienate you from him.”
“I shall do as you say, my Queen,” Jezebel said. “But . . . won’t he hate me?”
“Oh, my precious dear—of course he will. How much you have yet to learn of men.”
Sealiah drew Jezebel closer and slipped her arms about her shoulder. This felt wonderfully warm and comforting and yet terribly dangerous at the same time.
“Eliot will hate you, at first. But you will then have the boy’s interest . . . which, when mixed with his good intentions and budding manly concerns, will curdle into love.”
Jezebel understood.