Eric Nylund - All That Lives Must Die

Eliot and Fiona stepped around this new corner and found themselves-

— on a cobblestone boulevard running perpendicular to the main street.

It wasn’t as if this new passage were hidden. It opened quite plainly onto the main street behind them.

Eliot waved to a man as he rushed past on the sidewalk. “Hey, mister,” he called.

The man ignored him.

Apparently no one on the outside could sense this place, unless they knew exactly what they were looking for. [5] In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, inspectors from the State, Fire, and School Accreditation Boards easily found the Main Gate entrance of the Paxington Institute, but when reporters or tourists attempted to locate the entrance, they failed. This might simply be the nature of San Francisco’s convoluted street geometry. In old satellite images, the original Paxington campus does appear exactly where school officials claim (adjacent Presidio Park). Similar modern accounts, however, of the school’s “selectively appearing entrance” have been claimed of the new Paxington Institute on the San Francisco Archipelago. Inquiries made to the Institute result in a detailed set of directions. . which ultimately prove useless. Gods of the First and Twenty-first Century, Volume 6, Modern Myths. Zypheron Press Ltd., Eighth Edition.

There were a dozen stores on this in-between street: antique and curio shops, a few high-end fashion boutiques, a Chinese noodle house, and a café on the corner, where older Paxington students sat at canopy-covered tables. Farther down the boulevard, brick walls rose along the sides, weathered and ivy-covered, which ended a half block away at an intricate wrought iron gate.

Beyond those gates were majestic cathedral-like buildings stained black with age, structures with Greek columns that rose like a forest of marble, and wavering in and out of the ever-present Bay Area fog lorded a clock tower glinting with hints of gold filigree.

“It’s amazing,” Eliot said.

“Yeah. . ” Fiona immediately sobered. “But the time!” She grabbed his hand and pulled him along.

Eliot shook off his wonderment and ran with her.

As they neared the gate, Eliot saw that it was shut. Had they let everyone inside already and locked the place up?

A man with a stern look on his face stepped out of the gatehouse. He wore a navy blue suit with an embroidered Paxington crest. His blond hair was buzz-cut, and his beard was trimmed square, save the two braids that dangled from his chin.

He towered over Eliot and Fiona, but more impressive than his height was his girth. It would’ve taken three muscular men standing side by side to occupy the same space where he stood. His biceps flexed and stretched taut the fabric of his jacket.

He raised a clipboard and made two checks. “Master Eliot Post,” he muttered, “and the Lady Fiona Post. Good morning.”

“Yes, sir.” Eliot panted. “Good morning. Sorry.” He gave this man a short bow, unsure what the protocol was, but very sure that he deserved respect.

Fiona curtsied.

“Congratulations on passing the entrance exam,” the man said.

“Entrance exam?” Eliot echoed.

“A test to see if you have a spark. You’d be surprised how many potential freshmen wander just outside this street, sometimes for days, never giving up, but never having what it takes to get inside, either. So sad.”

The man’s iron stance relaxed a notch. “I am Harlan Dells,” he said. “Head of security at Paxington. Mind you two break no rules while on school grounds or you will answer to me.”

Eliot swallowed.

Harlan Dells glared at Eliot’s backpack.

Eliot felt his violin case shift inside. His hand tingled where Lady Dawn’s snapped string had cut and infected him. . apparently not so healed as he had thought.

Harlan Dells turned and opened the gate.

Something about the man was familiar. It was like when they had met Uncle Henry; Eliot felt an instinctual fear and some déjà vu. He sensed that Mr. Dells was related in some way. He was an Immortal.

Mr. Dells faced them. “I can hear the grass grow on the other side of the world. I can see the farthest shore, the most distant star. . and I can be in more than one place at a time, so I can easily spot and catch two troublemakers. Understand?”

“Yes, sir,” Eliot and Fiona said together.

“Good.” Mr. Dells pointed past the gates-over manicured lawns and marble fountains, across the courtyard to the clock tower and a domed building next to it. “Bristlecone Hall,” he told them. “That’s where your placement exams are this morning.”

The minute hand of the tower clock ticked into the straight-up position, and bells tolled.

“I suggest,” Mr. Dells said, “that you run for it.”

They did.

Louis Piper, often called the Prince of Darkness, Lucifer, or the Morning Star, mused on the nature of time. . how when one doted upon a beautiful woman, a moment stretched into days. . or like now, when one waited for his cousins to deliberate on their endless scheming-it took an eternity.

Louis shifted on the vinyl couch.

This waiting room was devoid of comfort. Windowless, the only ornamentation on the water-stained walls was a USA AS SEEN FROM LAS VEGAS poster. The odor of urinal cake wafted from the adjacent restroom.

Aside from the door marked EXIT, the only other egress was the door leading to the recently relocated Las Vegas Boardroom.

“They should’ve called me in already,” he told Amberflaxus. “Something is wrong.”

Next to him on the couch, his cat ceased licking its iridescent black fur and blinked.

“Yes, yes, I know,” Louis replied. “One cannot go from King of the Panhandlers to Chairman of the Board in a single season, can one?”

Louis reached to stroke Amberflaxus.

The cat, lightning quick, batted his hand away and gave a look of offense.

“No? You’re saying what right do I have to make such claims? I, who have wandered homeless and clueless as a mortal for sixteen years, his power severed and heart ripped asunder by the woman he loved?”

Had he really loved? Louis had forgotten. Perhaps it was just a bad dream.

His cat returned to licking himself.

Louis leaned closer. “You make perfect sense. Consider, though, my friend, that in the span of a few days, I have regained my Infernal status, killed our loathsome cousin Beelzebub, and absorbed his power. What stops me from marching in there and demanding a seat on the Board?”

Amberflaxus tore into the vinyl couch-shredding wildly as if the plastic were alive.

His sentiments were obvious: Louis was a fool.

Any of Louis’s relations had the power to slay hero or demon. But without land, Louis was a pale imitation of a real Infernal. Land made them what they were.

The door to the Boardroom eased open.

No one emerged to invite Louis in, a sign of his lower-than-dirt status. So be it.

He stood, brushed cat hair from his charcoal gray suit, and straightened his bloodred tie.

Amberflaxus bit into the couch’s stuffing, shaking nubs of fluff.

“Wait here,” he told the animal.

Louis turned, donned his armored smile, and entered.

The Boardroom had been a private gambling den during Prohibition. Six billiard lamps hung from the rafters, making cones of dust-filled light. On the far wall hung a gigantic computer screen showing the local news coverage of the Babylon Garden Hotel and Casino as preparations were made to demolish the place in one well-engineered implosion. That was Beelzebub’s nightclub, the last of his old bones being scattered in a final act of well-deserved degradation.

In the center of the room was a craps table padded with green felt, its lines and numbers worn smooth with age where bets were placed with chips, gold coins, or souls.