Lesley doesn’t look too disturbed. She doesn’t even spare a moment for the approaching boat. “Rose, this is Rey, Bleak, and Thorne. Everybody . . . this is Rose.”
Rey, the one you met before, is smiling at you. His eyes continue to flicker red, and the corners of his lips won’t stop twitching. He fidgets uncontrollably, and as a result his dreadlocks wiggle around his face like a nest of snakes.
The girl, Bleak, wears a flowing white floor-length robe with its hood pulled back, and her skin and French-braided hair are as pale as virgin snow. Unlike Rey, she does not smile at you. In fact, it doesn’t look like she’s ever done much smiling.
Thorne, the other boy, also doesn’t look tickled by your presence, but he doesn’t seem irritated by it either. He’s a head shorter than Rey, and much leaner, too. He can’t be any older than sixteen or seventeen, but he has a cigar gripped between his fingers. He appraises you for a moment, while idly tapping the ashes from his cigar onto the deck of the boat.
Finally he flicks the cigar into the water, kneels down, and sticks out his free hand. You suppose that means you should take it, and you do. It’s cold.
“Nice to meet you, Rose,” he says.
The name still sounds strange and wonderful, sugar to your ears.
Lesley unclips the box on her belt and clicks a button. “Cesar, kill the engines.”
Almost instantly the motor below grumbles and then whines to a halt, while the frothing wake behind the boat dissipates off into the black.
Meanwhile, the boat behind you makes incredible gains. A spotlight shines out from its perch on the front of the ship, and it dances over the water until it finally pins the five of you standing on the deck. You squint and raise your arm to block some of the light.
“I think they’ve come close enough,” Lesley says. “Let’s show our newest passenger what you can do. Want to get us started, Bleak?”
Bleak rolls the sleeves of her robe up to the elbows. When she reaches out with her arms, just above her wrist you notice a tattoo of a circle, divided into quarters—white, green, red, and gold.
She closes her eyes. She lets out a deep breath, and despite the relative warmth of the summer air, you see her breath fog from the cold.
With a sudden groan of metal that’s loud enough that you cover your ears, the other ship instantly grinds to a halt. The abrupt stop sends two crew members over the railing and plunging toward the water below.
But it’s no longer water they’re falling toward. Instead the two men strike the ring of ice that has crystallized around the boat. The ice floe crackles some more, and long prismlike icicles extend vertically out of the surface, locking the boat into place. Slowly the icy fingers twist the boat around and the ice floe with it, until the broad side of the vessel is exposed to you and the others. The soldier manning the spotlight swivels it around to keep you illuminated. You wince as the glare momentarily blinds you.
“That spotlight is insufferable, Rey,” Lesley tells the mountainous boy. “I think it’s lights-out for our adoring followers.”
Rey grins his crazy grin and brushes past Bleak to get a good spot at the railing. He cocks his head to the side at what looks like an uncomfortable angle.
The spotlight bursts, spraying the man operating it with glass confetti. The other lights on the main deck pop one by one until the ship falls into darkness.
Lesley clucks her tongue. “Too dark. I need to see what’s happening on board.”
Rey cocks his head to the other side. Fire bursts out of one of the portholes on the main deck, then another. This sequence occurs all the way down the row of portholes. One of the plumes of fire ignites a crew member. His shrieks echo over the divide, and he spills overboard. He smashes into the ice, where he briefly flails around until his body goes still.
You feel a strange admiration for the boy with the dreadlocks. He’s a creator of explosions—just like you.
As the flames consume the deck of the boat and men with fire extinguishers scurry madly to quell the growing fire, Thorne steps up to the railing.
“Yes,” Lesley purrs. “Blow out the fire for those boys. Pretend their ship is a birthday cake.”
Thorne’s hands unfold as though he’s about to conduct a symphony. His fingers swirl in the air, tracing concentric circles, small and slow at first, then gaining in speed and diameter.
Howling winds pick up over the stern, louder than any jungle storm that you’ve weathered. The clouds over the ship pulsate and twist until two gray daggers emerge. Their funnels grow thicker and longer, and soon the tornadoes touch down on the water’s surface. Instantly the gray vortexes grow dark and pregnant with the ocean waters . . . and then converge on the ship.
The water from the dueling waterspouts does nothing to extinguish the growing fire. Instead, as the waterspouts gyrate and sweep over the deck of the ship, they snatch members of the crew one by one, sucking them up into the heavens. The two tornadoes approach each other on a collision course, and one man who had managed to cling to the railing now leaps overboard.
He makes it only halfway to the ground. His body hangs midair, his descent stopped abruptly as his limbs continue to flail. Then his course reverses as the two vortexes combine into one, and with one last scream he is ripped skyward. You wave at him as he vanishes behind a wailing screen of wind and water.
Lesley kneels next to you as the devastation continues. “Now, Rose, I’m sure this all must come as a shock to you and can’t be easy to watch. But there’s something you should know.”
You want to tell her that it’s not strange to watch at all. To you, death and destruction feel . . . natural.
“Remember the men who captured you from your home? Remember the days when you were forced to starve in that stone castle? Remember the men who chased you day and night through the jungle so you couldn’t even sleep soundly?” Lesley looks sadly into your eyes, and then turns you by the shoulders so that you’re facing the ship again. “The men who are responsible are on that ship.” She pauses significantly. “And they’re coming to get you.”
The other three are watching you now. With their attention diverted, the vortexes are retreating into the sky, and the ice around the ship is melting, and the fire on deck has begun to die. Part of you wants to run, terrified, back to your cabin and cocoon yourself in the hammock for as long as you can.
But then you realize that if the other boat continues to pursue you, you may never be safe. You may never be free.
You may never get home.
And while part of you is crying out, I don’t want to hurt anyone . . .
. . . there’s a second voice even deeper, even louder, even more compelling saying, Yes, I do.
Thorne approaches you now, though he doesn’t kneel next to you like Lesley did. “I’ve heard about you, you know,” he says. “I hear you have quite the gift, that you can open a door between worlds.” His face disappears behind a cloud of cigar smoke, but when it reappears, his eyes are gleaming. “Why don’t you send those men someplace else? Somewhere . . . scary?”
Yes, you think. Somewhere scary.
You step around Thorne, and then past Rey. Bleak moves aside as you approach the railing.
You focus on the residue of hunger, the knot in your stomach from all those days as you starved in the fortress, the feeling of being caged within the concrete walls. You remember the nights when you were curled up in a tree, trying to sleep without a blanket while the jungle rains hammered down on you.
Then you draw in a deep breath and seize control from the wrath of war that has until this moment always been the master of you, pulling your reins whenever it wanted, to punish those both wicked and innocent.
Today you are the master.
Today the wicked shall be punished.
You blink.
Somewhere from deep in the water you hear a muffled boom. For a moment the air around the other ship shimmers and the melting ice trembles. The flames crackle and the breeze goes still.
/> A glow pulsates beneath the ice. Slowly the other ship begins to spin on an unseen axis, like a whirlpool has opened up beneath it.
But this is no whirlpool. The light shining up from the depths explodes outward, puncturing a hole between this world and the next. Where there had been water before, there is now just a jagged rift in the air, a portal to someplace even darker than here.
The hull of the enormous ship drifts uncontrollably toward the black hole, along with all of the water around it. When it reaches the gash in the universe, the ship folds in on itself, metal and wood and flesh imploding into one ball of wreckage.
Then the nugget of destruction vanishes into the depths, carried over the falls into the oblivion below. The rift closes behind it so quickly that a plume of water jettisons upward in its wake, licking the underbelly of the sky. You don’t even flinch as the water rains down on you and the others.
Lesley’s moonlit shadow falls over you. She kneels on the floorboards beside you, wraps her arms around your waist, and squeezes you gently. “Good girl. They’ll never hurt you again. With us you’ll always feast until you’re full, sleep until you’re renewed, and live safely with people who are just like you. You’ll have a place to call home with us in Miami.” She taps you once on the shoulder for each of the last three syllables. Mi-a-mi.
Lesley leans in closer until her breath washes over your tangled black curls. “You have a family now, Rose. And pretty soon, when your big sister, Eve, learns that we’ve found you, she’ll come to visit too.” Lesley smiles uncontrollably. “Yes, she’ll come to see our little Rose Wilde.” She pats your hair, and her last words tickle your eardrum as she whispers:
“Our Wilde Rose.”
Ash woke up with her face pressed against the tile floor.
The airport bathroom rematerialized around her, and her mind migrated from the Gulf of Mexico back to the terminal. From underneath the stall door she could see a pair of—thankfully human—feet standing in front of the sinks. Unless the Cloak had taken to wearing high heels, Ash was probably in the clear.
Ash was grateful to be lying next to the toilet, in case she lost what was left of her food court dinner. She still felt queasy, though she didn’t know whether it was from seasickness or her sudden return from the dream in limbo.
Or maybe it was from seeing her little sister again for the first time since May. The littlest Wilde had appeared to Ash in visions before—all of them visions of destruction like this. But Ash had never actually entertained the possibility of searching for “Rose,” if she was to adopt the admittedly catchy name that Lesley had chosen for her. Young as she was, Rose was clearly more dangerous and capable than the average six-year-old. And even if Ash could trust these visions of a girl she’d never seen with her own eyes, there was the fact that Rose had been in a different country until now, and Eve—crazy Eve—had been so adamant about finding her.
But those had all really been excuses, hadn’t they? Ash had spent the end of her semester trying to preserve the normalcy in her life, and that had selfishly meant finishing out the school year, not scouring the globe for a sister she’d never met.
This new vision only complicated things. One moment, seeing the world through Rose’s eyes, Ash had felt helpless and vulnerable; the next, she’d been forced to watch Rose open up a portal into God knows where, then crumple an enormous boat like a piece of paper.
Paper, Ash thought, rubbing her eyes. She bolted upright and burst out of the stall. The middle-aged woman at the sink jumped when the stall door slammed noisily against the wall. Ash probably looked crazed, coming right at her out of the stall, but she didn’t have time to apologize. “Do you have something to write with?” she frantically asked the lady. “Or write on? It’s an emergency.”
The woman’s hands fumbled nervously in her pocketbook until she produced a Sharpie and a crossword puzzle that had been torn out of a newspaper. She passed them over to Ash and then held up her hands as she backed away. “Just keep them,” she said. Then she disappeared through the bathroom door.
In the yellowed margin of the newspaper, Ash doodled the number that had been on the outside of Rose’s crate on the ship: HV-48967-1. It wasn’t exactly a solid lead, but it was at least a starting point. Ash folded the crossword once, twice, and then slipped it into the pocket of her dirty, torn jeans.
Ash had just exited the bathroom back out into the terminal when the intercom crackled on: “Now boarding rows one through fifteen on Flight 683, nonstop to JFK.”
Ash pulled her mangled ticket out of her jeans. She was row fourteen, but made no move toward gate seven, where the other New York–bound travelers were lining up to board the plane.
Ash knew she stood at a crossroads. On the one hand, she held a plane ticket back to “reality,” back to a pastoral life in the suburbs. There she could live out a predictable, hopefully mythology-free summer, playing bocce with her parents, languishing by the community pool, and forcing some boring but welcome normalcy back into her life.
On the other hand, the Cloak hadn’t provided her with the vision of her little sister for nothing. Rose’s future rested in the hands of Lesley Vanderbilt, a wealthy megalomaniac who had already interfered with Ash’s life once back at Blackwood Academy. In just the short time Ash had interacted with her, Lesley had already proven herself to be both unhinged and violent. As far as Ash could simplify the eighty-year history between the Wilde and Vanderbilt families, Lesley had parasitically suctioned herself to Ash’s life in three not so simple steps:
1) Lesley had inherited the legacy of hunting down Eve, to avenge the grandfather Eve had murdered in the 1920s during her previous life.
2) After mistaking Ash for the Polynesian storm goddess she was looking for, Lesley had endangered Ash, along with Raja, Rolfe, Ade, Lily, and Colt. (Although, in retrospect, Ash wouldn’t hold endangering the last two against Lesley.)
3) And now, because Ash had refused to collect Eve for her, Lesley had kidnapped Ash’s other sister—in hopes of luring Eve out into the open.
Who knew what Lesley had in store for the youngest Wilde? And if those three sadistic gods in the vision were on Lesley’s payroll, who was to say their dark influence wouldn’t mold and corrupt Rose into the same tortured soul Eve had become?
Now Eve was supposedly suffering in the Cloak Netherworld, imprisoned and alone. If Rose could really open a portal into their world like Colt had said, then finding Rose might be Ash’s only hope of rescuing Eve.
Going back home to Scarsdale now would be to forsake both of her sisters. But going to Miami . . .
Change of plans, Ash thought. She unconsciously reached toward the floor for her bag before she remembered that she didn’t have one. Everything she’d brought with them had been in Colt’s saddlebags on the Nighthawk, probably destroyed in the car wreckage.
Ash flipped open her phone, which had two missed calls and a voice mail from home. Her father picked up on the first ring. “Ashline, where the hell did you go?”
“I know where Eve is,” she blurted out. It wasn’t entirely the truth, but it was close enough that Ash felt only the first rumblings of guilt.
There was a long pause on the other end. “Is she okay?”
Well, she’s potentially trapped in hell with some oily creatures that no one seems to understand, but other than that . . . “She’s fine.” After all that the family had gone through, it hurt Ash to have to bend the truth like this. But if she was going to obtain her parents’ blessing to go looking for the other Wilde, she would need to sell this convincingly. “Granted, the lead I have isn’t much—just a city—but I need to go right now.”
“Just tell me everything you know.” Thomas Wilde’s voice bubbled with an excitement Ash hadn’t heard since before Eve had run away the first time. “I’ll take the week off and buy a plane ticket immediately.”
“Dad,” Ash tried to interrupt him.
But her father just kept going. “Gloria,” he said to her mother on the othe
r end of the line. “I need a notepad and a pen!”
“Dad!” This time Ash screamed it, and her father went silent. “I have to go alone. Eve is skittish enough already. If we all show up at her doorstep wearing matching ‘Welcome Home, Evelyn’ T-shirts, she’s going to run again.”
“I’m her father.” He sounded almost angry now. “I’m your father! I’ll be damned if I let my sixteen-year-old daughter go scouring whatever dangerous streets your sister has stumbled into. Now, where is she?”
Ash took a deep breath. This next part was going to hurt. “When Eve came back to Scarsdale, who did she come to first? To you? To Mom?” She paused long enough to let it all sink in. “No. She came to school. To find me. Eve’s been on the lam so long that she’s grown to fear the word ‘home.’ If you don’t let me do this—and now, before she runs again—we will lose her forever.”
“I’ve lost one daughter already. I will not lose another one.” His voice broke, but Ash could hear his will breaking too.
Ash knew she just needed to hammer the last nail home. “Dad . . . without Eve, without my big sister, I might end up lost too.” A tear slipped down her cheek, because between all the lies and half-truths, this much was true.
This time the pause on the other end of the line was interminable. Finally her father’s sigh of defeat was so loud that the receiver crackled on Ash’s end. “You better call your mother and me every five minutes to let us know you’re okay. Just tell me where I need to make the plane ticket out to.”
“I love you, Dad,” she whispered. “The ticket should depart from Portland, Oregon.” She stopped in front of the flight prompter, and couldn’t help but smile a little at the irony—the three-letter acronym for her new city of destination was “MIA.”
M. I. A.
Missing In Action.
“Destination: Miami, Florida.”
Embers and Echoes Page 3
