Wes and Ash walked out onto the eastern terrace, where a multitude of couples had gathered at the railing, overlooking the Atlantic beyond. “I haven’t quite figured out what their payoff is,” Wes said as they started down a staircase toward the water. “As a rule, those of our kind don’t work for humans unless they absolutely have to. It’s against the natural order—gods working for mortals. And for people like Rey, Bleak, and Thorne, who could just burn or freeze or blow their way into a bank vault, money’s not always a good enough incentive. Lesley must have some resource that they need, and in return they offer her protection.”
“For such a well-known businesswoman to keep three gods in her entourage, in plain sight—it’s got to be more than just ordinary protection,” Ash said as she felt the dots slowly connecting in her mind. She thought back to Blackwood, and how the mercenaries that Lesley had sent after Ash and her friends had ended up fertilizer for the redwood forest. Lesley must have smartened up and realized that in order to shield herself from the supernatural, she needed to fight fire with fire. But it wasn’t Ashline specifically that the businesswoman needed protection from. “They must be to protect Lesley from my older sister. Eve and Lesley have a blood feud that goes back nearly a century, to when my sister murdered Lesley’s grandfather during her previous lifetime. Eve would easily electrocute her way through a wannabe Mafia guy like the one who caught you on Lesley’s boat—no offense,” she added when he looked a little offended. “But if Eve comes looking for Rose, expecting to find Lesley helpless, and she finds three violent gods waiting for her instead . . .”
After they reached the bottom of the stairs, they walked over to the edge of the terrace, where the stonework stopped and the water abruptly began. Out in the harbor a stone barge with elegant carvings sheltered the cove from incoming waves. The statues facing the darkening horizon looked as though they’d weathered their fair share of hurricanes.
“Aurora and I have been watching them for months,” Wes said. “See, I’ve only lived in Miami for part of my life, but I’ve come to think of this city as my home . . . the only one I have.” The word “home” made his eyes flicker black, but then he was back in the moment. “Given my special, uh, talents, I took it upon myself to protect the people of Miami. It started with mostly amateur superhero shenanigans—you know, stopping a mugger who was preying on tourists, monitoring the local Mafias. But then Lesley’s new supernatural associates rolled into town and began consorting with a not-so-well-intentioned crime syndicate, so Aurora and I started devoting our nightly surveillance to the three gods, and eventually to Lesley Vanderbilt. I thought we’d gone unnoticed . . . at least until they captured me on the boat. We don’t know much about these gods or their intentions, but lately they’ve been referring to themselves as the Four Seasons.”
Ash snorted. “I thought you said there were only three of them. Can they not count properly, or are they a fan club for Vivaldi?”
“By my count, the three you saw in the villa—sun, wind, and cold—account for summer, fall, and winter.” He shrugged. “Maybe they’ve recruited your little sister as their new spring.”
Ash shook her head. “Spring is about rebirth and new life. As far as I can tell, Rose only brings the tides of death with her. There’s nothing springy or rainy about her—other than the fact that I’m sure she could ruin an outdoor wedding.”
“Well, there’s a good chance that whatever ‘discoveries’ Lesley is presenting tonight have some correlation to your little sister,” Wes suggested.
Ash pulled the invitation out of her purse and gave it a once-over. “I probably should have guessed from the words ‘mythology’ and ‘ruin.’”
Wes turned her away from the horizon by her shoulders and held her out at arm’s length. “Now that I’ve shown you what’s going on behind the scenes, you should also know that I brought you here exactly so you wouldn’t walk right up to Lesley in the middle of a party. You make a false move around here, and next thing you know, Bleak breaks into your hotel room and turns you into a human ice cube tray.”
Ash rolled her eyes. “I’ve got a fuel tank full of magma that would like to see her try.”
“I have to go rendezvous with Aurora now,” he said. “She’s been even more frantic and motherly than usual since I was captured yesterday. As for you, it will be better if we’re not all sitting together when the presentation begins. In the meantime . . .” He snagged two more flutes of champagne from a passing tray and handed one to her. “Have some more champagne.” He motioned to the empty eastern horizon. “Enjoy the backward sunset.” He started to walk away, but came right back to her. “Oh, and go easy on the shrimp.”
Ash attempted to kick him in the shin, but she got snagged on her dress and nearly fell backward into the water.
With Wes gone, Ash lingered at the edge of the bay. The third glass of champagne was beginning to make her feel a bit fizzy and warm. She hadn’t touched a drop of alcohol since the infamous masquerade ball last month, and before that, the night of Serena’s attempted kidnapping. She had begun to associate alcohol with trouble, and even now she was aware of how a gala hosted by her sister’s kidnapper probably wasn’t the wisest time to build a buzz. Time to slow down.
She was stirring her champagne with her ring finger and idly watching the bubbles when she felt a presence behind her. Immediately she had a brief flashback to the Bent Horseshoe, when Colt had introduced himself the exact same way, lurking silently in her shadow while she sat at the bar with her back to him.
Her conclusion: Men who quietly approached you in your blind spot were predatory and never to be trusted.
But when she turned around, there was no one at all—just a couple making their way up the stairs, a series of empty chairs and empty tables, and the lingering odor of a cigar.
Ash turned back to the horizon.
Thorne was standing next to her, a cigar in his mouth and a drink in his hand.
In her surprise the champagne flute slipped right out of her fingers.
Thorne, as quick as the wind itself, dipped and caught the glass before it shattered on the patio below.
“Shit, you spooked me!” she said, unable to compose herself in time.
He handed the champagne glass back to her and took the cigar out of his mouth. “Sorry about that. There’s really no graceful way to approach a woman at the water’s edge when she’s not expecting you.”
“Next time try announcing your presence first,” Ash said. “Anything—even a friendly ‘Nice bum, where ya from?’ would go a long way.” Ash’s hand trembled as she took a long sip from the champagne to calm her nerves. It wasn’t only from the way he’d startled her either. She was having flashbacks to her vision, to the two tornadoes he’d summoned from the sky and how they’d ravaged the disabled ship. While interacting with gods and goddesses was quickly becoming a staple of Ash’s new life, she’d developed a particular phobia for those gods with weather-related abilities . . . like Eve.
“Hector Thorne.” He extended his hand, which she hesitated to take. “Thorne is just a name,” he said. “The hand isn’t actually going to prick you.”
Maybe not your hand, Ash replied silently, but I know a prick when I see one.
Better play along and improvise, she told herself. “Rebecca,” she lied, and took his hand.
“Take a walk with me in the garden, Rebecca?” he asked.
She looked fleetingly to the villa entrance, where Wes had disappeared after he’d left her. This probably wasn’t what Wes had intended by “lay low,” but here was her chance to glean some answers from Lesley’s confidant, who was hopefully just intending to flirt with her. “Fine,” she replied. “As long as you get me back by curfew, or else Papa will get real mad.”
He winked at her. “Don’t worry; I have a way with fathers.” He offered her the elbow of his expensive-looking suit. “Shall we?”
The formal garden was a long plaza consisting of a center island surrounded by a stone-rimmed moa
t, and two lines of oak trees to provide general shade. The rest of the plaza was ornamentally landscaped with jasmine parterres, a series of elaborately designed hedges. In short the garden made the extravagant landscaping of Ash’s neighbors back in Scarsdale look like a nest of weeds and crab apple trees.
“Do you know,” Thorne asked as they walked along the stone path that cut through the parterres, “what the man who built this estate did?”
Ash shrugged. “Did he own Miami’s most popular deli?”
“He made tractors.”
They descended down into the statuary walk, a narrow side garden submerged in the shade of the native hammock trees. Ash felt her danger sensors tingling now that they were moving away from the bustling main villa toward the secluded fringes of the property. “You’re quite the wellspring of facts,” Ash said. “Does that mean you’re a curator here? Or possibly a tractor salesman?”
“James Deering had a fortune, as you can clearly see,” Thorne said, ignoring her questions, “but also the brains enough to know that tractors, much like the rest of us, have short life spans here on earth. A tractor’s motor eventually burns out, and then it sits rusting in a shed for many years, until it gets recycled for scrap metal. The majority of us are one-and-done here after ninety years or so, if we’re lucky. But a great man is someone who wants to leave a legacy, to be immortalized in some way . . . so rather than building just any ordinary home for himself, Deering sank a fortune into creating this villa.”
Ash tried to pick up their walking pace a bit, but Thorne had slowed down to admire the white-stoned statues that lined the path. “Are you suggesting that he built Villa Vizcaya so he could ‘live’ longer?” she asked. “It seems much more likely that he just wanted a place to, you know, hang out and stuff. Have a nice little garden to sprawl out in and read a good book. Maybe throw some bitchin’ parties in the courtyard.”
The corners of Thorne’s lips twitched. “Perhaps,” he mused. “However, there’s no denying that the villa did outlive the man who made it, and weathered a century against the elements after that.” He glanced back in the direction of the villa. “Unfortunately, even this great house will eventually crumble. Maybe it will finally meet a hurricane it can’t withstand. Maybe it will fall into ruin when we do, when there’s no one around to keep up the grounds, and the gardens will become wild and overgrown.”
This talk of mortality—and worse, the undertones of immortality beneath it—were seriously beginning to unnerve Ash. “Everything dies eventually,” she said.
Thorne caught her eye out of the corner of his own. “So true. Yet there are some among us who waste their quickly expiring lifetimes seeking ways to live just a little bit longer.”
“Among us?” Ash didn’t like the way this conversation was proceeding at all.
He ignored her, and his arm tightened around hers, not threatening but enough to lock her hand against his side. He gestured with his cigar to the white statues they were passing on their right, which looked vaguely mythological in origin. “Immortality is like these Veneto statues. Three hundred years old, imported from Italy. Eventually acid rain will eat away at them down to the last pebble. But while the statues themselves may slowly dissolve, the gods and goddesses they depict have lived on in mythology for thousands of years. Flesh and stone may perish, but words, history, ideas—these are the things that live forever.”
At this point Ash could barely stand the touch of his skin against hers as he led them back to the formal gardens, where several party guests were now making their way to the presentation. Ash was just happy to be in the presence of other people again, even if they were debutantes and journalists, distracted by the lush gardens and too human to protect her from a violent wind god.
Thorne stopped them in front of the limestone grotto next to the stairway, a fountain recessed into a little man-made cave. In the shadows she could see that the walls inside the grotto were decorated with jagged stone coral. Two sculpted women guarded the archway.
“The only way we can live on,” he continued, and Ash noted the way he inflected the “we,” “is through belief. The great religions can outlast even the civilizations that practiced them, so long as belief exists. Belief is beauty. Belief is power. Belief is immortality.”
Ash attempted to smile politely at the megalomaniac. She wiggled her arm to see how tight his grip was and whether she had enough leeway to escape. “Riveting as this lecture has been, Professor Thorne, it’s past my curfew.” She raised her champagne flute in a salute to him. “Now it’s time for me to return to my boyfriend.”
Thorne shook his head. “No. Now it’s time for us to stop pretending we’re mortals.”
She tried to lurch away, but Thorne caught her by the loose material of her dress, and he pushed her roughly through the archway of the grotto. Once inside, he slammed her hard up against the wall so that the sharp coral fingers jabbed into her back, and the breath deflated out of her on impact. With him pressing her up against the wall, they were both hidden from any passersby.
“Miami may be a diverse city,” he whispered into her ear, “but the mask on your face didn’t keep me from noticing the striking similarities between you and little Rose the moment I saw you across the room.”
Ash’s hand was still free, so she smashed her champagne flute against the coral. The glass and champagne littered the ground, but she had the daggerlike broken stem pointed at the side of his neck in a second. “Unless you can summon wind in these close quarters,” she growled, “I suggest you back off before I shish-kebab you and serve you as an appetizer to the party guests.”
Grudgingly Thorne released her. “I’m not here to hurt you. If I really wanted to kill you, I would have sent you into the waters back at the villa with a strong gust, and you’d be fish bait for the minnows of Biscayne Bay.”
“That would have been a shame.” Ash raised her makeshift dagger to fill the space between them. “To have my last breath of air be a whiff of ashtray and creepy cologne.”
Thorne bent down and picked up his cigar, which had fallen to the stone floor. He didn’t even wipe it off before he put it back into his mouth and took a long hit. “I don’t know which of the other Wilde girls you are—Ashline or Evelyn—but Lesley Vanderbilt has charged us with finding Eve, so that Lesley can finally avenge her family vendetta against her.” Thorne paused. “However, fortunately for the Wilde family, we have absolutely no intention of fulfilling our end of the obligation. You see, Lesley Vanderbilt is my stepping-stone to the Miami elite, and beyond that, the eyes of the nation—”
“Eyes of the nation?” Ash interrupted. “Do you guys have a sitcom or a variety show that you’re trying to get syndicated?”
Thorne didn’t look amused. “She and her national media connections remain available to me only so long as she doesn’t find Evelyn Wilde, in which case she’ll no longer need us. So here is my ultimatum: Stay away from Lesley, or I will bury you at the end of the earth. Lesley will never be the wiser and will continue to carry out her senseless grail quest to settle her family vendetta.”
“Fine,” Ash said. “Then give me back my little sister.”
This made Thorne chuckle. “You can’t get something ‘back’ that you never had to begin with. No, your little sister is the last cog in a machine I’ve spent the last two years assembling, and if you attempt to remove her, then—”
“Yeah, yeah, you’ll bury me at the end of the earth,” Ash repeated. “You should take some of the money you spent on that dinner jacket and buy some new lines.”
“Enjoy the presentation.” Thorne straightened the lapel of his jacket. “And just remember”—he spread his hands open threateningly—“that killing you would be a breeze.” He vanished out of the archway, leaving Ash alone in the grotto.
It took a few moments of heavy breathing for Ash to realize that she still had the flute gripped tightly in her hand. “Great,” she whispered to herself as she brushed the dust off the back of her dress and stra
ightened herself out. Twenty-four hours in Miami and she’d already interrupted a Mafia interrogation, blown her cover at the villa party, and made quick enemies with a god who made Eve look like a graduate of charm school by comparison. With a long sigh Ash wandered out of the grotto and up to the moat around the central island, where she tossed the broken stem of the champagne glass into the water.
Ash joined the steady procession of visitors heading to “the Mound,” where the presentation was about to start. With all the red masks and white jackets and dresses, they looked like a string of bloody pearls that had been scattered over the emerald garden. As Ash ascended the steps with the others, she spotted Wes on the opposite staircase. He gave her a quick nod but then broke eye contact and picked up his pace.
The Mound was a circular dais elevated above the gardens, sheltered by a ring of tall mangrove trees. The facility had set up enough chairs to accommodate at least two hundred people, and the chairs were all facing “the casino,” a little white open-air house illuminated blue by a series of spotlights. In front of the casino was a projector and screen. But what caught Ash’s eye was the mysterious nine-foot-tall object beside the projector screen, which was shrouded by a curtain. Looked like this presentation was going to be knee-deep in surprises.
Ash chose a seat on the outside, far enough back for her face to get lost in the crowd. On her way over she spotted Aurora. The winged goddess was wearing a white blazer over her dress, with no visible hump over her shoulder blades. Ash made a note to ask her later how uncomfortable it was to fold them up like that.
Thorne, however, was absent, even though the grotto where he’d attacked her was built right into the Mound. In fact, as she scanned the chairs, she couldn’t locate Bleak or Rey, either. Unsettling, to say the least. The three of them probably weren’t off playing Connect Four back at the mansion.
Lesley Vanderbilt stepped out of the casino. The audience stopped chattering and began to clap. From the intensity of the applause, Ash guessed that the guests were all regulars at Lesley’s galas . . . or were at least really psyched to be in the presence of free booze and appetizers.
Embers and Echoes Page 9
