“It’s called dating, Lily!” Ash screamed. “So Rolfe was a player. So you got played. You don’t skewer a boy through the heart for that.”
A new whip slithered out of Lily’s palm, and she slapped the ground with it. Dust mushroomed up into the air. “I did to his heart what he did to mine. Broke the heart of his little bitch, too.” Lily coiled the whip around her arm and pulled it taut. “And I’ll rip out yours as well if I have to.”
Ash cracked her knuckles. Lily would get no sympathy from her. “You’re looking a little tense around the eyes, Lily. Too bad Botox can’t fix your personality.” She held up her hand, which had started to burn. “And it certainly won’t fix what I’m about to do to your face.”
Lily brought her whip cracking down, but Ash released the fireball at the same time. It sliced right through the whip, sheering it in half so that the green tendril wriggled harmlessly on the ground.
The fireball continued on and struck Lily’s bare shoulder, spinning her around in a circle, before it vanished off into the trees.
So it was to Ash’s surprise that a larger, faster fireball whizzed out of the trees, too broad and quick for her to avoid. She lashed out her arm and easily shattered the ball into a million embers—one of the benefits of having fireproof skin—but she had to quickly slap out the miniature fires that had ignited all over her white dress.
Rey sauntered out of the trees with the maniacal grin of someone who wanted to eat her for dinner. Ash was probably the size of his typical meal.
Bleak too marched out from the palms. She rolled up the sleeves of her ivory robe, preparing for battle.
Ash backed away across the maze. Three on one was a game that she would undoubtedly lose, particularly against three gods who were clearly more practiced with their gifts than she was. From what Ash had seen them do on the boat, she was still an amateur by comparison.
Their determined approach was interrupted by a bomb dropping from the sky. Aurora landed in the space between Ash and the three Seasons. She had shucked her white blazer, and her wings were spread at half-mast.
Meanwhile Wes had stealthily approached behind Rey. He tapped the giant on the shoulder. “I think you owe the lady a new dress,” he said.
Rey spun around just as Wes cracked him right in the face. The Incan sun god plunged down onto one knee. Bleak and Lily both turned on Wes, and in turn Ash and Aurora converged on the two women, ready to fight.
“Enough.”
Thorne stood at the end of the garden trail, shaking his head and massaging his face in frustration. “We’re all gods, you know,” he said. “There was no need to turn my garden party into a scene from West Side Story.”
Wes backed away until he was standing next to Aurora and Ash, but he kept his attention locked on Rey, who was rubbing his sore jaw and no longer grinning. “You’re the one who decided to expose all of us to the world,” Wes said. “You’re the one who turned it into good versus bad, us versus them. What were you thinking?”
Thorne waved his hand impatiently. “Smoke and mirrors. Any religion needs to provide three things if it’s going to stick: miracles, answers, and protection from evil, whether it’s real or imagined. Our religion provides all three. And I am its shepherd.”
Aurora spat on the ground. “Sounds like a cult to me.”
“Oh, please.” Thorne rolled his eyes. “‘Cult’ is just another word for a religion you don’t fully understand.”
Ash blew out a small fire that had unintentionally erupted on her shoulder, this one her own doing. “Well, ‘shepherd’ is just another word for a poser who thinks he’s the second coming of Christ. Admit it,” she goaded him. “You started a religion because you wanted more Facebook friends.”
“The gods were put on earth to be worshipped, not to be forgotten. For centuries the humans built shrines for us, made sacrifices to us . . . even fought wars in our names. And now?” Thorne took the cigar out of his mouth long enough to spit on the ground. “Now we’re just a footnote in an ancient-history textbook for some ignorant teenager to sleep through before he goes home to his video games and his crack pipe.”
“Then why don’t you go back to school, become a history teacher,” Ash suggested. “MTV can make an inspirational movie all about how you used mythology to save inner-city teens from drugs and gang warfare.”
“Come.” Thorne turned and motioned for the other Seasons to follow. His cape billowed behind him. “We have better things to do than bloody a century-old garden.”
Rey pointed at Wes with a glowing red finger. “Next time, bogeyman,” he said before he thundered off. Bleak tagged along after him, close enough to be his shadow.
Lily backed slowly away. “You should tell Batwoman and Hercules that friends of yours tend to have short life expectancies.” Then she scampered off into the trees, acrobatically using a low branch from one mangrove to flip up into the canopy. It took all of Ash’s self-restraint not to plunge into the foliage after her.
Ash, Wes, and Aurora stood quietly, bathed in the pale yellow light of the garden’s central lamp. Finally Aurora shrugged and broke the silence. “Well, we can stand around and wait for them to come back . . . or we can go back to the apartment and order Chinese food.” She flapped her wings a few times to stretch, bent her knees, and then launched up into the air. A breeze followed in her wake.
After they had watched her fly away, Wes turned to Ash. “You hungry?”
Ash continued to look at the gap in the mangroves where Lily had vanished. “I’ll eat Chinese—just no fortune cookies,” she said. “After tonight I don’t need a slip of paper to tell me to expect old enemies in a new town.”
Even after seeing Wes’s Cadillac, Ash was unprepared for the luxuriousness of his South Beach apartment.
Actually, as he flipped on the lights to the suite—which took up an entire quadrant of the twenty-four-story complex’s top floor—she thought that “apartment” wasn’t a fitting word at all.
Penthouse. Wes lived in a penthouse.
Wes unfastened his tie and tossed his car keys onto the stainless steel countertop in his kitchen. Only then did he notice that Ash was lingering in the doorway. “What?” he asked. “You can come inside. The carpet isn’t booby-trapped.”
Ash ignored him and kept gawking, but allowed herself a few tentative steps into the penthouse. “It’s just . . .” It was just that the Japanese import furniture, in combination with the interior designer who probably put the room together, might have cost as much as the apartment itself. It was just that the view of Biscayne Bay and downtown Miami out the floor-to-ceiling glass windows was breathtaking even from thirty feet away.
It was just that eighteen-year-olds, even of the superhero variety, didn’t live in places like this.
“What do you think?” he asked.
She shrugged. “It’s okay, I guess.”
He laughed. “Stop acting like you’ve never seen an apartment before and join me on the roof.” He walked toward the corner where a narrow spiral staircase led up into the ceiling. “View’s better from up there.”
“View’s pretty damn good from where I’m standing,” she mumbled, but she followed him up the corkscrew and through the metal door at the top.
The roof terrace was more like an oasis than just a pool deck. The kidney-shaped pool was surrounded by live palm trees that bristled in the warm summer breeze, a breeze that Ash thought was far too pleasant and serene to be anything produced by Thorne.
The two of them walked past a row of beach chairs. Ash, who was still barefoot, gingerly dipped her foot in the pool and gave the back of Wes’s suit pants a tiny splash. He just rolled his eyes and walked up to the glass railing that protected the edge of the roof.
“Crazy night, huh?” Ash stepped up to a piece of railing beside him. “Are you disappointed that you didn’t audition to be one of the Seasons?” She made the mistake of looking straight down, and experienced a quick flash of vertigo. Three hundred feet was a long way down.
Wes smiled. “I’d love to sit in on their poker nights. The Four Seasons are all just so . . . charming. Especially your herbal friend.”
Just the thought of Lily disgusted Ash enough to spoil her view. She turned away. “Lily is a weed. When the time comes, I will happily pluck her for all the things she’s done.”
“No doubt,” Wes replied. “But if she’s the fourth Season, what’s curious to me is what they have planned for the miniature Wilde.”
“Maybe Rose is the god they’re talking about neutralizing while the world watches.” Ash shuddered. “Maybe they want to kill her in some sort of . . . weird performance art, like they put on tonight.”
Wes shook his head. “Not a chance. Thorne may be a lunatic with delusions of grandeur, but if he and his three Mouseketeers want to be championed as heroes by the city of Miami, the last thing he would do is publicly murder a six-year-old—even a dangerous one like your sister.”
“True. And Rose is Lesley’s last poker chip to get Eve back, so there’s no way she’d let that happen.” It sounded more like wishful thinking than fact, but Ash couldn’t bear the thought that she’d come all this way just to see her little sister sacrificed in cold blood.
“But that still leaves the question—if your sister isn’t the ‘cold merciless force coming to Miami’ that they talked about, then who the hell is?”
Ash didn’t respond to this. She had no answer either. Instead she sat down on the lip of the pool and slipped her legs into the water. The bottom of her dress was instantly soaked, but with the burns all over it from Rey’s fireball, even Miami’s finest dry cleaner wasn’t going to salvage it.
Wes kicked off his shoes, then his socks, and rolled his pant legs up until they were cuffed just above the knee. He joined Ash at the water’s edge. Even when he was sitting down beside her, the night god towered a head above her.
“Ashline,” Wes said, and he clasped his hands in his lap. “I want you to move in here.”
“Whoa.” Ash was so blindsided, she nearly slipped off the edge and into the pool. She tried to cover her shock with sarcasm. “I promised Mom I’d have a rock on my finger before I’d move in with a man. Or at least know him longer than twenty-four hours. I’m old-fashioned, you know?”
He flicked water at her. “I don’t mean permanently,” he said, “I mean for however long you’re in Miami.” His tone shifted from playful to protective. “Listen, I’m not going to blame you for losing your temper and blowing your cover tonight, but now you’re exposed. We’re all exposed. And if we have four Seasons of trouble lurking around the city, clearly itching to rumble with other gods, I would feel less antsy if you were a room away from me, and not holed up alone in a seedy motel.”
Ash crossed her arms. “As flattering as it is that you want to play the role of the big brother, I’ve singlehandedly taken on a tsunami and come out the other side alive.” She pulled herself out of the water, letting her legs drip onto the concrete around him. “I don’t need the big bad Aztec sandman to be my gladiator. And, if you can remember way back to yesterday, I was the one who saved your ass.”
Wes caught her by the wrist, firmly but affectionately, as she started to go. “Please,” he said delicately. “Let me rephrase my invitation in a way that would appeal to an independent woman. I would feel a hell of a lot safer myself with my own lava lamp nearby to protect me. Strength in numbers, you know?” He grinned from the left corner of his mouth. “If it sweetens the pot, Aurora is an amazing cook when she’s not flying five towns away to pick up takeout.”
Ash glanced at the light coming out of the door to the apartment, which Wes had propped open with a cinderblock. “Fine,” she agreed at last. She lowered herself back down to the lip of the pool, and couldn’t help herself from sitting closer this time, so that their thighs were touching. She smiled to herself when she felt his muscles tense under the touch of her scorched dress. “But if the Four Seasons come knocking, I call dibs on throwing Lily off the roof.”
“Done,” he said. “I might need you to sponge up any of Rey’s fire too, so I can take another crack at his face.” He looked her up and down provocatively. “Might be nice to see how much clothes he can burn off this time.”
She punched him in the arm. “Jackass. Don’t make me reconsider being your roommate.”
The mention of burning dresses sent her on a flashback to the night of the masquerade ball, the singed remains of her dress after she’d evaporated the tsunami, lying next to Colt on that wet stone. . . .
Don’t, she cautioned herself. Don’t project any memories of Colt onto a guy you just met. Especially one who was handsome and potentially interested, even though he was, regrettably, another god.
“I hope you don’t mind if I ask,” she said, changing the subject, “but how is it that you can afford such a ridiculous penthouse?” She gestured to the vacant chairs lounging around the pool. “And unless you’re paying all the other tenants not to use this beautiful pool deck, I’m going to assume that the whole roof terrace belongs to you.”
She expected him to at least crack a smile, but his expression sobered. He shifted over, putting just an inch between them. It might as well have been a mile. “This all belonged to my father,” he said. In case the way he’d used the past tense had left any room for confusion, he added, “I inherited it.”
“I’m sorry,” Ash whispered. On a whim she reached over and touched his knee. “How recently was it?”
“Three years in August.” He stood up. Ash was painfully aware that he wasn’t offering her a hand to join him. “Make yourself at home. The spare guest room is yours, and you can retrieve the rest of your belongings from the motel tomorrow.” He started around the pool and made it into the stairwell before he leaned out the door and added, “Oh, and tell Aurora to leave some of those crab rangoons out for me.”
As she listened to his heavy footsteps retreat down the stairs, the water she was dipping her feet into suddenly felt frigid and uninviting.
On cue there was a whoosh in the air, and Aurora dropped through the palm fronds overhead, landing in a slight crouch beside Ash. Clutched in each hand was a brown paper bag that smelled enticingly of grease and saturated fat. She was wearing a loose-fitting T-shirt tucked into the waistband of her shorts. “Sorry it took so long,” she apologized between labored breaths. “Our favorite Chinese restaurant is in Fort Lauderdale. Thirty miles, but the food is always worth the flight time, and . . .” She suddenly took notice of Wes’s absence. “Where’d he go? He was sitting right here when I was circling to land.”
Ash turned back to the door. “What happened to his father?” she asked.
Aurora set the bags down on the cement rooftop and sighed. “You asked him, didn’t you?”
“I have a history of asking the wrong questions at even worse times.” Ash added to herself, Or in the case of Colt and Eve, not knowing the right time to ask the right questions.
Aurora’s wings sagged. “Wes’s father was . . . killed.”
“You mean murdered?” Ash asked, sensing Aurora’s hesitation.
Aurora said nothing.
“Did they ever catch who did it?”
“They did,” Aurora said. “And they acquitted him of any wrongdoing.” A pause. “And now he lives in his father’s penthouse.”
THE TIKI BANDITS
1927; New Orleans, Louisiana
You stand in front of the large vault door. The metal is cool to the touch as you caress it, but you leave a trail of warmth as you draw concentric circles around the two dials. You knock three times and let the solid clack of knuckle on metal pulse through the underground chamber. Just from the sound of the knocking, you try to envision the bank vault on the other side, the rows of safety deposit boxes lining the walls, the hoard of gold and cash, hopefully in plain view or stashed accessibly.
Not that accessibility has ever been an issue for you.
The barrel of a revolver presses into the back of your skull. “Not
a move,” the man behind you growls. “I got no problems painting that vault door red if it keeps you on this side of it.”
You turn your head just slightly; you can recognize the gun just by the sound the hammer makes when it snaps into place. “Colt Banker’s Special,” you say. “Thirty-two caliber? You’re not messing around.”
The night guard must sense the mockery in your voice, because he forces the barrel deeper into your neck. “Hands to the ceiling and turn around real slow,” he orders.
You sigh and hold your arms up limply to give the appearance of weakness. You do a little bobbing dance as you turn around to face him. He’s got a horseshoe mustache tipped with the first tinges of gray. His eyes widen when he sees the wooden mask covering your face, with only slits for the eyes and mouth. He can’t be that surprised, though. Drawings of these masks have been appearing in the papers for months now, as far away as Saint Louis.
“So it’s true, then,” he says. His eyes dip to take in your whole body—as if he needs to see the curves hidden beneath your floor-length coat to figure out that you are a woman. “The Tiki Bandits are just a couple of costumed hussies.”
“We’re no suffragettes,” you say, “but we do prefer ‘costumed women’.”
“Shut up,” he barks. “If you’re the door woman, then where’s your torch?”
You cock your head to the side, hoping your wide eyes peering out through the mask will unsettle him. “Torch?”
He motions to the bank vault with his free hand. “All the other vaults were seared clean-through with an acetylene torch,” he says. “Don’t tell me that you’ve just been using a book of matches and a—”
The dim and grimy lightbulb overhead suddenly flickers and dies, interrupting his sentence. The underground foyer falls into darkness. He takes his eyes off you for a moment to examine the bulb.
“Storm’s coming,” you say.
A hand snakes around his neck and covers his mouth. The night guard’s eyes bulge, and he spins his revolver around to intercept his ambusher.
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