Embers and Echoes

by Karsten Knight

  She slipped into her sandals and watched Wes pile a brown paper bag full to the brim with groceries out of one of the cupboards. “Is this friend of yours . . . hungry?” she asked.

  He sifted through the contents of the bag to make sure everything was there, comparing it to a handwritten list on a yellow piece of paper. “Let’s just say she’s sort of a shut-in.”

  Half an hour later they had pulled into a parking lot on Key Biscayne, an island south of the city connected by bridge to the mainland, and they’d set a course down a palm-lined walkway that led to the beach.

  After a long trek down the narrow shoreline, which was sparsely populated with families and couples, Wes pointed toward the cape’s southern extremity. At first Ash thought he was gesturing to the tall white lighthouse looming over the beach, but then he set out for a lone gray beach umbrella. A single occupant sat within its shadow, a Latina girl with aviator sunglasses that covered half her face, and black hair so long it brushed the sand when she turned to look at them. She wore a daffodil sundress, and her tan arms were sun-spotted from overexposure. Ash wondered exactly how long she’d been sitting out on this beach.

  “I thought you said she was a shut-in,” Ash whispered as they approached.

  Wes shifted the bag to his other side. “I guess she’s technically a shut-out. Call the grammar police, why don’t you.”

  “If it isn’t my personal grocery delivery service,” the girl sang. She lowered her shades just slightly when they neared her.

  Wes placed the groceries next to her beach chair. “Right to your front door.” He kissed her on either cheek. “How’s the view?”

  He was of course talking about the unobstructed view of the Atlantic, but the girl was staring right past him at Ash. “The view is just beautiful. You brought me a girl toy?”

  Wes exploded with laughter, which only intensified when he saw Ash’s rose-tinged ears. “She’s not an escort, Ixtab,” he said, pronouncing her name “Esh-tawb.” “Ash is a new friend, and the goddess of—”

  “I know who Ashline Wilde is,” Ixtab interrupted him. “Or should I say Pele?”

  Ash, who was growing more unnerved by the moment, took an uneasy step backward. “Have we . . . met?”

  Ixtab slowly pulled herself to a standing position and stepped into the sun. “You haven’t met me, but I’ve met you. Twice, in fact.” Before Ash could even piece together a question, Ixtab’s body stiffened all at once. Her expression melted into nothingness, and even though Ash couldn’t see behind her sunglasses, she could tell that Ixtab’s eyes were staring somewhere . . . else.

  Ash waved her hand in front of Ixtab’s unmoving face just to be sure. Then she leaned around and shot a frantic look at Wes for help. “Is she epileptic or something?”

  Wes was frowning too, but he wasn’t even looking at Ixtab. Instead he was watching Ash with some concern. “She’s the goddess of the gallows,” he explained. “She comforts those who have died from violence or suicide during their final moments as they . . . pass over.”

  At least that explained how she’d seen Ash before—once at the death of Lizzie Jacobs, and then again when Lily had murdered Rolfe. It also explained why Wes was looking at her as though she were a total stranger. “Do you have any normal friends?” she asked, hoping it would snap him out of it.

  “Do you?” he shot back.

  Ixtab bristled, back in the moment with them. She removed her sunglasses and massaged the bridge of her nose. Despite the ninety-degree weather of the beach, she was shivering.

  “You were gone a long time,” Wes said. “Was it a bad one?”

  Ixtab answered by walking back under the umbrella and rifling through the bag of groceries. While they watched, she sorted through the items on top—a pint of strawberries, a box of granola—until she found what she was looking for beneath. “Aha!” she exclaimed, and held up a box of heavily processed cream-filled chocolate cupcakes. “I’ll never understand why you continue to hide these beneath the healthy stuff. Just leave them on top.”

  Wes crossed his arms. “Because there’s no god of good nutrition around to watch over you.”

  She unhooked a can of cola from a plastic ring and tossed it to Wes, who snatched it out of the air. “Take a walk,” Ixtab said, and nodded to Ash. “Hot stuff and I need to have some girl talk.”

  “Fine.” His can of soda hissed as he cracked the top. He held it up in a lazy salute and walked off. “Don’t corrupt Ash while I’m gone.”

  “Oh, please.” Ash kicked a clump of sand at him, even though he was already out of projectile range. “She can’t do anything to me that six months of isolated boarding school life didn’t already do.”

  Ixtab raised an eyebrow. “You sure about that? Even you look skeptical.”

  Ash pointed to the six-pack. “Just pass me a soda.”

  Ixtab laughed and did as she was instructed, prying one loose for herself as well, but Ash couldn’t help but notice that Ixtab’s smile was stale, as though her face would crack like mud under a hot sun if she laughed too hard. “You’re funnier in person,” Ixtab said. “But then again, they always are.” She glanced down the beach, to where Wes was getting smaller as he headed for the lighthouse.

  “You didn’t exactly see me in my shining moments.” Ash settled down into the sand, taking refuge beneath the relative cool of the umbrella’s shade. “So how often does . . . it happen?”

  “Depends.” Ixtab sipped her cola and wiggled until she found a comfortable position in her chair. “Usually it’s instantaneous, sometimes a couple of seconds. It will no doubt happen many times throughout this conversation, and you may not even notice. But if it’s really bad . . . well, for those I’ll be gone as long as a minute. It all really depends on how far the victim has to go to find peace.”

  “But where do you take them?”

  “Darling.” Ixtab coiled her long hair around her finger. “I’m not a flight attendant. I have no clue where my passengers are going. It’s not like I’m sunnily announcing over the intercom, ‘It’s seventy-three degrees and cloudless in Tampa. Please watch your step as you de-board, and enjoy your afterlife.’ In fact, it’s more about helping them come to terms with leaving this life behind than it is preparing them for whatever the hell lies beyond it.”

  Ash slipped her fingers into the sand, through the warm top layer into the cool, moist depths beneath. Rolfe would have been in heaven here.

  “I’m sorry,” Ixtab said. She removed her sunglasses and studied Ash with genuine concern. “I’m sure you’d just like to know that Elizabeth and Rolfe have gone on to a better place now.”

  “You remember their names?”

  Ixtab bowed her head. “I remember all of their names. When you’ve stood beside someone in their final moments, shared that sort of emotional intimacy with them . . . how can you ever forget?”

  “Do you come out here to be alone?” Ash gestured to the beach, which was gradually filling up with families. “If that’s the case, I’m sure you could find someplace more isolated than a public beach in Miami.”

  Ixtab shook her head. “When a person experiences violence, whether they’re the victim, the perpetrator, or—like you—just a witness, they’re indelibly marked by that moment.” A little girl with golden curls, no older than four, skittered by just then, wildly swinging a sand pail as she went. Her mother trotted after her, laughing the whole way. Ixtab smiled faintly. “I don’t come here to get away from everyone. Just to be around those who haven’t yet been scarred. Also,” she added, “the whisper of the ocean reminds me that I’m back, keeps me grounded in reality even while my mind is racing off to the corners of the globe to clean up humanity’s mess every four seconds.”

  Ash drilled her soda can into the sand. “You must see our kind a lot.”

  “Sometimes, when sleep finds me, I see flickers of violence from my previous lives. Ancient wars, cities conquered, bloody crusades . . . and our people are always there. Sometimes on the front lines, bu
t often in the shadows.” Ixtab breathed deeply. “The gods are born with every power imaginable. The power to control fire, to control storms. Power over the night and over the day. The power of life and death. It seems like the only ability that we lack is the power to not kill each other. This has happened every generation, and if there’s one sure thing I can tell you, it’s that this will continue to go on until our sun goes dark.”

  Ash thought back to what Colt had said about the Cloak, that they were not only blocking the gods’ memories from returning with each new life, but potentially interfering with their reincarnations as well.

  Maybe, she thought, the world would be a better place without us.

  Maybe we shouldn’t come back.

  “Funny,” Ixtab continued, “how so many mythologies have gods of war, and so few have harbingers of peace.”

  “Just because ‘peace’ doesn’t come in our job title, doesn’t mean it’s not in the job description,” Ash said. “One of the reasons I came to Miami is because I’m tired of being a witness. Watching two people die while I stood by helplessly was enough for one lifetime. Hell, it’s enough for all of them.”

  A figure approached from the direction of the lighthouse—Wes, who had apparently decided that their time for “girl talk” had expired, although their discussion had wildly departed from talk of clothing and boys.

  Ixtab was watching him as well. “I sent Wes away so we could talk freely. It’s not my place to share with him any details of your history that I’ve witnessed. But the two of you are kindred spirits in more ways than you can imagine. You both seek peace, and I fear that is why you both may never find it.”

  “I’ll do whatever it takes not to make a third appearance in your visions,” Ash said firmly.

  Ixtab turned so fast on her that Ash flinched and tipped over her soda. “What I’m telling you,” Ixtab said with authority, “is that for you to find peace, there may come a time when you will have to see me again. One way or the other.”

  Wes ducked under the umbrella. “You two need a few more minutes, or are the boys allowed to play now?”

  Ash just watched the pool of spilled cola slowly sinking into the sand. The oval silhouette it left could have been a surfboard.

  “Where’s that beautiful songbird of yours?” Ixtab purred, her gloomy demeanor gone.

  “Aurora’s at work,” Wes said. “And she’s still straight.”

  “Damn.” Ixtab slouched back into her seat and let out a long sigh. “One of these days that girl’s going to realize what she’s missing out on.”

  With a shudder Ixtab’s hand went slack on the armrest and her head drooped to the side. Her sunglasses dropped to the sand. Something about the distance in her unseeing pupils led Ash to believe that Ixtab wouldn’t be back for a while this time.

  Ash stood up and reached into the grocery bag. She pulled out one of the plastic-wrapped cupcakes and set it down on Ixtab’s armrest. “For when she returns,” Ash explained to Wes.

  On their way back to the car, Ash maintained a brisk pace, so much so that at one point the much taller Wes had to jog to catch up with her. “Wait,” he said, and grabbed her by the arm. “Where’s the fire?” He laughed after he said it. “I guess you would know if there was one.”

  Ash barely heard him. A plot was growing in her like a wild vine. “Where does Lesley Vanderbilt live?”

  He squinted at her, then glanced back down the beach toward where Ixtab’s camp was. “What exactly did Ixtab say to you?”

  “She just reminded me that I’m not here for spring break. That I’m not here for me.” And it was true. Back in California, Ash had been so inwardly focused, so preoccupied with preserving the last remnants of her normal mortal life, that she’d missed the little details that could have prevented so much pain—the poison building up in Lily before she cracked, all of Colt’s red flags. If she’d taken action before the actions of others had come to her. Well, she wasn’t going to make that same mistake again. “So where does Lesley live?”

  Wes hesitated. “Coral Gables,” he said quietly. “It’s no secret where her hacienda is. But do you really think she’s keeping your little sister in her own mansion?”

  “I’m not going there to look for my sister,” Ash replied. Finding her sister was the endgame, but what she needed for now was a starting point. She needed the element of surprise. And there was still one person in Miami who didn’t know she’d arrived. “I’m going there to kidnap Lesley Vanderbilt.”

  Kidnapping Lesley Vanderbilt the same night she’d decided to throw a large dinner party was, Ash realized as they pulled up outside Lesley’s hacienda, less than ideal.

  After manipulating some of Wes’s contacts within the Vanderbilt empire, they had gleaned inside information that Lesley was hosting a board of trustees dinner at home. So much for an in-and-out kidnapping.

  “This is a horrible idea,” Aurora reminded them for the third time as they walked around to the back of the van they’d rented. “Entertaining, possibly ingenious, but ultimately horrible.”

  Ash slipped the black apron over her head and pointed to the FORBIDDEN SWEETS BAKERY decal they’d applied to the side of the otherwise plain vehicle. “Why? You don’t think Lesley has a sweet tooth?”

  “I don’t care if she’s a sugar fetishist. She has four supernatural bodyguards who’d like to see you filleted and served for supper.” Aurora opened up the back door of the van and pointed at Wes, who was sitting patiently inside next to a very elegant four-tiered tangerine-colored cake. “I can’t believe you of all people are supporting this plan, Wes.”

  “Oh, come on.” Wes nodded to the towering bakery creation next to him. “It will be a piece of cake.”

  “I can’t believe you just said that,” Ash said. “I’m actually embarrassed for you.”

  Wes responded by grabbing a handful of flour from the bag on the cake’s pushcart and slinging it at Ash. It caught her fully across the chest, exploding in a fine white mist. When Ash was done coughing, she touched her hair and then looked down at her apron, which was coated in flour. “What the hell, Wes? Our plan didn’t involve me looking like a powdered donut.”

  “Now it looks like you’ve actually been baking the cake yourself, and not that we took it off the hands of Miami’s finest bridal bakery.” He hopped down off the back of the truck and ran a finger along the side of her forehead. His fingertip came away white, and he sucked his finger for good measure.

  “You are such a child,” Aurora said. “He also puts his elbows on the dinner table, FYI.”

  Ash tried to shake the rest of the flour from her hair. “I bet he plays with his food, too.”

  Wes winked at her. “What do you think I was just doing?”

  The cake cart, complete with the cake on top, must have weighed a hundred pounds easy, but since it was after nightfall, Wes was able to single-handedly lift the dolly and place it on the ground.

  Aurora gave them a three-fingered salute. “I’ll have the car idling for when you come racing out of the hacienda after this plan inevitably explodes in your face.”

  “Trust me, if there are any explosions,” Ash said, “they’ll be on purpose.” She slammed the back door closed.

  Ash and Wes, decked out in their aprons and baker’s hats, wheeled the enormous cake up to the front entrance of the hacienda. The doors were wide open to let in the fresh Miami air, but there were two men in suits posted to either side of the entrance. Fortunately, neither guard was a member of the Four Seasons. As long as Thorne had kept his word and said nothing about Ash to his boss, they were safe.

  One of the guards peeled away from the wall and stepped into their path. “Catering got here two hours ago,” he said. “They didn’t say they were expecting a cake.”

  Ash gestured back to the van. “This is a Forbidden Sweets delivery. A four-tiered tangerine-glazed dark chocolate cake for Lesley Vanderbilt, on behalf of Mario De La Cruz of the Miami Ledger. He sends his compliments on last night’s s
uccessful—”

  “Yeah, yeah.” The guard yawned, stepped aside, and waved her through. “Just leave it in the kitchen and let catering divvy it up to the aristocrats.”

  “Let them eat cake,” Ash said regally as they pushed the cart up the ramp and over the hump that marked the hacienda’s threshold. Both the guards laughed.

  Lesley’s hacienda was like a smaller version of the villa where they’d held the presentation the night before—but not smaller by much. The walls of the entrance foyer curved right up into vaulted ceilings, made of adobe that looked as though it could have come straight out of a kiln. The hall was lined with plants potted in turquoise vases. Strangest of all, Lesley seemed to have completely shunned electricity, since the hallway was dimly lit by candles on tall brass candelabras.

  Wes slowed the cart down to take in the clay-tiled hallway. “I’m just waiting for Zorro to pop out from behind a pillar,” he whispered. “Does she have some weird fixation on the way things used to be?”

  Ash ran her finger over the wick of a candle as they passed. It’s something she’d always done for a thrill when she was a kid, an irony she could appreciate now. “Considering the lengths she’s been going to to get her hands on Eve—all to avenge a grandfather who died eighty years ago and whom she never met—I don’t think an obsession with the old days is out of the question.”

  They turned a corner and came to a sweeping staircase that ascended to the upper floor. If the second story had even half the square footage of the first, Wes would have a lot of ground to cover. Somehow she’d convinced him to do a sweep of the upper floors to search for any trace of the little Rose, or at least something that might point them in the right direction. In the meantime Ash would carry out her plan to wrangle Lesley Vanderbilt.

  Wes rolled the cake cart to a stop and surprised Ash by seizing her hands. “You sure I can’t convince you to switch roles with me?” Wes ducked down so that they were on eye level with each other. “Maybe it makes sense for you to search for your sister, since you know what she looks like.”