Embers and Echoes

by Karsten Knight

  The two guards outside immediately looked perplexed to see the cake being rolled out intact, but Ash was on top of it. “Apparently Ms. Vanderbilt is allergic to tangerine,” she explained. She snagged the two pieces of cake off the cart before Wes dollied it out into the street. “But there’s no reason for perfectly good cake to go to waste. Enjoy, boys.”

  As she left, she overheard one guard say to the other, “Finally this job comes with some perks.”

  After they’d loaded the cart into the back of the van, Ash buckled herself into the passenger seat. “Keep an eye on our hitchhiker,” she instructed Wes. “She’ll be stirring soon.”

  Wes lifted the edge of the sheet and peeked underneath. “Considering how hard you must have negotiated with her to knock her out this long, we might want to have some aspirin ready for when she wakes up. Or at least a slice of cake.”

  “Where to now?” Aurora flipped on the van’s headlights as they rounded a corner and drove out of the Gables by the Sea neighborhood. “I suspect you’ll want someplace quiet and cozy for your date with sleeping beauty?”

  Ash rolled down her window and let the tepid Miami air wash over her face. “As a matter of fact, I know just the place.”

  When Lesley’s eyes flickered open, Ash was patiently sitting across from her in a little wooden chair with her hands clasped between her legs.

  “Where . . .” Lesley mumbled.

  Ash gave Lesley a minute to lasso her senses back in—to recall the remarkably short-lived brawl in the wine cellar, to test the ropes that were tethering her to the stiff wooden chair, to take in the fact that she was sitting face-to-face with the volcano goddess whose family she had vowed to destroy.

  Ash reached under her chair and held out a pastry plate. “Cake?” She pulled it back just a few inches. “Or are you actually allergic to tangerines? Because that would be a hilarious coincidence.”

  Lesley responded only by jerking her hands, which were tied to the chair’s wooden armrests, eventually pulling hard enough that the legs of the chair lifted off the ground. When that proved fruitless, she looked around the inside of the metal container. Then her gaze fell to the floor itself, the soggy carpet over the steel flooring.

  “Ah, yes. This room looks familiar, doesn’t it?” Ash pointed to the hammock that was still swaying in the corner from the sea’s gentle undulations. “This is the four-star cruise ship bedroom that you holed my little sister up in after you kidnapped her.”

  Lesley groaned and attempted to blow a strand of hair out of her eyes. “You say ‘kidnapped.’ I say ‘rescued from certain death.’ Without me Rose would either be jaguar food or target practice for the rain forest militia.”

  “Yeah, and then you inducted her into a cult with sociopathic gods who have lost all touch with reality. At least one of whom is a murderess.”

  Lesley snorted. “Sociopathic gods . . . murderers . . . You could be describing the Wilde family, for all I know.”

  Ash stood up and hurled her own chair at the container wall, where it splintered on impact. Then she seized Lesley by the throat and shoved her back. The chair balanced up on two legs and then crashed back onto the floor, taking Lesley with it.

  Lesley gritted her teeth and squeezed her eyes closed. “See what I mean? You’ve come so far since the days of Lizzie Jacobs.”

  “Where is my little sister, you cradle-robbing psycho?” Ash shook Lesley by her lapel and slammed the back of the chair against the ground again.

  “Where’s your older sister?” Lesley shouted back. “You know what I want. I’ll hang on to the wrong Wilde for as long as it takes if it eventually leads me to the right one.”

  Ash straightened up and took several deep breaths. She thought she’d left her days of violent rage behind her in Scarsdale, but how easily it all came back when someone like Lesley Vanderbilt pushed the right buttons.

  Ash lit a small, hot fire around the length of her pointer finger, and used it to sheer through the bonds that were holding Lesley’s arms in place on the chair.

  Lesley held up her hands, clearly surprised to be free, and rolled off the chair onto her feet. She massaged her rope-burned wrists and regarded Ash suspiciously.

  “Come on,” Ash said, and walked toward the door to the storage crate. “I have a business proposition for you.”

  The two of them walked out to the deck. At first Lesley kept her distance from Ash, as though she were convinced that the volcano goddess was going to incinerate her and toss her charred remains overboard. But as they approached the starboard railing, she seemed to notice that the boat was actually moving.

  Ash leaned up against the railing. Wes had steered the boat out into the open water. The distant lights of South Beach, and beyond that, the Miami skyline, glowed faint to the west. The moon blazed down on the Atlantic from the eastern horizon, sending a snaking oil trail of light over the swells.

  “Eve isn’t coming for Rose,” Ash explained when Lesley finally joined her at the boat’s edge, “because Eve is in hell.”

  “What?” Lesley’s shrill voice cut through the night air just as the engine died.

  “But not for good,” Ash said. “And that’s where I want to make a deal with you: one sister for the other. Eve Wilde for Rose. We believe that Rose can open a doorway into the underworld, and only through that rift can we extract Eve.”

  “That’s convenient. You need Rose first before you can give me Eve. You chose family loyalty the last time over my original proposition. How can I trust you to turn the elder Wilde over to me once you’ve brought her back?”

  Ash gazed down into the moonlit water that was lapping at the hull of the boat. From this close she could taste the salt of the sea, taste the subtle difference between the Atlantic, here, and the Pacific where she’d subdued Eve, where she’d allowed her sister to get dragged into oblivion by a monstrous entity no one fully understood.

  Some tastes you never forgot.

  “Because,” she answered finally, “I was the one who sent Eve to hell.”

  “If I do this,” Lesley said, boiling over from suspicion into excitement, “it will be an open betrayal of the Four Seasons.”

  “But why?” Ash asked. “Rose may be powerful, but at the end of the day she’s still a six-year-old girl. I understand why the Four Seasons needed you to get the attention of the media, but where does a clueless kindergartner like Rose fall into their big picture?”

  “I . . . I overheard them saying something about using her ‘to revisit the past.’” Lesley shook her head. “It doesn’t really matter. As soon as she goes missing, they’ll come for me. And then they’ll come for you.”

  “Let us take care of them,” Ash said. “Which brings me to the catch. I need you to do one other thing for me: The Four Seasons talked about neutralizing a threat, another god. I need to know what they’re planning.”

  Wes and Aurora came out of the cabin just then and joined the circle. Lesley tucked her hair behind her ear as she studied the two newcomers. “They had me buy a small fortune in airtime on a cluster of television networks. From what I understand, they captured some god last week. While the world watches, they’re going to drug and sedate him, so that he’s just lucid enough to use his powers, but too out of it for it to be a fair fight.” She paused. “And then they’re going to sacrifice him.”

  Ash sagged. Gods killing other gods in cold blood? It was Blackwood all over again. New city, new gods, same backstabbing.

  Aurora let her wings unfold and fill up like a sail with the sea wind. “Establishing religion through terror and killing. Sounds like a new crusade.”

  “Where are they holding their victim?” Ash asked.

  “Not even I am privy to that information,” Lesley replied, then eagerly added, “but I can find out.”

  Wes handed her a black cell phone. “There’s one encrypted number programmed into this. Once you find out where he’s being held, pass the information along. Sooner rather than later, so we’re not picking u
p an innocent god’s corpse off a Miami sidewalk after the broadcast.”

  Lesley cradled the phone in her hands. “There’s an old artesian well in Coral Gables, a public pool that my company has roped off for the week while we do restorations. When I have your bush child ready for you, I’ll contact you and we can meet there.”

  “Wait,” Aurora protested. “How do we know she’s not just setting up an ambush, courtesy of her seasonally affected friends?”

  “Lesley’s too smart for that,” Ash said in what she intended to be a half-statement, half-threat. “Because I’m the gatekeeper to what she’s been looking for her entire life. And if she crosses me now, her descendants will have a new Wilde to hunt down . . . for incinerating their grandmother.”

  Lesley nodded absently, but her eyes had glazed over. Perhaps she was fantasizing what she would do when she finally had the prize she’d sought all these years. Or perhaps she was considering how she could possibly contain the untamable beast that was Eve Wilde once Ash delivered her. Either way, she was off in nirvana when she rested her elbows on the railing.

  Only when they’d finally returned to the river marina and docked did the reality of Lesley’s kidnapping seem to sink in. “My people must be on red alert by now. You did,” Lesley reminded Ash, “kidnap me from the middle of a trustees meeting.”

  “Make something up,” Ash suggested. “Tell them you got drunk and went out joyriding in your boat. You seem like a convincing liar.” Ash slapped Lesley on the back with enough force to make her stumble all the way down the gangplank to the marina deck. “We’ll see you and Rose at that old pool at midnight tomorrow . . . and not a minute later.”

  The three of them watched Lesley go, before Wes asked the one question Ash had been thinking herself. “Do you really intend to trade one sister for another?”

  Ash pulled out the cell phone she’d be using for her communication with Lesley. “Not if I don’t have to. I wouldn’t be too worried about Eve, though. If there’s one thing you should know about my sister, it’s this:

  “Even hell is too small to hold her for long.”

  Celebration was in order, if only because Ash had successfully completed her first kidnapping and no one had ended up dead.

  Although, the thought of Thorne possibly freezing to death in the wine cellar was an admittedly pleasant one.

  The thought of Thorne and Lesley “together,” however, was not.

  Aurora dragged Ash and Wes to a small club in Little Havana called El Cielo Cristal, a Venezuelan bar along Calle Ocho. The interior wasn’t much to look at—a long bar in front of a dingy mirror—but the true appeal was the salsa band performing on the small stage. The open-air seating had all been pushed aside to form a dance floor, where a large mass of dancers was churning to the sultry music. Overhead the metal rafters were strewn with a thick webbing of white holiday lights.

  To Ash the romance of string lights had long since faded. Now they summoned only flashbacks to the Shelton Inn and the night of the fire and Rolfe’s death, a memory that kept resurfacing like an apple bobbing to the top of a dark barrel. No matter how hard she pushed the memory down, the littlest triggers kept buoying it to the front of her mind.

  Wes almost immediately spotted somebody he knew—from the way the other man carried himself, Ash guessed he was the owner—so Ash and Aurora sidled up to the bar by themselves.

  Aurora tapped on the bar to get the bartender’s attention. “Tres avocado coladas, por favor.”

  The bartender snickered a little bit and said, “But of course.”

  Aurora puckered her lips when she turned to Ash. “I’ve lived in Miami four years, and my Spanish still makes the natives laugh.”

  “At least you don’t get carded,” Ash said.

  Aurora tugged at the black cardigan over her shoulder. “Probably because hiding the wings requires an elderly fashion sense sometimes. Tough to look stylish and sexy when you have a nine-foot wingspan that needs to go unnoticed.”

  Ash clinked martini glasses with Aurora in a toast and said, “On the bright side, wings make it easier to pull off the angelic look.”

  Aurora shook her head and laughed under her breath. “Do you carry around a book full of these jokes, or do you pull them all out of your ass?”

  Ash took a sip of the colada, which, between the pea-green complexion of the liquefied avocado and the coconut shavings on top, could have been sludge from the Miami sewers. So it was to her surprise when she liked it—the soft chill, the sweet kick of lime juice. But then the harsh undercurrent of rum hit her and she began to cough.

  Aurora clapped her on the back a few times. “Easy there, tiger. I was just trying to give you a little liquid courage before Wes drags you out onto the dance floor.”

  “I am not,” Ash said determinedly as she cleared her throat and pointed to the throbbing mass of people, “going out there.” The last time Ash had danced with a boy, Eve had crashed the party. Even though this bar seemed safe enough, she still equated dance floors with hostage situations and death.

  “Oh, yes, you are,” Aurora said. “The looks that you and Wes have been exchanging the last forty-eight hours are so hot that I’m surprised you don’t need sunglasses to keep from getting pregnant.”

  This time Ash spit her colada all over the bar top.

  Aurora smiled at her. “Protest all you want like the delicate fire flower that you are, but when he finally comes up behind you and asks you to dance, we both know you’re going to accept with a nervous giggle, and then you’re going to set fire to the floor.”

  Ash waved apologetically to the bartender, who had trudged over to swab her spewed colada with his dishrag. “Careful when you use fire metaphors,” Ash said to Aurora. “When I’m involved, they end up less figurative than you’d think.”

  Aurora twisted in her bar stool. Her attention seemed to be gravitating toward the far end of the bar, where a younger Hispanic man, maybe a college student, was casting unabashed glances in her direction.

  “I’m surprised you and Wes don’t date,” Ash said. “Two gods, both attractive, under the same roof, good rapport.”

  “Love is not a checklist, and love is not convenience,” Aurora said whimsically. “Maybe in a different time. But sometimes people know far too much about each other for romantic feelings to ever take root.”

  Ash frowned. “What do you mean?”

  Aurora finally took a break from her amorous eye contact with the dark stranger. “When Wes and I first met, I was a sixteen-year-old girl in a bad relationship with a forty-year-old man. An . . .” She struggled with the word that came next. “Abusive relationship. Wes was convincing me to get out of there, but I was a teenage girl in a big city with nowhere to go. And once I make the decision to let a lover see the wings, to know the truth about me . . . well, that’s a lot to walk away from.”

  “You don’t have to go into this if you don’t want to,” Ash said.

  Aurora just waved her hand and peered into the mirror behind the bar. “The night when I finally tried to leave, it got ugly. He hit me. I blacked out. But when I woke up . . . I was lying in a bed in Wes’s bungalow with a cold compress on my head. All my stuff—what few things I owned—was all moved in. Wes never said a word about what happened back at my ex’s place, or how he’d known where to find me. All I know is that when I worked up the nerve to stupidly go back to the old apartment—just to see, you know?—a Realtor was showing it to a family. He was gone.”

  “I’ve found myself in some sticky situations with boys before,” Ash said slowly, as Colt’s face flashed through her mind, “But nothing even remotely as traumatizing as that.”

  “I’m still here,” Aurora said, “and I’ll never again take for granted finding a good man like Wes . . . especially one that you can confide in about your supernatural shit without him threatening to call The X Files or Men in Black. So go ahead and play hard to get if you want—a little HTG never killed anyone—but for crying out loud, when he asks yo
u to dance, take him up on it.”

  “Speak of the devil,” Wes said delicately from where he had snuck up behind them.

  “I’ll leave you two kids alone.” Aurora handed Wes his drink and abandoned her bar stool. “There’s a beautiful Cuban man at the end of the bar who seems to want to tutor me on my Spanish. Lord knows I need it.”

  “Yes, you do,” Wes agreed, and Ash wasn’t entirely sure he was referring to her Spanish fluency.

  He took a sip of his colada and made a face. “Every time we come here, she orders me the same damn thing. Aurora is the type of person who wants somebody to like something because they should, not because they will . . . even if they don’t care for it in the first place.”

  Ash prodded the coconut shavings in her drink with her straw and smiled softly. “I’m not convinced her radar is as off as you think.”

  The band started up with an up-tempo number. The brasses made a triumphant entrance by themselves before the bass and congas began to thump away beneath them.

  “This is my favorite song.” Wes pushed the remainder of his nearly full drink across the countertop and proceeded to drag Ash out to the dance floor.

  Ash let her feet drag only a little. It was a half-assed protest, and she knew it.

  The other dancers graciously let the large night god and his companion through, but then sealed back in behind them. Wes didn’t stop until they were completely encapsulated by the crowd. Ash looked anxiously at the wall of shoulders surrounding them. “Gah—no exit!”

  “Just relax,” Wes replied, and added in his best cheesy voice, “Let your body succumb to the rhythm of the music!” He concluded his sentence with a flourish of his hands.

  “Oh, my God. First of all”—Ash glanced around, embarrassed—“never do jazz hands in public ever again. And second, the only salsa that I know is the kind that goes on tortilla chips.”

  “No one here is studying to see if you trained in Latin ballroom.” Wes circled around the back of Ash. “The good news is that if Polynesian women and Latin women have anything in common, it’s this: They’re both known for their almost paranormal ability to move their hips.”