Embers and Echoes

by Karsten Knight

  “Yeah.” Aurora’s wings twitched. “I’ll just throw on my three-piece swimsuit.”

  “I met a Mayan goddess the other day who seemed like she’d really love a visit from you.”

  Aurora choked on her cereal. “Oh, Ixtab. Girl’s a sweetheart, but I think she’s waiting for my love life to get bad enough that I switch teams.” She paused. “Given my track record, it’s not the most absurd prediction she could make.”

  Ash eyed the folded newspaper on the sofa, and the film of orange juice pulp on a recently used glass. “Where’s the man of the house this morning?”

  “Gym in the basement,” she said.

  Ash raised an eyebrow. “Wes is lifting weights? But doesn’t he already have . . .”

  “I know,” Aurora said. “He’s been working out down in the cave for three hours already. That’s long even for him.”

  “Should I check on him?”

  “Yes,” Aurora replied. “But leave the carnation here.”

  Ash cringed.

  It took minimal searching to find the gym in the basement, a blessing after two days of operations that required her to know floor plans in enemy territory. In fact, Wes was one of the gym’s only male occupants, and the only person at all who was actually using free weights. The rest of the residents were on the treadmills and ellipticals that lined the wall, everyone hypnotized by their iPods and the wall of flat-screen televisions.

  Wes, however, was without an MP3 player. His concentration instead remained on a fixed point in the ceiling as he lay flat on a bench doing flies with dumbbells. After observing firsthand his strength and stamina over the last few nights, it was odd to see him breaking a sweat doing something so . . . human.

  “Need a spot, brah?” Ash asked as she stepped into his light.

  Wes finished his last rep and then dropped the sixty-pound weights to the floor. The thud of the dumbbells against the foam mats made Ash jump.

  “Depends,” Wes said. When he sat up, his sweat-glazed shoulders bulged under his black muscle shirt. “Do you think you can handle these iron weights without smelting them?”

  No, she thought. In fact, if I keep looking at you, those weights will be syrup on the floor by the time I’m done with them. She kept this thought to herself and averted her eyes. “My control is getting better by the day.” She toed the dumbbell and let it roll across the mat. “Speaking of powers, isn’t all this weight lifting sort of . . .”

  “Overkill?” he finished for her.

  “I was going to say ‘pointless.’”

  Wes picked up the weights and waddled over to the weight rack to return them. “Summer nights in Miami last ten hours. That leaves fourteen hours a day when I am powerless and abandoned to my own ‘natural’ defenses.”

  Ash snorted. “Christ, you are a vampire.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” She cleared her throat. “So as soon as the sun sets, you get this absurd strength from the moon—”

  “Night,” he corrected her.

  “But you actually have to bulk up and retain your own muscle for as long as the sun is overhead. Even when you’re indoors in the garden level gym of an apartment complex, safe from the UV rays.”

  He stretched his fingers toward his toes. Even folded in half, he was still practically Ash’s height. “Listen,” he said. “You can’t try to find a compromise between the gods and science. Science don’t want nothin’ to do with us, ya hear?” he added with a twang.

  “Easy there, varmint,” she said. Ash felt weird just standing around while Wes was clearly intent on working out, so she wandered over to the weight rack and picked up a dumbbell to do some curls. Even though she hadn’t been to the gym since she’d left Blackwood, the weights felt strangely feathery in her hands. “There’s some coexistence of science and gods going on,” she said as she began to curl. “My sister can summon storms, but on a day like today Mother Nature produces the thunderclouds all by herself, the good old-fashioned way. Still . . . you never know.”

  She noticed that Wes had stopped stretching to gawk at her while she lifted.

  “What?” The rhythm of her movements slowed down until she lowered the weights to either side and tossed them to the floor.

  “Just reconsidering letting you spot me.” His eyes dropped to her arms. “You’re handling those like they’re made out of paper. What sport did you say you played again? Bodybuilding?”

  She drilled him in the arm with a quick punch, enough to make him stagger back. “Varsity cage fighting,” she replied.

  He rubbed his arm and laughed. “Guess I better stay on your good side, at least as long as the sun is up. You must have broken a few hearts and heads back where you’re from.”

  The mention of broken hearts conjured a chilly silence. Ash shivered in the gym’s heavy air-conditioning. No doubt Wes was picturing Colt’s appearance the night before as well. As if to confirm this, he lumbered over to the rack that had the heaviest weights.

  Ash stepped in front of him to block his way. “Look, I’m sorry about last night. Goddess or mortal, it’s every girl’s nightmare that her ex will show up while she’s hanging out with another guy.”

  “You don’t owe me an explanation or an apology,” Wes said. “I’ve known you for four days.” He tried to head for the bench press again.

  She cut him off. “Wes, we can play the game where we pretend that there’s nothing going on between us; it’s not like I haven’t played it before. But this is me offering you a free one-way ticket past the bullshit.”

  Wes ran a hand through his hair, and when he finally made eye contact, the whites of his eyes clouded dark. “I’m not pretending like I don’t feel anything. I’m not pretending that, from the moment you saved me from that humidor, I haven’t been thinking about you as something more than just my rescuer. But seeing that guy last night reminded me that four days—no matter how much feeling they bring with them—can never compete with what I suspect is a long history.” He paused. “A very long history.”

  “Everything begins with a few days, Wes,” she said. “And besides, whatever happened between Colt and me, it’s . . .” Somewhere in her throat a whirlpool opened up and sucked the word “over” down into the abyss.

  Ash’s pocket vibrated, saving her, and the cell phone chirped out the familiar ring tone of “In the Hall of the Mountain King.”

  “Someone calling for a second date?” Wes asked.

  “No.” She flipped open the top, silencing the music, and read the text message on the screen. It was an address for somewhere in north Miami Beach, along with a floor and room number. There was no explanation provided, but no explanation was necessary.

  “Lesley just coughed up the location of the Four Seasons’ sacrificial victim,” she said. “Good thing freeing imprisoned gods is my specialty. You ready to break a few laws?”

  He smiled for the first time since the conversation had turned to Colt. “Kidnapping . . . grand theft boat . . . What’s one more breaking-and-entering charge at this point?”

  “Better sharpen your crowbar, then,” she said. “We strike at nightfall.”

  They didn’t wear all black, or panty hose masks, or, for that matter, bring crowbars with them on their mission to rescue the sacrificial god. Ash decided that since they were striking just after dark, it was probably best if they dressed normally so they could at least play the “oblivious teenager” card if caught. Their plan was fairly straightforward: Ash and Wes would enter the building from the ground level, while Aurora would do aerial reconnaissance outside in the rain, which had unfortunately developed into a downpour just as they’d arrived.

  Given that Lesley had supposedly sent them to the location of a captured, sedated god, Ash expected the address to belong to some sort of maximum-security fortress. Instead Lesley had directed them to the top floor of a luxury condominium, not unlike the one where Wes lived. There were no guards at the building’s entrance, unless you counted the concierge, who didn’t even l
ook up from her desk as Wes and Ash walked through the lobby to the elevators.

  The two of them stood in the elevator in silence. Ash was watching the numbers over the door light up one at a time, while Wes was boring a hole in his own warped reflection in the brass doors. Their conversation had suffered all afternoon. It could have been nerves about the rescue mission that they were blindly walking into, with no advance knowledge of the room’s floor plan or security. Or maybe he was still picturing where he fit into the equation with her and Colt—watching helplessly from the outside? Or lodged somewhere in between?

  “Isn’t flying around outside at window-level just asking for someone to see you?” Ash asked, breaking the silence.

  “With the weather like it is, hopefully not too many people are staring dreamily out at the Miami skyline,” Wes said. “And Aurora has a few years of practice flying stealthy.”

  “Should we be worried about lightning?”

  “Trust me.” Wes drummed his finger against the brass doors. “She currently has the least dangerous job of the three of us.”

  The elevator chimed and the doors parted.

  The hallway was completely quiet except for the tap of the rain on the skylight. They followed the red stripe in the carpet to a fork in the path, where a sign that read 3805–3810 directed them around the bend. They were looking for 3807.

  But they weren’t alone when they turned the corner. At the far end of the corridor was a glass window with the downtown skyline framed within it. In front of that was a man in a suit, who stirred as soon as they came into view. The door he was standing next to could only be 3807.

  Wes’s reaction was to let out a laugh—a love-drunk laugh if Ash had ever heard one—and he seized her by the waist and pressed her up against the wall. His lips found her neck, but she heard him whisper, “Pretend you’re attracted to me.”

  It was tempting to explain how little acting that would actually require. She let out a theatrical groan instead.

  The guard, however, was undeterred by their performance. His pace didn’t even falter as he approached the lovebirds. “Can I help you?” he asked hoarsely. Through Wes’s long hair Ash spotted a gun holstered in plain view on the man’s hip.

  Wes pulled back just long enough to look around the corridor. “Sorry, mate,” he apologized. “Guess we got off a floor early.” He then returned to Ash’s neck and playfully bit her earlobe.

  “This is the top floor,” the man reminded him. He reached out and put his hand roughly on Wes’s shoulder. “Now, I’d suggest—”

  Wes seized the hand on his shoulder and twisted until the man’s wrist joint audibly crackled. The guard dropped to his knees about to cry out, but Wes drilled him across the face, and the man slumped to the carpeted hallway floor.

  Wes grabbed him by the legs and dragged him down the hall. Ash jogged after him. “Think he’s from the same mob that was playing piñata with you the other night?”

  “Not mob,” he said quietly. “Local syndicate for hire.” He nodded to the door to 3806, through which they could hear a baseball game blaring on the television, and several voices shouting at it. “If I had to take a guess, I would say that this is their barracks, and this”—he stopped when they reached the door to 3807—“is the safe house.”

  “Well, let’s hope the ‘safe’ in ‘safe house’ extends to us.” Her pocket vibrated, and she pulled out her cell phone. A text from Aurora. She held it up so Wes could read it too.

  “2 Rooms. Entry clear. Package + 1 keeper in back room. Must be something good on TV.”

  “Thank God there’s a Marlins game tonight,” Wes said, and now that he mentioned it, Ash could hear the same game piping through the door to 3807, albeit softly.

  She touched the doorknob tentatively and gave it a soft twist.

  It turned without a hitch. No lock.

  “Guess they put too much confidence in that guy,” Ash whispered, and indicated the unconscious guard that Wes had slung over his shoulder.

  The apartment was lavish, and was the last thing that Ash would have expected to act as a detainment center for gods. It wasn’t a stainless steel cage but a warmly furnished penthouse, complete with sprawling crimson oriental rugs and a large dining room table. Then there was the enormous fish tank that took up the middle of the room, teeming with football-size tropical fish. There was even a room service cart—room service, in an apartment building!—abandoned next to the fish tank. Ash’s best guess: If you were a person with a lot of money who needed to disappear for a few weeks, but also wanted to live like a king under the protection of professional soldiers, this was where you paid a small fortune to hide out.

  Or, Ash thought as she eased toward the archway that opened into the other half of the suite, where you paid a small fortune for mercenaries to keep an eye on a sedated but potentially lethal god.

  Wes propped the unconscious guard against the wall and then locked the door behind them, but Ash’s curiosity propelled her across the room. Without waiting for him, she moved stealthily to the threshold between the dining room and the common area. She nearly yelled in horror when she came within sight of the scene in the den.

  The god—for it was a “he”—dangled from the ceiling in what looked like something out of a science fiction movie. Fifteen, maybe twenty, thick cables snaked down from a steel contraption that was bolted to the ceiling. The cables wrapped around the god’s thick torso and neck like an overzealous anaconda. More cords sprouted from the bottom, connecting him to a similar steel device on the floor. In essence he was being suspended in place by a series of rubber bands.

  Then there was the IV—a thick needle plugged into one of his forearms, both of which were strapped to his sides. The intravenous tube led to a column of liquid supported by a metal tower beside his “cage.”

  But it wasn’t the horrific prison or the industrial-strength anesthesia that caused Ash’s heart to sear hot in her chest. It was the fact that she knew the Haitian thunder god that the Four Seasons had selected as their sacrifice.

  Just seeing Ade like this brought bile to her throat. His eyes were closed in a sleep that was far from peaceful, while he dangled from the ceiling like a broken marionette. How had they even found him? Had they kidnapped him from his native Haiti, where he was supposed to be helping his people rebuild after a devastating earthquake? Then smuggled him into Miami just like they had Rose?

  Ash found herself wandering carelessly into the other room, but Wes slipped a hand around her waist and gave just the gentlest “Shh” into her ear.

  On the other side of the room was, as Aurora had warned them, just one guard, who was deeply engrossed in the baseball game. He had his back to them, and he didn’t even stir until Wes was right behind him. By then it was too late. Wes wrapped his forearm around the man’s neck and tightened.

  The guard started to flail, but rather than choking him completely, Wes cupped his free hand over the man’s eyes. “Sleep,” he whispered. “Sleep.”

  The guard’s hands, which had been trying to pry Wes’s other hand away, dropped impotently to his lap, and his head lolled forward.

  “Jesus, what are you, the sandman?” Ash said.

  “One of the perks of being a night god. Only works on the weak and the willing.” Wes released his hold on the man’s neck, and the guard slumped sideways onto the couch.

  Ash sized up the enormous guard that was now snoring soundly on the couch; he didn’t look too weak to her, at least physically. “That guy was willing to lose consciousness?”

  “His survival instincts probably reminded him it was better to sleep on the job than fight a losing battle with my arm and die of asphyxiation.”

  Ash wanted to ask him how he’d even figured out he could do something like that, but seeing Ade wrapped up in the machine distracted her. She reached up and brushed a strand of hair away from his face.

  “I take it you know this guy?” Wes asked. “You must be really popular among the gods.”

 
; Ash scowled at him, sensing the acid beneath his words. This was the wrong time and place for jealousy to rear its head. “A good friend from school. His name is Ade, and he’s a Zulu thunder god.”

  Wes crossed his arms and examined the device that Ade was cocooned in. “They weren’t taking any chances with your friend, I guess.”

  Ash plucked at one of the cables. Despite its metallic appearance, it was elasticized. When Ade bobbed up and down in the harness but didn’t wake up, Ash suddenly got it. “Much as I hate them, can’t say I’m not impressed. This whole thing is like the shocks on a car—meant to absorb any vibrations in case he starts to quake in his sleep.”

  Wes whistled. “So they put the thunder god in a big Slinky?”

  “To keep the neighbors oblivious, or, knowing Ade, the whole city block.” Ash gently withdrew the IV needle from Ade’s flesh, and a drop of greenish liquid spilled onto the carpet. The cables holding Ade in place held fast against her tugging.

  Wes reached down and yanked the same cord. With just a little bit of oomph, the cable came free in his hand.

  “Show-off,” she muttered. “You’re in charge of getting my friend down. I’ll stand watch.”

  Starting with the bottom, Wes ripped out the cables one at a time as though he were plucking weeds from a garden. Meanwhile Ash wandered over to a wall hanging that was rippling even though there didn’t seem to be a visible air vent or open window nearby. When she passed her hand over the cloth, she could feel a cool draft blowing through the weave. She pulled the tapestry aside.

  Behind the wall hanging was a door constructed of steel mesh, like the doors to an old-fashioned elevator. Through the mesh she could see a stairwell on the other side. Ash unlatched the lock and folded the door open. “I guess a syndicate safe house wouldn’t be complete without its own secret exit,” she said.

  “At least we know how they got your friend up here in the first place,” Wes said. “Though the bored concierge downstairs probably wouldn’t have looked twice if they’d dragged an unconscious 250-pound thunder god through the lobby and into the elevators.” With a grunt Wes ripped free the final two cables at once and caught Ade in his arms.