Embers and Echoes

by Karsten Knight

  Thorne had been dominating the foreground, but now the background took over the screen. It was a garden courtyard with archways in the distance, lit by firelight. At first Ash thought they were broadcasting from Lesley’s hacienda, but Wes drew in a long breath. “Wait,” he said. “I recognize that place. That’s the old Spanish monastery. It’s north of Miami.” He pounded his fist against the nearest armrest so hard that it snapped clean off. “They sent us to the opposite side of the damn city!”

  So Thorne had intended for her to catch Proteus. And, more disturbing, he had banked on Wes leaving the nightclub to find Ash, which could mean only one thing.

  Someone had been watching Ash and Wes together.

  The situation got worse as the camera panned over. In the center of the courtyard, Aurora was squirming on her hands and knees. She had been chained to a post that had been driven into the ground. Her wings fluttered weakly as she pulled against her restraints with excruciating futility. When she looked up at the camera, there was a drugged film over her eyes, which flickered as they struggled to stay open.

  Ash jumped as Thorne slid back into view, once again eclipsing the image of Aurora behind him. “It didn’t have to be this way.” He took another drag from his cigar. “We could have all gone our separate ways after the night at the museum, but you’ve continued to meddle. You freed my sacrifice. You attempted to turn Lesley against us. And then you killed one of our own, killed my Winter.”

  “We have to get to that monastery,” Wes said quietly to her. “If we start now—”

  “No doubt you’re making your way to the exit by now,” Thorne said, “clinging to some last fiber of hope that maybe you can make it here in time to stop this sacrifice from happening. But the doors have all been locked. And for the next ten minutes, you two will be reduced to mortals.”

  Behind them the doors through which they’d entered crashed shut, and the click of the lock echoed through the theater. A grating sound announced the metal bar that was being threaded through the handles on the other side.

  Then the lights hummed on.

  The ultraviolet lights.

  They had been installed everywhere—attached to the walls, bubbling up from the track lighting underneath their feet. The room instantly heated several degrees as the dark theater transformed into the arid floor of the desert.

  Under the harsh lights Wes looked visibly weakened. He would be useless to break through the door, which was spotlighted by a small galaxy of lamps.

  Ash took a step for the door with her hand raised, prepared to burn a hole through the locked doors. Given the rage and turmoil bubbling inside her, she could probably get hot enough to walk right through them.

  “I wouldn’t if I were you.”

  Ash turned and looked at Thorne’s patiently waiting image; he stared right back at her.

  “Take a moment,” he instructed her. “Smell the air.”

  Now that he mentioned it, there was something pungent in the theater’s atmosphere, the growing smell of natural gas that she’d failed to notice before in her panicked state.

  “This room is slowing filling up with a special blend of gases that, I’m afraid to say, are quite flammable. One burst filament from any of the UV lamps, or better yet, one spark from you, and the whole building will go up in flames, along with the nitroglycerin containers we’ve conveniently positioned around you.” Thorne tapped the end of his cigar, so that the smoldering ashes rained down. “If you so much as think a fiery thought, this movie theater will become a crater. And while you may be fireproof . . .”

  Behind her, Wes was violently pulling at the doors, but his strength was too sapped to move them.

  “Your boyfriend isn’t.”

  Ash stared at her hands. Thorne had done it. By corralling the two of them into the same place, he’d managed to neutralize them both.

  On-screen Thorne touched the Bluetooth in his ear and smiled. “Looks like we’re ready to record the sacrifice. But before I go, there’s somebody here who wanted to say hello to you, Ashline.”

  Vaguely Ash could still hear Wes slamming his shoulder into the door, and calling out her name for help, but she was hopelessly transfixed by the screen. The camera tracked down.

  Rose Wilde stepped into the frame.

  If anything the bags underneath Rose’s eyes had darkened since the last time Ash had seen her; they were now a bruiselike shade of indigo. She wore a white cotton dress over her small, deceptively frail body. Her shoulders poked sharply through her skin. And the way she was looking into the camera . . .

  It was as though she were already dead.

  “Aren’t you going to say hello, Rosey?” Thorne asked from offscreen.

  Rose reached out and touched the camera lens. When she pulled her fingers away, she left the residue of one of her fingerprints on the glass. “Who?” she asked finally. Just one word in that innocent high-pitched voice, from the girl who had seen so much of the world already.

  Thorne squatted down next to her and winked at the camera. “Just another person looking to take you away.”

  Rose didn’t react. Her face was an empty canvas. But after a moment the corner of her eye twitched. Somewhere in the distance there was a rumble.

  Thorne finally rotated the camera so that Rose was cropped out of the frame. “The sacrifice won’t broadcast until prime time tonight, so you get the unique privilege of watching this sixteen hours before everyone else. Enjoy the show,” he said. “And possibly the fireworks after.” He laughed.

  Then the projection went blue. Ash shouted “No!” and reached out for the screen.

  But when the feed returned several moments later, from the perspective of a new camera, Ash wished that the screen had stayed dark instead.

  The sacrifice began with Lily unshackling Aurora’s chains from the wooden mast. Immediately the winged goddess of the dawn stumbled forward to escape.

  She nearly tripped right into Rose, who had tottered out into the courtyard. That’s when Ash realized the full genius of the Four Seasons’ plan. To anyone watching this who didn’t know Aurora, she would look monstrous in her drugged state. Add that to the fact that she was lurching toward a six-year-old girl . . .

  At last Aurora spread her wings and bent her knees, preparing to spring into the air.

  The drugs in her system, however, had other plans, and her legs buckled beneath her. She landed on her knees, where she wobbled unsteadily and her wings wilted against her back. One hand braced her against the earth while the other one massaged the side of her head.

  Then a look of courage came over her. Her back straightened with a little shiver. When she opened her eyes, they shone out like headlights on a midnight road. She glanced over her shoulder at Lily, who was very lazily approaching her on foot. Aurora retracted back onto her haunches and launched herself up into the air. Her translucent wings spread to their full regal wingspan, catching the firelight behind them in a blaze of tangerine and amber.

  “Come on,” Wes, who had come up beside Ash, whispered at the screen. “You can do it, Rory. I know you can. You’re the strongest goddess I know.”

  Ash was clutching her legs so hard in anticipation that she was drawing blood. She watched Aurora take off with one stroke of her wings, then a second and a third, each one more powerful than the last as she fought her way into the sky above the monastery grounds. For a moment Ash felt a sapling of hope somewhere in her terrified heart.

  Then a gust of wind ripped Aurora right out of the sky.

  Her body, which had been rigid and determined, folded in two, and she crumpled like a sheet of paper on her way down. The camera followed her through the entire length of her quick plummet until she hit the grass. A second gust seized her wings, which involuntarily opened like a parachute.

  She didn’t stop sliding across the monastery courtyard until she hit the wooden post. She got to her feet, but by then Lily had reemerged from the shadows. Vines sprung from the soil and coiled around Aurora’s body i
n vicious spirals. As more vines lashed out, they caught her wings and roped them flat to her back.

  Meanwhile, as Ash and Wes watched, cemented to the theater floor, a different kind of plant life was beginning to rise up out of the dirt around Aurora’s squirming body.

  Roots.

  Wood.

  Bark.

  The camera zoomed in to capture every grisly detail of the scene that unfolded next.

  It started at her feet, a living sheet of wood pulp that coated Aurora’s shoes, her shins, up past her knees. The bark grew thicker and coarser and darker and sharper. Aurora twisted. She gritted her teeth. With what must have been every last vestige of will to live she had left in her, she screamed the fiercest war cry Ash had ever heard.

  Her wings exploded out of their vinelike cocoon.

  It was too little too late.

  As they flapped uselessly to lift her out of her botanical prison, the growing tree trunk had already climbed to her waist, locking her hips in place. No matter how hard she bucked with her wings, her lower half wouldn’t budge.

  The fury in her eyes dipped into panic while the tree continued up her torso so that she had to raise her arms over her head to keep them free. The bark washed fluidly over her wings, which continued to fight until the plant matter convulsed inward with the strength of a trash compactor, flattening her crippled wings to her shoulders.

  A sob burst out of Ash. Wes breathed raggedly beside her.

  On-screen Aurora let the tears flow freely. She stopped fighting. She stared heartbreakingly into the camera while the trunk of the tree cemented itself around her neck, then her chin.

  Then Aurora disappeared behind a shroud of timber and bark, buried upright in a living sarcophagus.

  The dawn goddess had seen her last dawn.

  The spell broke as soon as Ash lost sight of Aurora’s face. Her arm burned where Wes’s fingernails were now digging into her. “Get us out of here!” Wes yelled. “We need to get to her!”

  “It’s too late,” Ash cried. “She’s already—”

  “Don’t you dare say ‘She’s already gone.’” Wes’s voice broke. “Don’t you dare. Just work your magic and burn us a path out of here.”

  “And incinerate you in the process?” Ash shouted. “You don’t think I wanted to scorch my way through a wall to get to her? No—I’m not going to lose you both in one night.”

  “Fine,” Wes snarled. He released her arm and ran over to the wall. “Then I will tear this place apart with my hands.” He reached up and grabbed hold of one of the ultraviolet lights. He tried to pull it off the wall, but his strength was depleted and the light held fast to its mounted bracket.

  Meanwhile, on the screen, the camera zoomed out, showing Lily’s horrible creation. Aurora had been just the start, the foundation, but now that the tree had matured in just a matter of minutes, Ash saw it for what it was, with its drooping curtains of green leaves that hung low enough to brush the grounds.

  It was a weeping willow.

  A shadow passed in front of the image projected on the screen. Ash whipped around. The face of the man in the projector window was blotted by shadow, but Ash recognized his enormous frame and backlit dreadlocks.

  Rey held up what looked like a bottle of alcohol.

  With a rag stuffed into the top.

  The rag ignited under his touch.

  He lobbed it to the seats below.

  Ash could see it tumbling in slow motion.

  She could feel the flammable air around her crackle with potential energy.

  She could feel it waiting to ignite.

  Ash made it to Wes, who was still trying to jerk the UV light free of its mast, just as she heard the bottle shatter on the floor.

  She grabbed him by the shoulders.

  Threw him into the corner.

  Forced his head down so the giant was balled up into the smallest space possible.

  Blanketed her whole body over his own.

  Tucked her head down into his.

  The heat was extraordinary when the blast happened, even for Ash. The fire ate through the back of her shirt almost instantly. Even with her eyes tight the inside of her eyelids glowed white-hot. Still, she focused her mind, trying to divide her body into two separate tasks—

  The back of her, a raging river of lava keeping the probing fingers of the explosion at bay.

  The front, as cool as the dark side of the moon to protect Wes.

  Then the white light through her eyelids dimmed to a flicker. It was over.

  She pulled her head back to make sure Wes was unscathed . . . and instantly realized she couldn’t breathe. The massive explosion had consumed a chunk of the theater’s oxygen supply.

  Wes, too, put a hand on his neck when he discovered that his breaths were only taking in smoke. The explosion, however, had burst the UV lights. Wes pulled back his arm, which was blistered with minor burns, and sent a punch right into the boarded-up exit door.

  The whole door buckled outward and slid across the pavement outside. Cool predawn air rushed in through the opening, and Ash drank it greedily.

  When she’d inhaled her fill of oxygen, she crawled over to the front row. Pressed her bare, charred back against the rigid metal seats. Stared at the movie theater screen.

  The projector was still running, and the flames at the edge of the screen flared red-hot again as the oxygen billowed into the room.

  Ash could only watch as the aperture of fire converged around the smoldering image of the weeping willow.

  STREETCAR SUNRISE

  1929; New Orleans, Louisiana

  You can’t help but squeal as the man holding you kicks in the front door. It slams against the inside wall of the plantation manor. You bounce in his arms as he crosses the threshold.

  He stops in the middle of the manor home’s magnificent foyer, with its dual staircases running up to the second floor, and the enormous chandelier over your heads, crafted out of a series of antlers from animals from a distant forest. He pulls you so tightly to his body that you can feel the muscles of his chest even through the four layers of your white wedding dress. “Welcome home,” he says to you. “Welcome home, Lucille Halliday.”

  You coquettishly slide a finger along his jawline, but just as he leans in for a kiss, you slip out of his arms and onto your feet. You sashay across the foyer, and your heels click on the floor. “Your home is quite lovely,” you say, as though you haven’t spent a hundred nights entertained in this house before. “If not a bit roomy.”

  “Our home.” He steps up behind you and cups his hands over the points of your hips. “As for the abundance of space, it sure could benefit from a woman’s touch.”

  You cluck and slap his hands away one at a time. “I fear to guess how many women’s touches the Halliday estate saw before its master made himself an honest man.”

  “None that stayed till morning.” Before you can profess your disgust, his arms completely encircle your waist and he hoists you up into the air. You squeak in mock protest. He carries you to the staircase, and walks backward with you up the steps. “And darling,” he says, slightly out of breath from the exertion of climbing the stairs for two. “You knew going into this that you were marrying a Hopi trickster. To ‘make an honest man’ out of myself would be to deny my trickster identity, and thus to be honest would in fact be a lie.” He finally bears you up the last step and sets you down on the upper landing with a long breath of relief. “Do you see my conundrum?”

  “A paradox, to be sure,” you say sarcastically. You poke him in the sternum again and again, until you’ve backed him all the way up to the banister that overlooks the lobby floor thirty feet below. “You can continue to lie, cheat, and steal as much as your trickster heart desires. The only thing I ask”—you push him up against the dusty banister—“is that you do none of those three things to cross me. Especially cheating.”

  Colt laughs and sets his elbows down on the railing. “You don’t have to scare me into fidelity, L
ucy. Far as I’m concerned, there is no woman but you.” He glances down at the foyer floor. “It’s perplexing, given all that you know about my special ability, that you thought the threat of a short drop would scare me faithful.”

  You wink and back away. “Knowing that you’d live through the fall to feel the pain is what makes it a far more appealing threat.”

  “Where are you going?” he asks.

  “To freshen up,” you reply, and continue to edge toward the door to the bathroom. “That bed chamber of yours sure is drafty. I think I’ll need to put on a few more layers before I’m warm enough to sleep.”

  Colt laughs from the back of his throat. “Darling, you’ve got more warmth inside of you than a thousand fireplaces could muster. I reckon you’ve never been cold a day in your life.”

  But he doesn’t know that you have felt cold before, a deep and biting cold. The shadow of a smoldering barn drifts fleetingly over your face.

  He walks up to you and stops with his face just shy of yours; you can smell the bourbon and tobacco on the ruffled white shirt beneath his tuxedo jacket. “Take your time. I’ll wait for you in the bedroom with profound eagerness.”

  You stretch your arms over your head and fake a yawn. “Not too eagerly, I hope. I’m simply burned out from a long day of celebration, and I fear I might drift into slumber the very moment my head strikes the pillow.”

  “Then I shall hide all the pillows,” Colt replies. The last thing you see as you close the bathroom door is your trickster husband’s broad grin, which after three years of knowing him still brings your blood to a slow boil.

  You let the faucet run, and splash water on your face until you’ve removed most of the ridiculous makeup the governor’s wife applied before the ceremony. You’ve always felt like a doll wearing it. The cosmetics they sell in New Orleans aren’t exactly targeted at Polynesian skin tones.