Embers and Echoes

by Karsten Knight

  Once the last of the blush has bled into the sink, you stare into the pearl-lined mirror and tuck the curly tresses of hair behind your ears. The marriage and the celebration afterward at the governor’s mansion were a blur of flowers, lanterns, and faces both familiar and new. But now fatigue slows everything down. You finally have time to see the one thing that was missing from the biggest day of your life.

  Family.

  Although they have long since left this world, you had expected to feel Mama, and Gracie, and especially Papa there in spirit to guide you.

  But you did not.

  You knew Violet did not take the news well when you traded your life of thievery with her for a life of domesticity with Colt, but you still expected her to be there in the flesh.

  But she was not.

  Through the beads of dew on the window, you can see the first whispers of dawn leeching up into the eastern horizon. Your husband is waiting for you. “My husband . . .” you whisper, waiting for the words to not sound alien.

  There will be plenty of time to entertain all of these thoughts when you have another moment alone.

  You fill a wash bucket full of water under the faucet and then tiptoe down the hallway toward the master bedroom, trying your best not to spill any. You came up with this idea during one of the many times you spent daydreaming about your wedding night ever since Colt proposed. (Who are you kidding? Even before he proposed.) You wanted to make your first night together as memorable as possible.

  The door is just slightly ajar when you come to it. You take the bucket of water and slosh it so that the water streams under the door. Then you close your eyes and let the heat rise to the top of your skin. Your white dress, the one that cost so much yet you’ll never wear again, smokes, and then crackles, and then ignites. You kick off your shoes.

  You keep your eyes closed and push through the door. You step into the room, feel the cool puddle of water against the bare soles of your feet. Just the thought of what sort of pleased expression Colt has right now watching your wedding dress burn off makes you smile.

  You open your eyes.

  And you scream.

  Colt lies bare chested on top of the patchwork quilt. Only he’s not waiting in eager anticipation. He’s not even looking at you.

  He’s staring at the cannonball-size hole in his chest. The one right where his heart should be.

  Then, with shallow gasps, he reaches out to the man who’s towering over the bed, squeezing Colt’s bloody heart in his fist.

  The assassin spots you immediately, and the sight of the flames rising off you is enough to get him to back away from the bedside. With his black eyes trained on you, he drops Colt’s heart into a jar. Once he screws on the lid, he turns and runs for the far wall. He crashes shoulder-first through the balcony window, then drops over the ledge to the ground below.

  You rush to the bedside. Your body has run cold, and the flames soon extinguish themselves.

  Meanwhile Colt gropes around his chest, trying to hold the wound open. His regenerating flesh, however, has other ideas and rapidly closes over the gash, forcing his fingers out of the chasm as the ribs, and cartilage, and blood vessels knit themselves back into a living fabric.

  You bring your face up close to his. “Look at me, Colt,” you plead, even though his eyelids are fluttering closed. “Concentrate. You can survive this. You have the strongest heart of anyone I’ve ever met. You can grow it back if you just believe . . .”

  Your teardrops land on his face, and that’s when his eyes reopen. Dim embers still burn behind his pupils, but they’re cooling fast. He takes your hands in his and presses them to the disconcertingly smooth patch of his chest where his heart is . . .

  Or where his heart should be.

  There is no beat.

  Only an interminable silence that you will never forget.

  “This heart ain’t coming back, love,” he whispers.

  “No!” you cry out. You pound your fist on his chest.

  “Shh.” He musters the strength to open his eyes one last time. “Just remember,” he says, “that you were the first person to steal it.”

  His eyes are no longer looking into yours. They’re staring through you and into the next life.

  Your husband is gone, and even his supernatural talents can’t bring him back this time.

  There is a time to mourn. There is a time to weep for the fallen. Part of you just wants to crawl into the bed next to him and pray that your own heart stops beating before the shock wears off. Before the real pain comes. Before you have to ask questions about what sort of enemies your husband had who would murder him on his wedding night.

  But the fire in you takes over. Instead of looking at Colt, your gaze gravitates to the broken window through which the assassin exited. Where your heart wants to choose despair, the smoldering magic in that primordial lobe of your brain awakens and chooses something else for you instead:

  Vengeance.

  You dive through the gaping, jagged hole in the window as though you were threading a needle, and land in a crouch on the lawn outside. You pause, unsure at first where to go. The assassin has already fled the grounds, somewhere beyond the mangroves at the edge of your lawn.

  The air shimmers. The color bleeds out until the grass and the trees and the row of manor houses across the street mute into shades of gray. But faintly, heading in a thickening trail toward the south, a river of crimson floats in the air—the residual body heat left in the assassin’s wake, like the blood trail behind a wounded animal.

  This skill is new.

  It took a killer to activate your killer instincts.

  The hunter has awakened the huntress.

  You follow the trail at a sprint between two of the neighboring houses. It takes you across the quad of Tulane University. When you reach Saint Charles Avenue, that’s when you see him, crossing the grassy streetcar tracks. He jumps in front of an oncoming streetcar and waves his hands. The brakes screech and the trolley conductor stops the vehicle just inches shy of the killer.

  Meanwhile you’re running toward the trolley. Through the window you see the assassin toss the conductor out of the car and onto the grassy shoulder of the avenue. The streetcar takes off rolling before you can reach it. The dark stranger rotates his head to watch you through the window when he cruises past.

  You have no intention of letting this husband-killer escape from your clutches. If you have your way, he won’t live past sunrise.

  Your legs ache, but you still close the distance between you and the trolley, enough so that you can catch the metal guard on the caboose. With the rail as leverage you vault yourself up into the air and impossibly slip through the open window in back.

  At this early morning hour the trolley is completely devoid of passengers except for you and the pursued. Seeing him now in profile, there’s something almost regretful in his dark eyes, beneath his mangy shoulder-length hair—something that you recognize. But before you can study him any further, he senses your presence, and when he spins around, he launches an object on a long chain in your direction.

  You almost take the claw right to your face, but you dodge into one of the seats just in time to save yourself. The razor-sharp metal talons sink into the floor of the bus, and hold for a second. This close to the claw, you can see traces of blood on its blades—so this is what the assassin used to dig out Colt’s heart.

  So this is what you’ll use to dig out his heart.

  The assassin is already pulling on the chain to retrieve the claw, but you catch the other end before the talons can disengage from the floor. A quick pulse of heat shoots out of your hand, into the links, and conducts all the way up the chain. The dark giant roars and drops his end. He shakes his seared hand vigorously to soothe the burn.

  He grabs for the chain with the other hand, but you’re on top of him before he can reclaim it. Whereas he had showcased profound strength back at the mansion when he’d plowed a human-shaped hole through your window, he
seems weaker now.

  Your rage is caustic at this point, hot to the touch, and you easily subdue him, despite the fact that he’s twice your size. He struggles, but you herd him back into the driver’s seat of the streetcar, wind his own chain several times around his neck, and then knot it beneath the seat. A quick squeeze from your hand melts the links, securing the knot in place.

  “Please,” he rasps, pulling at the chains around his neck. He draws in a gulping breath. “It wasn’t personal.”

  “Why did you murder my husband?” you demand. You try to withhold the tears, but they leak through anyway. “What did he do to you?”

  “Please,” he says again. His words are punctuated between sharp breaths. “It was . . . nothing personal . . . just a job . . . I was sent to do.”

  “Sent by whom? By whom?” You tighten your hand around the chains and send a current of heat from one end to the other. The assassin’s scream sounds more like a cough when the chains burn into the skin over his throat.

  When he recovers enough to speak, he says, “There were . . . no names.” You reach for the chain again. “Wait!” he rasps. “She looked . . . just like . . . you.”

  You stagger away from him, back to the door. It can’t be. You knew Violet wasn’t thrilled about your marriage to Colt. About breaking up the sister duo after all those years together on the road. About how nothing would be the same again.

  But how could your own sister do this to you? How could Violet kill the one person who had managed to make you happy, truly happy, in a way that Violet never could in the years since you’d left the farm?

  In that moment you know that you hate her.

  In that moment you know you will do anything to find her.

  To track her down.

  To kill her.

  Your dress ignites again, not on purpose this time. This is a dry, uncontrollable wildfire fueled by an ocean of dark thoughts. Your flesh turns to molten rock, cracking in places to let the magma fluoresce through. A corona extends from your body outward, outward, until the fire streams up the walls, over the seats beside you, over the dashboard controls. The assassin tries to move back in the seat as best he can, out of the radius of your flames, but the globe continues to thicken. The blaze is already chewing its way through the streetcar.

  You stare out the front window. The streetcar has reached its maximum velocity with no pilot to slow it down. Not far ahead, you see the blocks across the railway where the track has been shut down for repairs. You’ll be upon it in a minute.

  “Do you have a family?” you calmly ask the assassin. “Do you have a wife?”

  He nods frantically. He has pulled his feet up onto the seat. The flames are crawling across the floor toward him. “Yes!” he cries. “I have . . . a wife. Please let me . . . see her again.”

  He could be lying to talk his way out of the situation, but something in his voice tells you he’s sincere. Somewhere in the world this bastard actually has a family who’s waiting for him.

  “Good,” you say.

  The assassin stops fighting against the chain-link noose around his neck and actually looks hopeful for once.

  You lean just close enough that the hot surface of your corona brushes against his face. “Now she’ll know how I feel.”

  You kick open the streetcar doors and jump down onto the green central avenue. You hear a long but broken “Nooooo!” echo out of the open doors.

  Then the flaming streetcar, the steel-cased inferno, batters through the barricade onto the disrupted track beyond. It flips onto its side and slides across the dirt until it smashes into a tree. The flames continue to burn. But the screaming has stopped.

  Over the derailed streetcar the dawn sun simmers on the horizon to the east.

  East, the direction of the last known place you heard from Violet.

  East, toward Miami.

  Ashline woke up facedown on the floor, screaming into the shag carpet. She was sweaty. She was breathless. She was faintly smoking.

  She staggered to her feet and threw open the window, partially to catch her breath, but also to ventilate the room so her nocturnal smoking wouldn’t set off Wes’s fire alarms. The afternoon air that rushed in was hot and humid, and did nothing to cool her.

  There was so much to take away from the vision.

  She really was in love with Colt Halliday in her last life.

  For better or worse he really did appear to love her back.

  Despite all his regenerative abilities, he was not invincible.

  Eve had been as violent and conniving as ever the last time around, maybe even worse.

  And the man that had killed Colt Halliday—

  The assassin that had taken orders from Eve—

  The man that Ash had left in the flaming wreckage of the streetcar—

  Left there to die in an infernal coffin—

  Was the very man she’d moved in with.

  The man she’d been fighting alongside this past week.

  The man who, against all of her better judgment, she was falling in love with.

  “Oh, God,” Ash whispered to the afternoon sky. “I killed Wes.”

  THE GLASS SARCOPHAGUS

  Sunday, Part II

  It was a beautiful, spotless afternoon, which felt wrong in every sense, with Aurora having been dead only a few hours. Ash wanted to follow her pain up to the penthouse roof and sit by herself in hurricane weather, let the storm winds carry her to the edge, let the cold bite into flesh that was designed to burn.

  Where was Eve to conjure a monsoon when Ash needed her?

  Wes’s bed was still empty when she poked her head in, the plaid sheets tucked immaculately into the edges of the bed frame—so he hadn’t returned yet. He had dropped Ash off at the condominium in the morning, directly after their escape from the movie theater. Once he’d made it clear that he didn’t intend to get out of the car to come inside, she’d pleaded with him to let her go with him wherever he intended to go. Instead he’d quietly leaned over and opened her door for her. The moment she’d climbed out of the Cadillac, he’d snapped the door shut and driven off without a word, leaving her only with a set of keys and a burden of grief that she didn’t know how to deal with.

  It was probably better this way. Grieving alone was somehow easier than the idea of grieving together with Wes. And now with the knowledge that Wes had died by Ash’s own hand in the last life . . . well, that just added a layer of complexity that she wasn’t prepared to deal with.

  The truth was that Ash didn’t know how to properly grieve for a girl who’d been gone only a few hours. In the past few days, Ash had gotten to know Aurora, had spent so much time with her, yet Ash still didn’t really know the Roman goddess. Ash had witnessed only a few of Aurora’s many facets—the saucy girl who’d reveled in attention at the bar, the winged athlete who’d showed fearlessness in battle, even when she’d been faced with certain death. There was both virtue and darkness from Aurora’s past that Ash could never know, would never know.

  And just like when Rolfe was taken from this life before his proper time, Ash’s heart ached.

  Everything felt wrong, no matter how she chose to spend her afternoon. Eating, trying to go back to sleep, going up to the roof to reflect . . . nothing felt big enough to fill the empty condo. Just the thought of planning another mission to rescue Rose or to confront the Four Seasons seemed blasphemous, when that same sort of scheming had ultimately led to Aurora’s death. Who was next if they continued to fight back? Wes?

  Lily’s words from just a few days earlier echoed in Ash’s mind. Friends of yours tend to have short life expectancies.

  Ash savagely flipped one of the beach chairs into the pool and let a shrill scream bellow out of her. Hatred rose in her like magma leaching its way to the earth’s surface. The desire to exact her revenge on the Four Seasons suddenly outweighed everything else.

  Revenge on Lily for killing yet another one of her friends.

  Revenge on Thorne for mastermi
nding the execution in order to advance his sadistic cult.

  Revenge on Rey for nearly burning Wes alive.

  And even revenge on Bleak, because Ash had seen a shred of humanity in the winter goddess. Maybe if Bleak had survived her fight with Ash, she could have been a voice of reason and put a stop to the violence.

  Everything else that had been a priority to Ash before—her desire to rescue Rose, her drive to retrieve Eve from the Cloak Netherworld, even the new feelings that she was developing for Wes—grew hazy beneath a film of dark urges.

  Tangled in her brooding thoughts, watching the beach chair bob on the surface of the pool, Ash suddenly remembered the clarity she’d felt on the beach after her conversation with Ixtab. As gloomy as Ixtab’s powers might be, the girl seemed to have a knack for imparting a sense of purpose to those who visited her. Ixtab was probably hurting fiercely right now too. Her abilities would have forced her to watch Aurora violently entombed within that tree, and if Ixtab was as keen on Aurora as she’d implied during Ash’s last visit . . .

  Ash took the Vespa to the store and picked up a few boxes of the processed cupcakes that Ixtab liked. Then she let her GPS navigate her south over the causeway and across the bay, until she reached Key Biscayne. Somehow she picked up the trail that Wes had taken across the island the last time, then retraced their steps down the beach until she spotted the familiar umbrella in the shadow of the lighthouse.

  But when she approached, the chair was completely empty. Ash frowned and set the bag down beneath the umbrella. Surely Ixtab couldn’t spend her entire day here, as Wes had suggested. Perhaps she’d just gone somewhere to eat, or to use the bathroom. She would return soon enough. Ash dropped into the chair and waited.

  An hour and several cupcake wrappers in the sand later, Ash wasn’t so sure. That’s when she finally examined the sand and discovered a series of slight depressions—the imprint of sandals—leading away from the umbrella.

  Ash followed them to the edge of the water, where the rising tide had begun to wash half of a barely visible footprint away. Standing in the shallows, Ash looked out to sea and wondered what had become of the goddess.