The trees thinned out as Ash progressed across the island, except around its periphery, where they eventually grew so close together that no person would be able to fit between them. In fact, now that she thought about it, they were sort of like the thick bars to a prison.
It’s a fence, Ash realized. She spotted two more cameras, then a third, all pivoting to leer at her. By now she’d reached the far end of the island. Here there was a ten-foot gap in the fence of trees, but her passage through was blocked by a web of very angry-looking thorns. The thorns had been wrapped around the trees to either side and pulled taut, forming a tall net of natural razor wire. Through the mesh she could see the waterfall and the dual staircases leading up to the Mound, her destination. It was as though Lily wanted to tease her, to show her where she wanted to go but trap her in here.
Time for some landscaping, she thought. She ignited her hand, ready to burn her way through the thorn patch.
Then a second thought occurred to her. The cameras. The fence surrounding the island.
This wasn’t intended to just keep her away from the Mound.
It was intended to keep her corralled on the island.
Because Lily had transformed the island into an arena.
Which also meant that Wes wasn’t the sacrifice—
He was just bait.
“I’m the sacrifice,” Ash whispered.
“Perceptive, as always,” came the reply from the trees overhead.
Ash winged a fireball upward toward the voice, but the flames met only with branches and leaves. She let a second ball of fire simmer in her palm and waited for Lily to appear.
Too late Ash felt the vine snarl around her ankle. It tightened, sinking its little thorns into her skin and pulling her flat to the ground. The vine retracted across the island, dragging her with it through the grass and dirt. The wild ride slammed her into one tree and continued toward a bushel of Jurassic thorns in the shape of a jaw. The thorny teeth gnashed together, hungry, longing to devour her in a few quick bites.
Ash lit her fingers, bared her claws, and sheared right through the vine holding her. Her body skidded to a stop right before she could enter the giant thorny mouth. That didn’t stop the jaws from lunging for her. She crab-walked backward, away from the botanical bear trap before it could turn her feet into its next meal.
She heard a rustling in the canopy overhead and looked up. In the center of the island, from the upper branches of the mangroves, Lily descended in a nest of vines. The vines had curled around her arms and shoulders and lowered her gently to the ground. She looked like a demented marionette, only she was her own dangerous puppeteer.
“Right on time,” Lily said. She peered around Ash, looking for someone else. “But you didn’t bring Rey with you? Good. I always thought he was a stick-in-the-mud.”
Ash brushed herself off and stood up. “Yeah, he was looking pretty stiff when I last saw him too.”
“I hope you’re not camera shy.” Lily nodded to the nearest camera, which twitched to follow her movements. “See, when we tried to play the heroes on the last broadcast, the viewers just laughed us off as some work of fiction. We live in a skeptical world, and we’ve realized that the only way for the public to believe in us is to first make them fear us. Once we capture your death on film, we’ll take care of your nocturnal boyfriend. That will give us two more sacrifices to broadcast to the world. Should be enough to scare up a small following, before we start doing some live performances in cities across the country. Now, do you want us to air your death first? Or would you rather be the encore presentation?”
Ash shook her head, suddenly feeling more weary than vengeful. “What happened to you, Lily? You were my friend. I’ll never fully understand what sort of internal torture you must have been going through at Blackwood to break this way, but I could have helped you if you’d let me in. Instead you had to go and break the rest of us too, when you killed Rolfe.”
Lily’s smile fell at the mention of Rolfe’s name. “Don’t.” Spittle flew from her mouth. “Don’t you say his name.”
“His name is all that you left of him.” In her rage Ash hurled a fireball at Lily. Lily quickly sidestepped the flames, which incinerated a bed of violets instead. “I’ve seen people take rejection poorly before,” Ash said, “but what was it about getting played by Rolfe that made you snap like this?”
“The only thing that’s going to snap,” she snarled, “is your neck.”
Only when she felt the caress around her neck did Ash realize her mistake. She’d been so concentrated on Lily in front of her, and the thorn jaws to the rear, that she hadn’t paid any attention to what was happening above her.
A vine noose had slipped loosely around Ash’s neck. As soon as she brought up her hands to throw it off, the noose fastened itself tightly, crushing her trachea and flattening her fingers to her throat. The vine retracted up into the canopy, and her white-knuckled grip on it was the only thing preventing her neck from breaking as the vine jerked her roughly off the ground.
Ash dangled ten feet above the forest floor, feeling the pressure build in her neck. She ignited her hands once again and tried not to panic—she should be easily able to sear right through the vines.
But the noose only tightened further in response. Lily was smiling up at her. “That vine is armored with redwood bark,” Lily explained. “How strange that I was so eager to get away from Blackwood Academy that I never realized that the redwood trees surrounding campus actually have fireproof bark. If I’d known that, maybe I would have stuck around.”
Ash’s fingers were still clamped to her throat, but she aimed her elbow so that it pointed down at Lily’s face. Lily’s noose might be fireproof, but Lily wasn’t.
Only a few impotent sparks streamed out of Ash’s elbow. With the noose cutting off the oxygen supply to her lungs, it was like trying to run a furnace in an airtight room. Soon even the sparks stopped coming.
Lily rolled her eyes. “Come on, Ashline. You have to put on a better show for the cameras than that. Nobody’s going to believe you’re a god just because you can shoot a sparkler out of your elbow. Where’s the fireworks display?”
Ash wriggled to get free. The more she moved, the more pressure she felt pull on her vertebrae. Her arms were bearing some of the weight for now, but even her tennis-toned forearms wouldn’t be enough to hold on forever.
Lily extended her arm, and a new vine sprouted lazily from it, coiling on the ground. “I know in your heart you think you’re the hero. That I’m the villain. And I’m going to admit there was a time when I felt conflicted about what I’d done to . . . him.” Rolfe’s name wilted in the air without ever blooming. Lily coiled the whip she’d created around her wrist. “But you know what I realized? He was a taker!” As she growled the last word, she unfurled the whip and lashed at Ash.
It caught Ash in the ribs. She might as well have been stabbed. The pain was so great that it caused her whole body to convulse upward, sapping some of the strength from her arms.
Lily reeled the whip back. “All of you are takers. But you and Raja are the worst offenders. You pretend to be friends with everyone, and you flash your pretty little smiles. . . .” She touched her aged face, perhaps remembering the youthful skin she once had before Raja got to her. “And then you take. You take any man that you want. You take thirty years from my life. You take everything!” Lily let the whip fly again.
The second blow from the whip was even worse. It was agony for Ash to have her hands tied, to be unable to reach down and soothe the wound. And her oxygen was long since used up. The world around her was starting to grow speckled with black. Even through the coming darkness, however, Ash turned her eyes up to the tree limb overhead. The one the noose was attached to. The one that looked like it was straining under her weight.
“That,” Lily continued, “is when I finally understood—it’s in your natures to take. Death destroys. Fire destroys. But I . . .” she spread her arms at the horrible arboret
um. “I create! I bring life where fire brings only death.” She wheeled back her whip. “Well, today is the day that the forest triumphs over the wildfire.”
Finally Ash pried one hand loose and grabbed the vine over her head quickly so that her neck wouldn’t bear the added pressure. Then the other hand. With the little oxygen she inhaled, she pulled herself arm over arm up the vine. In the canopy above she could see the branch that the noose was coiled around. All she had to do was keep climbing.
Meanwhile Lily’s whip cracked in the space where Ash had just been hanging. The blossom goddess jerked it back in frustration, preparing to strike again.
When Ash reached the top of the vine, she wrapped her hands around the limb that had been serving as her gallows and let herself dangle. With the pressure off the noose, she could finally breathe a little. She knew that if she lost her hold on the branch, she’d fall and break her neck when the vine went taut, but she had a plan. So she mentally prepared herself for a long fall, delegated all her power to her arms, and then heaved down on the branch.
The limb cracked right off the tree. Together Ash and her scaffold dropped all the way to the grass below. She was too relieved to feel any pain when she hit the ground. She loosened the limp noose around her neck to let in the air.
Lily, who had dived away to avoid being crushed, came at Ash with thorny fingernails, ready to slice her apart.
Ash picked up the fallen limb with two hands and jumped to her feet. Just as Lily got within range, Ash assumed her best softball batting pose and smashed the branch across Lily’s face.
The blossom goddess staggered back, stunned, giving Ash enough time to tackle her around the waist. Lily maintained her footing, but Ash pressed on until she’d carried the girl all the way across the island. With their combined momentum Ash slammed Lily back-first through the thorn fence that was blocking the island’s exit. Both girls tumbled through the air and struck the back wall of the shallow moat, before plunging into its leaf-covered waters.
The next few seconds were a blur. Lily somehow ended up on top, and her weight carried both of them to the bottom of the moat. Ash blindly thrashed out at first, connecting a few heavy blows to Lily’s head and chest, but the other girl retaliated by pressing Ash’s face down into the hard stone floor. Ash was already oxygen-deprived from the hanging, and if it came to a battle of holding each other underwater, Lily was sure to emerge victorious.
Sure enough the blossom goddess had reached the same conclusion. She slipped her hands around Ash’s neck and squeezed Ash’s already crushed windpipe. With Lily kneeling on top of Ash, no amount of floundering could break Lily’s hold. As the last few bubbles escaped from Ash’s mouth, a trail of embers sparked impotently out of her hands, illuminating Lily’s face long enough for Ash to see it. After all her talk of how she would enjoy murdering Ash, there was nothing gleeful written in Lily’s expression. Instead her eyes were knotted into something horrible as she wept, and her lips were trembling as the water silenced her sobs.
Something else was glinting under the light of Ash’s dying embers, however. It was glass lying on the moat floor, just within her reach—the shattered stem of the champagne flute Ash had thrown into the moat the night of the white-tie party, the same one she had defended herself with when Thorne had attacked her in the grotto.
Ash used the last of her strength to reach out and grasp it by its flat base.
And then she plunged the stem into Lily’s heart.
Lily’s hands immediately went slack on Ash’s throat, and her crying eyes shot wide open. A crimson ribbon of blood streamed from the wound in her chest and diffused through the water around them.
With little time left before she completely asphyxiated, Ash wriggled out from under Lily’s limp body and kicked off the bottom of the moat. In a moment of compassion, for whatever humanity was left in Lily’s soul, Ash grabbed Lily by her belt and dragged her to the surface.
Ash burst through the leaves and lily pads, and drew in several long breaths. Lily breached the surface with her, and Ash started to tow her toward the opposite edge of the moat.
“No,” Lily croaked.
Ash stopped splashing and treaded water next to the dying blossom goddess. Lily floated faceup, with her hands folded over the mortal wound to her heart. Blood continued to pump up between her fingers, a ring of red expanding through her wet shirt.
Her half-opened eyes fell on Ash. “Didn’t I tell you that you were all takers?” she whispered, every few words interrupted by the moat water she was still choking on. “First you took thirty years from my life . . . and now you’ve taken the rest.”
Lily’s final breath expired as a wet wheeze, and her eyes closed for the last time.
When she was sure Lily was gone, Ash paddled to the edge of the moat and crawled out. It was as much a relief to be back on dry land as it was to breathe fresh air again. There, she lay in a bed of flowers, trembling, until the drowning sensation had passed and she was well enough to climb to her feet.
Ash plucked one of the flowers in the bed around her and held it up to the moonlight. She recognized it—a black calla lily, a beautiful flute-shaped flower with dark petals.
She dropped it over the edge of the moat onto Lily’s chest, which seemed like a fitting tribute.
After all, like the blossom goddess, the black calla was a lily with a dark heart.
Ash hiked her way up the stairs to the Mound. She felt sore. She felt haggard. She was physically and emotionally exhausted.
It was time for all of this to end.
The search for her sister.
Colt’s schemes that he sucked everyone around him into.
The Four Seasons and their morbid quest for followers.
The rescue missions to save her friends from danger.
The loss of friends she couldn’t reach in time.
The chasing.
The fighting.
The lying.
The dying.
At the top of the stairs, Lily’s twisted landscaping had transformed the Mound into its own cathedral. The mangrove trees around either side had extended their branches up, up, and over, until they braided and twisted together above to form a high vaulted ceiling. On the ground level six rows of shrubs had blossomed out of the ground to either side of a center aisle to form pews.
At the front of the church, a thick knobby altar had been erected. Wes lay on top of it, immobile thanks to the IV tower pumping sedative into his veins. Thorne stood beside the altar, frozen. This was the first time Ash had seen Thorne looking unsure of himself—petrified, even. A cigar smoked faintly from between his lips. He had his hand on something beneath him, out of sight.
When Ash stepped closer to the altar, she could see at last over the front pew.
Ash had to stop walking. Her stomach rolled up tight like a window shade.
It’s her, Ash thought. She could be a ghost.
Thorne rested his hand on little Rose Wilde’s shoulder. As Ash approached, Thorne’s fingers curled around the little girl’s collarbone like an eagle clutching a rodent in his talons.
It was so strange for Ash to finally see the girl—her own sister—in the flesh and not in some freakish vision of death and destruction. Rose wore a lacy white dress that hung unflatteringly over her body. If it were at all possible, she’d lost weight since her time half-starving in the Central American jungle. Despite her frail thinness, Ash now saw the uncanny resemblance she bore to pictures of Eve and Ash when they were in grammar school.
If Thorne’s hold on her shoulder was painful, Rose didn’t show it. She peered unblinkingly at the new arrival with her wonder-glazed brown eyes. Perhaps she thought she was seeing herself ten years into the future.
“So,” Thorne said. He puffed on his cigar. His hand shook when he plucked the cigar out of his mouth. “The other Seasons have fallen, and now only Fall remains.”
“The only fall remaining,” Ash said, “is the one I’m going to help you take right off a cli
ff. Give me back my sister. Give me back my boyfriend. And go fly a kite someplace windy where I’ll never see you again.” Thorne was silent, so Ash added, “I can give you the name of a couple of deserts where you could start.”
“I will have,” Thorne said, articulating each word slowly, “my sacrifice.”
“I just gave you one,” Ash said. “She’s floating in a bed of wet leaves and lily pads. I’m a short fuse away from dropping you in there with her. The pair of you will make a great compost pile.”
“Better a compost pile than a weeping willow.” Thorne brought his cigar up to take another drag.
Ash focused on the embers at the end of his cigar. The cigar exploded in a cloud of tobacco and ashes. Thorne screamed.
When the cloud cleared, Thorne was quivering with his teeth bared. His face was blackened with soot. “Fine,” Thorne said. He glanced at the camera behind the altar. “I was going to save this finale for your night god lover, but you just earned your spot as my ultimate sacrifice.” Thorne crouched beside Rose. He moved the hair away from her ear and whispered just loud enough for Ash to hear: “Do you remember what you did to that ship after we rescued you from the jungle? Do you? Well, I want you to do something even worse to this bad lady.” Just so Ash was clear, he turned and mouthed the word “boom” to her.
Rose’s eyes narrowed. The edges of her eyes grew red in a fiery corona.
Ash felt a queasy, sinking sensation in the bottom of her stomach. Was this how it was going to end after all she had survived? A gory, explosive death at the merciless hands of a six-year-old girl? Her own sister, her own blood?
Thorne grew impatient. “What are you waiting for?” he shouted. “This bad woman wants to take you back to the jungle. To take you away from me!” Thorne shook her by the shoulders. “Do you want to go back there and live like an animal? Then do as I say.”
Embers and Echoes Page 27
