Embers and Echoes

by Karsten Knight

  “You asked me two months ago,” Ash said finally, “after our tennis grudge match—before the Cloak took you—whether I thought the two of us end up like this every time we’re reincarnated.”

  Eve clucked her tongue. “You mean right before you told me that you were done speaking with me for this lifetime?”

  Ash cringed. “Good memory. I’d sort of hoped that being plugged into the tree would make you forget some of the things I said.”

  “No amnesia.” Eve wrinkled her nose. “But it did leave me with the strong taste of lettuce in my mouth.” She fished around in the jeans she’d borrowed from Ash until she found her mints, and then popped one into her mouth. “God, I hope it’s not a permanent side effect.”

  “What I wanted to tell you,” Ash continued, “is that if we keep worrying about all the bad shit we did the last time around, or what will happen to us in the next life, sooner or later we’re going to completely forget to live this one. So we can go on living like two self-fulfilling prophecies, two forces of nature that can never coexist . . .” Ash turned Eve so that she was facing Rose, who was now floating faceup in the pool. “Or we can at least make a stab at being a happy, slightly creepy family.”

  Eve laughed for the first time since they’d returned from the Netherworld. “Let’s just hope Rose grows up to have my fashion sense instead of yours.” She plucked at the pockets on her borrowed jeans. “Where did you buy these, out of the back of a truck?”

  Ash ignored her. “Speaking of family . . .” She slowly held up her cell phone and flipped it open. The word “home” blinked next to the first speed-dial slot. “There is one thing you can do for me.” Her thumb reached up to press the send button.

  “Don’t.” Eve’s hand wrapped tightly around Ash’s wrist. Thunder clapped in the clouds overhead. “You rescued me—on many levels—and I owe you a great debt. Don’t ask me for something I cannot give.”

  When Eve withdrew her trembling hand, she left a white imprint in Ash’s flesh—exactly where Ash’s own handprint was burned into Eve’s.

  “You don’t need to go home right now,” Ash said. “You don’t even need to make promises. . . . But, Eve, you need to give them hope. Hope so Dad doesn’t stay up night after night on his laptop, searching police blogs and obituaries. So I don’t come downstairs in the middle of the night and find Mom at the kitchen table with her face buried in your old tracksuit.” The phone vibrated in Ash’s hand just then, and Ash added, “So they will stop calling me every damn five minutes.”

  Eve let out a long breath, and a sea breeze blew in from the Atlantic with it. Then she reached out and took the phone from Ash’s hand. “If I answer this call, we’re even. No more playing the ‘But I rescued you from hell’ card from now on.” She clicked the button, and the voice on the line—clearly Gloria Wilde’s—immediately started rattling off like a machine gun, a week’s worth of anxiety from Ash dodging calls and text messages.

  It all stopped as soon as Eve said, “Mom?”

  A profound and heartrending silence followed on the other end of the line. Ash was unconsciously holding her breath.

  Eve stared penetratingly into Ash’s eyes as she said her next three words:

  “It’s me . . . Eve.”

  Ash found Wes exactly where she expected he’d be. The Spanish monastery was easy enough to find, and the magnificent weeping willow in the courtyard was far too large to possibly miss.

  The morning’s rain clouds had gratefully blown off to sea, and the dusky sun peeked just over the monastery walls, casting the courtyard in an orange light. A few final tourists were wandering the grounds with bulky cameras and bored-looking children in tow.

  Ash brushed aside the curtain of leaves. Wes was sitting cross-legged between two protruding roots, staring out through the veil of drooping branches.

  Wes looked mildly startled by her appearance, and she saw with a sinking heart that he smiled only weakly when she took a seat next to him. “I thought you were going for some retail therapy and sibling bonding downtown,” he said.

  Ash shook her head. “Strangely enough, even after being comatose and attached to a giant tree all that time, Eve decided that she needed a big nap before she was ready to face the public again. And when I tried to explain to Rose about cutting her hair, I think she got the wrong idea, because she started running laps around the kitchen.” She sighed. “Maybe it was too much to expect that everybody would be ready to do ‘normal’ things.”

  Wes patted her knee. “Well, you get bonus points for trying to get everyone to jump back in with both feet. In the meantime, the Wilde sisters are all welcome to board at my place for as long as you need. Consider it your four-star hotel.”

  “Hopefully Eve left her angst back in the Cloak Netherworld, because if not, it might feel more like a sorority house than a hotel.”

  Wes pulled aside the veil of willow leaves so Ash could see out. The facilities people were beginning to set up rows of white chairs, all facing the tree. “There’s a wedding tomorrow morning. The happy couple has chosen to get married beneath this tree. Tourists have been sporadically filtering in and out all day, because of the ‘science fiction broadcast’ last night. They all seemed to think this tree was some kind of elaborate publicity stunt for some new television show. Not one of them actually believes that there is really a person beneath all this wood and bark. A handful of people dead, some of them because of gruesome murders, all in the name of the Four Seasons’ new religion . . . and in the end everyone seems to think it was a viral advertisement for a new TV series.”

  “It wasn’t all for nothing,” Ash said. “Sure, no one believes it now. But if we hadn’t stopped them, the Four Seasons would have traveled from city to city killing until there was enough blood pooled in the streets that people would have been forced to believe them.”

  Wes barely seemed to hear her. “This little girl who couldn’t have been older than four or five stopped in front of the weeping willow and couldn’t take her eyes off it. She finally said to her mother, ‘It’s a miracle.’” Wes let the willow leaves go. “I can see nothing blessed or miraculous about this.”

  “It might not be in this lifetime, Wes, but you’ll see Aurora again one day. That’s one of the small blessings of being half-mortal.” Ash turned to admire the tree, let her gaze climb the trunk to the lofty limbs above. “And as much as I hate Lily for taking her from us, Aurora couldn’t have asked for a more beautiful monument or resting place.”

  “Don’t try to make something beautiful out of this,” Wes snapped. His hands trembled. “This isn’t some happy arboretum—it’s a tomb.” He stood up. “You may have gotten your two sisters back, but I’ve just lost mine.”

  A bocce ball might as well have been lodged in Ash’s throat. She could barely swallow. “That’s not fair,” she said quietly.

  Wes bowed his head. “I’m sorry. . . . I can’t believe I actually said that. It’s as though this whole city has become venomous to me.” He leaned on a branch for support, and a few rogue willow leaves fluttered down. “That is why I have to leave now.”

  “You really think that if you immerse yourself in the anonymity of someplace else, you’ll find a release for the pain you’re going through?” Ash asked. “That the white noise of another city is going to help you to forget?”

  “I will never,” he said, “forget. But I don’t need to stay where I can see her face etched into every restaurant table, every patch of sand, every bird that flies overhead.”

  Ash stood up and stepped in front of him. “Then take me with you.”

  Wes said nothing.

  “Oh,” Ash said. “I see. So I’m just some scenery that will remind you of her as well.”

  “Don’t you think that I’d love to be able to separate you from all of this?” Wes demanded. His eyes flickered black. “I’ve known you for a week, but you’re already like a craving, like some elixir I can’t stop drinking. But I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to look at yo
u through a clear lens and not see the horrible things that happened here. The memories of her and you aren’t like oil and water. I can’t just burn the oil slick off the top and leave just the purity. Believe me, if I could retreat to the memory of you and me holding each other in the ocean without reliving everything that happened after that . . . I would give anything.”

  “So you take it one day at a time,” Ash argued. “And you make new memories. And you learn to smile and laugh and love and live again. And one day, once you have perspective and her memory is a distant ache, that horrible night will no longer be the first thing you think of when you wake up, or the last thing you imagine before you fall asleep. Or the first memory you think of when you look into my eyes.”

  He sighed and bowed his head. “Don’t you see, Ash? Maybe one of the reasons we can’t remember our previous lives is because we’re not supposed to find each other. I thought I saved Aurora when I carried her away from that awful relationship, but in the end it was being around me—being around other gods—that killed her.” His pointer finger darted back and forth between the two of them. “People like you and me weren’t built to lead peaceful lives together in the suburbs. Two of us together in one place is as inevitably fatal as running around a stack of dynamite with a torch.” He looked away. “And that’s why you need to let me go. To let me let you go.”

  She grabbed his face and forced him to look at her. Her voice shattered into a thousand shards as she spoke, and the tears streamed freely. “Damnit, Wes, don’t you run away from me. You’ve got a shot at meaning something to me, a shot at me meaning something to you. Instead you’re telling me that you’d rather just be the next person who buys a one-way ticket out of my life? Don’t be that guy. Don’t be just another thing that couldn’t last. Don’t leave.” Still Wes made no reply, so she let go of his face and pounded hard on his chest once, then again even harder, hoping that it hurt. Her temperature rose. “Are you not man enough for it? You’d rather not let the bad in with the good, so you’re just going to shut everything and everyone out? You’re a coward, Wesley Towers. You’re a damn . . .” She broke off into such hysterical sobs that she couldn’t finish her sentence.

  He wrapped his arms around her, pulling her tightly against his stone chest. Instantly her internal temperature bottomed out and she buried her face in his sternum. “Shh,” he whispered soothingly to her. He guided her over to the tree, and together the two of them lay so that Wes was propped up against its trunk while she clung tightly to him.

  As Wes held her, he stroked her hair and lowered his lips to kiss her forehead. “Rest now,” he whispered. She was mildly aware that his touch was affecting her with some type of magic, but before she could fight it, a calmness swept over her. The troubled seas within her grew still as the winds died from a howl to a whisper. She yawned. Part of her wanted to open her eyes, to stretch her limbs, to fight it, but part of her saw a window to a few minutes without pain if she would just let go, if she would just let go. . . .

  It sounded like Wes was speaking to her through a lengthening tunnel, and when she woke later, she would never be totally sure that she hadn’t dreamed it. “In a world that’s forever uncertain, there is one thing I know in my heart: We will meet again, Ashline Wilde.”

  When Ash opened her eyes next, it was well after dark. She was curled up in a ball in the cold grass beneath the weeping willow. And she was very much alone.

  In the end Wes had left her with two things: the key to his condo, tucked into the pocket of her jeans, and a spreading, numbing cold that even lava couldn’t thaw.

  THE MOLTEN CURE

  Tuesday, Part I

  After watching fifteen minutes of the seven o’clock news, Ash determined that she was somehow involved in just about every story.

  The untimely death of noted tycoon Lesley Vanderbilt, discovered mysteriously frostbitten and afloat in the Venetian Pool, along with the body of a second female victim.

  The explosions on the Lincoln Road Mall—that had left many businesses damaged, yet no one injured—and how the FBI was “exploring the possibility of terrorism.”

  The unidentified corpse encased in glass on the beach, who authorities believed to be the victim of a freak geothermal anomaly. (A portion of the beach had been closed to the public while volcanologists investigated).

  The trail of blood and death throughout the overgrown gardens on the Villa Vizcaya grounds, and the strange structure that had been constructed over the Mound, like some nightmare that had spawned out of radioactive fertilizer.

  And then the final, puzzling conclusion that tied all the stories together: The bodies recovered at each crime scene belonged to the strange “fantasy broadcasts” that had aired this past week. The newscasters could offer nothing more than a wild, nonsensical guess that a publicity stunt for an unaired television series had somehow gone awry, leaving six people dead, and the gory remains of a seventh unidentified.

  The single weeping willow tree that appeared overnight in the courtyard of the city’s Spanish monastery didn’t even make the news.

  Ash watched just long enough to be certain that her face or name didn’t pop up in any of the newscasts. Apparently no one had captured any footage of her firefight with Rey on the Lincoln Road Mall. She finally muted the television and pulled her feet up onto the long chaise longue in Wes’s apartment. In her hands she cradled a camera. She had taken it—along with all of the others that she could find—from Lily’s botanical arena at Villa Vizcaya.

  Unfortunately, this wasn’t a camcorder where she could just eject the tape and fling it into the fireplace to destroy the evidence. She flicked the antenna on the bottom. Somewhere in the world there could be a recording showing Ash using her abilities, from multiple angles, probably in high definition—enough to identify her face. Maybe this recording was sitting in an empty room, on a dusty computer, waiting for Lily or Thorne to come back to it. Maybe her secret was safe.

  Or maybe . . .

  The buzzer startled her. She dropped the camera onto the floor, and the lens cracked.

  When the buzzing at the front door happened again, Ash deduced that it must be the condominium’s equivalent of a doorbell. She staggered over to the intercom beside the front door, where she pushed the blinking blue button.

  “You have a guest at the front desk, Mr. Towers,” the female concierge said immediately over the intercom.

  “Very well,” Ash said in the deepest voice she could muster.

  Ash pressed her ear to the door to Wes’s room, where Eve was staying, and then checked on Rose, who was sleeping in the guest room with her arms and legs sprawled out in an X. Ash had discovered the night before that Rose slept with her eyes open. Even in slumber, the little girl was a little creepy.

  On the elevator ride down to the lobby, Ash wondered whether she was violating house guest etiquette by greeting a guest who’d come expecting to see Wes. She was potentially placing herself in a position where she’d have to explain to a stranger that Wes was on an indefinite leave from Miami to deal with his grief. But between Aurora and Ixtab, Ash had only ever met two of Wes’s friends—one now dead, the other missing. The curiosity of meeting someone else who was a part of his life triumphed over her better judgment.

  As it turned out, however, the visitor was there for Ash.

  The elevator chimed in tranquil monotone, and Ash stepped cautiously out into the lobby. Getting ambushed every day for the past week had made her jumpy. Even greeting guests in the busy lobby felt like she was walking into some sort of death trap. So it was a pleasant surprise when she heard the familiar voice call her name from the row of floral-cushioned armchairs by the faux fireplace.

  “Ashline?” Raja said. The Egyptian girl stood up slowly, as though her knees were arthritic.

  It took all of Ash’s restraint not to tackle Raja in happiness when she crossed the lobby to hug her. Ash kept her back hunched when she wrapped her arms around her, just in case there was any chance of crushing th
e baby she knew was growing inside Raja. The two of them had never been best friends at Blackwood—or friends at all until that fateful first week of May. But after all they’d been through . . .

  They both had tears in their eyes when they finally pulled away to look at each other. Raja had cut her hair so that her bangs came almost down to her eyebrows, but that couldn’t hide the thick, dark bags beneath her eyes. Her olive skin was mottled with red. Her face looked rounder, and her curves more accentuated than Ash remembered. It was hard to believe this transformation had happened in only the short span since Ash had last seen her.

  Ash laughed between sobs and wiped the corners of her eyes. “I don’t know what to say,” she said. “It’s just . . . really nice to see a friendly face.”

  Raja squeezed Ash’s arm. “You don’t know the half of it.”

  Ash shook her head. “But how did you know which condo I was staying in, or who to ask for, or . . . ?” Ash had to reflect back on the last week just to double-check that she’d never contacted Raja. “Wait, or what city I was even in?”

  “What do you mean?” Raja pulled out her smart phone and held up the screen—a virtual notepad was open with an address and Wes’s name written on it. “I know I wasn’t the most fastidious student at Blackwood, but I’m smart enough to take notes when I hear something important.”

  Ash felt that fog of joy, the one she’d been swimming in since she’d first seen Raja, fade into a dark mist. “I meant, who told you where to find me?”

  “Is . . . this a trick question?” Raja cocked her head to the side. “Ash, you did.”

  Ash swallowed. The Four Seasons had located Ade with Colt’s help—so who was to say they hadn’t tried to reel in Raja by using some sick trick as well? “I don’t know what to tell you, Raja. Whoever it was on the phone wasn’t me. But I promise you’re in no danger if it was who I think it was—”

  “No,” Raja interrupted her. “It wasn’t a phone call. It was a video chat on the computer. I saw you.”