Embers and Echoes

by Karsten Knight

  The night before, once Ash had finished crying and had accepted that Wes wasn’t coming back, she had watched television with her two sisters. An awkward silence had clung to the room until, finally, Eve had started laughing under her breath and pointed out the irony that they were watching a sitcom about three misfit brothers living in the same house. Then the three of them had collapsed in laughter, a contagious mix of relief and exhaustion, even though little Rose didn’t seem to have any idea exactly why she was laughing. That moment was the first time that Ash thought maybe, just maybe, her life was taking baby steps toward someplace more comfortable, predictable, and safe.

  In three words Raja had catapulted Ash right back into the land of the inexplicable, disconcerting, and weird.

  She could see that Raja, too, had gone quite pale, which made the blush spots on her cheeks far more pronounced. No use causing the girl a panic-induced miscarriage. “Listen,” Ash said, “I don’t know what’s going on, but the important thing is that you’re here, and you’re safe, and you’re healthy.” She took Raja by the arm and started to lead her toward the elevator, even though Raja resisted. “Come on. Let’s get you up into the air-conditioned apartment before the heat sends you into labor seven months early.”

  Raja opened her mouth.

  Then the baby cried.

  Ash stopped tugging. She peered around Raja and noticed for the first time the baby carriage that had been tucked in the shadow of the coffee table.

  And the baby who had just woken up inside of it.

  “Tell me you didn’t, Raja,” Ash pleaded with her. “Please tell me you didn’t.”

  Raja avoided eye contact by ducking down next to the carrier. She made several soft “shushing” noises and tucked the yellow blanket snugly beneath the baby. It didn’t stop crying until she pressed her lips to its forehead and held them there for several seconds. Gradually it’s sobbing faded to a gurgle, then silence. Ash could see the infant’s eyes flicker closed as it drifted back into pacified slumber.

  “You don’t understand,” Raja said in a hushed voice. “You can’t understand what it’s like . . . what it’s like to have the father of your child killed the day after she was conceived. What it’s like to stare at your stomach in the mirror and know that you have to wait nine months to make sure the baby’s okay too, all the while wondering if she’s going to share the same fate as her father. What it’s like to feel more alone when you’re eating and breathing and living for two people than you ever did when you just lived for yourself.” She rocked the carrier gently back and forth. “I just needed to know that she was okay for me to be okay myself.”

  Ash felt compelled to scold Raja for her recklessness. Harnessing her powers over life and death to speed up a pregnancy could have easily killed the child, or caused it to come out of the womb already old and deformed. But the damage, if any, was already done. And to be fair, Ash had been in possession of her little sister for only twenty-four hours, so she wasn’t exactly in the position to dispense parenting advice.

  Ash knelt down beside the carrier. “What’s her name?”

  Raja offered a sleepy smile. “I wanted to name her something strong and Norse like her father . . . so I call her Saga.” The baby’s eyes blinked open just for a moment when she heard her name.

  “It’s a beautiful name,” Ash said. “She’s beautiful.” And she was. Ash could already see features from both of the baby’s parents. The long, shapely nose from Raja, along with her Egyptian skin tone. The expressive robin’segg-blue eyes from Rolfe, and the early beginnings of what might turn out to be blond hair.

  “She laughs a lot, and she almost never cries.” Raja’s eyes glimmered wistfully. “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all be so strong.”

  Ash took Raja’s suitcase, and the three of them rode the elevator back up to the top floor. The adorable infant served as a welcome distraction to the questions that threatened to run wild in Ash’s brain—mainly, who had impersonated Ash? And what had her doppelganger said to Raja to make the girl travel a thousand miles to Miami with an infant.

  Raja continued to chatter excitedly (though in soft tones so as not to wake the baby), but she trailed off midsentence as they came through the entrance to Wes’s condominium. Eve was sitting at the kitchenette, and had stopped in the middle of a big bite from a McIntosh apple.

  The looks the two girls were exchanging said it all. Raja looked ready to drop her own child just for a chance to dive murderously at Eve’s throat, and Eve looked like a fox caught with its teeth clamped around a hen’s neck. Ash had been so preoccupied with all the other pressing questions that it hadn’t crossed her mind until now that Eve was partially responsible for Rolfe’s death.

  “What the hell is she doing here?” Raja growled. “I thought the bitch was dead.”

  “Hey,” Ash said. She placed her hands on Raja’s shoulders and forced her to make eye contact. “I know what you’re thinking. I know that you’re feeling the lust for revenge, and that Eve might seem like a sensible target for all that rage. But this moving-on thing works only if all of us agree to second chances, second chances for everyone.”

  Raja’s body was trembling so much that baby Saga stirred and gurgled. “You’ll forgive me,” Raja said, “if I don’t feel very forgiving.”

  “It’s okay,” Eve said. She wiped the juice from the apple onto her pants and stood up. “I would never ask you to forgive me for the unforgivable. I can tell you that I never meant for anyone at Blackwood to get hurt. I can tell you that I didn’t know that Lily would sour and curdle into a monster the way she did. But that won’t bring your boyfriend back.” Eve walked over to the guest bedroom. “For that,” she said over her shoulder, “I don’t deserve a second chance.” Then she closed the door softly behind her.

  Raja and Ash both stared at the closed door. Raja finally broke the silence first. “There’s one other thing you should know.”

  Ash withheld the urge to say, “Oh, God. What now?”

  Raja unzipped her suitcase and rummaged through the clothes until she found what she was looking for. From beneath the mound of underwear and jeans, she produced a familiar-looking scroll with a braille label on the edge.

  After her trip to the Cloak Netherworld, Ash had already had just about enough of the oily black creatures and their prophecies. “Don’t these things ever go away?” she moaned.

  “When Serena originally handed it to me, I couldn’t make sense of the instructions, but I felt this strange tickling in the back of my mind telling me that when I finally understood what it was that I had to do, I wasn’t going to like it.” Raja cautiously handed the scroll to Ash. “And I was right.”

  Ash took a deep breath and unfurled the scroll. Raja’s instructions had five words:

  DO NOT AGE THE CHILD

  This is bad, Ash realized. This could be very bad. As much as she didn’t want to buy into Jack’s prophecies, she knew that the overseers had a far deeper understanding of what the future held than Ash or anyone else did.

  Ash folded up the scroll, pried open the metal lid of the trash can, and dropped the prophecy in with the other refuse. She hoped she could scrap her misgivings with it. She pointed to the baby asleep in the carrier. “You did the right thing, Raja. Nothing this beautiful could ever be wrong.”

  Raja smiled. But then she looked around the room like she was searching for something. “Hey, what happened to your trip to Canada?” she asked. “Where’s Colt?”

  Ash snorted. She collapsed back into one of the empty bar stools at the kitchenette. “Oh, Raja,” she said. “We’re going to need a couple of cocktails before I can catch you up on that story.”

  Ash had never slept worse in her life.

  Maybe she was getting sick, or maybe it was just a headache from too many cocktails with Raja, but her sinuses blazed with a hot fire—and not the type of fire she could control, nor the kind of heat that made her feel at home. A fever had ignited in her skull. While she waited for the aspiri
n to kick in, she rolled over on the futon and pressed her sweat-soaked face deeper into the pillow, as though she could smother the feeling.

  It only intensified. As the pain swelled, she began to experience that out-of-body sensation that consumed her whenever she had a vision of a past life.

  A memory was clawing its way to the surface. If what Colt had said was true, about her brain prioritizing her memories, then whatever was trying to leak out might be important for her survival. Now if only she could fall asleep so she could experience it . . .

  Ash took slow, deep breaths and waited for her consciousness to fade,

  waited for the dark curtain to drop,

  waited for the scalding fever to subside,

  waited for the calm of slumber to—

  You lean on the ship’s railing and look out over the dark sea. Night clings to the Atlantic like an impenetrable shroud. The clouds are suffocating the moon, and only a few choice stars on the western horizon have punctured the darkness. The temperature feels nearly arctic, and even though you could easily produce a bubble of warmth around yourself, you don’t. Somehow the chill feels right tonight.

  The transatlantic cruise is taking you home from Spain, “home” to America. But with Colt dead, and no family, what the hell is “home” anyway?

  Anywhere is home.

  Nowhere is home.

  You’ve lived your last five years subsisting only on the bloodthirsty promise of revenge, believing that finding and catching and hurting and maybe killing Violet would be the antidote to this venom surging through your veins.

  Now you know the truth.

  The anticipation of the act was the only thing keeping you alive. Even if you had the will to start from scratch, you have no idea where you could go for a fresh start. There’s nothing left for you in New Orleans . . . but where else can you go?

  “Lucy . . .” The wind whispers. “Lucy . . .”

  It’s not the wind.

  It’s the voice of the ghost standing behind you.

  She could easily be Violet’s spirit come back from the underworld to avenge her own death. This girl, barely into her teenage years, looks just like your older sister did more than a decade ago. The lightbulb nearby buzzes and flickers, making all of the girl’s movements look jerky between strobes, like she’s teleporting forward inches at a time.

  After the initial rush of panic, you realize that this is no wraith at all. She doesn’t have the same broken, slightly crooked nose that Violet had her whole life from falling in the cornfield when she was five. The tattered black dress, the gaunt, malnourished face . . .

  This is not Violet.

  “You left me on the farm,” she rasps. “You left me for dead. Alone. I was four years old. I killed that bad man for you, blew him to bits, and you two repaid me by leaving me for dead.”

  “Gracie?” you whisper, and take a step toward her. “My little Gracie?”

  Gracie’s whole body vibrates, and the lightbulb next to her explodes. “Not your Gracie,” she says. “Not anyone’s Gracie.”

  You’re so overcome seeing your sister for the first time in more than a decade that you don’t heed her anger. You move in to embrace her.

  The back of her hand sends you reeling back. You nearly topple over the stern’s railing and into the water below. Your mouth fills with the metallic taste of blood.

  “Don’t touch me,” she roars. Spittle flies from her mouth. “It took years to find you two in New Orleans. Years of wandering, miserable and alone, only to discover the two of you living a life of luxury and hedonism, grinning like I never even existed.”

  “We thought you were dead,” you explain. “With the explosion, and the roof just ripped right off the barn, we figured—”

  “Figured?” Gracie echoes. “You left the farm without me because you figured I was dead? You dropped me in a pile of hay in the rafters and then ran for your life. Like a coward. The truth is that whether I was alive or not didn’t matter. It was just easier for the two of you to go lead a new life where you didn’t have a little girl to weigh you down. I was your sister, and you treated me like some unwelcome burden.”

  You start to lose your patience. “You found us and you said nothing?”

  “No, it was too late for my happiness.” Grace runs her fingers along the side of the cabin to her right. “So I took yours from you instead.”

  You hear Eve’s final words again.

  The wrong sister.

  That’s when it hits you.

  That’s when you snap.

  “You delusional little wretch,” you growl. “What have you done?”

  Gracie smiles for the first time. A weary smile. A deranged smile. “What haven’t I done? I had your husband killed. I made you kill our sister.” She holds out her hand, and a little prick of light blossoms over her palm. “And now I will leave you for dead in the middle of the Atlantic.”

  You lunge for her, but the explosive orb in her hand hits you in the chest before you can even make it two steps.

  Up is down. Down is up. The fall is quick. The water is cold.

  You plunge through the surface. It’s so dark and you are so disoriented that you’re not even sure you’re floundering in the right direction until you break the surface.

  The dense salt water stings your eyes, and you splutter for a long time before your lungs clear. And by the time you’ve recovered your bearings, the ship is already fifty yards away. The boat’s stern retreats into the cave of night. And standing at the railing is the silhouette of a girl who has taken everything from you and is laughing from the shadows.

  You try to ignite your furnace, to warm the frigid Atlantic waters around you. But calm, cool despair sets in like a painkiller, and you simply let the cold anesthetize your body. You tread water as best you can while you wait for the end, and tilt your head to whisper to the hidden moon, the only one that will listen.

  “The wrong sister.

  “The wrong sister.

  “The wrong—”

  Ash tumbled off the futon and onto the hardwood floor. She was still half-delirious from watching her own hypothermic, watery death, but adrenaline rapidly cleansed away the fog. Her internal danger indicator was graphing off the charts.

  Something terrible was about to happen.

  And she needed to find Rose.

  Half-blind in the dark, and still feeling partially like she was afloat in the Atlantic, Ash tripped over the coffee table, sending an avalanche of magazines onto the carpet. She hopped in pain on her good foot across the living room until she came to Wes’s room. She flung open the door.

  The bed was empty, with only the vaguest impression in one of the pillows where Rose’s head had recently lain.

  Ash hastened over to the front door, nearly tripping over the coffee table again. She prayed that she wasn’t going to have to go searching through the streets of Miami after midnight for an escaped six-year-old.

  The door, however, was shut and locked, with the dead bolt still in place.

  The door to Aurora’s room, where Raja and Saga were sleeping, was ajar. The mother lay sound asleep next to the baby’s makeshift crib. And even though Eve’s door was closed, Ash couldn’t imagine the two sisters were in bed spooning or braiding each other’s hair.

  Unless Rose was hiding in one of the kitchen cabinets, that left only one possibility.

  Ash found the door ajar at the top of the spiral staircase, propped open by an apple. The sound of the wind over Biscayne Bay whistled lightly past the opening.

  Ash stepped out onto the roof deck. Rose was nowhere in her direct line of vision, at least in the vicinity of the pool. Ash was about to turn the corner to continue her investigation on the other half of the roof, but she heard a man’s voice.

  “You don’t remember me, do you?”

  It was Colt’s voice, so Ash immediately whipped her head back and forth, assuming that the Hopi trickster was perched somewhere, talking to her.

  But then Rose’s vo
ice replied first: “No.”

  Ash peeked around the corner. Colt and Rose stood at the roof’s edge. They were both looking out over the downtown Miami skyline, with Colt leaning on the balustrade and Rose, much shorter, staring out from below.

  Ash was instantly sickened seeing the two of them together. Her first instinct was to charge toward Colt, to insert herself between them and demand to know how he’d gotten up to the roof, and why he’d lured her sister up here.

  Ash, however, was coming fresh off the memory of Rose leaving her for dead in the last life. For now, a flashing beacon in Ash’s mind was telling her to wait, to watch, to listen . . .

  “This may be hard for you to believe, Rose,” Colt was saying, “but we knew each other once, very long ago. Knew each other very well, in fact.”

  The way Colt said “very well” made Ash feel dirty in a way that no bath could ever make clean again.

  “I want to tell you a story.” Colt fixed a crick in his neck. “It’s a love story. Do you like love stories?”

  Rose said nothing. Slowly she nodded.

  “Once, in a time long before this city was even here”—he made a grand arc over the skyline with his hand—“when all this was just a rolling swamp, before the newcomers even landed their ships on this land . . . there was a man who loved a woman very much. They were both born of this earth, people of the clay, but they came from opposite ends of the world. Still, their love was so strong that, life after life, the two of them found each other, each magnetized specifically to the other so that no ocean could leave them unbound. Each so attuned to the other’s frequency that they could feel each other across continents.”

  Ash ducked down and quietly padded her way behind a row of the air-conditioning units to get closer. She stopped in a crouch behind the base of a tall satellite dish.

  “For centuries these two loved each other. Death itself couldn’t even separate them. They had one of those mighty loves that is so rare to this world—cosmic, steadfast, and eternal. Just like any real cosmic love, sometimes the passion was so strong that they hurt each other. Sometimes they destroyed the things around them, the people around them. But even in fiery ruins they ended right back in each other’s arms, and that’s all that matters, right?”