Embers and Echoes

by Karsten Knight

  Ash couldn’t be sure from her angle of view, but she thought she saw Rose smile a little.

  “Unfortunately, these two lovers weren’t without enemies. There are some people who are so miserable that they’d prefer to see everyone else miserable as well. One day these wild but powerful monsters, with hearts and souls as black as their oily skin, grew weary of seeing the boy so happy and gleeful . . . so they split the girl into three pieces. And because she would never be whole again, the boy felt like he would never be whole again either.”

  Colt dropped down onto one knee and put his hand on Rose’s shoulder. “I bet you’ve gone your entire life feeling like just a piece of what you could be. Feeling like a shard, like you’re incomplete.”

  Rose looked down. Her tiny hands fell limply to her sides, and she released a little sob.

  “You don’t have to cry anymore,” Colt whispered, barely loud enough for Ash to hear where she was crouched. He pounded his chest over his heart. “Because I feel the exact same way that you do . . . and because I’ve found a cure. I’ve found a way to reassemble your pieces and glue them back together. Then we will both feel whole again.”

  It was all Ash could do not to vomit onto the rooftop. So that was Colt’s plan.

  He didn’t want to just exterminate the Cloak to end their embargo on memories from past lives.

  He wanted to reunite with the Pele he’d loved for centuries.

  To melt Ash, Eve, and Rose back into a single person.

  OVER THE EDGE

  Tuesday, Part II

  Ash had to grab on to the air-conditioning unit to keep from toppling over. All this time, she knew that Colt had some dark agenda, and that it somehow involved the Wilde family, but how could he really consider trying to force her soul and those of her sisters back into a single goddess? All his lying and scheming, a string of gods and humans dead in Miami, and Ash hadn’t been just another pawn on Colt’s chessboard.

  She was his endgame, too.

  When Ash turned back to the railing, Colt was fishing around in his pocket for something. “Before I can make you feel whole again,” he said to Rose, “I need your help.” Colt pulled out a crumpled postcard. He flattened it out and then held it in front of Rose’s face. From Ash’s position, she could just make out a church steeple with a white top and a brick base. “Everywhere that you go, in every life you live, you leave a special trail, and the portals—the doors you open in the air—they can take you any place that you’ve been before.” He tapped the church in the picture. “You remember this, don’t you?”

  Rose took the postcard from him. She examined it closely. She nodded.

  “Well, in a few minutes I’m going to ask you to take us there. Before we can kill the monsters that split you into pieces, we need to pay a special visit to someone who hangs out at this church.”

  Ash had listened to enough. She revealed herself from behind the satellite dish. “You’re not taking my little sister anywhere, you sick freak.”

  Colt didn’t even look surprised or apprehensive at Ash’s sudden appearance. “You cannot stop this, Ashline. You’ll thank me for what I’ve done once I’ve reconstructed your soul. Once you are Pele again.” He actually sounded like he believed it, like she should be grateful that he wanted to smash Ash and her sisters back into a single, volatile entity.

  “I would die a thousand times over before I would let you touch my soul.”

  Colt gave her a weary smile. “Fortunately, you’ll only have to die once.”

  Ash didn’t even sense the man who had snuck up behind her until his fist blindsided her in the face. She’d fought her share of fights and taken her share of blows over the last few months, but this punch felt like she’d been smashed with a brick. She hit the roof on her back and groaned.

  While her world was struggling to right itself, the blurry image of a familiar Greek man loomed over her body. Proteus cracked his knuckles, which transformed from gray stone and mortar back into soft flesh.

  “Careful,” Colt warned him. “You are not to harm my past and future bride any more than is necessary.”

  Proteus held up his other wrist, with the still fresh burn of Ash’s hand imprinted in his skin. “The bitch had that one coming.”

  Ash sat up and massaged her face. “Guess I don’t have to wonder any longer who was impersonating me on video chat.”

  “Guess you don’t,” Proteus said, mimicking her voice precisely.

  Raja exploded out of the apartment door and into view. “Saga?” she shouted. “Saga?” Her head swiveled rapidly, frantically searching the pool deck before she realized that there were other people on the roof behind her. “Where is she? Where is my baby?” Finally she discovered Ash struggling to her feet, dazed, and it registered that there were other sinister things afoot in addition to her missing child. “Ash, what the hell is going on?”

  Before Ash could even begin to explain, Eve emerged from the other side of the roof, where she must have been listening the entire time. In her arms she cradled baby Saga, who was bundled in a white shawl and was fast asleep.

  Raja visibly relaxed. “Thank you, Eve.” She held out her arms. “Bring her to me now.”

  Eve ignored Raja. Instead she carried the child over to the railing, where she joined Colt, Proteus, and Rose.

  Both Ash and Raja recognized the treachery that was occurring, and converged on Eve. Eve, however, spread a hand over the sleeping child and let electricity crackle over her palm and fingers. The approaching girls stopped dead in their tracks. “I don’t want to do it,” Eve said quietly, “but I will if you make me.”

  Raja dropped to her knees and whimpered. “Please . . . ,” she whispered. “Eve, please . . .” She held out her empty arms.

  Ash couldn’t believe it. “I save you from an eternity of living half-conscious as fertilizer for a big tree . . . and this is how you repay me?” Her voice broke. This she couldn’t swallow. “I give you a second chance, and instead you kidnap an infant and start batting for the douche bag team all over again?”

  “Did you think that it would be that easy?” Eve shook her head. “That we could all just go back to mixing mint juleps at Mom and Pop’s house in Scarsdale, go handbag shopping at the Galleria, catch a movie in Times Square, and everything would be just freakin’ dandy? That the two of us would take Rose to the ice cream parlor and send her off on her first day of kindergarten, and that would make everything normal again?”

  “I thought you could at least try something for once that didn’t involve ruining the lives of everyone around you,” Ash snarled.

  “If everyone does what they’re supposed to, no one has to get hurt. Except the Cloak,” Eve said. “I need purpose and direction. I need to move from blindness into knowledge. I need to see my old memories so that I can know that life was better in the lifetimes before, that things can get better from here.”

  “I can tell you from experience,” Ash said, picturing Eve burning alive in the Spanish palm grove, “that things haven’t always been peachy. You don’t need to resort to terrorism to find out.”

  “You call it terrorism. I call it activism.”

  “Enough.” Colt stepped between them. “See how you’re bickering? See how having your soul butchered into three pieces has made you self-destructive? I’ve watched you two slowly eat each other alive—watched, chained from a rock, as you, Eve, nearly drowned Ashline, before she cast you into hell. It pains me to see the Pele I knew and loved for so many centuries wage war against herself now. As soon as I melt you back into one, you’ll be at peace, I promise you.”

  Ash pointed at Colt. “Are you listening to this psycho, Eve? Just a month ago you strapped him to a boulder and tried to force-feed him an ocean, and now he wants to throw your soul—our souls—back into the clay to make some supergoddess so he can play house with her.”

  Eve shook her head. “I didn’t know who he was at the time.”

  “Of course,” Ash said. “You tried to murder him when
he was an innocent human, and now you’re his willing concubine after discovering that he’s actually your unhinged, manipulative ex-boss.”

  “You used to love how manipulative I was,” Colt whispered. Then his face hardened. “Let’s get on with this. You—” He jabbed a finger at Raja, whose face was slick with tears. “We need you to add a few years to young Roselyn here.”

  “What?” Raja sniffed, and her eyes kept darting to the baby in Eve’s arms. “You want me to age Rose?”

  Colt patted Rose on the head. “As a child Rose is dependent and vulnerable, even as explosive as she can be. But as a teenager she won’t be quite so cumbersome on the journey we have ahead of us.”

  “Just because her body matures ten years doesn’t mean her mind will do the same,” Raja protested.

  “If you make her do this,” Ash said, “then you’ll be igniting a fuse that not even your trickery will be able to extinguish. Putting a six-year-old mentality into a sixteen-year-old body is like handing a sailboat captain the keys to an oil tanker.”

  Colt set his mouth in a straight line. “Do it now, Raja, or Eve is going to pump baby Saga with enough juice to power Miami for a year.”

  “I—”

  “Do it!” he shrieked, and his voice formed the awful, singing chords that could pluck at the mind.

  Ash tried to intercept Raja. “Don’t do this. You know what the scroll said. Don’t age the child. Eve is just bluffing. She’d never actually . . .” She couldn’t even finish her sentence. She no longer knew whether there was a limit to the evil her sister was capable of.

  “I have no choice.” Raja brushed past Ash. When she reached Rose, who was peering curiously up at her, Raja cupped her hands around either side of the girl’s face.

  The transformation happened rapidly, fueled by Raja’s anguish. Rose’s limbs lengthened, the creak of the growing bones audible from across the roof. Her thighs thickened, her legs widened, her breasts grew full and round. All the while her clothes ripped and snapped until they were just tattered rags draped half-modestly over the brand-new curves of her body.

  When all was done and Raja stepped away from her creation, the Polynesian girl standing at the railing was the very same one Ash had seen on the boat in her last life, right before Rose cast Ash overboard to an icy death in the Atlantic waters.

  Rose held her quaking hands in front of her face, trying to come to terms with the sudden lengthier, fuller body she’d been given. She dove for one of the metal air-conditioning conduits and stared at her warped image in the half-reflective steel.

  The scream that poured out of her open mouth was so horrible that Ash wondered if she would ever feel warm again.

  The next moment Ash would later remember as one of the worst in her life.

  Rose turned to face the others. Her eyes narrowed and her open mouth trembled. Raja had turned to Eve, unaware of what was about to happen next, focused only on having Saga returned safely to her arms. “I’ve done what you asked,” Raja said. “Now give me back my—”

  Rose’s explosive burst hit Raja in the chest and catapulted her body over the railing and out of sight, leaving the Egyptian goddess to plunge thirty stories to the street below.

  For the third time in as many months, Ash watched helplessly as one of her friends died a sudden and horrible death.

  “No!” Ash howled. “What have you done?” Her arms were already burning as she stomped toward the newly teenage Rose, ready to inflict severe pain on her, even though Rose was her sister, even though she was really still a little girl, even though nothing could bring Raja back.

  Rose spun and hit Ash with an open palm. The explosive orb that detonated against Ash’s torso knocked her over the row of air-conditioning units onto the roof beyond. Even with the friction of the rooftop tearing into her skin, her body didn’t stop until it struck the railing on the opposite side of the roof.

  Ash used the railing to lift her battered body off the ground. Across the deck she watched as Rose cast another explosive ball off the roof. This one detonated just beyond the railing, taking out part of the balustrade with it. Just as it had when they’d traveled to the Cloak Netherworld, the explosion carved a rift in the air. Only through this one wasn’t an ocean, but a dark cobblestone street lined with brownstones.

  Eve was the first to jump through, with Saga still in her arms. She stepped up through the mangled hole in the railing and glanced down at the Miami streets below before rocking back on her feet and then leaping through the portal.

  Ash sauntered across the roof toward them. A sharp pain drilled through her ankle, possibly a sprain, but she cared only about making it to that portal before it closed.

  Next was Proteus, who looked far more frightened of the short leap of faith he needed to make than Eve had. Colt, however, gave him an impatient shove from behind, and after a stutterstep and a squeal of terror, Proteus disappeared through the portal.

  Ash limped forward faster, then broke into a trot. She could already see the edges of the portal starting to shrink and fray.

  Then Rose dove through the rift awkwardly, like a little rag doll without full control or understanding of her new body. That left just Colt, who lingered on the roof’s edge long enough to watch Ash coming toward him. “I will find you again when it’s time for the merge,” he yelled across the roof. “You’re not ready to follow me now, but my one hope is that by the time we meet again, you’ll understand that I did all of this because I love you.”

  Ash screamed and began an all-out sprint. There was no pain now, only the hope of catching Colt before he made it through the portal, the promise of throwing him headlong off the building to his death.

  By the time she reached the air conditioners, she had enough momentum to hurdle over them using her hands. Colt, who had misjudged how fast she was coming, took off toward the rapidly closing portal a little late, and Ash grabbed hold of his wrist long enough to slow him down. A sharp kick from Colt, however, put enough distance between them for him to tear away.

  He reached the hole in the railing and jumped just a half second before her. She didn’t even slow down for a moment as she set her foot near the edge of the roof and hurled her whole body off. Her hand extended, straining, until she could feel the cloth on the back of Colt’s T-shirt—

  Colt threaded the needle into the portal.

  Ash, in midair over the Miami streets below, watched with horror and despair as the rift in the air sealed behind him.

  For the second time in a week, she entered into free fall off the edge of a tall building.

  Only this time there was no winged goddess to slow her fall.

  There was no night god to catch her.

  There were no angels to save her.

  There was just an ember falling fast in the night.

  EMBERS AND ECHOES

  Epilogue

  With the rift gone Ash was left to plummet toward the Miami street, twenty-four stories below her—a fall that even a sixteen-year-old Polynesian volcano goddess would not survive.

  But as the air rushed past her, she didn’t see all the places she’d been, or all the things that she’d never get to do.

  In the end all she felt was the desire for retribution.

  If she died, she would never be able to stop Colt—

  From exterminating the Cloak—

  From merging the Wilde sisters back into Pele, the Polynesian volcano goddess who’d proven too powerful and volatile to exist as a single entity.

  Death meant that, when she woke up in the next life, there might be no more Ashline Wilde.

  Ash wasn’t about to share a head space with violent Eve and crazy little Rose for the rest of eternity.

  She would not die today.

  As her body started to pick up speed, her blood boiled into magma.

  Her skin cracked into panels of igneous rock, no longer just flesh but heavy, durable brimstone.

  Her body ignited, the temperature skyrocketing a thousand degrees in less t
han a second.

  And when she held out her hands, a stream of molten fire spewed from her palms, two twin jets that changed her momentum midair. She shot backward into the apartment complex behind her.

  The impact with the glass hurt, bad—but the new stony panels of her skin were solid enough to crack the window and for her to keep right on going.

  Her burning body landed in an apartment bedroom, rolling hard through the nest of glass and into the chest of drawers against the back wall.

  The couple that had been fast asleep in bed bolted upright. When they followed the fire trail of smoldering carpet from the shattered window to the girl in flames, they both started shrieking in unison.

  “Enough!” Ash growled, the volcano goddess in her instinctually taking over. The couple instantly shut up and froze in place, with the woman reaching for the bedside phone. “No need to call the fire department,” Ash said as she pulled herself to her feet, leaving a trail of charred handprints on the cherry dresser. “I’ll just put myself out.” The corona of fire around her flickered off, and her igneous skin cooled back into soft flesh. She nodded to the lovebirds, well aware that most of her clothes had been burned off, and she marched out of their bedroom. Thankfully, the fire alarm in their apartment waited to go off until Ash was halfway down the hall to the elevator.

  She rode up twelve stories—the distance she’d fallen—back to the top floor. There she cut through Wesley’s penthouse and took the stairwell up to the roof.

  The item Ash was looking for lay half-crumpled near the roof’s edge, near where Rose’s portal had ripped apart a large section of the railing.

  It was the postcard that Colt had shown to Rose before she’d opened the gateway.

  It was the only clue Ash had to discovering where Colt had taken her two sisters, along with Proteus, the villainous shape-shifter, and Saga, the now-orphaned infant of Rolfe and Raja.

  Holding the postcard up to the moonlight, Ash recognized the iconic white steeple of the historic church in the postcard. The caption beneath the photo confirmed its location for her: