The odor of death from the back of Colt’s truck—
The cold of the stream water as she knelt beside him—
The flash of terror as she watched him fall from the log—
The nauseating sight of Wolfe being sucked down into an early grave . . .
She felt grimy inside and out. Why had she forgotten 213
the damn loofah back in the room? A thorough scrubbing was in order.
Then there were the larger questions. The distrac-tions of school, and new friends, and lame but entertaining boyfriends had always provided enough background noise to keep thoughts of her birth parents at bay, but now that she was alone and saddled with a new “divine”
identity, the curiosity had found her again.
Ashline and Eve had, for obvious reasons, been aware from an early age that they were adopted. The story that the Wildes had shared with them growing up was brief but satisfying: They had been the only two siblings in the island orphanage, an infant and a girl who couldn’t have been far past her first birthday. Even though neither of them would have been old enough to have more than a fleeting memory of ever having a sister, Thomas and Gloria couldn’t bear the possibility that someone would adopt one without the other.
Maybe it had been the comforts of growing up upper class, or maybe it had just been selfish ignorance, but Ash had never probed her parents for more information.
Now, as her mind traveled halfway around the world to an island she couldn’t remember, she felt lost in the yawning abyss of one question: Where the hell had she come from?
With three half-apologetic beeps, the water shut off. The Blackwood showers were all set on five-minute timers, and Ash often found herself wondering whether 214
this was another green feature, or whether it was simply intended to cut down on the shower lines in the morning.
Either way, it sucked.
When she returned to her room, she was ready for a nap. She was ready for a daylong spa treatment. But above all, she was ready for a familiar face, so she did something fairly atypical for her: She followed her umbil-ical cord to her cell phone, texted her mother, and waited on her laptop for her to sign on.
When Ashline was first struggling to convince the Wildes to let her attend Blackwood for the rest of sophomore year, one of the final bargaining chips that she’d played had been a solemn pledge to remain in communication. The promise of a weekly phone call was not enough for Gloria Wilde, so Ashline had had to improvise.
Her solution? Two web cameras, purchased with the final vestiges of her bat mitzvah money, and a guarantee that they would set aside time every Sunday for long-distance face-to-face chats.
Her mother’s face appeared on the laptop screen, as eager and darling as Ashline remembered her. She must have been sitting out on the porch, because Ashline could make out the dark street in the background—it was three hours later in New York—and the porch light backlit her blond curls with a gentle glow. A smile crossed her mother’s face as Ashline’s image materialized on her screen as well, and Ash experienced a twinge of guilt for wondering so feverishly about her birth parents. This was her true mother.
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“Only a minute to log on and set up the camera,”
Ash said. “You’re becoming a real technological wizard, Mom.”
“Oh, you know,” her mother replied bashfully. “I’ve got the step-by-step directions you wrote out for me taped to the back of my laptop. You lead a busy life over there. I wouldn’t want to keep you waiting while your mom fights with her Mac.”
Ash cringed. “Sorry I haven’t had time to chat in a few weeks. Life around here as been kind of—”
“What is that?” her mother interrupted, squinting at the computer screen. “Did you go shopping for an orange dress?”
It took Ashline a moment to realize that her mom must have been staring at something behind her. When she looked over her shoulder, she discovered her orange jumper, draped over the back of her reading chair, fully illuminated under the floor lamp. “Shit,” she mouthed.
She turned back to the camera. “Yeah, it’s a . . . sundress.
Weather’s warming up a tad around here, and I didn’t have much in spring colors, so Jackie and I took a day trip up to Crescent City.”
Gloria wrinkled her nose. “In last year’s tangerine too. I hope you got that on clearance.”
“Trust me,” Ashline said, “It was practically free.
How’s Dad?”
Her mother glanced both ways on the porch to make sure the coast was clear before she let out a sigh as long 216
as the March wind. She leaned closer to the microphone.
“He’s maddening, is what he is.” She threw up her hands.
“I always figured he’d have trouble living in an empty nest one day, when you would eventually go off to college, but his coping mechanism is completely busted. It’s like he’s grasping at anything he can stuff in here to fill the space. First he takes up yoga on Saturday mornings, which was fine, because—this is going to sound awful—at least it got him out of the house. But then just last week, he suddenly decides to become a vegan, and since he does most of the cooking, that means now I’m a vegan too.
It’s been nothing but soy and tofu and asparagus ever since. This morning I opened the Times after he read it and found two red circles in the classified sections, one around salsa dancing lessons at the Y, and another for a toy train collector set for sale. When I asked him about the trains, you know what he said? ‘It’s for the Holidays.’
It’s only May, Ashline. May!”
Even with a hand over her mouth, Ash couldn’t stifle her giggles. “Breathe, Ma,” she said. “Maybe there are some yoga relaxation techniques he can teach you.”
“I’ll breathe however he wants me too, but if I have to go one more week without a steak, I’m going to crack.
I swear, it’s like he thinks that if he flaps his wings hard enough, he’ll forget that it’s been almost a year since he heard from—”
Gloria stopped, her sentence derailed. It was a frag-ile thing, and Ashline knew that well. Ash had left Eve’s 217
name back in New York when she’d boarded her flight at LaGuardia four months ago, and she hadn’t said it aloud since. Eve’s memory was like a thawing pond: The sound of her name could send them all crashing back through the ice.
They were all just trying to forget about her in their own ways.
Her mother lifted her eyes from the screen and gazed directly into the camera, searching, pleading. “You haven’t . . .”
“No,” Ashline said firmly. “Not once.”
“But you’d tell us if you did?” Gloria looked tired, and for the first time since the conversation had started, Ashline noticed how much weight her mother had lost in the months she’d been away. Even her face had changed shape, as if the bones had rearranged beneath her skin.
The face of silent grief.
“Of course,” Ashline said, when what she was really thinking was, But not if it would break your heart.
When the break in conversation was too much for her to bear, Ash started to say, “I really miss—”
But it came out at the same time her mother said,
“I should get back to— I’m sorry, honey. What did you say?”
Ash bit her lip. “I was just saying I’ve got some work I’ve got to do. Econ reading.”
Her mother reached out and touched the side of the camera, like she was trying to brush Ashline’s bangs out 218
of her face. “Okay, sweetheart. Let’s do this again next Sunday?”
“You bet,” Ashline said. And then she closed the laptop screen down to the keyboard, severing the connection.
She was grateful her roommate was still three thousand miles away so there was no one to see her cry herself to sleep.
She woke up clutching her pillow to her face, with only the knowledge that it was most certainly too dark for it to be morning already. In fact, there was no wa
y to immediately know how long she’d been out, because the digits on her brand new alarm were unlit. She flicked her desk lamp a few times just to be sure, and, yup—the power was out.
Ashline rubbed her face. The air in the room was warm—no, “sweltering” was a better word, given the humidity. But that couldn’t be right, since Blackwood had turned off the heat for the last time in March. Sure enough, when she put her fingers to the sheets, they were slick with her own sweat. Maybe she was just running a fever?
She needed air. She shuffled over to the window and pushed aside the curtains.
The image she saw framed in the glass was enough to rip the breath right from her lungs.
There, in the middle of the Blackwood quad, stood a girl with long dark tangles of hair. Ashline couldn’t make 219
out her face, but one thing was instantly clear even in the low light.
She was staring up at Ashline’s window.
The girl cocked her head to the side, and Ashline wondered whether she could actually see her through the parted curtains. But seconds later she had her answer.
The girl pointed directly at her and then took off running across the quad, her footsteps quick and light, heading in the direction of the academic complex.
“Shit,” Ashline said. She’d fallen asleep in her pajama pants and a camisole, but there was no time to change.
She slipped on her sneakers without bothering to put on socks, and stepped out into the hallway.
It must have been late, well past midnight, because the dormitory was as silent as a forgotten cemetery.
Blackwood students were easily excitable. Had the girls been awake for it, a blackout would have proven an all-too-tempting opportunity to give the middle finger to curfew and wreak havoc in the dead of night. Impromptu games of hide-and-seek, dangerous flights down the hallway waving contraband candles, voyages over to the boys’
dormitory, and retaliatory invasions.
Instead the girls of the B pod slept undisturbed, and would probably continue to sleep right through their first-period class when the alarms failed to go off.
Ash crept down the hallway and out the front door.
She was grateful for the night chill after the startling heat of her bedroom. She cast one cautious glance across the 220
quad at the teachers’ residence before darting across the lawn and to the front door of the academic complex.
With a twist and a tug, the door opened, and Ashline cringed as she waited for the alarm to go off.
Silence. The security system was down, voiceless without the campus generator online to power it.
A whisper guided her toward the nearly pitch-black staircase, like an invisible, impalpable hand pressing into the small of her back. She could all but hear it echoing down the stairs.
The ground floor and stairwell nearly suffocated her with darkness, and she had to use the handrail to navigate her ascent, without even the auxiliary lights to guide her way. But when she reached the third floor, she knew before she even pushed through the double doors leading into the hallway that something was amiss. A gentle light, like the flicker of the walls of a pool house, thrummed steadily against the walls.
“Hello, Pandora’s box,” Ashline said to herself, and she pushed through the doors.
The hallway was empty.
As Ashline trod down the hall, past the rows of unused lockers—Blackwood students kept their books and supplies in their rooms—a whistling pierced the silence. Not a musical human whistle, but the sound of air flowing past an open . . .
Door.
Halfway down the hall, recessed into a passage that 221
was roped off with several cords, was what the students had not so originally dubbed “the Forbidden Stairwell.”
It was a well-known fact that the tiny metal door at the top was an access point to the roof. It was also a well-known, well-tested, and twice-punished fact that the door was locked and connected to the security alarm, which even the most technologically savvy seniors had failed to disarm. The roof of the academic complex was a veritable Shangri-La for the students of Blackwood, one they’d never seen.
And here it was, its alarm hushed, with the promise of the night outside slipping through the unlatched door as the wind whistled past.
Ashline slipped underneath the ropes. At the top of the stairwell, her fingertips paused only briefly on the cold metal door before she pushed it forward and out onto the roof.
The wind drifted over the shingles with grim determination on its pilgrimage back to the ocean, but the girl from the quad stood resolute on the edge of the rooftop, poised and as still as a boulder. For a fleeting instant as Ashline treaded carefully down the gently sloping roof, she thought that maybe she was reliving the nightmare with Lizzie Jacobs all over again, that she had never left her room at all. She briefly entertained that this might be the little girl from her vision on the beach yesterday, the exotic and deadly little cherub that had so devastatingly escaped from her jungle prison.
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But even despite the uncharacteristically long hair, well past her shoulders, Ashline recognized the taut, familiar musculature of the girl’s back underneath her tank top, recognized her attenuated lean, the way she placed all her weight onto her left hip, recognized the way that the temperature nearby plummeted ten degrees simply at the sight of her.
“You’re back?” Ashline said quietly, as if there were a question buried beneath those two words that could sum up eight months of distress.
When the girl turned and smiled, the steady sea breeze died instantly. “I’m back,” Eve said, her voice as smooth as two snowflakes colliding. “I’ve missed you, Little Sister.”
223
THE BURNING BED
Monda
y
“What’s the matter?” Eve asked half-innocently.
“It’s been eight months, and you don’t exactly look pleased as a peach to see me.”
Ash stared. “You and I don’t exactly have a good track record when it comes to meeting on rooftops.”
“Guess I can’t argue with that.” Eve slipped down into the sitting position on the edge of the roof, and patted the shingles next to her. “Want to take a seat? Tell me how you’ve been?”
“Last time you knocked me off our roof and left me in the grass waiting for the ambulance.”
Eve waved a hand. “Stop being dramatic. I knew the fall wouldn’t kill you. And you and I both know that you’re not safe anywhere on this roof. One strong gust and—”
“This is the part where you at least try to make me feel safe.”
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Eve nodded. “Sorry, Sis. . . . The company I’ve been keeping recently don’t really hold back. Real play-rough bunch. I keep forgetting when I’m among the living again.”
“Okay,” Ashline agreed. “I’ll sit with you, but if you try to shove me off, I’ll—”
“Be a pancake on the quad?” Eve interrupted.
“I was going to say ‘drag you with me.’” Ash couldn’t resist adding, “Although, if your ass has gotten any bigger, maybe you’ll just anchor us both in place.”
Eve offered her an ephemeral smile. “Good to know the California air hasn’t dulled that sharp tongue of yours. I was afraid these prep school kids would bore you to death.”
“‘These prep school kids’ definitely keep me on my toes.” Or, she added to herself, at least keep me involved in kidnappings, getaways, and canyon shoot-outs.
She wandered over to the edge of the roof. Below, on the sweeping Blackwood quad, was the scene that Eve had been gazing down upon and that Ashline had not seen when she’d been approaching the academic building.
There, crisscrossing the grass as if they were cows meandering around a pasture, were not two but six of the blue flame creatures. Even from three stories above, Ash could see the wreath of fiery cerulean their flames cast onto the ground.
Ashline’s breath caught in her throat. Eve looked nonplussed, her legs swinging
off the edge of the roof like a child’s on a swing. “Kind of beautiful, aren’t they?”
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“In a terrifying sort of way,” Ash said. “Then, sure.
What . . . what the hell are they?”
“We call them the Cloak.” Eve didn’t bother to elabo-rate on who she meant by “we.” “They’re a hive mind—
linked together so that when they interact, they can feed their thoughts into one shared collective consciousness. .
. . So I guess in that case the Cloak are really more of an
‘it’ than a ‘they.’ Think of them as many branches of the same tree.”
Given that Eve had remained civil for a full two minutes, and no one had been electrocuted yet, Ash shelved her misgivings and slipped down beside her. “If those are the branches, I’d hate to see the trunk.”
“Or the roots,” Eve added. Her face had drawn sober.
“They say that when the plants and the animals and the humans and the gods were created, the Cloak were made from the excess fabric that was left over. As if the Creator had an extra yard of velour when he was done making all of us and said, ‘Screw it. Let’s make Earth a little more interesting.’”
“And you believe that?” Ashline asked. She desperately wanted to know where Eve had learned all this, but there was a sixteen-car pileup of questions in her brain, preventing any of them from funneling their way out of her mouth.
Eve sniffed noncommittally. “Stories like that are merely intended to simplify what our tiny little minds can’t process. But if you ask me, if the Cloak are tele-pathic, unified, and apparently invincible, and we are the 226
imperfect little skin bags that fight and kill each other, then we must be the dregs left over after they were created.”
Ashline shuddered. “Are they dangerous?”
“When they want to be,” Eve replied. “As far as I’ve seen, the Cloak have no sense of right and wrong, no moral compass. But they do have an agenda . . . and that agenda, as far as I can tell, is to mess with us. Humans can’t see them, can’t notice the way they tinker with their lives every day.”
Wildefire Page 17
