Embers & Echoes (10 page)

“Never raised a hand to me?” Horatio growls. “Maybe you haven’t; but the fire-lighting hounds of hell that you call
daughters
managed to burn through half my harvest.”

Papa immediately stops trying to get up and turns his gaze on you. He says nothing, but his eyes whisper,
Is this true?

“Now justice has come to collect.” Horatio stumbles a little bit on a loose floorboard, but his aim stays true. “You know, Phillip boy, if you’d just given Clarisse the child she wanted, like a real man, none of this would have happened. . . . Shame I had to fill in for you.”

Your breath catches. Papa’s grip on the chair tightens so much that you can hear the wood splinter beneath his hand.

Horatio sneers. “You mean you didn’t even suspect?”

Papa draws himself up to his full height.

“When Clarisse sent herself back to her Maker in that barn,” McGrath says slowly, “she took one of mine with her.”

Papa screams and lunges for McGrath.

McGrath opens fire.

The impact folds Papa’s body in two and carries him across the room into the stove, where he shudders once and lies still. His unseeing eyes glare up at McGrath.

At once Gracie is wailing and Violet is screaming, and you want to join them, but the heat within is devouring your voice. Instead you dive for McGrath yourself.

He doesn’t have time to properly aim his rifle, but he shrugs you off hard with his shoulder, knocking you back into the kitchen table. It flips over along with you, sending corn and the extinguished lantern down onto the wooden floor.

The cold barrel presses into the side of your neck. “Any last words before I show you the same courtesy you showed to my scarecrow?”

“The same thing we told your scarecrow,” Violet says from behind him.
“Burn in hell.”

McGrath hollers, and the rifle clatters out of his hands. You turn in time to see McGrath clutching his bloody thigh where Violet has plunged in the broken milk bottle. Before he can reach for the fallen rifle, you snatch the lantern. In your mind you picture a bonfire in
a field. Instantly the wick inside the lantern ignites.

Then you smash the lantern against McGrath’s face.

He howls again as the glass and fire torch his cheek, and he tumbles to the ground.

Unfortunately, he lands right on top of the rifle, and to try to pry it out from underneath him is just asking to get shot. So you cast one last tear-filled look at Papa’s still form, slumped against the stove. Then you push Violet out the back door—it’s safer if you split up for now—and pull the squealing Gracie out of her stool. With one arm curled around her little body, you hurdle over McGrath’s moaning body and run out the front door onto the porch.

You start for the road, but you hear the kitchen door slam open behind you, so you change course for the shelter of the barn. A bullet hits the
WHITNEY FARMS, EST. 1796
sign next to your head, doing to the Whitney name what it had just done to Papa.

Inside the high-roofed barn you drop Gracie and heave the massive door closed as two more rounds slug the wood next to the handle. Twilight streams through the holes.

McGrath’s leg may be wounded, but with Gracie slowing you down, there’s no way you can outrun him. You’ll have to hide and hold on until Violet comes back with help.

You hoist Gracie onto your back so that her arms wrap around your neck, and you climb up to the loft using the rickety ladder. Up top the two of you scamper over the
hay until you’ve found a nook in the straw. The last dregs of daylight stream through the gaps in the wooden walls. You press Gracie, who has fallen silent now, flat against the floorboards, and you make a small hole in the hay in front of you so you can peer down at the barn floor.

It doesn’t take long. McGrath hauls open the century-old door, which squeals disagreeably on its track. His eyes take in the barn—the broken carriage in the far corner that hasn’t been hitched to a horse since before the Civil War, the collection of old hoes and shovels lining the walls, the ungainly tractor that Papa purchased secondhand and never found use for in the fields.

Then McGrath’s gaze slowly shifts to the loft. When he smiles, fresh blood dribbles from the gaping wound the lantern left on his face.

As you listen to his footsteps plod patiently across the barn floor, you tremble under the weight of the decision you have to make. If you try to take Gracie and flee, McGrath will catch and kill both of you.

But if you lead the monster away from her . . .

“Gracie,” you whisper as the first step of the ladder creaks. You press your face into her hair, letting your tears wet her beautiful dark curls. “I will come back for you.” A second creak. “And I love you very much.”

You spring from all fours out of the hay and off the edge of the loft. McGrath stops climbing when he sees you. He lets loose a round with his rifle hand, but the bullet goes wild and pierces the roof.

You hit the floor behind the tractor, and now this steel beast is the only thing that separates you, the prey, from the predator. You press your back up against the chassis and risk a peek around the tractor’s back wheel.

A shot hammers into the tire, which lets out its air with a defeated
poof
. A second round grazes the fuel tank. Gas begins to pour out onto the floor.

You hear jingling. McGrath must be reloading from his pocket, and you know this is your moment. You give one look back at the loft. Gracie is peering out at you, with her lip quivering and her face framed by the straw. You try your best to smile at her.

Then you swallow the vomit and fear and the memory of your dead father and kick off across the barn. The back door is so close, swinging loosely on its hinges, and you just have to make it outside before McGrath pushes another round into the chamber. . . .

Then the explosion.

The flames hit you from behind in a wall and propel you off your feet. You crash through the flapping door. Even with your back to the explosion, your vision glows white.

Next thing you know, you’re outside on the grass, rolling in the dirt to try to put out the fire on your dress, which you can’t extinguish with your mind because there’s a dreadful ringing in your ears. Wooden debris rains down around you.

When you finally flip onto your back, you see the
ruins where the barn used to be. Fire streams up the one remaining wall like it’s coated in kerosene. The top half of the barn, roof and loft included, has blown completely off. McGrath’s bullet must have hit the tractor’s gas tank or the leaking fuel—nothing else could have caused this sort of devastation.

There is a hand on your arm, pulling you back. “No,” you shout at Violet, though your words sound strangely muffled in your own ears, as if you’re screaming them through a pillow. “Gracie’s in there! Let me go!”

But Violet just slaps you across the face with enough force to daze you, and then throws you over her back. You want to protest, but you’re nauseous, and disoriented, and there’s a flaming wreckage where the barn used to be, and Gracie is dead in the rubble, and Papa is lying on the kitchen floor. Oh, God, Papa . . .

Everything rolls to black.

You come to just a few minutes later in a sickeningly familiar cornfield—McGrath’s plot. You’re still slung over Violet’s back. The field is a mess of blackened, flattened corn husks. Embers still burn hot in pockets everywhere, like fireflies nesting in the wreckage.

It’s only when you see the charred remains of the scarecrow that you squirm until Violet is forced to set you down in the field. “We did that!” you scream, pointing at the scarecrow. “This is
our
fault! We have to go back for them, Violet! We have to go back! We . . .” You wrap your arms around your sister’s ankle and then fall into sobs.

Violet’s hand affectionately slips into your hair, then both of her hands cup your face so that you’re looking up at her. “I know you don’t want to hear this,” she says, “but it’s just you and me now. We’re back in that washtub, anchored to the buoy, only this time no one’s coming to help us.” She leans closer and forces you to make eye contact. “We can only help ourselves. If you trust me, I’ll make sure we stick together—always.” She releases your face and holds out her hand. “Do you trust me, Lucy?”

You gaze one last time back over the McGrath household at the steady column of smoke rising into the night, circling the summer moon over the trees.

When you turn around, Violet is waiting patiently with a concern you’ve never seen before.

You take her hand. Her grip is strong, but there’s a resolve in your own that you never knew you had.

Wednesday

Ashline woke up in what smelled like a
mushroom cloud of cigarette smoke and wondered whether she’d passed out on the floor of a seedy bar.

But it was just her motel room, with the lumpy bed, the comforter that looked like it had been balled up in the corner of a basement for a few years, and the browning water stain in the shape of Arkansas directly over the headboard. She touched her forehead, which was damp, and couldn’t decide whether she’d been feverishly sweating in her sleep or something had been dripping onto her face.

Then came the vague whispers of her dream from the night before, the ugly patchwork quilt of disjointed images.

The scarecrow.

The farm.

The fire.

The pain.

Ash popped into the cramped shower and let the hot tendrils of water massage her face and extinguish the last images of the burning barn. But the shower couldn’t cleanse her of the sickening feeling that the dream was somehow real, not just a twisted historical nightmare.

Almost as soon as she exited the bathroom, there was a knock at the door.

She wrapped her towel more tightly around her. The knock on the door could mean that (1) the landlord was coming to tell her that her credit card had been declined, (2) Lesley Vanderbilt was here to kidnap her, or (3) her father had broken his word and flown down from New York.

“Please let it be Lesley Vanderbilt,” Ash whispered, and walked over to the door.

She peered through the peephole in time to see the landlord, with his mullet and ripped jeans, waddling back to the staircase like a satyr.

When Ash opened the door to see if he’d left anything, the package immediately landed on her foot.

At first she was hesitant to open it. She couldn’t find the sender’s name anywhere on the box, just her own name and room number scribbled on a Post-it note. But then she spied an insignia written in black marker on the upper left corner of the cardboard: a pair of wings, and a moon.

She smiled and carried the package into the room.

After a short-lived battle between the packing tape and her nonexistent fingernails, she tugged the top flaps
open so hard that a handful of packing peanuts popped out and littered her bed. The first thing she found after she rummaged through the Styrofoam was a white knee-length dress. She unfolded it and held it up to her body in front of the grimy wall mirror next to her bed. It was going to take a much-needed steaming in the bathroom with the shower on hot, but it looked as though it would fit her perfectly. Either Aurora happened to be the same build or Aurora and Wes had correctly guessed her size.

Beneath the dress she found two more items. One was a new GPS. When she booted it up, there was already a destination plugged in, a little museum icon labeled “Villa Vizcaya” in Coconut Grove.

The last item was an embossed invitation, the fancy kind that people sent out for weddings. But this invitation was for a gallery opening—and it was dated for tonight.

The invitation was illustrated with a beautiful Renaissance-style Italian mansion sitting on the waterfront.

The invitation seemed fairly harmless to Ash. That is, until she read the last line, written in fine red print and nearly hidden beneath the lace border threaded around the invitation:

The gods walk among us

Next to the final message was the blurred silhouette of a human in motion, which might have been almost comical had it not been for the single eye that looked suspiciously like a blue flame.

But that wasn’t all. When Ash flipped the invitation over, she found a sticky note that was written in the kind of nearly illegible scrawl that could only belong to a man . . . in this case, Wes:

Call this number when you arrive,
and wait by the entrance for me to come get you.
DO NOT ENTER THE VILLA ALONE.

—W

“Overprotective much?” Ash muttered. She’d dealt with Lesley Vanderbilt before, and unless the woman had somehow fireproofed her skin since the last time they’d butted heads, it was Lesley who should be hiding. Besides, Lesley had Ash’s sister somewhere. If push came to fire, Ash wasn’t above dragging the eccentric millionaire into a back room and roasting her like a rotisserie chicken until she turned over Rose.

Ash dropped the invitation onto the rug.
Looks like the party doesn’t start for another eight hours.
She cast a look at the dress on her bed, then to the corner where her sneakers were looking especially worse for wear after her trip to the docks and the cigar factory.

Guess I have no choice but to go pick out shoes that will do the dress justice.

After all, it was all in the name of good camouflage.

Ash would have gone with
something with a flatter heel if she’d remembered that she was taking the scooter to the gallery event.

Instead she discovered—almost as soon as she mounted the scooter—that Vespas were designed more for shorts and sneakers, and not for evening gowns and heels.