Embers & Echoes (14 page)

Everyone within a five-row radius stood up immediately, and then, like the wave at a baseball game, the rest of the crowd rose to their feet as well. This was exactly what Ash had intended. The standing audience would provide enough cover and confusion for her to make her way to Lily.

With two hundred people already on the precipice of panic after what might have been the strangest fifteen minutes of their lives, Ash fired the second heel over the crowd, toward the front of the stage. This time the crowd erupted into chaos, and they funneled into the center aisle, washing around the gods like an unstoppable tide.

Ash spotted Lily through the fray and began to weave her way through the shuffling masses in Lily’s direction. If she could sneak up from behind the blossom goddess and wrap her flaming hands around her neck, Ash might even be able to kill her and escape unnoticed. Revenge propelled her through the maze of people and folding chairs.

But when she reached the place in the crowd where Lily had been standing before, there was only a strand of withered vine in her stead.

Ash searched around frantically. At first she spotted only Rey and Bleak attempting to corral the milling crowd back toward their seats. Toward the north end of the Mound, however, she noticed a head of dark hair fleeing down the staircase.

Ash bagged her stealth approach and shoved through the crowd. At one point she knocked over an oblivious reporter who was filming the chaos with his handheld camera.

When Ash reached the back of the Mound, she didn’t even have time to take the stairs. She leapt onto the multitiered waterfall, dropping from platform to platform and sending plumes of water up behind her. She hurdled over the final pool and hit the stones below in a roll in time to watch Lily trailing off into the statuary walks.

Ash breezed by two stone sphinxes and then vaulted over the balustrade onto the grass below. On the opposite side of the path, Lily’s dress fluttered down a narrow
passage leading into the mangroves. Ash was gaining ground, but for a woman who was now in her late forties, Lily could still run damn fast.

The evening released its last scraps of daylight as Ash sprinted down the path. She didn’t have far to run, however. The trail emptied out into a circular garden, a corral of dense trees with nowhere else to go but the harbor. Ash could hear the waves lapping at the roots of the mangroves.

From studying the villa map, Ash recognized that she was standing in the maze garden, named after the broad circular maze landscaped out of the low shrubs. In the middle of the labyrinth was a single lamppost.

Ash didn’t hear the rustling until it was too late. By the time she turned, Lily had already cocked back the vine that had sprouted out of her wrist. The whip struck Ash right on the ear. The impact snapped her head to the side enough to give her whiplash, and her ear exploded with church bells.

The whip came down again, but, discombobulated as she was, Ash thrust out her forearm to protect her face. It absorbed the blow intended for her head. Then Ash wrapped her wrist around the vine before Lily could draw it back and pulled with all of her might.

Off balance, Lily stumbled toward Ash. As the two goddesses collided, Ash’s hand clamped around Lily’s neck. Thorn claws slipped out over Lily’s fingernails, and she pressed the sharp tip of her pointer finger into the skin over Ash’s jugular.

“Stalemate, bitch,” Lily rasped.

“Making chess analogies?” Ash asked. “Shouldn’t you be playing backgammon or bridge at your age?”

“Better to be in early retirement than playing dollhouse in that stifling hellhole you call a school. Speaking of which . . .” Lily looked around dramatically. “Where
is
the merry widow?”

“Somewhere safe.” Ash curled her fingers just a little tighter and let the slightest breath of warmth tingle from her palm into Lily’s throat. “I’m sure she’d be more than pleased if I turned your head into a teakettle. See if steam really
can
come out your ears.”

Lily laughed from the back of her throat, husky and thick. “If I’d be a teakettle,” she wheezed, “then I guess that makes Rolfe a pincushion.”

That got to Ash. She pounded Lily in the chest with her free arm, sending her sprawling over one of the hedges and onto her back.

Ash touched her throat where Lily’s thorn had been digging into the skin. She felt a drop of blood dribble down to her collarbone. “I just don’t understand how you could go from the Lily we all went to the bar with to . . . to this! How do you take away a boy’s life as though it were yours to take?”

Lily’s entire face convulsed as she untangled herself from the hedges. “You don’t know what he did to me!” she screeched. “The things I
let
him do with me, all in the hopes of a time when he wouldn’t stuff me back into
the shadows, back into silence. The quiet torture of the months I spent waiting for him to come around. Then that little death-monger swoops in, and in no time at all she has him practically lapping up the milk at her feet.”

“It’s called dating, Lily!” Ash screamed. “So Rolfe was a player. So you got played. You don’t skewer a boy through the heart for that.”

A new whip slithered out of Lily’s palm, and she slapped the ground with it. Dust mushroomed up into the air. “I did to his heart what he did to mine. Broke the heart of his little bitch, too.” Lily coiled the whip around her arm and pulled it taut. “And I’ll rip out yours as well if I have to.”

Ash cracked her knuckles. Lily would get no sympathy from her. “You’re looking a little tense around the eyes, Lily. Too bad Botox can’t fix your personality.” She held up her hand, which had started to burn. “And it certainly won’t fix what I’m about to do to your face.”

Lily brought her whip cracking down, but Ash released the fireball at the same time. It sliced right through the whip, sheering it in half so that the green tendril wriggled harmlessly on the ground.

The fireball continued on and struck Lily’s bare shoulder, spinning her around in a circle, before it vanished off into the trees.

So it was to Ash’s surprise that a larger, faster fireball whizzed out of the trees, too broad and quick for her to avoid. She lashed out her arm and easily shattered the
ball into a million embers—one of the benefits of having fireproof skin—but she had to quickly slap out the miniature fires that had ignited all over her white dress.

Rey sauntered out of the trees with the maniacal grin of someone who wanted to eat her for dinner. Ash was probably the size of his typical meal.

Bleak too marched out from the palms. She rolled up the sleeves of her ivory robe, preparing for battle.

Ash backed away across the maze. Three on one was a game that she would undoubtedly lose, particularly against three gods who were clearly more practiced with their gifts than she was. From what Ash had seen them do on the boat, she was still an amateur by comparison.

Their determined approach was interrupted by a bomb dropping from the sky. Aurora landed in the space between Ash and the three Seasons. She had shucked her white blazer, and her wings were spread at half-mast.

Meanwhile Wes had stealthily approached behind Rey. He tapped the giant on the shoulder. “I think you owe the lady a new dress,” he said.

Rey spun around just as Wes cracked him right in the face. The Incan sun god plunged down onto one knee. Bleak and Lily both turned on Wes, and in turn Ash and Aurora converged on the two women, ready to fight.

“Enough.”

Thorne stood at the end of the garden trail, shaking his head and massaging his face in frustration. “We’re all gods, you know,” he said. “There was no need to turn my
garden party into a scene from
West Side Story
.”

Wes backed away until he was standing next to Aurora and Ash, but he kept his attention locked on Rey, who was rubbing his sore jaw and no longer grinning. “
You’re
the one who decided to expose all of us to the world,” Wes said. “You’re the one who turned it into good versus bad,
us
versus
them
. What were you thinking?”

Thorne waved his hand impatiently. “Smoke and mirrors. Any religion needs to provide three things if it’s going to stick: miracles, answers, and protection from evil, whether it’s real or imagined. Our religion provides all three. And I am its shepherd.”

Aurora spat on the ground. “Sounds like a cult to me.”

“Oh, please.” Thorne rolled his eyes. “‘Cult’ is just another word for a religion you don’t fully understand.”

Ash blew out a small fire that had unintentionally erupted on her shoulder, this one her own doing. “Well, ‘shepherd’ is just another word for a poser who thinks he’s the second coming of Christ. Admit it,” she goaded him. “You started a religion because you wanted more Facebook friends.”

“The gods were put on earth to be worshipped, not to be forgotten. For centuries the humans built shrines for us, made sacrifices to us . . . even fought wars in our names. And now?” Thorne took the cigar out of his mouth long enough to spit on the ground. “Now we’re
just a footnote in an ancient-history textbook for some ignorant teenager to sleep through before he goes home to his video games and his crack pipe.”

“Then why don’t you go back to school, become a history teacher,” Ash suggested. “MTV can make an inspirational movie all about how you used mythology to save inner-city teens from drugs and gang warfare.”

“Come.” Thorne turned and motioned for the other Seasons to follow. His cape billowed behind him. “We have better things to do than bloody a century-old garden.”

Rey pointed at Wes with a glowing red finger. “Next time, bogeyman,” he said before he thundered off. Bleak tagged along after him, close enough to be his shadow.

Lily backed slowly away. “You should tell Batwoman and Hercules that friends of yours tend to have short life expectancies.” Then she scampered off into the trees, acrobatically using a low branch from one mangrove to flip up into the canopy. It took all of Ash’s self-restraint not to plunge into the foliage after her.

Ash, Wes, and Aurora stood quietly, bathed in the pale yellow light of the garden’s central lamp. Finally Aurora shrugged and broke the silence. “Well, we can stand around and wait for them to come back . . . or we can go back to the apartment and order Chinese food.” She flapped her wings a few times to stretch, bent her knees, and then launched up into the air. A breeze followed in her wake.

After they had watched her fly away, Wes turned to Ash. “You hungry?”

Ash continued to look at the gap in the mangroves where Lily had vanished. “I’ll eat Chinese—just no fortune cookies,” she said. “After tonight I don’t need a slip of paper to tell me to expect old enemies in a new town.”

Even after seeing Wes’s Cadillac,
Ash was unprepared for the luxuriousness of his South Beach apartment.

Actually, as he flipped on the lights to the suite—which took up an entire quadrant of the twenty-four-story complex’s top floor—she thought that “apartment” wasn’t a fitting word at all.

Penthouse. Wes lived in a penthouse.

Wes unfastened his tie and tossed his car keys onto the stainless steel countertop in his kitchen. Only then did he notice that Ash was lingering in the doorway. “What?” he asked. “You can come inside. The carpet isn’t booby-trapped.”

Ash ignored him and kept gawking, but allowed herself a few tentative steps into the penthouse. “It’s just . . .” It was just that the Japanese import furniture, in combination with the interior designer who probably put the room together, might have cost as much as the apartment itself. It was just that the view of Biscayne Bay and downtown Miami out the floor-to-ceiling glass windows was breathtaking even from thirty feet away.

It was just that eighteen-year-olds, even of the superhero variety, didn’t live in places like this.

“What do you think?” he asked.

She shrugged. “It’s okay, I guess.”

He laughed. “Stop acting like you’ve never seen an apartment before and join me on the roof.” He walked toward the corner where a narrow spiral staircase led up into the ceiling. “View’s better from up there.”

“View’s pretty damn good from where I’m standing,” she mumbled, but she followed him up the corkscrew and through the metal door at the top.

The roof terrace was more like an oasis than just a pool deck. The kidney-shaped pool was surrounded by live palm trees that bristled in the warm summer breeze, a breeze that Ash thought was far too pleasant and serene to be anything produced by Thorne.

The two of them walked past a row of beach chairs. Ash, who was still barefoot, gingerly dipped her foot in the pool and gave the back of Wes’s suit pants a tiny splash. He just rolled his eyes and walked up to the glass railing that protected the edge of the roof.

“Crazy night, huh?” Ash stepped up to a piece of railing beside him. “Are you disappointed that you didn’t audition to be one of the Seasons?” She made the mistake of looking straight down, and experienced a quick flash of vertigo. Three hundred feet was a long way down.

Wes smiled. “I’d love to sit in on their poker nights.
The Four Seasons are all just so . . . charming. Especially your herbal friend.”

Just the thought of Lily disgusted Ash enough to spoil her view. She turned away. “Lily is a weed. When the time comes, I will happily pluck her for all the things she’s done.”

“No doubt,” Wes replied. “But if she’s the fourth Season, what’s curious to me is what they have planned for the miniature Wilde.”

“Maybe Rose is the god they’re talking about neutralizing while the world watches.” Ash shuddered. “Maybe they want to kill her in some sort of . . . weird performance art, like they put on tonight.”

Wes shook his head. “Not a chance. Thorne may be a lunatic with delusions of grandeur, but if he and his three Mouseketeers want to be championed as heroes by the city of Miami, the
last
thing he would do is publicly murder a six-year-old—even a dangerous one like your sister.”

“True. And Rose is Lesley’s last poker chip to get Eve back, so there’s no way she’d let that happen.” It sounded more like wishful thinking than fact, but Ash couldn’t bear the thought that she’d come all this way just to see her little sister sacrificed in cold blood.