Embers & Echoes (20 page)

“Where are they holding their victim?” Ash asked.

“Not even I am privy to that information,” Lesley replied, then eagerly added, “but I can find out.”

Wes handed her a black cell phone. “There’s one encrypted number programmed into this. Once you find out where he’s being held, pass the information along. Sooner rather than later, so we’re not picking up an innocent god’s corpse off a Miami sidewalk after the broadcast.”

Lesley cradled the phone in her hands. “There’s an old artesian well in Coral Gables, a public pool that my company has roped off for the week while we do restorations. When I have your bush child ready for you, I’ll contact you and we can meet there.”

“Wait,” Aurora protested. “How do we know she’s not just setting up an ambush, courtesy of her seasonally affected friends?”

“Lesley’s too smart for that,” Ash said in what she intended to be a half-statement, half-threat. “Because I’m the gatekeeper to what she’s been looking for her entire life. And if she crosses me now, her descendants will have a new Wilde to hunt down . . . for incinerating their grandmother.”

Lesley nodded absently, but her eyes had glazed over. Perhaps she was fantasizing what she would do when she finally had the prize she’d sought all these years. Or perhaps she was considering how she could possibly contain
the untamable beast that was Eve Wilde once Ash delivered her. Either way, she was off in nirvana when she rested her elbows on the railing.

Only when they’d finally returned to the river marina and docked did the reality of Lesley’s kidnapping seem to sink in. “My people must be on red alert by now. You did,” Lesley reminded Ash, “kidnap me from the middle of a trustees meeting.”

“Make something up,” Ash suggested. “Tell them you got drunk and went out joyriding in your boat. You seem like a convincing liar.” Ash slapped Lesley on the back with enough force to make her stumble all the way down the gangplank to the marina deck. “We’ll see you and Rose at that old pool at midnight tomorrow . . . and not a minute later.”

The three of them watched Lesley go, before Wes asked the one question Ash had been thinking herself. “Do you really intend to trade one sister for another?”

Ash pulled out the cell phone she’d be using for her communication with Lesley. “Not if I don’t have to. I wouldn’t be too worried about Eve, though. If there’s one thing you should know about my sister, it’s this:

“Even hell is too small to hold her for long.”

Celebration was in order, if
only because Ash had successfully completed her first kidnapping and no one had ended up dead.

Although, the thought of Thorne possibly freezing to
death in the wine cellar was an admittedly pleasant one.

The thought of Thorne and Lesley “together,” however, was not.

Aurora dragged Ash and Wes to a small club in Little Havana called El Cielo Cristal, a Venezuelan bar along Calle Ocho. The interior wasn’t much to look at—a long bar in front of a dingy mirror—but the true appeal was the salsa band performing on the small stage. The open-air seating had all been pushed aside to form a dance floor, where a large mass of dancers was churning to the sultry music. Overhead the metal rafters were strewn with a thick webbing of white holiday lights.

To Ash the romance of string lights had long since faded. Now they summoned only flashbacks to the Shelton Inn and the night of the fire and Rolfe’s death, a memory that kept resurfacing like an apple bobbing to the top of a dark barrel. No matter how hard she pushed the memory down, the littlest triggers kept buoying it to the front of her mind.

Wes almost immediately spotted somebody he knew—from the way the other man carried himself, Ash guessed he was the owner—so Ash and Aurora sidled up to the bar by themselves.

Aurora tapped on the bar to get the bartender’s attention.
“Tres avocado coladas, por favor.”

The bartender snickered a little bit and said, “But of course.”

Aurora puckered her lips when she turned to Ash.
“I’ve lived in Miami four years, and my Spanish still makes the natives laugh.”

“At least you don’t get carded,” Ash said.

Aurora tugged at the black cardigan over her shoulder. “Probably because hiding the wings requires an elderly fashion sense sometimes. Tough to look stylish and sexy when you have a nine-foot wingspan that needs to go unnoticed.”

Ash clinked martini glasses with Aurora in a toast and said, “On the bright side, wings make it easier to pull off the angelic look.”

Aurora shook her head and laughed under her breath. “Do you carry around a book full of these jokes, or do you pull them all out of your ass?”

Ash took a sip of the colada, which, between the pea-green complexion of the liquefied avocado and the coconut shavings on top, could have been sludge from the Miami sewers. So it was to her surprise when she liked it—the soft chill, the sweet kick of lime juice. But then the harsh undercurrent of rum hit her and she began to cough.

Aurora clapped her on the back a few times. “Easy there, tiger. I was just trying to give you a little liquid courage before Wes drags you out onto the dance floor.”

“I am
not
,” Ash said determinedly as she cleared her throat and pointed to the throbbing mass of people, “going out there.” The last time Ash had danced with a boy, Eve had crashed the party. Even though this bar seemed safe enough, she still equated dance floors with hostage situations and death.

“Oh, yes, you are,” Aurora said. “The looks that you and Wes have been exchanging the last forty-eight hours are so hot that I’m surprised you don’t need sunglasses to keep from getting pregnant.”

This time Ash spit her colada all over the bar top.

Aurora smiled at her. “Protest all you want like the delicate fire flower that you are, but when he finally comes up behind you and asks you to dance, we both know you’re going to accept with a nervous giggle, and then you’re going to set fire to the floor.”

Ash waved apologetically to the bartender, who had trudged over to swab her spewed colada with his dishrag. “Careful when you use fire metaphors,” Ash said to Aurora. “When I’m involved, they end up less figurative than you’d think.”

Aurora twisted in her bar stool. Her attention seemed to be gravitating toward the far end of the bar, where a younger Hispanic man, maybe a college student, was casting unabashed glances in her direction.

“I’m surprised you and Wes don’t date,” Ash said. “Two gods, both attractive, under the same roof, good rapport.”

“Love is not a checklist, and love is not convenience,” Aurora said whimsically. “Maybe in a different time. But sometimes people know far too much about each other for romantic feelings to ever take root.”

Ash frowned. “What do you mean?”

Aurora finally took a break from her amorous eye
contact with the dark stranger. “When Wes and I first met, I was a sixteen-year-old girl in a bad relationship with a forty-year-old man. An . . .” She struggled with the word that came next. “Abusive relationship. Wes was convincing me to get out of there, but I was a teenage girl in a big city with nowhere to go. And once I make the decision to let a lover see the wings, to know the truth about me . . . well, that’s a lot to walk away from.”

“You don’t have to go into this if you don’t want to,” Ash said.

Aurora just waved her hand and peered into the mirror behind the bar. “The night when I finally tried to leave, it got ugly. He hit me. I blacked out. But when I woke up . . . I was lying in a bed in Wes’s bungalow with a cold compress on my head. All my stuff—what few things I owned—was all moved in. Wes never said a word about what happened back at my ex’s place, or how he’d known where to find me. All I know is that when I worked up the nerve to stupidly go back to the old apartment—just to see, you know?—a Realtor was showing it to a family. He was gone.”

“I’ve found myself in some sticky situations with boys before,” Ash said slowly, as Colt’s face flashed through her mind, “But nothing even
remotely
as traumatizing as that.”

“I’m still here,” Aurora said, “and I’ll never again take for granted finding a good man like Wes . . . especially one that you can confide in about your supernatural shit without him threatening to call
The X Files
or
Men in
Black
. So go ahead and play hard to get if you want—a little HTG never killed anyone—but for crying out loud, when he asks you to dance,
take him up on it
.”

“Speak of the devil,” Wes said delicately from where he had snuck up behind them.

“I’ll leave you two kids alone.” Aurora handed Wes his drink and abandoned her bar stool. “There’s a beautiful Cuban man at the end of the bar who seems to want to tutor me on my Spanish. Lord knows I need it.”

“Yes, you do,” Wes agreed, and Ash wasn’t entirely sure he was referring to her Spanish fluency.

He took a sip of his colada and made a face. “Every time we come here, she orders me the same damn thing. Aurora is the type of person who wants somebody to like something because they should, not because they will . . . even if they don’t care for it in the first place.”

Ash prodded the coconut shavings in her drink with her straw and smiled softly. “I’m not convinced her radar is as off as you think.”

The band started up with an up-tempo number. The brasses made a triumphant entrance by themselves before the bass and congas began to thump away beneath them.

“This is my favorite song.” Wes pushed the remainder of his nearly full drink across the countertop and proceeded to drag Ash out to the dance floor.

Ash let her feet drag only a little. It was a half-assed protest, and she knew it.

The other dancers graciously let the large night god
and his companion through, but then sealed back in behind them. Wes didn’t stop until they were completely encapsulated by the crowd. Ash looked anxiously at the wall of shoulders surrounding them. “Gah—no exit!”

“Just relax,” Wes replied, and added in his best cheesy voice, “Let your body succumb to the rhythm of the music!” He concluded his sentence with a flourish of his hands.

“Oh, my God. First of all”—Ash glanced around, embarrassed—“never do jazz hands in public ever again. And second, the only salsa that I know is the kind that goes on tortilla chips.”

“No one here is studying to see if you trained in Latin ballroom.” Wes circled around the back of Ash. “The good news is that if Polynesian women and Latin women have anything in common, it’s this: They’re both known for their almost paranormal ability to move their hips.”

“I’m from Westchester County,” Ash reminded him. “We’re not exactly overflowing with classes in traditional hula, so unless my island ancestors miraculously possess me while we’re dancing, I’d recommend keeping low expectations.”

Wes moved suddenly up behind her so that his chin loomed over her shoulder. His hands found the notches of her hips. “Guess I’ll have to give you a crash course in rhythm, then.”

Wes spun her around, and from there on out he took
control. One hand slipped into hers, while the other guided her from her back. He exuded strength, with his abilities at their peak now that it was nearly midnight. In fact, under his guidance her feet even began to move to steps they’d never learned, and she realized that she could read every intention of every move that he was about to make, simply by maintaining eye contact. His eyes said it all.

And it was only measures from the end of the song, as her racing heart rivaled even the machine-gun rhythm of the congas, that Ash knew:

Somewhere in the disconnected centuries of her previous lives, she’d met Wes before.

The song released its explosive last breath, and the band trickled into a slower song. Ash tried to latch on to that ghost of a memory, to dig further for a vision like the ones she’d been having over the last few nights. But the phantom slipped away from her, and she was left only with Wes holding her, unmoving, watching.

Ash cleared her throat and gestured toward the Calle Ocho. “Let’s get some air, eh?”

They moved to the edge of the crowd, where they had a view of the street. Ash pulled Wes close as they danced. The top of her head barely reached his chest.

Wes smoothed his thumb over her hairline. “You’ve been conveniently tight-lipped about your life before Miami. How many kidnappings of CEOs and brawls with Japanese blossom goddesses am I going to have to participate in before you fill in the rest of your backstory?”

“At least three more of each,” Ash said.

“Ash,” he said, turning serious. “I can’t know how to fully help you if I don’t know what you left behind.”

“Left behind?” Ash shook her head marginally against his collarbone. “When my sister ran away—for the first time—my mother sat down with me and said that there are two kinds of people. The kind that run to their future, and the kind that run from their past.”

“And which one are you?”

“As someone who has run twice in her life, I can tell you this: They’re the same damn thing. You can’t run someplace new and not fill up the new space with the old stuff. The things you want to leave behind are the very things you can’t.”

Wes had gone silent, and Ash’s first thought was,
Oh, shit. I’ve run my mouth again and pushed him away. Now I’m the chick with baggage.

But Wes had turned his head away from Ash and was looking over the rope that marked the boundary between the café and sidewalk. “It looks like somebody else is waiting in line for a dance with you.”

“Huh?” Ash lifted her head off Wes, since his chest was blocking her view of the street.

And she immediately wished she’d kept her head glued to him.

Colt stood on the edge of Calle Ocho, waiting for her. He wore a smile that was infuriatingly calm, attentive, and patient.

“Shit.” Her hands fell away from Wes’s shoulders like a spring rain.

Wes’s attention alternated tensely between Ash and the newcomer in the street. “I’m going to assume from the look of horror on your face that you know that guy.”

“I guess you could say we have a history,” Ash replied. “A couple of them, actually.”