Embers & Echoes (21 page)

Friday

It wasn’t until Colt actually started walking
toward the stanchions that Ash was able to move her feet. She stepped protectively in front of Wes. “It took you only four days to get out of the rock,” she said. “And I’d hoped it would take
at least
two weeks.”

“Three days to escape,” he corrected her. “And one day to track you down.”

Wes was trying to step around her, but Ash moved in front of Wes again to box him out. It was like a gender power struggle of who should protect whom.

“Relax.” Colt opened his hands. “I’m not here for revenge, and you’re in no danger—at least from me.”

“I’ll believe that as soon as you get your Adam’s apple removed,” Ash said. “Or at least a soundproof muzzle.”

Colt lifted his head to regard Wes, who with his height and size could never truly be “hidden” behind Ash.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt your date. Though I have to hand it to you, Ash: You sure rebound fast.”

Wes finally managed to muscle past Ash so that his shoulder eclipsed her.

“Tezcatlipoca, Aztec god of night,” Colt said. “You’re not as big as I remember.”

Ash put her hand on Wes’s back. She could feel the muscles tense and harden into wooden boards beneath his shirt. “Have we met?” he asked.

Colt rubbed the fuzz on his head. “Not recently.”

“Something tells me I didn’t like the smell of you last time either.” Wes made to step over the stanchions and out into the street.

“Wes.” Ash grabbed him by his arm and tugged him aside before he could hike his leg over. “I . . . I need a moment alone with my old friend.”

Wes chewed on his lip while he studied Ash. Finally he shook his head and gazed off through the crowd. He didn’t look pleased. “I guess you weren’t messing around when you talked about being followed by the things you leave behind.”

“Even when you think they’ve been set in stone,” Ash said. “Listen, you don’t have to worry about me.
I’m
the volcano goddess. He’s just some jackass with a persuasive singing voice.”

“And remarkable hearing,” Colt piped in.

Wes retracted himself and Ash into the crowd that was beginning to dance again now that a fast samba had
replaced the slower song. “I’d say I like this guy about as far as I can throw him . . . but I could probably throw him pretty far. In fact, I’m happy to find out exactly how far that is if you give me your blessing.”

Ash stood on her tiptoes and roped Wes by the neck to pull him down. She kissed his cheek just by the mouth. “Believe me,” she whispered into his ear. “If I have any trouble, he’ll be swimming in the asphalt on Calle Ocho.”

Wes slipped his finger along the edge of her jaw and then tilted her head upward. “It’s really tough to play the protective, territorial alpha male when the girl you want to defend is potentially more powerful than you are.”

“At least around UV lamps and tanning beds,” Ash said. “I’ll see you guys back at the apartment.”

“I’ll be waiting up,” Wes said, and slipped into the crowd. She watched his head cut through the dancers all the way to the bar, where he interrupted the conversation between Aurora and her suitor. She wondered whether Wes had any younger sisters, because he definitely played the protective older brother part to a T. Only, maybe not so much a
brother
when it came to Ash. . . .

Ash ducked under the rope and met Colt out on the sidewalk. “You’ve got three minutes, Halliday.”

Colt smiled from the corner of his mouth. “Gives me flashbacks to the second time we met in this lifetime, when you would let me ask only three questions. You and your conversation limits.”

“That wasn’t an invitation to be nostalgic,” Ash said.
“We’re not reminiscing about the good times. We’re not trying to rekindle a spark.”

Colt steered them down the road and away from El Cielo Cristal. “Actually I’m here to reminisce about a different time. Have you by chance been having any interesting dreams?”

Ash blanched. The way he’d said it made it clear that he already knew the answer to his question, which meant that either he was their architect or, worse, he was sharing the visions too and they were real. She didn’t know which possibility was more horrifying. “You . . . you’re the one who designed these . . . visions?”

A street cigar vendor came up to hassle them, but Colt brushed him away. “I didn’t design anything; they are
very
real. When you left me back in the forest, the final note I sang to you opened the door for them. Peering into your yester-life is essential if you’re ever going to understand why I’ve done the things that I’ve done.”

“I thought we couldn’t remember memories from our former lives,” she said.

Colt tapped the front of his skull. “All the memories from our former lives are up here, stored and waiting for us. The Cloak just did something to destroy the bridge that connects us to them.”

“That chord . . .” Ash remembered the last thing Colt had sung to her before she’d left him imprisoned in stone, the strange feeling in her brain like the lid had been pried off an old tomb. And then Colt’s final words:
I’ll be seeing
you in your dreams, Ashline Wilde.
“So, what—you repaired the bridge?”

“Not fully,” he said. “What you’re seeing are just echoes of many memories that are beginning to bleed out, like a hole that has burst in the dam. But the trickle is slow. Your brain is no longer accustomed to handling memories from multiple lives, thanks to the way the Cloak tampered with it—so your subconscious is sorting through the old memories, cherry-picking just the ones that it thinks you need to survive.”

Ash stopped under a streetlamp. “I needed to know that we were engaged in my last life to survive? It only complicated what should have been a clean break.”

“Unless your mind is telling you that you can’t live without me,” he suggested.

“If my mind is genuinely convinced of that, then I’ll volunteer myself for a lobotomy now.” She leaned against the lamppost. “So you helped me tap into the echoes so that I’d eventually realize how much I missed you? It’s going to take more than a couple of amorous looks at a garden party that happened eighty years ago for me to honestly believe you care for anyone but yourself and your crusade.”

Colt’s eyes caught the light of the streetlamp, and Ash was surprised to see them sincerely wistful. “The garden party . . . ,” he whispered. “That was a good night.”

Ash took a deep breath. Whether Colt was still here to play her, or whether a piece of him did
truly
miss
her—the “her” from this life or one from the past—it wouldn’t do her any good to remain constantly on the offensive . . . especially when she had the opportunity to manipulate some answers out of him. “So how much of the last life do
you
remember?”

He bowed his head. “All of it. My regenerative abilities eventually repaired whatever brain damage the Cloak performed to separate us from our old memories. As far as I can tell, I’m the only god among us who can remember all of it . . . and not just the last life. All of those that came before it. Let’s just say you figure prominently in the last five or so of them.”

“Oh, God.” Suddenly Ash’s stomach ached under the weight of her own history. “We’re one of those on-again, off-again couples.”

“Ashline.” He placed his hand on her shoulder. “We have the longest love affair in the history of the world.”

“I don’t understand.” She looked at his hand, but noted her own reluctance to brush it away. Was she supposed to feel the exact same things this time around just because she had four times before? With only brief glimpses of the last life, how could she ever be sure he hadn’t been using her for something else back then, too? Was he even the same person now that she married before? Was
she
the same person? “If you knew all this—if you remembered everything when you came to me at Blackwood—how come you didn’t just tell me then? Or even show me?”

Colt’s hand slid off her shoulder and fell limply away. “That’s the difficult part. You see, I never intended for us to reunite for a fifth time.”

Despite all the ill will that they’d exchanged since his emergence from the fiery car wreck, despite that she’d sworn off Colt for the rest of this life, it still stung. “Even sitting on four lifetimes’ worth of memories with me, you were considering not
trying
? Were you just bored with me? Were you ready for a new flavor?”

“No.” Colt look surprised. “That’s not it at all. I was trying to protect you. Last time didn’t end so well for either of us, to put it delicately.”

“At least we lasted until our engagement in the last life. This time we barely made it a month.” She held up the back of her right hand. “Now instead of an engagement ring and a fiancé, I have a dead friend and an ex who refuses to let me move on.”

“I clearly couldn’t keep away, though, could I?” Colt argued. “At first, in this lifetime, I somehow convinced myself that it was all about finding your little sister, even if deep down I knew that was bullshit. I convinced myself that we’d meet and my heart would be safe, because you wouldn’t remember me. That maybe this Ashline Wilde from Westchester, New York, wasn’t the Pele I’d fallen for over the last four centuries. But from the moment you told me to stop blocking your sunlight at the bar, I knew that, even without your memory, you were the same girl who captures my heart every time.”

A yellow convertible cruised slowly past them, a couple joyriding through the cloudless Miami night. Ash was tempted to jump into the back of the car just to get away from Colt; she was beginning to feel the first ripples of sympathy for the manipulative bastard, and that was a very dangerous thing. “Two people can’t have a real relationship when one of them is holding all of the cards, Colt. It was like I was falling for three weeks’ worth of you, while you’d already fallen in love with a few hundred years’ worth of me. A ‘me’ that I don’t even know
is
me.” She clutched her head. “Shit, this reincarnation thing is confusing.”

“That’s why I’m here. To level the playing field.” Colt fished around in his back pocket and pulled out a white hotel key card. “This is a spare key to my room at the Delano. Room 432. I’ve booked my stay here all the way through the weekend. If you come, I can help you with these echoes that are bleeding through, and then you can make a decision for yourself whether I fit into your life. If you don’t come after the week is over, then I leave and you’ll never see me again.”

“Really? You’ll just leave? You won’t sing at me until I come with you?”

A young Cuban girl with a bouquet of flowers wandered up to Colt with a sheepish smile. She rocked on her feet and held up the carnations. Colt smiled and exchanged a bill for one of the flowers, and she skittered back to her father, who watched stoically from
his cart of flowers that he was pushing along the road.

“Hard as it may be for you to believe,” Colt said, and cupped the flower in his hands. “There are no strings attached this time. Besides . . .” Colt tucked the carnation behind Ash’s ear. “There’s always the next life.” He turned and walked away.

Ash plucked the flower from her ear. “Colt,” she said, her voice breaking.

He paused and looked over his shoulder.

“Did we . . . Was there ever a happy ending for us?” she asked. “Any of the times?”

Colt wet his lips and gave her the smallest of smiles. “The odd thing about living forever is that the word ‘ending’ doesn’t apply to us. But just because there are no happy endings doesn’t mean you can’t hope for a ‘happy-for-now.’”

Then he was gone. Ash was left standing on the street corner, looking back and forth between the key card in one hand and the carnation in the other. As she watched, one of the flower petals dropped to the concrete.

Ash woke up to her
first Florida thunderstorm.

Up until now the weather had remained relatively warm and tranquil, if not occasionally overbearing when it got too humid. But now an eerie gray-green light filtered through the floor-to-ceiling windows, through the blinds, and the rain hammering against the windows could have been Satan himself drumming on the gates of hell.