Embers & Echoes (24 page)

At the last moment she wasn’t sure she had the nerve to make the jump.

A bullet sizzled past her ear, giving her just enough blind courage to maintain her momentum.

And she dove headlong over the edge of the balcony.

In the brief seconds that followed,

Ash spread her arms as though they were wings,

felt her body succumb to free fall,

felt the blistering wind suck the moisture right from

her open eyes,

and instead of her life flashing before her eyes,

she really just kept wondering how long she had

until she hit the road below,

but behind this curtain of

wild,

choppy,

random thoughts,

she heard a steady chant pulsing through her mind,

two words,

two little words:

Have faith.

Hands caught her under her armpits, which then slid down into the crook of her savior’s elbows. There was a flutter sound like a parachute opening—Aurora’s wings billowing out. Aurora grunted in pain with the addition of the extra weight. Ash’s shoulders felt ready to rip free of their sockets and leave the rest of her armless body to plummet to its death, but her descent slowed significantly.

Still, Ash knew that Aurora’s wings couldn’t be accustomed to supporting the weight of two people. Sure enough, even as the leathery appendages flapped, the two girls continued to descend at a steady pace to the street. The cement loomed beneath them, close enough now that Ash could make out the spaces between the yellow stripes in the road, the headlights of the cars driving either way down the street. Ash was quickly sliding down the length of Aurora’s rain-slick arms. In a last-ditch attempt to hold on, Aurora grabbed Ash’s arms with her fingers—

But there was only the horrible sinking feeling of wet flesh failing to grasp wet flesh.

Ash dropped free of Aurora’s hold with fifteen feet left to go. Her body rotated enough for her to watch the wind whip Aurora back up into the skies as though she had a bungee cord strapped to her back.

Ash hit the grassy median hard enough to knock the sense completely out of her. Her body bounced right off the curb and into the middle of the road. Dazed, she struggled to make it onto her hands and knees.

A light—

No, two lights—

Twin lights—

Side by side—

Approaching her.

She peeled her head off the asphalt and had to cover her eyes. A tractor trailer was rattling toward her. She knew she should crawl out of the way, but after the hard fall her body wouldn’t cooperate. Directions blurred. The truck’s horn blared. Hope died.

A streak crossed the avenue like a comet. Strong hands slipped underneath her body. Lifted her off the road. Carried her out of the path of the truck.

Wes dove with her onto the median just in time. They landed in the grass, with his arms and chest cushioning her fall. She felt a heavy vortex swirl around them in the wake of the tractor trailer as the truck barreled past the nearby curb.

Ash couldn’t remember much of the next few minutes. One minute she was draped over Wes’s back, wondering how she could still be alive. The next they were in the Cadillac with Aurora behind the wheel and Ade asleep and strapped into the passenger seat. Wes was leaning over Ash, touching her face tenderly. “Ashline,” he whispered. It may have been the first time he said her name. It may have been the fiftieth.

“We did it?” she whispered. Trying to collect her wits was like wrangling an entire bag of marbles as they scattered across the kitchen floor.

Wes smiled and nodded to the unconscious Ade. “We’ll take him back to my penthouse and watch over him until he comes to.”

“No,” Ash blurted out.

Wes frowned. “I don’t think taking him to a hospital is a good idea.”

Ash leaned around Wes. “Go to the train station,” she instructed Aurora.

Aurora shrugged and did a sharp U-turn around the median.

“If Ade wakes up in your penthouse and finds out what’s going on,” Ash said, “he’s going to want to stick around and help.” She turned to the rain-tracked window so she wouldn’t have to see Wes scrutinizing her. “Sometimes being a good friend is offering to fight your friends’ battles with them. And sometimes being a good friend means refusing their help so they stay out of harm’s way.”

Wes lingered for another minute before he accepted that the conversation was over and slipped back into his seat.

Ash was lodged in a memory of Blackwood Academy, when Rolfe was still alive, when they were all still just mischievous kids with an addiction to breaking curfew.

By the time they got to the Amtrak station, Ade was already beginning to toss and turn as the sedative wore off. Together Wes and Ash managed to get Ade’s hulking body on board the Silver Service train and comfortably into a seat. Ash turned his head so that it was looking out the window and then tucked his one-way ticket halfway into the pocket of his shirt so the conductor could punch it on his way down the aisle. It was a six-hour train ride to Tampa. Hopefully Ade would eventually wake, disoriented but alive, and find the water bottles Ash had left next to him.

She gave Ade a last look as the conductor outside made final call and the train’s whistle blew. Ade’s eyes flickered open for just a brief moment before they drooped closed again, but Ash swore that he had seen her.

She met Wes back outside on the platform. Her phone buzzed, and she was grateful for the distraction so she wouldn’t have to watch Ade’s face through the window while the train chugged away, or wonder whether she was doing the right thing keeping him at a distance like this.

It was another message from Lesley. This one read:
“Red Rose in hand. Midnight, tonight, at the Venetian Pool.”

“Lesley again?” Wes came up behind her shoulder, attempting to read the screen.

She flipped the phone closed. “Yes. She’s ready to give us Rose.”

“When?”

Her mouth started to form the word “midnight,” but it twisted and mutated until what came out instead was: “Noon. Tomorrow.”

When they returned home, Aurora’s
stomach was growling something fierce—as was Ash’s—and the winged goddess demanded that they go out for a “slightly late” dinner, since an eleven p.m. supper wasn’t unheard of in nocturnal Miami.

“Can’t we do takeout instead?” Wes whined from the couch, where his body had already molded into the cushions. “After that jailbreak, I’m completely exhausted.” He rubbed the spot on the couch next to him, and raised his eyebrows meaningfully at Ash.

“Nice try, Wes,” Aurora said, “but the whole exhaustion excuse? Doesn’t really fly when you’re a night god. Ash?”

Ash, who had been resisting Wes’s attempts to coax her over to the couch, shook her head. “You two go out and have a nice dinner. I could use some alone time here to touch base with my parents.” It wasn’t a total fabrication,
after all, even though she had no intention of calling them once the other two gods left. Her eyes darted to the clock on the kitchen wall. She had barely an hour to make it to the drop point where Lesley intended to deliver Rose.

Unfortunately, when she tore her eyes off the clock, she found Wes watching her carefully. “Got a date?” he asked. Any warmth that he had been showing toward Ash before melted off him and dripped between the seat cushions. Wes’s moods were every bit as transparent as Ash’s, and it sounded like he might be under the impression that she intended to go meet Colt.

Ash wondered what would make Wes angrier, believing that she was visiting her ex-boyfriend’s hotel room, or finding out that she was purposely walking alone into what could be an ambush. She managed a smile. “Yeah,” she said. “I have a date with one cell phone, two angsty parents, and a shot of cold medicine to help me sleep.”

Aurora, who had been trembling uncontrollably with jitters since they’d gotten home, took a shot of something clear and then pointed the empty shot glass at Wes. “You don’t need drugs to knock you out when you live with Miami’s resident sandman.”

“Can you promise good dreams, too?” Ash asked. Her eyes unconsciously flitted to the clock again.

“Only the dreams about me.” Wes stood up. “Let’s go, Aurora. I’ll call for a table at Atlantic Liberty when we’re on our way. A table for three in case Magma Maggie here decides to join us later on.” He didn’t even look
at Ash as he said it, and the tension as Wes and Aurora finally filed out the door was enough to sandpaper a bed of nails smooth.

Mood ring that she was, lying had never been Ash’s strong suit, especially when it involved lying to people she cared about.

Even when she was doing it to protect them.

Ash had originally been filled with a blind sense of excitement about meeting Rose for the first time, but by the time she pulled her Vespa into the deserted lot outside the Venetian Pool, her anticipation had diluted into fear and uncertainty. As she walked down the palm-lined path to the pool, questions buzzed around her like she’d just smashed a hornets’ nest. What would she do when Lesley handed Rose over? Would they have anything to say to each other? And where the hell could Ash even
keep
her? Short-term, she supposed they could stay with Wes. But beyond that, would Ash bring her back to Scarsdale?

Try explaining that to the Wildes.
I know Rose doesn’t have a birth certificate or any proof that she actually exists, but believe it or not, she’s my long-lost sister, and I really hope she helps to fill the void your oldest daughter left when she ran away from home and then got imprisoned in hell.

She was so preoccupied with these daydreams of having a new sister that she almost didn’t notice the change in the air. The hot Miami night seemed to cool a few degrees with every step she took toward the gates. Even
more concerning, where the air had been humid before, Ash felt her slick skin instantly dry, as though all the vapor had been sucked clean away.

Ash came to the black metal gates. One side swung open with an ominous creak under her touch.

Ash had never visited the Venetian Pool before, but it was apparent from the get-go that something wasn’t right. The rain had since died away, but the overcast clouds blotted out the stars and moon so that the only light came from a few candy-striped lampposts that rose out of the pool like skinny gravestones. Under their faint glow everything appeared far too still, all the way across the pool to the stone fortress in the back. Stranger even, the temperature continued to plummet with each step forward she took.

When she toed up to the pool’s edge, it all made sense—the stillness, the cold.

The pool was frozen solid from end to end. In the distance, as Ash’s eyes adjusted to the light, she could see where even the waterfall had frozen, a curtain of icicles dangling like butcher’s knives over the icy expanse.

Most unsettling, however, was the tall structure rising out of the middle of the pool, where the meager light from the lampposts failed to penetrate and darkness triumphed. It was like a totem pole made of ice, maybe twenty feet high, and at the top there was some sort of design that Ash couldn’t quite discern from this distance.

Ash’s skin tingled as she stepped down onto the ice. The needles on her internal threat detector were tracking off the charts, but she had never been one to turn away from a sinister cookie crumb trail.

The tall structure was still a mystery when she approached it. It started narrow at the base and then slowly widened as it grew higher until it fanned out at the very top. It was as though a two-story geyser had exploded out of the center of the pool and then frozen instantly.

Ash held up her arm and let the fire blossom from her fingers down to her wrist, transforming her hand into a makeshift torch. Her eyes adjusted to the tangerine light, and she lifted the torch higher, until the aura extended up to the top of the ice sculpture.

As soon as the orb of light revealed the top of the totem pole, Ash nearly fell over backward.

Lesley Vanderbilt was encased within the ice, at its very top, with her arms spread in a twisted human crucifix. Her fingers were curled into claws and her eyes had been frozen wide open, but there was no life left behind them. Her mouth hung open in a last-gasp scream. Maybe in her final moments she’d known that she was only a half-inch layer of ice away from the air she so desperately needed.

Ash dropped to one knee. The Four Seasons had discovered Lesley’s plan to betray them. Rose’s rescue had been compromised, again, just when it had been within
reach of Ash’s fingertips. Now her only link to her sister had been brutally murdered and put on display in a tortured ice sculpture that was clearly meant for Ash to find.

Then she felt the presence behind her.

Saturday

Ash spun around and let the warmth from
the torch on her arm wash over the figure lurking behind her.

Bleak wore the same floor-length hooded robe she always wore—did she ever wash the thing, or did she just have a closet full of them? She lingered back five yards from Ash, with her feet set and her arms slack. Hardly a threatening pose, but Ash still felt her hackles rise.

“It’s funny,” Bleak mused, “how we echo the forces of nature. The warm front collides with the cold front.” Her voice was higher than Ash had expected; she had anticipated something huskier. Bleak had a vague hint of a Scandinavian accent as well, her inflection rising and falling musically with every syllable.

“I’ve met cold fronts before,” Ash said. “You’re just a cold bitch.”

The winter goddess ignored her comment, and let her eyes float up to drink in the totem pole of ice and flesh. “Do you like my sculpture? I’ve never been much of an artist.”

Ash was trembling. Involuntarily the fire burning in her arm flared up, showering the ice with sparks. “I would never have asked Lesley Vanderbilt to be my maid of honor, and the woman is—was—a complete megalomaniac . . . but did you really have to murder her?”

“Yes,” Bleak said quietly. “She dishonored her vow to the Four Seasons. She attempted to lie and steal what is rightfully ours. And we needed to transform her into an example so you would know to stop looking for your sister.”