Embers & Echoes (33 page)

Ash had been so busy scanning the pedestrians on the Lincoln Road Mall for Colt that she hadn’t even noticed him slip into the seat across from her. “Just people watching,” she replied.

“Looked more like people-examining.”

The waiter came over, and without even looking at the menu, Colt rattled off something in Japanese that ended with “sake.” Leave it to Colt, who looked ten years older than his actual eighteen, to order alcohol fluently in another language and not get carded.

Then again, Ash thought, although they were both teenagers in body, they were also millennia old in spirit.

“So you’re fluent in Japanese,
and
a sake connoisseur,” Ash said. Suddenly her ice water with lemon looked very plain.

“Don’t worry. I ordered enough for two,” he said. “And you don’t travel the world for a thousand years without absorbing other languages and developing some more refined tastes.”

“All the time to try new things, yet you keep coming back to the same woman.” As soon as Ash said it, she was surprised at her own boldness—but there was no turning back now.

“Not
exactly
the same woman.” Colt thanked the waiter, who had just brought a ceramic carafe and two glasses. “That’s the interesting part about dating incarnations of the same goddess. It’s like you start with the same mold, the same cup”—he pushed one of the glasses across the table and slowly filled it with sake—“but what you pour into it changes each and every time.”

Ash took a cautious sip from her glass. “So Ashline Wilde is very different from Lucy Halliday, who was very
different from . . . whoever I was before that. What was I like in the other lives you knew me?”

The question caught Colt off guard. She could tell because he spilled a little sake from his glass onto the table. “You were . . .” He searched for the word. “You were much more impetuous before. More explosive, and rash.”

Ash laughed dryly. “Sounds like I had a little bit of Eve in me.”

Colt choked on his sake. The comment hadn’t been
that
funny, Ash thought.

He cleared his throat. “Something like that. Your temper made you violent at times. Let’s just say I was very grateful for my regenerative abilities. But at other times that same explosiveness also made you more passionate. It was intoxicating. I couldn’t get enough of it.”

“Apparently not,” she said. “Intoxicating enough that you lied just to get a fifth helping.”

Colt’s face tightened. He slipped his fingers through his bristly hair. “When the Cloak designed this mental block to separate us from our old memories—when they designed this
brain damage
for us—they overlooked the god with regenerative abilities. Never realized that his brain might slowly heal itself, too. Do you know what it’s like to be the only one who remembers?” He turned away from Ash to watch the passing crowd instead—a group of dolled-up girls chattering rapidly about their night plans, two young lovers arm in arm heading to dinner. “To live and die like
everyone else,” he continued, “but to come back with a full memory of everything that happened before, while the people around you—strangers, friends . . . lovers—don’t remember a damn thing?”

“So just to be clear, your argument”—Ash folded her hands and leaned over the table—“is that because you’re the only one who
knows
everything, you also have to
lie
about everything.”

“Travel back in time and space to that first day we met at the saloon, when I came up behind you at the bar.” He tapped two fingers to his temple. “Now imagine that by way of introduction, I said, ‘Hi, Ashline. You don’t know me, but I was married to you in your last life back when your name was Lucy, and you were a farmer’s-daughter-turned-bank-robber living in New Orleans. We had a beautiful love affair until an Aztec assassin ripped out my heart on our wedding night. Oh, and PS, you don’t know it yet, but you’re a Polynesian volcano goddess.” He paused and let all that sink in. “I’m sure you would have
definitely
agreed to a second date after that.”

“I really hate when you do that,” Ash said.

Colt raised an eyebrow. “Do what?”

Ash sighed. “Make a good point that I can’t argue with. Although,” she went on, as Colt chuckled, “you could have used some of that singing magic of yours to convince me to believe you.”

Ash’s hands were still in the middle of the table from
when she’d leaned in, and Colt reached across to touch them. “Hey,” he said, “I’m glad you came.”

She withdrew her fingers just an inch. Damn this guy was good. A week ago she buried him thigh-deep in stone. Now she was unintentionally letting him back in.
This wasn’t meant to be a romantic meet-up,
she wanted to tell him. With Wes still possibly in the picture, and all the death that was going on in Miami, the last thing she needed was a tropical love triangle.

Colt took his own hand back and averted his gaze as he refilled his sake glass. His eyes glistened in the moonlight. “I’m sorry,” he said, and smiled into his glass. “Sometimes I expect relationships to heal as fast as I do.”

“Even relationships that heal can scar, too,” Ash reminded him.

Before the conversation could cascade further into awkward touchy-feely topics that Ash wasn’t prepared for, the waiter graciously returned to take their food order. She panicked because she hadn’t even opened the menu, but Colt jumped to the rescue. “Do you mind?” he asked Ash. He proceeded to order what sounded like enough food to invite half of the pedestrian mall to join their meal.

“Hungry much?” Ash asked.

He passed the menus to the waiter, who walked away. “I’m still catching up on the meals I missed when I was trapped in an Oregon boulder for seventy-two hours.”

Ash narrowed her eyes. “How
did
you escape from the rock, by the way?”

He only smiled and sipped his sake. “So,” he changed the subject. “What’s the status of the hunt for your sister?”

“On hold, I guess.” She slouched in her chair. “I thought that tracking down Rose was the right thing to do, but now I just don’t—”

“Ash,” Colt interrupted, “you’re trying to rescue a kidnapped six-year-old. How could that be anything
but
the right thing to do?”

“In theory maybe. But I’m a night’s sleep from throwing in the towel and going home.”

“You can’t give up!” When he said it, his voice split into three pitches at once in a terrible chord—his persuasive song-voice had leaked through enough that Ash could feel it tug on her marionette strings.

“What is your malfunction?” she asked him. “If you want Rose so you can go spelunking in the Cloak Netherworld, then go retrieve her yourself. I’ve tried my best, and because of it, three people are dead.”

“Because of you,” he reminded her, his voice back to normal, “Ade is alive.”

He was right, of course, and Ash opened her mouth to agree with him. A pulse went through her brain, however, a beacon of warning that flashed once, twice, and then began to strobe outward through her body. Her stomach tightened. Her vision wavered, and nausea swept over her. Her survival instincts were alerting her that something about this conversation was terribly, terribly wrong.

That’s when she figured it out. In the course of all this plotting, all the destinies of these gods and goddesses converging and intersecting in pursuit of their own selfish ends, it was often hard to keep straight who knew what exactly. But after a quick mental review of the last few days, double-checking where her last conversation with Colt fell in the chronology, she could say one thing confidently:

There was no way Colt Halliday should have known that Ade had been the Four Seasons’ sacrificial prisoner.

“How did you know Ade was the sacrifice?” Ash demanded. “How did you know that we saved him?”

“I . . . ,” Colt started. “You said that—”

“I didn’t say
a word
to you about that, Trickster,” Ash said. “How did you know it was Ade?”

He massaged his stubble nervously. His right eye twitched. “It’s not what you think, Ash. You’re jumping to conclusions that—”

“What did you do?” Her fingers curled around her glass, and the sake inside began to froth and boil. “What the
hell
did you do, Colt?”

“Fine.” Colt threw up his hands. “You got me. The Four Seasons were looking for a sacrifice. I suggested Ade. I told them where to find him in Haiti. I knew you needed more incentive to stick to your guns, and the best way was to make it more personal.” He glanced at Ash’s glass, which had grown so hot that it was starting to steam. “He was never in any danger. I knew you’d save him.”

Ash watched Colt’s image swim through the steam curtain. “Should I even ask who told them about Rose and where to find her?”

He shrugged. “Why smuggle the little girl that I need into the country when I could trick a crazy billionaire and some hell-bent gods to do it for me? Trickery is what I do, Ash.” He tilted his chin up and stroked the skin over his neck. “All I had to do was open up these special little vocal cords of mine, and the Four Seasons were willing to do
anything
to achieve their delusions of grandeur. Lesley, too.”

The heat in Ash was growing so intense that she could feel the metal armrests of her chair beginning to soften. It was only a matter of time before she lost control completely. “How could you make them do those things, Colt? These aren’t soapstone pieces on a chessboard. They’re
real people
. You try to convince me that the Cloak are the evil monsters, but you’re the one who puppeteers massacres and then sleeps well at night.”

“I don’t put evil in the hearts of men. My song, my vocal persuasion, didn’t make the Four Seasons kill Lesley Vanderbilt and your friend. The ability to kill was always there in their blood. All I do is strip away inhibitions to let people do what their dark hearts truly desire.” A smile twitched at the corner of his lips, and Ash could all but see the shadow of their kiss back in Oregon reflecting in his eyes. “You of all people should know that, Ashline Wilde.”

Ash splashed her sake in Colt’s face. He didn’t even flinch as the scalding liquid splattered against his skin. The red welts it left quickly faded back to his copper Native American skin.

“In the short time I’ve known you,” Ash said quietly, “you’ve put me and just about everyone that I know in danger. You set your plans into motion, and then you sit back and watch the body count add up. You may not be a murderer, but you might as well be. Get away from this table, and get the hell out of my life.”

“I can’t do that,” he said.

Ash pointed out to the pedestrian mall. “I said get out!” she screamed. It was loud enough to draw the attention of all the nearby diners and passersby.

Colt downed the rest of his glass and stood up. He pulled a roll of twenty-dollar bills out of his pocket. “One day,” he said, and counted out a stack of bills onto the tabletop, “you’ll realize that I did it for you.” He backed away from the table but never took his eyes off Ash. “I did it
all
for you.”

“The next time I bury you in rock,” Ash called out as he disappeared down the pedestrian mall, “it will be from the top of your head down!”

Once she finally lost him in the crowd, she let her head drop to the table. How could she have ever thought this meeting was a good idea? Moreover, how could Colt . . . How could he just . . . She’d known he was conniving before, and that his trickery had indirectly
resulted in Rolfe’s death, but to purposely place Ade on death row just so Ash would follow through with her plans . . .

This was the second time that the gravitational pull of Colt’s plotting had latched onto Ash’s life like a tractor beam, and twisted and tore at it until she had nothing—and no one—left.

“Miss?”

The waiter was standing next to the table, looking beyond uncomfortable. He was trying his best to stay focused on Ash, but his eyes kept darting to the empty seat across from her.

Ash flicked the sake carafe. “Just bring me another pitcher of whatever this is.”

Thunder rolled down the strip, coming from the west, accompanied by a flash of light. “Heat lightning,” the waiter explained. A second flash and more thunder, only louder.

With the third clap of thunder, she heard a different sound, indiscernible at first, but then growing into something recognizable.

Screaming.

Lots of screaming.

Ash stood up just as the first person came running past her. Soon a current of shrieking people came sprinting down the pedestrian mall, heading east toward the water, engulfing the bystanders in their path and carrying them away. Ash had to retreat toward the restaurant to
avoid being towed away in the swift tide of people.

The fourth time she heard the thunder, she knew it wasn’t thunder at all.

Explosions.

Explosions moving down the strip.

The remaining people who hadn’t already been swept away by the mob joined it as soon as they realized what they were hearing. She heard the words “terrorist attack” thrown around by a couple rushing past her.

Ash knew better.

The pedestrian mall rapidly emptied of everyone—even Ash’s waiter, who knocked her carafe of sake off the table in his rush to flee.

Then Ash saw the lone man coming determinedly down the strip. White-collared shirt unbuttoned halfway down his chest, sleeves rolled up to the elbows, dirty dreadlocks.

Rey.

Summer had arrived.

“Ashline Wilde!” he shouted.

He aimed his hand at the front of the restaurant a few doors down and across the street from Ash. A light blossomed in the air in front of the window, a miniature sun rotating rapidly, like a basketball spinning on an imaginary finger.

It condensed briefly.

Then it exploded outward.

The restaurant’s tinted windows shattered from top
to bottom. The patio furniture near the explosion was blasted outward until it clattered down the Lincoln Road Mall. Somehow the diners inside had missed the chaos before, but they streamed out of the restaurant now, anywhere they could—some through the doors, and others through the gaping jaws of the windows.