Embers & Echoes (35 page)

Things only grew stranger the deeper Ash penetrated
into this twisted little enchanted forest that Lily had put together. Spanish moss clung to the crisscrossing tree limbs and draped down in curtains, green cobwebs that made visibility difficult.

Then there were the flowers, so many flowers. Thick beds of violets clinging to the forest floor, where they had chewed through the stone path and pulverized it into loose gravel. Orchids crawled up the side of a nearby redwood. Ash had to skirt around a bed of Jurassic-size roses that had thorns so big and thick they could qualify as tusks.

All this time she’d been wondering how Lily’s “construction” had gone unnoticed. Sure, the museum was closed for the night, and the police had their hands full at the crime scene across the bay, but wouldn’t security have noticed this severe landscaping issue by now?

Ash stepped up to the moat that surrounded the central island. In between the leaves and lily pads that coated the water, she saw two lumps floating at the surface. Their bodies bobbed facedown, but both the corpses wore gray security uniforms and black utility belts. A silent radio drifted not far from them.

It was when Ash leapt over the moat onto the center island that she spotted the first camera. It had been crudely bolted to one of the trees, and must have had a motion detector, because it swiveled to peer at her, like a vulture gawking down from its perch at potential carrion.

The trees thinned out as Ash progressed across the
island, except around its periphery, where they eventually grew so close together that no person would be able to fit between them. In fact, now that she thought about it, they were sort of like the thick bars to a prison.

It’s a fence,
Ash realized. She spotted two more cameras, then a third, all pivoting to leer at her. By now she’d reached the far end of the island. Here there was a ten-foot gap in the fence of trees, but her passage through was blocked by a web of very angry-looking thorns. The thorns had been wrapped around the trees to either side and pulled taut, forming a tall net of natural razor wire. Through the mesh she could see the waterfall and the dual staircases leading up to the Mound, her destination. It was as though Lily wanted to tease her, to show her where she wanted to go but trap her in here.

Time for some landscaping,
she thought. She ignited her hand, ready to burn her way through the thorn patch.

Then a second thought occurred to her. The cameras. The fence surrounding the island.

This wasn’t intended to just keep her away from the Mound.

It was intended to keep her corralled on the island.

Because Lily had transformed the island into an arena.

Which also meant that Wes wasn’t the sacrifice—

He was just bait.

“I’m the sacrifice,” Ash whispered.

“Perceptive, as always,” came the reply from the trees overhead.

Ash winged a fireball upward toward the voice, but the flames met only with branches and leaves. She let a second ball of fire simmer in her palm and waited for Lily to appear.

Too late Ash felt the vine snarl around her ankle. It tightened, sinking its little thorns into her skin and pulling her flat to the ground. The vine retracted across the island, dragging her with it through the grass and dirt. The wild ride slammed her into one tree and continued toward a bushel of Jurassic thorns in the shape of a jaw. The thorny teeth gnashed together, hungry, longing to devour her in a few quick bites.

Ash lit her fingers, bared her claws, and sheared right through the vine holding her. Her body skidded to a stop right before she could enter the giant thorny mouth. That didn’t stop the jaws from lunging for her. She crab-walked backward, away from the botanical bear trap before it could turn her feet into its next meal.

She heard a rustling in the canopy overhead and looked up. In the center of the island, from the upper branches of the mangroves, Lily descended in a nest of vines. The vines had curled around her arms and shoulders and lowered her gently to the ground. She looked like a demented marionette, only she was her own dangerous puppeteer.

“Right on time,” Lily said. She peered around Ash, looking for someone else. “But you didn’t bring Rey with you? Good. I always thought he was a stick-in-the-mud.”

Ash brushed herself off and stood up. “Yeah, he was looking pretty stiff when I last saw him too.”

“I hope you’re not camera shy.” Lily nodded to the nearest camera, which twitched to follow her movements. “See, when we tried to play the heroes on the last broadcast, the viewers just laughed us off as some work of fiction. We live in a skeptical world, and we’ve realized that the only way for the public to
believe
in us is to first make them
fear
us. Once we capture your death on film, we’ll take care of your nocturnal boyfriend. That will give us two more sacrifices to broadcast to the world. Should be enough to scare up a small following, before we start doing some
live
performances in cities across the country. Now, do you want us to air your death first? Or would you rather be the encore presentation?”

Ash shook her head, suddenly feeling more weary than vengeful. “What happened to you, Lily? You were my
friend
. I’ll never fully understand what sort of internal torture you must have been going through at Blackwood to break this way, but I could have helped you if you’d let me in. Instead you had to go and break the rest of us too, when you killed Rolfe.”

Lily’s smile fell at the mention of Rolfe’s name. “Don’t.” Spittle flew from her mouth. “Don’t you say his name.”

“His name is all that you left of him.” In her rage Ash hurled a fireball at Lily. Lily quickly sidestepped the flames, which incinerated a bed of violets instead. “I’ve
seen people take rejection poorly before,” Ash said, “but what was it about getting played by Rolfe that made you snap like this?”

“The only thing that’s going to snap,” she snarled, “is your
neck
.”

Only when she felt the caress around her neck did Ash realize her mistake. She’d been so concentrated on Lily in front of her, and the thorn jaws to the rear, that she hadn’t paid any attention to what was happening above her.

A vine noose had slipped loosely around Ash’s neck. As soon as she brought up her hands to throw it off, the noose fastened itself tightly, crushing her trachea and flattening her fingers to her throat. The vine retracted up into the canopy, and her white-knuckled grip on it was the only thing preventing her neck from breaking as the vine jerked her roughly off the ground.

Ash dangled ten feet above the forest floor, feeling the pressure build in her neck. She ignited her hands once again and tried not to panic—she should be easily able to sear right through the vines.

But the noose only tightened further in response. Lily was smiling up at her. “That vine is armored with redwood bark,” Lily explained. “How strange that I was so eager to get away from Blackwood Academy that I never realized that the redwood trees surrounding campus actually have fireproof bark. If I’d known
that,
maybe I would have stuck around.”

Ash’s fingers were still clamped to her throat, but she aimed her elbow so that it pointed down at Lily’s face. Lily’s noose might be fireproof, but Lily wasn’t.

Only a few impotent sparks streamed out of Ash’s elbow. With the noose cutting off the oxygen supply to her lungs, it was like trying to run a furnace in an airtight room. Soon even the sparks stopped coming.

Lily rolled her eyes. “Come on, Ashline. You have to put on a better show for the cameras than that. Nobody’s going to believe you’re a god just because you can shoot a sparkler out of your elbow. Where’s the fireworks display?”

Ash wriggled to get free. The more she moved, the more pressure she felt pull on her vertebrae. Her arms were bearing some of the weight for now, but even her tennis-toned forearms wouldn’t be enough to hold on forever.

Lily extended her arm, and a new vine sprouted lazily from it, coiling on the ground. “I know in your heart you think you’re the hero. That
I’m
the villain. And I’m going to admit there was a time when I felt conflicted about what I’d done to . . . him.” Rolfe’s name wilted in the air without ever blooming. Lily coiled the whip she’d created around her wrist. “But you know what I realized? He was a
taker
!” As she growled the last word, she unfurled the whip and lashed at Ash.

It caught Ash in the ribs. She might as well have been stabbed. The pain was so great that it caused her whole
body to convulse upward, sapping some of the strength from her arms.

Lily reeled the whip back. “All of you are takers. But you and Raja are the
worst
offenders. You pretend to be friends with everyone, and you flash your pretty little smiles. . . .” She touched her aged face, perhaps remembering the youthful skin she once had before Raja got to her. “And then you take. You take any man that you want. You take thirty years from my life. You take
everything
!” Lily let the whip fly again.

The second blow from the whip was even worse. It was agony for Ash to have her hands tied, to be unable to reach down and soothe the wound. And her oxygen was long since used up. The world around her was starting to grow speckled with black. Even through the coming darkness, however, Ash turned her eyes up to the tree limb overhead. The one the noose was attached to. The one that looked like it was straining under her weight.

“That,” Lily continued, “is when I finally understood—it’s in your natures to take. Death destroys. Fire destroys. But I . . .” she spread her arms at the horrible arboretum. “I
create
! I bring life where fire brings only death.” She wheeled back her whip. “Well, today is the day that the forest triumphs over the wildfire.”

Finally Ash pried one hand loose and grabbed the vine over her head quickly so that her neck wouldn’t bear the added pressure. Then the other hand. With the little oxygen she inhaled, she pulled herself arm over arm up
the vine. In the canopy above she could see the branch that the noose was coiled around. All she had to do was keep climbing.

Meanwhile Lily’s whip cracked in the space where Ash had just been hanging. The blossom goddess jerked it back in frustration, preparing to strike again.

When Ash reached the top of the vine, she wrapped her hands around the limb that had been serving as her gallows and let herself dangle. With the pressure off the noose, she could finally breathe a little. She knew that if she lost her hold on the branch, she’d fall and break her neck when the vine went taut, but she had a plan. So she mentally prepared herself for a long fall, delegated all her power to her arms, and then heaved down on the branch.

The limb cracked right off the tree. Together Ash and her scaffold dropped all the way to the grass below. She was too relieved to feel any pain when she hit the ground. She loosened the limp noose around her neck to let in the air.

Lily, who had dived away to avoid being crushed, came at Ash with thorny fingernails, ready to slice her apart.

Ash picked up the fallen limb with two hands and jumped to her feet. Just as Lily got within range, Ash assumed her best softball batting pose and smashed the branch across Lily’s face.

The blossom goddess staggered back, stunned, giving Ash enough time to tackle her around the waist.
Lily maintained her footing, but Ash pressed on until she’d carried the girl all the way across the island. With their combined momentum Ash slammed Lily back-first through the thorn fence that was blocking the island’s exit. Both girls tumbled through the air and struck the back wall of the shallow moat, before plunging into its leaf-covered waters.

The next few seconds were a blur. Lily somehow ended up on top, and her weight carried both of them to the bottom of the moat. Ash blindly thrashed out at first, connecting a few heavy blows to Lily’s head and chest, but the other girl retaliated by pressing Ash’s face down into the hard stone floor. Ash was already oxygen-deprived from the hanging, and if it came to a battle of holding each other underwater, Lily was sure to emerge victorious.

Sure enough the blossom goddess had reached the same conclusion. She slipped her hands around Ash’s neck and squeezed Ash’s already crushed windpipe. With Lily kneeling on top of Ash, no amount of floundering could break Lily’s hold. As the last few bubbles escaped from Ash’s mouth, a trail of embers sparked impotently out of her hands, illuminating Lily’s face long enough for Ash to see it. After all her talk of how she would enjoy murdering Ash, there was nothing gleeful written in Lily’s expression. Instead her eyes were knotted into something horrible as she wept, and her lips were trembling as the water silenced her sobs.

Something else was glinting under the light of Ash’s dying embers, however. It was glass lying on the moat floor, just within her reach—the shattered stem of the champagne flute Ash had thrown into the moat the night of the white-tie party, the same one she had defended herself with when Thorne had attacked her in the grotto.

Ash used the last of her strength to reach out and grasp it by its flat base.

And then she plunged the stem into Lily’s heart.

Lily’s hands immediately went slack on Ash’s throat, and her crying eyes shot wide open. A crimson ribbon of blood streamed from the wound in her chest and diffused through the water around them.

With little time left before she completely asphyxiated, Ash wriggled out from under Lily’s limp body and kicked off the bottom of the moat. In a moment of compassion, for whatever humanity was left in Lily’s soul, Ash grabbed Lily by her belt and dragged her to the surface.

Ash burst through the leaves and lily pads, and drew in several long breaths. Lily breached the surface with her, and Ash started to tow her toward the opposite edge of the moat.

“No,” Lily croaked.

Ash stopped splashing and treaded water next to the dying blossom goddess. Lily floated faceup, with her hands folded over the mortal wound to her heart. Blood continued to pump up between her fingers, a ring of red expanding through her wet shirt.