Embers & Echoes (38 page)

But as it turned out, she didn’t have long to fall. Ash didn’t have enough time to gain her bearings in this strange new world before she plunged into its stormy seas.

She sank down into the frothy water. Wes dropped in right after her, missing crushing her head by only a few feet. They both kicked to the surface, and Ash immediately began searching the ocean for her sister, who was nowhere in sight. It was night here in the Netherworld—if they had a day at all—and visibility was poor. But there was one thing Ash could see:

The crumpled and scorched hull of the boat that Rose had destroyed the week before, its flattened prow jutting out of the water like a mangled tombstone. And now Ash could see bodies floating all around her, the frozen, burned, and broken remains of the ship’s crew.

“Rose!” Ash screamed. She started to yell for her
again, but a wave crashed down, filling her mouth with sweet-tasting water and garbling her words.

When she emerged choking from the other side of the wave, barely treading water, she spotted a figure several spans from them. It was Rose, calmly dog-paddling for a dark shore, weaving her way through the corpses, even as the swells lifted her tiny body up and down.

Eventually Ash forged her way into the shallows, assuming she’d made it through the last of the whitecaps . . . until one final wave surprised her from beneath and lifted her up into the air. It dumped her off its crest onto the black sand beach as if to say,
And
stay
out!

Wes crawled out of the shallows and collapsed next to her. “Miami waters . . . not quite so turbulent . . . ,” he panted. “Should have taken . . . that lifeguard course.”

Ash pulled herself up so that she was leaning on one elbow, although the fine black sand was soft enough that she was tempted to rest her head for a few. “I guess we get to spend our time in hell wet and cold. There’s irony for you.”

“You’re a volcano goddess,” Wes reminded her. “Can’t you just dry your clothes?”

“Yeah, if I want to burn them off.” She caught him grinning. “Lose the smirk or you’ll lose something else, Towers.”

Rose had plopped down below a small dune not too far away, where her curly hair and gaunt face were backlit by this world’s moon, a moon that was threateningly low
and took up half the sky. She was busy gathering wet sand into a heap.
We’re sitting on the shores of the Netherworld,
Ash thought,
and my little sister is making sand castles.
Since Rose spent much of her time acting like she’d been possessed by a demon, it was all the more creepy when she acted like a real six-year-old.

After some coaxing to get Rose to abandon the black sand, the three of them approached the wall of indigo vegetation on the fringes of the beach. “What’s with the Jurassic ferns?” Wes asked.

“Not ferns,” Ash said when she was close enough to reach out and touch the soft velour of the ten-foot-tall plants. “They’re lilies.” In fact, they were monstrous versions of the same black calla lily that Ash had tossed onto Lily’s watery grave the night before. . . . Had the Cloak been watching her? “I can’t be sure, but something tells me that they decorated the beach just for me . . . which means they’re expecting us.”

“Could be worse,” Wes said.

“Oh, yeah? How’s that?”

“They could have left a death trap for you instead of an enormous flower arrangement.” He walked up to one of the black callas, wrapped his thick arms around one of the tubelike petals, and tugged hard to no effect. “She loves me not,” he grunted.

“You’re lucky it didn’t turn out to be a Venus flytrap,” Ash snapped at him, although she was happy to see his good spirits temporarily restored.

On their journey down the snarling path, Ash felt like she was beneath a black light, as the glow of the enormous moon filtered through the translucent indigo petals. It was pointless, she realized, to wonder why anything was the way it was in this world—the beach, the sand, the moon—because she got the impression that this was just how it looked
today
.

When they emerged from the end of the path onto a circular stone plaza, the first thing Ash noticed was the tree.

Then the snow.

Then the cliff.

Ash was used to tall trees, having gone to school in the redwoods. This single tree, however, imparted to her an unparalleled sense of awe. Between its thick baobab trunk, and the gnarled, twisting limbs, the tree formed a towering mushroom cloud. Ash gauged it to be at least a hundred feet tall, but it could have been even higher. With the moon looming in the background, she was having a tough time judging space and distance in this strange universe.

A steady curtain of snow fell onto the plaza. It was too beautiful for Ash to even remember to be cold. Rather than switching on her internal furnace to warm herself, she simply let the feathery snowflakes accumulate on her wet clothing without complaint.

Then there was the endless cliff, on all sides. With the exception of the flower forest from which they’d arrived,
the stone simply dropped off into nothing. Ash figured at first that there must be ground below them
somewhere
, but when she passed under the magnificent tree to the far edge of the circle, she discovered this presumption to be false. There was no base to the cliff, no canyon floor below.

There was only oblivion.

Nothingness.

Nonexistence.

The three of them stood at the stone periphery, looking out and down. The oblivion induced a gripping fear in Ash that, even as a goddess, even embroiled in her ongoing saga back on earth, she was far less significant to the universe than she could have ever realized. That even with reincarnation, nothingness was
always
a possibility.

Just like the body, maybe even the soul was a destructible, corruptible thing.

Ash might have gazed into the abyss for hours had she not seen the fiery blue flicker against the falling snow. Even though she’d come to the Netherworld fully expecting to meet with the Cloak, the blue flicker still sent dread coursing through her veins like an icy poison.

The Cloak had gathered in a semicircle around them, with a single Cloak standing out in front. Together they formed a monstrous fermata.

However, the Cloak looked different here on their own turf. Their flesh was the same oily coat with the floating blue flame dancing where the eye should be, but
they’d traded their usual bulky and amorphous shape for bodies noticeably more svelte. Two arms. Two legs. Humanoid. Like the three-dimensional shadow of a man, only steeped in something primordial and dangerous.

“You’re right on time,” the Cloak in the middle said.

“You speak English,” Ash replied.

“Among other things,” it countered. “You sound surprised.”

Ash instinctively stepped in front of Rose, although the thought was laughable. If the Cloak meant them any harm, Rose was probably the most dangerous god there. “I guess I should have expected it, since the instructions you sent to me were in English. But the last few times I’ve run into you, you’ve squawked, and roared, and smashed lanterns, and eaten people, so I guess I’m not used to seeing you quite so . . . eloquent.”

The Cloak all laughed identically and in unison. Still, it was just the humanoid in the center who spoke. “That will make sense to you in time.”

Ash sized up their “spokesperson” in the middle. When one of the Cloak had appeared to Serena, the Greek siren at Blackwood Academy, and delivered the personalized instructions that she was supposed to pass along to Ash and her friends, the Cloak creature had identified himself with a human name. “Are you Jack?” Ash asked.

The laughing stopped. “We are all Jack.”

Ash shuddered. There was something truly chilling
about dealing with an entity with a collective conscience—many vessels, one central hive mind. “Then I guess you know why I’ve come.”

“Ah, yes.” The Cloak purred in its chasm-deep voice. “You’re here for the stormy one.” As one the Cloak all turned and lifted their heads to the tree above. “You’re here for
her
.”

What Ash had failed to notice until the Cloak brought it to her attention was that the tree was made of more than just wood and leaves and plant fibers. As she wiped the snow from her eyelashes, she could now see that there were people in the tree—many people, all woven into and camouflaged by the plant matter around them. With their limbs slack and their heads bowed, they were like apples dangling in an orchard, waiting to be plucked. Their eyes were open but showed no signs of movement or awareness.

A rustling sound came from the upper limbs, moving downward, like an object was tumbling through the foliage. A few telltale leaves floated to the ground beneath the tree, and then a female form dropped out of the bottom branches. Her body stopped just shy of a bloody death on the stone platform, suspended by a mess of plant fibers.

Eve looked a bit worse for wear than the last time Ash had seen her. Her hair was longer and unkempt, matted to her forehead in wet strands. Her skin was mottled—pale in places, and flushed with red in others, like calico patches of flesh and crimson. Even in whatever comatose
trance she’d slipped into, a feverish dew glazed her skin, steadily dripping from her brow to the stone below.

And then there was the lifelessness in her blank eyes. Even in her most malicious days, Eve had for better or worse carried herself with a vivaciousness, a verve for life and its unpredictability. Now it was as though someone had unplugged the drain to her basin, and all that life force had funneled out with a loud and despairing gurgle.

“What have you done to her?” Ash asked. She knew it best not to grow enraged at the Cloak, especially in
their
world, where she had to play by
their
rules. The fire bubbled up anyway. The snowflakes hissed and turned to steam when they hit her skin. She gestured to the others who were also “plugged” into the tree. “What have you done to
all
of these people?”

“All in due time,” Jack said patiently. “But in order for me to explain, we must speak privately,
one-on-one,
as they say.” Again the thirty blue eyes around the semicircle flickered with laughter. Jack pointed a finger at Rose, and then at Wes, who was nervously cracking his knuckles. “You have done well to escort Pele here,” Jack said, “but now you must take the child and go.”

“I think I’d rather stay right here,” Wes replied. He took a protective step closer to Ash.

“We mean the fiery one no harm,” Jack said.
“Cross my heart and hope to die.”

Wes shook his head. “I’m not going any—”

“Very well,” Jack interrupted him. “Back to earth you go.” He flicked his fingers.

Two small portals opened in the stone beneath Wes and Rose, and with a yelp, they each succumbed to gravity and fell right back into the other world. Ash dove for the rifts to see where they’d gone, but they closed before she’d even landed. The last thing she heard were two splashes on the other side.
Please,
Ash prayed,
please let it be that they landed in the pool on the roof and not in the middle of the Atlantic.

But Ash had to worry about herself as well, because with Wes and Rose gone, she was now alone, in hell, with the creature that had transformed her sister into a human acorn. There was no way they were going to make Ash the next decoration in their twisted landscaping.

“Do you like the snow?” Jack asked. “We know it’s still summer, but we thought it would make you feel more at home. What is it about snow and big green trees that your people find so comforting around Christmastime, anyway?”

Ash willed the fire inside of her to cool. “Very thoughtful of you, but we celebrate Hanukkah in the Wilde household.”

Jack’s gray teeth flexed upward in a Cheshire smile. “Noted for your next visit.”

“Don’t do any major redecoration on account of me. The enormous bouquet of lilies you left for me on the way in was flattering enough.”

“It’s no trouble at all. This world is far more malleable
than your own. There is always the ocean, there is always the tree, and there is always the darkness beyond. But all that lies between”—Jack swept his arm back toward the forest—“transforms to soothe those we welcome, and to expel those we do not.”

“Good thing my name’s on the guest list,” Ash said. “Now can we skip to the part where we cut my sister down from this tree on steroids?”

“Patience never was one of your virtues, Pele,” Jack countered. “Besides, are you really so anxious to flee with Evelyn that you would throw away your chance to ask some very important questions?”

It was disturbing to know that the Cloak had probably spent so much time observing humans that they’d integrated maxims such as “Patience is a virtue.” But Jack still had a point. The people in her life until now—Eve, Colt, even Wes—often chose to remain mysterious and selective with the truth. While she had no guarantee that the Cloak wouldn’t just feed her
even more
lies, they’d let her pass safely through to their world when they could have easily killed her. Assuming that she could trust them to tell even half-truths, she had a free pass for answers, if she could come up with the right questions.

The real question, though, was where to begin.

Fortunately, Jack must have sensed that she was overwhelmed, because he began for her. “This world we inhabit is a beautiful and magical one, to be sure.” Jack knelt down and, using his obsidian hands, gathered a
palm full of snow from the stone plaza. “It should be everything that we want—contained, peaceful, responsive to our touch—but even
we
grow weary with time. And because of this, we have lately felt a growing restlessness. An urge to . . . fly away.” He cupped both hands around the snow in his palm and then launched it up into the air as though he were tossing confetti. But instead of snow, what emerged from Jack’s hand was a raven with two flaming blue eyes. It cawed and beat its wings. It circled the great tree and disappeared into the upper branches.

“We have watched over your world for longer than you know,” Jack continued, “and we have grown to respect it, to admire it. It has all the makings of what we wish to call home. The unpredictability. The coexistence of so many different climates and landscapes and organisms, all stitched together like a patchwork quilt. And because we have been charged with overseeing your people, it would certainly facilitate our efforts to cohabit the planet with you.”