Embers & Echoes (6 page)

She blinked, and the valve twitched off. She opened her hands to allow Osvaldo to take his own back, but at first he just let it linger there. When he finally pulled it away, he held it out in front of him like he didn’t know what to do with it. “You hear of such things, but you never . . .” He trailed off and peered at her as though he’d forgotten that the world could still have surprises in store for him.

Ash could see the condensation that had formed on the outside of her Coke glass, like a liquid kiss. “Not everything is as it seems,” she said. She hoped that she’d done the right thing, revealing herself to this near stranger. She’d always thought she was a good judge of character when it came to whom she should and shouldn’t trust, but
if Colt and Lily were any indication . . . Still, she was here to find her sister, and she didn’t have the time to sweet-talk answers out of reluctant bartenders. “Now,” she said, “I need to know where I can find those little boats.”

Osvaldo held up a
One minute
finger to the customer in the Hawaiian shirt who was trying to flag him down. “Miami River,” he told her after a brief hesitation. “Parts of it are nicer now, but some smaller boats still dock in marinas upstream, closer to Little Havana. But I swear to God,” he said with intensity, his accent thickening, “if I turn on the news tomorrow and I see your face among the missing . . .”

“Thank you,” she said. “You’ve been both helpful and knowledgeable.”

He held up his cell phone. “Your dinner is on the house if you’ll call Mrs. Osvaldo and tell her that.”

But at the mention of food, her own hunger made her think of Rose again, the persistent throb of starvation Ash had suffered while seeing the world through the little girl’s eyes. It was hard to complain about her meal of airplane cookies and soda when her six-year-old sister had spent a month roaming the jungle and scavenging off the forest floor. With Rose potentially only a few miles away, dinner was going to have to wait. Despite everything that had happened with Colt yesterday, having a sense of direction felt . . . good.

Osvaldo caught her smiling. “For someone who’s skipping the beach to hang out by the docks, you sure are
grinning like a jaguar child.” He chuckled. “You happy to be here, or are you just happy not to be somewhere else?”

“A little of both, Osvaldo. A little of both.” She dropped a five on the counter and stood up. “How long do you think the taxi ride to the river will be from here?”

“Not long . . .” He tapped his chin. “But if you’ll allow me, can I make a suggestion for more creative transportation?”

As the wind billowed through
her helmet and the crisp bite of Biscayne Bay washed over her, Ash couldn’t help but have flashbacks to just yesterday, sitting on the back of the Honda Nighthawk with Colt. But now she was on the opposite coast, on a motorized scooter alone, and cruising over a long bridge into who knew what sort of trouble.

This is the way I like it,
she realized.
On my own.

She didn’t want to have to ride through life on the back of a bike, with her arms strapped around someone else. She wanted to be at the helm.

To the south of the causeway, on her left, a mountain of cargo containers glowed in metal bouquets of blue, green, and red under the low angle of the setting sun. Beyond that she could see a few mountainous cruise ships at dock. The ship she was looking for was probably more on the petite side, and hopefully docked on the Miami River where Osvaldo said it might be.

But where to begin? The boat could have already
pulled into dock and unloaded its cargo: Rose. Ash still had both sides of the five-mile-long river to canvas in her search. The odds certainly weren’t leaning in her favor.

The causeway wound to the north until her phone’s GPS indicated her upcoming exit, and she snagged the off-ramp. Music blossomed from Bayfront Park’s amphitheater on her left—a concert that Osvaldo had suggested as a last-ditch attempt to derail her mission. She tapped her toe on the footboard to the rhythm of the song, a tune she recognized from the radio. Some stupid pop number with lyrics that basically boiled down to getting hammered and throwing yourself at every man in the nightclub.

She was almost glad to be scouring the river instead.

Ash had pored over a map of the city as she was renting the Vespa back in South Beach. To the south side of the river was Little Havana, a sweeping neighborhood that was apparently home to a large population of transplants from Cuba and Latin America. Directly north of the Miami River were a university, a hospital, a college, some hotels, and a convention center. Neither side of the river screamed “crime-ridden” to Ash, but the boat
had been
coming from Central America, and if she were smuggling a six-year-old war goddess into the country, she’d probably avoid the side in plain view of a convention center.

Much to her annoyance, there wasn’t just one road that ran the full length of the river’s south side. Instead
she had to tediously carve her way in and out.

After four continuous miles of weaving roads and silent docks, she was beginning to feel like she was running a fool’s errand—and she wasn’t just thinking of her combing the Miami River in search of the boat, but her journey to Miami in general. Yes, Lesley had her little sister, and yes, Rose was just a little girl. But Ash had come to Florida with only two leads: the number on the boat’s container, and the port of destination. She might as well have been searching for a coconut shaving on a glacier.

She was about to turn around and call it a night, maybe even have takeout delivered to her motel, when her eyes abruptly began to boil. The heat escalated until her vision grew bleary with tears, and she jerked the Vespa over to the side of the road.

When her line of sight cleared, she found herself standing in a world without color. Everything that lay in front of her—the shipyard, its compound of metal-sided buildings, the yachts and speedboats in the marina ahead—had been muted to shades of gray and brown, and even the dusky sky had been poached of its color.

No, not everything, Ash realized as she leaned her Vespa against one of the dock buildings. In the gravel there were two parallel lines of fading orange, trailing off into the marina grounds beyond.

Ash couldn’t spot any dockworkers in the empty shipyard, so she followed the ember trail all the way to a boathouse in the back, where the lines stopped just behind
the tires of a waiting van. The moment she touched the van, color leaked back into the world around her and the heat trail in the gravel faded into the stone.

Ash rubbed her eyes. Hopefully the weird heat vision was a sign that she was on the right trail, and not an indication that she was going completely insane. It was increasingly hard to tell these days.

The main door to the boathouse was locked from the inside, so her only way in was through the opposite end, where the boats exited. She had to skirt along the thin ledge between the dock walls and the river beyond. Up this close, the river water below had a green and brown tinge to it like mossy tree bark, and Ash prayed that she wouldn’t fall in. Even fire wouldn’t protect her from river pollutants.

Once inside the boathouse, she slipped quietly down the row of white midsize boats.

Four boats later, she found it.

It looked exactly as it had in the dream, and as she stared up at the two-bar railing, she had a flashback to her vision, to staring out of a child’s eyes as the pursuing ship balled up into a nugget of steel and death and was swallowed by the wrath of a war goddess who didn’t know any better.

Ash had to be sure, though. A metal gangplank had been extended from the starboard side of the boat down to the dock. She cursed the hollow clanging of her footsteps against the metal treads.

Once she had boarded the ship, Ash crept down the
hallway until she was standing in front of a familiar crate. She took the crossword clipping with the numbers and held it side by side with the actual numbers to make sure they matched. As she brushed the stenciled numbers and letters with her fingertips, it occurred to her that at one point her little sister had walked down this very hall.

For the first time since she’d had the original vision of Rose, Ash’s sister seemed like a reality, not just some borderline nightmare that lay outside her realm of responsibility. In fact, Ash was beginning to feel downright ashamed that she’d chosen to brush off the visions in favor of tennis matches, the school dance, and Colt. All of that felt so frivolous now.

Maybe she’d needed to lose one sister before she realized how important it was for her to save the other one.

She was so deep in reverie that it took her a full minute to realize there was a conversation happening inside the crate. She pressed her ear to the corrugated metal.

There were several voices, actually, and shuffling, too. Groans of exertion and deep breathing. It sounded as though the men inside were moving something heavy.

And they were coming for the door.

Ash scurried down the row of crates as quickly as she could, toward the port-side railing. The door to the crate slammed open behind her, and the voices exploded outward into the marina. She lost her footing on a slick section of deck and ended up scampering the remaining few lengths to get around the corner in time. She leaned
against the outside of one crate and tried to listen as best she could.

“You resist again,” a loud voice with a thick Hispanic accent shouted, “and I’m going to start cutting off fingers.” There was the muffled sound of a fist striking flesh followed by coughing and sputtering.

Ash allowed herself a quick glance around the corner, hoping the shadows would hide her face.

Four men had emerged from the crate—one of them with a thick mustache and a suit, and three others with white button-down shirts rolled up to their elbows.

In their midst, restrained by the three underlings and shackled in heavy chains around his arms and legs, a figure in jeans and a dark black T-shirt was hunched over, recovering from whatever blow he’d just suffered. When he straightened up, Ash could see that he was tall, even taller than Colt—pushing up on six and a half feet. The giant had a solid, muscular build, and his tattered black T-shirt strained around his chest and arms. A dark mesh bag had been fitted over his head and cinched around his neck. Even without seeing his face, one thing was crystal clear:

This was not Rose Wilde.

“It’s almost seven thirty,” the man in the three-piece suit said as he checked his watch. “Should be plenty of time to get him to the factory before sundown.”

“Sundown,” Ash mouthed. Clearly some sort of hostage situation was afoot. Wouldn’t it have been to their benefit to transport him at night?

“Do what you need to do to get him to the van.” He made a shooing motion to the other men, two of whom secured the prisoner by his arms while the other steered him by his shoulders. “But remember, boss wants him conscious, so avoid the Chicano’s face, eh?”

Ash was just starting to lean closer to the scene when she felt fingers slide through her hair and twist. She tried and failed to stifle a squeak as a hand yanked her to her feet by the top of her head. The follicles of her scalp screamed in pain.

She turned around just far enough to see her attacker. He wore a sleeveless T-shirt and couldn’t have been older than twenty-one or twenty-two. His goatee was scraggly where his facial hair had yet to come in fully. But Ash was forced to take him seriously when she noted that his free hand had unholstered the gun from his hip.

“Whatchou doing here?” he grilled her in an accent that matched that of the man in the suit—Cuban?

She tried to untangle his fingers from her hair, but his grip tightened and he twisted her head roughly to the side.

She had to bite her lip to keep from squealing out again. “What the hell, bro?” she growled. “Can’t a girl watch a sunset from a boat without getting scalped?”

“Wait a minute.” The guard’s eyes grew wide, and he released her hair, though to Ash’s horror, a few of her dark hairs came away with his fingers. “You’re her, aren’t you?”

“What?” Ash asked, massaging her scalp, then realized she was asking the wrong question.
“Who?”

He gestured quickly around the corner with the gun. “His little girlfriend. I’ve
heard
about you.”

“Wait, I’m not—”

“I want to see them,” he said.

Ash glanced down at her shirt. “Are you talking about my—”

“I don’t got all day and I’m not playin’.” He raised the gun and trained it directly between her eyes. “I
want
to
see
them. Take off your shirt.”

She opened her mouth to argue, but he flicked the safety on and off to tell her that he meant business.

The bile crept up Ash’s throat. She hadn’t even removed any clothing, and she already felt violated by this little bastard. She didn’t know who he thought she was, but she could only assume what he was after. Her choices, however, were limited. She didn’t trust her abilities enough to melt a bullet in the chamber, and heating up his hand could cause him to misfire.

Her hands were shaking as they made their way down to the first button, and then the second. Strangely, however, she noticed he wasn’t looking at her breasts. He was staring intently at her shoulders. In fact, he was so focused on the nape of her neck that his gun was just ever so slowly drifting off target.

When she hit the third button, she couldn’t take it anymore—she struck.

She lashed out with her mind at the handle of the revolver. The guard screamed and dropped the gun. He held up his now crimson palm, which was bleeding in patches. Some of his skin was still stuck to the red-hot handle of the gun.

Ash seized the opportunity and landed a kick to his knee, dropping him. Then she followed up by slamming his head into the railing.

However, the blow to his head didn’t put him out like she thought it would. He snaked his arm around the back of her leg and ripped her feet right out from underneath her. She landed hard on the unforgiving wood, and the air exploded out of her lungs.