Embers & Echoes (13 page)

Ash chose a seat on the outside, far enough back for her face to get lost in the crowd. On her way over she spotted Aurora. The winged goddess was wearing a white blazer over her dress, with no visible hump over her shoulder blades. Ash made a note to ask her later how uncomfortable it was to fold them up like that.

Thorne, however, was absent, even though the grotto where he’d attacked her was built right into the Mound. In fact, as she scanned the chairs, she couldn’t locate Bleak or Rey, either. Unsettling, to say the least. The three of them
probably
weren’t off playing Connect Four back at the mansion.

Lesley Vanderbilt stepped out of the casino. The
audience stopped chattering and began to clap. From the intensity of the applause, Ash guessed that the guests were all regulars at Lesley’s galas . . . or were at least really psyched to be in the presence of free booze and appetizers.

“Thank you,” Lesley said. The microphone on her lapel boomed her already commanding voice out across the Mound. Bathed in the blue, she was looking especially demonic tonight.

“It was nearly five hundred years ago that Hernán Cortés and his conquistadores landed in the Americas.” An antique map of Mexico without its current borders flashed on the projector screen. “There, in what is now modern-day Mexico, they infamously laid siege to the Aztec empire, leaving its cities in ruins and its people in disarray.

“Years later,” she continued, “when Cortés returned to Spain, he would claim that the Aztec people had received him as a deity—that they believed him to be their own wind god, Quetzalcoatl.” The image on the screen transitioned to a yellowed painting of a warrior-like figure with the body of a man and the head of a snake. His garb was luxuriously adorned with feathers of every color. “But to the Aztecs, Quetzalcoatl was a symbol of life and resurrection, a good creator of the people. He was never intended to be a symbol of foreign invasion and a harbinger of doom.”

Lesley crossed in front of the projector, so that the
gleaming image of the serpent warrior’s eyes briefly overlapped her own. “What Cortés didn’t realize was that Quetzalcoatl—the true Quetzalcoatl—was walking the earth at that time as a mortal . . . and that the two of them had actually met.”

The screen transitioned to a picture of a stone carving. Much like the painting before, the relief was a sculpture of a fanged snake’s mouth with a corona of feathers. “Using sonar technology, my archaeological team discovered this grave site buried under thirty feet of soil on the Yucatán peninsula. Within it were the mummified remains of an Aztec man, laid out on an earthen altar within. His hands and feet were ceremoniously staked to the four corners of the altar with the fangs of a large snake.” She paused dramatically. “But that is
not
how he died.”

The illustration on the screen morphed into a bloody battle in a large plaza. “According to the artifacts the team excavated, the man most likely came from the city of Cholula, and was one of the many
thousands
of unarmed noblemen massacred in the city plaza one night by Cortés and his men. His body shows evidence of two lacerations on his thighs and then a sword wound that penetrated through his back and exited the front of his chest cavity.”

Ash pursed her lips. After her meet and greet with Thorne, the thought of him skewered by a conquistador wasn’t so horrible an image.

“We believe that his body was secretly moved to the tomb by high priests from the cult of Quetzalcoatl, and
the feathered serpent that marks the entrance identifies the man within as the wind god and creator himself.” Lesley clasped her hands and grinned fiercely. “I’m pleased to announce that, thanks to the latest in preservation advances, Vanderbilt Estates has brought him here to you tonight.”

She crossed over to the curtained object. With a grand flourish she ripped down the white sheet and cast it to the ground.

The audience collectively inhaled, Ash included. Encased in a clear unit with his arms and feet pinned at the four corners in the same way that Lesley had described, was a mummified corpse. Feathers had been gathered around his skull in a mane, and his jaw gaped open in an eternal scream.

“Recently my team has developed facial mapping software that allows us to scan the bone structure of any skull, full or partial, and develop an accurate representation of what the subject’s face would have looked like in life.” Lesley gestured to the projector screen, where a close-up of the mummified skull had materialized. “I give to you the face of a living god.”

On the screen Ash watched as the skull’s wrappings digitally unraveled, and the decomposing flesh beneath rotted away, leaving only the skull. Once the skull was clean and white, veins and muscle and cartilage quickly populated its surface, then on top of that, skin, lips, eyes, and hair.

When the digital transformation was complete, the image of Quetzalcoatl’s face remained.

It was Thorne, and his dark eyes stared like lances out into the crowd. A murmur ran through the audience, and Ash heard someone a few rows back whisper, “It’s like one of those paintings where the eyes follow you no matter where you go.”

Lesley waved her hands to hush the crowd. “Now, moments ago I said that Vanderbilt Estates had brought Quetzalcoatl to you tonight. What you don’t know is that I wasn’t referring to the mummified remains from his tomb. I wasn’t referring to the digital recreation of his face you see on the screen.” She pointed to one of the blue-lit archways of the casino behind her. “I was referring to him.”

The real Thorne emerged from the structure. No longer in his tuxedo, the wind god now wore full traditional Aztec garb. A loincloth, ornately woven with black, crimson, and gold, had replaced his tuxedo pants, and a similar cape covered his shirtless chest, knotted at his left shoulder. He wore a golden headdress with feathers, identical to the headpiece worn by the mummy.

There were rumblings of confusion in the audience.

And then the audience began to laugh and point.

Ash couldn’t help a grin herself, especially seeing the impatient confusion written all over Lesley’s face. True as her story was that Thorne was Quetzalcoatl in the flesh, how could she have possibly expected the audience to take her seriously?

Thorne, however, didn’t look the least bit perturbed. He stepped calmly out to center stage, set his feet, and in a fear-inspiring voice shouted, “Silence!”

The blast of wind that accompanied it sent everyone’s hair fluttering back, and the hysterical crowd died back to mumbling.

“You don’t have to believe now,” Thorne said, his voice quieter but still carrying over the Mound. “But in time you
will
believe. And for the present, you will hear the news that I’ve brought for you. A warning.”

“Is this guy for real?” the woman next to Ash mumbled to nobody at all, but Ash noticed that she’d whipped out a handheld voice recorder—must have been a reporter.

“You see, my mortal friends, the gods
do
walk among us. I am not the only one. Hundreds of us, from mythologies around the world, from Egypt to Peru to the shores of Polynesia—are all here as flesh and blood. Some of us are here to protect you, while others . . .” He paused. “Well, to them you are ants beneath a magnifying glass to be burned, to be trampled . . . to be eradicated.”

Some people even dared to laugh this time, but the cold silence was taking over the audience like a plague as Thorne continued. “Despite the imminent danger presented by these forces crushing in around you, I come before you tonight to tell you that there are four among us who have sworn to protect you. As the demons from around the globe assemble to wage war on the defenseless, feel safe in knowing that you can weather the storm
beneath the umbrella of the Four Seasons.”

One brave soul in the front of the audience, who hadn’t yet heeded Thorne’s steely warnings, stood up. “The Four Seasons?” he jeered. “I love that hotel!”

Thorne’s head slowly rotated around to look at his critic. “No,” he said finally. “I mean Mother Nature herself.”

A heavy wind picked up over the casino and slammed into the heckler. He toppled back into his chair, flattening several of the people around him in a mess of limbs and folding chairs. Some of the audience nearest them rose to their feet, but nobody in the crowd dared to flee the premises.

“You may call me Fall,” Thorne said, and nodded to the fallen heckler, “a name some will learn well. Let me introduce you to the other Seasons.”

“Summer,” a deeper voice called from the back corner of the Mound. Ash turned in unison with everyone else. Rey rolled his sleeves up and held his arms out over the audience.

It started as a pinwheel of light, floating over the central aisle for all to see, but it quickly spiraled into a burning orb. Soon a miniature sun blazed overhead, sending waves of heat fanning down onto the masses. Ash wiped her brow out of instinct, even though her own supernatural resistance to heat kept her from sweating. The temperature blazed hotter than even the native Floridians around Ash seemed comfortable with.

“Winter.”

Bleak climbed out of the bushes in the northwestern corner and extended her hands toward the fiery sun. The air crackled, and the heat on Ash’s face instantly cooled, then turned bitterly cold. A collective shiver rolled through the spectators.

The white-hot sun quickly died through several shades of tangerine and red, until it was reduced to a soft glow. A shell of ice crept around the bottom hemisphere of the orb, starting at its southern pole, then working its way up to the equator. By the time the ice had coated the orb, the fire within had died to a single, pulsing baby star, a fiery nucleus gently glowing inside the floating glacial sphere. Ash caught Rey casting Bleak a lustful look from the opposite side of the Mound.

“And of course,” a strangely familiar woman’s voice announced from the back, “winter always turns to spring.”

“Spring” finished climbing the stairs in the back, a middle-aged Japanese woman with dark hair, even darker circles around her eyes, and a lopsided grin. Though Ash had seen her face many times before, she’d seen it only once prior in its aged state, shortly after this same woman had murdered one of Ash’s best friends.

Lily Mayatoaka knelt down in the central aisle, stopping just beneath the slowly rotating ball of ice. From this close Ash could make out the crow’s-feet at the corners of the blossom goddess’s eyes. Ash’s hands tightened around the edge of her chair.

The ground rumbled. Shrieks erupted throughout the audience.

From the ground underneath the ball two tendrils of ivy penetrated the stone surface, sending rocks and soil showering over the nearby observers. The appendages blossomed leafy fingers that snaked around the orb, lashing around it from all angles.

When the vines stopped sprouting, the ivy had encircled the orb at every latitude and longitude. Then, as one, the vines all contracted, hard, and the ice shattered instantly, extinguishing the fire within.

The remains of the ball landed at Lily’s feet, a mass of shattered ice, cinders, and withering plant life.

Even the crowd members who had stood up before now slipped back into their seats. No one seemed so eager to depart any longer with the Winter, Summer, and Spring Seasons blocking their path.

Ash was trembling. She felt the old tang of fire lapping at her innards, rage igniting within the deepest pockets of her soul. Nothing burned quite like the opportunity for vengeance. Her first priority was supposed to be rescuing her little sister, and deep down she knew that revealing herself now could jeopardize that . . . but Lily had caused so much suffering for Ash and her friends that Ash had become a slave to her vengeful instincts. With the taste of retribution on her tongue, the part of her that was still a normal sixteen-year-old drifted to the back burner, and Pele, the volcano goddess, seized control.

With the audience sitting, Ash knew she’d be instantly recognized the moment she stood up. Then she’d have only a short window of time to trample over the seated bystanders between her and Lily. Could Ash get her hands on Lily and incinerate her before the plant goddess realized something was afoot?

“Undoubtedly,” Thorne said, drawing attention back up to him, “tomorrow some of you will write in your newspapers of the ‘parlor tricks’ that happened here today, chalking up the miracles you’ve just witnessed to high-priced special effects. Rest assured that this has all been real . . . and these
parlor tricks
will one day soon save your life.”

Ash was going to need a distraction if she was going to get to Lily unnoticed. And if she could disrupt Thorne’s presentation at the same time, all the better. What was this crap he was saying about “saving lives” supposed to mean, anyway? Given Thorne’s personality, he seemed more likely to use a strong gale to blow someone in front of a speeding bus.

“A cold and merciless force is coming to Miami. In just a few nights’ time, the Four Seasons will have to face the threat of another god, a god who would have you all suffer.” Thorne walked out into the center aisle toward the mound of debris. “The world will watch as we neutralize that threat.” His cape billowed out behind him. “And
then
you will believe.”

Ash slipped off her heels. Fortunately the reporter
next to her was too transfixed on Thorne and Lily to even notice her. Ash gripped each of the heels in a separate hand. Turned the valve connecting her to the sacred fire. Felt the juices of a millennia-old volcano building within her.

The heels ignited. Fire lapped around the straps, spreading fast from the soles up to the clasp. Then, as inconspicuously as she could, she lobbed the first one over her head and into the crowd.

The projectile landed somewhere near the center aisle not far from Lily. It was noticed immediately, because it landed in a man’s lap.

He released a girlish screech as he slapped wildly at the heel, interrupting Thorne’s bombastic conclusion to his speech. The woman next to the heel’s victim, in true helpful fashion, pointed at the heel and screamed “Fire!”