Embers & Echoes (19 page)

Ash froze. This guy,
again
? The lock on the cellar door was just a big dead bolt. Thorne could break through it with a strong gale if he wanted to. Ash searched around
the room for an alternate escape route, on the off chance that Lesley had built the cellar with a contingency plan. No dice. The oak door was the only exit.

Anxious from the silence, Thorne pounded on the door with a sense of urgency. “Lesley, what’s going on?”

Ash cleared her throat and attempted her best impression of Lesley’s voice, letting her voice drop half an octave into Lesley’s husky alto. “Just looking for the dessert wines. Everything’s fine. Return to your post.” She held her breath. It would be a miracle if he actually bought it.

“Return to my post?”
Thorne echoed. “Lesley, what the hell are you talking about?” He jimmied the door handle hard, and then began to slam his shoulder into the wood. On his third attempt Ash heard the door crack.

Ash grabbed the unconscious Lesley by her lapel and heaved her across the floor and onto the drop cloth. Lesley hadn’t even finished rolling across the cloth before Ash grabbed the corner and dragged it into the shadowy nook beneath the stairs. The slamming against the door ceased, but Ash knew what was coming, so she piled on top of Lesley and folded the canvas cloth over her to conceal the two of them.

The door came right off its hinges when the gale struck it. Through the peephole she’d left in the drop cloth, Ash watched the door land just shy of destroying part of Lesley’s wine collection. The ensuing wind nearly ripped the covers right off Ash’s head and, worse, sent a
plume of dust her way. Ash covered her mouth and tried her best not to cough or sneeze.

Thorne took the steps four at a time and landed at the bottom of the stairs in a crouch. His eyes vigilantly searched the room. Thankfully he glossed right over Ash’s hiding spot.

Then she watched his posture relax as he straightened up, no longer on red alert. “Oh, now I get it. . . .” A carnal smile spread across his face. “You want to play a little game of hide-and-seek. Well, you know I’m always on board for some after-hour festivities.”

Between the seductive way he was talking and the shit-eating grin on his face, it immediately dawned on Ash what he was implying.

Him . . .

Ash looked down at Lesley’s regal but clearly age-worn face.

And her.

Ash’s face convulsed with disgust, and she resisted the urge to retch right then and there. A teenage wind god “mating” with a forty-something bloodthirsty corporate cougar. Disgusting.

If she escaped the hacienda alive, Ash made a note to look up Florida’s age of consent.

Thorne wandered over to the side of the wine rack and peeked behind it. “Where, oh where could you be?” His boots passed in front of the drop cloth, but he didn’t give it a second look. Instead he seemed fixated on the
steel refrigerator door, which was so new that it gleamed even under the dim light.

“I wonder . . . ,” he whispered as he trekked across the stone floor. He pulled the lever and hauled the steel door open, which was so big it looked heavy even for him. Then he disappeared inside.

This was Ash’s chance, and she knew she would get only one shot. Ash sprung from beneath the drop cloth and headed straight for the door. She grabbed hold of the handle and with all her strength heaved the door shut.

Almost immediately Thorne was back at the door, pushing and pounding from the inside.

While Ash pinned it closed with her feet and shoulder, she focused on last night’s dream, how her hand had melted right through the bank vault door. She reached out with her free hand, tapped into her inner fire, and pressed her hand to the metal.

Like an acetylene torch, her fingers made raw, molten slices into the steel as she raked her fingertips from the top of the door, through the lock, and all the way down to the bottom. The igneous metal spilled out over the door frame and leached into the porous stone. The lock itself liquefied under Ash’s touch.

And just as easily as she had poured the heat from her hand, her fingertips vacuumed the heat right up again.

When she was confident that the door no longer needed her support to stay shut, she stepped back and admired her handiwork. The entire edge of the door was
warped, bubbled, and now cool to the touch. It was going to take another torch to cut Thorne out of there. She could hear his weak attempts at wind already thudding up and down the interior of the door, but in such a confined, nearly airtight space, it was going to take some real ingenuity for Thorne to get out.

“I know it’s you!” he screamed from the inside. “I can practically smell your kerosene
stink
from in here.”

“You might want to crack open a bottle of that overpriced wine in there to stay warm,” Ash suggested, and patted the metal door. “Oh, and I’d conserve your air if I were you. You’re going to need it.”

The thumping against the metal door picked up with renewed vigor.

Ash crossed the room and grabbed all four corners of the drop cloth where she’d concealed Lesley. “I’m going to apologize in advance for this,” she whispered.

With Lesley cocooned in the drop cloth, she pulled her up the stairs one step at a time, then out into the long hallway, like a net full of fish being hauled out of the sea.

Fortunately, the trustee members out in the courtyard were too involved in their raucous conversation to notice Ash towing her load down the hall, or to hear the hiss of the drop cloth against the adobe floor tile.

When Ash finally reached the tangerine cake, she rolled Lesley’s body up into the underbelly of the cart, where she would be concealed by the long tablecloth.

With impeccable timing Wes jogged down the stairs
right as Ash began maneuvering the cart down the long hallway. “No dice,” he whispered. “No sign of any Polynesian orphans
or
any arrows pointing us in the right direction.”

Ash sighed. “So much for the days when crooks kept a paper map on their wall with pins in all the locations you should look.”

Wes pointed at the cart as he walked alongside her. “Did you . . .”

“Uh-huh,” she said, and kicked the cart’s bottom shelf.

“How are we going to explain to the guards why we still have the cake?”

“Push the cart and leave that to me,” she replied.

They switched places, and Wes slowed the cart down enough so that Ash could cut two big pieces from the cake’s lowest tier. She scooped them onto the serving plates they’d brought along just to further their ruse as bakers.

The two guards outside immediately looked perplexed to see the cake being rolled out intact, but Ash was on top of it. “Apparently Ms. Vanderbilt is allergic to tangerine,” she explained. She snagged the two pieces of cake off the cart before Wes dollied it out into the street. “But there’s no reason for perfectly good cake to go to waste. Enjoy, boys.”

As she left, she overheard one guard say to the other, “Finally this job comes with some perks.”

After they’d loaded the cart into the back of the van,
Ash buckled herself into the passenger seat. “Keep an eye on our hitchhiker,” she instructed Wes. “She’ll be stirring soon.”

Wes lifted the edge of the sheet and peeked underneath. “Considering how hard you must have
negotiated
with her to knock her out this long, we might want to have some aspirin ready for when she wakes up. Or at least a slice of cake.”

“Where to now?” Aurora flipped on the van’s headlights as they rounded a corner and drove out of the Gables by the Sea neighborhood. “I suspect you’ll want someplace quiet and cozy for your date with sleeping beauty?”

Ash rolled down her window and let the tepid Miami air wash over her face. “As a matter of fact, I know just the place.”

When Lesley’s eyes flickered open,
Ash was patiently sitting across from her in a little wooden chair with her hands clasped between her legs.

“Where . . .” Lesley mumbled.

Ash gave Lesley a minute to lasso her senses back in—to recall the remarkably short-lived brawl in the wine cellar, to test the ropes that were tethering her to the stiff wooden chair, to take in the fact that she was sitting face-to-face with the volcano goddess whose family she had vowed to destroy.

Ash reached under her chair and held out a pastry
plate. “Cake?” She pulled it back just a few inches. “Or are you
actually
allergic to tangerines? Because that would be a hilarious coincidence.”

Lesley responded only by jerking her hands, which were tied to the chair’s wooden armrests, eventually pulling hard enough that the legs of the chair lifted off the ground. When that proved fruitless, she looked around the inside of the metal container. Then her gaze fell to the floor itself, the soggy carpet over the steel flooring.

“Ah, yes. This room looks familiar, doesn’t it?” Ash pointed to the hammock that was still swaying in the corner from the sea’s gentle undulations. “This is the four-star cruise ship bedroom that you holed my little sister up in after you kidnapped her.”

Lesley groaned and attempted to blow a strand of hair out of her eyes. “You say ‘kidnapped.’ I say ‘rescued from certain death.’ Without me Rose would either be jaguar food or target practice for the rain forest militia.”

“Yeah, and then you inducted her into a cult with sociopathic gods who have lost all touch with reality. At least one of whom is a murderess.”

Lesley snorted. “Sociopathic gods . . . murderers . . . You could be describing the Wilde family, for all I know.”

Ash stood up and hurled her own chair at the container wall, where it splintered on impact. Then she seized Lesley by the throat and shoved her back. The chair balanced up on two legs and then crashed back onto the floor, taking Lesley with it.

Lesley gritted her teeth and squeezed her eyes closed.
“See what I mean? You’ve come
so
far since the days of Lizzie Jacobs.”

“Where is my little sister, you cradle-robbing psycho?” Ash shook Lesley by her lapel and slammed the back of the chair against the ground again.

“Where’s your
older
sister?” Lesley shouted back. “You know what I want. I’ll hang on to the wrong Wilde for as long as it takes if it eventually leads me to the right one.”

Ash straightened up and took several deep breaths. She thought she’d left her days of violent rage behind her in Scarsdale, but how easily it all came back when someone like Lesley Vanderbilt pushed the right buttons.

Ash lit a small, hot fire around the length of her pointer finger, and used it to sheer through the bonds that were holding Lesley’s arms in place on the chair.

Lesley held up her hands, clearly surprised to be free, and rolled off the chair onto her feet. She massaged her rope-burned wrists and regarded Ash suspiciously.

“Come on,” Ash said, and walked toward the door to the storage crate. “I have a business proposition for you.”

The two of them walked out to the deck. At first Lesley kept her distance from Ash, as though she were convinced that the volcano goddess was going to incinerate her and toss her charred remains overboard. But as they approached the starboard railing, she seemed to notice that the boat was actually moving.

Ash leaned up against the railing. Wes had steered the boat out into the open water. The distant lights of South
Beach, and beyond that, the Miami skyline, glowed faint to the west. The moon blazed down on the Atlantic from the eastern horizon, sending a snaking oil trail of light over the swells.

“Eve isn’t coming for Rose,” Ash explained when Lesley finally joined her at the boat’s edge, “because Eve is in hell.”

“What?” Lesley’s shrill voice cut through the night air just as the engine died.

“But not for good,” Ash said. “And that’s where I want to make a deal with you: one sister for the other. Eve Wilde for Rose. We believe that Rose can open a doorway into the underworld, and only through that rift can we extract Eve.”

“That’s convenient. You need Rose first before you can give me Eve. You chose family loyalty the last time over my original proposition. How can I trust you to turn the elder Wilde over to me once you’ve brought her back?”

Ash gazed down into the moonlit water that was lapping at the hull of the boat. From this close she could taste the salt of the sea, taste the subtle difference between the Atlantic, here, and the Pacific where she’d subdued Eve, where she’d allowed her sister to get dragged into oblivion by a monstrous entity no one fully understood.

Some tastes you never forgot.

“Because,” she answered finally, “I was the one who sent Eve to hell.”

“If I do this,” Lesley said, boiling over from suspicion
into excitement, “it will be an open betrayal of the Four Seasons.”

“But why?” Ash asked. “Rose may be powerful, but at the end of the day she’s still a six-year-old girl. I understand why the Four Seasons needed you to get the attention of the media, but where does a clueless kindergartner like Rose fall into their big picture?”

“I . . . I overheard them saying something about using her ‘to revisit the past.’” Lesley shook her head. “It doesn’t really matter. As soon as she goes missing, they’ll come for me. And then they’ll come for you.”

“Let us take care of them,” Ash said. “Which brings me to the catch. I need you to do one other thing for me: The Four Seasons talked about neutralizing a threat, another god. I need to know what they’re planning.”

Wes and Aurora came out of the cabin just then and joined the circle. Lesley tucked her hair behind her ear as she studied the two newcomers. “They had me buy a small fortune in airtime on a cluster of television networks. From what I understand, they captured some god last week. While the world watches, they’re going to drug and sedate him, so that he’s just lucid enough to use his powers, but too out of it for it to be a fair fight.” She paused. “And then they’re going to sacrifice him.”

Ash sagged. Gods killing other gods in cold blood? It was Blackwood all over again. New city, new gods, same backstabbing.

Aurora let her wings unfold and fill up like a sail with
the sea wind. “Establishing religion through terror and killing. Sounds like a new crusade.”