Embers & Echoes (28 page)

“We all heal in different ways,” Ash said. Some people, fresh out of bad relationships, seduced strangers at the bar.

And others,
Ash thought,
fly halfway across the country with no game plan to rescue a girl they’ve never met.

Ash snapped back to reality, hoping that Wes hadn’t been studying her face or reading the dark thoughts that lurked behind it. Colt had already come between the two of them enough already.

Wes’s attention, however, was fixed over her shoulder into the dance crowd. “I thought this girl was checking me out, but if I didn’t know any better . . .” He looked troubled. “I’d say she was staring at you.”

Ash twirled around. It didn’t take much scanning to pick her out of the crowd—a teenage girl in a black tank top and jeans standing barely five yards from them. Statue-still and rigid, she had her gaze pinned on Ash.

It was Eve Wilde.

Ash got lost in the eyes of her sister, the eyes that she thought she’d seen for the last time as they’d vanished into the belly of the enormous Cloak creature almost two months ago.

Now here she stood in the flesh, not only breathing and alive . . . but smiling.

Amused.

Gloating.

Sunday, Part I

Despite everything the Wilde sisters had
been through, Ash had spent the last week doing everything in her power to get Rose back, so she could in turn rescue Eve from the Cloak. But this wasn’t the happy reunion Ash had imagined—Eve leering at her across the nightclub floor, with her teasing grin flickering under the strobe lights. Even a goddess like Eve, who could make a career out of her dramatic reentrances into Ash’s life, didn’t just break out of hell and come back with a smirk on her face.

Something was very wrong.

Wes stepped into her view so that Eve, still unmoving, drifted out of focus behind him. “Tell me I don’t need to be jealous.”

“That’s my sister,” Ash whispered, then repeated herself louder so he could hear her over the music. “My sister!”

Wes took a second look at Eve. “I see the resemblance, but she’s a little on the, um, mature side for a six-year-old.”

“Wrong sister!” Ash snapped. Wes leaned over just enough to block her view of Eve. Ash leaned around his shoulder . . . and discovered the back of Eve’s head receding through the crowd. She had a red backpack slung over her shoulder and was cutting a path for the front entrance.

Ash brushed past Wes, and he was too startled to even make a grab for her until she had plunged into the fray, out of reach. With one shoulder forward as a battering ram, Ash muscled her way through the trance-music pandemonium. Most people were dancing so frantically that they didn’t even stop to see who had shouldered past them. Even over the music Ash could just barely hear Wes shouting her name.

There wasn’t time to apologize that, for the second time, a face from her past had shown up unexpectedly while they were dancing.

Ash sprinted past the coat check and out onto the street, past the bouncers. “The music’s that bad?” a girl at the front of the line asked her.

Down the street Ash spotted Eve making a break for a couple who were parking their Vespas at the curb. Eve roughly shoved the man off his scooter before he had a chance to withdraw the keys. He flopped onto the curb while his girlfriend shrieked and tried to take a swing at
Eve. But Eve drilled a hard kick into her attacker’s stomach, and the girl tripped back-first over her own scooter. Eve revved the engine and rocketed onto Collins Avenue.

Ash took off toward the curb, where the Vespa-robbed couple were just climbing to their feet and brushing themselves off. The boyfriend looked like he was in shock as the taillight of his Vespa disappeared down the avenue, while his girlfriend collapsed into hysterics, trying to fish her cell phone out of her purse.

Much to their added confusion, Ash hopped onto the second Vespa. “Are you kidding me?” the girl shrieked. She sauntered toward Ash with her bag raised, ready to strike.

“I’m going to get your boyfriend’s scooter back,” Ash promised as she flipped up the kickstand. “But I need to borrow yours first.” Ash took off, and the girl chased her only a few steps before she stopped, helpless, and watched the second Vespa sail away.

Ash isolated the other Vespa’s taillight, a small red dot a block up the avenue, and set a course for it. Well aware that she had only a few days’ experience on a scooter, she pushed her chariot up through thirty miles an hour, then past forty. She veered around a Porsche that looked fresh off the lot, and caught a yellow light in time. Up to fifty miles an hour. She shot through another light and dodged a slow-moving joyrider in a convertible, who laid on the horn.

Sixty miles an hour and she was flying perilously toward two SUVs that were shoulder to shoulder, blocking
both lanes and obstructing her view of Eve’s taillight. Her vision was growing blurry as the hot and humid Miami air drilled into her face. Overhead the stoplight shifted from green, to yellow, then to red.

Ash was sick of watching her leads drift away.

She was sick of having two sisters who existed only as visions and memories.

She sure as hell wasn’t going to let Eve come back from the dead only to run away again.

Ash punched the engine up to seventy. She sucked in her breath. And she held the handlebars as steady as she could.

Somehow she kept the scooter on a straight enough line to navigate the tight gap between the two SUVs. Only by ducking at the last second did she prevent the side mirrors from taking off her head.

As soon as she popped out into the dim intersection, a pair of headlights sliced across her. The harsh blare of a horn startled her so badly that she nearly toppled off the scooter. She twisted the handlebars to the right just as the swerving BMW squealed past her back tire, missing her by only inches.

Ash surveyed Collins Avenue ahead, expecting to have lost her sister in the chaos of running the red light. Instead Eve was directly in front of her, still cruising forward but at a relaxed speed, allowing Ash to steadily catch up. Eve glanced over her shoulder and smiled again before she finally accelerated.

She’s not trying to get away,
Ash realized.
She’s waiting for me to follow her.

But where was Eve leading her to? The Cloak underworld? Off the edge of a cliff?

After Ash had followed her at a cautious distance for several blocks, Eve took a sharp right into a driveway leading up to a large, expensive-looking hotel with a long, white curved façade. Eve plowed up the drive and only slowed when she rolled under the roof of the porte cochere. There she abandoned her scooter on the curb and dashed through the revolving door to the lobby.

Ash pulled in just a few seconds later. She tossed her keys to the very perplexed-looking valet as she dismounted the bike. “Park it next to my Ferrari,” she said, and stormed past him before he could protest.

Ash burst through the revolving door and followed the collective gazes of the confused hotel guests. Eve was sprinting through the crowded lobby, which was lit blue like the inside of an ice cave. The guests must have been even more startled to see a second Polynesian girl—who looked so much like the first—in hot pursuit.

Ash was still just a month fresh out of tennis season, and rapidly gained on the less-athletic Eve now that they were on foot. Perhaps sensing this, Eve grabbed the golden luggage-packed cart from a bellhop and spun it in Ash’s direction.

Direct hit. The cart toppled over onto Ash, and heavy luggage cascaded down onto her.

By the time Ash had unburied herself from underneath the luggage, Eve was at the end of the blue-carpeted corridor and turning the corner. Ash waved away the bellhop, who was trying to help her up, and charged after her sister again.

When she rounded the corner, the door directly in front of her was slowly listing closed. The spa beyond lay in darkness, but Ash wasn’t about to let a little trespassing stop her. The hotel staff was no doubt already on red alert to find the suspicious girls who’d transformed the hotel lobby into a violent foot race, but after squaring off against bloodthirsty gods and gun-toting mercenaries, the threat of being caught by underpaid security guards was laughable.

Inside the spa’s waiting room the only light was what filtered through the opaque spa doors, but it was enough for Ash to make her way to the steam room beyond. A thick steam was already beginning to fill the space, its hissing echoing off the tile walls.

Ash’s caution had returned, now that her sister had corralled her into a dark and cloudy enclosed space. She ignited one of her hands enough to form a halo around her, a lantern in the mist. At least her torch could double as a weapon should Eve launch herself out of a dark corner. “You know, Eve . . . ,” Ash called out. Her words echoed with a twang off the tile. “You could have just asked me to go to the spa with you. Hell, between my fire and your storms, we could have just
made our own
.”

There was no answer from the shadows.

In the next room, which was even narrower than the steam room, Ash spotted a series of drains on the ground. What the hell was this room for?

Something clicked at the end of the hall. The spouts overhead pulsed on. It was a rain room, sending a network of light showers, cold and hot, hot and cold, down onto Ash, drenching her shirt and jeans within seconds. “Come on,” Ash shouted again. “Flipping a switch to make rain? That’s far too conventional for the sister I know.”

And that, Ash realized, was a problem
.
None of this chase was like Eve. Sure, between Scarsdale and Blackwood, Ash’s sister had always enjoyed making dramatic entries back into her life. But Eve was also in love with the sound of her voice and prone to grandiose speeches whenever she reappeared. Eve was the type of girl who cornered her opponents,
not
the type who led them on a wild sprint halfway across a city in the dead of night.

Ash’s blood began to pump faster when she reached the third room, which contained a long mineral pool and a parade of reclining beach chairs. It also had some ambient light, courtesy of the moon as it streamed through the French windows that opened out onto the spa’s patio. Ash let the flames of her torch peter out to a soft glow.

One item was out of place in the mineral pool—Eve’s bright red backpack, which was tucked against one of the
beach chairs. Another warning flag. Eve, label snob that she was, wouldn’t have been caught dead (or in this case, alive again) wearing a knapsack the color of a fire engine.

Ash pried open the rope clasp and withdrew the soft contents within. The backpack contained a black shirt and jeans, the same clothes that Eve had been wearing just minutes ago. Ash held the shirt up to the light.
Unless Eve is running around the resort naked somewhere . . .

A hand clutched her elbow.

Ash screamed and brought her fist around to attack, her whole hand bursting into flames on sheer survival instinct.

Wes caught her by the forearm. “Jesus,” he said, eyeing the ball of flames that had nearly seared his face. “Let’s try not to burn down any billion-dollar four-star resorts. Or me, for that matter.”

Ash huffed, but let her arm cool until the flames extinguished. “One word of warning could have prevented you from becoming a human barbecue,” she snapped at him. “How the hell did you even find me here?”

He took a cautious step away from her. “I nearly didn’t, thanks to your Indy 500 race through half of Miami Beach,” he said. “Thankfully I just kept my eyes peeled for two abandoned scooters and a valet who looked like he was on the verge of a panic attack, and—”

Ash held up her hand to cut him off. She was staring through one of the French doors out at the sky, which was still immaculate, as though the moonbeams had
vaporized any clouds over Miami. “The weather . . .”

“Is perfect?” Wes finished for her. “It’s exactly the same as it’s been all night.”

“That’s the problem,” Ash replied. “A cloudless star-filled night? If Eve is truly back, Miami should be either in the middle of a category-twelve monsoon or under two feet of snow. States of emergency are how she celebrates.” She cocked her head back and smelled the air. “That girl I just chased was
not
my sister.”

“Why are you sniffing the air now?” Wes put a hand on her arm. “It’s dark here. Let’s get back inside where we can at least see a little better.”

Ash pivoted on her heel, grabbed Wes by the lapel, and used all her strength to heave his enormous body toward the pool. With Wes caught off guard, his foot snagged on one of the beach chairs and he crashed into the water.

Ash was at the mineral pool’s edge before he could even resurface. She plunged her arms into the water up to her elbows.

When Wes bobbed to the top, he floundered and attempted to swim for the opposite side of the pool.

“Don’t move,” Ash growled at him, “or I will happily bring the temperature of this water up to boiling in a matter of seconds.”

“A-Ash,” Wes stuttered, treading water. He was blinking uncontrollably. “It’s me. It’s Wes—”

Ash balled her hands into fists and sent a lance of
heat that torpedoed through the water. When the trail of hot water hit Wes’s legs, he screamed.

And then he transformed.

His face shuddered with a violent seizure before it melted into blankness. His arms, which were still thrashing about in the water, shortened by nearly six inches, withdrawing back into his body while the bones beneath them rearranged.

When his face restructured itself, the person it revealed underneath had a broad, flat nose and slicked-back hair. It certainly wasn’t Wesley Towers.

Ash opened her hands again and allowed the water to simmer. “You should remember next time that no self-respecting Aztec night god is afraid of the dark. Also,” she added, “whatever fragrance is coming off you certainly isn’t Wes’s cologne. You’re good, but you’re not that good.”

Gradually the shifter stopped floundering. He floated and said nothing.

“You have ten seconds to tell me who you are, who you’re working with, and why you’re impersonating my sister,” Ash said. “Otherwise you better transform yourself into a lobster or a deviled egg. Ten—”