Embers & Echoes (3 page)
But just like every boy she’d ever known after every breakup she’d ever had, Colt of course wanted to have the final word. It was one sentence, and he screamed it down the hill to her before she was out of earshot:
“I’ll be seeing you in your dreams, Ashline Wilde.”
Ashline didn’t let herself cry until she’d locked
herself in a stall in the airport bathroom.
She’d been on the run for hours, making her way out of the forest and back to the highway, eventually hitchhiking to Portland with a hippie couple who’d taken pity on the ragged-looking girl on the side of the road. As long as she’d stayed in motion, it had kept at bay the reality of what had just happened with Colt. But now, sitting on a toilet seat with her knees hugged to her chest and a plane ticket back to New York tucked in her pocket, Ash could barely stifle her sobs.
Not only had Colt pretended to be mortal all that time while Ash and the others had been discovering their own godhood—
Not only had he manipulated Eve to do his bidding, only to let her be condemned to the Cloak Netherworld when he was done using her—
But he’d finessed Ash into developing feelings for him as well.
Even worse, Ash was just starting to remember the instructions the Cloak had given her, the three words on her scroll that were supposed to prevent some sort of cataclysm between the gods:
Kill the trickster.
After today it didn’t take a crystal ball to figure out who the trickster on her hit list was supposed to be.
Just when Ash didn’t think she could bear the stillness of the airport bathroom any longer, her phone chimed and vibrated in her pocket. The screen was cracked from her fall off the motorcycle, but she could still read the name on the caller ID:
Home.
Her first instinct was to press ignore. When she’d flown out to California to meet Colt for their ride up to Vancouver, she’d told her parents only that she was “visiting a friend.” What was she going to do now—try to explain to them, between sobs, that she’d had a horrible breakup, nearly died, and fled the scene of an accident? Pass.
But if it was already after midnight in Oregon, that meant it was three a.m. Westchester time . . . and her parents were by no means night owls. It could only be some sort of emergency. She picked up on the third ring.
“Ashline?” It was her father, and he didn’t even wait for her to say “hello” first.
“I’m here, Dad,” she said. She tried her best to swallow
the lump in her throat, but her voice still sounded nasal from crying.
There was a long sigh on the other end, whispering over the receiver. “Ash, baby, there’s something we need to tell you.” His words sounded taut and trembling—had he been crying too? “It’s . . . about your sister.”
Ash leaned forward on the seat.
Please don’t say that her body washed up on shore somewhere.
After hearing the news that Eve might be alive in the Cloak Netherworld, and experiencing the strange swell of hope that came with it . . . well, she couldn’t bear it if that turned out to be just another one of Colt’s lies. “What about Eve, Dad?”
“The Oregon State Police called. Eve’s motorcycle was . . . recovered from a horrible accident that happened earlier today.”
The bathroom’s overhead lights flickered. Ash cursed her own stupidity. She had been so caught up trying to get away from Colt, she’d overlooked that the motorcycle’s license plate might have survived the crash.
“For better or worse,” her father continued, “she was nowhere to be found when police searched the area . . . but one man said he’d seen a girl matching her description talking with a guy about her age.” Was that hope Ash now heard in his voice? Hope that would be dashed in so many ways if she told him that she was the Polynesian girl spotted at the scene of the accident? “Your mother and I . . . we just hope that she’s not hurt, wherever she is. You haven’t heard from her, have you?”
Ash wanted to shout,
When do I
ever
hear from her?
But the lights flickered again, and this time the bathroom around her went completely dark.
The door creaked open, and footsteps echoed over the tile. “Dad,” she said quietly into the phone. “I’m going to have to call you back.” She flipped the cell closed before her father could protest.
Whoever had just walked into the blacked-out bathroom moved with deliberate, heavy steps, and her first crazed thought was that Colt had somehow found her and the blackout was his doing.
Then she saw the blue light. The fiery, flickering sapphire glow that she’d come to associate with the dreaded Cloak.
Ash pulled her knees back up against her chest. She tried to soften her breaths, but they came out ragged and fearful anyway.
Its footsteps lumbered across the tile with calculated patience. Ash wanted to close her eyes so badly, but she couldn’t keep herself from watching the narrow gap between the stall door and the wall.
Moments later, as the glow intensified, the creature passed right in front of the gap—first the single blue flame it had for an eye, then the rest of its massive oily body. Underneath the door its squat legs visibly slowed, then stopped, just in front of her stall.
It rapped on the plastic door.
Oh, God, this is it,
Ash thought. The creature had devoured her sister, and now it had come back for her as well.
The door thundered open, bringing Ash face-to-face with the Cloak. She screamed at the same time it gnashed its bear-trap teeth and roared. Then her gaze was drawn hypnotically into the iris floating in its blue flame, and she felt her consciousness ripped away to the edge of the universe.
To a place she’d been before, where your memories are no longer your own.
To limbo.
The jungle fronds slap against
your face, and it’s nearly impossible to see where you’re going. The rain forest is so dense here, you could run off the edge of a cliff and not know until you’d fallen halfway to your death. But you can hear the barking of the hounds now, closer than they’ve been in weeks.
You are running for your life.
Ever since the explosion of that village more than a month ago, you’ve hidden in the trees, fed off leaves, berries, and whatever raw animals you can catch, all while avoiding the dogs and mercenary patrols that have been making vigilant sweeps through the brush. But no matter how far you journey away from the crater where the village used to be, no matter how often you roll in the mud, no matter how high you climb into the trees, the hounds never completely lose your trail.
Finally you have to stop—your little six-year-old legs are about to give out beneath you—and as you lean against the tree, broken to the point of almost giving up, that’s when you hear another sound.
The sound of hope.
The whisper of the ocean tide.
You throw caution to the wind once more and sprint through the jungle, ignoring the scrapes on your cheeks and legs as you tear through the underbrush. Even the threat of the hounds and the military men can’t stand between you and the water, the ocean that calls to you.
You stumble out of the jungle and across the narrow beach until you’re kneeling in the surf. You cup your hands beneath the silken water and bring several handfuls up to cleanse your face. The brine stings your eyes, but you don’t care. You begin to weep, from exhaustion, from joy that you’re out of the jungle and into the water . . . and from nostalgia because the gentle lapping of the ocean reminds you of the distant island you once called home.
You wade in deeper, let the mud and grime and leaves and soil slough right off you. For a heavenly minute you float weightlessly in the ocean and feel as though maybe everything will be okay if you just drift out to sea.
The first bee stings your shoulder, and you let out a cry. You reach up and pluck out the stinger. No, not a bee at all. This stinger is long and metal and cylindrical and . . .
Another one slips into your opposite shoulder, closer to your neck. This time you can only whimper while your strength fails you and you struggle to reach up and yank it out. Soon your whole body has lost sensation. You float belly-up.
Though you can feel your consciousness beginning to
fray and unravel, your blurry, paralyzed eyes settle on a tall woman wading up beside you, wearing overalls. You can barely make out her features under her wide-brimmed hat.
You try to move your mouth to speak, but only a gurgle comes out. You can only hope she’s come to save you from the soldiers, and the dogs, and now the metal bees with stingers that make you sleepy, so sleepy . . .
“Shh,” she hushes you gently. Her arms support you, cradling your small delicate body in the tide. “You’re safe now. And among friends.”
As the last of your consciousness unwinds, you see three shadows—two boys and a girl—wade into the shallows too. One word bobs to the surface before your world goes black completely:
Friends.
When you wake up, the world beneath you is squirming.
You lie faceup in the dark, your eyes trained on what you believe is a ceiling fan. You can hear it whirring. You can feel its gentle breath against your face. Yet you still can’t make out its shape, because the room you’re in seems to be impenetrable to light.
Well, not quite. As your eyes struggle to adapt to the darkness and you turn your stiff neck, you see a faint glow trickling under the door across the cabin.
Beneath your fingers you can feel rope weave, which means you must be lying in a hammock like the one
between the two banana trees at home. When you try to slip out of the swaying berth, you immediately fall flat onto your stomach. Your back tingles where the crisscrossing mesh of the hammock has embossed a waffle pattern into your flesh. Your joints feel like they haven’t moved from this position in many days. How long have you been out?
The door opens with a resistant groan. You peel your face off the moist metal treads on the floor.
The woman in the door is backlit by a harsh spotlight. Her long shadow stretches all the way across the floor, but even in silhouette you know this must be the same woman who saved you from the metal stingers in the water.
“Good. You’re awake,” she says. She crosses the room in a couple of quick strides, and then very tenderly slips her hands under your armpits to help you up. “There are people that I want you to meet, Rose.”
You don’t remember ever being called that name before—Rose
—
but you sort of like it. She has her hand held out for you, so you slip yours gingerly into hers. The two of you walk hand-in-hand out the door.
Immediately you smell the ocean and understand that the world moving beneath you wasn’t just your hammock.
You’re on a boat. Like the one that brought you to the jungle and the stone castle where the men in white starved you. Will this be the one to bring you home?
You stop to look at the room in which you’ve been sleeping—it’s some sort of rusty metal box, labeled in white painted letters:
HV-48967-1
.
At the end of the hallway, you can see the ship’s forward railing, and beyond that the dark ocean. The strange woman guides you up to the prow of the boat, and the two of you stop there, with her gripping the upper railing, and you, so much smaller, holding the lower.
“Beautiful view, isn’t it?”
At this time of night the water and the sky almost fuse into one, a dark mass of clouds above the horizon and the churning seas below. And just at the lip of the horizon, sandwiched between them, is a dark line . . . land. And the ship is moving steadily toward it.
Someone clears his throat behind you. It’s an enormous boy with long dreadlocked hair and earthen skin, not unlike yours. His red-eyed gaze darts from the woman to you, then back again. “Lesley,” he says.
“Yes, Rey?”
“The ship is approaching from the southwest.” His eyes seem to dance wildly like two flickering candles even when they are still. “They will be within range soon enough.”
Lesley waves her hand. “No matter. We have their cargo.” She leans over and wraps her arm around your waist and ushers you away from the railing. The three of you journey toward the stern of the boat, with the boy, who is twice your height, making occasional glances at you.
Two others already stand at the aft railing, looking out over the trail of foamy white the ship is carving in its wake. Another ship looms off in the distance, visibly larger than the one you’re on. It’s getting close enough that you can see the outlines of people standing onboard its well-lit deck.
Lesley doesn’t look too disturbed. She doesn’t even spare a moment for the approaching boat. “Rose, this is Rey, Bleak, and Thorne. Everybody . . . this is Rose.”
Rey, the one you met before, is smiling at you. His eyes continue to flicker red, and the corners of his lips won’t stop twitching. He fidgets uncontrollably, and as a result his dreadlocks wiggle around his face like a nest of snakes.
The girl, Bleak, wears a flowing white floor-length robe with its hood pulled back, and her skin and French-braided hair are as pale as virgin snow. Unlike Rey, she does not smile at you. In fact, it doesn’t look like she’s ever done much smiling.
Thorne, the other boy, also doesn’t look tickled by your presence, but he doesn’t seem irritated by it either. He’s a head shorter than Rey, and much leaner, too. He can’t be any older than sixteen or seventeen, but he has a cigar gripped between his fingers. He appraises you for a moment, while idly tapping the ashes from his cigar onto the deck of the boat.
Finally he flicks the cigar into the water, kneels down, and sticks out his free hand. You suppose that means you should take it, and you do. It’s cold.
“Nice to meet you, Rose,” he says.
The name still sounds strange and wonderful, sugar to your ears.
Lesley unclips the box on her belt and clicks a button. “Cesar, kill the engines.”
Almost instantly the motor below grumbles and then whines to a halt, while the frothing wake behind the boat dissipates off into the black.
