Embers & Echoes (32 page)
The man who, against all of her better judgment, she was falling in love with.
“Oh, God,” Ash whispered to the afternoon sky. “I killed Wes.”
It was a beautiful, spotless afternoon,
which felt wrong in every sense, with Aurora having been dead only a few hours. Ash wanted to follow her pain up to the penthouse roof and sit by herself in hurricane weather, let the storm winds carry her to the edge, let the cold bite into flesh that was designed to burn.
Where was Eve to conjure a monsoon when Ash needed her?
Wes’s bed was still empty when she poked her head in, the plaid sheets tucked immaculately into the edges of the bed frame—so he hadn’t returned yet. He had dropped Ash off at the condominium in the morning, directly after their escape from the movie theater. Once he’d made it clear that he didn’t intend to get out of the car to come inside, she’d pleaded with him to let her go with him wherever he intended to go. Instead he’d quietly leaned over and opened her door for her. The moment
she’d climbed out of the Cadillac, he’d snapped the door shut and driven off without a word, leaving her only with a set of keys and a burden of grief that she didn’t know how to deal with.
It was probably better this way. Grieving alone was somehow easier than the idea of grieving together with Wes. And now with the knowledge that Wes had died by Ash’s own hand in the last life . . . well, that just added a layer of complexity that she wasn’t prepared to deal with.
The truth was that Ash didn’t know how to properly grieve for a girl who’d been gone only a few hours. In the past few days, Ash had gotten to know Aurora, had spent so much time with her, yet Ash still didn’t
really
know the Roman goddess. Ash had witnessed only a few of Aurora’s many facets—the saucy girl who’d reveled in attention at the bar, the winged athlete who’d showed fearlessness in battle, even when she’d been faced with certain death. There was both virtue and darkness from Aurora’s past that Ash could never know, would never know.
And just like when Rolfe was taken from this life before his proper time, Ash’s heart ached.
Everything felt wrong, no matter how she chose to spend her afternoon. Eating, trying to go back to sleep, going up to the roof to reflect . . . nothing felt big enough to fill the empty condo. Just the thought of planning another mission to rescue Rose or to confront the Four Seasons seemed blasphemous, when that same sort of
scheming had ultimately led to Aurora’s death. Who was next if they continued to fight back? Wes?
Lily’s words from just a few days earlier echoed in Ash’s mind.
Friends of yours tend to have short life expectancies.
Ash savagely flipped one of the beach chairs into the pool and let a shrill scream bellow out of her. Hatred rose in her like magma leaching its way to the earth’s surface. The desire to exact her revenge on the Four Seasons suddenly outweighed everything else.
Revenge on Lily for killing yet
another
one of her friends.
Revenge on Thorne for masterminding the execution in order to advance his sadistic cult.
Revenge on Rey for nearly burning Wes alive.
And even revenge on Bleak, because Ash had seen a shred of humanity in the winter goddess. Maybe if Bleak had survived her fight with Ash, she could have been a voice of reason and put a stop to the violence.
Everything else that had been a priority to Ash before—her desire to rescue Rose, her drive to retrieve Eve from the Cloak Netherworld, even the new feelings that she was developing for Wes—grew hazy beneath a film of dark urges.
Tangled in her brooding thoughts, watching the beach chair bob on the surface of the pool, Ash suddenly remembered the clarity she’d felt on the beach after her conversation with Ixtab. As gloomy as Ixtab’s powers might be, the girl seemed to have a knack for imparting a
sense of purpose to those who visited her. Ixtab was probably hurting fiercely right now too. Her abilities would have forced her to watch Aurora violently entombed within that tree, and if Ixtab was as keen on Aurora as she’d implied during Ash’s last visit . . .
Ash took the Vespa to the store and picked up a few boxes of the processed cupcakes that Ixtab liked. Then she let her GPS navigate her south over the causeway and across the bay, until she reached Key Biscayne. Somehow she picked up the trail that Wes had taken across the island the last time, then retraced their steps down the beach until she spotted the familiar umbrella in the shadow of the lighthouse.
But when she approached, the chair was completely empty. Ash frowned and set the bag down beneath the umbrella. Surely Ixtab couldn’t spend her
entire
day here, as Wes had suggested. Perhaps she’d just gone somewhere to eat, or to use the bathroom. She would return soon enough. Ash dropped into the chair and waited.
An hour and several cupcake wrappers in the sand later, Ash wasn’t so sure. That’s when she finally examined the sand and discovered a series of slight depressions—the imprint of sandals—leading away from the umbrella.
Ash followed them to the edge of the water, where the rising tide had begun to wash half of a barely visible footprint away. Standing in the shallows, Ash looked out to sea and wondered what had become of the goddess.
That’s when she began to feel truly alone.
Aurora was dead.
Wes was grieving.
Ixtab was, for all Ash knew, lost at sea.
Ash dropped down into the sand and let the sweeping surf lap around her bare knees. For the second time in two weeks, Ash had lost all of her friends in the mythological world and was utterly alone.
Then the anger seized her. Just like last time, her godly friends hadn’t deserted her by choice. They’d been taken from her. They’d been murdered in flesh. Murdered in spirit.
Vengeance would be her new friend. Vengeance meant that the Four Seasons, whom she’d already reduced to three, would shrink to two, and then one, and then none at all. Vengeance meant delivering a final blow for Rolfe, and for Aurora, and for all the gods who the Four Seasons had yet to harm on their rise to power.
Vengeance meant finishing what she’d started.
She opened her cell phone. If she was going to have any hope of tracking down Rose and finding the Four Seasons to bring them to justice once and for all, she needed someone with ears everywhere in the god world. Someone whose manipulative mind and elaborate trickery could keep them one step ahead of the Four Seasons.
Someone in Miami who might understand what she was going through.
She dialed the operator. Inside her wallet she found the key card she’d been avoiding since Friday.
The operator connected her to the Delano hotel in South Beach, and when the front desk picked up, she paused only a moment before saying, “Yes, I’d like for you to connect me to room 432. The guest’s name is Colt Halliday.”
Ash was on her way
to meet Colt when they televised Aurora’s execution.
She was walking down the Lincoln Road Mall, a long pedestrian avenue that crossed the entirety of South Beach between Sixteenth and Seventeenth Streets. It was a gorgeous mix of restaurants that spilled right onto the outdoor walkway, as well as trendy nightclubs that would start to see lines form around midnight. As if anyone on the Lincoln Road Mall could forget where they were in the world, a long center island of palm trees stretched end to end along the boulevard.
Just as she was passing a sports bar where a cover band was playing an old country hit, the music pumping out of the windows suddenly died. As the cymbals faded to a whisper and the banjo twanged into nothingness, Ash could hear a commotion inside. She ducked through the front door.
The bouncer didn’t even notice her come in—he was too transfixed by the large flat-panel televisions over the bar. In fact, all of the bar’s occupants, from the early diners to the waitstaff and even the band, had gathered in one clump to watch the grisly images on-screen.
It was just as horrible for Ash watching the execution a second time—even worse, in fact, without the flicker of hope that Aurora might escape her gruesome demise. Even though Ash knew that Aurora was the victim of the sacrifice, from certain camera angles it really did look like Aurora was staggering threateningly toward little Rose. The distant, drugged abyss of her eyes made her look crazed, dangerous, ready to snatch the six-year-old girl in her talons and carry her off into the clouds.
There was also footage Ash hadn’t seen before. The Four Season had filmed additional shots of Thorne and Lily concentrating hard as they summoned their powers and dragged Aurora back to earth. Without context, without reality, it might appear to any viewers that the two gods were vanquishing some sort of evil winged demon who was trying to murder a little girl.
Ash looked away when the weeping willow finally swallowed Aurora. But when she turned back, through her bleary eyes she had to watch something just as nausea-inducing and horrific—a final close-up of Thorne dropping to his knees and wrapping his arms around Rose. Now that the bartender had pumped up the volume on the TVs, Ash could just make out Thorne’s words to the little Wilde:
“You’re safe now.”
They’d done it, Ash realized. It was ghastly, it was scripted—but they’d almost managed to make themselves look like the heroes, at least to anyone twisted enough to buy what was happening on-screen.
Eventually the scene looped right back to the beginning. Some people wandered back to their dinners, while others remained at the bar to watch the execution all over again. The bartender was using the remote to try to find a new network, but it took several tries before he found a sports station that
wasn’t
broadcasting the supernatural horror.
Ash felt a hand on her arm—the bouncer, peering curiously at her. “Hey,” he said. “It’s okay. It was just special effects. Must be some advertisement for a new movie.” He actually sounded convinced too.
Ash didn’t say anything. She just backpedaled out of the bar and power walked down the Lincoln Road Mall to get to her meeting with Colt. Like the bouncer, many other people would choose not to believe what they’d just seen. The world would not stop for the Four Seasons.
But somewhere out there, among the deranged and the fanatical, Ash knew that this broadcast would strike home. Maybe just a few loonies here and there, watching it over and over again, baptized in Thorne’s madness. Eventually they’d come to the conclusion that the gods
were
real. Then the Four Seasons wouldn’t have just followers . . . they’d have zealots. Extremists.
Worse, seeing Aurora’s murder reduced to a Sunday night television spectacle made Ash think that maybe it was time to abort her quest to bring home Rose and rescue Eve. There was nothing she wanted less than for her younger sister to be raised in the arms of a murderous
cult, like some sort of explosive messiah, but Aurora would be alive right now if Ash hadn’t involved her. What would happen if more people died, only for Ash to finally reach Rose and discover that the little tyke
didn’t want
to leave with her?
As the hostess escorted Ash to her seat at Machibuse, the upscale sushi restaurant where Colt had made reservations, Ash realized she’d actually warmed up to the idea of having dinner with her immortal ex. It would at least provide a welcome distraction from everything else.
So it was with a mixture of electricity and dread that she waited at the two-seater table, out in the warm clutches of the Miami night. Her eyes anxiously darted around, on the lookout for Colt, but also to familiarize herself with the restaurant should she need an escape route.
The nervousness of it all was causing Ash to drink like a fish, to the point that her poker-faced waiter had to refill her glass almost immediately. She was loath to admit that there was some element of excitement to meeting Colt—not necessarily in a romantic sense. But there was a certain unpredictability to him. Every meeting with Colt was like boarding a new roller coaster, and you never knew—
“Somebody looks deep in thought,” Colt said.
