Embers & Echoes (37 page)
Violet stirs. “What . . .” She tugs at the bonds securing her to the post. They hold true. Her eyes go from dazed to alert. “I . . . I don’t understand. Why are you doing this, Little Sister?”
“Why did you kill my husband?” you demand to know.
“Kill your . . . wait, Colt?” Violet shakes her head. “I didn’t—”
Your open hand slaps her across the face, and her
head rotates around as far as it will go without breaking her neck. The slap leaves a welt. Inside, you feel a different kind of sting. The tears well in your eyes. This was supposed to be all about anger, about cold revenge, but sorrow is percolating up with it. “Why? Why did you send the assassin? Why did you do it?” you sob. You hit her again. “Why, damnit?”
“You have to believe me,” Violet whimpers. “I would never—I didn’t even . . . I mean, you know I was never keen on Colt, and I’ve always been suspicions of his intentions, but even then, I wouldn’t . . . Lucy, you have to believe me!”
It’s the first time you feel doubt. For five years you’ve pursued her with unflagging certainty. You’ve fantasized about what you would do to her for betraying you. For sending that assassin to murder Colt. For her insistence that, if you weren’t by her side, then you might as well suffer as she did. Miserable. Vengeful. Alone.
Now there’s something in her voice, in the broken sobs that have rendered her unable to speak, in the way she hangs limply from the post, that makes you want to believe her. This is your sister. There is a feeling inside you—and questions, too—that are growing as you watch her.
But then there is that other feeling. The sinking in the pit of your stomach. The clicking in your ears. You can see the hair rising around your head.
You dive off to the side just as the lightning bolt forks down from the sky. One prong of the lightning bolt sinks
its electric fist into the ground where you were standing before. The other rips through the nearest palm tree as though it were made of copper wire. Despite the dampness, both the tree and the grass beneath the lightning strike burst into flames.
You brush the mud off your arms and stand up slowly. If it were at all possible, you feel even more rage now for the girl strapped to the post than you did on your nightmarish wedding night.
“Lucy,” Violet whispers. “That was only in self-defense. You wouldn’t believe me, so I panicked. I’m sorry. Look me in the eyes, and you’ll see that what I’m telling you is true!”
You have no desire to search for truth and penitence in your sister’s eyes. Instead you’re watching the fire trail left by the lightning. The palm is already engulfed in flames. The circle of fire in the grass is widening rapidly.
Violet notices too. The rain picks up again, but the droplets just hiss and turn to steam when they hit the fire.
“You can stop this!” Violet shouts at you, and you wonder if she’s referring to more than just the fire. She wriggles against her restraints, and her apologetic tone caves into anger. “Damnit, Lucy, put this fire out
now
!”
“You started it,” you say. You smile at the double meaning.
“I didn’t kill your husband!” Violet curls her legs up—the fire has crept all the way around her wooden post.
“You know the funny thing about wildfires?” you say
to her. “Sometimes they’re good for a forest. Sometimes they burn up all the little weeds that threaten to strangle and suffocate the life around them.” You turn to your sister. “You are a weed, Violet.”
The little sickly palm tree ignites behind her. The fire courses up its trunk. Violet’s eyes bulge when she feels the heat at her back. “I didn’t kill your husband,” she repeats, “but . . . but I can tell you who did!”
You pause. “Fine. If you didn’t send the assassin, then who did?”
“It was . . .” Violet turns to blow out a small fire on the shoulder of her robe. “It was Gracie!” she finishes. “Gracie did it.”
“Let me get this straight. You’re blaming this on our dead baby sister?” You shake your head. “Have fun in hell, Violet.” You turn 180 degrees and walk away.
“She’s alive!” Violet pleads with you. “You’re punishing the wrong sister!
The wrong sister!
” But her words will be lost soon, because the cathedral bell is chiming now, and you’re walking farther away, and the rain thickens even though it won’t save her. Still, between her shrieks, and through the bells and rain, you hear three words echoing over and over again in your mind, three words that you’ll never believe but that will haunt you for the rest of your days anyway.
The wrong sister.
The wrong sister.
The wrong sister.
It was a strange thing, having a new sister
.
Ash watched little Rose, who was in turn staring through the glass window of Wes’s condominium. Whether the girl was watching the torrential Miami rainstorm outside or staring someplace else altogether, Ash would never know.
On top of trying to acclimate to the new addition to her family—and what that would translate to when Ash returned to the real world of school, friends . . . her parents—Ash had a pressing decision to make:
Was she really about to barge her way into the Cloak Netherworld to retrieve her
other
sister?
On the one hand, part of her was tempted to let it be for the moment. It had been more than a month since Eve’s abduction. What was another few days, or even a few weeks? Maybe it made more sense to let Rose get her
bearings around Ash, one-on-one, before Ash introduced her to the unpredictable elder sister, who was about as calming an influence as fireworks in a room full of sleeping children.
It’s not like Ash and Eve had parted with a hug and an “I’ll miss you,” either. Eve had tried to murder her boyfriend and had nearly drowned Ash herself. Ash had burned her own hands into the flesh of Eve’s wrists. And before the Cloak dragged her to hell, Eve spent her final moment on earth conjuring a tsunami to crush Ash and Colt. Their history of attempted sororicide was a lump too big just to sweep under a rug and move on.
Then there was the horrible vision from the prior night. She’d let Eve burn to death in that palm grove, had let the wildfire purge her like some weed. Eve was her
sister
, not just another delusional god who’d had it coming. She was family.
The vision had proven once and for all that their violent sibling rivalry wasn’t unique to this lifetime.
It was in their DNA.
But it was reflecting back on the dream that finally made up Ash’s mind.
No matter how much Eve may have deserved her fate in the last life—
No matter how much Eve may have deserved her imprisonment in this life—
No matter what Eve being back on earth might mean for the future—
Ash couldn’t live with herself if she condemned Eve to death two lifetimes in a row.
The circle of violence had to stop now.
Wes stepped in front of her, fresh from his night’s rest and looking surprisingly clear-eyed, considering that he’d spent much of the previous evening in a drug-induced coma. He flipped a chair around and straddled it, leaning on the chair back. “So,” he said.
“So,” Ash repeated. She slumped back against the kitchen counter and crossed her arms.
Wes glanced at the little girl in his window. “Why do I feel like my bachelor pad just turned into a kindergarten classroom?”
Ash snatched an apple out of the fruit bowl. “Well, heads up, teach.” She lobbed it underhand at him.
At first Wes went to take a bite out of it, but something made him stop just short. He lowered the apple and gently balanced it on his knee. “So this is the part where I ask you not to put yourself in danger again. Then you tell me that you have to, that Eve is your sister.”
“Is that right?” Ash asked.
Wes nodded. “I come back with a list of very practical reasons why you shouldn’t,” he continued, “pointing out that you don’t even know whether there’s oxygen where you’re going, or an atmosphere, or a gravity that won’t crush you like a sardine can in a trash compactor. Meanwhile I know that everything I’m saying is falling on deaf ears because, if all the volcano goddesses I’ve ever met
share one thing, it’s an immovable stubbornness when they’ve resolved to do something.”
“Just one of our many adorable qualities,” Ash added.
“So rather than ranting uselessly at you for another half hour, I cut my losses: I tell you that the two of us are going right now. That way you can’t give me the slip and make the journey to hell by yourself as soon as I’m not looking.”
Ash pursed her lips. “I guess I should also skip the part where I try to convince you that this is
my
fight, and my fight alone . . . and that someone needs to stay behind to fix dinner, because there might be three hungry Wilde sisters ready to eat when we return from hell?”
“Glad we’re reading from the same script.” Wes stood up and opened the nearest cabinet. “We’re out of food anyway, so the four of us can order takeout when we get back.”
Ash wandered over to Rose and knelt beside her. While Rose seemed to understand English well enough, it was another thing completely to explain to her that she needed to open up a portal into hell . . . especially when Ash had no idea how it worked. If it weren’t for last week’s vision, when Rose opened the rift that ravaged and swallowed the pursuing boat, Ash might have believed that Rose’s power was something Colt had completely fabricated.
“Rose,” Ash said. She reached to brush a strand of Rose’s hair that had fallen into her eyes, but checked
herself. It still felt too intimate for a sister she’d just met. She did, however, make a note to get the girl to a hair stylist soon after they got back. “I need you to take me someplace that . . . that apparently you’ve been before. A place with . . .” She fumbled for a word to describe the Cloak. “A place with monsters.” She immediately cringed.
Great, Ashline,
she thought.
Let’s scare the shit out of her
. Using the word “monster” around a six-year-old wasn’t exactly starting off on the right foot.
Rose’s expression, however, was nowhere in the vicinity of “terrified.” If anything, in the brief moment when she raised her eyebrow, she looked vaguely curious.
This was going to take a different approach. With Wes’s help Ash rustled up a piece of paper and colored pencils. She set up a little workstation on the hardwood floor next to Rose and sketched the outline of what she hoped would be recognizable as a Cloak. After a minute of sketching, the scratch of the pencil against the paper finally aroused Rose’s attention, and she sat down cross-legged next to the paper.
It was only once Ash had begun to shade in the outline of the Cloak (which, given her dearth of artistic ability, resembled an amorphous oil spill) that Rose made a tiny squeak of recognition. As Ash watched, Rose drew in a deep breath and then exhaled hard against the window. A film of condensation formed on the cold glass. Then Rose took her pinky finger and drew two figures in the dew.
When she was done, even as the condensation faded from the glass, Ash knew exactly what they were looking at.
A row of interlocking machete-sharp teeth.
A flame-shaped single eye.
Rose looked questioningly to Ash.
Ash swallowed and nodded.
And Rose smiled.
As her illustration vanished from the window, Rose excitedly scampered up the stairs leading to the roof and threw open the door.
Of all the times for Rose to show her playful side,
Ash thought,
she chooses now?
Ash followed behind the light-footed little girl, with Wes’s heavy footsteps treading the staircase behind her. Out on the roof the rain washed over Ash in a powerful downpour. Thunderstorms this intense were usually reserved for violent encounters with Eve.
How strange that a tempest like this should also signal the start of Eve’s rescue mission.
Rose, meanwhile, walked up to the lip of the pool. She descended a few steps until she had waded in up to her knees.
Rose brought both hands over her head and curled her fingers. A miniature vortex of lava formed over her palm, and with a tiny but terrifying scream, she slung the lava ball into the pool.
It burst through the surface of the water and exploded,
showering the roof and its already rain-soaked occupants. After Ash had finished spitting out a mouthful of chlorinated pool water and had wiped the sting from her eyes, she turned back to the pool, expecting a miracle.
Nothing happened. There was no portal, no interdimensional tear like Ash had been waiting for.
Rose tried again, making an even bigger explosion, but to no avail. This time the frustration got to Rose. She pulled at her hair and began to rant angrily in a language that Ash couldn’t understand.
Maybe what Rose needed was encouragement, Ash thought. Even half-mortal kids needed positive reinforcement, right? “You can do it, Rose!” she shouted. It sounded lame as soon as it left her mouth.
Rose finally ended her foreign rant and collected herself. This time her fingers were graceful as she used both hands to weave another ball of light and fire out of the air. It hissed and steamed as the water poured down on it.
Rose’s fingers tightened. She heaved it into the pool.
And when this one exploded, it took part of the world with it.
The air might as well have been made of tissue paper. The explosion gouged an enormous tear in the fabric of time and space, as if a big fist had punched through this dimension into the next. Dark scraps dropped like confetti onto the surface of the water and dissipated into a thousand microscopic embers.
Rose motioned for them to follow her toward the dark,
jagged hole in the universe. Ash was about to ask why she’d opened it in the pool, but Rose splashed through the opening with an excited squeak and was gone.
Already the edge of the tear started to bleed closed, as the barrier between worlds repaired itself. Ash and Wes exchanged looks and sprinted for the opening. Ash beat him there by a stride and did her best lifeguard dive through the tear. When she immediately felt a falling sensation on the other side, her first thought was,
We are all going to die.
She’d jumped blindly into a slice in the universe created by a six-year-old, and now she was going to splatter on a canyon floor in hell.
