Monsters: The Ashes Trilogy

vii
ALEX had fallen like this only once in her life. That
happened when she was nine and took a wild leap from Blackrocks
Cliff off Presque Isle into the deep sapphire-blue of Lake Superior.
She remembered that the air was laced with the scent of wild lilacs
and early honeysuckle. Although hot sun splashed her shoulders,
her bare arms and legs were sandpapery with gooseflesh because
the wind skimming Superior was, even in June, still very cold—and
she was also, frankly, freaked out. Standing at the cliff ’s edge, her
monkey-thin toes gripping rough basalt, she looked down past her
new emerald green bathing suit, felt her stomach drop, and thought,
Seriously?
That cove looked pretty puny. Her dad, who’d gone first
with a whoop and a leap, was only a dot.

“Come on, you can do this, honey!” She could see the white
flash of his grin—a tanned, muscular, bluff, and confident man, who
carried her on his shoulders and boomed out songs. “Jump to me,
sweetheart! Just remember, feet first and you’ll be fine!”

“Oh-oh-oh . . .” She meant to say
okay
, but her teeth chattered.
Heights scared her something stupid. Stephanie’s birthday party last
month? The indoor climbing wall?
Mis
taaake. Not only was she the
only one
to freeze and then slip; she came
this close
to wetting her pants.
And now her dad was daring her to jump from way up here? For
fun
?

Can’t do this, I can’t . . .
Every muscle locked in a sudden, wholebody freeze, except for her head, which swelled and ballooned.
I’m
going to faint.
Her brain seemed surprised.
This is what it’s like to—

There was a whirring sensation, like the blast of a jet engine gushing through her skull, blowing her sky-high. All of a sudden, she
wasn’t in her body at all but floating
waaay
up there, looking down at
this teeny-tiny girl in a deep green bathing suit, an emerald smudge
with hair as red as blood. Far below, so small he was nothing more
than a mote in a very blue and watery eye, was her dad.

“Alex?” Her dad’s voice was the size of a gnat. “Come on, sweetheart, jump to me.”
“If she doesn’t want to . . .” Her mom, the worrier, on a faraway
crescent of gravel, hand to her eyes as the wind whipped her hair.
“She doesn’t have to prove—”
But yes, I do.
Her mom’s words—her doubt that Alex had the
guts—cut the string of the strange kite to which her brain was yoked.
That weird distance collapsed, and Alex plunged back into her skin,
faster than a comet, to flood the space behind her eyes.
Then she was out over open water, with no memory of launching herself from the cliff—probably a good thing, because she’d have
spazzed,
I’ll slip, I’ll slip, I’ll bust a leg or break my face
, and only scared
herself more. Long red hair streaming like a failed parachute, she
sliced through air in a high whistle of wind.
Slapping the water, still icy at that time of year, was a shock. She
punched through with her hip, a hard smack that jolted a mouthful
of air past the corkscrew of her lips. Silvery, shimmering bubbles
boiled from her mouth and all around her. Water gushed up her
nose, the pain of the brain freeze scaring her even more than losing
what was probably no more than a sip of air. She could hear herself,
too: a choked little underwater raspberry, a
bwwwuhh
, not quite a

scream but close enough. The water wasn’t blue at all but murky
and a really weird, brassy green. She couldn’t see more than a few
feet—and was she still sinking?
I’m going to drown!
She could feel a
panic-rat skittering in her skull, nipping her eyeballs as she whirled,
her hair fanning like seaweed.
I’m going to drown!
Wild with fear, she
looked for her dad but didn’t,
couldn’t
see legs or feet or hands or
anything
. She wasn’t sure where the surface was. Craning, she saw
how the water yellowed with diffuse sun.
Go, that’s up, go, go, swim!
Thrashing, she bulleted up and then crashed through, her breath
jetting in a thin shriek:
“Ahh!”

“Attagirl!” Her father was instantly there, laughing, his wet hair
dark and slick as seal skin. “That’s my Alex! Wasn’t that
fun
?”
“Uh,” she grunted. Still booming a delighted laugh, her dad
wrapped her up and boosted her—shrieking deliriously now—way
up high, nearly out of the water, before bringing her back down to
earth and to him, because he was
that
strong.
Then, together, they stroked for the gravel beach, her father pulling a slow sidestroke, staying with her the whole way as she churned
for shore, and home.

That was where the memory ended. She couldn’t recall if she and her
dad climbed the cliff again. Knowing her dad—how much she adored
and wanted to please, be
his
girl and dare anything—they probably
had. Knowing her dad, he’d treated her to a waffle cone of chocolate custard topped with Mounds and Almond Joy chunks because,
sometimes, you just feel like a nut. Her dad probably stole from her
cone so she could dip into his, right backatcha. She bet her dad told
her mom,
Relax, honey, she’s wash and wear
, as Alex crunched almonds
and chewy, juicy coconut and licked sweet chocolate runnels, molten
in the afternoon heat, from her wrist and forearm and the knob of
her elbow. Her father was that kind of man.

More than likely, she’d been underwater less than ten seconds. She
got herself out of it, too, and all because her dad dared her to try.
After that leap, she really believed she might dare anything, because
no matter what, if she jumped, her father would be waiting to swim
by her side, stroke for stroke, into forever.

Years later, after her parents were dead, her doctors said she’d had
an out-of-body experience. Commonplace, no voodoo. For example,
certain epileptics had similar experiences all the time. Hoping to walk
the stars and know the gods, mystics and shamans drank potions. It
was all funky brain chemistry, the doctors said, the mind’s switches
already primed, requiring only that you tickle the brain in the right
spot, goose it just so. Easy-peasy. Figure out how to bottle it, and we’d
all be rich.

In fact, her last doctor thought what happened at Blackrocks—
that shove from the shell of her mind—might’ve been the monster,
just beginning to wake. That her sleep going to hell and the smell of
phantom smoke weren’t her first symptoms after all. That her little
baby monster was hatching, chip-chip-chipping a peephole to peer
with one yellow baby-monster eye—
why, hello there
—way back then.

And she had been falling, falling, falling ever since . . .
Into now.