Wildefire (29 page)

She paused only to feel the caress of his forehead against her own, before she parted her lips and slipped them over his.

The camera flashed again.

Between the underground parking lot and the stairwell in East Hall, Colt must have asked “You’re sure this is okay?” nine times before she finally convinced him to 284

hush up for the rest of their trip down the hallway. Drunk on lust, she nearly kicked open the door to her bedroom.

He’d barely stumbled inside, tangled in her arms, when she slammed the door shut behind him.

He was able to tear his face away from hers long enough to sniff the air. “Have you been barbecuing in here?”

“Roommate’s perfume,” Ash mumbled, and pulled his face down to hers again. They stumbled back to the twin-size bed, where Ash tipped over the footboard and sprawled out onto the old lacy bedspread she had replaced the charred one with.

“You’re sure this isn’t too fast?” Colt lingered at the foot of the bed. His body swayed back and forth like he couldn’t decide whether to pounce on top of her or back out of the room and into a cold shower.

Ash unclasped her sandals and kicked them off—one of them bounced off the window—before launching herself onto her knees. “You really don’t know when to shut up, do you?” She seized a fistful of his shirt and dragged him down on top of her.

This time Ash went for his mouth a little too aggres-sively, and they accidentally bumped teeth as their lips met. Ash giggled nervously.

“What did I tell you about being patient?” he said.

She nibbled his earlobe playfully and whispered,

“What did I tell
you
about talking?”

The laughter faded as his hands found her hips and 285

he leaned into her. The cautious and gentlemanly Colt, who had half heartedly attempted to thwart her advances, yielded to a passionate, unrestrained hunter’s side of him she hadn’t yet seen.

And she liked it.

Her fingertips wandered with a mind of their own, and soon they had untucked his shirt. As they slithered up his ribs, she closed her eyes and leaned back—

Colt screamed.

Her eyes snapped open.

He grabbed his chest and toppled off the bed and out of view. Ash scrambled forward, and her first thought as he lay on her shag carpet, moaning with pain, was that in his excitement he had suffered some sort of heart attack or coronary.

Instead, as the moaning retreated, his fumbling hands found the opening in his button-down. With a hard yank the shirt ripped down the middle, sending buttons skittering across the floor.

There, tattooed in the valley between his now bare pectorals, was a large red welt that was growing darker by the second.

Ashline’s handprint was burned into his chest.

286

INTERLUDE II

Centr

al Amer

ica

It’s just past nightfall.

The jungle releases its steam to the heavens, and the sky is packed with stars now that the western winds have carried away the rain clouds. The guerillas have been trailing her since just before noon, when the bodies were finally discovered in the citadel. The little girl had been too much for two unarmed, unprepared laboratory tech-nicians, but the general was fairly sure that
la pequeña chu-pacabras
would be no match for a parade of submachine guns.

Twelve hours later, she is growing fatigued. The hounds bark persistently somewhere to the north. The weary soldiers begin to sing in their native tongue, though they are closer than they think.

She tries everything she knows to deter them.

She rips off a piece of her clothing, ties it to a branch, and then quickly switches direction.

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She intentionally slices open her hand and bleeds on the trees to mark several false trails.

She even finds a mud patch in which to wallow, as if the earth could cleanse away her scent.

But still the soldiers follow relentlessly. Stabbing pains slalom through her abdomen, brutal reminders of her seventy-hour fast. Her pace slowed hours ago when the fruit esters stopped working their magic, and she dry-heaves several times from dehydration.

She has only the light of the northern star to follow, but soon a different light blossoms on the horizon. Over the sounds of the dogs and the singing men, she can hear the low voice of a woman at work. Fifteen more yards, and the trees separate until the girl sees the walls of a house, and beyond it a village.

The portly but beautiful woman sits on a chair scrubbing away at a haggard-looking shirt. Occasionally she pulls it from the basin, holds it up to the firelight, and clucks her tongue, only to push it beneath the surface again. Her singing resumes.

The older woman perks up as she hears the rustle of leaves, and her wrinkled labor-worn hands pause in their work. The little girl staggers out of the woods and casts a last pleading look at the woman before her knees crumple. She crashes to the ground with her cheek pressed into the dirt. Her mouth moves slowly, forming silent, shapeless words.

The basin tips over, and the woman kneels at her 288

side.
“Niña,”
the woman whispers. Then she cries out,

“Cristóbal! Jesús!”

The front door buckles open. Her husband stumbles out onto the stoop to find his wife leaning over the unconscious child. A younger man with the same stone-chiseled chin appears behind him. The father scoops the little girl into his arms and carries her into the single-story house. They wind their way through the kitchen and into a back room that reeks of sawdust and oil. The young-est son kicks away tools with his feet and, with quick work, unfolds a fresh newspaper to cover the soiled floor.

The man lays her down on her side, so that her face rubs against the picture of the fierce uniformed man on the cover. Her head slumps to the side so that her unblinking eye rests next to today’s date—
3 de mayo
.

“Agua!”
the man shouts to the woman, who has been fussing in the doorway. She comes back almost instantly with a ladleful of water, which he snatches from her and presses to the little girl’s chapped, dehydrated lips. Somewhere in her dying brain, survival instincts kick in, and she finds the strength to slurp down some of the cool liquid. Most of it spills onto the front of her mud-stained shirt.

The father taps the girl’s face, and her eyelashes twitch in response—improvement!

The woman dashes into the kitchen, and as she goes to fill a tin cup with water, she remembers the leftover chicken broth on the stove. Yes, the girl will need nutrients.

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She hears a high-pitched yelp from the other room.

They’re losing her fast. She dips the cup into the Crock-Pot and hustles back to the work room, praying that she’s not too late.

The tin cup hits the floorboards.

The puddle of broth soaks into the dust.

The men and the little girl have switched positions.

The son is slumped, unmoving, over a workbench. The father lies in a lagoon of blood on the pile of newspapers, mouthing the same three words over and over again:

“Diosa de la guerra . . . Diosa de la guerra . . .”

The girl, now on her feet, holds up her trembling blood-soaked hands. Gravity pulls her tears to the earth.

The mother falls to her knees, whimpering.

“Lo siento,”
the girl sobs in the mother’s language.

Then in English: “I’m so sorry.”

The house explodes.

Back in Berry Glenn, California, Ash woke with a scream.

The image of the woman’s face just before the explosion, the unwillingness to live written in her dead eyes, careened right out of the vision and into Ashline’s bedroom. She dove out of her bed, grabbed hold of the metal wastebasket, and immediately threw up.

After her stomach convulsions had subsided, Ashline crawled slowly over to her laptop and flipped it open. She winced as her eyes adjusted to the glow of the screen, but she managed to open her Internet browser and navigate 290

to a Spanish-English translator. With trembling fingers she typed in the three words the dying man had repeated right before his bloody, fiery end: “
Diosa de la guerra
.”

She clicked enter.

The three words that returned sent Ashline scrambling for the wastebasket again. Only this time nothing came out as she dry-heaved.

Goddess of war.

As those three words faded from her mind, a different image floated to the surface—the date on the newspaper in the vision.

This year.

May 3.

Two days ago.

If the events in the vision had just occurred two days prior . . .

And if what Ashline and Eve were seeing in these nightmares weren’t echoes from their previous lives, or lost relics from childhood . . .

Then the girl in the vision was not Ashline.

And the girl in the vision was not Eve.

Ashline curled up around the wastebasket and hugged it to her chest.

“I have a little sister.”

291

Wednesda

y

Ashline had never been so grateful for game-day jitters.

Her match against Patricia Orleans was technically scheduled for five p.m., but the whole school had started referring to it as “sundown,” as though she were headed to a gunfight at the OK Corral.
Just strap two six-shooters to
my hips and call me Wyatt,
she thought as she high-fived what felt like the hundredth hallway passerby.

Bobby Jones, bless his warped and immature heart, decided the best way to win points with Ashline was to start a chant for her in the lunchroom when she emerged from the stir-fry line. He mounted a lunch table and wielded a megaphone, which whinnied mechanically as he powered it on. “Come on, everybody,” he ordered the cafeteria in his best impression of a professional cheerleader. “Let’s show Ashline some Owl spirit!”

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The audience hooted in unison.

With the help of his fellow soccer hooligans, he started a rousing chant of “Go, Wilde! Go, Wilde! Go, Wilde!” which, fueled by Bobby’s charisma and mass hysteria, caught fire across the dining hall. By the time she reached the table with the rest of the women’s tennis team—where Bobby and his teammates had ceremoniously decorated her plastic seat with streamers—she was grinning, an impressive feat, considering that she was still standing in the shadow of what had quickly become the worst Tuesday of her life.