Embers & Echoes (40 page)

“You would have done the same for me,” Ash offered.

This actually evoked some choked laughter from Eve. “Like hell I would. You know better than to credit me with any selflessness. But you . . . After all that happened between us, why would you come for me?”

“Because . . .” Ash glanced at Jack just briefly before she gave the only explanation that made sense to her right now:

“Because you’re my big sister.”

Ash knew she shouldn’t have
expected the Wilde sisters to have a family game night around the fireplace for their first Monday evening reunited, but this was ridiculous.

After the Cloak had released them from the underworld, the three sisters had camped out on the roof deck to Wes’s penthouse, where the fickle Miami weather had gone from stormy to spotless in a matter of hours. Rose always seemed more at home when she was outdoors, and Ash figured that Eve was probably feeling fairly claustrophobic after being cocooned in a tree for the last month. At the very least the weather goddess was probably anxious to be back in an atmosphere that she could control.

Now Rose stood ankle-deep in the roof pool, staring down into the water. Eve was leaning on the glass railing with her attention turned to the sky. Whenever she snapped her fingers, lightning bolts would flash between the fluffy clouds overhead.

Ash, meanwhile, was having trouble finding any words to say to either of her sisters. With Eve the problem was that they already had so much history between them. With Rose the problem was that they didn’t have
any
history.

Finally Ash couldn’t bear the silence any longer, so she climbed out of her pool chair and stepped into the shallow end with Rose. She placed a tentative hand on the little girl’s shoulder. “Did they have pools where you lived before?”

Instead of answering the question, Rose frowned and pointed at the water. “Where are the fish?”

“They’re in the sea.” Ash’s eyes suddenly lit up, and she knelt next to Rose, ignoring the water that seeped
through her jeans. “If you like fish, how about I take you to the aquarium tomorrow?” The word “aquarium” only got a blank stare from Rose, so Ash started to pantomime a box shape with her hands. “It’s a big, uh, cage that you can see through, where they take fish of all sizes and color from the ocean and put them on display, so people can watch them swim around.”

“They take the fish from their home?” Rose asked sadly. She turned away from Ash and whispered, “They should put them back.”

Ash sighed and retracted her hand from Rose’s shoulder. She should have known better than to think Rose would want to see animals in captivity, after she had been treated like one for the last few months.

Ash wandered over to Eve, who had had almost no words for Rose since the two had finally met, which was strange and frustrating, since it was originally Eve’s idea to track down their third sister. “Easy on the thunderbolts, there, Zeus,” Ash said.

Eve bristled. “Sorry,” she said. “Guess I got carried away thinking about what I’d like to do to a certain supernatural tree. And its oily black gardeners.” Even as she said it, Ash could scarcely hear any of the typical edge in her voice, as though the will to fight had fled her altogether.

Ash had been struggling all day with whether or not she should tell Eve about the Candelabra, about how the Cloak had carved the soul of Pele into three “siblings.”
But Eve had barely had time to adjust to being back on earth, and selfishly Ash wasn’t ready to untangle how the news might further complicate their already thorny relationship.

“You asked me two months ago,” Ash said finally, “after our tennis grudge match—before the Cloak took you—whether I thought the two of us end up like this every time we’re reincarnated.”

Eve clucked her tongue. “You mean right before you told me that you were done speaking with me for this lifetime?”

Ash cringed. “Good memory. I’d sort of hoped that being plugged into the tree would make you forget some of the things I said.”

“No amnesia.” Eve wrinkled her nose. “But it did leave me with the strong taste of lettuce in my mouth.” She fished around in the jeans she’d borrowed from Ash until she found her mints, and then popped one into her mouth. “God, I hope it’s not a permanent side effect.”

“What I wanted to tell you,” Ash continued, “is that if we keep worrying about all the bad shit we did the last time around, or what will happen to us in the next life, sooner or later we’re going to completely forget to live this one. So we can go on living like two self-fulfilling prophecies, two forces of nature that can never coexist . . .” Ash turned Eve so that she was facing Rose, who was now floating faceup in the pool. “Or we can at least make a stab at being a happy, slightly creepy family.”

Eve laughed for the first time since they’d returned from the Netherworld. “Let’s just hope Rose grows up to have my fashion sense instead of yours.” She plucked at the pockets on her borrowed jeans. “Where did you buy these, out of the back of a truck?”

Ash ignored her. “Speaking of family . . .” She slowly held up her cell phone and flipped it open. The word “home” blinked next to the first speed-dial slot. “There is one thing you
can
do for me.” Her thumb reached up to press the send button.

“Don’t.” Eve’s hand wrapped tightly around Ash’s wrist. Thunder clapped in the clouds overhead. “You rescued me—on many levels—and I owe you a great debt. Don’t ask me for something I cannot give.”

When Eve withdrew her trembling hand, she left a white imprint in Ash’s flesh—exactly where Ash’s own handprint was burned into Eve’s.

“You don’t need to go home right now,” Ash said. “You don’t even need to make promises. . . . But, Eve, you need to give them hope. Hope so Dad doesn’t stay up night after night on his laptop, searching police blogs and obituaries. So I don’t come downstairs in the middle of the night and find Mom at the kitchen table with her face buried in your old tracksuit.” The phone vibrated in Ash’s hand just then, and Ash added, “So they will
stop calling me
every damn five minutes.”

Eve let out a long breath, and a sea breeze blew in from the Atlantic with it. Then she reached out and took
the phone from Ash’s hand. “If I answer this call, we’re even. No more playing the ‘But I rescued you from hell’ card from now on.” She clicked the button, and the voice on the line—clearly Gloria Wilde’s—immediately started rattling off like a machine gun, a week’s worth of anxiety from Ash dodging calls and text messages.

It all stopped as soon as Eve said, “Mom?”

A profound and heartrending silence followed on the other end of the line. Ash was unconsciously holding her breath.

Eve stared penetratingly into Ash’s eyes as she said her next three words:

“It’s me . . . Eve.”

Ash found Wes exactly where
she expected he’d be. The Spanish monastery was easy enough to find, and the magnificent weeping willow in the courtyard was far too large to possibly miss.

The morning’s rain clouds had gratefully blown off to sea, and the dusky sun peeked just over the monastery walls, casting the courtyard in an orange light. A few final tourists were wandering the grounds with bulky cameras and bored-looking children in tow.

Ash brushed aside the curtain of leaves. Wes was sitting cross-legged between two protruding roots, staring out through the veil of drooping branches.

Wes looked mildly startled by her appearance, and she saw with a sinking heart that he smiled only weakly
when she took a seat next to him. “I thought you were going for some retail therapy and sibling bonding downtown,” he said.

Ash shook her head. “Strangely enough, even after being comatose and attached to a giant tree all that time, Eve decided that she needed a big nap before she was ready to face the public again. And when I tried to explain to Rose about cutting her hair, I think she got the wrong idea, because she started running laps around the kitchen.” She sighed. “Maybe it was too much to expect that everybody would be ready to do ‘normal’ things.”

Wes patted her knee. “Well, you get bonus points for trying to get everyone to jump back in with both feet. In the meantime, the Wilde sisters are all welcome to board at my place for as long as you need. Consider it your four-star hotel.”

“Hopefully Eve left her angst back in the Cloak Netherworld, because if not, it might feel more like a sorority house than a hotel.”

Wes pulled aside the veil of willow leaves so Ash could see out. The facilities people were beginning to set up rows of white chairs, all facing the tree. “There’s a wedding tomorrow morning. The happy couple has chosen to get married beneath this tree. Tourists have been sporadically filtering in and out all day, because of the ‘science fiction broadcast’ last night. They all seemed to think this tree was some kind of elaborate publicity stunt for some new television show. Not
one
of them actually believes
that there is really a person beneath all this wood and bark. A handful of people dead, some of them because of gruesome murders, all in the name of the Four Seasons’ new religion . . . and in the end everyone seems to think it was a viral advertisement for a new TV series.”

“It wasn’t all for nothing,” Ash said. “Sure, no one believes it now. But if we hadn’t stopped them, the Four Seasons would have traveled from city to city killing until there was enough blood pooled in the streets that people would have been
forced
to believe them.”

Wes barely seemed to hear her. “This little girl who couldn’t have been older than four or five stopped in front of the weeping willow and couldn’t take her eyes off it. She finally said to her mother, ‘It’s a miracle.’” Wes let the willow leaves go. “I can see nothing blessed or miraculous about this.”

“It might not be in this lifetime, Wes, but you’ll see Aurora again one day. That’s one of the small blessings of being half-mortal.” Ash turned to admire the tree, let her gaze climb the trunk to the lofty limbs above. “And as much as I hate Lily for taking her from us, Aurora couldn’t have asked for a more beautiful monument or resting place.”

“Don’t try to make something beautiful out of this,” Wes snapped. His hands trembled. “This isn’t some happy arboretum—it’s a tomb.” He stood up. “You may have gotten your two sisters back, but I’ve just lost mine.”

A bocce ball might as well have been lodged in Ash’s
throat. She could barely swallow. “That’s not fair,” she said quietly.

Wes bowed his head. “I’m sorry. . . . I can’t believe I actually said that. It’s as though this whole city has become venomous to me.” He leaned on a branch for support, and a few rogue willow leaves fluttered down. “That is why I have to leave now.”

“You really think that if you immerse yourself in the anonymity of someplace else, you’ll find a release for the pain you’re going through?” Ash asked. “That the white noise of another city is going to help you to forget?”

“I will
never
,” he said, “forget. But I don’t need to stay where I can see her face etched into every restaurant table, every patch of sand, every bird that flies overhead.”

Ash stood up and stepped in front of him. “Then take me with you.”

Wes said nothing.

“Oh,” Ash said. “I see. So I’m just some scenery that will remind you of her as well.”

“Don’t you think that I’d love to be able to separate you from all of this?” Wes demanded. His eyes flickered black. “I’ve known you for a week, but you’re already like a craving, like some elixir I can’t stop drinking. But I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to look at you through a clear lens and not see the horrible things that happened here. The memories of her and you aren’t like oil and water. I can’t just burn the oil slick off the top and leave just the purity. Believe me, if I could retreat to the
memory of you and me holding each other in the ocean without reliving everything that happened after that . . . I would give anything.”

“So you take it one day at a time,” Ash argued. “And you make new memories. And you learn to smile and laugh and love and live again. And one day, once you have perspective and her memory is a distant ache, that horrible night will no longer be the first thing you think of when you wake up, or the last thing you imagine before you fall asleep. Or the first memory you think of when you look into my eyes.”

He sighed and bowed his head. “Don’t you see, Ash? Maybe one of the reasons we can’t remember our previous lives is because we’re
not supposed to find each other.
I thought I saved Aurora when I carried her away from that awful relationship, but in the end it was being around me—being around other gods—that killed her.” His pointer finger darted back and forth between the two of them. “People like you and me weren’t built to lead peaceful lives together in the suburbs. Two of us together in one place is as inevitably fatal as running around a stack of dynamite with a torch.” He looked away. “And that’s why you need to let me go. To let
me
let you go.”

She grabbed his face and forced him to look at her. Her voice shattered into a thousand shards as she spoke, and the tears streamed freely. “Damnit, Wes, don’t you run away from me. You’ve got a shot at meaning something to me, a shot at me meaning something to you.
Instead you’re telling me that you’d rather just be the next person who buys a one-way ticket out of my life? Don’t be that guy. Don’t be just another thing that couldn’t last. Don’t leave.” Still Wes made no reply, so she let go of his face and pounded hard on his chest once, then again even harder, hoping that it hurt. Her temperature rose. “Are you not man enough for it? You’d rather not let the bad in with the good, so you’re just going to shut everything and everyone out? You’re a coward, Wesley Towers. You’re a damn . . .” She broke off into such hysterical sobs that she couldn’t finish her sentence.

He wrapped his arms around her, pulling her tightly against his stone chest. Instantly her internal temperature bottomed out and she buried her face in his sternum. “Shh,” he whispered soothingly to her. He guided her over to the tree, and together the two of them lay so that Wes was propped up against its trunk while she clung tightly to him.