Wildefire (26 page)

with a fresh start and a brain that wasn’t bordering on malfunction. She cast a final worried glance at Jackie, who snored contentedly, with a column of drool running out of her open mouth and onto Hayley’s pillow.

Ash pulled the cord to the light, plunging the room into darkness, before sliding under the covers and letting sleep overtake her.

Ashline wasn’t sure how long she’d been out when someone was knocking on her window. Her first exhausted thought was that it must be a woodpecker, but when she caught sight of the face behind the glass, she nearly toppled out of bed.

Colt was perched outside, gripping the frame with one hand to steady himself on the narrow ledge, and rapping the glass with the other. “Ashline.” He mouthed to her.

She shook her head to shake loose the last shackles of exhaustion and stumbled over to the window. She lifted it slowly, terrified that she was going to knock Colt backward.

“Are you crazy?” she asked him as he climbed through her window. “We’re on the second floor. How did you even get up here?”

He wrapped his arms around her waist. “I couldn’t wait for tomorrow,” he replied as if that were an adequate answer.

“We can’t,” she whispered, her will breaking. “Jackie’s here . . .”

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But Jackie was gone, the bed made and the pillows fluffed, like no one had ever slept there.

“Any more reasons I shouldn’t kiss you now?” he asked her. She opened her mouth, but her reply was lost in the abyss as his lips melted into hers.

Before she could talk herself out of it, she was letting him drag her across the room to her bed. Something was terribly wrong, and yet this is what she wanted, wasn’t it?

This is what she saw in flashes of light whenever she was near him, one of the many delectable possibilities. Now it was all happening, happening so very fast . . .

His mouth was on her neck, and suddenly it wasn’t feeling so wonderful. “It burns,” she said to him. Then louder, “You are burning me.”

As his lips continued their downward voyage toward her collarbone, she heard his smooth voice say, “It is just the heat of the fire between us. Do you feel the fire?”

Ash woke up. The dream—Colt, the feel of his hands, his lips—evaporated. But the heat did not. If anything, the room felt hotter than it had before, and now it was glowing ruby and orange, as if she had gone to sleep in California and woken up in hell. Her throat was parched.

If only she could reach over and find her glass of water . . .

It was then, when she touched flame, that she realized her bed was on fire.

The prison of flames surrounded her on all sides, crackling and eating away at her comforter, while the blaze danced higher and higher toward the ceiling.

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Ash had the presence of mind to stand up before the flames grew any taller, and with a crouching start she hurdled over the fire. She landed in a roll and tumbled toward the window. It was only when she landed outside of the infernal prison that she discovered that her night-shirt was on fire as well. She pulled it off so quickly that it ripped, and she proceeded to pummel it against the floor.

Jackie chose to wake up at that moment, staring in hungover stupefaction first at the burning bed, then at Ashline, standing in a sports bra and boxers, and beating her singed shirt against the carpet.

“Your bed is on fire!” Jackie shouted.

“I know!” Ash said, flinging her shirt across the room.

“We need to put it out with something!”

Jackie had dropped out of bed and was hopping from left to right, like she couldn’t decide whether to run for the door, try to fan the flames, or scream for help. “We could . . . beat it with your blanket?”

“My blanket is what’s on fire, genius!” Ashline dashed past her and grabbed Hayley’s quilt. In her mind she tele-graphed an apology to her absentee roommate for what she was about to do. She secured two corners of the quilt with her hands, and then began to beat the fire with it.

It took nearly a full minute of dancing around the bed while Jackie ran back and forth in a panic. Finally Ash sequestered the last rebellion of fire that was still burning near the headboard. With several quick strokes with Hayley’s quilt, she pounded out the remaining flames.

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Jackie stopped fidgeting long enough to pry open the window and let out the last tendrils of smoke. Ash took a heavy breath but kept the seared quilt on her shoulder, in case the fire should ignite again without warning. She quickly scanned the room for damage. Her comforter, the same timeworn and beloved blanket that had kept her warm at night since elementary school, was now a mess of char marks and rips, an immolated rag of what it used to be. Hayley’s quilt, too, had been sacrificed in the process, beyond what any dry cleaning could repair. A goose might as well have exploded in the middle of the room, because there was feather down scattered all over the floor. And on the ceiling the malfunctioning smoke detector chirped once before returning to its song of buzzes and sparks.

“Need air,” Ash mumbled, and dashed over to the open window. She was just slipping her head outside, preparing herself to puke all over the rhododendrons below, when she saw the figure standing out on the quad.

It was Eve, watching her from the lawn. Again.

“You bitch!” Ashline shrieked, unable to contain herself.

Inside, Jackie took a frightened step back. “Me?

What did I—”

“Not you,” Ash snapped. “Stay here.” Jackie sagged and fell back onto Hayley’s bed while Ash burst through the door and hustled down the hallway.

Outside on the quad Eve was nowhere to be seen.

Ash cursed and stomped the ground. To believe that her 257

sociopathic sister had really returned with a pure heart and a plan to reunite with her lost sibling . . . Well, Ashline was just a fool.

She was fuming with such passion that she didn’t notice at first the girl standing behind her.

“Ashline?” Raja hugged her nightgown tightly around her waist and shivered in the cold. “Was that you who just stampeded past my door? What’s wrong?”

A full minute passed while Ash simply let the heat from the fire roll off her and up into the night, while she breathed in the smoke-free air. “The scrolls that Serena gave us on the beach,” she said at last. “From Jack.” She hesitated, remembering that Serena had forbidden them to share their prophecies with one another. But now that Eve was back in the picture, it seemed like the right time to put aside discretion. “Mine told me to ‘Kill the Trickster.’”

“I don’t follow,” Raja said. She wrapped a corner of her nightgown around Ashline’s bare shoulder. “And you smell like smoke.”

“I just realized what Jack wants me to do.” Ash stared across the quad, at the empty space where Eve had been standing.

“Does it involve coming inside and warming up?”

Raja asked hopefully. When Ashline didn’t laugh, Raja stepped in front of her and touched her elbow. “You can tell me.”

Ash trembled, but not from the cold.

“I’m supposed to kill my sister.”

258

HANDPRINT

Tuesda

y

“That the last one?” Ashline asked as she lowered her sponge from the bedroom wall.

Jackie placed the large box fan in the semicircle with the other four. “There were only five in the supply closet.

I’m sure there are others in the boys’ residence, but I figured, ‘Hey, can we borrow all of your industrial fans to clear out smoke odors in East Hall?’ would sound a little fishy.”

Ashline pointed to herself. “Irritable, sleepless girl here. So if we could try to use our sarcasm filters this morning.”

After she’d plugged the new fan into the power strip, Jackie moaned and rubbed her head. “I’ll trade you an hour without sarcasm for three ibuprofen.”

“Top drawer,” Ashline called over her shoulder, and went back to scrubbing. She had worked her way up the wall, but she’d already missed first period, and the ceiling was going to have to wait until three p.m.

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When her wrist had grown sore and she felt certain she was approaching the onset of carpal tunnel, she dropped off the step ladder with a grunt of defeat. “Well, I think we’ve downgraded the fragrance of the room from The Bed Is on Fire to Musky Mesquite.” She poked the wall. “Fortunately, recycled plastic milk jugs don’t seem particularly odor absorbent.”

Jackie popped a handful of Advil and swallowed without water. “Ash, you know I’m your friend first, but I don’t know as the floor prefect how I’m supposed to overlook writing up an incident report for this. You could have been burned alive.”

“Yeah, and what’s the incident report going to say?”

Ash tossed her sponge into the soap bucket. “I can see it now. ‘I woke up somewhere between intoxication and hangover in somebody else’s bed to discover that Ashline Wilde’s comforter had spontaneously combusted
.
’ Riley will
definitely
promote you to hall prefect for that one.”

“There could be an electrical short somewhere in this room. And that smoke detector needs to be replaced.

There was a bonfire directly beneath it, and it didn’t so much as beep!”

“Deep breaths,” Ash instructed her friend, and plopped down beside her on the bed. “I told you that it was probably just my heating blanket malfunctioning. Next week, when the room no longer smells like the inside of a charcoal grill, we can have buildings and grounds install a new smoke detector. The residence hall 260

is made of plastic anyway, It’s not going to burn down over the weekend.”

“
You’re
not made of plastic,” Jackie reminded her.

“Well, I must be made of asbestos, then, because there’s not so much as a grill mark on me. See?” Ash rolled up her sleeves to show Jackie. “So stop worrying, go hydrate yourself, and GO BACK TO BED.”

“Fine.” On her way out of the room, Jackie picked up one of the fans and aimed it directly at Ash. Her hair billowed around her.

Ash laughed and held her hands in front of her face.

“Brat!” But as Jackie was leaving the room, she couldn’t help but say, “Believe it or not, these days it feels like you’re my last anchor to humanity . . . and for that I love you.”

“You know,” Jackie said, “sometimes you say things that creep me out. But I love you, too.”

At this point Ash was growing far too accustomed to having her day descend from normalcy into chaos . . . and earlier and earlier each day. For now she could only hope there was a limit of one strange incident per morning.

So that left one lingering question as she sat in French class. Did her bed igniting count as late Monday night or early Tuesday morning? She had fallen asleep,
and
she had dreamed, which meant she had at least entered her REM cycle before she’d woke to find herself engulfed in flames. That had to count for today, right?

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As she stared at her reflection in the glossy screen of her cell phone, the exhausted ragamuffin that stared back at her said, “Wishful thinking, kid.”

For once Monsieur Chevalier wasn’t picking on Ashline, or harassing her to answer him in a language she could barely comprehend let alone speak competently; she guessed this charity was some combination of pity for her drowned-rat appearance and gratitude that she’d watched his rehearsal with Serena on Monday.

Just when she was counting down the moments until lunch so she could head back through the rain to East Hall for a lukewarm five-minute shower, the intercom buzzed at the front of the room. Monsieur Chevalier, who was in the middle of describing some film called
Jules
et Jim
, audibly muttered
“Merde”
before slogging over to the door and picking up the phone. He said four words, three of which were “
Oui,”
before he slammed the phone back onto its cradle and leveled Ashline with a look of disapproval. “Madame Wilde. The headmistress kindly petitions your presence in her chambers, posthaste.”

Ash stood up and gave him a curtsy on her way out.

“Merci, monsieur.”
As soon as the door was shut, she found herself scowling at the empty hallway. If Jackie had ratted her out to the headmistress, then so help her God . . .

She didn’t even bother to greet the receptionist as she stormed through the waiting room. It was time to just meet her fate and resign herself to whatever conse-quences would follow. How was the headmistress going 262

to spin this one to make it look like her fault? Playing with matches? Smoking in bed? At least she wouldn’t have to spend her Wednesday throwing up with nervous-ness over her impending match against Patricia Orleans, or worrying about finding a dress for the masquerade ball.

“Headmistress,” she said as she stepped through the door, “I—”

Headmistress Riley was not alone. Ash couldn’t see the person sitting in the other chair, only a sleek feminine hand gripping the armrest.

To make matters stranger, the headmistress had a bright smile on her face. “Ashline. Just the girl I was looking for.”

Ash coughed. “And here I was thinking there was a warrant out for my arrest.”

The headmistress opened her mouth, and Ash could all but hear the accusation in her head—
Oh, Lord. What
on earth have you done now
?

But she stamped out any further suspicion for the benefit of the third party in the room. “I know you’re not officially part of our student ambassador program, but we have a prospective student visiting Blackwood just for a morning tour, and she specifically asked if there were any other students from New York whom she could shadow today. Allow me to introduce Elektra Quentin.”

“Hello,” Eve said, rising from her chair. She held out her hand across the divide. “Pleased to meet you . . .

Ashline, was it?”

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Ash said nothing. Visions danced in her mind’s eye, of the lightning shooting out of Lizzie’s open mouth, of waking up to her bed on fire. But Eve extended her hand a little farther, and Ash finally seized it.

She squeezed firmly, hoping to inflict some pain on her older sister, but Eve merely squeezed harder until Ash was forced to retract her hand with a wince. “Welcome to Blackwood, Elektra Cute.”