Ashline rubbed her face. The air in the room was warm-no, "sweltering" was a better word, given the humidity. But that couldn"t be right, since Blackwood had turned off the heat for the last time in March. Sure enough, when she put her fingers to the sheets, they were slick with her own sweat. Maybe she was just running a fever?
She needed air. She shuffled over to the window and pushed aside the curtains.
The image she saw framed in the gla.s.s was enough to rip the breath right from her lungs.
There, in the middle of the Blackwood quad, stood a girl with long dark tangles of hair. Ashline couldn"t make 219 out her face, but one thing was instantly clear even in the low light.
She was staring up at Ashline"s window.
The girl c.o.c.ked her head to the side, and Ashline wondered whether she could actually see her through the parted curtains. But seconds later she had her answer.
The girl pointed directly at her and then took off running across the quad, her footsteps quick and light, heading in the direction of the academic complex.
"s.h.i.t," Ashline said. She"d fallen asleep in her pajama pants and a camisole, but there was no time to change.
She slipped on her sneakers without bothering to put on socks, and stepped out into the hallway.
It must have been late, well past midnight, because the dormitory was as silent as a forgotten cemetery.
Blackwood students were easily excitable. Had the girls been awake for it, a blackout would have proven an all-too-tempting opportunity to give the middle finger to curfew and wreak havoc in the dead of night. Impromptu games of hide-and-seek, dangerous flights down the hallway waving contraband candles, voyages over to the boys"
dormitory, and retaliatory invasions.
Instead the girls of the B pod slept undisturbed, and would probably continue to sleep right through their first-period cla.s.s when the alarms failed to go off.
Ash crept down the hallway and out the front door.
She was grateful for the night chill after the startling heat of her bedroom. She cast one cautious glance across the 220 quad at the teachers" residence before darting across the lawn and to the front door of the academic complex.
With a twist and a tug, the door opened, and Ashline cringed as she waited for the alarm to go off.
Silence. The security system was down, voiceless without the campus generator online to power it.
A whisper guided her toward the nearly pitch-black staircase, like an invisible, impalpable hand pressing into the small of her back. She could all but hear it echoing down the stairs.
The ground floor and stairwell nearly suffocated her with darkness, and she had to use the handrail to navigate her ascent, without even the auxiliary lights to guide her way. But when she reached the third floor, she knew before she even pushed through the double doors leading into the hallway that something was amiss. A gentle light, like the flicker of the walls of a pool house, thrummed steadily against the walls.
"h.e.l.lo, Pandora"s box," Ashline said to herself, and she pushed through the doors.
The hallway was empty.
As Ashline trod down the hall, past the rows of unused lockers-Blackwood students kept their books and supplies in their rooms-a whistling pierced the silence. Not a musical human whistle, but the sound of air flowing past an open . . .
Door.
Halfway down the hall, recessed into a pa.s.sage that 221 was roped off with several cords, was what the students had not so originally dubbed "the Forbidden Stairwell."
It was a well-known fact that the tiny metal door at the top was an access point to the roof. It was also a well-known, well-tested, and twice-punished fact that the door was locked and connected to the security alarm, which even the most technologically savvy seniors had failed to disarm. The roof of the academic complex was a veritable Shangri-La for the students of Blackwood, one they"d never seen.
And here it was, its alarm hushed, with the promise of the night outside slipping through the unlatched door as the wind whistled past.
Ashline slipped underneath the ropes. At the top of the stairwell, her fingertips paused only briefly on the cold metal door before she pushed it forward and out onto the roof.
The wind drifted over the shingles with grim determination on its pilgrimage back to the ocean, but the girl from the quad stood resolute on the edge of the rooftop, poised and as still as a boulder. For a fleeting instant as Ashline treaded carefully down the gently sloping roof, she thought that maybe she was reliving the nightmare with Lizzie Jacobs all over again, that she had never left her room at all. She briefly entertained that this might be the little girl from her vision on the beach yesterday, the exotic and deadly little cherub that had so devastatingly escaped from her jungle prison.
222.
But even despite the uncharacteristically long hair, well past her shoulders, Ashline recognized the taut, familiar musculature of the girl"s back underneath her tank top, recognized her attenuated lean, the way she placed all her weight onto her left hip, recognized the way that the temperature nearby plummeted ten degrees simply at the sight of her.
"You"re back?" Ashline said quietly, as if there were a question buried beneath those two words that could sum up eight months of distress.
When the girl turned and smiled, the steady sea breeze died instantly. "I"m back," Eve said, her voice as smooth as two snowflakes colliding. "I"ve missed you, Little Sister."
223.
THE BURNING BED.
Monda y "What"s the matter?" Eve asked half-innocently.
"It"s been eight months, and you don"t exactly look pleased as a peach to see me."
Ash stared. "You and I don"t exactly have a good track record when it comes to meeting on rooftops."
"Guess I can"t argue with that." Eve slipped down into the sitting position on the edge of the roof, and patted the shingles next to her. "Want to take a seat? Tell me how you"ve been?"
"Last time you knocked me off our roof and left me in the gra.s.s waiting for the ambulance."
Eve waved a hand. "Stop being dramatic. I knew the fall wouldn"t kill you. And you and I both know that you"re not safe anywhere on this roof. One strong gust and-"
"This is the part where you at least try to make me feel safe."
224.
Eve nodded. "Sorry, Sis. . . . The company I"ve been keeping recently don"t really hold back. Real play-rough bunch. I keep forgetting when I"m among the living again."
"Okay," Ashline agreed. "I"ll sit with you, but if you try to shove me off, I"ll-"
"Be a pancake on the quad?" Eve interrupted.
"I was going to say "drag you with me."" Ash couldn"t resist adding, "Although, if your a.s.s has gotten any bigger, maybe you"ll just anchor us both in place."
Eve offered her an ephemeral smile. "Good to know the California air hasn"t dulled that sharp tongue of yours. I was afraid these prep school kids would bore you to death."
""These prep school kids" definitely keep me on my toes." Or, she added to herself, at least keep me involved in kidnappings, getaways, and canyon shoot-outs.
She wandered over to the edge of the roof. Below, on the sweeping Blackwood quad, was the scene that Eve had been gazing down upon and that Ashline had not seen when she"d been approaching the academic building.
There, crisscrossing the gra.s.s as if they were cows meandering around a pasture, were not two but six of the blue flame creatures. Even from three stories above, Ash could see the wreath of fiery cerulean their flames cast onto the ground.
Ashline"s breath caught in her throat. Eve looked nonplussed, her legs swinging off the edge of the roof like a child"s on a swing. "Kind of beautiful, aren"t they?"
225.
"In a terrifying sort of way," Ash said. "Then, sure.
What . . . what the h.e.l.l are they?"
"We call them the Cloak." Eve didn"t bother to elabo-rate on who she meant by "we." "They"re a hive mind- linked together so that when they interact, they can feed their thoughts into one shared collective consciousness. .
. . So I guess in that case the Cloak are really more of an "it" than a "they." Think of them as many branches of the same tree."
Given that Eve had remained civil for a full two minutes, and no one had been electrocuted yet, Ash shelved her misgivings and slipped down beside her. "If those are the branches, I"d hate to see the trunk."
"Or the roots," Eve added. Her face had drawn sober.
"They say that when the plants and the animals and the humans and the G.o.ds were created, the Cloak were made from the excess fabric that was left over. As if the Creator had an extra yard of velour when he was done making all of us and said, "Screw it. Let"s make Earth a little more interesting.""
"And you believe that?" Ashline asked. She desperately wanted to know where Eve had learned all this, but there was a sixteen-car pileup of questions in her brain, preventing any of them from funneling their way out of her mouth.
Eve sniffed noncommittally. "Stories like that are merely intended to simplify what our tiny little minds can"t process. But if you ask me, if the Cloak are tele-pathic, unified, and apparently invincible, and we are the 226 imperfect little skin bags that fight and kill each other, then we must be the dregs left over after they were created."
Ashline shuddered. "Are they dangerous?"
"When they want to be," Eve replied. "As far as I"ve seen, the Cloak have no sense of right and wrong, no moral compa.s.s. But they do have an agenda . . . and that agenda, as far as I can tell, is to mess with us. Humans can"t see them, can"t notice the way they tinker with their lives every day."
"But we can," Ashline said, and felt a bit odd using the term "we," as if she belonged to some sort of club.
"Does it make it any better when you see who"s holding the stick that"s poking you through the bars of the cage?" Eve shook her head. "Take right now, for instance.
Are they wandering around your school because they"re just curious about human life? Or are they just mulling around because they smell deity nearby and they want to get into your head?"
The word "deity" echoed within Ashline"s brain as if she"d inserted her head into the clock tower bell right as it was being rung. "So we are G.o.ds, then."
Eve raised her eyebrows twice. "Cool, ain"t it?"
"Then why are we-"
"Then why are we stuck in teenage bodies, forced to go through p.u.b.erty and endure the embarra.s.sment of high school just like everyone else?" Eve finished for her.
"The first of many questions."
"Because the G.o.ds aren"t like we"ve been told they 227 are," Eve said, and Ashline could all but hear her sister"s soul buzzing. "Not some malevolent immortal beings sitting on the top of a mountain, or ruling the earth from the clouds. We"re flesh and blood and bone and breath and laughter and pain, just like everyone else. . . . Only, unlike everyone else, we"re reborn every century or so with no memory of the last time and forced to live it all over again from scratch. We"re not immortal in the sense that we can"t die; just immortal in the sense that we end up back here."
"We"re reincarnated . . . as ourselves," Ash said, trying to piece it all together.
"Ash, we"ve been here before!" Eve grabbed her sister"s arm excitedly. "Many times-thrown onto the grid-dle and then tossed back into the pancake mix, over and over again. Who knows the things we"ve seen in all our years, all our centuries. The cities rising, the cities falling.
Distant lands, our lovers, our wars . . ."
Ash closed her eyes, probing the recesses of her mind for memories waiting to be unlocked, of faraway sh.o.r.es and old friends.
"But something is wrong," Ash said.
Eve gave a her a sideways glance, up and down. "You mean besides the mismatched pajama set you"re wearing now?"
"Good to see that you"re still a brand sn.o.b even on this side of mortality."
"If I"m going to be a G.o.ddess," Eve said, "there"s no 228 reason I shouldn"t look like one too." She winked.
Despite the toxic wasteland of history between them, Ash couldn"t help but laugh. "So nothing"s up? You"re just here on a social visit, or scoping out new schools?"
Ash frowned. "You"re not . . . you"re not planning to enroll here, are you?"
"Trade in world travels for a calculus textbook?" Eve rolled her eyes. "I"m just here to see my baby sister. Just like last time." Eve bit her lip as if the last four words would take her someplace she didn"t want to go.
Just like last time.
"Okay, spill." Ash crossed her arms. "We share the same DNA, Eve. I know exactly when you"re spraying on bulls.h.i.t and pretending it"s perfume."
Eve looked back out over the quad; four of the Cloak had disappeared, off into the woods maybe. Two of them still lurked outside the athletic complex. "I know I"ve made mistakes along the way, Ash, but you don"t always have to believe the worst."
But Ashline refused to be suckered. "Stuff that hurt puppy look into your Coach bag, and just tell me what the h.e.l.l is going on."
Eve huffed. "You want the truth, Ash? We"re all going to die."
"Yeah, you just said that. From the sound of it, we"ve died a whole lot."
"Well, this time we aren"t coming back," Eve blurted out, as if a water main inside her had burst.
229.
A boreal cold filled Ash, like a permafrost had formed beneath her skin. "What?"
Eve slipped both hands through her tussled hair. "For the last few generations, fewer and fewer of us have been making the return each time. At first it was only a few . .
. and then entire pantheons disappeared, lost somewhere in the limbo of time. And now we"re all convinced that the Cloak have somehow found a way to interfere with our regeneration."
"You keep saying "we,"" Ash said. "And you certainly aren"t referring to you and me."
"When I was traveling, searching for other people like us," Eve explained, "I met a group of G.o.ds living up in Vancouver. They were led by some sort of divine being called Blink. Wears a mask. Creepy as h.e.l.l. No one could explain to me what he was, or how they"d found him, only that he wasn"t like us, or humans, or even the Cloak.
He was . . . something else. He scared the s.h.i.t out of me at first, but in a time when I didn"t know who to trust, Blink was the first to give me answers."
"So you"ve been taking orders from this Blink, and you don"t even know what he is?" Ashline asked. But even then she was thinking back thirty-six hours to when she"d been standing on the beach, taking orders from a scroll that had been given to her by a blind girl, who had in turn dictated the message from a strange man that had shown up on her porch.
"We"re all just marionettes, Ashline," Eve said softly.
230.