Ash groaned. It took several tries for her to pick herself up off the floor. The carpet around her was littered with shards of gla.s.s, and her hands were covered in blood.
Pain exploded somewhere in her abdomen. She had definitely broken a rib.
Eve appeared in the mangled door frame, a dark silhouette against the fiery smoke-screened background of the pavilion. It wouldn"t take long before the flames made their way down the roof and into the ballroom, but Eve didn"t look the least bit concerned. Instead she stepped through the broken window and hovered over her incapacitated sister.
"I was heading back to Vancouver when I had an epiphany, Little Sister," Eve mused. "I realized that deep down you want to be free of this high school bulls.h.i.t, but you have a sense of duty and obligation that I don"t. You need somebody to emanc.i.p.ate you, to the cut the shackles of your old life before you can enjoy your rebirth."
Ash crawled on her hands and knees, but Eve"s foot came down on her back, flattening her to the ground. Ash howled with pain.
"But before you rise from the ashes like the phoenix you were meant to be, I"m going to have to burn everything to the ground. This inn. Your school. Your friends."
She paused. "Your boyfriend."
"What did you do with Colt?" Ash croaked.
"Don"t you worry about that." Eve squatted and placed a finger beneath Ashline"s jaw, lifting her face so 365 that they were practically touching noses. "This is for your own good. I love you, Ashline."
Behind Eve, Ash spied a dark pair of suit pants.
Rolfe"s voice said, "Well, I hate your guts."
Rolfe seized a surprised Eve by the back of her dress and spun her around like a discus before letting go. She landed on her back on the long wooden table with such force that the legs broke out from underneath it.
The fall had only rattled her, and she was already peeling herself off the table. But Ade had joined Rolfe and now mailed home a current of thunder that cata-pulted Eve into the long, regal mirror that covered the back wall. It shattered on impact, and Eve dropped to the ground, unconscious. Where she had smashed into the mirror headfirst, blood dripped from the broken gla.s.s.
"Are you okay?" Raja asked, and helped Ash to her feet. Ash grimaced, but waved an okay. Smoke was quickly filling the ballroom, and the sprinklers overhead hissed on just as the fire alarm started wailing.
Under the red flashing lights of the alarm, Rolfe crossed the room in a few quick steps. He pulled the half-conscious Eve up by her neck with one hand, and with his other made a fist. "If you so much as sneeze, I"ll make Ashline an only child."
Through the haze Ash spotted a figure appearing in the foyer behind Rolfe. She screamed for him to look out, but between the screech of the fire alarm and the intensity with which he was concentrating on Eve, he didn"t hear her.
366.
Lily stepped up behind him, and a sharp wooden spear elongated from her open hand. He finally sensed the shadow behind him, and dropped Eve roughly to the floor.
He spun around just in time for Lily to thrust the skewer through his heart.
He gazed down at the mistletoe spear in stupefaction, before Lily withdrew it and stepped away. The superhuman power fled from his dying limbs, and he had a few agonizing seconds to grope around at the hole in his chest as his legs gave out and he dropped to his knees.
He slumped face-first to the ground.
And just like that, Baldur, G.o.d of light, had fallen.
Rolfe was dead.
Ash was screaming, and Ade was screaming, and Raja was screaming loudest of all, their howls rising above the pulse of the fire alarm. Ade was the first one across the room, but Lily was prepared for him. She sent another spear hurtling his way. Ade couldn"t dodge it in time, and it pierced his thigh. Blood spurted onto the ground, and Ade dropped to the floor with a helpless cry.
Raja and Ashline were on Lily too fast for her to grow another spear. Ash grabbed hold of Lily"s struggling arms and pulled them roughly behind her back. Raja struck her viciously in the nose, so hard that when she pulled her fist away, Lily"s nose was visibly crooked.
The hard Egyptian lines of Raja"s face drew taut with murderous rage, and she fixed her hands on either side of Lily"s face. A tortured growl rumbled from Raja"s belly.
367.
Ash watched in the shattered mirror as Lily"s face aged five years, ten years, then fifteen and beyond. Her face, contorted with pain, softened as her smooth, young complexion puckered with years she had never seen. The flesh around the corners of her eyes wrinkled like tinfoil, and her black hair lightened by the second as if the color were dripping right off the follicles and onto the floor.
But in the reflection, Ash saw something else too late.
Eve had risen, dazed but awake, and she hammered her fist down onto Ashline"s back. The shock waves savaged her already broken rib, and the pain was too much. She fell to one knee, crippled with agony.
With her arms now free, Lily grabbed Raja"s head with her aging hands and brought her face crashing down onto her knee. Raja slumped to the carpet and landed, unconscious, next to her recently deceased boyfriend.
Lily took one last look in the mirror at her new vis-age, at the unfamiliar forty-five-year-old j.a.panese woman looking back at her. Then she lurched off down the hall, baying like a maimed creature until the front door of the inn slammed shut.
Eve grabbed her fallen sister roughly by the hair and shouted into her ear. "Catch me if you can. Your boyfriend"s waiting on the beach for his lady in red." Ash reached out with a hand to grab Eve"s ankle, but Eve was already out of reach and running for the nearest window.
A hard wind shattered the gla.s.s, and the storm G.o.ddess hurdled out into the night.
368.
Ash choked back the pain and gradually rose to her feet. A wounded Ade was limping toward her. She gestured through the smoke to where Raja lay. "Get her out of here before this place burns to the ground with her inside it." She started for the window.
Ade grabbed her tightly by the arm. "What are you doing?"
Tears streamed down Ashline"s cheeks as she cast a last look at Rolfe"s body. His unseeing eyes stared gla.s.sily off into a world beyond this one. "Making sure this never happens again."
Ade"s grip on her slackened. With a running start Ash leapt through the broken window and landed on the wraparound porch outside.
Two fire trucks had pulled up outside the inn. Water arced from the hoses, but they were fighting a losing battle to dampen the flames rising from the blackened sh.e.l.l of the pavilion. Farther in the distance the ma.s.s of Blackwood students lingered on the gra.s.s watching the scene. The horn of a third fire truck trumpeted into the night as it raced across the parking lot to join the others.
Through her tear-blurred vision Ash spotted what she was looking for-Eve"s shadowed body heading for the narrow beach.
The k.n.o.b of pain in Ashline"s left side only fueled her pursuit.
She cast off her shoes when she hit the beach, and tore across the sand in her bare feet.
369.
Meanwhile, Eve reached the water first and changed trajectories so that she was heading along the coast. But Ashline"s tennis-toned calves made her faster, and she was closing the distance little by little.
The small beach in front of the inn ended abruptly in a cliff that rose sharply out of the sh.o.r.eline, trading sand for stone. Eve vanished behind the wall of rock, but Ashline didn"t let up. She hit the water and ignored the sharp sting of the rocks under her feet.
The cliff rose higher as the chase continued alongside it, and so too did the water rise. What had been ankle-shallow before rapidly deepened until Ash was knee-deep, then up to her thighs. Even as the water approached her waist, she still struggled forward.
Ahead the cliff recessed back into a cove, and Eve splashed around the corner out of sight.
When Ash rounded the corner herself, she stopped dead in her pursuit.
They had waded into a cul-de-sac of stone, where the cliff towered thirty feet over them, But Ashline was looking at a series of sharp rocks protruding from the water, or more precisely, the man shipwrecked on them.
Lying there in his sea-soaked tuxedo was Colt Halliday. His body was chained to the rock by a series of thick metal links, and he was stretched out like he was on a torture rack. Blood drooled from his mouth down onto his bare chest, where Eve had ripped open his white tuxedo shirt. The lower half of his body was submerged 370 beneath the water. His eyes flickered in a state of half-consciousness, but he had the presence of mind to loll his head across the seaweed-covered stone and mouth something to Ashline.
"Help me."
Eve, panting but trembling with victory, pointed to her prize. "Doesn"t he look handsome?" she asked. "He saved his last dance for you."
371.
SIBLING RIVALRY.
Frida y Ashline started toward Eve, but the storm G.o.ddess wagged her finger warningly. Out on the horizon a bolt of lightning forked down from the heavens and struck the water.
Ash pointed back in the direction of the burning inn.
"Because of you a boy died tonight. Did you think all this would make me love you?"
"All you ever had to do was love me!" Eve shouted.
"You give your love away to all of those little urchins from your snotty prep school." She waved an arm at Colt.
"You give your heart for free to every boy who so much as smiles in your direction. And you can"t find an ounce of forgiveness in your G.o.dd.a.m.n heart for your delinquent, misguided sister?"
"Reality check, Eve." Ash bravely waded forward a few steps. "I don"t give a s.h.i.t if we were discovered 372 abandoned in the same hut in the Pacific. h.e.l.l, I don"t care if we crawled out of the a.s.s of the same sea monster.
You gave up the right to be my sister, my blood, when you started terrorizing me, when people started dying."
"No one has to die anymore," Eve said quietly. "Five words can save your boyfriend"s life. Let"s go find our sister.
Five words."
"That easy?" Ash asked. "You just cut Colt"s chains and we hop on a flight to Acapulco or wherever the h.e.l.l our miniature orphaned berserker is running amok? We track her down, take her to a carnival to get some cotton candy, and wait for her to explode? Are you out of your G.o.dd.a.m.n mind?"
A wind picked up over the water. Storm clouds billowed out of nowhere. Within seconds the sky transformed from a clear, moonlit night to a frothing, unsettled c.u.mulonimbus ma.s.s. Thunder echoed in the cove, and darkness descended down on them like a falling curtain.
"I wish I had a crystal ball to show you your future with this loser," Eve said. "One month of sweet talk, maybe two if you make him hold out. And then he will use every inch of you and leave your heart in a Dumpster.
It"s always the same story. This is for your own good."
"Go to h.e.l.l," Ash replied.
Eve just stared at her sister blankly, her posture slumped. This wasn"t the victorious, gleeful, destructive Eve that Ash had watched light up when she"d smashed her motorcycle helmet into Lizzie"s face. But it wasn"t the 373 old Eve either, the mischievous but innocent older sister who had challenged her to ice cream races and laughed with her when they"d fallen to the floor with headaches from the cold. This was a stranger, every bit as confused, alone, and defeated as the six-year-old that was running around somewhere in the forests of Central America, burning everything to the ground. And Eve was just as dangerous.
Finally Eve said, "They say that drowning victims experience a calm just before they die. I hope for Colt"s sake that"s true."
"No!" Ashline raced forward as quickly as she could, splashing through the water.
Eve shook her head at her sister. "You shouldn"t watch this."
Ash had crossed only half the distance when a sharp riptide washed around her feet, sweeping them out from under her. She landed on her back in the water and sank below the surface. She tried to stand up, but before she could find her footing, an enormous wave rose out of the water and hammered down on her, forcing her farther under. Her head slammed into a rock on the ocean floor, and the dark sea around her flashed white. She lost all sense of direction, of up and down. The riptide grew stronger.
She floundered about helplessly, and the more she tried to break free of the tide, the harder it pulled at her body, drawing her out to sea. She pressed her fingers into 374 the dirt, hard enough to draw blood from her fingertips as she attempted to fight the drag, but it was as though the current itself had wrapped around her like a dexterous tongue, dragging her down, down, down into the waiting jaws of Davy Jones"s locker.
Her lungs burned for oxygen. Dark spots blis-tered across her vision. She teetered over the abyss of unconsciousness.
As her limbs stopped fighting, And her hands stopped digging, And the tears stopped coming, And the hopes of saving Colt plummeted to nonexistence, She had one last fleeting thought: If Colt was to die because of her, at the merciless hands of the sea, at least she would be there lying dead on the beach beside him.
No, a woman"s voice whispered to her.
Ash opened her eyes. In the sand beneath her the face of a dead girl stared back. It was Lizzie Jacobs, looking calm and resolute. She reached out her hands and placed them delicately to either side of Ashline"s face. No, she whispered to Ash again.
Not yet.
The icy embrace of the bleak night ocean vanished instantly, replaced by a hot blaze. Ashline"s entire body ignited. Every inch of her skin blossomed with fire, as if natural gas were leaking from her pores. The flames 375 instantly evaporated the riptide holding her down, allow-ing her to break free through the surface. She drew in a long greedy breath, and when the oxygen reached her lungs, the corona burning around her expanded outward.
In a cloud of steam she charged through the water back toward the cove. Her dress fell apart as the fire chewed through it, but modesty was the least of her worries. Ahead Eve stood with her arms raised in front of Colt. Wave after wave pounded down on his face. He was shaking his head from side to side, gasping for air as the salt water choked him.
Eve heard the splashing too late. She twirled around with electricity building in her palms, but Ashline, the human fireball, seized her by the wrists.
Eve screamed as Ashline"s fiery fingers locked onto her flesh, burning hard, burning bright. The pain severed Eve"s connection with the ocean, and the waves pummel-ing Colt died away. The electricity fizzled to nothingness in her palms.
Unable to stand the look of torture on her sister"s face any longer, Ash released her. Eve held up her blackened wrists and wailed in agony. The indentations of Ashline"s fingers were charred into Eve"s skin, and Eve plunged her arms beneath the surface of the water to cool them.
Ash focused her mind, concentrating on finding the valve to turn off whatever ghostly force was fueling the fire. Something clicked in her brain. Her imaginary hand 376 closed around the valve and twisted it shut. The corona around her faded, and soon after extinguished itself completely.
Eve knelt in the water, submerged up to her shoulders, and sobbed. Neither she nor Ashline knew that something much worse was in store for the elder Wilde.
Ash noticed it first, the eerie darkness swelling in the water behind Eve. It grew like an oil slick from h.e.l.l, per-colating up from oblivion. Soon it rose out of the water in a thick column, bubbling up, up, until it towered the height of three men over the crouching Eve.
From the darkness bloomed one flaming blue eye, two, then a third. The nightmarish irises popped up all over its dark oily body until there were no fewer than twenty eyes flickering and blinking at the Cloak"s prey waiting vulnerably in the water.
Bathed in blue light, Eve looked up at Ashline with terrified eyes. Out of the black, two arms exploded outward and latched themselves to Eve"s shoulders. A third and fourth secured her by the waist and jerked her body backward. She screamed and extended a pleading hand as her torso was swallowed into the blackness.
Ash would never forget the empty look in Eve"s eyes when her face vanished into the Cloak. Her mouth opened just before it was sucked into the void, and Ashline would always have to wonder whether it was to apologize for everything or just to scream.
The Cloak descended into the water until the last of 377 the blue flames disappeared beneath the surface, carrying Evelyn Wilde with it into the oblivion beyond.
Ashline wanted time to process and possibly mourn what had just happened to her sister, but wouldn"t get the chance. Something boomed on the horizon, and a strange whistling overtook the hush of the ocean. With Eve out of the picture, the clouds rapidly dissolved, and the reappearing moon illuminated an ominous line on the horizon.
"Oh my G.o.d," Ashline whispered when she realized what she was looking at.
In her last moments Eve had left Ash and Colt with a farewell gift.
A tsunami.
It would kill them both. Even if it didn"t rip Colt free from his chains, even if it didn"t smash him open on the rocks, even if Ashline survived the impact with the rock cliff behind her as the water surged forward, it would surely drown them both.
Ash waded the last few steps to the rocks where Colt lay unconscious and limp in his chains. His head rolled to the side. Ash crawled up onto the rocks beside him and cradled his face in her hands.
"I"m so sorry," she whispered to him, her thumb caressing the line of his jaw. She pressed her lips to his for the last time, only wishing he were present to kiss back.