She had intended to kiss him until the end, intended to keep contact with his chapped, salty lips until the tidal 378 wave dragged her away from him and carried her to her death against the rocks.
But she had to pull away prematurely. The fire had returned, and this time she felt it blossoming in her belly first. She cradled her stomach and staggered back through the water. Flames sprouted from her hands, igniting the last singed vestiges of her dress that still clung to her skin.
She turned to face the tidal wave. The line of water was growing exponentially taller, and a deafening whoosh drowned out the whistle of the wind.
Ash gazed at the fire simmering in the palms of her hands.
Her body trembled and her earthen Polynesian skin transformed into red and then a glowing brown.
Flesh turned to lava.
Blood turned to magma.
She lifted her head to the moon and bellowed, willing the fire to grow. Her corona widened. Dark solar flares licked out around her body.
The atmosphere around her sizzled up a hundred degrees, then another. While the temperature skyrock-eted, the water nearby hissed and turned to steam.
She faced the incoming tsunami head-on and held out her hands.
I am the fieriest depths of h.e.l.l, she told herself.
I am the surface of the sun.
I am the belly of a volcano. I am the unstoppable force that 379 has formed new islands, and the same unstoppable force that has brought cities to their knees.
I am the volcano G.o.ddess who has survived a thousand years.
I am Ashline Wilde, and I may not survive another thousand years, but I"ll be d.a.m.ned if I"m ready to go yet.
She planted her feet, closed her eyes, and braced for the impact.
The wall of flames exploded out of her and hit the tsunami right as it entered the cove. The wave rammed the fire with the velocity of a runaway freight train. But the heat in front of Ashline escalated higher and higher, a living kiln in the face of death.
In ten seconds it was all over. From the front of the wave to the very bubbles of its tail, the heat generated by Ashline vaporized the tsunami into steam.
When she was sure it was all over and the howling had ceased, the fire around Ashline snapped off as suddenly as it had erupted from her. She dropped to her knees, exhausted, and held her head in her hands as the last embers died from her skin. The surf lapped around her once more and filled the void left by her ma.s.s evaporation.
Eventually she found the strength to return to her feet. It was nearly impossible to see anything in the cove.
The vapor had transformed the atmosphere around her into a thick fog. But a waking groan from Colt clued her in to his location. She waded through the shallows until his rock peaked out through the fading cloud around them.
380.
Colt turned his head to the side and threw up several pints of brine onto the rocks. When the retching had finished, he blinked uncertainly at the white around him, at the shackles that pinned him to the rock, at the vision of Ashline coming through the cloud toward him.
She was vaguely aware that the heat from her body had incinerated all but the last pieces of her underwear, but this wasn"t the time or place for self-consciousness.
She took her spot next to him on the rock and pressed her hand to his chest. "Don"t worry," she said. "I know it looks like we"re in the clouds, but you"re not in heaven."
He coughed with pain, but managed a quick smile. "I would hope not. . . . If heaven involves me chained to a rock in a sauna and feeling like I drowned, then I"d hate to see what h.e.l.l looks like."
Ashline laughed and wiped the tears from her eyes.
There was so much to say and yet none of the words to say it. So instead she settled for placing her head on his collarbone and sliding her arm over his waist.
"Ash?"
She closed her eyes and nuzzled closer to him.
"Mmm?" was the only response she could muster.
He playfully tugged at the exposed underwire of her singed bra. "If we go back to the dance now, do you think we still have a shot at winning "Best Dressed"?"
381.
EXTINGUISHED.
One Mont h Lat er It was an interesting end to the school year, to say the least.
It was all Headmistress Riley could do to keep the school open after a rash of student disappearances. Lily, of course, never returned after the night of the masquerade ball. Even if she had, no one would have believed the middle-aged woman had just days prior been a soph.o.m.ore at Blackwood.
After Ade had pulled Raja from the burning ballroom, he"d also smuggled Rolfe"s body out into the woods shortly before the firemen stormed the inn looking for missing students. (Fortunately, they found an unconscious Bobby Jones and carried him out onto the street before the roof of the pavilion caved in.) Rolfe was, in the end, unaccounted for when the list of attendees was compared to the list of students shivering 382 but alive outside the Shelton. Eventually, when the wreckage of the inn was fully explored, they mounted a search for him in the surrounding woods. The search turned up nothing; Ade and Ashline held a private service for him in the forest before Ash closed her tear-filled eyes and cremated his body.
Raja couldn"t bear to be a part of the ceremony. She returned home for the duration of the school year, which was just as well. With both Rolfe and Lily gone AWOL, the overly imaginative Blackwood students came up with several theories that linked the two of them romanti-cally, including one in which they had eloped in Vegas and moved to Tokyo to live off her father"s money. The rumors flew around campus like stray bullets.
None of the rumors suggested that Lily had murdered Rolfe.
In the wake of the fire, when the medics spotted Ade limping and Raja unconscious, they threw them both into a hospital-bound ambulance, despite Ade"s fervent protest. For the next few weeks Ade limped around campus.
But as soon as the wound in his leg healed, he headed back to his native Haiti. The island had been devastated by a major earthquake months before, another heart-breaking tragedy from Mother Earth. Before he left, he told Ashline that it was time to start wearing his father"s work boots, so to speak, and that there would be time to be a student-or a G.o.d-later. For now he needed to be a brother to humanity.
383.
Bobby Jones avoided Ashline completely after the dance. How much he remembered leading up to his electrocution, Ash would never know.
As for Ashline, she somehow flew under the radar.
Colt had lent her his white b.u.t.ton-down to cover her half-naked torso and had borrowed one of the thick fireman"s blankets to wrap around her body, so she wouldn"t hence-forth be known as "that girl whose clothes got burned off at the ball." Colt stayed with her on the dreadful bus ride back to campus. He mercifully waited to barrage her with questions about Eve, his kidnapping, and the events of the ball until the following day, when he took her to the hospital to get her broken rib attended to. Ashline was even more thankful when he willingly accepted the insane truth, or at least the abridged version that she recounted for him. Although, to be fair, he didn"t have much of a choice if he wanted answers. There weren"t too many explanations for what he"d witnessed while chained to the rock that wouldn"t have sounded utterly crazy.
But the greater miracle to Ashline was that Colt still doted upon her with the same unflagging pa.s.sion he had shown since the beginning. It was one thing for him to accept that the girl he was dating was a reincarnated Polynesian volcano G.o.ddess; it was another altogether to want to remain with her, even after she had seared her handprint into his chest and her crazy sister had nearly drowned him.
At night Ash would lie, sleepless, in her dormitory 384 bed. Sometimes, during her insomnia, she would get up and go to the window. But the quad was always empty.
Eve was truly gone.
On Monday of the next week, Ash was just finally drifting off into much-needed slumber when, with a rattle and a click, the door to the room popped open.
Her roommate, Hayley, walked in and flipped the light, fresh from her trip to Philadelphia, with a bag slung over her shoulder and her rolling suitcase in tow behind her.
"Hey, love," she greeted Ash, and dropped her duffel bag to the floor with a crash. "How was Spring Week? I miss anything exciting?"
Ash just stared at her.
It was the first week of summer, and they met exactly where they"d said they would.
At a marina in Santa Cruz, Ashline used her fake ID to charter a boat. With their precious cargo on board, she and Raja headed out into the open water.
They couldn"t have asked for a more beautiful day.
The setting sun glistened down on the ocean, and a warm June breeze had picked up over the Pacific. Their ride was quiet for the most part, even though they hadn"t seen each other in more than a month. Ash contented herself to steer while Raja hugged her knees to her chest and gazed out over the water.
They were nearly a mile out to sea when Ashline cut 385 the motor. The little white boat slowed to a drift.
"You ready?" she asked Raja.
The other girl nodded. The two of them stood up, unsteady at first until they got used to the gentle rocking of the boat. From a wicker basket Ashline carefully removed the urn containing the last of Rolfe"s ashes.
Some of them Ashline had already distributed over the Blackwood quad, while others Raja had taken with her, making a discreet trip to the house where Rolfe had grown up, to sow them under the dogwood tree in his garden.
Together they scattered all but one handful of the remaining ashes out into the open sea and watched the gray snow sink beneath the surface. Now a little part of Rolfe would always be in the ocean.
Raja took his favorite surfboard from where it was strapped to the back of the boat and laid it in the water, with the tip pointing toward the mainland. Ashline scooped the last of his ashes from the urn and sprinkled them over the long-board until it was speckled with the G.o.d once known as Baldur, but who to them would always be a boy called Rolfe.
Raja gave the surfboard a push toward the mainland. Rolfe would get to ride one last wave into sh.o.r.e, before some kid, perhaps, would discover the marooned long-board and adopt it for his own lifelong addiction to surfing.
"I hope there are towering waves wherever you are, Rolfey," Ashline said to the drifting surfboard. "So you can hang ten, or . . . whatever it is that surfers do."
386.
"I hope," said Raja, who had managed until now not to cry, "that the people there laugh at all your stupid jokes."
The two girls sat on the edge of the boat and let their feet dip into the water. After a few minutes had pa.s.sed, Ashline asked Raja, "Are you going to be okay?"
Raja"s chin quivered. For the first time since they"d arrived in Santa Cruz, Ashline noticed around Raja an aura of fear, which maybe indicated that something was troubling her beyond the untimely death of her boyfriend.
"I . . . ," Raja started, but stopped as soon as she had begun.
Ash slid closer to her, and tucked her arm around Raja"s waist. "It"s okay."
Raja sniffed and turned her attention to the depths where they had lain Rolfe"s ashes to rest. "I did something stupid. We did something stupid."
Ash frowned. "Who?"
"The night before the masquerade ball. After that whole thing in the forest with Lily . . . I don"t know what I was thinking. I . . . He didn"t think it was a good idea, but it was like I couldn"t help myself. I dragged Rolfe back to his room. We spent the whole night there."
"Did you . . . ?" Ashline let her question float away into the water with Rolfe"s surfboard.
Raja"s hands traveled up her thighs and stopped when they came to rest on her belly. "Ashline . . .
"I"m pregnant."
m 387.
When Ash returned home to Scarsdale two days after Rolfe"s funeral, she had a cardboard box waiting for her on her bed upstairs.
It was addressed to her from Serena, and according to the postmark, it had been sent on the last day of school, from Blackwood. Strange.
Ash peeled away the packing tape and slipped her hands into the sea of Styrofoam peanuts within.
Almost immediately her fingers settled on the paper.
And then the wooden dowels that the paper was wrapped around.
Even in the eighty-degree heat of the summer evening, Ashline"s skin turned to tundra.
Although there was no note inside-Ashline felt around the bottom of the package just to be sure-and although she couldn"t read its braille tag, she knew beyond a doubt that the scroll she was holding had once belonged to Rolfe Hanssen.
Ash carried it gingerly out to the porch, as if it could explode any second. Serena"s warning from the beach greeted her as she lowered herself carefully into the rocking chair.
Under no circ.u.mstances are you to share your messages with anyone else. Yet Serena had somehow gone through Rolfe"s belongings to collect this, had elected to violate her own rule, and had sent the scroll to her. "But why me?" Ashline whispered. Raja had been his girlfriend, and Ade his best friend.
Ash unfurled the scroll.
388.
The rays of the setting sun beat down on the ink-scrawled message on the page. Ashline"s breath caught.
She rolled the dowels back together, set the scroll down beside the rocking chair, and fixed her gaze on the lawn. It took her a moment to realize that she was staring at the spot in the gra.s.s where Lizzie Jacobs had landed, dead, when she"d rolled off the roof. But anywhere was better than looking at the instructions Jack had left for Rolfe.
Ashline"s scroll consisted of three words. Rolfe"s scroll consisted of only two.
PROTECT PELE.
The wind in her hair. Her leather jacket billowing behind her. The tingle of the sun against her face.
Ash wrapped her arms more tightly around Colt"s waist. In response he pushed the motorcycle faster. Even with the back of his head to her, she could practically feel him smiling.
On the last day of school, Colt and Ashline had returned to the Shelton Inn, to bid farewell to the scene of the crime. The inn was then a husk of what it had once been, and the demolition and rebuilding process was another few weeks from beginning. A long chain-link fence now surrounded the burned sh.e.l.l, but that didn"t stop Colt and Ashline from sneaking in and exploring the wreckage.
However, it had been what they"d found hidden in 389 the bushes just down the road from the Shelton that had made their trip back to the inn worthwhile.
Eve"s old Honda Nighthawk.
Now with only a week to go in June, Ashline had returned to California. When Ashline had told Colt she was planning a trip to Vancouver to find some answers about what her sister had been doing all this time, he had not only insisted on coming with her, but had also suggested they make a road trip out of it by riding the Nighthawk.
It was strange to be riding on the back of Eve"s bike with Colt at the helm, especially since she"d categorically refused to climb aboard every time Eve had invited her.
But here they were heading up the 101 along Oregon"s Pacific Coast Highway, taking the scenic route on their seven-hundred-mile journey north.