This was the second time that the gravitational pull of Colt’s plotting had latched onto Ash’s life like a tractor beam, and twisted and tore at it until she had nothing—and no one—left.
“Miss?”
The waiter was standing next to the table, looking beyond uncomfortable. He was trying his best to stay focused on Ash, but his eyes kept darting to the empty seat across from her.
Ash flicked the sake carafe. “Just bring me another pitcher of whatever this is.”
Thunder rolled down the strip, coming from the west, accompanied by a flash of light. “Heat lightning,” the waiter explained. A second flash and more thunder, only louder.
With the third clap of thunder, she heard a different sound, indiscernible at first, but then growing into something recognizable.
Screaming.
Lots of screaming.
Ash stood up just as the first person came running past her. Soon a current of shrieking people came sprinting down the pedestrian mall, heading east toward the water, engulfing the bystanders in their path and carrying them away. Ash had to retreat toward the restaurant to avoid being towed away in the swift tide of people.
The fourth time she heard the thunder, she knew it wasn’t thunder at all.
Explosions.
Explosions moving down the strip.
The remaining people who hadn’t already been swept away by the mob joined it as soon as they realized what they were hearing. She heard the words “terrorist attack” thrown around by a couple rushing past her.
Ash knew better.
The pedestrian mall rapidly emptied of everyone—even Ash’s waiter, who knocked her carafe of sake off the table in his rush to flee.
Then Ash saw the lone man coming determinedly down the strip. White-collared shirt unbuttoned halfway down his chest, sleeves rolled up to the elbows, dirty dreadlocks.
Rey.
Summer had arrived.
“Ashline Wilde!” he shouted.
He aimed his hand at the front of the restaurant a few doors down and across the street from Ash. A light blossomed in the air in front of the window, a miniature sun rotating rapidly, like a basketball spinning on an imaginary finger.
It condensed briefly.
Then it exploded outward.
The restaurant’s tinted windows shattered from top to bottom. The patio furniture near the explosion was blasted outward until it clattered down the Lincoln Road Mall. Somehow the diners inside had missed the chaos before, but they streamed out of the restaurant now, anywhere they could—some through the doors, and others through the gaping jaws of the windows.
“Ashline Wilde!” Rey shouted again. He was drawing near Ash’s position now, and he angled his hand this time at the restaurant where she was.
Rey noticed Ash immediately and stayed his hand—no explosion this time. “Ashline Wilde,” he repeated. “I am to escort you back to Villa Vizcaya, where you will meet your fate.”
Ash felt the first pinpricks of anger dilating beneath her skin. “Wow, as much as I’ve been meaning to meet my fate recently, I have to politely decline.” She pointed her thumb back at the restaurant. “See, I have a large sushi platter for two coming out any minute, and as you can see, I no longer have a date, so if you want to sit down and talk this out over some raw fish—”
Rey roared and thrust out his open hand. Another miniature sun detonated just in front of the sushi restaurant. The glass rained down from the window frame. The sushi chefs taking cover inside came sprinting out of the restaurant in a parade of white aprons and hats.
Ash winced and slapped her ear, which was singing from the explosion. “Look what you’ve done,” she said. “How are they going to finish making our order now?”
“I figured you’d put up a fight,” he said. An unhinged smile unzipped across his face. “If only your boyfriend had been more of a challenge.”
Ash’s breath caught in her throat. In all the time she’d spent waiting for Wes to come home, it had never occurred to her that he might be someplace worse than mourning. “Wes?” she choked out. “What have you done with him?”
“Caught him lurking around the Spanish monastery looking for his leafy little lass.” Rey snorted. “Predictable. Now you get to come and watch him live out his destiny as our next sacrifice.” His face darkened as he picked a cloth napkin off the nearest table. It erupted into flames, balled up in his hand. “Now I will roast him alive in front of the world, and bring him to justice for what he did to my girlfriend.”
“To your girlfriend?” Ash started to ask. And then it all clicked.
Bleak and Rey. Winter and summer, together as one.
And now Rey was blaming Wes for the icicle-shaped hole in his dead girlfriend’s back.
Well, it was time to set him straight. “Wes didn’t kill Bleak,” Ash said. “I did.”
“You?” Rey squinted at her. “You murdered my girlfriend?” Every time Ash had seen him before, he’d looked perpetually amused by nothing at all.
He wasn’t laughing now.
“What was I supposed to do, Rey?” she argued. “Bleak froze me to the surface of a pool and then came at me with a knife. Should I have just let her slit my throat?”
“Yes,” Rey said tersely.
“Glad this is going to be a rational conversation,” Ash mumbled.
He clutched his dreadlocks at the scalp level, like he wanted to rip them out, and his eyes scrunched shut in agony. When they reopened, his red eyes blazed with a deadly focus. “Then I can’t take you back to the villa. If I do, Lily will want to horde you for her own private revenge. But it’s Bleak’s life that you need to pay for, and you’ll pay for it right here, at my hands.”
“Listen,” Ash said. “I know what you must be feeling right now. I’ve spent the last week feeling my hatred bubble up for you people for kidnapping my sister and Ade. I’ve spent the last month thinking about what I’d like to do to Lily for killing my friend Rolfe back in California, and now for murdering Aurora last night. But as much as I’d like to set fire to those beeswax dreads of yours, let’s be smart enough not to start a firefight in the middle of the Lincoln Road Mall.” A chorus of sirens picked up from the north. “Hear that? Do you want to be here in ten minutes when the Air Force shows up on red alert because of your explosions?”
Rey unbuttoned his shirt and then threw it onto the ground. The guy was a mountain, close to three hundred pounds of sinewy muscle that could make most NFL linebackers run for the goalposts. “Do I look,” he said, “like a man who gives a shit about making a spectacle?”
“So what are we going to do, Rey?” she inquired. “Gods of fire who are both fireproof. Sounds like a stalemate, unless you want to have a good old-fashioned brawl. Maybe we could throw some chairs at each other?”
Rey responded by picking up the metal chair nearest him, stretching it over his head, and launching it full speed at Ash’s head.
She had to roll over a table to get out of its path. It hit the pavement and did several cartwheels until it smashed into the windows of the next restaurant over.
The table tipped over under Ash’s weight and she spilled onto the other side. Her elbows slammed against the ground and cut open. The pain invited her internal furnace to flicker on, and her eyes sparked when she looked up at Rey. She climbed to her feet. Reason was battling it out with her blossoming temper.
On the one hand, entering into a brawl with Rey wasn’t like her school yard brawl with Lizzie Jacobs last year. Rey was bigger and stronger and crazier, and, at least for the moment, more enraged than Ash.
But the scales of rage were quickly changing. Her temper flared. This man had helped expose the gods to the public, and life was about to become even more difficult because of it. He had taken her little sister. He had participated in a conspiracy that had resulted in Ade’s kidnapping and Aurora’s death, and now potentially Wes’s as well.
Ash wanted blood.
Rey held out his hands. “Just because my explos
ions won’t kill you because you’re fireproof”—an orb of fire twinkled to life in front of him and started to expand—“doesn’t mean the asphalt won’t kill you when you land.” The orb stretched rapidly, ready to burst.
Footsteps slapped across the pavement, and a figure hurled himself off the central island—Colt, who’d apparently been summoned by the sound of explosions. Rey may have weighed much more than him, but Colt struck him like a two-hundred-pound missile, and the larger boy went down. The sun that had been ready to burst fizzled out.
Colt turned to Ash, clearly straining to hold Rey’s face against the pavement. “Run, Ashline,” he ordered her. “Run!”
Colt’s arrival snapped Ash out of her trance. Her temper deflated long enough for her survival instincts to kick in. If she were to stick around—even if her flesh could handle the fire—one blast from Rey could break her neck. She found herself backing away at first, then turning and running from the two gods, who were slugging it out on the ground.
She chanced a look over her shoulder. Colt had picked up a chair and held it out like a battering ram as he charged toward Rey. However, the Incan sun god wasn’t to be bested by the trickster. From his crouched position on the ground, he flicked out a single finger, and an explosion detonated in the area in front of Colt. The trickster god flew up into the air, over the center island, and into a second-story window across the boulevard. Even despite all that Colt had lied about, Ash experienced a fleeting urge to turn around and see if he was all right. But he was the one with regenerative powers, not Ash, so she turned up the heat and ran faster.
Once she had safely crossed Collins Avenue and approached the terminus of Lincoln Road, she thought she’d made it safely away from Rey. Her trail was silent except for the growing wail of sirens and the fluttering of helicopters overhead, circling the mall farther inland. If only the authorities really knew what they were looking for.
She heard the explosion at almost the same time that the fireball hit her back. The impact carried her body up off the road, over the beach boardwalk, and into the trees. Her back bounced off the trunk of a palm before she tumbled out through its fronds and onto the beach beyond.
The impact against the beach was even worse. Sand splashed up around her, and by the time she rolled to a stop, she was unable to breathe. It felt like two cannonballs had replaced her lungs.
Her vision was blurry with tears, but she could still see Rey’s burning upper body emerge through the palms onto the beach.
“You have an awful lot of men who want to fight your battles for you,” he called out as he approached. “But they cannot protect you. Just like I couldn’t be there to protect Bleak before you ripped her life away from her. Now you’ll die knowing that you were too late to save your love, your all-powerful Aztec night god, from sacrifice.”
Ash staggered to her feet and launched a fireball at him, which he easily deflected away. It struck the white lifeguard tower, which erupted into flames. Rey followed up with an exploding sun that, with her injuries, Ash was too slow to dodge. The world rotated like she’d been trapped in a cement mixer.
When her body finally came to rest, she tried to open her eyes, but the vertigo was too much for her. She let her head rest on the sand, pressed against the cool grains, so that she could hear Rey’s footsteps approach.
“Now as far as your final resting place goes . . . ,” Rey said.
Ash kept her eyes closed. She burrowed her hands into the beach.
“Would you like to be buried on the beach for some kid with a sand pail to find?”
Ash reached out with her mind, deep into the earth. Searched for that thread of power somewhere beneath the earth’s crust that she had tapped into for centuries. If I can make islands, she thought.
“Or would you rather I scatter your limbs at sea as shark bait?”
Then I can take care of this asshole.
Rey came to a stop on the sand just a few yards in front of her. She could hear his jeans stretch as he crouched down. “I thought I’d be humane and give you a choice,” he said.
The sand beneath them trembled. Ash finally opened her eyes. “I’m not that thoughtful,” she said. “You don’t get a choice.”
The magma, with the heat of a fledgling sun, penetrated up through the earth’s surface, instantly liquefying the beach under Rey’s feet. He didn’t even have time to look surprised—his body just plunged deep into the fiery pool, where the heat had transformed the sand into molten glass.
The high temperatures, Ash knew, couldn’t kill him. He managed to swim to the surface, his body a uniform, glowing orange form covered in the smoldering glass. Ash could feel the heat radiate off him while he blindly attempted to melt the goop off his body.
This wasn’t a battle she was going to lose. She stepped up to where Rey was floundering to climb his way out. Bubbles were forming in the molten rock over his mouth as he struggled to breathe. His fingers clawed away enough of the liquid glass that he could burble out a single word for Ash to hear:
“Bleak.”
“You’ll see her soon,” Ash whispered. She pulled back her hands, siphoning the heat swiftly away from the volcanic vent that had ruptured onto the beach.
The earthen cocktail of lava and glass cooled.
Rey’s coating of glass dimmed from orange to beige to gray.
His movement slowed.
His articulations stiffened.
In his final moments, with his legs still halfway buried in the vent, he extended his hand out toward the ocean.
Then he was still. Rey died, an enormous glass statue frozen in time like some sort of twisted wax figurine.
Ash struggled not to fall to her knees exhausted, because there was no time. Across the dark moonlit beach she could see beachgoers converging on her location. The lifeguard stand was still burning and drawing the late-night walkers to it like a bug zapper. It was only a matter of time before they discovered Rey and his glass coffin as well.
She heard Colt screaming her name back in the direction of the street. He had bought her time just now, for sure, but the last thing she needed was him tagging along on her rescue mission to save Wes. As much as she didn’t want to walk into a death trap alone, as much as his regenerative abilities might prove useful, Colt had been the catalyst for all the bloodshed that had happened in Miami, all so he could get to her little sister—and Ash had no intention of leading him right to Rose.
She fled back across the beach and onto the boardwalk, and began to navigate through the streets of South Beach to the garage where her scooter was parked.
Rey had said they were holding Wes back at the Villa Vizcaya.
And if Lily and Thorne were there waiting for her . . .
Well, she couldn’t disappoint them, could she?
BURNING BLOSSOMS
Monday
As Ash drove over the bay to Villa Vizcaya, the night sky was filled with lights. Helicopters buzzed overhead, circling the scene of the explosions back at the Lincoln Road Mall. Ash knew it was only a matter of time before the military and National Guard came to close off the bridge, and she might be too late to save Wes if she had to seek an alternate route.
Ash abandoned her bike just off the road. She wasn’t about to waste time climbing over the front gates to the villa, so she burned herself an Ash-size hole right through them.
The villa itself was dark, its visiting hours long since over. But Ash knew that Thorne and Lily both seemed to enjoy putting on a show, and if they were going to film another sacrifice, the best place to do it was the same place where they’d performed for the media last week.
Up on the Mound.
Ash followed the path around the side of the villa to the gardens. Now that she was out of earshot from the sirens and helicopters, an eerie calm had descended around her. Even the fountains had been turned off for the night. Had Rey sent her to the wrong place? Was this going to be like Aurora’s death? Was Ash going to stumble upon a big-screen television that would sh
ow her Wes dying, someplace out of reach, too far away for her to get to in time?
When she rounded the corner, however, she knew with a mixture of relief and dreadful certainty that she’d come to the right place.
The beautiful, well-manicured formal gardens, the ones that led the length of half a football field to the Mound, had been transformed into a wild, unkempt rain forest.
Ash wandered forward into the new wilderness and lit a soft glow on the torch of her hand, just enough to make sure she didn’t walk into a snare or pitfall. All around her, tall tropical trees had grown at odd angles like crooked teeth, some of which looked like transplants from the Amazon. Then there were more familiar-looking trees—cypress trees, mangroves . . . and of course small redwoods and sequoias mixed in with the rest. As if Lily needed to leave a calling card for Ash to know who had done all this.
Things only grew stranger the deeper Ash penetrated into this twisted little enchanted forest that Lily had put together. Spanish moss clung to the crisscrossing tree limbs and draped down in curtains, green cobwebs that made visibility difficult.
Then there were the flowers, so many flowers. Thick beds of violets clinging to the forest floor, where they had chewed through the stone path and pulverized it into loose gravel. Orchids crawled up the side of a nearby redwood. Ash had to skirt around a bed of Jurassic-size roses that had thorns so big and thick they could qualify as tusks.
All this time she’d been wondering how Lily’s “construction” had gone unnoticed. Sure, the museum was closed for the night, and the police had their hands full at the crime scene across the bay, but wouldn’t security have noticed this severe landscaping issue by now?
Ash stepped up to the moat that surrounded the central island. In between the leaves and lily pads that coated the water, she saw two lumps floating at the surface. Their bodies bobbed facedown, but both the corpses wore gray security uniforms and black utility belts. A silent radio drifted not far from them.
It was when Ash leapt over the moat onto the center island that she spotted the first camera. It had been crudely bolted to one of the trees, and must have had a motion detector, because it swiveled to peer at her, like a vulture gawking down from its perch at potential carrion.