“We have watched over your world for longer than you know,” Jack continued, “and we have grown to respect it, to admire it. It has all the makings of what we wish to call home. The unpredictability. The coexistence of so many different climates and landscapes and organisms, all stitched together like a patchwork quilt. And because we have been charged with overseeing your people, it would certainly facilitate our efforts to cohabit the planet with you.”
“Or it would at least shorten your commute,” Ash added. Jack cocked his head to the side. “Never mind,” she said. “So what’s keeping you from making the big move? You seem to already enjoy haunting forests, high school campuses, and airport bathrooms when you feel the urge. If you’re worried about what the humans will think if you reveal yourself, I’m sure they’ll eventually warm up to being neighbors with an oil slick who has a blue bonfire for an eye.”
“Perhaps,” Jack mused. “But we have one big problem. Something happens to us when we are around your kind. What your people do not recognize is that your propensity for violence—the humans, yes, but specifically the gods—creates an atmosphere that is poisonous to us.”
Ash squinted into Jack’s flame. “You’re allergic . . . to hate?”
“In a word. It corrupts us. When we stay for long, we lose our sentience, our eloquence as you so eloquently put it. We transform from what you see now into the shadows of your vengeful hearts. Wild. Confused. Snarling. Wrathful. We drown in it. And we have had enough.”
The way that Jack said “enough” sent Ash reeling back a few steps. She could feel the lip of the platform under her heel, and reminded herself to be more careful. One wrong step, and she could tumble right off the edge of the world and into the great void.
“In the beginning we thought that since the gods retained their memories from life to life, so too would they retain their wisdom. We thought that they would return to your world with an even better understanding each time, and guide the mortals who had only one life to live, one life to learn. But it worked just the opposite. Instead of acquiring wisdom, you simply acquired grudges. Memories of past grievances turned to century-long feuds, which generated violence and seething hatred. So a few centuries ago we attempted to remedy this the best way we knew how.”
“You took our memories from us,” Ash said.
“We gave you the gift of a fresh start. But even that failed to end the violence . . . in part because one of the worst perpetrators of lies and hatred managed to hold on to his memories. Colt Halliday is a virus. Without your memories you gods might live your whole lives without ever tracking each other down, but every time he comes back, he spins a new web that snares old rivalries and ignites extinguished fires. And you, Pele . . . well, he can’t help but make you the centerpiece to his grand web.”
“Do you think I asked for that?” Ash yelled. “Do you know what I’d give to have never met him?”
“Good.” Jack nodded. “You are angry. And you should be. Because if Colt is not stopped, he will destroy your world in due time. This I promise you, Ashline Wilde.”
“Oh, I’m angry.” Ash’s voice trembled. “But not just at him—at you, too. You could come to our world and grab him, plug him into this freaky little tree of yours, and be done with it. Instead you sent a blind girl with a bunch of cryptic nonsensical messages to get us to do the heavy lifting for you. Then you give me visions of my little sister with no instructions, when you could go protect her yourself. It’s like it’s some kind of board game for you.”
In a flash Jack had glided up to Ash. He leered down at her. “There are rules, Pele. Rules more ancient than you or us. We have been charged to watch over you, to be your gamekeepers, but there are lines even we will not cross.”
“As sanctioned by whom?” Ash shouted. “You have all this power, and you’re trying to tell me that I’ve watched two of my friends die because you’re afraid to cross some imaginary line?”
Jack leaned even closer. As he grew angry, his body was starting to lose its humanoid shape and revert back to the monstrous Cloak she recognized from earth. “The Cloak are meant to oversee the gods. The gods are meant to oversee mankind. Our charge is to watch and protect, but not to intervene. Your people have degenerated into violent chaos precisely because you meddled with the humans. You mated with them, you hurt them . . . you killed them.” Jack finally took a hold of himself, and the edges of his body narrowed back to its humanoid shape. “We will gently guide and mentor your people, but we will not—what is your term for it?—take out your trash for you.”
“Well,” Ash said, “at least we can both agree to call Colt Halliday trash.”
“There is, however,” Jack said, “one exception we’ve agreed to make, where we will cross that line.” He placed his hand on Ash’s shoulders and guided her around so she was looking at the tree again. She shuddered under his touch; it felt as empty as the oblivion behind them. “This is the Tree of Life. It is what renews us from the poisonous hate of your world. It is our oxygen. It is also the only thing strong enough to imprison those gods and goddesses that we have chosen to—how do you say it?—take offline. Those like Evelyn who have, over the years, proven themselves consistently carcinogenic to your world. Here, they are given a chance to exist in tandem with life rather than destroying it, to toil and feed into the tree. It is our hope that in existing for the good of another creature, these gods will eventually be rehabilitated.”
Jack toed a line in the snow as he continued. “There is a boundary that a god like yourself must cross first before we will finally touch you in your own world. You must first have become such a malignant life force that someone who loves you actually desires you harm. In Evelyn’s case she did enough psychological violence to you that you were finally willing to stop her, at any cost. Only then were we able to take her.”
Ash kicked snow over the line Jack had drawn. “Good luck applying your rules to Colt; I’m not sure anyone could ever truly love him.” But that wasn’t true, was it? She’d felt strongly enough to marry him the life before, had doted amorously over him when he was alive, had grieved deeply after he was murdered. If he hadn’t revealed himself after the car accident, and they’d continued on that motorcycle ride up to Vancouver uninterrupted, she could have easily developed deep feelings for him in this life as well. After all, she’d let her guard drop completely after their romantic photography trip in the woods.
“In fact, we did try to rehabilitate him,” Jack said. “Just once, nearly two centuries ago.”
Ash gazed up at the towering tree, and tried to picture Colt wired into it, his hair matted against his forehead and his eyes hollow. “What happened?”
“The tree began to rot and wither. Rather than nourishing it, his mere presence flowed like a slow poison into the branches and down the trunk.”
“I’m not surprised that Colt doesn’t have a green thumb,” Ash said. “He’s toxic to people, too.”
“Then you also realize how important it is that you carry out the mission we have charged you with,” Jack said. “You are remarkably powerful, and perhaps the only one capable of getting close to Colt. For that, we have chosen you as our emissary and our chief hope. Should you fail, then your world and your people . . .” Jack whistled. Above, the raven in the tree cawed and dove for Jack’s waiting wrist. Just as it was about to land, Jack swatted it with his other hand. The raven exploded into a thousand snowflakes.
Jack didn’t finish his sentence. Ash got the picture just fine.
“Listen,” Ash said. “I want to help you out. I do. You’ve been far more inviting and helpful than most of the other people in my life. But as dangerous as I know Colt is, I would be every bit as monstrous as he is if I didn’t put family first.” She pointed at Eve’s body, and she was surprised when the tears welled in her eyes. “That’s my sister. She’s not perfect and she never will be. But I’m not leaving without her.”
“Very well.” Jack glided toward the tree and motioned with a curled fing
er for Ash to follow. The line of Cloak parted to let them through. “But there is one final thing you should know before you decide whether we release Evelyn Wilde to you.”
Ash frowned. “I’ve come this far, haven’t I? What could you possibly tell me that would change my mind about freeing my sister?”
Jack paused. “That Evelyn Wilde is not your sister at all.”
It felt like a major league baseball player had taken a sledgehammer to her stomach. “What?” was all she could manage.
“Did you ever do any research on your namesake, Pele?” Jack inquired. “With all the technology your people have now, there’s really no excuse.”
“It’s kind of hard to justify sitting down with an encyclopedia or a Polynesian mythology text when people are dying around you. I know that Pele was the goddess of volcanoes, but I don’t know what that has to do with Eve.”
Jack shook his head. “Volcanoes are only part of it. If you’d done your research, you would have known that Pele was the goddess of volcanoes, yes, but she was also the goddess of storms and explosions.”
Another blow to Ash’s gut. This time she actually staggered on her feet. “Are you telling me that . . .”
“We see one where you see three. We say ‘you’ where you say ‘we.’”
Ash trembled. “This is not the appropriate time to speak in your cryptic rhymes and riddles.”
“We call you the Candelabra,” Jack explained. He held out his hand, and the snow levitated off the ground and congealed over his palm. When it had finished molding together, it formed a white three-pronged candlestick. “Three heads, three flames . . . one vessel. You see, Pele was once the most powerful god to walk the planet. But she was too powerful. Too destructive. Too wild to contain. Because of this, two lifetimes ago we finally had to cross the line and do what we thought was best: separate Pele into three pieces, three abilities, three personalities. An unpredictable summoner of storms. An impetuous, destructive wielder of explosions . . . And a cunning volcano goddess.”
“No,” Ash whispered. “I am not her. She is not me. We are not the same.” The last part came out as a growl.
“A branch may produce two apples, one flawless and one rotten to the core,” Jack mused. “That does not mean they aren’t still fruits of the same tree.”
Ash could feel her sense of individuality withering away by the moment. It was as though she’d lived her whole life trying to blaze her own trail for herself, only to find out that she wasn’t whole at all. She was just a fragment, a shard of a whole being. “You have a look-but-don’t-touch policy with everyone else, but it was okay for you to cut my soul like a ten-dollar pizza? What gives you the right?”
The Cloak had formed a ring around her at this point. She could only guess that they were banking on her taking the news poorly. “We thought we could save you from rehabilitation. Pele made this fate for herself. Colt Halliday has romanced your last five incarnations not because opposites attract. Intact, Pele was just like him. Worse, perhaps. By separating you into three parts—the Spark, the Fuse, and the Flame—we have given you each a chance to redeem your past.”
Ash’s knees no longer felt sturdy beneath her, and she almost collapsed into the snow. “What else can I possibly do to redeem myself?” she asked weakly. She’d completely given up her normal life. She’d saved some friends, and watched others die. She’d survived a tsunami, car accidents, a fall off a skyscraper, and even a lynching.
She wasn’t sure how much she had left to give.
“That question brings us to the business of Evelyn’s bail, as your people call it. We will let the Spark go only on the condition that you fulfill the mission we have assigned you. And so we ask you now, Ashline Wilde, do you promise to stop the trickster Colt Halliday?” He extended his black hand and waited.
In the previous week Ash had taken the lives of three gods. But those had all been in self-defense, for the purposes of her own survival. Did she have what it takes to seek out a man, a man whom she’d known intimately over many lives, and rip his life away from him? His scheming had facilitated woe and tragedy, but Ash had never witnessed Colt commit an act of murder himself.
It took only one look at Eve for Ash to make up her mind. She had no choice but to agree for now, even if she had no intention of carrying out the Cloak’s wish. If what they had said was true, there wasn’t much they could do to Ash unless she was harmed by someone who loved her. “Consider it done,” she said. She seized Jack’s hand, and under his touch the nerves all the way up her arm lost their sensation for a moment.
With a sound like wet paper tearing in half, the fibers supporting Eve’s body snapped at once. She was spluttering and coughing only moments after she hit the ground. Her retching made her whole body convulse into a ball while she vomited a green concoction onto the virgin snow.
When the vomiting turned to dry heaves, Eve finally looked up and noticed her audience—thirty blue flame eyes and Ash. She snarled and backed up toward the tree like a cornered rabid dog, waiting to attack.
“Eve, it’s okay.” Ash treaded carefully toward her and pumped the air brakes. “You’re just a little disoriented.”
Eve didn’t say anything, but she held up her arms, examined the tender burns scarred into her wrists.
“There will be time to play the blame game later,” Ash said. “For now, do you want to get out of here and back to earth”—she motioned to Jack and the crowd of Cloak—“or would you rather these gentlemen turn you back into a tree ornament?”
Eve remained tense for a few more moments. Then her body relaxed and slumped against the tree. She let her back slide down until she was sitting against the base of the trunk. Then she pressed her face into her hands and began to weep.
Ash sighed. Fantasies of Eve trying to electrocute the Cloak and subsequently being cast into the oblivion faded from her imagination.
She joined Eve beneath the tree and sat beside her. Weird as it felt for her nurturing instincts to take over, she wrapped her arm around Eve’s quaking shoulders. “Everything’s going to be okay now, Eve.”
Eve stopped crying long enough to peel her face from her tear-soaked fingers. Her bloodshot eyes studied Ash. “You came for me,” she said finally.
“You would have done the same for me,” Ash offered.
This actually evoked some choked laughter from Eve. “Like hell I would. You know better than to credit me with any selflessness. But you . . . After all that happened between us, why would you come for me?”
“Because . . .” Ash glanced at Jack just briefly before she gave the only explanation that made sense to her right now:
“Because you’re my big sister.”
Ash knew she shouldn’t have expected the Wilde sisters to have a family game night around the fireplace for their first Monday evening reunited, but this was ridiculous.
After the Cloak had released them from the underworld, the three sisters had camped out on the roof deck to Wes’s penthouse, where the fickle Miami weather had gone from stormy to spotless in a matter of hours. Rose always seemed more at home when she was outdoors, and Ash figured that Eve was probably feeling fairly claustrophobic after being cocooned in a tree for the last month. At the very least the weather goddess was probably anxious to be back in an atmosphere that she could control.
Now Rose stood ankle-deep in the roof pool, staring down into the water. Eve was leaning on the glass railing with her attention turned to the sky. Whenever she snapped her fingers, lightning bolts would flash between the fluffy clouds overhead.
Ash, meanwhile, was having trouble finding any words to say to either of her sisters. With Eve the problem was that they already had so much history between them. With Rose the problem was that they didn’t have any history.
Finally Ash couldn’t bear the silence any longer, so she climbed out of her pool chair and stepped into the shallow end with Rose. She placed a tentative hand on the little girl’s shoulder. “Did they have pools where you lived b
efore?”
Instead of answering the question, Rose frowned and pointed at the water. “Where are the fish?”
“They’re in the sea.” Ash’s eyes suddenly lit up, and she knelt next to Rose, ignoring the water that seeped through her jeans. “If you like fish, how about I take you to the aquarium tomorrow?” The word “aquarium” only got a blank stare from Rose, so Ash started to pantomime a box shape with her hands. “It’s a big, uh, cage that you can see through, where they take fish of all sizes and color from the ocean and put them on display, so people can watch them swim around.”
“They take the fish from their home?” Rose asked sadly. She turned away from Ash and whispered, “They should put them back.”
Ash sighed and retracted her hand from Rose’s shoulder. She should have known better than to think Rose would want to see animals in captivity, after she had been treated like one for the last few months.
Ash wandered over to Eve, who had had almost no words for Rose since the two had finally met, which was strange and frustrating, since it was originally Eve’s idea to track down their third sister. “Easy on the thunderbolts, there, Zeus,” Ash said.
Eve bristled. “Sorry,” she said. “Guess I got carried away thinking about what I’d like to do to a certain supernatural tree. And its oily black gardeners.” Even as she said it, Ash could scarcely hear any of the typical edge in her voice, as though the will to fight had fled her altogether.
Ash had been struggling all day with whether or not she should tell Eve about the Candelabra, about how the Cloak had carved the soul of Pele into three “siblings.” But Eve had barely had time to adjust to being back on earth, and selfishly Ash wasn’t ready to untangle how the news might further complicate their already thorny relationship.