woods, our land before time began.
Treasure them.
She reached for the envelope that had dropped to the ground and pulled out the two photographs she had missed before. There, in the first picture, were Ash and Colt, smiling stupidly in their blindfolds. Ash had never seen a photograph where she’d looked any happier.
But something was wrong with the background of the image. Ash staggered over to the lamp and squinted closer. Faint in the area behind them, where there should have just been forest, was a distortion, what looked like a blue thumbprint hanging in the air.
Ash frowned. A trick of the setting sun? Maybe it was 322
just a lens flare, or Colt had botched this batch of photographs when he’d developed them.
She flipped to the next picture.
This was the photograph of the two of them kissing for the first time. Her hands held his head tenderly, and their lips looked like they were two puzzle pieces made to fit together.
Directly behind them and looming over their heads was a gigantic black creature with a blue flame for an eye.
The Cloak stood facing the camera dead-on, with the two of them in profile.
A picture may have been worth a thousand words, but this one said three words loud and clear: We are watching.
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MIDNIGHT MOVIE
Thur
sda
y
“We there yet?” Jackie asked. She tugged at the sleeve of Darren’s sweater, causing him to jerk the steering wheel to the side.
“Jesus!” Darren shouted as the truck careened onto the shoulder of the road. Ash, Jackie, and Raja, who were squished into the cab of the pickup without seat belts, all pancaked together to the left. With a spin of the wheel the truck fishtailed back onto the 101, this time sending the three girls toppling to the right.
Finally he straightened the truck out and skewered Jackie with a scathing look. “Are you completely bonkers, Cutter?”
She blinked at him. “You didn’t answer my question.”
He sighed and reached for the radio. “Ten more minutes,” he said, as Garth Brooks’s “Friends in Low Places”
bellowed out of the speakers. Jackie opened her mouth to 324
say something else, but he cranked the radio up to drown her out.
Ash laughed, grateful that she’d called the seat next to the window. She was enjoying the light spring breeze on her face. Overnight Berry Glenn’s mysterious light coating of snow had melted with the evening rain, and with each degree that the temperature of the afternoon air climbed, it felt as though Eve must be that much farther away.
Eventually the forest thinned as the Redwood Highway approached the coast, until the trees gave way completely and they were running parallel to the ocean.
A string of cars cluttered the sandy shoulder of the highway, where local residents and sea-starved travelers alike wheeled coolers onto the beach. A few brave souls had waded into the water wearing wet suits, but the rest of the beachgoers sat safely away from the hypothermic ocean in favor of beach chairs and brightly colored umbrellas.
They passed a string of inns and motels before rolling by the marina and into Crescent City. After a couple of ninety-degree turns in the labyrinth of one-level buildings, the GPS announced their arrival at the women’s clothing boutique.
Darren threw the car into park. “Out,” he ordered roughly, and pointed to the curb.
The three girls tumbled out of the cab. Ashline leaned through the open truck window. “You mean you’re not coming dress shopping with us?” she whined 325
with mock disappointment. “I could really use a male opinion.”
“While debating chiffon and silk and up dos sounds like a hot heap of fun,” Darren replied as he typed a new destination into his GPS, “I’m going to politely decline.
First of all, we both know you’re not my ‘type.’” He winked at her. “And since Patrick is coming all the way up from Santa Monica for this shit-show of a dance, I need a haircut so I don’t look like a total surfer bro. No offense to your date,” he added to Raja, who was lingering outside the car.
“None taken,” Raja said.
With the promise to pick them up in two hours, Darren lurched the truck forward with the screech of rubber on asphalt, and he was off to the salon.
It took trips to three different stores before the girls at last found dresses to their liking. Jackie decided she wanted to be “sultry” and picked out a strapless black number.
In honor of the newfound nice weather, Raja chose something lacy and knee-length from the spring collection. The dress clung to the curves of her body like a second skin. When she emerged from the dressing room and twirled in front of the mirror, even Ashline couldn’t keep her jaw from spilling open. “Damn, girl,” Ash said. “You better get a defibrillator to go with the dress, because Rolfe is going to have a heart attack when he sees you in that.”
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The mirror wasn’t big enough to contain the smile on Raja’s face.
Ash was still having trouble settling on a dress after fifteen minutes of browsing at the third boutique. She could tell Raja and Jackie were starting to squirm, so she offered to let them go do their own thing in the city.
Raja grinned lasciviously. “I do need to find some matching lingerie to go with my new dress.”
Ash raised her eyebrow.
“What? It’s just in case.”
“I didn’t say anything,” Ash said.
“Maybe not with your mouth, but your eyes just called me a slut.” She held up her phone as she backed toward the door. “Call me when you’re ready to move on to shoes.”
Jackie lingered, but Ash made a shooing motion toward the door. “You’re relieved of your best friend dress-finding duties as well.”
“You sure? I was thinking of making a visit to the optometrist. My glasses don’t exactly match the dress.
Maybe it’s time to make the transition to contact lenses.”
“So Ade can stare longingly into your eyes?”
Jackie stepped on Ashline’s toe hard enough to make her squeak, but added “Love you, boo!” as she disappeared out of the boutique.
After a good deal of searching the racks, Ash spied a red chiffon dress hidden on the clearance rack. She couldn’t find any stains or rips, and, most important, it 327
matched her new earrings. She headed for the dressing room.
She was admiring the dress in the hallway mirror—it was perfect—when she felt the umbra of someone lurking in one of the dressing room doors. At first she panicked and thought that it was Eve, back to torture her, and maybe tear her new dress to shreds.
But the woman watching her from the doorway was not Eve. This woman was blond and beautiful, though her makeup couldn’t hide the age lines around the corners of her eyes. She had a distinguished, educated air to her, though she was cut from a different stock than Headmistress Riley.
“I think red is your color,” the woman complimented her. “Va-voom.”
“Thanks.” Ash smiled into the mirror. She turned from her left side to her right to make sure the dress looked slimming on her stomach and hips, before twirl-ing to see how it looked from behind. “This is a nice little boutique you own here.”
“Oh, I don’t work here,” the woman replied. “But I do want to find the store clerk to ask if that dress comes in fireproof.”
Ashline’s fingers tightened around the strap that she had been adjusting. “Excuse me?”
“Chiffon.” The woman pointed to the dress. “Catches fire easily. You might want something heat-resistant.
Maybe with asbestos insulation.”
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In a moment like this Ash knew there were two options: She could feign ignorance, play like she didn’t know what the woman was talking about; or, since the former wasn’t likely to work, she could play the dangerous you-don’t-want-to-mess-with-me role.
She chose the latter.
“I’ll gi
ve you five seconds to explain yourself.” She spread her fingers. “Before I send you running for a fire extinguisher. Five, four—”
“Whoa, slow down there, Smoky—”
Ash lifted her eyes to the ceiling. “Three. I’d be surprised if this sprinkler system even functions. Two . . .”
“I sent the mercenaries after you,” the woman blurted out.
“Aren’t you supposed to be making a case for why I shouldn’t burn you alive?”
“I promise I’m not here to hurt you. I’ll tell you what.”
She gestured to the street. “I’m going to go stand out on the curb. I’ll let you pay for your dress—it really is quite beautiful—and if you want to talk, I’ll be outside. At this point I wouldn’t blame you if you decided to sneak out the back.”
Ash nodded. “I guess that’s fair. But if there’s a horde of guerillas out on the street waiting to tranquilize me . . .”
“As if you and your friends left me with any guerillas,” she said. “I’ll see you in five.”
Ash changed back into her jeans and T-shirt, and 329
she approached the cash register with the little red dress.
As she reached into her handbag for her credit card, the young cashier waved her hand. “No need, miss. That dress is already paid for.”
“Who . . . ?” Ash started to say, but her answer was standing outside next to a fire hydrant.
“Thank you?” Ash said as the bell hanging over the door jingled, announcing her exit.
“The least I could do,” the woman said. “And I certainly can’t let you go to a masquerade ball in that lovely orange jumpsuit you were wearing on Sunday. I’m Lesley Vanderbilt.” She offered her hand.
Ash took it hesitantly, and they started walking in the direction of the water.
“You’ll forgive me if I’m a little disturbed that, over the course of four days, you’ve gone from attempting to capture me and my friends for some sort of science experiment, to buying me a dress and walking with me to the beach.”
“Science experiment? Capture you?” Lesley made an amused sound. “I knew those mercenaries would never make it out of that canyon.”
“Why the hell would you pay a group of ex-soldiers to
. . .” But the answer dawned on Ashline even as she asked the question. “You just wanted to see what we could do.”
“Your people are very shy about your abilities, and with good reason. The only way to get you to show what you’re really made of is to back you into a corner, 330
so to speak. The caged and cornered animal will eventually bear its claws. So I staged a kidnapping of a girl that my team has identified as a siren, and when that didn’t coax you out of your shells, I had to bring in the firepower.”
“You did this so you could spectate from the trees?”
She regarded the woman’s blazer with no small touch of derision. “I guess the Roman aristocrats who had season tickets to the gladiator fights were always the well-dressed ones.”
“I instigated that firefight in the canyon because for the last eight months I’ve thought that you were the person I was looking for. I needed to be sure, and I was hoping you would reveal yourself. But it’s recently come to my attention that the one I’m looking for is actually somebody else.”
“Who, then?”
They had finally reached the ocean, where the road culminated in a small parking lot that overlooked the jagged rocks and, beyond that, the Pacific. In the distance the sun was going down behind Battery Point lighthouse and the small island it sat upon. With the orange sunset as its backdrop, it looked as though the lighthouse were burning.
“The woman I’m looking for,” Lesley said at last, “is Evelyn Wilde.”
Out on the shoreline the waves crashed onto the rocks, sending a plume of water high into the air.
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“Why are you looking for my sister?”
Lesley clasped her hands behind her back. “I’ve been keeping tabs on news stories about lightning strikes, electrocutions, and other weather phenomena for some time now. About eight months ago I hit the treasure chest I’d been looking for—a sophomore at Scarsdale High School, Elizabeth Jacobs, struck by lightning in an accident on the roof of somebody’s house—your house—and you were the only witness. Further digging revealed reports of strange weather patterns that same day. Snow in September?
Unlikely.”
“I can suggest a few less morbid and more productive hobbies than researching weather anomalies and freak accidents,” Ash suggested.
“Accidents?” Lesley barked. Her calm façade evaporated violently. “Let me spell it out for you. In 1929
my grandfather was murdered by a Polynesian storm goddess.”
Ash opened her mouth to argue, but Lesley plowed on. “I inherited all of his journals and captain’s logs, so I know all about you people and your rebirth. During the prohibition of the 1920s, my grandfather was a rumrunner. To make his living he smuggled liquor between the Bahamas and Miami. With the coast guard on watch, it was a nearly impossible task . . . until he met your sister. She teamed up with him in exchange for a sizable take of the profits. Every time my grandfather’s boat would come to port with a new shipment, 332
a fog would conveniently roll over Biscayne Bay, and fierce waves would batter away any curious boats. They partnered like this for three years.
“Then,” she continued, “one night shortly after my grandmother gave birth to her only child—my father—
my grandfather didn’t come home. They found him tied to the hull of his ship, fully frostbitten at his extremities and his body still cooling from where the lightning had struck him.”
Ashline’s stomach ached. She could still remember the smell of Lizzie Jacob’s burned flesh under the falling rain as she lay beside her in the grass. “Why would Eve do that?”
“I don’t know.” Lesley sneered. “He was too dead to write another journal entry about it.”
“Listen.” Ash took Lesley by the elbow. “Even if my sister did do that to your grandfather, if his journals were as thorough as you say they are, you’d know that Eve has no recollection of her former lives. Why bother? All for a grandfather you never met?”
“Especially because I never met my grandfather.”
Lesley jerked her arm free from Ashline’s hold. “My grandmother made Dad promise not to hunt your sister down. He vowed to anyway, for the father he never knew, but Evelyn died before he could get to her. Now my father is in a nursing home and doesn’t even remember who he is. So it’s my responsibility to find your sister.
I don’t give a damn if she doesn’t remember murdering 333
my grandfather. Judging from what happened to your friend Lizzie, your sister is programmed to kill.”
Eve’s words from yesterday echoed in Ashline’s ears.
Do you think it happens this way every time?
Do you think, maybe in the other times, I wasn’t the bad girl?
“So you sent a squad of mercenaries to their death just in the hopes that I would shoot lightning bolts from my hands, or make it snow?”
“It didn’t occur to me until after watching your tennis match yesterday that I had the wrong sister all along.”
“And what will you do if you capture her?”
“I’m hoping to find a way to dig into that brain of hers. Unlock her past memories. Find out what really happened with my grandfather.” Lesley looked to the horizon; two tall rocks offshore framed the sun between them like fingers holding a burning marble. “And then I’m going to take a gun and find out if she’s bulletproof.”
“Don’t expect me to help you with that.” Ash started to walk away. “I’ve heard enough.”
It was Lesley’s turn to catch her by the elbow. “You have an obligation—to my grandfather, to Elizabeth Jacobs, to every family your sister has yet to ruin in this lifetime—to bring her to me. I’ve seen the way she is with you; whatever violence moves the soul of Evelyn Wilde, t
here’s something magnetic that binds the two of you.
You know that you will never lead a normal life as long as she’s alive to haunt you.” Ash slapped her hand away, 334
and headed up the street. “You must bring her to me!”
Lesley screamed.
Ash turned and jabbed a warning finger back at Lesley. “You keep playing with a kite in a thunderstorm, and sooner or later you’re going to get struck by lightning too. From now on stay the hell away from me, my sister, and my friends.” As an afterthought she held up her bag.
“Oh, yeah—and thanks for the dress, bitch.”
She’d made it only as far as the intersection when Lesley called after her, “Don’t you want to know how she died last time?” A pause. “Your sister?”
Ash remained still. A car drove by, and the breeze sent her hair billowing out. Her fist tightened around the twine handle of her bag.
“They found her in a field in Spain, chained to a post.” Another pause. “She’d been burned alive.”
Ashline crossed the street.
Blackwood’s Student Government Association was a farce.
Yes, they held elections every fall. Yes, they convened for biweekly meetings in the dining hall.
But everyone knew that their SGA co-chairs, along with all of the class presidents, senators, secretaries, historians, and other imaginary positions that they concocted for the annual ballot, had only one real job every year.
To plan Spring Week.
Spring Week was a series of nightly events the first 335
week of May. It kicked off with a mandatory full-school attendance at an athletic event—this year, the Blackwood-Southbound tennis match—and culminated on Friday with the masquerade ball. A pancake breakfast generally followed on Saturday morning, but the few ragamuffins that made it out of bed in time for brunch usually looked like they’d been sleeping on a train for days or, in some cases, possibly been hit by one.
The purpose of Spring Week was allegedly to reward the students for an accomplished year of studious academics at one of California’s premier prep schools, and to give them one last romp before they geared up for study week and final exams.
Ashline knew better than that; Spring Week was the faculty’s only bargaining chip to keep the students from burning the school to the ground. At the semester’s opening ceremonies back in January, the threat was clear: You misbehave, no Spring Week.