Embers and Echoes

by Karsten Knight

  “You went to meet Lesley on your own,” he said calmly. Not a question.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “You lied to me.”

  “Yes.” She paused. “Why don’t I sense a rant coming?”

  He squeezed her waist playfully. “I spent a good part of the night pacing while I was waiting for you to come home. Then when you finally got in, I figured I’d pretend like I wasn’t waiting up for you, even though I just ended up pacing some more. But I felt no anger when I heard the door open . . . just relief.”

  “That’s it? No lectures about deceiving you, or about being a team player?” She elbowed him in the ribs through the blanket. “No macho rants about how it was foolish to show up for an ambush without my big strong male protector and his flawless hair to stand between me and harm?”

  “You’re alive,” he said simply. “Although, I’ll have you know that this hair has saved many a maiden in its day.”

  Ash settled her hands into her lap and turned her attention back to the golden tower. “I killed somebody tonight.”

  Wes’s thumb, which had been affectionately drawing concentric rings on her lower back, stopped in its tracks.

  “I’ve seen people die before,” she said quietly. “I thought I’d seen the worst. But it’s another thing altogether when it’s your own hand that takes a life.”

  “You also saved a life tonight,” Wes reminded her. “Ade is safely waking up on a train somewhere, hopefully far from here, because you risked your life to extract him from that building.”

  “It’s not a checkbook,” Ash said. “You don’t save a life, take a life, line it up in the margins, and everything adds up. I feel . . . dirty.” Ash took a deep breath. “It’s like because we know we have all these past lifetimes behind us and future lifetimes in the pipeline, it’s okay to treat each other like we’re disposable. Like we’re only ripping a page out of someone’s book rather than burning the whole thing.”

  Ash chanced a look at Wes. He was looking wistfully off to the north. “My father was a bastard,” he said finally. “But he wasn’t a killer. You’d think a man who was wealthy and successful, who traveled the world, couldn’t possibly be unhappy enough to lay a hand on his wife. On his kid.” A pause. “I guess you just come home to San Antonio after spending the weekend with your mistress in your Miami penthouse, and you realize that none of your lives—at home, abroad, in the arms of family, in the arms of strangers—are the ones you saw yourself living. Or, worse, maybe you are living the life you thought you would, and it’s still not enough.”

  “Wes,” she whispered, offering him an out in case he didn’t want to relive the pain.

  He continued anyway. “He comes home after a long trip. Sees that we forgot to take out the garbage. My chore. Throws me down the basement stairs and locks the door. I remember watching the sun going down through the garden windows. Remember my face on the dusty cement floor as I listened to what was going on up in the kitchen. Then as the last shadow faded on the basement wall, I remember something boiling up in me like a dark spring. Walked up the stairs. Ripped the door off the hinges. Dad raises the cordless phone clutched in his hand. Couldn’t hear a word he was screaming at me. Then I hit him. Once.” Wes paused again. “Just once. And the noise stopped. And my father fell. And he never got back up.”

  Ash, who didn’t realize she’d been holding her breath throughout the entire story, let out a long breath. “You did nothing wrong, Wes. You know that, right?”

  “The court absolved me of any wrongdoing,” he said robotically, like the excuse had been programmed word for word into his brain—like everyone believed it but him. “When you have a mother and a kid who are visibly bruised and scarred, apparently it’s difficult to argue that it was anything but self-defense.”

  She was thinking back on the visions she’d seen of the childhoods of other gods. Ade’s earthquake bringing the chapel down on the pastor. Raja locked in a funeral home while her foster father’s corpse reanimated. Lily’s cutthroat father. Ash’s own sister, a murderess and an outlaw; her other sister, a fugitive in the Central American jungle. And now Wes. “Let no one say that gods live charmed childhoods,” Ash said at last.

  This seemed to snap Wes out of his dark reverie. In fact, he almost seemed relieved to have gotten it off his chest. Lighter. “What I was trying to say is that every choice we make has two sides to it. And you’re right. It doesn’t always add up. Just because you saved your mother doesn’t mean you didn’t kill your father. Just because you protected your friend doesn’t mean people won’t get hurt along the way.”

  “Then what do you do when the math doesn’t add up?” she asked. “What do you do when doing the right thing doesn’t make things right?”

  He held out a hand toward the skyline. “You make a decision whether you want to spend your life staring at dark horizons . . .” He turned. Ash followed his gaze over her shoulder, to the ever-brightening eastern sky. “Or whether you want to spend it catching every sunrise that you can.”

  They didn’t even need to discuss it. Ash and Wes rose as one, and her hand slipped into his fingers, which had curled in anticipation. Together they wandered over to the condo’s eastern railing.

  They waited.

  Something about staying up until the point of exhaustion always allowed Ash the deepest sleep. Thus she shouldn’t have been surprised when, after staying up past the sunrise, she woke up at nearly four the next afternoon.

  Wes must have either been monitoring her or had an acute sense of her sleep patterns—he popped his head in the doorway before she even had time to pick her head off the pillow. “Oh, good,” he said. “You’re up in time for lunch.”

  Ash attempted to sweep aside the hair that was matted to her forehead, but sweat had cemented it in place. “I could live in Miami for a hundred years and not get used to your bizarre meal schedule,” she said.

  Wes shook his head. “We eat lunch at the right time. Everyone else in the country just eats four hours early.”

  Ash rolled over. “Wake me up before dinner, then.”

  She heard his footsteps plod across the room. Then Wes ripped the covers off the bed. She squeaked and curled up into a ball as the air washed over her bare legs. Wes’s grin was barely apologetic while he stood over her, with the down comforter still in his talons. “Nice boy shorts,” he said. “Get dressed. And pack a bathing suit.”

  “Get out!” Ash shrieked. She tugged the comforter out of his clutches to cover up her exposed legs.

  He held up his hands apologetically and backed out of the room. But he poked his head back in almost immediately, “For the record, red is a great color on you.”

  “Out!”

  Once Ash had finally dressed—and made sure she wasn’t wearing a single item that was red—she sauntered out into the kitchen, where she caught Aurora, who was halfway out the door. Her eyes widened when she spotted Ash, and her wings visibly fluttered underneath her button-down. If Ash didn’t know any better, she would have thought that the winged goddess had been trying to sneak out of the apartment.

  Ash raised an eyebrow. “You’re not coming to the beach with us?”

  “I’d love to,” Aurora said, “but I, uh, have to . . .”

  “Did Wes tell you to make yourself scarce so that he could take me out one-on-one?” Ash interrogated her.

  “Don’t be silly,” Aurora said as she gradually edged out the door. “I have a . . . hair appointment. At the salon.” She pulled halfheartedly at her hair, which had clearly been recently cut and colored.

  “I’ll be the girl not looking surprised when your hair looks the same the next time I see you,” Ash said.

  “Gotta go!” Aurora gave a short playful wave, and the door snapped shut behind her.

  “So.” Wes walked out of his bedroom just then carrying a wicker basket with a stack of beach towels folded on top. “Ready for a picnic on the beach?”

  But Ash just shook her head at him. “Smooth, Wes. Re
al smooth.”

  At the beach, as she spread out their towels and Wes planted their umbrella, Ash felt a twinge of guilt. She’d slept the day away already, and now she was going to spend her evening lounging on the beach? She was here on a mission to find her sister, not for a vacation—or a tropical romance, for that matter.

  The more she thought about it, however, the more she resigned herself to an evening of leisure. Lesley Vanderbilt had been her last tether to Rose; for better or worse, Lesley’s corpse was probably still thawing out in a Miami mortuary. Without the Lesley connection, Ash didn’t know where to find the Four Seasons. They could have a lair next door to Wes’s condominium, for all she knew. Now that Ade had been rescued, the Four Seasons no longer had a god to sacrifice for their national broadcast. Hopefully, whichever god they went after next would incinerate them in the process. With Bleak dead, they were already down a Season. Maybe the cult would fall apart altogether.

  Ash dug her toes into the warm sand, and for the first time in a week let her anxieties melt away under the low evening sun. She’d give it a night, she decided as she bit into one of the artichoke sandwiches Wes had made. Then, if she needed to, she’d start early tomorrow taking the city block by block. Maybe if she got close enough to where Rose was being held, the same strange heat vision that had directed her to the dockyard four nights ago would lead her to her sister as well.

  From behind the stealthy privacy of her sunglasses, she allowed herself a long moment to drink in Wes out of the corner of her eye. He was lying facedown next to her, in the volcano-covered swim trunks he’d worn for her amusement. His body was so long that his knees didn’t even fit onto the beach towel.

  At least there were some perks to sticking around Miami while she was searching for her sister, with or without leads. Though the fact that Wes was even partially weighing into her desire to stay in Florida concerned Ash. She’d known him for four days—four days!—and wasn’t a week out of her “relationship” with Colt. It had all the makings of a rebound train wreck . . . yet she couldn’t help herself.

  Wes opened his eyes and shielded them from the low-angle sunlight with one of his hands. He squinted at Ash. “Were you watching me nap?”

  Ash just smiled and adjusted her sunglasses. “You’ll never know.”

  Wes rifled through the contents of their wicker basket. He held up the empty sandwich wrap that used to contain their homemade paninis, then pointed to the third empty wrapper at Ash’s hip. “Either I’m a four-star chef or you were really hungry.”

  Ash tucked the sandwich wrapper under her towel. “Shut up.”

  Later, once the sun was setting and the white sands were clearing out, the two of them got dressed and indulged in a long meal at an Italian restaurant along the main drive. Ash felt particularly sluggish by the time Wes asked for the check, but he still insisted they ditch their sandals and go walking on the beach.

  The conversation had been fairly constant through all of dinner, but now, alone on the moonlit Atlantic shoreline, they fell into an impenetrable silence. They’d been surrounded by bustle and movement all day, from their fellow beachgoers to the hordes of people dining on Ocean Drive. Now the background static had descended to a distant hum, and the beach was empty save an occasional couple as they wandered by.

  When Wes was clearly beginning to fidget as the quiet persisted, Ash laughed.

  “What?” Wes shoved his hands deeper into his jeans pockets. “What’s so funny?”

  “When we first met,” Ash explained, “four nights ago, you told me that your nocturnal powers increase as the full moon approaches. Between everything you’ve organized for us today—the one-on-one time, the beach picnic, the dinner for two, and now a very clichéd but enjoyable moonlit stroll—I’m starting to wonder if it’s your sense of romance that waxes with the moon.”

  Wes visibly slouched a few inches. “You just seemed so glum last night that I thought a pick-me-up was in order. If anything—”

  Ash stepped in front of him and placed a hand on his chest to stop him. “Hey, I didn’t say that so you’d get defensive. There’s no need to apologize for a night that I’m enjoying every minute of. Nor do you have to feel like a stretch of silence will make me enjoy it any less. These last few hours have been exactly what I needed.”

  Her words summoned Wes’s confidence again, and one of his hands found its way out of his pocket and into her hand.

  The two of them cut across the dry sand until they hit the water. The tide lapped at the bottom of Ash’s jeans, which she didn’t bother to roll up. Even at night, even as the surface of the sand expelled a day’s worth of heat, the water here remained so much warmer than the Cape Cod beaches where Ash had vacationed growing up.

  “Aurora has this getting-to-know-you game she likes to play,” Wes said. “She says you can never really know someone fully, but there are three questions you can ask that can help you to understand them right now. I’ve seen her play it with strangers she just met at the bar; once upon a time she used to play this game with me, too. Do you mind if I ask you those three questions?”

  Ash splashed a little bit of water at his jeans. “As long as you’re not disappointed if I choose not to answer.”

  “Question number one,” he said. “What is something you secretly wish but that you probably wouldn’t tell your best friend?”

  “Wow.” Ash whistled. “That’s a pretty personal question. Aurora gets strangers to answer that at the bar?”

  “She’s a very persuasive girl when she wants to be. You and I hardly qualify as strangers, but I’m also not the charmer she is. . . . So I guess you’ll have to ask yourself whether you’re willing to take a chance and share something personal with a sort-of stranger who you sort of live with.”

  Ash realized they were walking north along the shore. Somewhere a thousand miles in this direction, her parents were at home, probably worrying sick about her, about Eve, too. Ash bowed her head. “Sometimes I think that I would give all this up—the new friends, the adventure”—she snapped her fingers, and a jet of fire sprung from the tip of her thumb like a lighter—“my powers, if I knew that it would heal my broken family. I would give up a thousand fast-paced, violent lives as a goddess in exchange for just one life of happiness and stability with the people who swore to love me, even though I would never be their daughter by blood.” She snapped again. The fire extinguished. “And sometimes I remember life in high school before all this, and I think that I’m full of shit, that I’m selfish, that no matter how many people I see get hurt, no matter how much pain I feel myself, I wouldn’t have the strength to return to a ‘normal’ life.”

  “I guess the sand is always whiter on the other beach,” Wes mused. “Second question: What is your greatest fear right now?”

  This one came more easily to Ash. It was something that she’d spent a good chunk of her time on the roof last night thinking about. “For the last few days I’ve been afraid that I’ll never find my younger sister, and that I’ll never bring Eve back. But then last night, when I thought I was this close to Rose, I realized what was most terrifying to me is the thought that I’ll get both of my sisters back . . . and it won’t make everything okay.”

  “Well, at least the third question is on the lighter side,” he said. Ash could tell he was wondering whether his thought-provoking three-question game had taken a harpoon to the romantic gaiety of their date. “The last question is this: If you could be anywhere in the world right now, where would you be?”

  But even this question, which she knew was supposed to be fun and inspire her to describe a dream vacation, took on a new sense of gravity. Did he expect her to say “here”? Was he wondering if her desire to give it all up for a normal life in Scarsdale included giving up meeting him as well? Was he wondering whether there was a place for a ninety-six-hour romance in Ash’s ideal life?

  Rather than answering, Ash said, “I want you to answer those same three questions. Since you’ve just put me on the sp
ot, it’s your turn to psychoanalyze yourself.”

  Wes’s expression soured. “The easiest of the three questions, and you’re just going to skip it?”

  Ash pouted right back at him. “God, give a girl a second to come up with a thoughtful answer.”

  “Fine.” Wes stopped walking and set his heels in the wet sand as he formulated his answers. “My secret desire,” he said, “is that I hadn’t inherited everything that I own—the money, the car, the condo—but that I’d worked for it. At the moment my secret fear is that, even if what you and I have between us is something special, when all this ugly business with the Four Seasons and your sisters is over, you won’t be able to remember me without thinking of all the pain along the way.” He paused to take in the moonlight. “But despite all that, if I could be anywhere in the world right now, I’d be right here standing ankle-deep in water with you.”

  Ash’s ears were growing hot, to the point where she thought they might ignite. She tried to blow the flames out by looking out over the ocean. In fact, the warm Atlantic waters were looking particularly inviting. . . . “If I could be anywhere in the world right now . . .” she said playfully, “then I would be . . . right there!” She pointed to a patch of water twenty feet out, where a trail of moonlight reflected off the surface.

  Wes cocked his head in confusion, but by then Ash was already stripping off her pants. Soon she had tossed her T-shirt into a pile in the sand with her rumpled jeans. Now in just her bikini, she took off running through the water and dove gracefully into the waves. The water was warm, yes, but even then she still had that moment of cold shock as her body slipped into the velvet touch of the ocean.

  When Ash resurfaced, she flipped her head back to get the wet hair out of her face. After she’d cleared the salt water from her eyes, she saw that Wes was still dawdling on the beach, fully clothed.