That’s when she began to feel truly alone.
Aurora was dead.
Wes was grieving.
Ixtab was, for all Ash knew, lost at sea.
Ash dropped down into the sand and let the sweeping surf lap around her bare knees. For the second time in two weeks, Ash had lost all of her friends in the mythological world and was utterly alone.
Then the anger seized her. Just like last time, her godly friends hadn’t deserted her by choice. They’d been taken from her. They’d been murdered in flesh. Murdered in spirit.
Vengeance would be her new friend. Vengeance meant that the Four Seasons, whom she’d already reduced to three, would shrink to two, and then one, and then none at all. Vengeance meant delivering a final blow for Rolfe, and for Aurora, and for all the gods who the Four Seasons had yet to harm on their rise to power.
Vengeance meant finishing what she’d started.
She opened her cell phone. If she was going to have any hope of tracking down Rose and finding the Four Seasons to bring them to justice once and for all, she needed someone with ears everywhere in the god world. Someone whose manipulative mind and elaborate trickery could keep them one step ahead of the Four Seasons.
Someone in Miami who might understand what she was going through.
She dialed the operator. Inside her wallet she found the key card she’d been avoiding since Friday.
The operator connected her to the Delano hotel in South Beach, and when the front desk picked up, she paused only a moment before saying, “Yes, I’d like for you to connect me to room 432. The guest’s name is Colt Halliday.”
Ash was on her way to meet Colt when they televised Aurora’s execution.
She was walking down the Lincoln Road Mall, a long pedestrian avenue that crossed the entirety of South Beach between Sixteenth and Seventeenth Streets. It was a gorgeous mix of restaurants that spilled right onto the outdoor walkway, as well as trendy nightclubs that would start to see lines form around midnight. As if anyone on the Lincoln Road Mall could forget where they were in the world, a long center island of palm trees stretched end to end along the boulevard.
Just as she was passing a sports bar where a cover band was playing an old country hit, the music pumping out of the windows suddenly died. As the cymbals faded to a whisper and the banjo twanged into nothingness, Ash could hear a commotion inside. She ducked through the front door.
The bouncer didn’t even notice her come in—he was too transfixed by the large flat-panel televisions over the bar. In fact, all of the bar’s occupants, from the early diners to the waitstaff and even the band, had gathered in one clump to watch the grisly images on-screen.
It was just as horrible for Ash watching the execution a second time—even worse, in fact, without the flicker of hope that Aurora might escape her gruesome demise. Even though Ash knew that Aurora was the victim of the sacrifice, from certain camera angles it really did look like Aurora was staggering threateningly toward little Rose. The distant, drugged abyss of her eyes made her look crazed, dangerous, ready to snatch the six-year-old girl in her talons and carry her off into the clouds.
There was also footage Ash hadn’t seen before. The Four Season had filmed additional shots of Thorne and Lily concentrating hard as they summoned their powers and dragged Aurora back to earth. Without context, without reality, it might appear to any viewers that the two gods were vanquishing some sort of evil winged demon who was trying to murder a little girl.
Ash looked away when the weeping willow finally swallowed Aurora. But when she turned back, through her bleary eyes she had to watch something just as nausea-inducing and horrific—a final close-up of Thorne dropping to his knees and wrapping his arms around Rose. Now that the bartender had pumped up the volume on the TVs, Ash could just make out Thorne’s words to the little Wilde:
“You’re safe now.”
They’d done it, Ash realized. It was ghastly, it was scripted—but they’d almost managed to make themselves look like the heroes, at least to anyone twisted enough to buy what was happening on-screen.
Eventually the scene looped right back to the beginning. Some people wandered back to their dinners, while others remained at the bar to watch the execution all over again. The bartender was using the remote to try to find a new network, but it took several tries before he found a sports station that wasn’t broadcasting the supernatural horror.
Ash felt a hand on her arm—the bouncer, peering curiously at her. “Hey,” he said. “It’s okay. It was just special effects. Must be some advertisement for a new movie.” He actually sounded convinced too.
Ash didn’t say anything. She just backpedaled out of the bar and power walked down the Lincoln Road Mall to get to her meeting with Colt. Like the bouncer, many other people would choose not to believe what they’d just seen. The world would not stop for the Four Seasons.
But somewhere out there, among the deranged and the fanatical, Ash knew that this broadcast would strike home. Maybe just a few loonies here and there, watching it over and over again, baptized in Thorne’s madness. Eventually they’d come to the conclusion that the gods were real. Then the Four Seasons wouldn’t have just followers . . . they’d have zealots. Extremists.
Worse, seeing Aurora’s murder reduced to a Sunday night television spectacle made Ash think that maybe it was time to abort her quest to bring home Rose and rescue Eve. There was nothing she wanted less than for her younger sister to be raised in the arms of a murderous cult, like some sort of explosive messiah, but Aurora would be alive right now if Ash hadn’t involved her. What would happen if more people died, only for Ash to finally reach Rose and discover that the little tyke didn’t want to leave with her?
As the hostess escorted Ash to her seat at Machibuse, the upscale sushi restaurant where Colt had made reservations, Ash realized she’d actually warmed up to the idea of having dinner with her immortal ex. It would at least provide a welcome distraction from everything else.
So it was with a mixture of electricity and dread that she waited at the two-seater table, out in the warm clutches of the Miami night. Her eyes anxiously darted around, on the lookout for Colt, but also to familiarize herself with the restaurant should she need an escape route.
The nervousness of it all was causing Ash to drink like a fish, to the point that her poker-faced waiter had to refill her glass almost immediately. She was loath to admit that there was some element of excitement to meeting Colt—not necessarily in a romantic sense. But there was a certain unpredictability to him. Every meeting with Colt was like boarding a new roller coaster, and you never knew—
“Somebody looks deep in thought,” Colt said.
Ash had been so busy scanning the pedestrians on the Lincoln Road Mall for Colt that she hadn’t even noticed him slip into the seat across from her. “Just people watching,” she replied.
“Looked more like people-examining.”
The waiter came over, and without even looking at the menu, Colt rattled off something in Japanese that ended with “sake.” Leave it to Colt, who looked ten years older than his actual eighteen, to order alcohol fluently in another language and not get carded.
Then again, Ash thought, although they were both teenagers in body, they were also millennia old in spirit.
“So you’re fluent in Japanese, and a sake connoisseur,” Ash said. Suddenly her ice water with lemon looked very plain.
“Don’t worry. I ordered enough for two,” he said. “And you don’t travel the world for a thousand years without absorbing other languages and developing some more refined tastes.”
“All the time to try new things, yet you keep coming back to the same woman.” As soon as Ash said it, she was surprised at her own boldness—but there was no turning back now.
“Not exactly the same woman.” Colt thanked the waiter, who had just brought a ceramic carafe and two glasses. “That’s the interesting part about dating incarnations of the same goddess. It’s like you start with the same mold, t
he same cup”—he pushed one of the glasses across the table and slowly filled it with sake—“but what you pour into it changes each and every time.”
Ash took a cautious sip from her glass. “So Ashline Wilde is very different from Lucy Halliday, who was very different from . . . whoever I was before that. What was I like in the other lives you knew me?”
The question caught Colt off guard. She could tell because he spilled a little sake from his glass onto the table. “You were . . .” He searched for the word. “You were much more impetuous before. More explosive, and rash.”
Ash laughed dryly. “Sounds like I had a little bit of Eve in me.”
Colt choked on his sake. The comment hadn’t been that funny, Ash thought.
He cleared his throat. “Something like that. Your temper made you violent at times. Let’s just say I was very grateful for my regenerative abilities. But at other times that same explosiveness also made you more passionate. It was intoxicating. I couldn’t get enough of it.”
“Apparently not,” she said. “Intoxicating enough that you lied just to get a fifth helping.”
Colt’s face tightened. He slipped his fingers through his bristly hair. “When the Cloak designed this mental block to separate us from our old memories—when they designed this brain damage for us—they overlooked the god with regenerative abilities. Never realized that his brain might slowly heal itself, too. Do you know what it’s like to be the only one who remembers?” He turned away from Ash to watch the passing crowd instead—a group of dolled-up girls chattering rapidly about their night plans, two young lovers arm in arm heading to dinner. “To live and die like everyone else,” he continued, “but to come back with a full memory of everything that happened before, while the people around you—strangers, friends . . . lovers—don’t remember a damn thing?”
“So just to be clear, your argument”—Ash folded her hands and leaned over the table—“is that because you’re the only one who knows everything, you also have to lie about everything.”
“Travel back in time and space to that first day we met at the saloon, when I came up behind you at the bar.” He tapped two fingers to his temple. “Now imagine that by way of introduction, I said, ‘Hi, Ashline. You don’t know me, but I was married to you in your last life back when your name was Lucy, and you were a farmer’s-daughter-turned-bank-robber living in New Orleans. We had a beautiful love affair until an Aztec assassin ripped out my heart on our wedding night. Oh, and PS, you don’t know it yet, but you’re a Polynesian volcano goddess.” He paused and let all that sink in. “I’m sure you would have definitely agreed to a second date after that.”
“I really hate when you do that,” Ash said.
Colt raised an eyebrow. “Do what?”
Ash sighed. “Make a good point that I can’t argue with. Although,” she went on, as Colt chuckled, “you could have used some of that singing magic of yours to convince me to believe you.”
Ash’s hands were still in the middle of the table from when she’d leaned in, and Colt reached across to touch them. “Hey,” he said, “I’m glad you came.”
She withdrew her fingers just an inch. Damn this guy was good. A week ago she buried him thigh-deep in stone. Now she was unintentionally letting him back in. This wasn’t meant to be a romantic meet-up, she wanted to tell him. With Wes still possibly in the picture, and all the death that was going on in Miami, the last thing she needed was a tropical love triangle.
Colt took his own hand back and averted his gaze as he refilled his sake glass. His eyes glistened in the moonlight. “I’m sorry,” he said, and smiled into his glass. “Sometimes I expect relationships to heal as fast as I do.”
“Even relationships that heal can scar, too,” Ash reminded him.
Before the conversation could cascade further into awkward touchy-feely topics that Ash wasn’t prepared for, the waiter graciously returned to take their food order. She panicked because she hadn’t even opened the menu, but Colt jumped to the rescue. “Do you mind?” he asked Ash. He proceeded to order what sounded like enough food to invite half of the pedestrian mall to join their meal.
“Hungry much?” Ash asked.
He passed the menus to the waiter, who walked away. “I’m still catching up on the meals I missed when I was trapped in an Oregon boulder for seventy-two hours.”
Ash narrowed her eyes. “How did you escape from the rock, by the way?”
He only smiled and sipped his sake. “So,” he changed the subject. “What’s the status of the hunt for your sister?”
“On hold, I guess.” She slouched in her chair. “I thought that tracking down Rose was the right thing to do, but now I just don’t—”
“Ash,” Colt interrupted, “you’re trying to rescue a kidnapped six-year-old. How could that be anything but the right thing to do?”
“In theory maybe. But I’m a night’s sleep from throwing in the towel and going home.”
“You can’t give up!” When he said it, his voice split into three pitches at once in a terrible chord—his persuasive song-voice had leaked through enough that Ash could feel it tug on her marionette strings.
“What is your malfunction?” she asked him. “If you want Rose so you can go spelunking in the Cloak Netherworld, then go retrieve her yourself. I’ve tried my best, and because of it, three people are dead.”
“Because of you,” he reminded her, his voice back to normal, “Ade is alive.”
He was right, of course, and Ash opened her mouth to agree with him. A pulse went through her brain, however, a beacon of warning that flashed once, twice, and then began to strobe outward through her body. Her stomach tightened. Her vision wavered, and nausea swept over her. Her survival instincts were alerting her that something about this conversation was terribly, terribly wrong.
That’s when she figured it out. In the course of all this plotting, all the destinies of these gods and goddesses converging and intersecting in pursuit of their own selfish ends, it was often hard to keep straight who knew what exactly. But after a quick mental review of the last few days, double-checking where her last conversation with Colt fell in the chronology, she could say one thing confidently:
There was no way Colt Halliday should have known that Ade had been the Four Seasons’ sacrificial prisoner.
“How did you know Ade was the sacrifice?” Ash demanded. “How did you know that we saved him?”
“I . . . ,” Colt started. “You said that—”
“I didn’t say a word to you about that, Trickster,” Ash said. “How did you know it was Ade?”
He massaged his stubble nervously. His right eye twitched. “It’s not what you think, Ash. You’re jumping to conclusions that—”
“What did you do?” Her fingers curled around her glass, and the sake inside began to froth and boil. “What the hell did you do, Colt?”
“Fine.” Colt threw up his hands. “You got me. The Four Seasons were looking for a sacrifice. I suggested Ade. I told them where to find him in Haiti. I knew you needed more incentive to stick to your guns, and the best way was to make it more personal.” He glanced at Ash’s glass, which had grown so hot that it was starting to steam. “He was never in any danger. I knew you’d save him.”
Ash watched Colt’s image swim through the steam curtain. “Should I even ask who told them about Rose and where to find her?”
He shrugged. “Why smuggle the little girl that I need into the country when I could trick a crazy billionaire and some hell-bent gods to do it for me? Trickery is what I do, Ash.” He tilted his chin up and stroked the skin over his neck. “All I had to do was open up these special little vocal cords of mine, and the Four Seasons were willing to do anything to achieve their delusions of grandeur. Lesley, too.”
The heat in Ash was growing so intense that she could feel the metal armrests of her chair beginning to soften. It was only a matter of time before she lost control completely. “How could you make them do those things, Colt? These aren’t s
oapstone pieces on a chessboard. They’re real people. You try to convince me that the Cloak are the evil monsters, but you’re the one who puppeteers massacres and then sleeps well at night.”
“I don’t put evil in the hearts of men. My song, my vocal persuasion, didn’t make the Four Seasons kill Lesley Vanderbilt and your friend. The ability to kill was always there in their blood. All I do is strip away inhibitions to let people do what their dark hearts truly desire.” A smile twitched at the corner of his lips, and Ash could all but see the shadow of their kiss back in Oregon reflecting in his eyes. “You of all people should know that, Ashline Wilde.”
Ash splashed her sake in Colt’s face. He didn’t even flinch as the scalding liquid splattered against his skin. The red welts it left quickly faded back to his copper Native American skin.
“In the short time I’ve known you,” Ash said quietly, “you’ve put me and just about everyone that I know in danger. You set your plans into motion, and then you sit back and watch the body count add up. You may not be a murderer, but you might as well be. Get away from this table, and get the hell out of my life.”
“I can’t do that,” he said.
Ash pointed out to the pedestrian mall. “I said get out!” she screamed. It was loud enough to draw the attention of all the nearby diners and passersby.
Colt downed the rest of his glass and stood up. He pulled a roll of twenty-dollar bills out of his pocket. “One day,” he said, and counted out a stack of bills onto the tabletop, “you’ll realize that I did it for you.” He backed away from the table but never took his eyes off Ash. “I did it all for you.”
“The next time I bury you in rock,” Ash called out as he disappeared down the pedestrian mall, “it will be from the top of your head down!”
Once she finally lost him in the crowd, she let her head drop to the table. How could she have ever thought this meeting was a good idea? Moreover, how could Colt . . . How could he just . . . She’d known he was conniving before, and that his trickery had indirectly resulted in Rolfe’s death, but to purposely place Ade on death row just so Ash would follow through with her plans . . .
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