Crown of Ashes

by Addison Moore

  “Whatever you do, whatever you can do—please don’t let Gage die.” A single tear rolls down her cheek, sudden and unannounced.

  “Don’t let Gage die,” I repeat numbly as I sigh into the concept. Gage dying is something that can never happen, and yet Gage not dying seems like an impossible feat.

  “It is appointed for man to die once.” The words strum from me like the lyrics to a tragic country song. “But I will stave off that hex, Skyla. I will do it for you.” I shake my head out at the toothless lanes, most of the pins already picked over and taken to new homes. I gave away everything from balls to fixtures the night of the ’80s party. Half the shoes have done a disappearing act as well.

  “Thank you.” She pulls me in and holds me with that strangled grip. “That means everything to me, Logan. Thank you from me. Thank you from my boys.” Her heated breath warms my chest. “I’m sorry.”

  “Why are you apologizing?” My hand rubs over her shoulder as if coaxing the answer from her.

  Skyla looks up, red railroad tracks where the whites of her eyes were. “Because I never set out to break your heart.”

  This is the part where I assure her she didn’t. She couldn’t. But I think we both know that would be a lie.

  “And I never set out to be an obstacle to your happiness. Don’t worry about me.” A smile ticks to my lips, dull and lifeless. “Gage lives.” I press my gaze to hers, heavy as iron. “And so does Celestra. When he entered into that covenant last December—Demetri gave a speech.”

  “Doesn’t he always,” she growls.

  “He said something to the effect that the covenant would one day come to an end. I can’t remember the exact words, but I remember thinking this curse wouldn’t last forever. I promised myself I’d share that with you. Give you—give us hope.”

  “Thank you,” she mouths the words. Skyla hikes up on her tiptoes and presses her forehead to mine, her eyes staring dizzying into me. “I hope that’s true. But nevertheless, you are never an obstacle to my happiness. You are a source of pure joy. Our beautiful, brief marriage was a shining star in my life. Its glorious light still radiates over me, fills me with its brilliance, and sets my heart on fire. Three glorious days that most people cannot find in a lifetime. We had it all, Logan.” She swallows hard. “Our love, our proposal, our wedding, our honeymoon—it was all perfect.” Her thumb wipes away a tear I didn’t know I shed. “I don’t regret a thing, and neither should you.”

  I shake my head in lieu of words.

  “Looks like a ghost town in here.” Gage strides over at a decent clip, and both Skyla and I break apart like a couple of school kids caught making out in the closet. “Can anybody join, or is this a private party?” He flashes that killer grin, and I lift Skyla’s arm into the air and twirl her right over to him where she belongs.

  That bubbling laugh reprises itself. “We were just waiting for you to kick things off. What should we do? Pray over it? Steal the fixtures?”

  “Pray over it?” I tuck my head back a notch. “I vote for destruction.” I kick up a loose board with my shoe, same damn board I’ve spent the last six years nailing down with tacks, and with a hulkish cry I pour every ounce of Celestra strength I have into uprooting it from its home of forty years. Forty years ago, my father had this monument to shoe disinfectant erected, and forty years later, his lesser, far less greater son insists on dismantling it. I couldn’t bring this place back to its former glory. I couldn’t restore what Skyla and I had without destroying it either. I am nothing. A sheer disgrace to those who bore me, who came before me in my Nephilim lineage. Almost pure. That’s what I was. Chloe, Skyla, and I—the three that could thrive. One is dead, one is evil, and one demands to cling to a Fem. We are a wily bunch, aren’t we?

  The board finally gives with a creaking groan, and the universe I was attempting to uproot in my hands lifts with ease as I come up triumphant. It’s from the same lane Skyla and I shared so much history, and I’m keeping the damn thing—heck, I might even frame it.

  Skyla and Gage stare over at me, wild-eyed, on alert should I go feral on them. I suppose the dead should be forever categorized as unpredictable. We don’t have a hell of a lot to lose.

  “Don’t hog it all, man.” Gage comes close to winking, a stunt he pulls off when he’s having very real reservations about something. He bends over, and with a thunderous roar, in half the time, evicts the lane from its resting place.

  Skyla jumps back, waving the dust from her face while coughing. “You boys have fun with that. There’s something I’m hoping is still here, and if it is, it’s coming home with me tonight.” She trots off to the rack of balls in the back, scurrying from one end to the other, checking out the meager selection.

  “No, no, no!” Skyla tiptoes to each and every ball receptacle between the lanes in a panic. “Oh no!”

  My heart warms because I know exactly what she’s looking for.

  “Oh well.” Her hands slap to her thighs. “I guess it’s gone.” She buries her face in her hands a moment before coming up for air. “And so is my sanity.”

  Gage takes her into his arms and lands a tender kiss to her temple. “Don’t worry. Logan will have this place restocked with the latest and greatest as soon as the bowling alley is up and running again. And it will be.” He scolds me with that last part.

  “It was my favorite ball.” She tosses a guilty glance my way. I know the one she’s lamenting. A marbled blue and white beauty. “It was so pretty.” Her lids hang heavy in my direction. “I remember thinking it was as though you shrunk down the earth and the sky for me in that little heavenly sphere.”

  A smile twitches on my lips, but I’m too somber to give it. I would shrink the earth and the sky for her if I could. I think everyone in the room knows that. The ball, however, is safe, sitting in a glass encasement, waiting for her in the butterfly room at Whitehorse. I think I’ll let her stumble upon that surprise herself.

  “Hey”—I tick my head to the very first lane, the one that I guess you could say started it all—“I’ve got a complete set of pins. How about I kick both your asses in one last game?”

  “Ha!” Gage gives a howl of a laugh. “You wish.”

  Skyla clicks her tongue as she makes her way over. “You’re both going down. The gloves are coming off. It’s a take-no-prisoners kind of a night.”

  Gage lends those baby blues my way. I recognize that determined look, smug and far too self-approving. “You are going down, Logan. I am winning, and there is not a thing you can do about it.” His smile is the last to arrive to the party as he joins his wife in picking out a ball.

  But my stomach is tight as a wire. Something about that look, those words, equals a far from empty threat. If I didn’t know better, I would say it was Gage’s best premonition to date.

  Skyla, Gage, and I play game after game—and game after game, Gage beats the hell out of us. He bowls strike after strike. He sends the ball sailing down the lane in a sublime pin-straight line that only Gage is known to do. He proves himself a force to be reckoned with even if it were the last thing in the world he wanted to prove. Gage loves us, and yet he is primed, he is destined to destroy the core of what we stand for.

  He knocks the pins down one last time with a dynamic force that sends them detonating into the four corners of the earth.

  “Yes!” he howls, beating his left hand over his chest. “There’s no stopping me!”

  And that, my friends, is exactly what I’m afraid of.

  Skyla and Gage take off, but I lie down in that very lane with my face to the ceiling, a heart full of sorrow, and fall into an unsettling slumber.

  That night I dream of my father—of my mother, roaming these haunted halls. The bowling alley is rundown, half the roof missing, the evergreens dipping in with their branches as if claiming its architectural victim. I’ve never believed Paragon wanted people here with their homes and roads and smog-riddled cars. She wanted to be left alone, cloaked in the fog, the mystery that surrounds
those rocky crags at the base of Devil’s Peak. In my dream, there is no wrecking ball dismantling all my father worked so hard to build. It is the island. Paragon reaches in with her evergreen talons and lifts the floorboards up one by one until all that is left is matchsticks. She is the victor. By the time my lids flutter to life like a couple of sparrows, I’m convinced this island could dismantle anyone if it tried.

  Even Gage Oliver.

  There are some days you wait for, pray for, love, hate, wish you could avoid. For me this day is all of those combined into one.

  Barron stops by in the morning on his way to work, and we cross the street from Whitehorse to stand in the parking lot together one last time before the wrecking ball hits.

  “It’s coming back greater than ever,” I marvel at the old dilapidated building. Had I ever noticed what shabby condition it was in before? There is something inherently sad about it, something very much like Gage, and for that alone I want to weep because I would never take a wrecking ball to my nephew. Especially not after what I promised Skyla last night. I guess you could say I officially became Gage Oliver’s guardian angel, even if I don’t quite qualify for the job—even if there’s a force of darkness out there whose sole purpose in life is to make sure I don’t succeed.

  Barron lands his arm over my shoulders, and I take in the weight of my brother. Barron has always been a source of comfort, a refuge in the eye of the storm. He gave me the best life. He also gave me another brother, Gage.

  “You know, son”—my heart warms when he calls me that—“it’s rare for anything that has the ability to regenerate itself to come back in its former glory when its future glory is what it was destined for all along. There is little value to looking back with the exception to avoiding the pitfalls you couldn’t dodge the first time. There is new purpose, new pleasures to be had, new victories, new alliances, and lastly, new discoveries for it to make about itself. I suppose that’s the wild card. What will it become ultimately? Something to be venerated? Regretted? Something to be treasured and cared for, resented and discarded? The lens of a future world is not ours to peer through. Time will tell.” He offers an abrupt pat to the back. “And I predict it will turn out well.”

  We stare off at the building, but those words Barron just spoke might as well have been a benediction to his one true son. Every word could be strained through Gage Oliver’s lineage. If you could write a poem with his DNA, Barron just penned it.

  “I’m off to work.” He pulls me into a firm embrace just as an old truck comes sputtering into the parking lot, burping and farting like a seventy-year-old geezer who downed a keg of beer last night. And I’m right on every account.

  Liam jumps out of his latest junk pile revival and struts on over.

  “So, this is it?” He squints at the bowling alley as if the sun actually bothered to show up today.

  “This is it.” I welcome my brother with an open arm on the other side of me. “I had the appliances gutted from the kitchen last week. The construction company took the ones I could use in the new place and put them into storage for me.”

  Liam winces as he looks out at it. “Everything approved through the city?”

  “You should know.” The guys at Townsend Construction are letting Liam hang out and glean what he can. I know he’s eager to open up shop on Paragon himself. This should be a great way to learn the ropes, not to mention the contractors state board he’s working to pass.

  Liam grunts as he shakes his head at the place. “It’s going to hurt like a motherfucker watching this place go down.”

  Both Barron and I give a sober nod of agreement.

  “The party starts at noon if you want front row seats. I’ll be out on the lawn.” I’ve envisioned what it would feel like when the first blow struck, and it hurt each and every time just the way Liam said.

  “Goodbye, friend.” Barron salutes the old place, and Liam and I follow his cue.

  “Goodbye, friend,” my lips whisper, but my heart says it’s never going to say goodbye.

  At about eleven thirty, the front lawn at Whitehorse begins to fill in with bodies. Laken and Coop, Drake and Bree, Ellis and Giselle, Michelle and Liam, Nat and Pierce, Kate, Ezrina and Nev, Dudley, Lexy and even Chloe, and, of course, Skyla and Gage. They’ve left the boys with Emma—a good move, considering there will be dust and debris floating throughout the next few miles in radius to the bowling alley.

  Skyla settles between Gage and me in lawn chairs as the construction crew brings in the heavy equipment. The crane that hoists that magnificent wrecking ball stands foreign in the air like a skyscraper. This is the city encroaching on Paragon’s country charm, stealing the tranquility right out of the air.

  A horn sounds and that ball begins to sway, slow and smooth as if it were trying to hypnotize the building in an effort not to hurt it.

  Skyla takes my hand and gives it a squeeze.

  Stay strong. She sets her nose to the sky as that menace across the street swings wide. I love you. We all do.

  The first strike hits and blows a hole right through the side of the building, and a gasp comes from those around me.

  “Yes!” Ellis howls, and Giselle is the first to silence him on my behalf.

  “It’s okay,” I reassure her. “This is progress.”

  “To progress!” Lexy shouts as that wrecking ball goes at it one more time.

  “To progress!” the small crowd echoes, but Skyla, Gage, and I remain silent on the subject. It feels like a lot of things. At the moment, progress isn’t one of them.

  Like a dream in slow motion, like a nightmare at the right speed, we watch in horror, in delight, as the entire building folds like a house of cards. Arcade Heaven, the stinky pile of shoes, the defunct electrical system, the tiny thimble of an office, that kitchen where we had so much history, all of it gone and all but forgotten. All that remains is a pile of smoking rubble. The cleanup crew starts in right away with the effort to haul my father’s dream away like waste. At the end of the earthly day, all of our material desires rot away like refuse. And upon closer inspection, they might have been that all along. It’s the people, the flesh and blood you surround yourself with, that are the real treasure—the irreplaceable, indispensable monuments of our love that have the ability to define the sum total of our existence.

  One by one the bodies drift from the lawn. After one lingering embrace after the other, they all scatter and disappear just like the bowling alley.

  I head over to the oak I had planted in the center of the lawn so many years ago when I had this place built for Skyla. I lean against its sturdy trunk and stare out at the gaping, toothless smile of the forest that is also mine along with the pile of rubble that once belonged to my father. Technically, the land is Liam’s and Barron’s as well, but Barron made it clear years ago that my father would have wanted me to have it as something solid I can hold on to—and, as it were, destroy. If I ever make more than a dime off the new infrastructure, or the farm I plant behind it, I’ll make sure to include my brothers in the spoils of my riches. A laughable idea at best, but a nice theory nonetheless.

  Gage grunts as he heads on over. Skyla went inside with Lex. “I’ll talk to my brother, see where his head is concerning the girl who looks like Laken.”

  “Sounds good, man.” I know what he’s trying to do—divert my attention. If only it could work.

  Shockingly, it doesn’t even bother me anymore when Gage references Wes as his brother. It comes so easily from his lips and sounds so normal, so very real. At this point in our lives, it’s nothing more than a fact. They share a father. Gage and I aren’t even related by blood anymore. We’ve had our identities, our lives, our souls ripped from our bodies and stolen by wickedness, and yet here we are standing a foot apart as if nothing ever happened. At the end of the day, it couldn’t change where our hearts lie. Gage is my brother. He is my family. Our lives are interwoven in every intricate way, so much so that if one of us should bend, it moves the other. Our minds
, our souls, our hearts are sewn together. There is no barrier of blood that defines what we mean to each other. At least not with Gage in this state.

  A horrible agony comes over me as I look at those big sky blue eyes. Not even Paragon and all of her brooding can erase that heavenly hue. It kills me to think that Demetri alone has the power to tamp down Gage Oliver’s heart to a pile of rubble just the way I did with the bowling alley.

  “Dude”—he grimaces as he pulls me in—“let it out. I know this is tough on you. You don’t have to pretend around me. I’m the one person you never have to do that with.”

  Skyla pops up, breathless from the run over. “And I’m the second.” Her arms find their way around me, and Gage closes his big mitts over the two of us until we form a warm huddle of perfect love. And the tears come, hers, mine, his, they are all there and accounted for. I was right. It’s the people who are the treasures. My tears weren’t for the lumber I’m soon to replace across the street. They’re for Gage, Skyla, and me—three determined beings moving through time and space at lightning speeds on our way to our destinies, barreling toward that place that was determined so long ago for each of us as fate cinches the leash around our necks that much tighter. It’s choking out the oxygen, making it harder to resist the inevitable slide, the momentum picking up at an unimaginable clip. We are unstoppable in our velocity. We will arrive on time, in the manner determined for us long ago, each of us on our way to complete the mission set out before us. Three minds, three hearts, and not one of us on the same page, no, not really. Gage has his role to fulfill in order to spare the boys of a darker fate. Skyla has welded a demon to her side—that would be Chloe. And as for me, I’m inching my way closer to what my flesh has wanted all along, Skyla as my own. And in an irony too big for fate to handle, I’m fighting tooth and nail for that never to happen. Even more grievous than that, I know deep in my spirit that I will battle Gage himself in an effort to stop him from self-destructing. Maybe the real irony is that we each self-destruct.