Wildefire (23 page)

Ashline slipped underneath the ropes. At the top of the stairwell, her fingertips paused only briefly on the cold metal door before she pushed it forward and out onto the roof.

The wind drifted over the shingles with grim determination on its pilgrimage back to the ocean, but the girl from the quad stood resolute on the edge of the rooftop, poised and as still as a boulder. For a fleeting instant as Ashline treaded carefully down the gently sloping roof, she thought that maybe she was reliving the nightmare with Lizzie Jacobs all over again, that she had never left her room at all. She briefly entertained that this might be the little girl from her vision on the beach yesterday, the exotic and deadly little cherub that had so devastatingly escaped from her jungle prison.

222

But even despite the uncharacteristically long hair, well past her shoulders, Ashline recognized the taut, familiar musculature of the girl’s back underneath her tank top, recognized her attenuated lean, the way she placed all her weight onto her left hip, recognized the way that the temperature nearby plummeted ten degrees simply at the sight of her.

“You’re back?” Ashline said quietly, as if there were a question buried beneath those two words that could sum up eight months of distress.

When the girl turned and smiled, the steady sea breeze died instantly. “I’m back,” Eve said, her voice as smooth as two snowflakes colliding. “I’ve missed you, Little Sister.”

223

THE BURNING BED

Monda

y

“What’s the matter?” Eve asked half-innocently.

“It’s been eight months, and you don’t exactly look pleased as a peach to see me.”

Ash stared. “You and I don’t exactly have a good track record when it comes to meeting on rooftops.”

“Guess I can’t argue with that.” Eve slipped down into the sitting position on the edge of the roof, and patted the shingles next to her. “Want to take a seat? Tell me how you’ve been?”

“Last time you knocked me off our roof and left me in the grass waiting for the ambulance.”

Eve waved a hand. “Stop being dramatic. I knew the fall wouldn’t kill you. And you and I both know that you’re not safe anywhere on this roof. One strong gust and—”

“This is the part where you at least try to make me feel safe.”

224

Eve nodded. “Sorry, Sis. . . . The company I’ve been keeping recently don’t really hold back. Real play-rough bunch. I keep forgetting when I’m among the living again.”

“Okay,” Ashline agreed. “I’ll sit with you, but if you try to shove me off, I’ll—”

“Be a pancake on the quad?” Eve interrupted.

“I was going to say ‘drag you with me.’” Ash couldn’t resist adding, “Although, if your ass has gotten any bigger, maybe you’ll just anchor us both in place.”

Eve offered her an ephemeral smile. “Good to know the California air hasn’t dulled that sharp tongue of yours. I was afraid these prep school kids would bore you to death.”

“‘These prep school kids’ definitely keep me on my toes.”
Or
, she added to herself,
at least keep me involved in
kidnappings, getaways, and canyon shoot-outs.

She wandered over to the edge of the roof. Below, on the sweeping Blackwood quad, was the scene that Eve had been gazing down upon and that Ashline had not seen when she’d been approaching the academic building.

There, crisscrossing the grass as if they were cows meandering around a pasture, were not two but six of the blue flame creatures. Even from three stories above, Ash could see the wreath of fiery cerulean their flames cast onto the ground.

Ashline’s breath caught in her throat. Eve looked nonplussed, her legs swinging off the edge of the roof like a child’s on a swing. “Kind of beautiful, aren’t they?”

225

“In a terrifying sort of way,” Ash said. “Then, sure.

What . . . what the hell are they?”

“We call them the Cloak.” Eve didn’t bother to elabo-rate on who she meant by “we.” “They’re a hive mind—

linked together so that when they interact, they can feed their thoughts into one shared collective consciousness. .

. . So I guess in that case the Cloak are really more of an

‘it’ than a ‘they.’ Think of them as many branches of the same tree.”

Given that Eve had remained civil for a full two minutes, and no one had been electrocuted yet, Ash shelved her misgivings and slipped down beside her. “If those are the branches, I’d hate to see the trunk.”

“Or the roots,” Eve added. Her face had drawn sober.

“They say that when the plants and the animals and the humans and the gods were created, the Cloak were made from the excess fabric that was left over. As if the Creator had an extra yard of velour when he was done making all of us and said, ‘Screw it. Let’s make Earth a little more interesting.’”

“And you believe that?” Ashline asked. She desperately wanted to know where Eve had learned all this, but there was a sixteen-car pileup of questions in her brain, preventing any of them from funneling their way out of her mouth.

Eve sniffed noncommittally. “Stories like that are merely intended to simplify what our tiny little minds can’t process. But if you ask me, if the Cloak are tele-pathic, unified, and apparently invincible, and we are the 226

imperfect little skin bags that fight and kill each other, then
we
must be the dregs left over after
they
were created.”

Ashline shuddered. “Are they dangerous?”

“When they want to be,” Eve replied. “As far as I’ve seen, the Cloak have no sense of right and wrong, no moral compass. But they do have an agenda . . . and that agenda, as far as I can tell, is to mess with us. Humans can’t see them, can’t notice the way they tinker with their lives every day.”

“But
we
can,” Ashline said, and felt a bit odd using the term “we,” as if she belonged to some sort of club.

“Does it make it any better when you see who’s holding the stick that’s poking you through the bars of the cage?” Eve shook her head. “Take right now, for instance.

Are they wandering around your school because they’re just curious about human life? Or are they just mulling around because they smell deity nearby and
they want to
get into your head
?”

The word “deity” echoed within Ashline’s brain as if she’d inserted her head into the clock tower bell right as it was being rung. “So we are gods, then.”

Eve raised her eyebrows twice. “Cool, ain’t it?”

“Then why are we—”

“Then why are we stuck in teenage bodies, forced to go through puberty and endure the embarrassment of high school just like everyone else?” Eve finished for her.

“The first of many questions.”

“Because the gods aren’t like we’ve been told they 227

are,” Eve said, and Ashline could all but hear her sister’s soul buzzing. “Not some malevolent immortal beings sitting on the top of a mountain, or ruling the earth from the clouds. We’re flesh and blood and bone and breath and laughter and pain, just like everyone else. . . . Only, unlike everyone else, we’re reborn every century or so with no memory of the last time and forced to live it all over again from scratch. We’re not immortal in the sense that we can’t die; just immortal in the sense that we end up back here.”

“We’re reincarnated . . . as ourselves,” Ash said, trying to piece it all together.

“Ash, we’ve been here before!” Eve grabbed her sister’s arm excitedly. “Many times—thrown onto the grid-dle and then tossed back into the pancake mix, over and over again. Who knows the things we’ve seen in all our years, all our centuries. The cities rising, the cities falling.

Distant lands, our lovers, our wars . . .”

Ash closed her eyes, probing the recesses of her mind for memories waiting to be unlocked, of faraway shores and old friends.

“But something is wrong,” Ash said.

Eve gave a her a sideways glance, up and down. “You mean besides the mismatched pajama set you’re wearing now?”

“Good to see that you’re still a brand snob even on this side of mortality.”

“If I’m going to be a goddess,” Eve said, “there’s no 228

reason I shouldn’t look like one too.” She winked.

Despite the toxic wasteland of history between them, Ash couldn’t help but laugh. “So nothing’s up? You’re just here on a social visit, or scoping out new schools?”

Ash frowned. “You’re not . . . you’re not planning to enroll here, are you?”

“Trade in world travels for a calculus textbook?” Eve rolled her eyes. “I’m just here to see my baby sister. Just like last time.” Eve bit her lip as if the last four words would take her someplace she didn’t want to go.

Just like last time.

“Okay, spill.” Ash crossed her arms. “We share the same DNA, Eve. I know exactly when you’re spraying on bullshit and pretending it’s perfume.”

Eve looked back out over the quad; four of the Cloak had disappeared, off into the woods maybe. Two of them still lurked outside the athletic complex. “I know I’ve made mistakes along the way, Ash, but you don’t always have to believe the worst.”

But Ashline refused to be suckered. “Stuff that hurt puppy look into your Coach bag, and just tell me what the hell is going on.”

Eve huffed. “You want the truth, Ash? We’re all going to die.”

“Yeah, you just said that. From the sound of it, we’ve died a whole lot.”

“Well, this time we aren’t coming back,” Eve blurted out, as if a water main inside her had burst.

229

A boreal cold filled Ash, like a permafrost had formed beneath her skin. “What?”

Eve slipped both hands through her tussled hair. “For the last few generations, fewer and fewer of us have been making the return each time. At first it was only a few . .

. and then entire pantheons disappeared, lost somewhere in the limbo of time. And now we’re all convinced that the Cloak have somehow found a way to interfere with our regeneration.”

“You keep saying ‘we,’” Ash said. “And you certainly aren’t referring to you and me.”

“When I was traveling, searching for other people like us,” Eve explained, “I met a group of gods living up in Vancouver. They were led by some sort of divine being called Blink. Wears a mask. Creepy as hell. No one could explain to me what he was, or how they’d found him, only that he wasn’t like us, or humans, or even the Cloak.

He was . . . something else. He scared the shit out of me at first, but in a time when I didn’t know who to trust, Blink was the first to give me answers.”

“So you’ve been taking orders from this Blink, and you
don’t even know what he is
?” Ashline asked. But even then she was thinking back thirty-six hours to when she’d been standing on the beach, taking orders from a scroll that had been given to her by a blind girl, who had in turn dictated the message from a strange man that had shown up on her porch.

“We’re all just marionettes, Ashline,” Eve said softly.

230

“Dangling, dancing, waiting. You can pretend like you pull your own strings, but in the end your only hope is that you’ve landed in the hands of someone who knows what the hell they’re doing.”

“No one pulls my strings,” Ashline whispered.

Eve ignored her. “I was in San Diego last week, trying to track down a Celtic goddess who was on the run.

She caught me by surprise with a golf club and knocked me out cold. A freaking river goddess and she decides to go
Sopranos
on me with a nine iron. Didn’t wake up for hours. But while I was out, I had a vision. A vision of a girl on a boat, being transported to some tropical coast. A vision of a girl who looks just like you and me.”

Ash frowned. “Was she about this high”—she spread her arms apart—“and as deadly as she is soft-spoken?”

“So you’ve seen the visions too, then!” Eve squeezed Ashline’s hand.

“Who is she?”

“If I had to take a guess,” Eve replied, “I’d say we’re seeing echoes from the last time we were here. Some interested parties must have kidnapped us for their experiments. . . . Blink is under the impression that lodged somewhere in those echoes is the answer to how we can restore the cycle—to how we can live forever again.”

“And you believe him,” Ashline said.

“You’re damn right I do!” Eve shouted, loud enough that Ash actually glanced far across the quad toward the faculty residence. “It’s a cosmic joke, that we live all of 231

these lives but get to retain
none of it
. None of it!” Her finger darted toward the blue glow bleeding softly through the windows of the athletic complex. “I’m sure they’re somehow to blame for this. I want them dead!” She slammed her fist down on the roof, and Ashline jumped to her feet as a shock zapped her through the seat of her pajamas.

“Lower your voice!” Ash hissed.

Eve clambered to her feet. “Come with me, Ash. I know I blew it when I came to Westchester last year, but that’s why I’m here—to ask you the right way. Come with me. Best-case scenario, we beat the system and we get to roam the earth the way we were supposed to. Worst-case, you get to spend some time with your older sister, and in style. Not drowning in boredom with your nose in a calculus book.”

She actually means it this time
, Ashline thought. And so she was hopeful when she replied, “I have a better idea.

Let me finish out the rest of this school year—there’s barely a month left—and then we’ll have the entire summer to hash this thing out.”

Eve paused. “You mean in Westchester.”

“They miss you.”
If only you could see Mom’s face.

“This isn’t like elective surgery, Ash. You don’t just schedule it for when it’s more convenient for you. Eternity doesn’t wait until after finals.”

“What about tennis season?” Ashline joked.

Eve didn’t laugh, but instead toed up against the 232

edge of the roof. “There’s a fiery tide coming, and there’ll come a time when you’re going to have to decide where you stand. Do you want to be just a flicker in history? Or will you stand up and be a torch in the tide? So you can wall yourself here in your snow globe a little longer and pretend like your dances and tennis matches and bonfires are the sun around which your world revolves.” She tapped her head. “But this time you can trust that I’m not going to abandon you. I’ll be seeing you, Ashline,”