Wildefire (36 page)

The room tilted a little. Shit, she realized. She was rapidly diving from buzzed into drunk. The last dregs of alcohol were sabotaging the good-decision-making 359

epicenter of her brain, which had already been compro-mised by her desire to hurt Colt for standing her up.

She wanted to tell Bobby to pull her closer.

She wanted to tell him to go to hell.

She wanted to kiss him.

She wanted Colt to walk in just as Bobby Jones put his lips on her neck.

She wanted Bobby to get fresh again, to try the things she’d scolded him for a week ago.

She wanted to throw another alarm clock at his head.

Shit, she
really
wanted to kiss him.

Rather than answering him, she pressed her head to his chest so she wouldn’t have to look him in the eyes as she went to war with her hormones.

Reason kept telling her, “He’s nice but still has the maturity of a toddler, and P.S. You’re intoxicated.”

The Beelzebub inside her was seductively whispering,

“Yes, but he’s impossibly beautiful.”

Adonis or not, if her hormones raged any further, she was likely to set him on fire.

She took a step back, pulling free of his arms. “I . . .

I’ve got to get some fresh air.”

He protested and reached for her again, but she was already lost in the crowd. The lights briefly illuminated a wisp of smoke rising from her body.

The route off the dance floor was an obstacle course of unsavory grinding and couples sucking face, until she had skirted around the last hot and heavy pair. Two 360

chaperones nearby seemed to be resisting the urge to police the orgy in front of them, so long as no one got pregnant.

She safely reached the veranda, a little disc at the periphery of the pavilion, and the only spot that wasn’t covered by the roof. Free at last of the clammy dance floor, Ash inhaled several deep breaths. She grabbed hold of the railing overlooking the silent forest and willed the spins to go away, willed the alcohol to filter out of her bloodstream.

After a minute the world righted itself again. She listened to a few more songs from the veranda until the forest came back into focus. The pulse she could feel in her temple slowed, and the vein recessed back into her head. The ringing in her ears from the loud music died to a thin whine.

“You’re going to go back in there,” she instructed herself patiently. “You are not going to make out with any losers, even if they are hot. And you are absolutely not going to cast any more pathetic glances at the pavilion entrance.”

With her pep talk concluded and sobriety fast approaching, she returned to the land of the living. The DJ, perhaps sensing that the students would soon run out of fuel, shifted from pop music to techno, and the heartbeat of the crowd picked up. Ash tried looking through the sweating, grinding masses for familiar faces—Jackie, Darren, Rolfe—anyone. She stopped in the middle of the 361

dance floor, lost, and was about to give up and head for the appetizer table when she heard the moaning next to her.

Bobby Jones had his lips glued to a girl in an emerald dress. His eyes were closed but the look of joy on his face was nothing short of nirvana. He moaned again as her lips traveled across his cheek on a mischievous path toward his earlobe.

Ash nearly vomited on herself right then and there.

She tried to leave the disgusting couple to their intimate lip-lock, but hadn’t made it two steps before she heard Bobby’s voice, just audible over the music: “Oh, Ashline

. . .”

At first she thought he was calling out to her to apologize. But his eyes were still closed and he was very clearly speaking to the girl in his arms. “Ashline,” he murmured again.

They turned in profile, revealing the girl who was attacking his face like it was covered in sugar. Her soft, beautiful Polynesian features were deathly familiar to Ash even under the glittered mask covering the top half of her face.

Eve pulled away from Bobby’s neck and drew in a deep breath. Electricity crackled over her lips and between her teeth. And then she kissed Bobby Jones on the mouth.

His eyes, which had remained closed in ecstasy the entire time, instantly shot open, and his body shuddered in a violent seizure. He tried to squirm free, but Eve’s 362

muscular arms closed around his back and pressed his body into hers.

Bobby’s eyes rolled back until they were only whites, before his head lolled onto his shoulder, unconscious.

And still Eve held him, pressing his head into her neck and holding his body upright. To any nearby dancers it would appear as though he’d just had too much to drink, or maybe was having a romantic moment with his head resting on her shoulder.

The strings of lights exploded. The filaments inside them burst one by one like little firecrackers as electricity surged through the wires. The dancing instantly came to a screeching halt.

Then the music cut out as well, replaced by loud feed-back buzzing through the speakers.

The atmosphere outside crackled as if a car were being sawed in half.

A lightning bolt hammered down on the pavilion.

The bang was so deafening that the room erupted in screams. Even Ash threw up her hands to cover her ringing ears. When the blinding light receded, Ash could see smoke filling the rafters. A fire had started up in the beams. The flames quickly began to devour the roof, and the panicked shrieks of the students only grew louder.

Students banged into Ash left and right as they stampeded for the exit. Ash spotted the chaperones at the entryway trying to shepherd everyone out in an orderly fashion, but the mob of students overtook them. Their 363

cries of protest were drowned under all the screaming, and they were carried away down the steps like pieces of driftwood.

Meanwhile, Eve had dropped the unconscious Bobby roughly to the floor. Her presence towering over his body was the only thing that prevented him from being trampled by the fleeing students.

Ashline’s rage grew with each student who slammed into her as the crowd on the dance floor thinned out.

When she couldn’t restrain herself anymore, she lunged for Eve. Her fist slammed into her sister’s cheek, and Eve staggered back. Before Ash could get in another strike, a heavy gust coursed through the pavilion and wrapped its tornado fingers around Ashline’s neck. Like a phantom bungee cord attached to her waist, the wind dragged her on her back across the floor, maneuvering her through the last few escaping students. The friction with the wooden floorboards burned the skin of her bare back. She frantically tried to slow her momentum with her hands.

Ash was vaguely aware of the wall looming behind her, but it was still a surprise when she collided with the French doors that led into the ballroom. The glass spiderwebbed on impact, and for a tantalizing second she just leaned, dazed, with her back against the broken window.

A second gust ripped through the burning pavilion.

This one struck her with such velocity that the glass buckled behind her. She somersaulted backward through the door and into the dark ballroom.

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Ash groaned. It took several tries for her to pick herself up off the floor. The carpet around her was littered with shards of glass, and her hands were covered in blood.

Pain exploded somewhere in her abdomen. She had definitely broken a rib.

Eve appeared in the mangled door frame, a dark silhouette against the fiery smoke-screened background of the pavilion. It wouldn’t take long before the flames made their way down the roof and into the ballroom, but Eve didn’t look the least bit concerned. Instead she stepped through the broken window and hovered over her incapacitated sister.

“I was heading back to Vancouver when I had an epiphany, Little Sister,” Eve mused. “I realized that deep down you want to be free of this high school bullshit, but you have a sense of duty and obligation that I don’t. You need somebody to emancipate you, to the cut the shackles of your old life before you can enjoy your rebirth.”

Ash crawled on her hands and knees, but Eve’s foot came down on her back, flattening her to the ground. Ash howled with pain.

“But before you rise from the ashes like the phoenix you were meant to be, I’m going to have to burn everything to the ground. This inn. Your school. Your friends.”

She paused. “Your boyfriend.”

“What did you do with Colt?” Ash croaked.

“Don’t you worry about that.” Eve squatted and placed a finger beneath Ashline’s jaw, lifting her face so 365

that they were practically touching noses. “This is for your own good. I love you, Ashline.”

Behind Eve, Ash spied a dark pair of suit pants.

Rolfe’s voice said, “Well, I hate your guts.”

Rolfe seized a surprised Eve by the back of her dress and spun her around like a discus before letting go. She landed on her back on the long wooden table with such force that the legs broke out from underneath it.

The fall had only rattled her, and she was already peeling herself off the table. But Ade had joined Rolfe and now mailed home a current of thunder that cata-pulted Eve into the long, regal mirror that covered the back wall. It shattered on impact, and Eve dropped to the ground, unconscious. Where she had smashed into the mirror headfirst, blood dripped from the broken glass.

“Are you okay?” Raja asked, and helped Ash to her feet. Ash grimaced, but waved an okay. Smoke was quickly filling the ballroom, and the sprinklers overhead hissed on just as the fire alarm started wailing.

Under the red flashing lights of the alarm, Rolfe crossed the room in a few quick steps. He pulled the half-conscious Eve up by her neck with one hand, and with his other made a fist. “If you so much as sneeze, I’ll make Ashline an only child.”

Through the haze Ash spotted a figure appearing in the foyer behind Rolfe. She screamed for him to look out, but between the screech of the fire alarm and the intensity with which he was concentrating on Eve, he didn’t hear her.

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Lily stepped up behind him, and a sharp wooden spear elongated from her open hand. He finally sensed the shadow behind him, and dropped Eve roughly to the floor.

He spun around just in time for Lily to thrust the skewer through his heart.

He gazed down at the mistletoe spear in stupefaction, before Lily withdrew it and stepped away. The superhuman power fled from his dying limbs, and he had a few agonizing seconds to grope around at the hole in his chest as his legs gave out and he dropped to his knees.

He slumped face-first to the ground.

And just like that, Baldur, god of light, had fallen.

Rolfe was dead.

Ash was screaming, and Ade was screaming, and Raja was screaming loudest of all, their howls rising above the pulse of the fire alarm. Ade was the first one across the room, but Lily was prepared for him. She sent another spear hurtling his way. Ade couldn’t dodge it in time, and it pierced his thigh. Blood spurted onto the ground, and Ade dropped to the floor with a helpless cry.

Raja and Ashline were on Lily too fast for her to grow another spear. Ash grabbed hold of Lily’s struggling arms and pulled them roughly behind her back. Raja struck her viciously in the nose, so hard that when she pulled her fist away, Lily’s nose was visibly crooked.

The hard Egyptian lines of Raja’s face drew taut with murderous rage, and she fixed her hands on either side of Lily’s face. A tortured growl rumbled from Raja’s belly.

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Ash watched in the shattered mirror as Lily’s face aged five years, ten years, then fifteen and beyond. Her face, contorted with pain, softened as her smooth, young complexion puckered with years she had never seen. The flesh around the corners of her eyes wrinkled like tinfoil, and her black hair lightened by the second as if the color were dripping right off the follicles and onto the floor.

But in the reflection, Ash saw something else too late.

Eve had risen, dazed but awake, and she hammered her fist down onto Ashline’s back. The shock waves savaged her already broken rib, and the pain was too much. She fell to one knee, crippled with agony.

With her arms now free, Lily grabbed Raja’s head with her aging hands and brought her face crashing down onto her knee. Raja slumped to the carpet and landed, unconscious, next to her recently deceased boyfriend.

Lily took one last look in the mirror at her new vis-age, at the unfamiliar forty-five-year-old Japanese woman looking back at her. Then she lurched off down the hall, baying like a maimed creature until the front door of the inn slammed shut.

Eve grabbed her fallen sister roughly by the hair and shouted into her ear. “Catch me if you can. Your boyfriend’s waiting on the beach for his lady in red.” Ash reached out with a hand to grab Eve’s ankle, but Eve was already out of reach and running for the nearest window.

A hard wind shattered the glass, and the storm goddess hurdled out into the night.

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Ash choked back the pain and gradually rose to her feet. A wounded Ade was limping toward her. She gestured through the smoke to where Raja lay. “Get her out of here before this place burns to the ground with her inside it.” She started for the window.

Ade grabbed her tightly by the arm. “What are you doing?”

Tears streamed down Ashline’s cheeks as she cast a last look at Rolfe’s body. His unseeing eyes stared glassily off into a world beyond this one. “Making sure this never happens again.”

Ade’s grip on her slackened. With a running start Ash leapt through the broken window and landed on the wraparound porch outside.

Two fire trucks had pulled up outside the inn. Water arced from the hoses, but they were fighting a losing battle to dampen the flames rising from the blackened shell of the pavilion. Farther in the distance the mass of Blackwood students lingered on the grass watching the scene. The horn of a third fire truck trumpeted into the night as it raced across the parking lot to join the others.

Through her tear-blurred vision Ash spotted what she was looking for—Eve’s shadowed body heading for the narrow beach.

The knob of pain in Ashline’s left side only fueled her pursuit.