Wildefire (37 page)

She cast off her shoes when she hit the beach, and tore across the sand in her bare feet.

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Meanwhile, Eve reached the water first and changed trajectories so that she was heading along the coast. But Ashline’s tennis-toned calves made her faster, and she was closing the distance little by little.

The small beach in front of the inn ended abruptly in a cliff that rose sharply out of the shoreline, trading sand for stone. Eve vanished behind the wall of rock, but Ashline didn’t let up. She hit the water and ignored the sharp sting of the rocks under her feet.

The cliff rose higher as the chase continued alongside it, and so too did the water rise. What had been ankle-shallow before rapidly deepened until Ash was knee-deep, then up to her thighs. Even as the water approached her waist, she still struggled forward.

Ahead the cliff recessed back into a cove, and Eve splashed around the corner out of sight.

When Ash rounded the corner herself, she stopped dead in her pursuit.

They had waded into a cul-de-sac of stone, where the cliff towered thirty feet over them, But Ashline was looking at a series of sharp rocks protruding from the water, or more precisely, the man shipwrecked on them.

Lying there in his sea-soaked tuxedo was Colt Halliday. His body was chained to the rock by a series of thick metal links, and he was stretched out like he was on a torture rack. Blood drooled from his mouth down onto his bare chest, where Eve had ripped open his white tuxedo shirt. The lower half of his body was submerged 370

beneath the water. His eyes flickered in a state of half-consciousness, but he had the presence of mind to loll his head across the seaweed-covered stone and mouth something to Ashline.

“Help me.”

Eve, panting but trembling with victory, pointed to her prize. “Doesn’t he look handsome?” she asked. “He saved his last dance for you.”

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SIBLING RIVALRY

Frida

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Ashline started toward Eve, but the storm goddess wagged her finger warningly. Out on the horizon a bolt of lightning forked down from the heavens and struck the water.

Ash pointed back in the direction of the burning inn.

“Because of you a boy died tonight. Did you think all this would make me love you?”

“All you ever had to
do
was love me!” Eve shouted.

“You give your love away to all of those little urchins from your snotty prep school.” She waved an arm at Colt.

“You give your heart for free to every boy who so much as smiles in your direction. And you can’t find an ounce of forgiveness in your goddamn heart for your delinquent, misguided sister?”

“Reality check, Eve.” Ash bravely waded forward a few steps. “I don’t give a shit if we were discovered 372

abandoned in the same hut in the Pacific. Hell, I don’t care if we crawled out of the ass of the same sea monster.

You gave up the right to be my sister, my blood, when you started terrorizing me, when people started dying.”

“No one has to die anymore,” Eve said quietly. “Five words can save your boyfriend’s life.
Let’s go find our sister
.

Five words.”

“That easy?” Ash asked. “You just cut Colt’s chains and we hop on a flight to Acapulco or wherever the hell our miniature orphaned berserker is running amok? We track her down, take her to a carnival to get some cotton candy, and wait for her to explode? Are you out of your goddamn mind?”

A wind picked up over the water. Storm clouds billowed out of nowhere. Within seconds the sky transformed from a clear, moonlit night to a frothing, unsettled cumulonimbus mass. Thunder echoed in the cove, and darkness descended down on them like a falling curtain.

“I wish I had a crystal ball to show you your future with this loser,” Eve said. “One month of sweet talk, maybe two if you make him hold out. And then he will use every inch of you and leave your heart in a Dumpster.

It’s always the same story. This is for your own good.”

“Go to hell,” Ash replied.

Eve just stared at her sister blankly, her posture slumped. This wasn’t the victorious, gleeful, destructive Eve that Ash had watched light up when she’d smashed her motorcycle helmet into Lizzie’s face. But it wasn’t the 373

old Eve either, the mischievous but innocent older sister who had challenged her to ice cream races and laughed with her when they’d fallen to the floor with headaches from the cold. This was a stranger, every bit as confused, alone, and defeated as the six-year-old that was running around somewhere in the forests of Central America, burning everything to the ground. And Eve was just as dangerous.

Finally Eve said, “They say that drowning victims experience a calm just before they die. I hope for Colt’s sake that’s true.”

“No!” Ashline raced forward as quickly as she could, splashing through the water.

Eve shook her head at her sister. “You shouldn’t watch this.”

Ash had crossed only half the distance when a sharp riptide washed around her feet, sweeping them out from under her. She landed on her back in the water and sank below the surface. She tried to stand up, but before she could find her footing, an enormous wave rose out of the water and hammered down on her, forcing her farther under. Her head slammed into a rock on the ocean floor, and the dark sea around her flashed white. She lost all sense of direction, of up and down. The riptide grew stronger.

She floundered about helplessly, and the more she tried to break free of the tide, the harder it pulled at her body, drawing her out to sea. She pressed her fingers into 374

the dirt, hard enough to draw blood from her fingertips as she attempted to fight the drag, but it was as though the current itself had wrapped around her like a dexterous tongue, dragging her down, down, down into the waiting jaws of Davy Jones’s locker.

Her lungs burned for oxygen. Dark spots blis-tered across her vision. She teetered over the abyss of unconsciousness.

As her limbs stopped fighting,

And her hands stopped digging,

And the tears stopped coming,

And the hopes of saving Colt plummeted to nonexistence,

She had one last fleeting thought:

If Colt was to die because of her, at the merciless hands of the sea, at least she would be there lying dead on the beach beside him.

No,
a woman’s voice whispered to her.

Ash opened her eyes. In the sand beneath her the face of a dead girl stared back. It was Lizzie Jacobs, looking calm and resolute. She reached out her hands and placed them delicately to either side of Ashline’s face.
No,
she whispered to Ash again.

Not yet.

The icy embrace of the bleak night ocean vanished instantly, replaced by a hot blaze. Ashline’s entire body ignited. Every inch of her skin blossomed with fire, as if natural gas were leaking from her pores. The flames 375

instantly evaporated the riptide holding her down, allow-ing her to break free through the surface. She drew in a long greedy breath, and when the oxygen reached her lungs, the corona burning around her expanded outward.

In a cloud of steam she charged through the water back toward the cove. Her dress fell apart as the fire chewed through it, but modesty was the least of her worries. Ahead Eve stood with her arms raised in front of Colt. Wave after wave pounded down on his face. He was shaking his head from side to side, gasping for air as the salt water choked him.

Eve heard the splashing too late. She twirled around with electricity building in her palms, but Ashline, the human fireball, seized her by the wrists.

Eve screamed as Ashline’s fiery fingers locked onto her flesh, burning hard, burning bright. The pain severed Eve’s connection with the ocean, and the waves pummel-ing Colt died away. The electricity fizzled to nothingness in her palms.

Unable to stand the look of torture on her sister’s face any longer, Ash released her. Eve held up her blackened wrists and wailed in agony. The indentations of Ashline’s fingers were charred into Eve’s skin, and Eve plunged her arms beneath the surface of the water to cool them.

Ash focused her mind, concentrating on finding the valve to turn off whatever ghostly force was fueling the fire. Something clicked in her brain. Her imaginary hand 376

closed around the valve and twisted it shut. The corona around her faded, and soon after extinguished itself completely.

Eve knelt in the water, submerged up to her shoulders, and sobbed. Neither she nor Ashline knew that something much worse was in store for the elder Wilde.

Ash noticed it first, the eerie darkness swelling in the water behind Eve. It grew like an oil slick from hell, per-colating up from oblivion. Soon it rose out of the water in a thick column, bubbling up, up, until it towered the height of three men over the crouching Eve.

From the darkness bloomed one flaming blue eye, two, then a third. The nightmarish irises popped up all over its dark oily body until there were no fewer than twenty eyes flickering and blinking at the Cloak’s prey waiting vulnerably in the water.

Bathed in blue light, Eve looked up at Ashline with terrified eyes. Out of the black, two arms exploded outward and latched themselves to Eve’s shoulders. A third and fourth secured her by the waist and jerked her body backward. She screamed and extended a pleading hand as her torso was swallowed into the blackness.

Ash would never forget the empty look in Eve’s eyes when her face vanished into the Cloak. Her mouth opened just before it was sucked into the void, and Ashline would always have to wonder whether it was to apologize for everything or just to scream.

The Cloak descended into the water until the last of 377

the blue flames disappeared beneath the surface, carrying Evelyn Wilde with it into the oblivion beyond.

Ashline wanted time to process and possibly mourn what had just happened to her sister, but wouldn’t get the chance. Something boomed on the horizon, and a strange whistling overtook the hush of the ocean. With Eve out of the picture, the clouds rapidly dissolved, and the reappearing moon illuminated an ominous line on the horizon.

“Oh my God,” Ashline whispered when she realized what she was looking at.

In her last moments Eve had left Ash and Colt with a farewell gift.

A tsunami.

It would kill them both. Even if it didn’t rip Colt free from his chains, even if it didn’t smash him open on the rocks, even if Ashline survived the impact with the rock cliff behind her as the water surged forward, it would surely drown them both.

Ash waded the last few steps to the rocks where Colt lay unconscious and limp in his chains. His head rolled to the side. Ash crawled up onto the rocks beside him and cradled his face in her hands.

“I’m so sorry,” she whispered to him, her thumb caressing the line of his jaw. She pressed her lips to his for the last time, only wishing he were present to kiss back.

She had intended to kiss him until the end, intended to keep contact with his chapped, salty lips until the tidal 378

wave dragged her away from him and carried her to her death against the rocks.

But she had to pull away prematurely. The fire had returned, and this time she felt it blossoming in her belly first. She cradled her stomach and staggered back through the water. Flames sprouted from her hands, igniting the last singed vestiges of her dress that still clung to her skin.

She turned to face the tidal wave. The line of water was growing exponentially taller, and a deafening
whoosh
drowned out the whistle of the wind.

Ash gazed at the fire simmering in the palms of her hands.

Her body trembled and her earthen Polynesian skin transformed into red and then a glowing brown.

Flesh turned to lava.

Blood turned to magma.

She lifted her head to the moon and bellowed, willing the fire to grow. Her corona widened. Dark solar flares licked out around her body.

The atmosphere around her sizzled up a hundred degrees, then another. While the temperature skyrock-eted, the water nearby hissed and turned to steam.

She faced the incoming tsunami head-on and held out her hands.

I am the fieriest depths of hell,
she told herself.

I am the surface of the sun.

I am the belly of a volcano. I am the unstoppable force that
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has formed new islands, and the same unstoppable force that has
brought cities to their knees.

I am the volcano goddess who has survived a thousand years.

I am Ashline Wilde, and I may not survive another thousand years, but I’ll be damned if I’m ready to go yet.

She planted her feet, closed her eyes, and braced for the impact.

The wall of flames exploded out of her and hit the tsunami right as it entered the cove. The wave rammed the fire with the velocity of a runaway freight train. But the heat in front of Ashline escalated higher and higher, a living kiln in the face of death.

In ten seconds it was all over. From the front of the wave to the very bubbles of its tail, the heat generated by Ashline vaporized the tsunami into steam.

When she was sure it was all over and the howling had ceased, the fire around Ashline snapped off as suddenly as it had erupted from her. She dropped to her knees, exhausted, and held her head in her hands as the last embers died from her skin. The surf lapped around her once more and filled the void left by her mass evaporation.

Eventually she found the strength to return to her feet. It was nearly impossible to see anything in the cove.

The vapor had transformed the atmosphere around her into a thick fog. But a waking groan from Colt clued her in to his location. She waded through the shallows until his rock peaked out through the fading cloud around them.

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Colt turned his head to the side and threw up several pints of brine onto the rocks. When the retching had finished, he blinked uncertainly at the white around him, at the shackles that pinned him to the rock, at the vision of Ashline coming through the cloud toward him.

She was vaguely aware that the heat from her body had incinerated all but the last pieces of her underwear, but this wasn’t the time or place for self-consciousness.