Part 30 (1/2)

Ash groaned. It took several tries for her to pick herself up off the floor. The carpet around her was littered with shards of gla.s.s, 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 bulls.h.i.+t, but you have a sense of duty and obligation that I don't. You need somebody to emanc.i.p.ate 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 gla.s.s.

”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 flas.h.i.+ng 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.

366.

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, G.o.d 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.

367.

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 cras.h.i.+ng 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 j.a.panese 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 gla.s.s, and the storm G.o.ddess hurdled out into the night.

368.

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 gla.s.sily 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 sh.e.l.l of the pavilion. Farther in the distance the ma.s.s of Blackwood students lingered on the gra.s.s 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 k.n.o.b of pain in Ashline's left side only fueled her pursuit.

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

369.

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 sh.o.r.eline, 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 s.h.i.+pwrecked 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 s.h.i.+rt. 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.