Wildefire Series: Wildefire Part 2

She stepped forward and prodded Alexis roughly with her finger. "This is a mandatory team bonding experience, and if you bail now, I'll make sure Coach glues your a.s.s to the bench this season. So what's it going to be?"

After a period of silence during which she glanced between the two older girls, Alexis shrugged in consent.

"Okay, okay. Let's just get in and out before the police show up."

With that the girls disappeared out of Ashline's view, vanishing somewhere in the direction of the garage. Ash cast a hesitant look at her cell phone, where it had landed next to the wastebasket. The smart thing would be to call the police. But curiosity overpowered reason, and this coupled with an intense desire to defend her house from the would-be intruders, so she picked up the phone, flipped it to silent, and dropped it into her pocket.

Ash ditched her moccasins and tiptoed out of the room, letting her socks mask her footsteps. Before she headed down the stairs, on a whim she grabbed a bottle of aerosol hair spray from the bathroom, wielding it in front of her like a gun.

24.

When she reached the bottom of the stairs, she could hear the faint sound of giggling from the side of the house.

Across the living room three shadows flickered past the windows, accompanied by a faint grating as one of the girls dragged her hockey stick along the siding. They were heading toward the backyard.

As soon as Ash heard their footsteps travel across the stone patio, she ducked behind the kitchen counter so they wouldn't catch a glimpse of her through the slider door. She wasn't ready to forfeit her element of surprise just yet. The motion-sensitive lights in the backyard buzzed on, projecting two silhouettes through the window and onto the back wall; so somebody had remained on the side of the house.

On her hands and knees Ash crawled across the floor until she reached the door that opened out into the side yard. With one hand perched on the doork.n.o.b and the other still clutching her can of hair spray, she gave herself a once-over and realized that her rabbit-covered pajama bottoms and pink tank top weren't doing much to up her intimidation factor. Nothing she could do about that now . . . and getting caught should be enough to startle the mischievous girls.

Ash counted to three and marched out into the yard with cool intensity. The murmur of the heavy drizzle against the gra.s.s buffered the creak of the opening door, and for a few seconds Alexis remained oblivious to the angry girl crossing the yard toward her. She sat at the 25 picnic table, a can of spray paint in one hand and her field hockey stick across her lap. She wore a miserable pout and was visibly sickened, either by the thought of spraying graffiti on the wall in front of her or because she was now soaked to the bone outside instead of tucked into her safe, dry bed.

Ash stopped a good five yards from Alexis, who with a flinch finally realized she was no longer alone. She was so startled that she fell off the picnic table, landing on her back in the muddy gra.s.s.

"You don't want to be here," Ash whispered to her, and pointed back toward Baker Lane. "I'll give you five seconds to pick your sorry a.s.s up off my lawn and run home. But you better run. One-"

Ash hadn't even counted to two when the timid freshman pounced to her feet like a gazelle with a lion in hungry pursuit. She barreled off across the lawn, abandoning both her field hockey stick and her can of paint in the gra.s.s. If she showed that kind of speed on the hockey field, Ash thought, she needn't worry about riding the bench this season. Ash wriggled with enjoyment watching Alexis stumble and fall to her knees in a huge puddle, before she reached the sidewalk and sprinted off into the night. There was a good possibility Alexis would either wet herself or throw up by the time she got home. Maybe both.

One down, Ash thought. She scooped up Alexis's forgotten can of paint and tucked it into her waistband. And then she rounded the corner of the house.

26.

In the backyard Ash found only one of the two remaining girls. Crouched on the patio tiles, Gabby was just wrapping up a graffiti portrait on the back wall-an enormous drawing of a p.e.n.i.s. The field hockey co-captain had just begun to scrawl Ashline's name beneath it. She'd made it only halfway through the h. She cursed and shook her can vigorously, but only air came out of the nozzle as she tried to complete the name.

"d.a.m.n it," Gabby mumbled, and then she heard Ashline's footsteps approaching across the patio.

Mistaking Ashline for her teammate, she didn't look up from her masterpiece but said, "I'm out of paint, Lexi.

Can I borrow your can? It won't have the same effect if it looks like I just wrote 'a.s.s.'"

Ash stopped right next to Gabby and leaned over.

Gabby must have finally caught sight of Ashline's socks and rabbit pajamas, because she snapped her head around in horror. "Sure," Ash replied. "I'll give you a spray."

She let loose a long blast of hair spray past Gabby's eyes, purposely just missing her face. Gabby shrieked anyway and dropped onto her back like a turtle. The spray can rolled out of her hand and across the patio.

Clutching her eyes, which began to stream with tears, Gabby fumbled onto her knees. But Ash seized hold of her letter jacket before Gabby could get too far, and heaved her off the patio and into the mud.

Ash knelt over Gabby and held her firmly by the lapel, bringing the other girl's face toward hers until they were nose to nose. "I don't give a rat's a.s.s about you, Gabby 27 Perkins. So I'm going to do you a favor. Tell me where Lizzie is, and I'll let you stumble out of here. I won't call the cops, and when I pa.s.s you in the halls from now on, this didn't happen."

Gabby gazed up at her with bleary eyes, blinking furiously. And then she resignedly pointed up toward the roof.

Ash snorted. "Is this what you call team loyalty?" She released the girl and pushed her back into the mud. "Now get the h.e.l.l out of my yard."

Gabby cast a last torn look at the roof, toward the teammate she was leaving behind. And then she took off-if it were possible, even more quickly than Alexis had departed minutes earlier.

It took only a few seconds for Ashline to figure out how Lizzie had made her way to the roof. Ash had to give her credit. Either the girl had tremendous cojones or she just hated the Wilde family so much that she was willing to throw caution to the wind. At the corner of the house was a trellis, a crisscross pattern of woodwork that Ashline's parents used as a clutching board for their Boston ivy. It was actually Ash's favorite part of the house, and she enjoyed reading under it during the spring and summer months.

Clearly her enemy had used it as a ladder to climb onto the roof. Now Ash was going to have to as well.

Ash slipped off her wet socks and cast them onto the patio before she approached the trellis. She slipped her 28 fingers through the square holes and rattled it a few times to make sure it was firmly attached to the wall. And then she began her ascent.

It occurred to Ash as she climbed that she was just as crazy as Lizzie to be following her up to the roof. The holes in the trellis were tiny and didn't offer proper footholds, and her bare feet kept slipping off. More than once she found herself dangling by her hands alone. The whole wooden structure was slick with rain-not to mention the snow from earlier-and felt slimy to the touch, as if it were covered with algae. Every time Ash reached for a new handhold, she half-expected the wood to have rotted away and the trellis to break off in her hand.

And so it was to Ashline's relieved surprise that she clambered over the gutter and onto the roof shingles without having broken a leg or dropped onto the patio stones twenty feet below. Lizzie was nowhere in sight. Using her hands and feet, Ash cautiously crawled up the treacher-ous, slippery slope, over the summit of the A-frame roof, and onto the side facing the street.

Lizzie, who was at the other end of the roof and had her back to Ashline, was concluding work on the exclamation point in "s.l.u.t!" She had painted the word in eight-foot-tall letters on the shingles, more than large enough to be read by pa.s.sersby on the street, possibly by the pa.s.sengers of low-alt.i.tude airplanes as well. The rain had caused some of the paint to ooze toward the gutter like runny eggs. Lizzie was already done with her first draft, 29 but had apparently decided that the letters were neither wide nor bold enough to sate her thirst for retribution.

Ash plucked her own bottle of spray paint from her waistband and clambered down the roof. "Let me help you with the dot on that exclamation point," Ash said, and before Lizzie could turn around, Ash fired a stream of paint onto the back of Lizzie's checkered London trench coat. By the time Lizzie could shy away, Ash had tagged her with a slime green bull's-eye.

Lizzie extended her spray paint arm, as if the electric blue paint would protect her somehow. Her cheeks and eyes were a swollen mess of black and violet and blue and tinges of green where Ash and Eve had made a Jackson Pollock painting of her face.

Ash smiled acidly. "I figured I'd tag you, so that animal control would know that there's a b.i.t.c.h on the loose."

With a growl Lizzie stripped off the now destroyed coat and tossed it off the roof. "That was my favorite Burberry!"

Ash shrugged. "This was my favorite roof."

"What are you going to do? Push me off it?" Lizzie asked, trying to sound fierce, but Ash caught her glancing nervously to the ground below.

"No." Ash chucked the spray paint can to the side and took a deep breath, trying to quell the flames that this girl was so talented at fanning. "All I want is for you to go home. We don't have to be friends at school, or even civil in the hallway. I don't want to borrow your 30 algebra homework, and I don't expect you to come over and braid my hair while we watch VH1. I just want to go sit in my room alone, wait out my suspension, and forget this bulls.h.i.t ever happened."

"Don't act like you didn't bring this on yourself,"

Lizzie said, though she sounded like she only half-believed it. "I'm not the villain here."

Ash bowed her head. "I don't know who deserves what anymore. I just know that all this"-she gestured around, to the roof, then to Lizzie's bruised face-"isn't worth a lowlife like Rich Lesley."

Lizzie wiped the rain from her eyes and looked up to the heavens. The rain seemed to be coming down with renewed intensity, working its way from a drizzle up to a full-blown downpour. The girls regarded each other coolly in the rain. They were far from establishing a rap-port but were perhaps coming to a truce, neither one fully understanding the events that had brought them up onto this slippery roof in the dead of a stormy night.

"So that's it?" Lizzie said. "I just head home, you don't call the cops. I don't sue you for knocking out my tooth, and we don't speak of this again?"

"I'm afraid it's not that easy," another voice shouted through the rain.

Lightning flashed over the trees in the backyard, illuminating the dark figure straddling the summit of the house-Eve. With vicious grace Eve slid down the shingles until she came to a stop behind Lizzie. Before the 31 field hockey captain could react, Eve wrapped her fingers around the soph.o.m.ore's neck and squeezed.

With superhuman strength Eve lifted Lizzie Jacobs off the roof. There, with her eyes bulging and her blotchy bruises darkening to a more sickening shade, Lizzie dangled helplessly, with her toes flailing a full foot from safe harbor.

"This is the last time you screw with the Wilde sisters," Eve said to the girl clutched in her talons.

"Put her down, Eve," Ash ordered. "Everything will be okay. Lizzie will drop the charges against you. Won't you, Lizzie?"

Lizzie was attempting to pry Eve's hands off her throat, her face all the while turning crimson, but she managed a single frantic nod in response.

"Too late," Eve said to her sister, and hoisted the field hockey player higher. "This is bigger than the law now.

This is about respect." Eve narrowed her eyes at Lizzie.

"You should have learned your lesson the first time."

In that moment a number of things happened. A strange sensation blossomed in Ashline's stomach, the feeling of an approaching fall as if she were cresting the hill of a roller coaster. Her ears clicked, once, twice, and then there was a series of rapid clicks; she experienced the same phenomenon every time she traveled by airplane.

The pressure around them on the roof was plummeting at an alarming rate.

Most frightening of all, the hair on Lizzie's head stood 32 upright. Ash watched as each of the girl's wet strands of hair rose skyward, pointing up at the hidden moon, until a circular mane of blond hair had surrounded her face like the rays of a Mayan sun. Static electricity visibly crackled everywhere-through the ends of her blond locks, between her fingertips, from the tops to the bottoms of her eyelashes.

Ash took a frightened step back. "Eve, are you . . . are you doing this?"

But when Eve turned to look at Ash, her eyes shone fluorescent white, and the smile on her face told Ash everything she needed to know.

"Didn't your parents tell you not to play outdoors during a thunderstorm?" Eve taunted the girl in her clutches. "You might just find yourself playing the lightning rod."

With a crackle from above as if the fabric of heaven itself were tearing in half, Lizzie's head snapped back, and a bolt of lightning shot from her mouth up into the clouds.

The flash was blinding. Ash had to throw her hands up to protect her face as the air around them heated so rapidly that the moisture on the rain-slick roof evaporated into a mist. But through the slats in her fingers, Ash could only watch, petrified, as Lizzie's body shuddered violently, her arms and legs rigid out to either side.

Then, as soon as the lightning had come, it was gone.

The mist cleared and Eve dropped Lizzie's lifeless body to the roof. Lizzie rolled limply down the slope of the 33 A-frame, followed by a trail of smoke from where the lightning had burned holes in her tank top. Her body reached the gutter and dropped to the gra.s.s below.

"Oh my G.o.d." Ash covered her mouth. "You killed her."

Eve had been admiring the spot where Lizzie's body had tumbled off the roof, dreamily appreciating her own handiwork, but Ashline's voice snapped her out of it. Her fluorescent eyes blazed when she turned to face her sister.

"You're defending that monster?"

"Monster?" Ash repeated. She searched Eve's face for any sign of the sister she once knew. "Eve, that monster made out with my a.s.shole ex-boyfriend. For something like that you put peanut b.u.t.ter between the pages of her textbooks or . . . or spread a rumor that she has herpes.

You don't . . . you don't . . ." But she couldn't finish the sentence because her nose had discovered the scent of burned flesh. She gagged.

"I wouldn't even know the name Lizzie Jacobs if you hadn't gone and punched her in the face!" Eve shouted.

"Here," she said, and dipped her hand into the paint of the T in "s.l.u.t!" Eve drew a line of the electric green paint across her own cheek. Then she crossed the roof in three long strides and smeared the paint on Ashline's bare shoulder and down her arm. "Now neither of us is clean of this. Now her blood is on you, too."

Ash touched two fingers to the paint and held it in front of her face, just as Lizzie had done with her own 34 blood that very morning after Ash had punched her in the mouth. I did this, she realized. I did this. But when she opened her mouth to say it out loud, what came out instead was, "Why did you have to come back now?"

Eve's face softened, and the afterglow behind her eyes flickered and dimmed gently like a firefly dying in the night. When she spoke, Ash could hear some phantom affection of the Eve who years ago would walk her to the playground when their parents were working late at the practice. "I came back to Scarsdale for you, Ash. To tell my baby sister all the places I've been."

"Yeah," Ashline muttered. "And now I'm chock-full of answers."

Eve gestured to the road with a big sweep of her arm.

The rain had picked up again. "You think I was really out on the road all these months? While you were canoodling with Rich Lesley, I was traveling to a place you can only dream of. I can take you there too, Ash. We can find out what gifts you have waiting for you in here." She pressed a finger to Ashline's chest. A trail of sparks blossomed beneath her touch. "Let me and my friends help you unlock it. Let us show you that we were all meant for a greater destiny."

Ash gritted her teeth, trembling as she gazed up at her taller sister. "I will never go with you," she said. And before she could think better of it, she added, "You freak."

Eve's hand shot up and fixed itself around Ash's face, squeezing until Ash felt like her jaw was going to pop 35 loose. A screech erupted from the back of Eve's throat.

She c.o.c.ked her other hand back and then struck her sister so hard that Ash went tumbling across the roof.

Disoriented and picking up speed, Ash attempted to reach out and grab the gutter.

The next thing she knew, the world had opened up underneath her and she was twisting and falling. After a stomach-churning plummet, Ash hit the ground back-first so hard that she thought her head would break right off her body and roll into the street.

Everything went still. She lay there, unmoving, watching the troubled night clouds billowing overhead, like the writhing gray matter of a brain come to life. Her vision grew bleary as a pool of rain and tears filled her eyes in a thickening sheen. There was a thud in the gra.s.s somewhere next to her, and the blurred image of Eve appeared in the foreground.

"I thought family meant something to you," Eve said.

She spit on the ground next to Ash's face. "You are no sister of mine. Don't come looking for me."

Perhaps it was Ash's increasingly soggy vision, but in the moments that followed, it appeared as if the wind itself swept down from the trees and whisked Eve's body away.

A few dazed minutes pa.s.sed before Ash had the presence of mind to pull her cell phone from her waterlogged pocket. She dialed 9-1-1, mumbled her address, and then dropped the phone into the mud, while the tinny voice 36 of the dispatcher asked repeatedly for the nature of her emergency.

Even as the sirens picked up from the south, even as the red and whites flickered over the lawn soon after, Ash lay still in the gra.s.s, letting the rain cascade down around her, hoping her mind would take her some place-any place-other than here on the lawn with a dead girl.

37.

PART I: THE REDWOODS.

Eight Months Later SLEEPWALKER.