Wildefire Read Online Free PDF Page B

from where the lightning had burned holes in her tank top. Her body reached the gutter and dropped to the grass below.
    “Oh my God.” 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 asshole ex-boyfriend. For something like that you put peanut butter 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 “SLUT!” 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 cocked 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 grass 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