Embers & Echoes by Karsten Knight

avoid the Chicano’s face, eh?”
    Ash was just starting to lean closer to the scene when she felt fingers slide through her hair and twist. She tried and failed to stifle a squeak as a hand yanked her to her feet by the top of her head. The follicles of her scalp screamed in pain.
    She turned around just far enough to see her attacker. He wore a sleeveless T-shirt and couldn’t have been older than twenty-one or twenty-two. His goatee was scraggly where his facial hair had yet to come in fully. But Ash was forced to take him seriously when she noted that his free hand had unholstered the gun from his hip.
    “Whatchou doing here?” he grilled her in an accent that matched that of the man in the suit—Cuban?
    She tried to untangle his fingers from her hair, but his grip tightened and he twisted her head roughly to the side.
    She had to bite her lip to keep from squealing out again. “What the hell, bro?” she growled. “Can’t a girl watch a sunset from a boat without getting scalped?”
    “Wait a minute.” The guard’s eyes grew wide, and he released her hair, though to Ash’s horror, a few of her dark hairs came away with his fingers. “You’re her, aren’t you?”
    “What?” Ash asked, massaging her scalp, then realized she was asking the wrong question. “Who?”
    He gestured quickly around the corner with the gun. “His little girlfriend. I’ve heard about you.”
    “Wait, I’m not—”
    “I want to see them,” he said.
    Ash glanced down at her shirt. “Are you talking about my—”
    “I don’t got all day and I’m not playin’.” He raised the gun and trained it directly between her eyes. “I want to see them. Take off your shirt.”
    She opened her mouth to argue, but he flicked the safety on and off to tell her that he meant business.
    The bile crept up Ash’s throat. She hadn’t even removed any clothing, and she already felt violated by this little bastard. She didn’t know who he thought she was, but she could only assume what he was after. Her choices, however, were limited. She didn’t trust her abilities enough to melt a bullet in the chamber, and heating up his hand could cause him to misfire.
    Her hands were shaking as they made their way down to the first button, and then the second. Strangely, however, she noticed he wasn’t looking at her breasts. He was staring intently at her shoulders. In fact, he was so focused on the nape of her neck that his gun was just ever so slowly drifting off target.
    When she hit the third button, she couldn’t take it anymore—she struck.
    She lashed out with her mind at the handle of the revolver. The guard screamed and dropped the gun. He held up his now crimson palm, which was bleeding in patches. Some of his skin was still stuck to the red-hot handle of the gun.
    Ash seized the opportunity and landed a kick to his knee, dropping him. Then she followed up by slamming his head into the railing.
    However, the blow to his head didn’t put him out like she thought it would. He snaked his arm around the back of her leg and ripped her feet right out from underneath her. She landed hard on the unforgiving wood, and the air exploded out of her lungs.
    The guard started to crawl toward her, and Ash lashed out on pure instinct. Her boot caught him square in the nose. His eyes had a moment to look at her, startled, before they lost focus and his eyelids drooped. His head landed on the wooden deck with a sickening thud.
    Ash slowly lifted herself off the wood and massaged her side. The rib she’d broken during her confrontation with Eve in May was still tender.
    She peeled the guard’s face off the deck. He was breathing, but his nose was visibly bent and there were splinters now protruding from his forehead. After what he’d done, she had to resist the dark urge to roll his body into the water to see if he floated.
    The four men and their prisoner were nowhere on the deck of the ship when she looked back down the row ofmetal crates, nor were