Afterglow (Wildefire) (14 page)

PART II: NEW YORK CITY

Saturday

As far as car rides
went, this had to be one of the more awkward ones in Ash’s life.

The two Wilde sisters had agreed to a ceasefire, yes, and yes, they’d also agreed to hunt a common enemy . . . but that didn’t mean that everything was going to be instantly warm and sisterly again.

Eve had insisted on driving the rental SUV, even though she looked horribly uncomfortable behind the wheel. Ash was sure Eve would rather be back in the saddle of her Honda Nighthawk, the bike that Colt and Ash had sort of blown up in a car accident on a joyride to Canada.

Ash rolled down the window and dangled her arm out of the car, letting the seventy-mile-an-hour roar of the passing wind on the MassPike fill the silence that neither sister could. After the incident at RazorWire labs
the previous night, they’d raced back to Colt’s hideout, only to find that he’d taken Rose and left town fast. Ash had expected to find Raja’s orphaned baby, Saga, there as well, but Eve explained that Colt had dumped her at an orphanage days ago. After he’d used the baby to manipulate Raja back in Miami, the child was no longer of use to him. The thought of Saga alone, with both her parents murdered, broke Ash’s heart like a porcelain figurine, but for now Saga would be safer in the care of an orphanage.

After dropping Modo off at MIT so he could try to put his life back together—without his treacherous girlfriend—the Wilde sisters were New York City–bound. According to Eve, before she’d blown her cover, Colt had revealed the Big Apple to be the destination for some sort of heist he’d conceived. Whatever object he planned to steal was somewhere in Manhattan . . . but beyond that detail Colt had kept the cards close to his chest. Maybe he didn’t trust Eve completely. Maybe he was afraid the Cloak would overhear him and intervene. Regardless, Colt seemed sure that with the object in his possession he’d be able to walk safely through the Cloak Netherworld without getting devoured alive.

Which would mean that he could walk right up to their big Tree of Life and chop it down with a few powerful strokes of the ax.

Which also meant that the Cloak might die, and the evil, twisted gods imprisoned in the tree would be liberated,
placing an army of supernatural gods at Colt’s disposal.

“Worst of all,” Eve had said, looking genuinely unnerved, “Colt has all of the gods on his payroll convinced that killing the Cloak will bring all the memories from our old lifetimes back. But I think he’s been lying all along and it’s just the opposite. If the Cloak die, I think it may mean we
never
get those memories back.”

It was a terrifying concept. As much as Ash found herself overwhelmed and confused when an old memory resurfaced in her sleep, she saw the big picture now. Even if Ash and Eve stopped Colt tomorrow, they’d forget all about his manipulations when they woke up in the next lifetime, while he would remember everything. With the Cloak gone, what was to stop him from coming back time and time again until, one lifetime, he finally succeeded?

After Eve brought Ash up to speed on Colt’s scheming, the two sisters fell into an icy silence. In the quiet Ash felt a year’s worth of frustration with Eve coming to a boil. She wanted so badly to be happy to have Eve back by her side, but instead she felt more distanced from her sister than ever.

Finally, Ash rolled up her window, unable to keep her annoyance contained any longer. “Why didn’t you just tell me?” she demanded. “Why didn’t you let me in on this whole double cross, instead of letting me believe that you really were in league with Colt?” She thought back to their skirmish at the Renaissance fair. “I could have killed you.”

Eve didn’t take her eyes off the road, but her arms stiffened. “Kill me? As if.” She chuckled softly under her breath. “Look, Ash. We both know that I’m the conniving one here, while you, on the other hand . . . well, you’ve always been a terrible liar. You know how I always used to call you the human mood ring? It’s because your emotions, your push-buttons, your insecurities . . . You wear them with the subtlety of a goddamned fireworks display. As much as I wanted to let you in on it, it was much more convincing when your seething hatred for me looked all the more real to Colt. But the other part of it . . .” She trailed off, then finally took her eyes off the road long enough to appraise Ash. “I worry that when the time comes, you won’t have it in you to do what’s necessary . . . especially if it’s dirty.”

Ash crossed her arms. “Dirty? Eve, you haven’t seen the depths of hell I’ve had to descend into—the people I’ve had to hurt, the people I’ve had to kill, even—to get our baby sister back, and now to track down Colt. I’m not proud of some of the things I’ve done . . . but don’t sit there and question my motivation because you think I’m too dainty to get the job done.”

“So what?” Eve snapped. “You’ve killed a couple of people who attacked you first? They were bad fucking people, rotten apples to the core, and you killed them in self-defense. But what about Colt? The guy has done some deplorable shit to mold us back into his freakin’ volcano goddess Barbie that he can play dollhouse with.
Deranged as he may be, though, he really does love us—or at least what we could become. So can you live with the fact that you might have to kill a man who refuses to physically hurt you even as you’re ending his miserable life?” Ash said nothing, because she had no answer. She’d been so focused on ending Colt’s reign of death and misery that she’d never stopped to consider the actual act of killing him. Self-defense was one thing, but the cold-blooded murder of a man who might not fight back . . .

“Then there’s the collateral damage,” Eve rattled on. “Hephaestus—Modo, Limpy McLimperson, whatever he goes by—that kid might have been the only god in the world with the supernatural acumen to make a weapon to cut down the Cloak’s Tree of Life. One stroke of lightning through his body and Colt’s plan would have gone to shit, and our fight would be over for good. You wouldn’t let that happen. Sure, you didn’t know why I was playing assassin with him at the time, but even if you did—you’re too precious to acknowledge that in the big picture a few innocents might have to die to keep a hell of a lot more people alive.”

Ash’s hand fastened around Eve’s wrist. “No more innocents die. At our hands or anyone else’s.”

Eve glanced knowingly down at Ash’s hand, then at the scars on her own wrists—the permanent burn scars Ash had seared into Eve’s flesh only months earlier. “That’s exactly my point. You see everything as black and white, that one lonesome engineering student shouldn’t
have to die. The way I see it? This Pele chick that we used to be was one crazy, hot-tempered biatch. She wasn’t just like you and me and Rose added together; she was us
multiplied
together . . . and let’s face it, the three of us are no charm school graduates. Now let’s say Pele does come back to life, and marches into Times Square in rush hour, and thinks, ‘I’m having a real shitty day,’ and next thing you know, she’s summoning a volcano in the middle of Forty-second and Broadway, enveloping a few thousand tourists in lava and bringing buildings crashing down . . . all because a waitress served her morning cup of coffee cold.” Eve let that image sink in. “Tell me preventing that isn’t worth the life of an innocent bystander or two now.”

Ash groaned and looked out the window at the approaching golden arches that advertised the upcoming rest stop. Maybe Eve had a point about killing a few to save thousands . . . but it was Eve’s complete disregard for the value of human life that had always bothered her. “Some days,” she said, “I really wonder how we’re related.”

With a hard jerk of the wheel Eve swerved across traffic into the rest-stop plaza, as the cars she’d cut off blared their horns. As soon as they rolled into a parking space by the gas pumps, she engaged the emergency brake and the car screeched to a halt.

“What, do you need to pee that badly?” Ash asked, her hand still with a death grip on the door handle.

Surprisingly, Eve was regarding her with a soft, almost
affectionate expression—a look that Ash couldn’t remember seeing once in the last decade since they had drifted apart.

“Look, no matter what the Cloak and Colt say about us being shards of the same person,” Eve said, “to me, you’ll always be my baby sister. Growing up, you were always the good apple. Sure, you had some brushes with trouble here and there. And I’m not going to turn this into some after-school special by saying that I looked up to you or anything . . . but you were the daughter Mom and Dad wished I could be more like.” She shook her head and stared out at the cars rushing by on the highway. “I’m not here to make you change into some immoral monster like your older sister. All I’m saying is that, when the shit hits the jet turbine, you’re going to have to decide whether you’ve got it in you to do the kind of dirty, soul-staining things that might keep you up at night for life. If you can’t commit to doing what’s necessary, then all that I ask is that you get the hell out of my way when it’s time for me to take care of it.”

“I mean this in the most positive way possible,” Ash said slowly. “But sometimes, you’re one scary chick.”

Eve snorted, fished a twenty-dollar bill out of her jeans, and flung it at Ash. “Now go inside and get your maniacal older sister a double cheeseburger with extra pickles.”

After Ash had used the bathroom and picked up fast food for the two of them, she made one last stop to grab a copy of the
New York Times
before she returned to the
car. With a big bite of cheeseburger still in her mouth, Eve wrinkled her nose and waved the sandwich at the newspaper, letting a drop of mayo land on the front page. “Since when do you care about current events, Ash?”

Ash fanned through the pages. “All we know is that Colt is after something in Manhattan, and twenty-three square miles and one-point-six million people is kind of a lot of area to cover when we have no leads.”

“And you figured,” Eve said through another mouthful of burger, “that Colt might have placed a classified ad with the headline ‘Hopi Trickster God Seeks Mythical Object to Help Him Journey through Hell’?”

Ash shot her a dirty look, but went back to scouring the paper. While she didn’t find anything that screamed “item that Colt would be after,” she felt her internal furnace freeze when she came across one human interest story on the back page:
THE FIVE-BOROUGH VIGILANTE
.

According to the story, for the last several nights a modern-day “superhero” of sorts had been incapacitating muggers, drunken rabble-rousers, and gang members from sundown to sunup, all across the city. On Tuesday he’d left seven suspects on Staten Island beaten, hog-tied, or in need of hospitalization. Early Wednesday morning, just after midnight, it had been eleven in Spanish Harlem, and fourteen in the Bronx on Thursday night. The mugging and assault victims saved in each of these incidents reported the Five-Borough Vigilante to be massive in stature, standing at least six and a half feet tall,
with broad shoulders and a threateningly muscular build. In a few situations, where he’d battled multiple gang members at once, bystanders reported that his body took a number of hard, punishing hits—in one case from the blunt end of a lug wrench—yet in all the cases, he seemed unfazed by the attack.

The few people who’d gotten a look at his face beneath his hood had identified him as a Hispanic male in his late teens or early twenties.

Holy shit
, Ash thought.

The Five-Borough Vigilante had to be Wesley Towers.

The timing made perfect sense. She’d last seen Wes on Tuesday night, in Miami. Distraught by the gruesome murder of their mutual friend Aurora, the Aztec god of night had told Ash that he couldn’t bear to stay in Florida another day. Everything there—including Ash—reminded him of the horrible events that had led up to the fateful night when Aurora was sacrificed. It had just been too painful, so Wes left Ash alone with the key to his Miami penthouse and the awful, stomach-tearing feeling that she’d never see him again.

Ash had only known the Aztec god a week, but there had been something there, something more than a high school infatuation—this awe and admiration for the boy that made even her grave circumstances feel lighter. Wes had inherited a fortune, yet instead of retiring early to a carefree, self-indulgent poolside life, frivolously enjoying fine dining and piña coladas until he became a part of the
tropical landscape, he’d devoted his life to protecting the people of Miami—the city he’d adopted as his home after a tragic childhood.

Now it seemed that he’d relocated to a new city, where he’d wasted no time in using his supernatural abilities to lay down the law. Thanks to his godly powers his body was uncannily strong, agile, and resilient under the cover of night.

He would make the perfect superhero, so long as the sun was down.

But as Ash read through the article, there was something dark and savage about the events described. He was saving innocent people, there was no argument about that . . . but she almost got this premonition that he was reveling in the brutality of it. Like hurting bad people was the only thing that could distract him from the agony of losing his best friend, Aurora. After all, Lily and Thorne—the two people responsible—were dead now. If he couldn’t punish them . . .