Afterglow (Wildefire) (16 page)

Interestingly, as the panic-stricken spectators turned up Stillwell Avenue toward the train station, Mohawk continued east toward the amusement parks. It was hard to keep tabs on him with all the streetlamps still lightless . . . which was why it was all the more impressive when Eve came up alongside Ash. “Following a lead?” she asked Ash, as they brushed past a couple of Staten Island bodybuilders.

“Literally,” Ash confirmed, nodding to Mohawk ahead in the thinning crowd.

They followed him to the entrance to Moon Park, where he jumped the gate without ever looking back. Not that he had much to worry about, since the amusement park had been closed for an hour and all the available police officers seemed to be responding to the baseball stadium.

And that’s when something clicked with Ash. What if the blackout and the firecrackers had all been just smoke and mirrors? Like they were drawing all the cops to one bug zapper, so they could get away with something even bigger, undisturbed?

Ash and Eve both clambered over the gates to the park. It was near pitch-dark with all the rides and lights zapped by the blackout, so if Mohawk noticed them, then at least they could pretend to be with Bedlam. With five hundred members no one could know everybody in the gang, right?

Up ahead they spotted the silhouettes of four more gang members moving beneath the massive Tempest coaster. Even in darkness it wasn’t hard to see exactly what they were doing.

The Bedlam members were pouring tanks of gasoline around the wooden supports.

They were going to torch the roller coaster.

Sure enough, after they’d sufficiently doused the support beams, the guy in the center took the lit cigarette from his mouth and tossed it into a puddle of gas. A shimmering fire trickled up where the butt landed, then spread outward rapidly. In just a few seconds the flames engulfed the wooden beams they’d targeted, then started to climb into the rafters. In no time at all, it seemed, the coaster tracks were going to go up like they were made out of matchsticks.

The inferno provided light where there had been none before. Of the five men who’d been admiring the blaze, one turned around before Ash and Eve could retreat into the shadows. His face flickered a demonic red in the firelight, but with the shaved sides of his head, his long braid in the back, and the scar that puckered one of his cheeks, Ash recognized him.

It was Cesar del Frisco, the Bedlam mastermind whose picture had been in the papers.

Apparently Ash had been wrong about Bedlam being too big for Cesar to know everyone, because he stuck out his lower jaw then said, “Carnival’s closed, ladies.”

“Then why are you five carnies still working?” Eve asked. “I hope the freak show labor union is paying you good overtime.”

The five men laughed darkly, but even as they did, they fanned out around the two sisters, quickly surrounding them. It might have felt threatening if either of the Wildes had planned to flee or back down.

They weren’t planning on doing either.

“You girls are very pretty,” Cesar purred. In his bloodshot eyes, Ash could practically see a slide show playing of all the terrible things he wanted to do to them. “Won’t you stay and”—he glanced up at the burning coaster—“enjoy a good ride.”

One by one the Bedlams were drawing weapons from their waistbands. Box cutters, a machete, a hatchet. “Seriously?” Ash asked, unfazed. “Five guys versus two girls . . . and you think you’ll need weapons?”

“Bedlam’s not about what’s fair,” Cesar informed her, twirling his butterfly knife in one hand like he was carving the air with a jack-o-lantern face. “Bedlam’s about what’s fear.”

“I’m not even going to try to tackle the grammar in that sentence,” Ash said, and Cesar squinted at her.
Either he didn’t understand what grammar was, or he was trying to understand how two defenseless girls could dare to be so cheeky to five armed goons.

It probably only unnerved them more when Eve seemed to be fighting back a smile. She turned to the thug nearest her and pointed to his machete. “Could you raise that just a teensy bit higher, cupcake?”

The thug laughed a little, then looked confusedly to Cesar before he shrugged and raised the blade higher.

What he didn’t notice was the tiny point of electricity gathering on the tip of the machete.

Or the fact that his long, dirty hair was starting to float around his face with static electricity.

He did, however, notice when the lightning bolt sizzled down from the clouds and zipped through the machete before it pumped his body with enough electricity to power Brooklyn for a few days.

When it was over, and the blinding light of the bolt faded, the thug collapsed to the dirt in a violent seizure before his body went still. Only a low moan escaped his mouth, and even that soon faded to a whine as he succumbed to unconsciousness.

When Eve turned back to the four remaining Bedlams, who were all standing too stunned to move, her eyes fluoresced with an electrical sheen. She tossed a ball of lightning back and forth between her hands. “Take me out to the ballgame . . .,” she started to sing creepily as they all watched her. “Take me out with the
crowd. . . .” She windmilled the orb of lightning around, then whipped it at the thug to the left of Cesar. He flew back into one of the wooden supports of the burning roller coaster, and Ash couldn’t be sure whether the
crack
sound she heard on impact was the wooden beam, or the vertebrae in his back.

Ash couldn’t help but join Eve’s creepy sing-along as she continued. “Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack . . .,” they both sang together.

Ash spun on her heel and slammed a fireball into Mohawk’s chest. The explosion of fire rocketed him back over a concession stand counter, where he smashed into a wall of popcorn and cotton candy.

Cesar and his remaining man backed away toward the flaming roller coaster, apparently more terrified of the two Wilde sisters than of being burned by the inferno. Still, Ash and Eve sang in unison as they slowly edged forward: “I don’t care if I never get back! Let me root, root, root for the home team, if they don’t win it’s a shame. . . .”

Eve pointed at the guy next to Cesar with her thumb and forefinger, forming a fake gun. When she clicked the imaginary trigger, another bolt of lightning forked down from the clouds and incapacitated him.

Ash shook her head at Cesar. “Come on, Cesar, sing along for the finale.” Then she and Eve turned to each other, and in their most boisterous voices they shouted, “For it’s one, two, three strikes you’re out . . .”

Behind Cesar, in his blind spot, an enormous
silhouette emerged from the flaming underbelly of the roller coaster—a man over six and a half feet tall wearing all black. Wes drew back his hood, so that the firelight illuminated his handsome Latino face. He reached up and snapped one of the burning crossbeams off the coaster like he was breaking a twig off a tree and cocked it back like a bat. Then he enthusiastically finished the song for the Wilde sisters in his deepest, manliest, opera voice. “At the ooooold baaaaall gaaaame!”

Cesar turned just in time to catch the swing of Wes’s “bat” full-tilt in the chest. The gang leader somersaulted backward three times until he hit a trash can. He used one arm to try to pick himself up, before he wheezed heavily, then dropped unmoving to the dirt.

“Babe Ruth called,” Eve started to say. “He says he wants his swing ba—”

But by then Ash had already squealed, taken a few running steps, and pounced up onto Wes Towers, wrapping her arms and legs around his enormous upper body. She reveled in it as the muscles in his arms tightened around her back. Then they kissed, long and hard, while the chassis of the Tempest still burned around them like a flaming picture frame.

“God,” Eve said, disgusted. “Let a girl at least finish her joke before you start sucking face.” Still, Ash and Wes didn’t pull away from each other, so Eve muttered, “Fine—I’ll just, you know, extinguish the burning roller coaster while you two go at it.”

Soon the rain from Eve’s storm clouds spattered down on them. Ash and Wes finally pulled away from the kiss, leaving just an inch between their faces. Water cascaded down their cheeks, which Ash was grateful for because her tears blended right in. “You sure know how to make an entrance,” she told him finally, and then half-laughed, half-sobbed with relief and joy, and so many other emotions that were vibrating in her. It had only been four days since they had last seen each other, but with the intensity of all that had happened these last few weeks, it felt like it had been years.

As he peered at her, she saw that the bags beneath his eyes had darkened with sleeplessness. Other than that, though, it was the same old Wes. He planted a feverish kiss on her forehead, then let his words whisper through her hair: “I should have never let you go, Ashline Wilde.”

“Duh!” Eve called from somewhere in the rafters, where the heavy rains were finally extinguishing the flames. The upper parts of the roller coaster remained intact, but some of the charred lower supports looked like burned up matchsticks.

“Sisters,” Ash mused. “Their number one job description is apparently to ruin moments like these.”

“Speaking of ruining moments . . .” Wes glanced up at the Tempest through the steam billowing around them. “I’m trying really, really hard not to make a horrible pun about love being a roller coaster. It’s just so tempting.”

Ash pressed a finger to his lips to silence him. “You
are the worst.” But they kissed again, and this time they didn’t let up until the sirens of the approaching fire engines wailed. Eve insisted they get the hell away from the crime scene before they were charged with trespassing and arson along with the unconscious Bedlams.

On the walk back through Brooklyn, with Eve ten paces in front of them as though she were allergic to romance, the streetlamps flickered back on.

With her hand tucked into Wesley’s, Ash felt as though power had been restored inside of her, as well.

Sunday

Ash woke up with Wes’s
massive arm draped over her body. It was sort of like being trapped beneath a heavy tree branch, but in a good way. Wes was on his side, with his cheek pressed into the pillow. His chin-length hair was matted to his face with sweat, but a strand billowed in and out with each of his light breaths. Eventually, he opened one big, brown eye and regarded Ash soporifically. “Were you . . . were you just watching me sleep?”

Ash offered him the craziest joker grin that she could. “I am one hopelessly creepy romantic. And you . . .” She ran her hands from his cannonball-size shoulder down his ribs and to his waist. “You give a whole new meaning to ‘big spoon.’ ”

He glanced down toward where his toes—and his calves, and his knees—were protruding off the end of
the mattress. “I miss my custom-made bed in Miami. It’s always nice to, you know, fit on a bed without turning your body diagonally.”

Ash climbed on top of him. “I’ll turn your body diagonally, if you know what I mean.” She winked at him saucily.

Wes bit his lip. “The horny eighteen-year-old boy in me is turned on by the way you said that, yet my internal Hemingway is really struggling to decipher that metaphor.” Still, his hands closed around her waist.

Ash had a funny thought and abruptly started to laugh. Wes peered up at her inquisitively, so she said, “I just had an epiphany. I met you for the first time beating the living pulp out of a cigar shop full of gang members. . . . Fitting that beating up some more people should bring us back together.”

“Let no one say we haven’t had a classic fairy-tale romance,” Wes joked, then turned serious. “I really thought that leaving you was the right thing to do in Miami. I selfishly thought that was the only way to ease this pain inside with Aurora gone.” He turned to the window, as though he might see the winged goddess flutter past their hotel room, her wings filled with Manhattan wind as she sailed back to the Hudson River. But there was only an unwavering morning light. “But she’s gone, either way. And when I saw you last night, the firelight from that roller coaster washing over you, I realized that you’re all I’ve got left in this world
right now. You’re the reason for me to not give over to hate and rage.”

Ash pressed her face into his stubble. “God, put it in a song, Towers,” she whispered, then kissed his neck.

Just then Eve kicked open the door to the room without knocking and walked in, fully dressed and very awake-looking. Since when was she a morning person? Ash wondered. And Ash certainly didn’t remember giving her a key to the room she and Wes were sharing.

Eve was either oblivious to the romantic moment she’d just interrupted, or she didn’t care. She tossed a bag of fresh bagels onto the bed next to them, the smell of still-warm dough washing around them. “Chop chop,” Eve snapped, cracking an imaginary whip. “Less snuggling, more hunting the evil trickster god bent on world domination. And eat your bagels before they get cold.”

After bagels, with only one computer between the three of them at the hotel room, the three gods went mobile, commandeering three computer stations at the New York Public Library. For hours they plugged away, cross-referencing “armor” with “Manhattan” in search of anything helpful. But by the afternoon the text on the screen was beginning to swim in front of Ash’s eyes, which felt like they were about to bleed. What if Colt had already stolen what he needed and was on his way to the Cloak Netherworld? What if he wasn’t even in Manhattan, and he’d given Eve a false lead when he sensed her deception?

But something began to tickle her mind when she was going through the thousandth search result. She lifted her head from the screen and said aloud to the two others, “What if we’re taking ‘armor’ too literally?”

Wes and Eve squinted at her, partly out of confusion, but partly because they too were half-blind from all the Web surfing.

“Think about it,” Ash said, getting more excited as the idea planted seeds in her brain and started to grow. “Armor is meant to protect your body on its way through battle. But the Cloak aren’t going to give a rat’s ass about some metal or leather suit. They’re too powerful for that sort of mortal concern. So ask yourself: What
does
concern them?”