Afterglow (Wildefire) (17 page)

“They’re allergic to hate,” Wes said cautiously. “But . . . armor implies something you wear. And you can’t wear hate.”

Eve snorted. “Have you seen Ashline’s closet lately?”

Ash rolled her eyes but continued. “People—both gods and mortals alike—create hate. But we leave trails of it wherever violence or cruelty happens. That’s why the Cloak can’t even go to a secluded forest without it transforming them. Hate is like some deadly particle that we’re slowly filling this world with. If that’s the case though, what if it’s not just places where we leave hate trails . . . what if we can taint objects, too?”

Both Eve and Wes were starting to catch on. “So you get an object that’s imbued with hatred,” Eve said,
“and you wear it almost like a protective amulet to walk through the Cloak Netherworld.”

“But,” Wes interrupted, “and I hate to play devil’s advocate here . . . shitty, hateful things happen every day, in every city, around the world. There would be millions of objects that are hate infused, if that were the case. So if what Colt led Eve to believe wasn’t more smoke and mirrors, then why is he so fixated on a single object here in New York?”

Ash considered this. “Yes, violence happens every day, and yes, violence seems to be an inherently hateful thing. But so many other factors go into most acts of violence. Just think of all the terrible stories you hear about from friends or see in the news. A mugger corners and attacks his victim in a dark alley . . . but the victim is probably anonymous, and the attacker is just looking for quick cash. A man comes home to find his wife cheating on him and turns a gun on both her and her lover. A terminated employee walks into the workplace that fired him and starts shooting at random. There’s some semblance of hate in all of these situations, but it’s not pure, or focused, or calculated. They’re crimes of passion, because they’re governed by things like envy, greed, self-loathing, fear of poverty, fear of the future . . . a whole bouquet of motivations that Freud couldn’t sort out in a flowchart if he wanted to.”

“We get it,” Eve said, cricking her stiff neck. “Violence is complicated. What’s your point?”

What is my point?
Ash wondered, but then she felt her mind zeroing in on the idea that had been just barely eluding her. “So if you want something so poisonous to the Cloak that they can’t come near you, even when they have home-court advantage, you don’t walk into the Netherworld with a mugger’s knife, when it probably belonged to some scared, stupid kid who only used it because he was looking to get his next drug fix. Colt wouldn’t take a gamble like that. No, he wants an object that is pure with evil, overflowing with hatred so intense that those other factors barely play into it.”

“So in summary,” Wes said, “you mean that we should be looking for an object that is one hundred percent hatred not-from-concentrate?”

“Bingo,” Ash said, then flagged down the librarian who’d been helping them. He practically pranced over, just as ecstatic as he’d been in the first place. He looked more like a bashful, blond-haired Baywatch cast member than any librarian stereotype that Ash could think of. Even though it was Ash who’d summoned him, his gaze kept flitting to Eve, who’d shown him no interest or eye contact since they’d arrived. Apparently he was into the dark, brooding, slightly sociopathic, hard-to-get type.

“We were wondering,” Ash asked him, “if there are any current events happening in the city right now that might center around . . . hate. Evil. That sort of thing.”

He idly twisted the lanyard around his neck, which had his name—Ephram—printed on it in big block
letters. “Well, there’s an opera about vengeance going up at the opera house next week, and there are several memorials and monuments around the city, but those are more about the memory of the victims than the violence that took them.” From the murky database of his information-loaded brain his eyes widened with clarity. “ ‘The Seven Deadly Sins, Realized,’ ” he said with a snap of his fingers.

“What the hell is that?” Eve snapped, finally acknowledging him. “Some sort of amateur Broadway musical?”

His bashful eyes met Eve’s and quickly glanced away. “It’s a new exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Not your typical art gallery kind of thing—there are seven artifacts, each with major historical significance, that speak to one of the Seven Deadly Sins. Sloth. Lust. Pride . . .”

“Wrath?” Ash finished for him.

He nodded. “Exhibit opens to the public tomorrow. I actually might make a trip there if”—he glanced at Eve again—“any of you wanted to check out the exhibit with me.”

Eve yawned. Wes pretended to cough to cover his snickering. Ash had already turned back to her computer to research the exhibit, so Ephram awkwardly shuffled away to straighten out some books that didn’t need straightening.

According to the Met website Ephram was right—the exhibit didn’t open to the public until tomorrow morning.
However, the museum was hosting a private, rooftop gala with the artifacts tonight, just for donors and historians.

Where Colt’s scheming was involved, even twelve hours could make a big difference.

Ash took Wes by the hand and fluttered her eyelashes coquettishly at him. “My dearest trust-fund baby,” she cooed at him. “How do you feel about making a last-minute museum donation? Philanthropists really, really turn me on.”

Wes rolled his eyes. “I am way too young to be someone’s sugar daddy. . . . Fine, how much do you think it’s going to take?” He already had his phone out, looking for the Met’s fund-raising number.

“However much it costs to get three tickets to tonight’s cocktail party,” she said absently, but her mind was already spinning, fantasizing about finally getting the upper hand on Colt.

You want an object that will allow you to safely walk through hell, Colt?
she thought.
I’ll show you a girl that won’t let you safely walk through Earth.

As Ash, Eve, and Wes followed the flow of guests through the grand halls of the Met, they earned their fair share of admiring or envious looks from the normal museum goers. At first Ash figured it was just because they looked real sharp in their black-tie formal wear—Ash and Eve in cocktail dresses of, respectively, red and gold, and Wes in the three-piece tuxedo from the men’s big-and-tall
section. But after a girl shyly approached them to ask Wes for his autograph, Ash burst out laughing when she realized what was going on.

“What?” Wes snapped, then lowered his voice. “Do you . . . do you think they recognized me as the Five-Borough Vigilante?”

“No,” Ash said when she finally stopped cracking up. She shifted the satchel slung across her dress from one shoulder to the other. “You bear a striking resemblance to a certain player on the Knicks. They probably think we’re your arm candy for the night.”

“Ugh,” Eve groaned in disgust. “I’m no concubine, especially for a professional basketball player.”

Ash figured that most of the museum donors would be on the older side, but when they emerged onto the moonlit rooftop gardens, the three of them really didn’t look that out of place. In addition to the more mature patrons she’d expected, there was a smattering of young donors too—probably real estate brokers, Wall Street types, or dot com entrepreneurs, she guessed.

Fortunately, Ash didn’t immediately have any Colt sightings on the crowded rooftop, although it was tough for anyone to stand out among all the men wearing tuxedoes. Instead she wandered carefully through the crowd, with Eve and Wes in tow, while she went from glass case to glass case to investigate the new exhibit. The items the curator had chosen to represent each one of the sins weren’t much on first look—mostly timeworn relics that
looked like throwaways from
Antiques Roadshow
.

But when she stopped at each of their glass encasements to read the plaque below, she felt a growing sense of awe. For instance, at the installment for the sin of pride, there was a gold-trimmed mirror. According to its caption, the mirror had purportedly belonged to the Countess Elizabeth Bathory of Hungary—or the Blood Countess, as she was known later in history. Bathory had been infamous for a sense of vanity so intense that in order to preserve her youthful looks she’d allegedly stooped to black magic by torturing and murdering young virgins.

According to some accounts she actually bathed in their blood.

“Jesus,” Eve muttered after she read the caption. “Maybe she should have just tried Botox.”

When Ash skimmed through the captions of the exhibit’s other antiquities—gluttony, envy, lust, sloth, greed—they were just as unsavory. But it was when she finally came to the wrath artifact near the far end of the exhibit that she felt truly sickened.

For all appearances, the wrath object looked like a tobacco pipe, although oddly it was made out of a scuffed bronze metal. Only when Ash peered closer did she recognize the pieces that had been sculpted and welded together to form the pipe.

They were shell casings from a rifle.

The caption explained that the pipe had belonged to an officer in the Nazi Gestapo during the Holocaust.
Apparently his favorite sport had been to corral groups of concentration camp prisoners that he no longer needed for his labor efforts.

Then he would line them up.

And he would see how many human beings his bullet could pass through in the lineup before it would come to a stop.

The bullet casings that he’d saved and fashioned into a pipe—which he apparently smoked out of every day—were from the bullets that had gone the farthest.

This truly is hate
, Ash thought. No ulterior motives. No desperation because of poverty, no jealousy over an unfaithful wife. Just one man who so unconditionally loathed another group of people that he killed them without provocation, and without mercy, and with so much pride that he made this pipe to remind him of his own hatred on a daily basis.

Ash was very relieved to see that the man had been executed as a war criminal in the wake of the Holocaust, but she still felt a desire for retribution and vengeance for victims that she would never know. Who knows how many had been slain to make this pipe—fifty, sixty, maybe even more? All she knew was that the mere sight of it made her vision swim.

“So this is it,” Eve said, and she seemed equally mesmerized as she peered at the pipe. “A couple of old bullet casings, and our boy Colt buys himself a get-out-of-jail-free pass to walk untouched through the Cloak Netherworld.”

Ash nodded absently, but before she could speak, another party guest caught her eye through the glass case. The young girl was breathtaking in her floor-length black gown, and there was a willowy elegance to her with her one-size-too-long arms and legs. Her dark hair was so straight and well cut that it seemed to fall in one seamless curtain.

But her expressive brown eyes and her face, which looked like Ash’s own, only harsher and more angular, needed no introduction.

“Oh my god,” Eve said, apparently noticing the girl at the same time. “How did Colt manage to get her hair done and have her dress fitted without her blowing anyone up?”

It was Rose, after all, and even though she’d only been in a teenage body for less than a week since Raja aged her, she’d already shed the initial awkwardness of her newfound, taller body to reveal a powerful grace.

Still, despite the façade of beauty and elegance, Ash only saw the deadly darkness that lurked beneath it.

For the first time, as Ash gawked at her younger sister, she realized it wasn’t Eve she was most terrified of sharing a head space with again for eternity if they failed to stop Colt. It was Rose, who was volatile and alien and oblivious to just about anything human, like an incurable psychopath.

“Breathtaking, isn’t she?” Colt said. He had snuck up beside them and was leaning against a patch of railing
with a martini in hand. Ash could tell he was trying to look composed, as always, but he had to be surprised that they’d worked out what “armor” he was after. His eyes kept flitting to the glass case beside them, then down at the satchel slung over Ash’s shoulder.

“That girl,” Ash said, pointing across the way to Rose, who was looking curiously at their group but not approaching, “has the mind of a six-year-old . . . and you’re playing dress-up and house with her as though she’s Evening Wear Barbie?”

Colt swilled his drink around. “You know one of the things I loved most about Pele? She—you—would never impose such rigid human morality on the gods. We make our own rules.”

“Cool it, James Dean,” Ash said.

Meanwhile Wes positioned himself between Colt and Ash, ever the protective boyfriend, even though Ash and Eve were both arguably more dangerous than he was. Colt, who was six feet tall himself, had to gaze up at Wes, but there was no fear in Colt’s face. Fear doesn’t function the same way when your body can repair itself from even the most horrific injuries.

Wes leaned his head down just slightly, to remind Colt who the big dog was. “The last time we crossed paths, I seem to remember telling Ash that I didn’t trust you as far as I could throw you . . . and that I’d be happy to find out exactly how far that was.”

Colt gestured to the other museum patrons around
them, who were completely oblivious to the tense confrontation happening near the wrath artifact. “Really, Towers? Let’s save the primitive fisticuffs until we’re no longer in civilized company.”