Afterglow (Wildefire) (21 page)

Ash recognized this all for the bluff that it was—Colt
had no bargaining chips if he killed the Wildes now—but both Wes and Eve lunged across the lawn to intercept Itzli.

Itzli turned and thrust out a hand.

A thick slab of stone burst out of the yard, and Wes and Eve collided with it at a full sprint. The two of them dropped, dazed, to the ground. Before Ash could get to them, three more stone walls sprang up around Wes and Eve. The tops of the stone slabs angled in until they formed a point over the box.

When the massive stones finally stopped moving, Wes and Eve had disappeared behind a gray prison of seamless stone. She could hear the muffled slaps of them pounding on the inside of the foot-thick slabs, but Wes’s super strength had vanished with the sunrise. And what were Eve’s weather abilities going to do to the heavy rock? Erode it away over a thousand years?

“Did you at least leave them an airhole?” Colt asked Itzli. “I don’t care if your Aztec brother asphyxiates, but I need the stormy one.”

Itzli grumbled, held up a finger, and twisted it in the air. Rock dust rained down on the lawn as an unseen drill punched the tiniest of holes in the prison roof.

To Ash’s further surprise, Rose walked casually past her, heading for the other gods ahead. Ash caught Rose by the wrist. “What about what we talked about up there?” She pointed back to the bedroom window. “You don’t understand what’s at stake here, Rose.”

Rose jerked her arm free. “You want me to wait to feel better. He promised I’ll be happy tomorrow.”

“His promises are full of—” Ash started.

“He keeps his promises,” Rose said. “You just leave me alone.” Her voice softened. “When he puts us back together, you won’t be able to leave me . . . and I’ll never be lonely again.” With that, she turned and joined the other gods near the mailbox.

Ash glanced next door, where their neighbors had come out to watch the spectacle. Mr. Glassman had his cell phone out, and Ash could hear the approaching wail of police sirens. A cruiser whipped around the corner at the end of the street, gunning for the house, even though the police officers inside of it had no idea what they were getting themselves into.

Itzli looked bored as he turned to the road. Another flick of his hand and a stone wall exploded out of the asphalt.

The Crown Victoria collided with it at a full forty miles an hour before the police officer driving it even had a chance to apply the brakes. Ash couldn’t see behind the wall, but the cruiser’s horn blared . . . and no one seemed to be getting out of the car.

“You know what to do?” Colt asked Rose, and she nodded. “Good girl,” he said, and patted her head. Patted her like she was a dog.

Still, she smiled.

Then she hurled an explosive blast across the yard.
It detonated near the stone jail cell containing Wes and Eve, sending a massive crack through one slab, though unfortunately not enough to liberate its prisoners.

When the explosion cleared away, a jagged rift had ripped through the fabric of space and time, a window to a dark realm on a different plane of existence.

Epona arched her fingers over Ash’s parents, and both of them rose to their feet. They’d stopped moaning and were no longer fending off imaginary creatures, but they weren’t conscious, either. Instead they sleepwalked toward the open portal. Epona and Itzli followed close behind them, with the latter twirling his stone sword at Ash. Any funny business, she was certain, and he’d be delighted to shish-kebab her sleeping parents.

Colt and Rose were close behind, and Colt motioned for Ash to join him. “Come, Ashline Wilde. You need to see what happens next.”

Ash didn’t have much of a choice. Her parents’ lives were at stake. Wes and Eve were trapped in a prison that they wouldn’t likely be able to break out of until nightfall, when Wes’s strength was reinstated.

So she did the last thing she thought she’d ever do:

She willingly followed Colt and his evil partners through the portal and into the Cloak Netherworld.

Monday, Part II

When the portal snapped shut
behind Ash, she found herself sprawled on a familiar beach. The sand was black as a starless night, and stormy waves crashed against the shore, as though the ocean could sense the intruders. Out at sea, where the thunderclouds churned and grumbled, a large ship protruded from the waters like a gravestone, and if Ash looked carefully, she could still see the bloated corpses of sailors bobbing over the ocean swells.

This was it—the Cloak Netherworld.

The place that Ash had prayed she’d never have to return to again.

Colt flexed his back and touched the ax strapped across it to make sure it was still in place after they’d passed through the rift. Then he gestured for the others to come closer to him. “Stay near me as we make our way to the tree,” he instructed all of them. “The pipe buried in
my body will give me freedom to pass safely through the landscape here, but I can’t guarantee how far the sphere of protection will extend.”

They formed a tight caravan as they headed toward the tree line ahead. Colt made Ash walk out in front, with Ash’s parents marching hypnotically behind him. Every time she even tried to look back at them, to strategize some way to break them free, Itzli leaned menacingly between Thomas and Gloria and pressed the edge of his stone sword to one of their necks.

On Ash’s last visit the forest had been made up of enormous black calla lilies, but now it had transformed into a thick, impenetrable rainforest. Lines of brambles as sharp as razor wire and as thick anchor chains hung between the trees in tight lines.

Clearly, the Cloak had tried to prepare for Colt’s arrival. They must have underestimated the poisonousness of both Colt and the wrath artifact entombed within him though . . . because when Colt stepped up to the tree line, all of the vegetation began to wither. The thorny vines liquefied onto the soil, and the trees groaned as they dried up, until they cracked and toppled aside. With each step Colt took, a path formed through the previously impassable forest. Even the grass browned and dried up under his feet as he walked slowly but confidently forward.

Halfway through the forest, they were attacked by their first Cloak.

The creature appeared in their path, where Colt’s aura was gradually gnawing through the trees. It materialized in humanoid form first, only eight feet tall, with a black oily coat and that wavering blue flame of an eye.

The closer they approached, however, the more its body degenerated into something wild and animal, a supernatural beast that had crawled out of a tar pit. It dropped to all fours. Its legs articulated back, and its body grew bloated. Its gray fangs lengthened and sprouted an extra row.

And when the animal instincts became too much for it, it reared back onto its haunches and pounced for Colt.

Ash experienced a brief moment of hope while it lingered midair that Colt hadn’t thought this through, that the Cloak were finally going to put a stop to his deadly antics once and for all. She pictured the Cloak’s inky talon plunging into Colt’s chest, cracking open his ribs, and tearing out his heart with a snap of its claw.

Instead, when the Cloak was only a few yards away, it struck some invisible wall in the air formed by the extreme concentration of hate and evil . . . and it simply evaporated. Its body exploded into a million particles of darkness and rained down around them like confetti.

These attacks happened several more times throughout their journey—from the dying tree canopy overhead, from the sides—but always to the same result with deadly efficacy. Even though Ash would never have called the Cloak friends, exactly, there was something truly chilling
to see a being so otherworldly, so omniscient, dying in the blink of an eye.

By the time they reached the great stone dais—the hub of the Netherworld—the Cloak had given up altogether. It was snowing on the dais, which ended abruptly in a cliff that overlooked a vast and chilling nothingness—just a gaping void. Ash could theorize that if you fell off the edge, you might simply fall for eternity.

The real attraction here, however, was the towering life tree, which was every bit as breathtaking as it had been when Ash first gazed upon it. The tree was a skyscraper of spiny wood and gnarled branches and thick, vibrant leaves . . . and if you looked closely enough you could see the faces of imprisoned gods just visible through the foliage. They had been plugged into the tree the way Eve had been while she was imprisoned here. These were the most sordid gods that history had to offer, preternatural beings so vile and destructive to the people around them that the Cloak had crossed the threshold between worlds and taken them “off-line.” So long as they were imprisoned here, they couldn’t be reincarnated like the other gods; instead they were supposedly rehabilitated by the tree’s cleansing powers—the same cleansing that gave the Cloak their life energy and restored them after they came in contact with evil.

Across the stone amphitheater, at a safe distance for now, the remaining Cloak had gathered and coalesced into a single entity. Ash had seen them do this before. Their
oily, viscous bodies just melted into one super-Cloak, thirty feet tall. Twenty collective blue eyes flickered out of its amorphous head, but the flames were dimmer, less vibrant than usual. With each Cloak that had just perished trying to protect the Netherworld, Colt seemed to have chipped away at their overall life force.

However, even recognizing that they were about to die, the Cloak maintained an eerie calmness. They had solemnly accepted that their time had come.

Colt didn’t even give the Cloak a casual look. He just strode across the dais and drew the enormous ax from its sheath on his back. Then he wheeled back, spun a hundred and eighty degrees, and drove the head of the ax into the tree trunk.

The Cloak’s life tree had stood tall for centuries and imprisoned some of the most powerful, vengeful beings to ever roam the earth . . . yet with just the first swing, the ax cut a third of the way through its intimidating trunk before it stuck. Ash decided that even if the wood had been reinforced with titanium or carbon steel fibers, the blade that Modo had fashioned would have cut through it as though it were a warm stick of butter.

As Colt pried the ax from the trunk and prepared for another swing, the branches of the tree rustled with discontent overhead. Colt took another massive swing from a different angle, sheering through another third of the tree trunk. The rustling grew louder, and at first Ash
hoped that maybe the tree was coming to life and preparing to fight back.

Instead it was something far, far worse.

The gods imprisoned in the enormous tree were being liberated.

One by one they dropped out of their stations where they had been attached to the tree like acorns. Their bodies plummeted toward the stone dais below, but the vinelike plant fibers that had wired them into the tree slowed and stopped their fall before their bodies could splatter on the stone.

And as they dropped, their eyes flickered open. They were gods of every race, men and women alike, some of them dressed in ancient, foreign garb. One of them was a nightmarish creature, with dark sinewy wings and red, glowing eyes. As they reawakened from what had been centuries’ worth of slumber for some of them, they dazedly reached back and snapped the vines suspending them from the tree, like marionettes casting off their puppet strings. Among them Ash even recognized two from her visions—Tane and Tangaroa, the forest spirit and the sea god she’d condemned to death in that sea cave on Maui. They showed no signs of knowing Ash, so they must have been imprisoned by the Cloak during their last lives.

Ash looked over at the Cloak super-creature—Jack, as it called itself. It hadn’t moved from its perch, but with the power draining from the tree, Jack’s massive dark body was hunched over, one hand bracing itself against
the earth. Its blue flame eyes looked dimmer than ever before.

Colt must have noted the fallen Cloak too, because a triumphant smile—the grin of a true trickster—was smeared across his face. He gazed up into the branches one last time, probably to make sure that all the gods had been successfully relieved of their botanical prison.

He drew back the ax, and, with all his accumulated vengeful hatred for the Cloak, he drove the blade home.

This swing didn’t even catch on anything. It sheared straight through the remaining portion of the trunk and kept right on going through the other side.

For an agonizing moment, the tree precariously tottered upright in one last act of defiance. But then gravity caught up with it, and it fell in the direction of the cliff. The awakened gods had emerged from their stupor enough to stumble out of the way before it crushed them, except for one blond god who didn’t even see it coming. One of the enormous branches of the tree struck him in the chest as he was climbing almost drunkenly to his feet. The force of the impact knocked him off the edge of the stone dais, and with a quick yelp he tumbled into oblivion.

None of the gods—Colt, Itzli, and Epona included—looked like they cared enough to mourn his loss.

With the tree destroyed and Jack collapsed in an oily, melting heap, Colt climbed up onto the stump that remained of the life tree. The awakened gods gathered
around him, and Ash noted that none of them looked particularly confused by Colt’s appearance. In fact there was a recognition, a respect, in all of their expressions.

Because they’d all met the trickster in their previous lives.

Because they’d maybe even looked up to him like a boss, or as their king.

For all appearances, Colt was a made man among the gods, the crime overlord who had directed the morally dubious deities for hundreds of years.

Epona flashed Ash a sarcastic thumbs-up. The nightmare goddess had directed Ash’s parents to sit cross-legged on the stone dais, while they stared catatonically off into nothingness.

“Brothers and sisters,” Colt boomed over the dais. “Today is a great day. We have finally brought about the extinction of the vile shadow creatures that have meddled in our affairs since the dawn of our race. We have freed you from your eternal, dormant purgatory here in the Netherworld. And now, as one, we can return to Earth as the triumphant superior race.”