Afterglow (Wildefire) (22 page)

The crowd of gods offered a positive reaction to this: nods and cheers of agreement. Ash had never heard Colt give a damn about making the gods some “superior race,” but she had encountered quite a few evil gods who felt that way—gods who were sick of living silently among the mortals, gods who longed for a new era when they would be worshipped, even feared once again.

Gods who were willing to kill to see that happen.

And now, trickster that he was, Colt was telling these power-hungry deities exactly what they wanted to hear. He’d be perfectly content to rile them up and unleash them upon the world if it meant he could manipulate them to do his bidding later on.

“The world has changed a vast deal since many of you last saw it,” Colt went on. “As the gods retreated to the shadows, choosing lives of anonymity and banality over the dominance we once held, the humans have almost completely forgotten about us, made us footnotes in the history books as they worship their new idols—wealth, technology, sex. Well the time has come for us to reclaim our rightful throne.” He hoisted the ax over his head. “The time has come for us to step out of the shadows, as one. The time has come to remind the human race that to us, they are ants.”

Colt stepped down off the stump. He motioned someone to join him, and Ash couldn’t initially see who it was through the crowd of gods . . . until Rose stepped into view. He took her hand and looked lovingly at her. She returned his gaze with a bashful affection, the kind of crush that a child might have on an adult.

Ash had witnessed many horrors these past few months, but the bond Colt was fostering with Rose . . . Just watching the two of them together knotted Ash’s insides like a wet dish towel.

Colt let go of Rose’s hand and turned back to the
assembly. “We need to rescue one more member of our family first before we’re ready to strike—one of our finest, fieriest warriors,” he continued, and Ash had no doubt he was referring to Pele. “So we will gather in the solitude of an ancient forest on Earth for just two nights . . . and on the third day we will sweep across the world as an unstoppable flood and re-establish our authority, no longer as mortals . . . but as gods once more.”

A cheer rose up from the freed prisoners, a riotous frenzy as they all became swept up in Colt’s powerful presence. On cue, Rose doled out a series of explosive blasts that ripped portals into the air all around the dais. The floating windows back to Earth all showed the same backdrop of a familiar forest that was near and dear to Ash’s heart.

Towering trees with trunks of burnt umber.

A daffodil afternoon light filtering through the green canopy.

And in the distance, just visible through the thicket of trunks, the faux-wooden buildings of a boarding-school campus.

Colt was convening his council of murderous, evil gods back at Blackwood Academy.

Where Ash had first come into contact with her fellow gods.

Where the bloodshed began.

The gods all poured through the inter-dimensional rifts, and Ash could hear joyous, crazed laughter from the
other side as they gratefully left the Cloak Netherworld for their home planet . . . the very planet that they were about to immerse in a plague of violence and fear.

Epona jerked on some imaginary reins, and Ash’s parents hopped to their feet like they’d been shocked by a cattle prod. The current of gods carried them out into the redwood forest as well.

Ash started to follow the flow toward the forest, but Colt, who had lingered behind with Rose, shook his head at her. “I’m afraid we must part ways for one night, Ashline . . . though I know you’re anxious to remain in my presence.”

Ash spat on the stone in response.

Colt whispered something to Rose, and she nodded and cast a new fiery orb toward the back of the dais, where the Cloak lay unmoving. It ripped open the air next to Jack, and through it Ash saw the backyard of the Wilde residence.

“Return to New York and collect your older sister,” Colt instructed Ash. “That will give me time to make preparations without the two of you meddling again. You and Eve will have until midnight tomorrow to meet me at the banks of the redwood forest. Come to the stone lighthouse just offshore, where you will begin your rebirth as Pele. If you fail to arrive on time, or refuse to follow my exact directions upon your arrival, or resist in any way . . . then I will be forced to crush the two mortals who took you under their wing for the last sixteen years. If you cooperate, then
I will allow them to live, although in a few nights’ time, ‘life’ for any mortals will never be the same.”

With that he drove his ax into the stump of the life tree, and left it planted there, a flag claiming the Netherworld for his own. Then he and Rose both jumped through the last of the closing portals to Blackwood, before the seam in the air closed altogether.

Ash knew that she only had a limited time before her own portal back to Earth vanished, but she couldn’t help it—she jogged over to where the Cloak lay and knelt down beside it.

Jack’s enormous mouth hung open, and only shallow, wheezy breaths whistled through his teeth—although Ash had never even been sure if the creature breathed, or ate, or did anything remotely mortal, for that matter. The blue flames that made up his collective eyes were winking out one at a time as his collective consciousness died.

Still, his voice was strong as he spoke to Ash for the last time. “Colt has gained the allegiance of many of his followers by promising that in killing us, it would restore all your memories in the next lifetime.” He drew in one long, ragged breath, before he continued. “But the reality is just the opposite—with us gone, the damage to your memories from previous lives will prove permanent.”

And now Ash had glimpsed the true genius behind Colt’s scheming. With his regenerative abilities, his brain repaired itself lifetime after lifetime, so that he had a monopoly on remembering his extensive past. Meanwhile
all the other gods were cut off from their own.

Colt had just secured that monopoly from now until eternity. Even if Ash somehow succeeded in destroying him in this life, she’d forget all about him in the next, and the cycle would begin anew. He would continue to use the other gods, and they’d never be the wiser.

Ash was overcome with a heavy exhaustion and a sense of futility. Tears welled in her eyes. There was almost nothing human to Jack, to the Cloak, yet she still felt a mixture of anger, sorrow, and fear at his imminent death.

The anger is what came out first. She pounded the stone dais nearest Jack’s face. At this point all but one of the blue flames had been extinguished. “It didn’t have to go this way,” she shouted at Jack through her tears. “I warned you this would happen. You could have ended all this and saved so many lives. Instead you’re going to die because you couldn’t be more like us.”

“No,” Jack whispered, as the final blue flame gradually dimmed. “We are dead because
you
could not be more like
us
.” The last flame flickered out and Jack was gone. His body simply dissolved into tiny black particles, which a low wind blew toward the abyss.

The Cloak were no more.

Ash wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. There was nothing left for her in the Netherworld, so she jumped through the open portal and landed on her grassy backyard in Scarsdale just as the rift snapped shut behind her.

Back on Earth, Ash moved quickly to the edge of the house and chanced a look toward the street. Her boring suburban neighborhood had transformed into a crime scene since she had left. It looked as though the entire Scarsdale police force—and maybe some units from nearby towns as well—had responded to the crashed squad car. The paramedics tended to the two officers who must have been in the car; one was being loaded onto a stretcher, and the other was pressing an ice pack to his head. Either way, Ash was relieved to see both of them alive.

The stone prison containing Eve and Wes hadn’t changed in her absence. At some point she’d have to go at it with the sledgehammer her father kept in the garage, but not now, with twenty police officers and half the neighborhood watching. As long as Wes and Eve weren’t asphyxiating in there, they would have to wait.

She had another order of business to take care of first, anyway. Ash returned to the Wildes’ patio and took out her cell phone. She scrolled through her contacts until she came to the
S
section and found the number she’d never once called since she had programmed it in before summer break.

Serena Andreotes was a petite blond girl who’d been a classmate of Ash’s at Blackwood Academy. Despite her incredibly expressive gray eyes, which flickered with vitality and near constant amusement, Serena was entirely blind.

She was also the reincarnation of a Greek siren.

While other gods like Eve and Ash had powers that manifested themselves physically in the elements, Serena’s abilities were far more subtle. Her telepathic voice could reach anyone in the world, anywhere in the world. While it didn’t involve actual words per se, and it wasn’t as forceful as mind control, her siren’s call could project emotions into the minds of those she called. It was Serena who had drawn several gods, including Ash, to the Blackwood campus, by appealing to those gods who felt a need to belong. They had never even realized until later that it hadn’t been their own idea to matriculate at a boarding school in the redwoods.

Serena picked up on the second ring, and before they could even go into pleasantries or small talk, Ash unloaded an abbreviated version of everything that had happened in the last few weeks onto her. The blind girl listened in near silence, although when Ash reached the part about Raja’s death, Ash heard a crackling sound over the receiver—Serena tightly clutching the phone in her hand.

When Ash concluded her story, there was only a brief silence before Serena said calmly, “Just tell me what you need me to do.”

Ash took one last minute to contemplate whether the plan forming in her head was really the right thing to do. Lately, allowing others to help her in her quest had proven a death sentence for just about anyone involved—Rolfe, Aurora, Raja. Ash hadn’t exactly pushed any of
them in front of a bullet, but they’d all died because in hanging around Ash they’d wandered into Colt’s web of trickery as well. To that end, she never wanted to ask for anyone’s help ever again.

But the game had changed. This wasn’t just about preventing Colt from tampering with her soul anymore; it wasn’t just personal. He’d freed a cellblock’s worth of crazy, malevolent gods, riled them up with his trickster rhetoric, and now intended to submerge the world in pure chaos until the gods ruled the human race as its merciless enslavers. From the events that had recently happened while Ash was in Miami, she’d seen how much trouble and destruction four power-hungry gods could rouse.

With an armada of them under Colt’s direction, it would be genocide.

Ash had no choice but to ask for help this time. “Reach out to any god with a good heart left in them. Summon them to drop what they’re doing and find a way to our meeting place in Crescent City, California, by tomorrow afternoon. Ultimately, it will be their choice whether or not they want to fight, but for those brave enough to join me, we’ll storm the Blackwood campus . . . and we’ll strike those bastards down.”

“That much I can do,” Serena offered, “but the siren’s call is no exact science. I can hone the frequency all I want, but there’s always a chance that one of Colt’s people could pick up my broadcast too. That may have been how Colt found you on the Blackwood campus in
the first place, you know. If anyone overhears, Colt may know we’re bringing a wildfire to his forest.”

“Maybe so,” Ash said. Despite everything, she couldn’t help the killer smile that tested the waters of her lips. “But you know the thing about wildfires and forests? Even when you see one coming, you can’t put it out.” She turned to the sliding door to observe her own reflection in the glass, and when she put her hand to the pane, she left a softened, molten imprint. “Even when you see it coming . . . it’ll still burn everything in its path to the ground.”

PART III: CALIFORNIA