Afterglow (Wildefire) (24 page)

Eve had never talked about her time in the Cloak prison before, so this was news to Ash. And Eve had only been attached to the tree for a little over a month. She couldn’t imagine the kind of venom that the others might have accumulated after being locked away for centuries.

“There’s more,” Ixtab continued. “While Colt waits for you in a stone tower off the coast, a Celtic goddess has been stewing mutiny among the Dark Pantheon. Colt had promised the safe passage of you and your sister before, but don’t expect these gods to honor that. When we head into battle in those woods, you’re just as vulnerable as the rest of us.”

Epona
, Ash thought darkly. She spared the girl’s life back in Massachusetts, and now the girl was convincing the hornet’s nest to sting her. No surprises there.

Gradually, the sun approached the horizon. The food had been mostly devoured, and the sense of restlessness
was palpable. Most of the twelve arrivals were complete strangers to Ash—gods from pantheons ranging from Central America to the Far East. There were, however, two other recognizable faces in the mix: Papa and Rangi. Without access to memories from their previous lives, they clearly didn’t recognize Ash and Eve, nor did they, fortunately, remember that Pele had murdered them two lifetimes ago. In fact Rangi and Papa hadn’t even arrived together. This is how it’s supposed to be, Ash thought. Everyone gets a fresh start.

Ash knew it was time, but suddenly she wondered what sort of solace or motivation to fight she really had to offer these people. While the threat of the Dark Pantheon was very real, “the world is at stake” was such an abstract and broad and almost ridiculous claim for anyone to wrap their mind around. But she needed to say something.

Ash held up her hand and let a small but vibrant stream of sparks shoot from her fingertips into the air. The impromptu fireworks display snagged everyone’s attention, and the group of sullen gods formed a ring around her. Wes and Ade smiled at her encouragingly. Eve crossed her arms and waggled her eyebrows at Ash as if to say,
You better make this good, sis.

“There’s always that point in the movies,” Ash began slowly, “where the general stands before his troops, or the coach comes into the locker room before his team takes the field for the last time, and he starts motivationally waxing on about how they may be the vastly outnumbered and
outgunned underdogs, but that’s exactly why they’re going to win. It all builds up to this intense emotionally charged climax where everyone cheers with unity as they fill to the brim with a power they weren’t even sure they had.” Ash blinked and looked to the sand. “Well, I’m not your coach, and I’m not your general, and in full disclosure, I got a B-minus in the last public-speaking course I took.” A few people laughed, but it was a choked, tense laughter.

Ash switched on her internal furnace, and fire instantly lapped over her arms, all the way up to her elbows. She held them out for the group to see. “There was a time, even after I learned that I was a one-woman pyrotechnic freak-show, where I thought I could live a normal life if I just retreated to schoolwork and dances and tennis matches, and pretended like this other, ancient world didn’t exist. But then I met Colt Halliday, this”—she searched for the word to call him—“this fucking asshole, and the world started to fall apart around me. Friends turned on each other. People I loved dearly were murdered in the most unmentionable, personal ways. Hell follows him like a shadow, and everyone pays for it. Everyone.”

Ash gazed to the south, between Ixtab and Serena, in the direction of the Blackwood campus. “As long as Colt Halliday walks the earth, nobody’s fireproof. He manipulates everyone around him, and then steps back and watches the chaos. One morning you’ll wake up with a knife between your ribs, and while it may not be his hand on the dagger, you’ll hear him laughing from the
shadows. That’s how the douche bag operates. And now he’s got a posse of gods, some of whom have spent centuries stewing in a sweaty prison and are about to make up for lost time by torching this world. They’ll let the whole planet burn for no better reason than to watch its ashes blow in the wind.”

Ash knelt down, scooped up a handful of sand, and let it sift down through her fingers. “As much as the gods we’ll be going up against probably deserve to be punished, it makes me sick that anyone has to die. I’ve seen so much killing in the last few months, all because of Colt’s puppeteering, and let me tell you: It doesn’t matter whether the person is innocent or guilty, whether it’s in rage or in self-defense, whether it’s something I witnessed or an act of violence by my own hand—killing is always a vicious, ugly thing. This one girl, who I once might have called a friend, fell from grace, and I watched her personally murder two of my friends in cold blood.” Ash flinched as Lily’s face popped into her mind, as if the girl had snuck up behind her. But then she pictured Lily as she’d last seen her, as she died, floating in a moat of water, with blood pumping out of her chest. “I really thought I wanted to avenge my friends, but in that final moment, when I put the sharp end of a broken champagne glass through her heart, I felt no happiness or vengeful excitement. It was awful.

“That’s why it’s with a heavy conscience that I ask you to join me on what could inevitably be a suicide
mission. I’m just a stranger to most of you, and I’ve already asked too much of you—summoning you to this distant beach, luring you away from your family and friends, and placing you into the path of danger. I had little right to do so.” Ash took a deep breath. “Think of those people dear to you when you decide whether to join me on the journey into the forest. No one will blame you if you turn around now and go back to the life you left behind. If you pretend you never saw this cataclysm between the gods brewing.” Ash pointed south, in the direction of Blackwood. “But sooner or later, if we fail tonight, then those dark gods will come to your town, to destroy your home and the people you love. So either you can fight by my side now, when we still have a chance . . . or you can fight alone then, when it might be too late.”

And just like that, Ash gave them the option. Five of the assembled gods turned and walked away, after various levels of hesitation. One even came up to Ash and could barely meet her gaze as she said simply, “I can’t,” before she turned on her heel and headed back to the parking lot.

When the deserters had departed, ten gods remained on the beach: Ash, Eve, Wes, Ade, Serena, Ixtab, Papa, Rangi, and two new arrivals that Ash had never met before, in this lifetime or in any of her resurrected memories: Sila, the Inuit goddess of the air, and Erebus, the Greek god of the shadows. They both had very personal
reasons to fight. Sila’s sister, Sedna, an Inuit goddess of marine life, had been tortured by the awful Epona, racked with nightmares for hours at Colt’s request. Sedna had survived the ordeal, but was now institutionalized and hadn’t uttered a word since. “Even if you stand in front of her,” Sila explained, her face hard but her eyes welling with tears, “it’s like she stares right through you.”

As it turned out, Erebus and Eve already knew each other, which Ash didn’t realize until she saw her sister give him a civil clap on the shoulder. The teenage shadow god, along with Eve, had been part of Colt’s dark entourage a year ago, when the trickster was still moonlighting as the masked figure Blink. Once Erebus had seen the big picture of Colt’s plans, he’d tried to escape . . . and Colt had sent Itzli to “take care” of Erebus’s girlfriend as a parting gift. Itzli had crushed the girl—a mortal—with a massive stone from the neck down, so Erebus would be able to recognize her face when he returned to the apartment. Until now, however, Erebus hadn’t known where to find the trickster to seek his revenge.

Nightfall landed, and Ash knew it was time to move out. They would strike Colt’s Dark Pantheon first, then storm the trickster’s stone tower afterward to rescue Ash’s parents and Rose . . . that is, if the girl wanted to be saved.

Thanks to Ixtab’s visions and her in-depth knowledge of mythology, they had a pretty good idea of some of the gods they were up against out in the wild. However, this
didn’t put Ash at ease, because she knew that identifying the gods was one thing—but surviving a battle against them was something else altogether.

In the beach parking lot they loaded up into the two jeeps that Wes had rented for the attack. “I hope you opted for the insurance on these,” Ash said to Wes, as he handed a pair of keys to her.

“Unfortunately, the insurance only covered ‘acts of God’ and not ‘acts of gods,’ ” Wes joked.

“Damn these rental companies and their refusal to acknowledge the supernatural.” Ash leaned into Wes and pressed her forehead against his collarbone—she had to stand on her tippy toes to accomplish this. “You drive safe, Wesley Towers,” she said to him, since they’d each agreed to drive one of the jeeps.

Wes pulled her in close. “We’re just driving down the 101,” he said softly. “We’re not piloting dual space shuttles on a dangerous mission to destroy a globe-killing asteroid.” But they both knew that the risks were every bit as high, and that the moment they parted here could be the last moment they shared alive.

Ash couldn’t handle the thought of a prolonged goodbye, so she kissed Wes hard on the Adam’s apple, then turned and walked to her own car without making eye contact.

She was surprised to find Ixtab in the passenger seat of the jeep, in addition to Ade, Erebus, and Sila, who’d loaded up in the back.

“What?” Ixtab said defensively when she saw the way Ash was looking at her. “Let me guess: You want to know what good my powers will do us out in the field? How the whole ‘I see dead people’ shtick will help me out there?”

Ash put a hand on Ixtab’s shoulder. “You’ve already done so much. Because of you, we’ve been able to identify some of the gods we’re up against tonight. You’ve given us a fighting chance. You don’t have to do anything else to—”

“Look,” Ixtab interrupted. “I may not be able to ignite things, or make earthquakes, or summon the wind, or . . .” She glanced back at Erebus. “Or whatever the hell that guy does with shadows. But humans have fought for centuries with more material means, and that’s exactly what I intend to do. Colt’s underlings already took one person I love from me.” Her weary eyes went somewhere else for a second, and Ash could all but see Aurora’s pumping wings reflected in them, the Roman goddess of the dawn taking flight. “I won’t let that happen to anyone else while there’s still breath left in my body.”

Ash nodded. Even if she were stripped of her own fiery abilities, nothing would stop her from marching into battle to avenge any of her friends.

And after all, Ash thought with a wry smile as she started the jeep, even before she’d acquired her own powers, she’d always been able to throw a mean right hook.

“Buckle up, kids,” she instructed the four gods in the car. “It’s going to be a Wilde ride.”

“Really?” Ade groaned. “You went there?”

“Let me get this straight,” Sila said, buckling her seat belt nonetheless. “We’re headed into a cataclysmic battle between the gods . . . and you’re concerned about seat belts?”

Ash looked into the rearview mirror and raised her eyebrows. “Clearly you’ve never driven with me before.” Then she threw the car into drive, slammed her foot down on the gas pedal, and rocketed past the jeep containing Wes, Eve, Papa, and Rangi. Serena stood on the corner, with her cane slung over her shoulder, and in true Serena fashion, shouted, “I’ll see you soon, Ashline Wilde,” as the jeep flew past her.

How the blind girl knew it was the jeep with Ash in it, Ash would never know.

The drive from Crescent City to the Blackwood Academy campus was only forty miles.

Thirty miles into it, the passengers of Ash’s jeep fell into an anxious silence.

Thirty-eight miles into it, they hit the fog.

It started as just a light mist over the narrow road. After another minute, it thickened until the enormous, towering redwood trees that flanked either side of the highway disappeared into a dark, gray cloud. The road glistened with an inch of standing water, even though it hadn’t rained. Ash slowed the jeep way down and chanced a look over her shoulder just to make sure that Wes and
the others were still following behind them. Wes flashed his headlights reassuringly.

Behind Ash, Sila had tilted her head to the sky. “This isn’t right,” she said, and sniffed the air. “This fog isn’t . . . natural.”

Ash had figured as much herself. If one of the Dark Pantheon was behind this, then there was a good chance that the welcoming committee already knew they were coming.

Somewhere in the trees off the passenger side, a large crack resounded from the woods. Before Ash could even see what had made the sound, Ixtab grabbed her arm and shouted, “Watch out!”

Ash slammed on the brakes just as the colossal trunk of a redwood tree came chopping down across the road like a cleaver. It landed just ten feet in front of them, and even at the jeep’s diminished speed, Ash had to whip the steering wheel to the side. The jeep hydroplaned sideways over the slick road before it stopped inches from the fallen tree.