Afterglow (Wildefire) (25 page)

Behind them, Wes’s jeep screeched to a halt as well, and Ash stood up and frantically waved for him to turn around. But even as Wes started to put his jeep in reverse, there was another crack, and a second redwood toppled across the road behind them. They were now trapped in a wooden pen, with nowhere to go in the jeeps unless they tried to go off-roading into the forest.

A third crack. This time, through the mist, Ash saw
the tree hammering toward the second jeep. “No!” she screamed over its groaning, splintering trunk.

Wes leaped out of the driver-side door, and at first Ash thought he meant to get out of the way. Instead he stepped right in the path of the falling tree, braced his legs against the asphalt, and extended his massive arms over his head.

Even with his superhuman strength, the Aztec night god staggered backward under the tremendous weight of the tree, and the pavement cracked beneath his feet. The tree’s descent stopped only a foot from crushing the jeep and its occupants, who took the opportunity to scramble out onto the road. As soon as Wes was sure everyone was out of harm’s way, he growled and then heaved the trunk off to the side.

Everyone was evacuating Ash’s jeep when a fourth redwood came crashing down. With no one to catch it this time, it crushed the abandoned jeep just as Ash and her compatriots dove clear. Glass shattered everywhere, littering the road. The tree trunk practically folded the vehicle in half, mangling the steel of the jeep’s chassis as though it were Play-Doh.

“It’s an ambush,” Sila hissed, as if that weren’t obvious enough. The five from Ash’s car defensively backed up into each other, as the milk-thick mist continued to pulsate around them.

There was a shriek down the road, in Wes’s group, and Ash snapped to attention just quick enough to see
some sort of man-size creature with batlike wings carrying Rangi up into the mist, its talons fastened around the god’s neck. Ash prepared to launch a fireball up at the creature, but dared not, lest she hit Rangi in the process. She could no longer see the creature in the clouds anyway, so she’d be throwing blindly.

Ten seconds later, Rangi’s body fell back through the mist and hit the pavement next to Ash with a wet
thuck
. Blood seeped into the rain-slick road, mixing with the gasoline that was leaking out of the jeep.

“Back toward the tree line,” Ash barked at her group, trying to urge them off the road and out of the open. There was nothing they could do for the dead Polynesian sky god now.

Before they could properly retreat, the beating wings of the bat creature sounded through the mist, and as he swooped over them, he vomited a fireball down at the mangled jeep. Ash barely had time to leap in front of the vehicle before it ignited. The explosion from the gas tank sent her reeling back, but Ash recovered her footing and held out her arms, shielding her friends from the angry flames. She let her fireproof skin absorb the heat before letting the shield drop altogether.

The remaining eight gods all retreated to the forest, and not a moment too soon: A series of inhuman growls echoed out of the woods on the opposite side of the road, from the direction of Blackwood. At first Ash thought they must be coming from some crazed gods. But the
figures that emerged through the mist were far more terrifying.

It was a pack of woodland animals indigenous to the redwoods—coyotes, mountain lions, and black bears—only they were all in various states of postmortem decay. Most of them had lost all but patches of their fur in the decomposition process, leaving behind exposed fat, sinew, and bone, which glistened in the firelight from the exploded jeep. They didn’t look friendly, either—they foamed rabidly at the mouths with hunger, and their gnashing teeth looked as sharp as the day they’d died.

Behind them, walking coolly, was a human figure: Hel, the Norse goddess of the underworld, if Ixtab had identified her correctly. She pointed at Ash and the other fleeing gods, and the zombie animals loped after them.

Ade boldly stepped forward and raised his arms, preparing to bowl the creatures over with one of his signature waves of thunder. But before the Zulu thunder god could release a shock wave, a zombie elk came barreling through the mist. It rammed into Ade with its head down and scooped him up with its antlers, carrying him off into the wild.

Not only did the attack of the undead animals force the rest of them deeper into the trees, but their angle of attack divided Ash’s squad even farther from Wes and the others. The last thing she wanted to do was to lose sight of her sister and Wes when there were bloodthirsty creatures in pursuit, but she had little choice, so she dashed like hell
was on her heels into the mist. The last she saw of Wes, an undead bear was taking a swipe at his head with a bone-breaking swing of its claw. Wes ducked under the bear’s right hook, and then countered with one of his own that knocked the bear’s lower jaw right off its skull.

Ash made it a solid forty feet into the forest before she heard the quickly approaching padding of paws on dirt. She knew it was only a matter of time before she was outrun by the reanimated animals, so she turned on her heel, switching to the offensive. The outline of a cougar materialized through the mist, coming fast. Ash launched a fireball in its direction, hoping to burn the creature alive.

But the problem with burning the cougar alive was that it was already dead. The fireball exploded across the exposed sinew of its face, but the mountain lion didn’t even flinch. It just continued to lope forward, in flames, and Ash couldn’t even get out the words “oh, shit” before it pounced and landed on her.

Its claws sank into her shoulders, and the weight of the creature took Ash to the ground like a falling tree. It was all she could do to thrust out her hands and wrap them around the zombie cougar’s neck and squeeze. This kept its gnashing teeth inches from her nose. The fiercely putrid smell of burning, rotting flesh threatened to make her vomit, and she tried her best not to scream as its claws dug deeper into her flesh.

Ash’s own anger was growing at the thought of dying at
the mercy of a carcass. Hel couldn’t fight her own battles, so she summoned carrion to do her bidding instead?

“Fuck this,” Ash growled. She kicked off the ground, somersaulting backward with the mountain lion, then launched him by the neck hard at the nearest redwood.

The cougar hit the tree back-first, and its exposed spine snapped in half. Still, with its back and hind legs twisted at a macabre angle, it tried to drag itself forward through the dirt on just its front paws.

Before the fallen creature could crawl its way any farther, Erebus reappeared from the mist, wound up with his right leg and let loose a kick across the cougar’s face. Its head snapped off its neck and flew into the mist. “Got to admire its persistence,” Erebus said, as the broken, headless corpse on the ground continued to lash out blindly with its claws.

The two of them had been so fixated on the cougar that they didn’t hear the other creatures creeping up behind them until a bear stepped on a dry leaf. Ash spun around to find not one but five undead animals surrounding them, with Hel a few paces to their rear. Her nappy, twig-littered hair ran all the way down to her waist, and she flashed them an ugly, taunting smile.

As Ash and Erebus backed into a redwood, not daring to turn their backs on the pack of bears and coyotes that was slowly closing in on them, Erebus whispered to Ash, “Now would be a good time to cast a little light for me.”

Ash didn’t question Erebus, even though she knew the zombie animals wouldn’t fear fire like a living creature might. She just launched a fireball down into the ground in front of them, which erupted in an impromptu bonfire.

The firelight bathed the zombie animals in its red glow, casting long shadows behind them.

Ash watched with morbid delight as Erebus raised his hands . . . and the shadows of the animals came to life.

The silhouettes emerged from the soil, no longer in two dimensions but three, and the distorted, darker versions of the zombie creatures were even larger and more terrifying than their originals.

Hel blanched as she saw the silhouettes turn on her. She didn’t even have time to run before the pack of ravenous shadows pounced. Her awful, earsplitting screams only lasted a few seconds before one of the shadow bears ripped out her throat with its teeth.

Instantly the five zombie animals in front of Ash and Erebus crumpled lifelessly to the ground, once more becoming rotting cadavers, as they had been before Hel disturbed their eternal rest.

“Killer shadow puppets?” Ash said, impressed, and toed the black-bear carcass in front of her. “And I really thought I’d seen everything . . .”

Erebus gave her a humble grin and shrugged. “You know what they say about being afraid of your own—”

In a flourish of ugly translucent wings, the red-eyed
bat god—the one Ixtab had identified as Camazotz, a demon of sorts from Mayan mythology—dropped out of the mist and raked his sharp talons across Erebus’s throat. The shadow god immediately grasped his neck to cover the wound, but blood just oozed out between his fingers and down onto his T-shirt.

Ash released a vengeful cry and lunged for Camazotz, but without even turning around, the bat god dropped to his hands and bucked out with both of his legs, like a rodeo bull. His feet connected with Ash’s stomach, and she tripped over an exposed root as she fell backward.

Ash was on fire by the time she even got to her feet. Camazotz stood between her and Erebus, who was curled up on the forest floor, still applying pressure to his neck. There was less blood pumping out now, which could mean that the demon’s claw had missed the boy’s jugular . . . or it could just mean that he was already running out of blood. Either way, Erebus was going to need medical attention soon.

Just as Ash stepped forward, preparing to flame broil the bat god, a strange sensation came over her. The corona that had erupted around her started to dim, the flames retracting back into her body against her will. Her lungs felt heavy, and she realized that the air she was breathing in was suddenly devoid of oxygen. Her mouth opened impotently, trying to draw in fresh air, but the burning in her lungs only worsened.

That’s when Sila stepped into view from where
she’d been lurking under the cover of mist. Her fingers were curled tight, and she never took her gaze off Ash. “Traitor,” Ash rasped. The girl had to be on Colt’s payroll, which meant the story she’d told them about her brain-dead sister was probably bullshit, too. At least Ash no longer needed to guess who’d alerted the Dark Pantheon to prepare an ambush for them.

With the Inuit air goddess stealing Ash’s oxygen, it was impossible for Ash to tap into her fiery abilities. Camazotz and Sila watched her intently, content to let her asphyxiate. Even as the inky spots blossomed in her sight and Ash began to panic, she noticed a large outline appear in the mist behind the two sinister gods.

Ash staggered to the right, which prompted Sila to laugh. “Moving around won’t get you the oxygen that your lungs are so desperately yearning for,” the Inuit goddess ribbed her. “The vacuum goes where you go, Pele.”

Ash dropped to one knee a few steps later. “Not searching for air,” she croaked. “Just moving out of the way.”

That’s when Ade sent a hard current of thunder into the two standing gods. The blast of thunder bowled both of them over, but the less fortunate Sila collided with a nine-foot-wide redwood headfirst before dropping to the ground.

Camazotz landed closer to Ash. He struggled to his feet with his hands covering his explosively ringing ears, but the concussion from the thunder had discombobulated
him. Ash pinned his right wing to the forest floor with an angry drive of her boot, then leaned in close so he could hear her. “I knew another winged god once,” she said, referring to Aurora. “I liked her far better than you.”

With a fierce twist of the bat god’s head, she broke Camazotz’s neck, and he slumped back into the dirt.

When Ash finally removed her foot from the dead god’s wing, she turned her attention back to Erebus. Ade was kneeling over him and wrapping a section of his own T-shirt around the shadow god’s throat. Ixtab had also managed to find her way back to them, and Ash was relieved to see that no gods or undead animals had torn the Mayan girl to shreds.

Erebus was moaning something in a low rasp—Camazotz’s claw must have nicked his vocal cords. “I don’t think his jugular was hit,” Ade said, and Ash felt a wave of relief. “He might sound like a James Bond villain from now on, but he’s going to be okay.”

“Do you think you can navigate your way with him to the Blackwood campus?” Ash asked Ade, who nodded. This part of the forest was a cell phone dead zone, but Ade would be able to call for help from campus. “I’m hoping it will be god-free since all the bad apples seem to be out here in the woods. But if you come across anyone who shouldn’t be there . . .” Ash spread her hands. “Make their ears ring in the afterlife.”

With no time to waste, Ade scooped up the fallen god as delicately as he could and hurried off into the mist.
Ash and Ixtab continued through the forest in the direction they hoped would reconnect them with Wes, Eve, and the others. Midnight was fast approaching, and even though Ash had committed to battling it out with the Dark Pantheon first, time was dwindling down to the deadline Colt had given her for meeting him at the lighthouse.

The woods were disconcertingly quiet as Ash and Ixtab walked through the mist. Ash tried to not read into this—Wes and the others weren’t about to start shouting and giving away their location to any other demented gods who happened to be lurking nearby. Still, she couldn’t keep her imagination from traveling to dark places. The thick mist around them was a blank canvas that was just asking for morbid thoughts to be painted upon it. . . .

A curious sound finally interrupted the silence, quiet at first, but growing louder. It was the sound of a rope swinging rhythmically back and forth. As they traveled toward the noise, a shape appeared through the curtain of steam: a large pendulum of sorts, a thick object swinging from the bottom of the rope.