Afterglow (Wildefire) (26 page)

Once they took several more steps through the trees, Ash recognized it for what it was: The rope was a vine.

The object at the end of it was Papa.

She was dangling upside down by one foot, the vine fastened around her ankle. Her hair swished around her face as the rope listed back and forth. The earth goddess was still alive, but there was a gash across her skull and
a growing bruise where she’d been struck with a blunt object. Her eyes squinted in and out of focus at Ash and Ixtab, dulled by whatever concussion she’d been dealt.

Ixtab drew a pocketknife from her jeans and immediately started toward Papa, preparing to cut her down. Ash paused in her tracks, sensing that something was afoot. “Ixtab, wait—” she whispered harshly to the knife-wielding goddess.

There was the creak of a second vine, somewhere in the canopy above. Ash realized the ambush that was happening, but even though she rushed forward to tackle Ixtab to the ground, she didn’t reach her in time.

Ixtab never knew what hit her. On the end of a long vine, swinging like a deadly pendulum, a boulder-size clump of thorns slammed into Ixtab. It lifted her up in the air, with the long, Jurassic-size thorns sticking into her like she was a pin cushion. The booby trap finally dumped her unceremoniously against the trunk of a tree. She sat there, slumped like a broken doll against the colossal redwood, multiple stains of red soaking into her tank top.

Ash sprinted for the girl, dodging the pendulum as it made a slower second pass in the opposite direction. Ixtab was wheezing hard with shallow breaths—the brambles must have pierced her lungs.

A figure dropped out of the trees, landing between Ash and her fallen friend. She recognized Tane, the Polynesian forest spirit, both from her visions and from
when Colt liberated him from the life tree. He must have also been the one uprooting those redwood trees back on the 101.

Ash thrust out both hands, showering Tane with dual spouts of fire, but his powers were quicker on the draw. A series of barklike plates slid over his entire body, an organic armor that covered him from head to toe. It finished in a helmet with bestial ears and eye slits exposed just enough for Ash to see his green, glowing eyes staring out at her. Most wood might burn or scorch, but Tane’s new wooden plating meant that Ash’s fire just washed around him innocuously.

Redwood bark. He’d armored himself with redwood bark, one of the most fireproof of all the world’s trees.

Sure enough, when Ash finally turned off her internal pilot light, Tane had only suffered a light singe to his bark. He looked down at the black marks on his armor and the steam rising off them as though Ash had just scuffed his favorite sports car. Then he wound back with his arm and backhanded Ash with the hard, spiky edge of his forearm. She tumbled back so far, she nearly wound up back in the path of the swinging bramble ball.

Ash touched the bloody edge of her lip, but stood tall and resolute as Tane strode toward her. “You’re not the first plant god to try to kill me,” she said, spitting a bloody wad at Tane’s feet. “You can join the last one in the compost pile.”

“Ignite all you want, Pele,” Tane growled. The jovial
spirit of the Tane that Pele had known two hundred years ago was gone, replaced with something inhumane and vicious. “But you can’t make a bonfire out of fireproof logs.” Tane held up both arms, letting the thorny quills grow longer and sharper out of them. Then he lunged for Ash, preparing to skewer her.

A gunshot resounded through the woods. Tane’s body stiffened mid-flight and Ash sidestepped him as he crashed limply down. He landed helmet-first on the bramble pendulum, shuddered, then went still.

At the base of his neck, where the wooden armor was thinnest, a single bullet hole smoked faintly.

Ash looked over toward Ixtab. The girl was still slumped against the tree, but she held a pistol stiffly out in front of her. It must have been concealed in her waistband all this time—she hadn’t been kidding when she’d said she intended to fight with more material means.

Once Ixtab was sure that Tane wasn’t getting up, her gun arm fell weakly to her side. “Fireproof,” she rasped, using her last breath. “But not bulletproof . . .”

Her quaking chest seized after the last word, and though she died looking at Ash, her eyes stared piercingly into an altogether different world.

Ash knelt over the girl and wept. She barely had enough strength to gently close Ixtab’s eyes. The Mayan goddess of the gallows had seen enough of this lifetime. Ixtab had spent most of her days comforting others in their final
moments and shepherding them into the beyond—it was the blessing and the burden of her powers.

But when the gallows goddess died, who was there to comfort her in her final moment?

Eventually, Papa’s moans snapped Ash out of her mourning. Ash picked up the switchblade Ixtab had dropped and used it to saw through the vine. Just as Ash sheered through the last plant fiber, she managed to catch Papa before she could drop headfirst to the dirt.

“Thanks,” Papa mumbled dazedly after Ash was sure the woman was lucid enough to stand on her own two feet. Papa’s eyes focused and refocused as she recovered from the concussion. She didn’t regain her bearings until her gaze fell upon Ixtab’s blood-stained body. “I’m sorry,” the earth goddess said. “You knew her well?”

“No,” Ash replied. “Yet she was still one of the most selfless people I’ve ever known.”

A primitive scream sounded through the mist, followed by the galloping of hooves. Difficult as it was to see through the steamy forest, Ash knew the girl riding toward them on horseback could only be the wretched Epona. As Epona came into view, Ash saw that the insane redhead had a long, sharp-tipped spear cocked back and ready to throw. She aimed the metal javelin at Ash.

Ash was sick of all these games, all this detestable violence. Papa, too, stood her ground with no small amount of contempt.

“This one’s for Ixtab and Rangi,” Ash said, and let a
single, explosive flare burst from her open palm.

The flare struck the ground just in front of the wild mare and ignited into a crackling fire. The horse, which had been charging like it was in the front line of a Civil War cavalry charge, bucked wildly at the sight of the flames, throwing Epona from the saddle. She flipped over the fire before landing hard on her back.

Epona tried to regain her footing and reach for her fallen spear, but Papa waved her hand at the soil beneath the Celtic goddess. The earth around her liquefied in a matter of seconds, and Epona plunged into the quicksand.

For a moment, Ash thought the girl was going to drown, but Epona’s head resurfaced through the muck. Her red hair and freckled cheeks were filthy with mud, and she groped around wildly for the edge of the sand pit with panicked, unsure gasps.

Papa wasn’t done with her yet. The earth goddess drew her hands back, and just as quickly as the soil had liquefied, it hardened back into a solid. Epona let out a series of frightened, mousy squeaks, but to no avail—the hard-packed earth locked around her, burying her from the neck down.

The image nearly made Ash laugh. It reminded her of the time she’d encased Colt in rock up to his waist.

While Epona continued her impotent struggle to escape, groaning with exertion, Ash whispered something to Papa, who smiled darkly.

“What’s so funny?” Epona snarled, only her head visible above the quicksand. “Are you freaks joking about how you’re going to kill me?”

Ash shook her head. “We’re not going to kill you, Epona,” she said, and waited long enough for Epona’s face to soften with hope. “But,” Ash continued, and gestured to the now hard-packed soil beneath her feet, “I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but you’re buried up to your head in the center of a natural valley in the forest floor.” She glanced meaningfully up at the sky. “And the forecast tonight calls for rain . . . a lot of it.”

There might have been mud coating Epona’s face, but Ash was sure that even the girl’s freckles must have gone white as she imagined the natural crater filling up, the rains flowing down the slopes and pooling around her head, her mouth and nose slowly disappearing under the rising water level. . . .

“My best advice?” Ash knelt down and slapped the side of Epona’s face lightly with her hand. “Drink real fast.”

They left Epona, whose fruitless efforts to free herself were accompanied by small, sobbing shrieks. Once they were out of earshot, Papa said to Ash, “The forecast tonight called for clear skies, didn’t it?”

“It did,” Ash said. “But when your sister’s a storm goddess, there’s always a chance of rain.”

“Speak of the devil,” Papa said.

Because they’d stumbled upon Eve in the mist.

Eve was leaning against a redwood, looking a
little bored. At her feet, Ash recognized Tangaroa, the Polynesian sea god, whose body was still convulsing with the electricity Eve had pumped into him. Ash could even see the blackened, festering welt on his chest where the lightning bolt must have struck.

“Like dropping a toaster in a bath tub,” Eve said casually.

Tangaroa’s eyes rolled back into his head finally, but his body still continued to twitch posthumously.

Not too far away, Ash heard Wes’s voice calling for her. Papa opened her mouth, about to summon the night god over to them, but Ash caught her by the elbow. “Listen, Papa,” Ash said. “Eve and I need to go take care of something . . . alone. But my noble boyfriend is going to want to tag along. Could you do us a solid and distract him for a few minutes?”

Papa frowned uncertainly, but then nodded. She hurried off into the fog, which was already starting to dissipate now that Tangaroa was dead.

“You ready for this?” Ash asked her sister.

“Yes.” Eve’s eyes crackled with static electricity. “This was just a warm-up for what I’m going to do to Colt. I brought a little backup plan too, in case we need a distraction. . . .” Eve opened the knapsack that she’d kept on her back, long enough for Ash to see the music box inside.

Hopefully it wouldn’t get anyone blown up this time.

Together they headed in the direction of the coast, away from the sound of Wes’s voice. It pained her to
leave him behind, especially when she couldn’t be sure there weren’t other gods from the Dark Pantheon lurking in the forest. He’d no doubt be furious that they’d confronted Colt without him, but this final battle was for the Wilde sisters alone.

The walk lasted several miles, until the trees finally thinned, and the swooshing roll of the ocean emerged through the silence. And when they stepped out onto the pebble-strewn beach, it wasn’t hard to locate their destination.

A half mile up the coastline, a colossal stone structure rose out of the shallows like a middle finger flipping the bird to the Pacific horizon. Itzli must have had a really good time creating the nightmarish lighthouse, because he’d designed the limestone exterior to look almost like a massive coral reef, complete with jagged rocky fingers that reached off into the night. The sadistic bastard, Ash noted with scorn, must have an artistic streak.

At the lighthouse’s impressive summit, backlit by the glow of a fire, a man stood at the edge, staring down the coast in their direction. It was impossible to distinguish any of his features from this far away, but it had to be Colt.

“I think it’s time to go break up with our old flame,” Eve said to Ash.

Ash nodded in agreement. “And let’s not let him down gently. . . .”

Wednesday, Part I

As Ash and Eve passed
through the entrance into the dark interior of the towering lighthouse, the first thing they noticed was the staircase. Ash illuminated her hand at the same time Eve let an electric luminescence glow around hers, two torches floating in the dark. Thick stone steps spiraled around the inside walls, a helix wrapping around the tapered shell of the tower. They eventually disappeared high above, through an aperture in the ceiling.

Ash immediately started for the stairwell, but Eve caught her by the wrist. Eve opened and closed her mouth several times; whatever she wanted to say, she was fighting tooth and nail not to let it come out. “Look,” Eve said once her lips finally cooperated. “Anything could happen up there, so I just wanted you to know . . . shit,” Eve said, unable to get it out on the first try. A glossy coating had
formed over her eyes, glistening bluish white from her electric torch. “I spent so much of my life being a bitch that sometimes saying something human is like trying to vomit up a bowling ball.”

Ash rubbed her sister’s arm and smiled wanly. “Lovely image.”

“The point is,” Eve continued, “I hope you realize that I never ran away from Scarsdale because of you.” She gazed up to the roof, where their hostage parents presumably awaited them. “I didn’t even run away because of them. I just woke up every morning in my bed and saw what a monster I was gradually becoming. I mean, there’s teen angst, but the awful, hurtful things I started to say to everyone, the parties, the drinking, the fights at school . . . I lost control. I walked all over our parents, and then my friends at school, and eventually . . . even my best friend.” Her wet eyes fell on Ash. “It was like this out-of-body experience. No matter how much I kept telling myself that I needed to be a better person, my mouth just kept saying the same caustic shit, and my fists just kept on swinging. So I ran. Far away. I did it to find a fresh start, but every time I found myself alone in a bathroom—in rest stops, in hostels, in abandoned apartments where I’d squat—I always ended up looking at myself in the mirror, thinking, ‘You used to be such a good kid, Eve. What happened to you?’ ”

“You may think you’ve said or done things so terrible that you can’t come back to us,” Ash said. “But then why
have Mom and Dad still spent the last year clinging to every hope that you’d eventually come home? And as for me, I went to hell and back—literally—to find you. We never gave up on you.” Ash pointed to the stairs. “So let’s go up there, save our parents, kill an unkillable trickster . . . and if we make it out of this alive, I promise we won’t have to wait until our next lifetimes to make a fresh start . . . together.”