Afterglow (Wildefire) (3 page)

Ash wasn’t sure how long she’d been out when the telltale creak of the stairwell door woke her up. She scrambled to her feet just as a skinny college-aged boy popped into view. The moment he saw her, he froze in the doorway, his foot only beginning to come down. He had a bulky backpack slung over one shoulder and a pizza box in his hand.
Beneath his red and black baseball cap, there was something in his expression. . . .

Recognition.

And that’s when he tried to run.

Disoriented as she was, Ash caught up to him before he could even make it to the second step. She looped her fingers around the handle of his backpack and pulled hard, sending the boy flying back into the bell tower. He landed in the dust beneath the bell ropes. Ash slammed the door shut to block his escape.

“Listen.” He held up his hand. “I already told you people where you could find him. If he’s not at the observatory, that’s not my fault. I’m not his keeper.”

“I’m not here to hurt you. I just have a few questions.” Ash took a step forward, into the path of the light streaming through the window.

The boy visibly relaxed a little when the afternoon sun lit her face. “Your hair is longer than hers,” he said. “But you two
must
be related.”

“You saw my sister?” Ash asked. Must have been Eve, too, since Rose had longer hair than all of them. “And they were asking for someone?”

“I take it you’re not with them, then.” He sounded relieved and took off his Red Sox cap to wipe his brow. The hair over his ears turned up in wingtips from where the cap had probably made a home since his last haircut . . . whenever that was.

“Hell no,” Ash said. “When were they here?”

The boy swept aside the heavy ropes and threw down his backpack in the corner. “The two of them came in before I left for lunch,” he said. “The Native American guy and your sister, apparently.”

So Rose hadn’t been here . . . which explained why the church was still intact and not a pile of brick and wooden rubble down on Salem Street. Colt must have put Proteus, the shape-shifter, in charge of babysitting her somewhere—a weird image, since six-year-old Rose was now in the body of a sixteen-year-old.

The guy seemed to have decided that Ash wasn’t a threat, because he popped a squat on the wooden stool that his pizza box had landed next to. The top had flipped open, but the pizza inside remained magically unscathed. “I’m Tom, by the way.” The aroma of greasy cheese seemed to have distracted him, and he took a moment to inhale with his eyes closed. “Nobody makes pizza like the Italians do.”

“Dude,” Ash said. “I didn’t come here for a Food Network episode.”

Tom took a huge bite of pizza. “Sorry,” he said, his voice muffled through cheese and crust. “Anyway, they were looking for my friend.”

“What friend?”

“My classmate. At MIT.” He kicked his backpack, which was so overstuffed with textbooks that it probably weighed as much as the bells above them. “We’re both biomedical engineering majors—and Bellringers, too.”

She pointed to his blue T-shirt that, sure enough, read
“Bellringer” across the front. “I just thought that was the name of some band I’d never heard of.”

Tom laughed through another mouthful of pizza. “It sort of is. We’re the guild in charge of making music with those things.” He jabbed the slice of pizza crust up toward the rafters, then to the ropes. “Eight men, each to a rope, in charge of one bell, one note.”

“Riveting,” Ash muttered. “I bet all the girls throw their panties into the belfry when you guys give concerts.”

“That’s why I’m going to med school. Chicks dig doctors. Anyway, the Native American dude and your sister somehow found out that Modo and I do all our homework up here during the week—it’s quieter than the library, you know?—but he’s off preparing for his performance tonight.”

Ash raised her eyebrow. “His name is Modo? My sister and her friend were looking for a guy named
Modo
?”

“You know, like short for Quasimodo?” For the first time since his arrival Tom actually looked a little embarrassed. “The guy has a crippled leg, walks with a limp, and hangs out in a bell tower. It would be a travesty of literary justice if we didn’t nickname him that.”

“You named your friend,” Ash said slowly, “after the Hunchback of Notre Dame?”

“Oh come on. Even he calls himself Modo now.”

Ash held up a hand to shut him up. “I just want to know where to find . . . Modo. Where did you send my sister and the douche bag with her?”

A slow grin trickled across Tom’s face. “Where you’ll
find Modo and where I said he is are two different things.”

“You lied to them?” A peal of relieved laughter burst out of Ash. “Tom, I could kiss you right now!” When he lowered the slice of pizza in his hand and leaned in hopefully, Ash shook her head. “It’s just an expression.”

Tom shrugged and bit into the slice. “I sent them to an observatory on the other side of the state where Modo likes to go stargazing sometimes. . . . Only they won’t find him there. He’s working the fair tonight.” Before Ash could ask, “Fair?” he reached into his backpack and pulled out a flier.

The one-page handbill was printed to look like it was on old, beige parchment, to match the headline across the top:

King Edward’s Feast

It was an advertisement for a freaking Renaissance fair.

The pictures showed women in corsets and men in chain mail, with jousting and court jesters and medieval magic shows.

Tom leaned in, and at first Ash thought he was making another pass at her. Instead he put his greasy fingertip on a picture toward the bottom, of a boy with olive skin dressed in medieval garb. Ash guessed he was of Mediterranean descent, possibly Greek. His curly black hair fell to his shoulders, which were covered in chain mail. It wasn’t that his face was unattractive, but there was something grizzled and timeworn about his skin that made him look much older
than a college student. He sat on top of a horse, with a lance under one arm and a metal helmet cradled in the other.

“So that’s Modo, huh?” Ash said. “How can I get to this dorky little festival?” Since she had arrived, she’d barely had time to drop the bag of clothes she’d thrown together at a cheap hotel, and she wasn’t old enough to rent a car.

“It has a small fan base among the MIT kids, so they charter a bus to the fair. If you hustle to campus, you might make the four o’clock shuttle.”

Ash stood up, already programming the engineering school into her cell phone’s GPS. “I won’t need a student ID to board the bus?”

“Nah, they don’t check it.” Tom smirked. “And even if they did, you could easily pass for an engineering student.”

“Why’s that?” When Ash realized what he was implying, she crossed her arms. “Do we need to have a discussion about cultural stereotypes? I’m Polynesian.”

“Maybe we can discuss my ignorance over dinner?” he asked hopefully.

But Ash was already on her way out the door, heading for the subway. The fourteenth-century lords and ladies of the Renaissance fair were about to get a special visit from a twenty-first-century goddess.

Ash slept most of the bus ride, having pulled an all-nighter to catch her early morning flight out of Miami. The next thing she knew, her seat was being jostled as the students behind her stood up. She blinked away the thin veil of sleep
and stepped down into the dirt parking lot with the others.

After paying the entry fee to get in, Ash’s first thought as she entered the fairgrounds was:
I am completely under-dressed.

She knew she’d been the only one on the bus wearing jeans, but this was ridiculous. As far as the eye could see across the wooded marketplace, people were dressed in tunics and trousers and dresses. Some of the women rocked elaborate braids, while the men donned feather-tipped caps and leather helmets.

So much for looking inconspicuous
, Ash thought.

She wasn’t quite ready to go flashing a picture of Modo around to random strangers, playing the “Have you seen this knight?” game, so she decided to take a walk around the compound. The fair basically consisted of a series of wooden storefronts and huts, each containing some type of medieval craftsman. Weaver. Corset maker. Even an artist painting the profile of a squirming schoolgirl who wouldn’t stop giggling.

Ash took extra care to scan the lines at the archery and knife-throwing games, since she figured those would be the first logical places a typical twenty-year-old guy might go at a fair like this.

However, it wasn’t until after she wandered past the sword-swallowing act in a circular amphitheater that she heard a suite of sounds that caught her attention.

Hammering.

The crackle of open flames.

Ash wasn’t sure if it was the rhythmic
clank-clank-clank
of metal striking metal, or if the fire was somehow calling to her, but she felt herself magnetically drawn to the blacksmith’s open-air hut. Even despite the shade of the roof and the tall oak trees surrounding it, the boy inside was sweating profusely, thanks to the furnace glowing in the back. Perspiration dripped off his curly ringlets and onto the anvil where he was stationed. He gripped a hammer in one hand, which he was using to repeatedly strike the blade of a glowing metal sword he held in the other.

Modo was wearing a sleeveless tunic, which revealed a detail his picture had not: Modo was ripped. His bicep bulged every time he brought the hammer down. From the size of his forearms, Ash guessed this whole blacksmith thing was more than just a part-time gig. He certainly didn’t get those muscles from ringing church bells.

The word “blacksmith” triggered something in Ash’s mind, and she experienced a tremble of excitement. There was little that Ash knew about her own Polynesian mythology, but she had retained a few random facts about Greek mythology from Mr. Carpenter’s ancient history class.

The reason she was excited was because the Greeks had a god of metallurgy . . . one who was exceptionally good at weapon making and forge working.

One who was characterized by a wizened face and a lame foot.

“Hephaestus . . .” she whispered.

Just then, Modo looked up from his smith work. His
hammer was cocked back, ready for another strike. “Did you say something?” he asked in a faux English accent, with a historical lilt. He sounded like he’d stumbled out of one of the Lord of the Rings movies.

Ash cleared her throat and stepped under the straw roof. “I, uh, said ‘how festive.’ As in, the sword you’re making is festive to the, uh . . . festival.”

Modo gave her a once-over, from her T-shirt down to her jeans. “Well someone around here has to look festive. Can I presume that this is your first trip to our fair kingdom?” He smiled, just slightly baring his pointy teeth. “If you feel like slipping into something a little more comfortable, I can recommend a talented corset maker just a few huts away.”

“I treasure my ability to breathe too much.”
And my dignity
, she stopped herself from saying. “But I’ll remember to bring a pair of pantaloons next time.”

She was struggling with how to broach the “So you’re a god too, huh?” topic, but Modo kept right on going in character. He pointed to her forearms. “Quite the sinewy arms for a maiden . . . This leads me to believe you’re used to wielding a short-range weapon—a quarterstaff or an archer’s bow, perchance?”

“Tennis racket,” Ash replied.

“Ah, yes,” he said musically. “Difficult to master, but deadly in the right hands.” He hammered away at the sword a few more times and then held it up to the light to inspect the blade. “So, stranger—if you haven’t come
to King Edward’s realm to fit your person with clothing befitting of a lady, and you’re not here to engage in close-quarter combat like a man, then why have you come?”

“I came here to find you,” Ash said, then added, “Modo.”

At the sound of the name, Modo’s arm once again paused on its way down to the blade. When he finally spoke, the medieval inflection to his voice faltered, and she could hear a distinctly Canadian accent. “Where did you hear that name?”

She stepped farther into the tent and put a hand on his arm. “Listen, we don’t have much time, so just for the sake of efficiency, let’s drop the whole Renaissance act and stop pretending like we’re not gods.”

“Gods?” Modo stared at her as though she were a complete lunatic. He tilted his head to the side. “Who put you up to this? Was it my frat brothers at Delta Psi? Or was it the Bellringers?”

“Nobody’s putting me up to anything. You need to come with me.” She tried to tug him away from the anvil.

He wouldn’t budge. Instead he let out a short, husky laugh. “Wait a minute—it’s my birthday tomorrow. Did the guys hire a stripper to come here and do some sort of weird, fantasy role play?”

Ash punched Modo in the arm, eliciting a whiny “ow” from him. “I am not,” she enunciated, “a stripper. I am a god like you who has come here to save your ass from a group of other gods who are far less friendly.” Every time
she said the word “god,” his confusion deepened, and it was then that she had an epiphany.

Modo honestly had no idea what the hell she was talking about.