Afterglow (Wildefire) (30 page)

Ash lifted her eyes to the sky, where the beginnings of gray clouds were finally starting to coalesce. “It does in mine,” she said.

Six hours later Ash sat on the beach as the rain hammered down on her. She’d discarded her soaked towel and was resting in the sand, hugging her knees to her chest and staring out at the Pacific. Only a few brave beachgoers remained, mostly surfers who probably figured they were here to get wet regardless. The rest of the tourists had fled when the storm failed to relent after ten minutes.

She’d done what she’d come here to do, and tomorrow she’d return to New York, to try to put her life back together. There were decisions to be made. For starters, should she return to Blackwood Academy in the fall, or give life at Scarsdale High a second chance? But the biggest adjustment was going to be the relationship with her parents.

When they’d woken from their sedated, nightmare-plagued state in the shattered stone lighthouse, Ash had struggled to fabricate a story that would explain how they’d both lost consciousness in Scarsdale and woken up on the California coast thirty-six hours later. In the end she decided the easiest solution was just to tell them the truth.

All of it.

Sure, they might have thought she was high at first as she launched into her story about Colt, and the gods of Blackwood Academy, and the bicoastal saga that had unfolded from California to Miami to Boston and back again. But when they watched as their daughter
spontaneously combusted into a volcanic-plated fire monster, right in front of their eyes, the rest of the wild story must have been a little easier to swallow.

The supernatural stuff was a breeze to explain. It was trying to explain what happened to Eve that nearly snapped Ash in two. She’d grappled with whether she should write Eve completely out of the story, or at least the final chapter of it. Was it better for her parents to think that their daughter was somewhere still out there, alive, riding her motorcycle from town to town, but always having to wonder why she wouldn’t come home? Or was it better for them in the long term to know that their daughter had loved them, had sacrificed everything so they could live . . . but had died in the process?

There was no end to the crying when Ash told them. They wanted to lay their daughter to rest, but there was nothing left to bury but her memory and a room full of stuff she’d outgrown at home, items that really no longer had anything to do with the girl who’d climbed to the top of that lighthouse and given her life for her family.

Or maybe those items had everything to do with her.

She heard the footsteps in the wet sand, but didn’t know they belonged to Wes until he dropped down behind her and wrapped his arms tightly around her waist. She’d recognize those biceps anywhere.

“You know,” Wes said, leaning his big, square chin down on her shoulder, “it’s cheating to hold a wet T-shirt contest when you’re the only contestant.”

Ash laughed despite herself. She leaned back and craned her head around to kiss him. Kisses between them these last few weeks on the islands were partially for pleasure, yes, but also to put off all the questions they’d yet to answer about their future. Would he come back with her to Scarsdale? Would he follow her to school in the fall, or return to the lifestyle he’d abandoned in Miami? And would their love for each other flourish without the death and cataclysm to hold it back . . . or would it feel strange and foreign now that things had quieted down?

It was sort of like meeting somebody in a loud nightclub, Ash realized. You hear only the tinniest edges of their voices over their music, see the sultry, uninhibited side of them with their faces shrouded in darkness and laser lights. Then at the end of the night you step out under the streetlamps, and without the noise to drown each other out, you think: So that’s what he looks like, what he sounds like.

Even if it would take some time to readjust to the silence, even if they didn’t know whether the future might separate them, Ash realized that she felt the same way Kalama did: Given the choice between half her time with him or none of it at all, the decision for now felt easy.

Ash didn’t realize she’d been sitting silent the whole time until Wes said, “I can’t see your face from back here, but even the back of your head looks pensive.” Ash elbowed him in the ribs, and Wes faked a wheeze. “What? You have a very sexy back side to your skull.
Some men are boob guys, and others are butt guys, but I’m a skull guy through and—”

Ash spun around and flattened him into the sand, pressing her whole body to his with another kiss. Once she pulled away, she let her dripping hair drape around him like a weeping willow. “Sometimes I think you run your mouth just so I’ll kiss you to shut you up.”

He smirked. “Am I that transparent?”

Ash rolled to the side of him, and they lay there, backs coated in sand, letting the rain paint their faces. It was dying to a drizzle, so at least they weren’t drowning in it.

“I . . .,” Ash started finally. “I want to feel this sense of victory, this sense of closure. But I just keep thinking: This is only really a temporary victory, isn’t it?” Wes went to interrupt her with some optimistic bullshit, but she just talked right over him. “Colt’s dead, but in eighty, ninety years, all of us will be reincarnated again, and that bastard will be the only one to remember any of this. He’ll be able to walk right up to me, pretending to be a stranger, and I’ll be none the wiser. What if he works his way back into my life? What if he does succeed in melding my sisters and me back into one goddess? What if I fall for the guy and I let him? Just the thought of him touching me like that, as lovers . . .” Ash shuddered.

“Hey.” Wes rolled onto his side, propped up on his Herculean elbow. “You’ve got a chance for a fresh start here. Yeah, Colt’s got a few cards stacked against you for when you come back next time around. But he started
with the upper hand this time too, and look how it turned out for him.” Wes gently tapped the side of her temple, then let his hand linger there. “You’ve got tools up here that are far more powerful than lighting things on fire. The truth is, you have a whole lifetime to enjoy now, and if you don’t because you’re constantly worrying about the future, then Colt will have taken the present from you too. Then what would be the point of all this?”

He was right, of course. And if she was going to forge a new life, then there was no better time than sharing a beautiful Hawaiian beach at sunset, in a rainstorm, with the goofy but charming Mexican boy she was falling for all over again.

She cocked an eyebrow and traced her fingers seductively along his arm, from his wrist up to his elbow. “Remember that night in Miami? On the beach, as we waded half-naked in the Atlantic Ocean, and I heated the water to make us our own private steam room . . .?” Where her fingers went, the rain evaporated off his skin in small puffs of mist.

He inched closer to her. “I hope that’s a rhetorical question. I’ll never forget that night.”

It had been the last carefree moment they’d shared until now. Everything descended into hell after that. But if they could just find their way back to that little bubble of steam, that pocket of serenity . . .

“I was just thinking,” Ash went on, “that now would be a very good time to see how the Pacific Ocean
compares.” Her eyes darted playfully down the beach to the waterline.

He cupped his hands around her face. “I hear the water’s just right here,” he offered. “I hear . . . that it’s paradise.”

She jumped to her feet, and before he could even rise next to her, she was tossing off articles of clothing haphazardly into the sand, leaving a trail down to the water. Her sandals, her shirt, her jeans, until she was down to only her bikini. She splashed in up to her knees and then dove into the Pacific with a graceful dolphin arc.

Wes was hot on her heels, deceptively fast for his size, and just as he surfaced, he threw his arms around her and lifted her up out of the water. He let her linger up there so she could look down at him for once. Her hips pressed into his bare chest, and he slowly lowered her so that the contours of her curvaceous body slipped down the hard angles of his.

The steam started to rise out of the water, enveloping them in a fine, warm mist. “Just pretend for old time’s sake,” he said, “that there’s no world outside. It’s just you and me floating in our own private cloud.”

“For old time’s sake,” she agreed, and pressed her lips to his.

The cloud slowly enshrouded them, and to any remaining bystanders on the beach they might have looked like two teenage spirits, deeply in love, vanishing into the great abyss.

New Zealand, 2080

Johanna sat at the bar,
a near-empty bottle in her hand. The rest of her fellow crew members—all men—were scattered around the bar. Most of them were playing darts or hitting on the few local women who were unlucky enough to stumble into this pub on this night. The women came for a drink and maybe a little attention; what they discovered instead were a lot of sex-starved sailors with wandering eyes and hands.

Those men had learned better than to sit next to Johanna.

After all, she was Joaquin’s girl.

The bartender continued to polish a glass in front of her, eyeing her, but she kept her gaze on the old, broken holo-screen, which flickered with age. The three-dimensional image showed a torn-up field and a gaggle of rugby players wrestling for a ball. Johanna had no idea of
the rules of the game, but the barkeep had confused her Polynesian roots for New Zealander and become convinced that she was originally from the island, even after she had assured him that she had grown up in Toronto, and she was on shore just for the night, before the crew left port tomorrow.

She felt the stranger looming behind her before he even had a chance to say anything. His shadow spilled over her like an oil slick, blocking the light from the dingy electric lantern overhead.

Johanna didn’t even give him a chance to draw first blood. “Oh, come on,” she said, over her shoulder, without even looking at him. “You should know that you’re supposed to think of the pickup line,
then
walk over. Not the other way around. What is this, amateur hour?”

Still, he said nothing, but from his shadow she could see that he was gesturing with his hands. “Are you listening to a word I’m saying?” she started to say, swiveling around on her barstool.

She stopped when she saw the stranger. He was a strikingly handsome man, with a dark, even tan, and hair cropped close to his skull. Either he came from a life of hard, manual labor, or he was just naturally built, because his forearms were like small logs. She could tell that his T-shirt concealed some hard, toned lines as well.

But it wasn’t the man’s beauty that stopped her mid-sentence. It was the fact that he was gesturing wildly with
his hands, alternating between signs and then touching his throat.

The man was a mute.

“I am so sorry,” Johanna said. She clamped a mortified hand down over her forehead. “If I’d known you couldn’t speak . . .”

Then the stranger’s hands fell back to his sides, and a devious grin spread across his face. “There’s nothing wrong with my vocal cords. I just wanted to see you squirm.”

Johanna crossed her arms. “Wow, this must be a new record for me,” she said. “You’ve only put two sentences together, and I already hate your guts.”

The stranger nodded back toward the door. “Want me to give it a second try? I’m sure if I worked really hard, I could have made you hate me in one sentence.”

“Great. Think of one and come back tomorrow. I’ll be here.” Johanna spun back to face the counter.

The stranger slid onto the barstool next to her. “Here’s the thing. I fully acknowledge that I’ve blown whatever remote chances with you I thought I had, before I awkwardly approached you from behind and inconveniently found myself speechless. I assume, from the calluses on your hands and from the surly coworkers of yours who have invaded this bar, that you probably work on the boat that pulled into port this morning, and that romancing you is futile when you’ll just set sail again tomorrow. Your general standoffishness tells me that you’re either not looking
for romance or you’ve got a boyfriend, and the fact that a room full of horny, sex-starved sailors are keeping their distance from you like you’re radioactive suggests that it’s probably the latter. So,” he said, and propped up his head on his beefy fist, peering at her profile. “Think of this like a trade: I buy you a drink, in return for you enduring a conversation with me so I can save face. Everybody wins.”

Johanna finally gave him the courtesy of eye contact. “That doesn’t buy you much time. I drink very fast.”

“Fortunately, I talk very fast.” The stranger held up two fingers to the bartender, already assuming she’d agreed to his terms.

Johanna pushed away her empty bottle and accepted the fresh beer from the bartender. “You know, some say persistence is a virtue. I say that persistence can get you killed.”

“You’d be surprised what I’m impervious to,” the stranger replied. He took a sip of his beer to cover a smile.

When he turned back to her, he could see something in her eyes as she peered at him. She’d shucked the whole standoffish act, replaced it with curiosity . . . and if he wasn’t mistaken, the first symptoms of déjà vu. “What’s your name, stranger?” she asked.