Afterglow (Wildefire) (6 page)

You tilt your head back to the sky in frustration. A cloud rolls in front of the sun. “I have met that blind man before. He also tells stories of a man-eating tortoise and a sea lion that steals babies from the arms of their sleeping mothers. And this Driftwood Stranger? He’s probably thinking of that white man who tried to kidnap the king years ago—you know, the one they stabbed to death in the water? Some dangerous visitor he was.”

“No,” Rangi says, unmoved by your argument. “That man, Cook, came on a ship with many others. The Driftwood Stranger, the elder foretells, will come alone . . . and he’ll come without a ship.”

This makes even Tane pause mid-bite. You can’t deny that the circumstances of the stranger’s arrival make you uneasy. No shipwreck. No signs of starvation on his filled-out body. Not even a sunburn.

And he knew your name.

“He is my prisoner,” you say sternly. Your eyes burn
red when your gaze finds Tangaroa’s again. “No one touches him until I find out who he is and why he’s here.”

“And if he proves dangerous?” Tu, who had remained silent until now, asks. “How will you handle him then?”

“Then I’ll drop him into a lava pool on Kilauea,” you reply, “and find out if the Driftwood Stranger burns like driftwood.”

“And for those among us who don’t spend our days lighting fires, Pele,” Tane says, “how
does
driftwood burn?”

You try to sound as merciless and uncaring as possible when you say the next word, so that they’ll trust you to handle the stranger on your own:

“Slowly.”

The cove where you left the stranger isn’t far from the bamboo forest, and ordinarily you’d run back after the Council meeting, drawing strength and energy from Haleakalā, the quiet volcano. But Tangaroa could be traveling by sea to “visit” the stranger himself, so you explosively gouge out a section of the air and pass through the narrow portal.

Only, when you step into the cave, the stranger is gone.

It hasn’t been more than an hour since you left him for the tense meeting with the other gods, so he couldn’t have gone far. You try not to panic, and you let your eyes take in the heat within the cave. As you concentrate, the color fades from the world around you until the cave and the light filtering through its opening have muted to mostly shades of gray and sepia.

However, the hollow depression in the stone glows a soft orange, where the stranger’s body heat lingers on the pebbles. Unfortunately, the water cooled any heat trail he might have left on his way out, so you return to the mouth of the cave.

As you stand beneath the magnificent sea arch, you worry that you may have lost him for good. The sea and stone together are just a cool variety of grays, with only the sun lighting up in vivid red.

But when you turn around, back to the cliff, you catch just the slightest hint of color among the rocks. In fact there’s a staggered trail of fading embers leading up the cliff face, where hands and bare feet have recently touched.

He must have scaled the nearly vertical stone wall.

You don’t have the patience to climb it yourself, so you carve a new rift in the air and step out onto the top of the cliff above.

He’s sitting close to the edge, with his knees bunched up against his chest. He flinches, momentarily startled, when you appear next to him and the sea water that leaked through the portal splashes into the grass, but he doesn’t appear afraid of you. “Aloha,” he greets you.

You skip the pleasantries. “Who are you, and where have you come from?” you ask him in his own language.

“You . . . speak English?” He actually looks more surprised by this than when you stepped out of a hole in the air moments before.

“It is the language of your missionaries,” you say indignantly, “who flock to our islands like bats to a nest of moths.”

“They are not
my
missionaries.” He points toward the eastern horizon. “They came to my lands, unwelcome, the same way they did to yours . . . although,” he adds with a smile, “my lands are so vast it will be some time before they’ve conquered them all.”

Against your better judgment you sit down beside him, although an arm’s length away, as though he might be rife with sickness. Out in the water a humpback whale surfaces, then another. They’ve always seemed just as fond of this bay as you have, though they never come close enough to admire the lava rocks.

“My name is Colt,” he says.

You open your mouth and laugh deeply. The gathering thunderclouds chuckle with you. “They named you,” you say once you’ve caught your breath, “after that strange four-legged creature that those
haoles
like to ride on?” You laugh some more.

Colt doesn’t look offended. In fact, after a hesitation, he laughs along with you. “What? Colts are dependable, powerful, and fast, with an energetic, masculine spirit. They can travel for miles.”

“As have you,” you say, spreading your arms out to the ocean. The laughter stops. Neither of you is watching the whales anymore. As he studies your face, you’re struggling with the sense of instant familiarity you feel
with him. He
just
washed up on shore. You can tell he’s holding back something, like he doesn’t know how much to trust you, how much to share with you.

“I wish I could tell you how I got here,” Colt says at last. “One moment I was falling asleep at the base of a dune, back on the mainland, letting the sound of the tide carry me into slumber. . . . When I woke up next the tide actually
was
carrying me away. I couldn’t even see the shores the waters were so choppy with storm waves. The current dragged me under a few times.” He shook his head. “I have no idea how long I was floating out at sea before I washed up here. Under the heavy sun, and without fresh water, I plunged into delirium for many days.”

It was impossible. You know from the pesky missionaries who come here that the mainland is a long ways to the east. It’s a far journey even for a boat with sails. . . .

It should be an impossible journey to survive for a man who simply
floated over
.

“What are you?” you ask him. “And how did you know my name?”

“I can’t answer your first question,” he says. “But as for the second . . .” He swallows and runs a hand over his short, cropped hair. “Pele, I’ve been seeing you in my dreams. Every night . . . for the last twenty years. Only . . .” This time he summons the courage to look back into your eyes, and you see your reflection in them. “Only I don’t think they’re really dreams at all.”

Thursday

Ash knew that Modo was
supposedly the Greek god of the forge, but he snored like a thunder god.

After his near death by electrocution at the Renaissance fair, it had been pretty easy for Ash to convince him that her hotel room would prove a better safe haven than his frat house, since Colt and Eve probably knew where he lived. He had grumbled a little bit about how spending the night with a random girl in a Boston hotel room was going to be tough to explain to his girlfriend, but Ash just pinched him hard until he shut up.

Now it was nearly noon, with the sunlight peeking through the hotel room blinds. While Ash did research on her laptop, Modo was out cold on the scratchy twin-size bed, lying on his back with his chest rising and falling in bellowing snores. Still, it was the memories of the dream—the vision—she’d experienced last night that dominated her thoughts.

Memories from her previous lives had bled into her dreams before; it was a curse thrust upon her by Colt weeks ago. After nights spent dreaming of her last incarnation in the 1920s and 1930s, her restless brain had apparently moved on to the life before that one. It had been strange inhabiting the brain of Pele and knowing now that the volcano goddess wasn’t just her, but a composite of all three Wilde sisters.

Still, the vision left Ash perplexed. Ash had trusted the Cloak, who insisted that they’d split Pele into three goddesses because she’d proven to be too volatile and dangerous as one entity . . . but the Pele in her dream didn’t seem so bad, did she? A bit impetuous, a bit quick to anger, but she’d mostly been concerned with protecting Colt.

What could Pele have possibly done that would instigate the Cloak to take such an unthinkable, drastic measure: splitting a soul apart?

Then there was Colt. In her vision, Pele had truly believed the trickster’s tale about being washed up on the Hawaiian shore merely by chance, but now Ash recognized it for what it was: another one of Colt’s lies. Each lifetime since the Cloak had stripped the gods of their old memories, Colt had capitalized on her inability to remember him or their longstanding romantic history together, and he’d manipulated his way back into her life. He would always pretend that he was just meeting her for the first time, and usually pretended to be human as well. Perhaps he’d watched Pele walk that rocky beach
for weeks before he finally faked washing ashore, unconscious and half-dead.

Strangely, despite all the lies he’d ever told her, Colt had always used his real name.

Ash was so involved in her thoughts that she didn’t even notice that the snores had stopped until Modo’s head was peering over her shoulder. The guy moved stealthily, considering he had a serious limp. “What are you doing?” he asked, far too wide-eyed and alert for someone who’d been passed out until just moments ago.

“Looking at porn,” Ash said, gesturing to the laptop screen. “Also, searching Amber Alerts in the New England area over the last few months.”

“Amber Alerts?” Modo echoed. “Like missing children?”

Ash nodded. “Before my little sister took Colt, Eve, and Proteus through a portal to Boston, Colt mentioned something about how Rose could only form portals to places she’d seen before. So unless my six-year-old sister has been jet-setting through Massachusetts on her own, there’s a good chance that she may have originally been adopted by a family here . . . and I really doubt that her family willingly donated her to be some sort of lab experiment in the Central American jungles.”

Modo flipped another chair around and dropped down next to Ash. “Maybe her adoptive parents thought they were sending her to summer camp?”

“Or maybe . . .” Ash double-clicked on one of the
Amber Alert listings . . . and after six lines of reading, she knew she’d found her match.

Monterey, Massachusetts. April 23. Six-year-old Penny Wallace was forcibly taken from her home in Berkshire County at approximately 2:15 a.m. on Thursday morning. Penny is described as being of Polynesian descent, 4’1” and 65 lbs., frail, with waist-length black hair. No leads on the identity of her captor(s), but incendiaries were used in the forced entry of the Wallace household. Suspects should be considered armed and dangerous. If you have any information pertaining to Penny’s whereabouts, call . . .

As if the description wasn’t definitive enough, attached to the bottom was a school picture of Rose, stoic and unsmiling as ever, but still six years old. Now this little girl’s mind was trapped in the body of a sixteen-year-old, and she was as lost and frightened as ever.

Ash realized that she had been unconsciously touching the laptop screen and let her hand fall away. She’d become so accustomed to calling her sister Rose that it was hard to imagine her by any other name . . . and even harder to imagine her fitting in with a nice family out in the Massachusetts countryside.

The strangest part: Monterey, Massachusetts, was only a hundred miles and a state border away from Scarsdale, New York, where Ash grew up.

All those years living a normal life, and not only did Ash never realize she had a younger sister—but that sister was living only a two-hour drive from her.

Modo squeezed her shoulder. “I guess that description of Rose is a little outdated now.”

Ash shook her head. “Yeah, but I doubt they’ll understand if we ask them to update it to, ‘Five-foot-nine, one hundred forty pounds, supernaturally aged ten years by a goddess of death. Just follow the sound of devastating explosions.’ ”

“Not to be a downer,” Modo said, “but what good will this do you now? I really doubt Colt, Eve, and Proteus are playing house with Rose at the same house where she grew up. Especially, you know, with her parents there.”

“It’s not Rose I’m expecting to find there,” Ash said. “Rose might be in a sixteen-year-old body, but she still has the mind of a six-year-old. And children respond to things that remind them of safety and home. I’m hoping I can find out more about her, take a look around her old room, anything at all that might get her to trust me instead of Colt, especially since our last encounter concluded with Rose hammering me with an explosive blast.”
And sending one of my best friends flying off the apartment building to her death.

Modo snorted. “So you’re going to lure your
sixteen-going-on-six-year-old sister away from a bunch of killers . . . using, like, a nursery rhyme or a teddy bear? Why do I feel like this can only end with the teddy bear—and the person holding it—getting blown up?”

Ash didn’t have a retort for that. The plan was a crap-shoot, at best. But right now the odds were four against one (unless she counted Modo, in which case it was really just four against one and a half, considering he’d only found out that he was a god less than twenty-four hours ago and didn’t yet know how to wield his powers). Any possible advantage she could get before facing Colt again was worth looking into.