Afterglow

by Karsten Knight

  Ash considered reaching out and trying to burn Proteus’s hand with her mind, but his aim was steady, and she might just cause him to pull the trigger instead. Eve must have sensed this too, because she gave Ash the most fractional shake of her head.

  Colt laughed dryly at the mutinous shifter. “If you go to the Cloak Netherworld, they will eat you alive and cast you into oblivion before you take three steps on their home turf. I, however, hold the secret to passing safely through their realm.”

  “What is it then?” Proteus demanded, then shrieked, “Tell me!” Colt still said nothing, so he moved the gun just a hair to the left and fired a bullet past Ash’s face. Her eardrum sang as it whistled past and smashed through one of the big windows. Glass rained down, littering the floor and falling twenty stories to the parking lot below.

  Colt, Ash could see, was losing his cool. He still had Modo held against the laser machine, but his attention was completely on Proteus’s pistol. In his own deranged, twisted way, he really did want to make sure Ash stayed safe. Still, he remained silent. He doesn’t want the Cloak to hear his secret plan, Ash realized. The oily creatures had ears and eyes everywhere—but they couldn’t read minds, so Colt had the upper hand as long as he kept his mouth closed.

  “Fine,” Proteus said. He aimed the gun back at Ash. “Let’s find out if her fire’s quick and hot enough to stop a bullet to the face.”

  Just as his finger went to squeeze the trigger, Eve sent a lightning bolt sizzling from her outstretched hand across the room and into his chest. The machinery all around them exploded with sparks, and Proteus writhed with convulsions. Ash dove for the floor right as two bullets discharged from his gun, nearly hitting her.

  In just a few furious strides, Eve crossed the room to where the shifter was still shuddering on his knees. Her fingers wrapped around his neck, and she lifted him up in one hand. “Bullets are for cowards,” she scolded him, and sent another electric current through him until his pistol clattered to the floor. With his toes just barely brushing the tile, she dragged him over to the window he’d shattered. Eve smiled sweetly up at him. “For your next trick, let’s see you transform into a pancake.”

  Then she threw him out the window.

  There was a very short-lived scream, which ended suddenly with the crunch of a body landing on the top of a car.

  With Proteus dead, Ash straightened back up. Eve turned around slowly. They locked eyes briefly to acknowledge that, for the first time in over a year, the two of them were now on the same team.

  Then they started to converge on Colt.

  The lightning bolt had short-circuited the laser, so Colt finally released Modo, who crab-walked behind the shelter of another machine. It was like he was a bystander in a ghost town who sensed the duel that was about to happen.

  Meanwhile, Colt backed away toward the corner of the lab, with the ax gripped in both hands. “So,” he said to Eve. “You were just playing along the whole time, thinking that I might share my plan with you?”

  “You got it,” Eve said. She spread her hands and let electricity pass between her palms, like an accordion made of lightning. “When you tried to recruit me again in Miami, it was tempting for me to send one hundred thousand volts through you to find out how much pain and punishment that regenerating body of yours could endure . . . but you’re a slithery one and good at escaping. So I decided to out-trick the trickster and earned your trust instead.”

  It was Ash’s turn to smile as she sauntered toward Colt. Smoke rose threateningly from her palms. “Eve and I barely coexisted in the same household growing up without killing each other. How could you possibly think either one of us would want to coexist in the same brain for eternity?”

  Colt bumped into the window behind him and seemed to realize that he’d run out of room. Ash and Eve fanned out a little to either side to make sure he didn’t try to escape around them.

  His expression should have looked helpless as he watched the volcano and storm goddesses closing in on him . . . but instead he just nodded resolutely at both of them. “It’s good to see you two working together,” he said softly. “Actually, it’s . . . kind of a turn-on. With every fiber of your being that you resist becoming Pele, you actually become more like her. The ruthlessness. The brutality. The carnal appetite for destruction.”

  “Sometimes it takes a bastard to corner a bastard,” Ash said.

  Colt raised the ax and at first Ash thought he might be so desperate that he intended to swing it at one of them. Instead he drove the butt of the ax backward, hard, into the window, shattering the glass. “What corner?” he asked innocently.

  And with the ax still in hand, he jumped out the window.

  Ash and Eve both rushed to the window’s edge, careful not to throw themselves out as well.

  For a moment Ash thought that maybe this really was the end of the road for Colt Halliday. His body lay in a messy splatter on the grassy hillside below, a puddle of blood spreading through the earth and down toward the parking lot curb. Not too far from him, Proteus was sprawled dead on the roof of the car that had “broken” his fall.

  Unlike Proteus, however, Colt eventually stirred. With a groan audible to Ash even on the top floor, Colt rose onto one arm, then the other. The regenerative magic in his body shifted the bones around, setting and mending all the ones that had snapped during the fall. When his spine healed, he was at last able to stagger to his feet. The indentation in his skull popped outward, and his healing flesh repopulated with his close-cropped hair.

  When the process had finished, he limped over to the ax, the entire blade of which had sunk into the ground during the fall. He ripped it free of the earth, like he was drawing Excalibur from the stone. With the ax hoisted in one hand and a congenial wave up at the two Wilde sisters, he loped off into the trees.

  A speechless minute passed while Ash and Eve just stared out the broken window at the place where Colt had disappeared. He would be in his car and gone by the time they took the elevator down anyway.

  “How bad do you think that hurt?” Ash asked Eve finally, breaking the silence.

  Eve grunted. “Not bad enough.”

  Outside, sirens of the police and the paramedics were just arriving in the parking lot—someone must have heard Proteus hit the car. But even though Ash knew they should get going before the police traced the body to the broken windows in their laboratory, she couldn’t help but study Eve in the glow of the sunset. The girl had double-crossed her before. She may have saved her life from Proteus tonight, but trust still wasn’t going to come easy.

  “So is this real?” Ash asked at last. “The two Wilde sisters, teaming up to hunt down the trickster?”

  “On one condition,” Eve said, and she flashed a grin that would scare off a grizzly bear. “That when we track the bastard down, we play rock-paper-scissors to decide who gets the pleasure of ripping out his heart.”

  BENEATH THE SEA ARCH

  Maui, 1831

  Of all people, you never thought you’d develop a deep friendship with a mortal.

  In fact your friendship with Colt Halliday is in a lot of ways your only true friendship, even among the Council. Papa and Rangi are far too stern and inwardly focused to properly bond with anyone else. Tu is more the silent, brooding type, and Tane spends the majority of his time either haunting the influx of foreigners who’ve started to visit Hawai‘i or seducing girls from the village. You wonder how many fathers will never know that their children are not their own.

  Then there’s Tangaroa. The more time you spend with Colt, the more distanced and callous the sea god grows. He barely looks at you at Council meetings, let alone flirts or paws at you the way that he once did. It had always been assumed that you would both pair up, but jealousy has deadened any romantic momentum the two of you had before.

  Somehow you don’t really care. You’d fully expected Colt, marooned as he was, to be desperately seeking a way back to the mainland . . . but as far as you can see, he’s adopted
the islands as his true home. He shows a persistent and insatiable inquisitiveness for the ways and customs of the different peoples, for mastering the language, for getting to know the personality and geography of each of the main islands.

  It’s been six months since you found his body in the surf, and he’s given no indication that he ever plans to leave. You like that. You like it so much that you haven’t even bothered to hide your godliness from him. Who would he possibly tell anyway? And it’s not like the others have made strict efforts to conceal their own identities. Tane’s girls know full well that they’re not being seduced by an ordinary man. Tu, in his former life, supposedly counseled King Kamehameha in the ways of conquest, while Papa regularly moved through the fields, bringing fertility to the soil wherever she tread.

  So you use your portals to speed up your travel as the two of you jump from island to island, and light fires for Colt in his cave before you leave him each night, so that he’ll remain warm until morning, when you both do it all over again.

  One morning you arrive beneath the sea arch to find Colt’s cave empty. This isn’t unusual—it’s not as though he’s always by your side. You still travel to the summits of Haleakalā and Kīlauea for contemplation, and bring rain to the forests when they desire it. But this morning is special. Until now you’ve never taken Colt to the summit of any of the volcanoes. They are a sacred place, your place, and only this morning did you decide he’d earned this special privilege. The volcanoes are the last key to Colt understanding your importance here, how the islands would never have come into being without the raw, molten power source that lurks beneath the earth’s crust.

  When you get to the cave and find Colt missing and the bonfire extinguished, you don’t panic. By now you’ve figured out which bays and forests and reflection pools are his favorites, and unless he’s constructed some sort of raft, there are only a limited number of them he could have traveled to on foot without your portal-making abilities.

  You find him on the second try, when you step out into a glade on the southeastern side of Maui. You hear the dramatic whoosh of Waimoku Falls before you even see it, the four-hundred-foot waterfall that cascades down the rocky cliff carved into the side of Haleakalā. But the more breathtaking sight is the young man standing knee-deep in the water, at the base of the moss-covered cliff.

  It’s Colt, of course. He’s standing beneath the rushing falls with an untamed strength, as though it were just a trickle and not the weight of four hundred feet of water crashing down on him.

  He’s also completely nude.

  Before you can escape, hide, or even just look away, Colt turns and spies you standing there between the trees. You expect him to show some embarrassment or shyness—you’ve seen most of his body every day in the malo that you fashioned for him, but never this much.

  Instead his expression remains placid, and he steps just out of the waterfall, so that his naked body is no longer obscured by the rushing water. He wipes the last droplets of water from his scalp, but then leaves his hands at his sides, letting you take in all of him. You sense the invitation lingering there.

  The blood pulses in your temples, and a new heat burns in your chest. Your heart feels like it’s pumping out magma in double time. Your relationship with this outsider has already crossed so many forbidden lines, but the threshold that hangs between you now is the one you never thought you’d cross.

  The one you’ve always secretly wanted to.

  Even though the faces of the Council—of Tangaroa, especially—materialize in your mind, logic slips away under the burning tides of temptation. You are Pele, a voice whispers inside of you. You made these islands, so you should walk among them wherever you please.

  And lie down with whomever you please.

  You step out from between the tree trunks. Colt hasn’t moved. As you walk toward the edge of the pool, you untie the kapa wrapped around you and let it fall to the stones, leaving your body completely bare. Colt’s eyes never leave yours as you stride slowly but purposefully out into the pool. With each step the fiery soles of your feet cause plumes of steam to rise up.

  Then your bodies come together, your flesh hot to the touch, his flesh a stirring cool from the Waimoku waters.

  When it’s over, you both lie beneath the falls. His arms have never unwrapped from their position around you since your bodies first came together. There’s nothing desperate in the way he holds you, like he thinks you might run off through another portal, to leave him for good. There’s no fear in it either.

  There’s only a powerful certainty.

  You press your face into the crook of his neck and you whisper, “So that’s how it feels. . . .”

  “That’s how what feels?” Colt asks, running his hand through the wet strands of your hair.

  “The stillness,” you say, picturing the rocky volcanic bay where you first found Colt. “That’s how the lava feels when it joins with the tide.”

  You lose yourself over the next few weeks. You stop showing up for Council meetings. After all, what function do they serve anyway? So Tane can brag cheekily about his latest exploits? So Tangaroa can scathingly ignore you? If anything, it’s just a formality to maintain a bond between six people with nothing in common except for their mutual godhood and shared heritage.

  For true passion and friendship, it took an outsider.

  You’ve even started sleeping in the sea cave with Colt, instead of the crater atop Haleakalā where you used to curl up most nights before you met him. You wake up in his arms every morning, greeted by the cool breath of the tide and the warm breath of your lover. You spend your days hunting and fishing, showing Colt every tiny islet he’s never seen before in the archipelago, gleefully sprinting through the bamboo forests. He may be mortal, but he always keeps pace with you.

  He never seems to get hurt either, which is something you can’t even say for your godly self. Even when he lost his footing on a climb up Kīlauea and tumbled a hundred feet down the hillside, he just brushed himself off and stood up. Not one bloody scrape or scratch visible on his body.

  Somewhere in his home lands, the gods are still smiling upon him.

  One morning you wake up to a sound that your sleepy brain can’t make sense of at first. It’s a deep and distant musical note, and the echo of the cave tunnel distorts it. . . . But after you’ve gathered your senses, you realize what you’re hearing.

  Somebody’s blowing into a pu conch shell in the distance. And not just any conch—this shell is among the largest ever found, with a deep sonorous note that you were forced to memorize.

  It is the Council’s horn, blown by Rangi’s deep sky-wielding lungs so that its sound will carry to any of the islands. The conch is only to be blown in the event of an emergency meeting when the immediate gathering of the gods is imperative.

  Colt stirs next to you. “What . . .?” he mutters.

  You’re already on your feet, but you kneel back down and press your lips to the short, bristly hair on the top of his head, the hair that he never cuts but it still never grows. “I must obey the shell’s call and gather with the others,” you say, as the conch lets loose another deep blast. “I’ll be back in time to fish with you on the banks of Lāna‘i, as I promised.” You carve a portal into the air and you’re gone.

  In the bamboo grove Rangi and Papa have already assembled as usual. The other three are nowhere to be seen. Rangi holds the conch shell to his mouth, ready to blow a third time, but he lowers it when you appear in front of them.

  “What is it?” you bark. “Why have you blown the horn?”

  “Patience, Pele,” Papa says in her soothing alto. “We shall explain when the others arrive.”

  You squint at the two of them. They’ve summoned you here at dawn with the utmost urgency, and even their normally stoic façades betray the faintest signs of nerves. Now they want to linger around and await the arrivals of the other, slower gods when you could already be taking action?

  Minutes pass. Somet
hing is off. While the others may not be able to move instantaneously through portals like you, traveling between two places miles apart as though they were side by side, they can also travel lightning-quick when necessary by calling up their various elements. So where is Tangaroa? Or Tane? Or Tu?

  Then you notice an even more chilling detail: Rangi is no longer sounding the horn. The rules say that he must continue to blow into the conch until the others have come to the Council in case, for instance, Tangaroa should miss the initial call while swimming deep around the reefs, as he often likes to do.

  Instead Rangi holds the horn half-cocked at his side, while his other hand keeps tightening then relaxing, as though he’s prepared to use it. Papa, too, maintains a defensive stance, subtle but tight in her legs.

  “What have you done?” you say finally; then in a harsher voice that sends tremors up the slopes of Haleakalā: “What have you done?”

  “What needed to be done,” Papa says, circling around to the other side of you. “Let them do what they must with the Driftwood Stranger and then come back to us. Peace will be restored.”

  “The time for peace is over,” you growl.

  You feel the sky breathing in as Rangi circles his hands, preparing to flatten you with a harsh gale. Unfortunately for him, lightning moves faster than wind—you thrust out a hand in his direction, and a bolt forks down from the heavens and spears him through the chest. He crumples to his knees, and his face slumps into the dirt.

  You spin and grab Papa by the neck before she can run. She wheezes as you lift her off the ground and hold her up over the short cliff. The water in the pool below looks too blue and serene for a place where they’ve forced you to spill blood.