Afterglow

by Karsten Knight

  “Please,” Papa gasps out. “I always thought highly of you, Pele.”

  Your fingers tighten around her neck. “I always thought you were boring.” With your free hand you fire an explosive burst into her chest, and she sails into the pool below. When her body resurfaces, it’s facedown and unmoving.

  With no time to lose you gouge another portal in the air and lurch through it. You pop out beneath the sea arch, where the waters had been calm when you left.

  Now they’re frothy and angry with a raging, stormy tide. The waves pound against the cliff wall, and the tide has risen so high that the entrance to the sea cave has completely disappeared below the surface.

  “No . . .,” you breathe out. Then you inhale deeply and dive into the maelstrom.

  Tangaroa’s deadly tide batters your body as though you were a minnow as you try to flounder your way into the underwater cave opening. Each current that pulses through the water slams you against the jagged walls of the cave, tearing into your skin. You still press on, guided by dread that you may be too late to save Colt.

  Finally, just as your lungs are burning and the rush of the water around your ears is starting to fade, you breach the surface into an air pocket. Ahead you discover why both Tangaroa and Tane are missing. Colt lies where you left him, only he’s very much awake. The waterline has crept nearly up to his head. In any other situation he might have been able to lift his mouth clear of the water and retreat to an air bubble, but Tane has summoned vines out of the rock to tether Colt firmly in place. The two gods aren’t in the cavern, but they can’t be too far off.

  You swim to Colt, but not before a sharp stalactite bites into your shoulder. With your burning hands you easily shear through the vine bonds holding Colt down. The plant matter withers and retreats into the stone, singed and blackened with fire.

  Up the slope, at the dead end of the cavern, you cast a new portal into the air. You push the half-drowned Colt toward it, and he catches himself before he goes all the way through. He spits up more water onto the ground, then holds out a hand for you to join him.

  “No.” You shake your head. “I’m sending you to Ni‘ihau,” you say, pointing to the vision of the arid cliffside floating in the air. “It has no forests for Tane to track you in, and Tangaroa won’t be able to sense you unless you go into the sea.”

  He tries to protest for you to come with him, but you have one more Council “meeting” to attend. You push him through, and the portal snaps shut before he can scramble back to you.

  Eventually, Tangaroa and Tane must sense that they’ve lost their prey. The storm tide recedes and the waves flatten out, until you can see back through the cave entrance ahead.

  It isn’t long before Tangaroa and Tane arrive. They wade through the now-placid waters but stop when they see that you’re alone. “Where is the mortal?” Tangaroa barks at you.

  Tane tilts his head back and sniffs. “I can still smell him. He hasn’t been gone long.”

  You hold out your hand, letting an explosive orb hover over your palm. Fire laps around it as it grows bigger until it’s twice the size of your head. It needs to be big for what’s going to happen next. Tane and Tangaroa shrink back toward the exit, but ultimately hold their ground.

  Once you’re certain it will do the job, you spin and wing it down the cave tunnel. Tane and Tangaroa both dodge to the side, clinging to the cave walls as it zips past them.

  “You would try to maim me?” Tangaroa cries out, beating his chest.

  You smile. “It wasn’t meant for you.”

  The orb completes its trajectory through the cave opening and slams into the base of the sea arch outside. The cave trembles, and the tremendous sound of cracking stone echoes down the cave walls. Tane and Tangaroa turn to flee, sensing all too late what you’ve intended.

  They don’t make it to the entrance in time. The sea arch collapses over the mouth of the cave, and as the enormous mound of stone blocks the last of the exit, the cave falls into pitch blackness.

  But not for long. Your eyes flicker red, glowing through the dark just enough to see the terrified expressions of the two men in front of you. Even gods and forest spirits know fear.

  The ground trembles again, this time behind you. The stony surface where you’ve slept for the last month splits open as magma bubbles up through the surface. The molten lava flows around you, lapping at your legs, but of course you’re impervious to it—you could swim in an erupting volcano unscathed if you wanted to.

  You are Pele.

  Tane and Tangaroa stagger back toward the blocked cave entrance. “Stop this madness,” Tangaroa orders you. The lava rolls down into the water, which slows it down at first. But as the shallow pool turns to steam, new lava starts rolling right over it. With gruesome certainty it boxes in Tangaroa and Tane.

  They’re still close enough for you to see the sweat dripping from their brows, and it’s not just from the intense geothermal heat rising off the lava.

  “Please,” Tangaroa pleads in the missionaries’ language, his courage evaporated just like the water. He huddles next to Tane as the lava starts to eat up the last of the cave floor. “We were like a family before the stranger came here.”

  “Yes!” Tane agrees vigorously. “You were our cherished sister!”

  With a tiny detonation behind you, you carve a new portal in the air, to Ni‘ihau, where Colt awaits. “Cherished sister?” you echo. “I’m afraid you’re mistaken. I’m an only child.” You hop through the rift in the air onto a barren cliff on Ni‘ihau. For a few seconds two tortured screams sear through the opening before the portal closes behind you.

  It won’t be long before the cave fills in completely.

  Colt waits nearby like you expected . . . and so does Tu.

  You immediately take a defensive stance between the war god and your lover, but Tu holds out a hand for you to stand down.

  “I mean the Driftwood Stranger no harm,” Tu offers. “I was not part of the plot to destroy him.”

  “Yet you knew about it, didn’t you?” You try to be fierce with him, but after destroying four members of the Council you’re exhausted, and your anger sounds weak. “You could have warned me before it turned to this.”

  He indicates one of the many tattoos that cover his body. It’s made of many triangular strokes and waves, but you recognize it as a spear wrapped in kapa leaves. “Sometimes,” he says ruefully, “being a good god of war means knowing which battles are not your own.”

  Colt steps up behind you and rests his hands soothingly on your shoulders. You press your back into his chest but keep your eyes on Tu. “So you’re not here to avenge the Council?” You want to believe him, but it’s hard to trust anyone after the four people you knew best in these islands just conspired against you.

  Tu shakes his head. “What the Council sought was murder. What you just accomplished was justice. And I believe in justice.” After a pause Tu adds, “I also believe in prophecy. The Driftwood Stranger may not have intended to bring destruction to Hawai‘i, but just as the prophecy foretold, he has. So for the good of our people, I ask you to leave these islands.”

  From his tone it’s clear that there’s no “asking” about it.

  “Where will we go?” you ask.

  “Somewhere you’ll find peace, I hope,” Tu says. The irony that he’s a war god offering this advice must not be lost on him, because his lips form a stiff smile—it may be the only time he’s ever smiled. Then he wanders off down the beach.

  You’ll never know how he predicted where he could find the two of you after the Council’s mutiny . . . or that you’d emerge alive at all.

  Colt spins you around and holds you tenderly by the elbows, drawing you to him. He rests his head on yours. “I would never ask you to leave your home for me, Pele. Say the word, and I shall swim away from these islands, the way that I came.”

  “My home is with you now.” You look meaningfully to the east, where the sun lingers over the blue horizon. “Wher
ever we may go.”

  “You’re willing to put your faith in a man you barely know, who washed up into your life without invitation,” Colt says, somewhere between gratitude and confusion. “Why?”

  “Because . . .” You swallow. “Because . . . I love you.”

  It’s the truth, but not the words you didn’t have the courage to tell him. Not the words that have died on your lips every time you’ve tried to say them this last week.

  Because, you had wanted so badly to tell him, I’m carrying your child.

  PART II: NEW YORK CITY

  BLACKOUT

  Saturday

  As far as car rides went, this had to be one of the more awkward ones in Ash’s life.

  The two Wilde sisters had agreed to a ceasefire, yes, and yes, they’d also agreed to hunt a common enemy . . . but that didn’t mean that everything was going to be instantly warm and sisterly again.

  Eve had insisted on driving the rental SUV, even though she looked horribly uncomfortable behind the wheel. Ash was sure Eve would rather be back in the saddle of her Honda Nighthawk, the bike that Colt and Ash had sort of blown up in a car accident on a joyride to Canada.

  Ash rolled down the window and dangled her arm out of the car, letting the seventy-mile-an-hour roar of the passing wind on the MassPike fill the silence that neither sister could. After the incident at RazorWire labs the previous night, they’d raced back to Colt’s hideout, only to find that he’d taken Rose and left town fast. Ash had expected to find Raja’s orphaned baby, Saga, there as well, but Eve explained that Colt had dumped her at an orphanage days ago. After he’d used the baby to manipulate Raja back in Miami, the child was no longer of use to him. The thought of Saga alone, with both her parents murdered, broke Ash’s heart like a porcelain figurine, but for now Saga would be safer in the care of an orphanage.

  After dropping Modo off at MIT so he could try to put his life back together—without his treacherous girlfriend—the Wilde sisters were New York City–bound. According to Eve, before she’d blown her cover, Colt had revealed the Big Apple to be the destination for some sort of heist he’d conceived. Whatever object he planned to steal was somewhere in Manhattan . . . but beyond that detail Colt had kept the cards close to his chest. Maybe he didn’t trust Eve completely. Maybe he was afraid the Cloak would overhear him and intervene. Regardless, Colt seemed sure that with the object in his possession he’d be able to walk safely through the Cloak Netherworld without getting devoured alive.

  Which would mean that he could walk right up to their big Tree of Life and chop it down with a few powerful strokes of the ax.

  Which also meant that the Cloak might die, and the evil, twisted gods imprisoned in the tree would be liberated, placing an army of supernatural gods at Colt’s disposal.

  “Worst of all,” Eve had said, looking genuinely unnerved, “Colt has all of the gods on his payroll convinced that killing the Cloak will bring all the memories from our old lifetimes back. But I think he’s been lying all along and it’s just the opposite. If the Cloak die, I think it may mean we never get those memories back.”

  It was a terrifying concept. As much as Ash found herself overwhelmed and confused when an old memory resurfaced in her sleep, she saw the big picture now. Even if Ash and Eve stopped Colt tomorrow, they’d forget all about his manipulations when they woke up in the next lifetime, while he would remember everything. With the Cloak gone, what was to stop him from coming back time and time again until, one lifetime, he finally succeeded?

  After Eve brought Ash up to speed on Colt’s scheming, the two sisters fell into an icy silence. In the quiet Ash felt a year’s worth of frustration with Eve coming to a boil. She wanted so badly to be happy to have Eve back by her side, but instead she felt more distanced from her sister than ever.

  Finally, Ash rolled up her window, unable to keep her annoyance contained any longer. “Why didn’t you just tell me?” she demanded. “Why didn’t you let me in on this whole double cross, instead of letting me believe that you really were in league with Colt?” She thought back to their skirmish at the Renaissance fair. “I could have killed you.”

  Eve didn’t take her eyes off the road, but her arms stiffened. “Kill me? As if.” She chuckled softly under her breath. “Look, Ash. We both know that I’m the conniving one here, while you, on the other hand . . . well, you’ve always been a terrible liar. You know how I always used to call you the human mood ring? It’s because your emotions, your push-buttons, your insecurities . . . You wear them with the subtlety of a goddamned fireworks display. As much as I wanted to let you in on it, it was much more convincing when your seething hatred for me looked all the more real to Colt. But the other part of it . . .” She trailed off, then finally took her eyes off the road long enough to appraise Ash. “I worry that when the time comes, you won’t have it in you to do what’s necessary . . . especially if it’s dirty.”

  Ash crossed her arms. “Dirty? Eve, you haven’t seen the depths of hell I’ve had to descend into—the people I’ve had to hurt, the people I’ve had to kill, even—to get our baby sister back, and now to track down Colt. I’m not proud of some of the things I’ve done . . . but don’t sit there and question my motivation because you think I’m too dainty to get the job done.”

  “So what?” Eve snapped. “You’ve killed a couple of people who attacked you first? They were bad fucking people, rotten apples to the core, and you killed them in self-defense. But what about Colt? The guy has done some deplorable shit to mold us back into his freakin’ volcano goddess Barbie that he can play dollhouse with. Deranged as he may be, though, he really does love us—or at least what we could become. So can you live with the fact that you might have to kill a man who refuses to physically hurt you even as you’re ending his miserable life?” Ash said nothing, because she had no answer. She’d been so focused on ending Colt’s reign of death and misery that she’d never stopped to consider the actual act of killing him. Self-defense was one thing, but the cold-blooded murder of a man who might not fight back . . .

  “Then there’s the collateral damage,” Eve rattled on. “Hephaestus—Modo, Limpy McLimperson, whatever he goes by—that kid might have been the only god in the world with the supernatural acumen to make a weapon to cut down the Cloak’s Tree of Life. One stroke of lightning through his body and Colt’s plan would have gone to shit, and our fight would be over for good. You wouldn’t let that happen. Sure, you didn’t know why I was playing assassin with him at the time, but even if you did—you’re too precious to acknowledge that in the big picture a few innocents might have to die to keep a hell of a lot more people alive.”

  Ash’s hand fastened around Eve’s wrist. “No more innocents die. At our hands or anyone else’s.”

  Eve glanced knowingly down at Ash’s hand, then at the scars on her own wrists—the permanent burn scars Ash had seared into Eve’s flesh only months earlier. “That’s exactly my point. You see everything as black and white, that one lonesome engineering student shouldn’t have to die. The way I see it? This Pele chick that we used to be was one crazy, hot-tempered biatch. She wasn’t just like you and me and Rose added together; she was us multiplied together . . . and let’s face it, the three of us are no charm school graduates. Now let’s say Pele does come back to life, and marches into Times Square in rush hour, and thinks, ‘I’m having a real shitty day,’ and next thing you know, she’s summoning a volcano in the middle of Forty-second and Broadway, enveloping a few thousand tourists in lava and bringing buildings crashing down . . . all because a waitress served her morning cup of coffee cold.” Eve let that image sink in. “Tell me preventing that isn’t worth the life of an innocent bystander or two now.”

  Ash groaned and looked out the window at the approaching golden arches that advertised the upcoming rest stop. Maybe Eve had a point about killing a few to save thousands . . . but it was Eve’s complete disregard for the value of human life that had always bothered her. “Some days,” she said, “I really wo
nder how we’re related.”

  With a hard jerk of the wheel Eve swerved across traffic into the rest-stop plaza, as the cars she’d cut off blared their horns. As soon as they rolled into a parking space by the gas pumps, she engaged the emergency brake and the car screeched to a halt.

  “What, do you need to pee that badly?” Ash asked, her hand still with a death grip on the door handle.

  Surprisingly, Eve was regarding her with a soft, almost affectionate expression—a look that Ash couldn’t remember seeing once in the last decade since they had drifted apart.

  “Look, no matter what the Cloak and Colt say about us being shards of the same person,” Eve said, “to me, you’ll always be my baby sister. Growing up, you were always the good apple. Sure, you had some brushes with trouble here and there. And I’m not going to turn this into some after-school special by saying that I looked up to you or anything . . . but you were the daughter Mom and Dad wished I could be more like.” She shook her head and stared out at the cars rushing by on the highway. “I’m not here to make you change into some immoral monster like your older sister. All I’m saying is that, when the shit hits the jet turbine, you’re going to have to decide whether you’ve got it in you to do the kind of dirty, soul-staining things that might keep you up at night for life. If you can’t commit to doing what’s necessary, then all that I ask is that you get the hell out of my way when it’s time for me to take care of it.”

  “I mean this in the most positive way possible,” Ash said slowly. “But sometimes, you’re one scary chick.”

  Eve snorted, fished a twenty-dollar bill out of her jeans, and flung it at Ash. “Now go inside and get your maniacal older sister a double cheeseburger with extra pickles.”

  After Ash had used the bathroom and picked up fast food for the two of them, she made one last stop to grab a copy of the New York Times before she returned to the car. With a big bite of cheeseburger still in her mouth, Eve wrinkled her nose and waved the sandwich at the newspaper, letting a drop of mayo land on the front page. “Since when do you care about current events, Ash?”