Afterglow

by Karsten Knight

  It was Cesar del Frisco, the Bedlam mastermind whose picture had been in the papers.

  Apparently Ash had been wrong about Bedlam being too big for Cesar to know everyone, because he stuck out his lower jaw then said, “Carnival’s closed, ladies.”

  “Then why are you five carnies still working?” Eve asked. “I hope the freak show labor union is paying you good overtime.”

  The five men laughed darkly, but even as they did, they fanned out around the two sisters, quickly surrounding them. It might have felt threatening if either of the Wildes had planned to flee or back down.

  They weren’t planning on doing either.

  “You girls are very pretty,” Cesar purred. In his bloodshot eyes, Ash could practically see a slide show playing of all the terrible things he wanted to do to them. “Won’t you stay and”—he glanced up at the burning coaster—“enjoy a good ride.”

  One by one the Bedlams were drawing weapons from their waistbands. Box cutters, a machete, a hatchet. “Seriously?” Ash asked, unfazed. “Five guys versus two girls . . . and you think you’ll need weapons?”

  “Bedlam’s not about what’s fair,” Cesar informed her, twirling his butterfly knife in one hand like he was carving the air with a jack-o-lantern face. “Bedlam’s about what’s fear.”

  “I’m not even going to try to tackle the grammar in that sentence,” Ash said, and Cesar squinted at her. Either he didn’t understand what grammar was, or he was trying to understand how two defenseless girls could dare to be so cheeky to five armed goons.

  It probably only unnerved them more when Eve seemed to be fighting back a smile. She turned to the thug nearest her and pointed to his machete. “Could you raise that just a teensy bit higher, cupcake?”

  The thug laughed a little, then looked confusedly to Cesar before he shrugged and raised the blade higher.

  What he didn’t notice was the tiny point of electricity gathering on the tip of the machete.

  Or the fact that his long, dirty hair was starting to float around his face with static electricity.

  He did, however, notice when the lightning bolt sizzled down from the clouds and zipped through the machete before it pumped his body with enough electricity to power Brooklyn for a few days.

  When it was over, and the blinding light of the bolt faded, the thug collapsed to the dirt in a violent seizure before his body went still. Only a low moan escaped his mouth, and even that soon faded to a whine as he succumbed to unconsciousness.

  When Eve turned back to the four remaining Bedlams, who were all standing too stunned to move, her eyes fluoresced with an electrical sheen. She tossed a ball of lightning back and forth between her hands. “Take me out to the ballgame . . .,” she started to sing creepily as they all watched her. “Take me out with the crowd. . . .” She windmilled the orb of lightning around, then whipped it at the thug to the left of Cesar. He flew back into one of the wooden supports of the burning roller coaster, and Ash couldn’t be sure whether the crack sound she heard on impact was the wooden beam, or the vertebrae in his back.

  Ash couldn’t help but join Eve’s creepy sing-along as she continued. “Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack . . .,” they both sang together.

  Ash spun on her heel and slammed a fireball into Mohawk’s chest. The explosion of fire rocketed him back over a concession stand counter, where he smashed into a wall of popcorn and cotton candy.

  Cesar and his remaining man backed away toward the flaming roller coaster, apparently more terrified of the two Wilde sisters than of being burned by the inferno. Still, Ash and Eve sang in unison as they slowly edged forward: “I don’t care if I never get back! Let me root, root, root for the home team, if they don’t win it’s a shame. . . .”

  Eve pointed at the guy next to Cesar with her thumb and forefinger, forming a fake gun. When she clicked the imaginary trigger, another bolt of lightning forked down from the clouds and incapacitated him.

  Ash shook her head at Cesar. “Come on, Cesar, sing along for the finale.” Then she and Eve turned to each other, and in their most boisterous voices they shouted, “For it’s one, two, three strikes you’re out . . .”

  Behind Cesar, in his blind spot, an enormous silhouette emerged from the flaming underbelly of the roller coaster—a man over six and a half feet tall wearing all black. Wes drew back his hood, so that the firelight illuminated his handsome Latino face. He reached up and snapped one of the burning crossbeams off the coaster like he was breaking a twig off a tree and cocked it back like a bat. Then he enthusiastically finished the song for the Wilde sisters in his deepest, manliest, opera voice. “At the ooooold baaaaall gaaaame!”

  Cesar turned just in time to catch the swing of Wes’s “bat” full-tilt in the chest. The gang leader somersaulted backward three times until he hit a trash can. He used one arm to try to pick himself up, before he wheezed heavily, then dropped unmoving to the dirt.

  “Babe Ruth called,” Eve started to say. “He says he wants his swing ba—”

  But by then Ash had already squealed, taken a few running steps, and pounced up onto Wes Towers, wrapping her arms and legs around his enormous upper body. She reveled in it as the muscles in his arms tightened around her back. Then they kissed, long and hard, while the chassis of the Tempest still burned around them like a flaming picture frame.

  “God,” Eve said, disgusted. “Let a girl at least finish her joke before you start sucking face.” Still, Ash and Wes didn’t pull away from each other, so Eve muttered, “Fine—I’ll just, you know, extinguish the burning roller coaster while you two go at it.”

  Soon the rain from Eve’s storm clouds spattered down on them. Ash and Wes finally pulled away from the kiss, leaving just an inch between their faces. Water cascaded down their cheeks, which Ash was grateful for because her tears blended right in. “You sure know how to make an entrance,” she told him finally, and then half-laughed, half-sobbed with relief and joy, and so many other emotions that were vibrating in her. It had only been four days since they had last seen each other, but with the intensity of all that had happened these last few weeks, it felt like it had been years.

  As he peered at her, she saw that the bags beneath his eyes had darkened with sleeplessness. Other than that, though, it was the same old Wes. He planted a feverish kiss on her forehead, then let his words whisper through her hair: “I should have never let you go, Ashline Wilde.”

  “Duh!” Eve called from somewhere in the rafters, where the heavy rains were finally extinguishing the flames. The upper parts of the roller coaster remained intact, but some of the charred lower supports looked like burned up matchsticks.

  “Sisters,” Ash mused. “Their number one job description is apparently to ruin moments like these.”

  “Speaking of ruining moments . . .” Wes glanced up at the Tempest through the steam billowing around them. “I’m trying really, really hard not to make a horrible pun about love being a roller coaster. It’s just so tempting.”

  Ash pressed a finger to his lips to silence him. “You are the worst.” But they kissed again, and this time they didn’t let up until the sirens of the approaching fire engines wailed. Eve insisted they get the hell away from the crime scene before they were charged with trespassing and arson along with the unconscious Bedlams.

  On the walk back through Brooklyn, with Eve ten paces in front of them as though she were allergic to romance, the streetlamps flickered back on.

  With her hand tucked into Wesley’s, Ash felt as though power had been restored inside of her, as well.

  VENOM AND STEEL

  Sunday

  Ash woke up with Wes’s massive arm draped over her body. It was sort of like being trapped beneath a heavy tree branch, but in a good way. Wes was on his side, with his cheek pressed into the pillow. His chin-length hair was matted to his face with sweat, but a strand billowed in and out with each of his light breaths. Eventually, he opened one big, brown eye and regarded Ash soporifically. “Were you . . . were you j
ust watching me sleep?”

  Ash offered him the craziest joker grin that she could. “I am one hopelessly creepy romantic. And you . . .” She ran her hands from his cannonball-size shoulder down his ribs and to his waist. “You give a whole new meaning to ‘big spoon.’ ”

  He glanced down toward where his toes—and his calves, and his knees—were protruding off the end of the mattress. “I miss my custom-made bed in Miami. It’s always nice to, you know, fit on a bed without turning your body diagonally.”

  Ash climbed on top of him. “I’ll turn your body diagonally, if you know what I mean.” She winked at him saucily.

  Wes bit his lip. “The horny eighteen-year-old boy in me is turned on by the way you said that, yet my internal Hemingway is really struggling to decipher that metaphor.” Still, his hands closed around her waist.

  Ash had a funny thought and abruptly started to laugh. Wes peered up at her inquisitively, so she said, “I just had an epiphany. I met you for the first time beating the living pulp out of a cigar shop full of gang members. . . . Fitting that beating up some more people should bring us back together.”

  “Let no one say we haven’t had a classic fairy-tale romance,” Wes joked, then turned serious. “I really thought that leaving you was the right thing to do in Miami. I selfishly thought that was the only way to ease this pain inside with Aurora gone.” He turned to the window, as though he might see the winged goddess flutter past their hotel room, her wings filled with Manhattan wind as she sailed back to the Hudson River. But there was only an unwavering morning light. “But she’s gone, either way. And when I saw you last night, the firelight from that roller coaster washing over you, I realized that you’re all I’ve got left in this world right now. You’re the reason for me to not give over to hate and rage.”

  Ash pressed her face into his stubble. “God, put it in a song, Towers,” she whispered, then kissed his neck.

  Just then Eve kicked open the door to the room without knocking and walked in, fully dressed and very awake-looking. Since when was she a morning person? Ash wondered. And Ash certainly didn’t remember giving her a key to the room she and Wes were sharing.

  Eve was either oblivious to the romantic moment she’d just interrupted, or she didn’t care. She tossed a bag of fresh bagels onto the bed next to them, the smell of still-warm dough washing around them. “Chop chop,” Eve snapped, cracking an imaginary whip. “Less snuggling, more hunting the evil trickster god bent on world domination. And eat your bagels before they get cold.”

  After bagels, with only one computer between the three of them at the hotel room, the three gods went mobile, commandeering three computer stations at the New York Public Library. For hours they plugged away, cross-referencing “armor” with “Manhattan” in search of anything helpful. But by the afternoon the text on the screen was beginning to swim in front of Ash’s eyes, which felt like they were about to bleed. What if Colt had already stolen what he needed and was on his way to the Cloak Netherworld? What if he wasn’t even in Manhattan, and he’d given Eve a false lead when he sensed her deception?

  But something began to tickle her mind when she was going through the thousandth search result. She lifted her head from the screen and said aloud to the two others, “What if we’re taking ‘armor’ too literally?”

  Wes and Eve squinted at her, partly out of confusion, but partly because they too were half-blind from all the Web surfing.

  “Think about it,” Ash said, getting more excited as the idea planted seeds in her brain and started to grow. “Armor is meant to protect your body on its way through battle. But the Cloak aren’t going to give a rat’s ass about some metal or leather suit. They’re too powerful for that sort of mortal concern. So ask yourself: What does concern them?”

  “They’re allergic to hate,” Wes said cautiously. “But . . . armor implies something you wear. And you can’t wear hate.”

  Eve snorted. “Have you seen Ashline’s closet lately?”

  Ash rolled her eyes but continued. “People—both gods and mortals alike—create hate. But we leave trails of it wherever violence or cruelty happens. That’s why the Cloak can’t even go to a secluded forest without it transforming them. Hate is like some deadly particle that we’re slowly filling this world with. If that’s the case though, what if it’s not just places where we leave hate trails . . . what if we can taint objects, too?”

  Both Eve and Wes were starting to catch on. “So you get an object that’s imbued with hatred,” Eve said, “and you wear it almost like a protective amulet to walk through the Cloak Netherworld.”

  “But,” Wes interrupted, “and I hate to play devil’s advocate here . . . shitty, hateful things happen every day, in every city, around the world. There would be millions of objects that are hate infused, if that were the case. So if what Colt led Eve to believe wasn’t more smoke and mirrors, then why is he so fixated on a single object here in New York?”

  Ash considered this. “Yes, violence happens every day, and yes, violence seems to be an inherently hateful thing. But so many other factors go into most acts of violence. Just think of all the terrible stories you hear about from friends or see in the news. A mugger corners and attacks his victim in a dark alley . . . but the victim is probably anonymous, and the attacker is just looking for quick cash. A man comes home to find his wife cheating on him and turns a gun on both her and her lover. A terminated employee walks into the workplace that fired him and starts shooting at random. There’s some semblance of hate in all of these situations, but it’s not pure, or focused, or calculated. They’re crimes of passion, because they’re governed by things like envy, greed, self-loathing, fear of poverty, fear of the future . . . a whole bouquet of motivations that Freud couldn’t sort out in a flowchart if he wanted to.”

  “We get it,” Eve said, cricking her stiff neck. “Violence is complicated. What’s your point?”

  What is my point? Ash wondered, but then she felt her mind zeroing in on the idea that had been just barely eluding her. “So if you want something so poisonous to the Cloak that they can’t come near you, even when they have home-court advantage, you don’t walk into the Netherworld with a mugger’s knife, when it probably belonged to some scared, stupid kid who only used it because he was looking to get his next drug fix. Colt wouldn’t take a gamble like that. No, he wants an object that is pure with evil, overflowing with hatred so intense that those other factors barely play into it.”

  “So in summary,” Wes said, “you mean that we should be looking for an object that is one hundred percent hatred not-from-concentrate?”

  “Bingo,” Ash said, then flagged down the librarian who’d been helping them. He practically pranced over, just as ecstatic as he’d been in the first place. He looked more like a bashful, blond-haired Baywatch cast member than any librarian stereotype that Ash could think of. Even though it was Ash who’d summoned him, his gaze kept flitting to Eve, who’d shown him no interest or eye contact since they’d arrived. Apparently he was into the dark, brooding, slightly sociopathic, hard-to-get type.

  “We were wondering,” Ash asked him, “if there are any current events happening in the city right now that might center around . . . hate. Evil. That sort of thing.”

  He idly twisted the lanyard around his neck, which had his name—Ephram—printed on it in big block letters. “Well, there’s an opera about vengeance going up at the opera house next week, and there are several memorials and monuments around the city, but those are more about the memory of the victims than the violence that took them.” From the murky database of his information-loaded brain his eyes widened with clarity. “ ‘The Seven Deadly Sins, Realized,’ ” he said with a snap of his fingers.

  “What the hell is that?” Eve snapped, finally acknowledging him. “Some sort of amateur Broadway musical?”

  His bashful eyes met Eve’s and quickly glanced away. “It’s a new exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Not your typical art gallery kind of thing—t
here are seven artifacts, each with major historical significance, that speak to one of the Seven Deadly Sins. Sloth. Lust. Pride . . .”

  “Wrath?” Ash finished for him.

  He nodded. “Exhibit opens to the public tomorrow. I actually might make a trip there if”—he glanced at Eve again—“any of you wanted to check out the exhibit with me.”

  Eve yawned. Wes pretended to cough to cover his snickering. Ash had already turned back to her computer to research the exhibit, so Ephram awkwardly shuffled away to straighten out some books that didn’t need straightening.

  According to the Met website Ephram was right—the exhibit didn’t open to the public until tomorrow morning. However, the museum was hosting a private, rooftop gala with the artifacts tonight, just for donors and historians.

  Where Colt’s scheming was involved, even twelve hours could make a big difference.

  Ash took Wes by the hand and fluttered her eyelashes coquettishly at him. “My dearest trust-fund baby,” she cooed at him. “How do you feel about making a last-minute museum donation? Philanthropists really, really turn me on.”

  Wes rolled his eyes. “I am way too young to be someone’s sugar daddy. . . . Fine, how much do you think it’s going to take?” He already had his phone out, looking for the Met’s fund-raising number.

  “However much it costs to get three tickets to tonight’s cocktail party,” she said absently, but her mind was already spinning, fantasizing about finally getting the upper hand on Colt.

  You want an object that will allow you to safely walk through hell, Colt? she thought. I’ll show you a girl that won’t let you safely walk through Earth.

  As Ash, Eve, and Wes followed the flow of guests through the grand halls of the Met, they earned their fair share of admiring or envious looks from the normal museum goers. At first Ash figured it was just because they looked real sharp in their black-tie formal wear—Ash and Eve in cocktail dresses of, respectively, red and gold, and Wes in the three-piece tuxedo from the men’s big-and-tall section. But after a girl shyly approached them to ask Wes for his autograph, Ash burst out laughing when she realized what was going on.