Afterglow

by Karsten Knight

  There was another long pause on the other end while her father probably tried, unsuccessfully, to figure out how she knew all that. “Yes, how did you . . .?” He trailed off and lowered his voice. “She just wandered in while we were having breakfast in the kitchen, and immediately started up the stairs without even saying hello. I just caught a quick glimpse of her face and thought at first it was one of you two . . . but when we raced upstairs and found her in your bedroom, we realized the girl wasn’t either of you at all. But the resemblance . . .” He trailed off again as the house rumbled a second time. “Ash, what the hell is going on?”

  Ash snapped her fingers at Eve and pointed frantically at the phone. Eve got the message and rammed her foot down on the gas as they sped up the parkway toward Scarsdale. “Look, I’ll explain when we get there,” Ash promised her father, “but for now, I need you to do me a big favor: Get out of the house. I don’t care where you go—grab some patio chairs and sit in the far corner of the backyard if you can.” In truth, she’d feel much safer if her parents got in a car and booked it out of town, but she knew she’d never convince them to leave the house with a strange girl wandering around inside it. “When we hang up, don’t call the police; just wait for Eve and me to get there in about fifteen minutes.”

  “Wait,” her father said, “you two are in New York? Why didn’t you—”

  “Do not,” Ash interrupted him, “go up and interact with that girl anymore.” She pictured Rose’s home in Massachusetts, and what the girl had done to the bedroom.

  The blood patches on the wall.

  Her father was asking more questions, but Ash just said, “See you soon,” and hung up.

  Thanks to Eve’s maniac driving, they made record time getting to Scarsdale. After cutting over to the Bronx River Parkway, Eve nauseatingly veered off onto the Fenimore Road exit, and the pain in Ash’s skull ignited all over again as she was tossed up against the car window.

  When they swerved into the Wilde’s driveway, Ash and Wes were out the passenger doors before Eve hit the brakes. Thomas and Gloria Wilde had honored Ash’s cryptic instructions and set up two lawn chairs by the bird-feeder mailbox. They looked dazed, and a million questions danced in their eyes as they stood up—most notably, Who the hell is this giant man-boy that’s next to you? when they spotted Wes.

  But all those questions disappeared into a galaxy of emotion when Eve stepped out of the driver-side door. Eve visibly grimaced, flinching like she was about to be lashed, the moment she locked eyes with her adoptive parents.

  Thomas and Gloria didn’t miss a beat. They both rushed forward and wrapped their arms around Eve at the same time. There was a lot of crying involved, from both of Ash’s parents. Eve just stood there stiffly, trying not to let the cracks in her hardened exterior show. In another life, or another road in this one, maybe she would have hugged them back.

  Impenetrable though her armor may have seemed, and even though Eve was the type who’d rather die than let any vulnerability show, Ash caught just the lightning-quick glimpse of an embarrassed, remorseful, but ultimately happy smile flicker across her face.

  Ash stepped up behind them. “Don’t worry about me,” Ash said, “I just, you know, brought your rogue daughter home safely.” And rescued her from hell, she added silently. And, uh, sort of banished her there in the first place.

  Her parents laugh-cried and took her in their arms too, while Wes tried to stand unobtrusively in the background—a tough feat for someone the size of a Kodiak bear.

  Before the Wildes could fully squeeze the life out of Ash, the yard rumbled just slightly beneath their feet. In the window to her own second-floor bedroom there were brand new spiderwebbed cracks in the windowpane. Ash knew that there was very little time before Rose threw a tantrum and took a large fiery chunk off the side of the house.

  “There will be time for happy reunions and explanations later,” Ash said, though she had no idea how to really explain any of the last few months to her parents, who were still oblivious to the fact that their daughters were reincarnated goddesses. She pointed to the house. “The three of us are going to go have a little chat with the Polynesian orphan that’s running amok in there.”

  Eve and Ash took the lead on the walk up the stone pathway, while Wes offered a sheepish wave and an awkward “Uh, nice to finally meet you both” to Ash’s parents.

  Once they were inside, the house rumbled again. Ash wondered what sort of fiery “redecorating” the little Rose was doing to Ash’s bedroom, and whether she should consider grabbing the fire extinguisher from under the staircase.

  At the top of the landing, where the door to her bedroom was ajar, Ash held out a hand to stay the other two. “Maybe I should go in alone at first. She’s not exactly a . . . social butterfly, so bombarding her with three of us at once might prove overwhelming. Since the sound of a music box was enough to make her self-destruct and run off last night, I’m really hesitant to push her.”

  Eve nodded. “I guess between the two of us, you’re the more ‘personable’ sister.”

  This made Wes snicker, but he shut up as soon as Eve held up a warning finger glowing with electricity. “We’ll wait out here in case you need backup,” he promised Ash.

  “Okay, but if I yell something like ‘She’s gonna blow!’ then get the hell out before this house turns into a fucking meteorite crater.” Then she took a deep breath and slipped through the space between the door and the frame.

  Rose sat on Ash’s twin bed, staring down at a picture frame cradled in her hands. She was still wearing her black dress, although by now it was singed and hung in tatters from all the self-detonation she’d been doing. Her legs were coated with mud, and her hair hung in matted strands, which had a few twigs and leaves clinging to them. When Ash had seen Rose in a dream for the first time, Rose had been a girl lost in a jungle, but who looked like she belonged in the wild, as though civilization would never truly hold a place for her.

  Even though Rose’s body had aged ten years since that vision, the girl sitting on her bed still looked like the same lost six-year-old.

  Rose didn’t even look up to acknowledge her visitor, so Ash decided to take a big risk: She sat down on the bed beside Rose, gently though, as though there were a land mine hidden somewhere beneath the covers. Still, Rose didn’t lift her head, so Ash peered down at the photo she was admiring so intently. It was a five-by-seven black-and-white shot of Ash and Rich Lesley, her tennis-playing jerk of an ex-boyfriend. The candid shot had captured the once-happy couple in front of a bonfire, while Ash hand-fed a gooey marshmallow into Rich’s mouth. It was from last summer—almost exactly a year ago—and had been snapped by one of the fair-weather friends who’d abandoned Ash in the wake of the breakup.

  “Have you seen the boy in this picture before?” Ash asked.

  Rose nodded, almost imperceptibly, and traced her fingers over the face in the photograph. Her fingertips left soot trails over the glass when she pulled them away. “I want to live like this,” she said cryptically.

  “You’re only six,” Ash said, then grimaced when she took notice of Rose’s prematurely aged teenage body. “Kind of. In time you’ll get your own memories, ones you get to create and weave yourself. Some of them will be beautiful. Some of them . . .” She glanced at the picture in Rose’s hands. “Well, some of them you’ll at least be able to laugh at later. But if you don’t learn to control that rage and loneliness inside of you, people are going to get hurt. And then all you’ll be left with are a collection of bad memories and no one to form new, better ones with. You just have to be patient . . . Penny.” Ash knew it was risky using Rose’s given name, but she didn’t know how else to get through to her. Maybe if she appealed to a happier time in her life . . .

  Apparently it was the wrong move. “Don’t call me that . . .,” Rose said in a low voice, and as her hands tightened around the frame, a long diagonal crack ripped across the glass from corner to corner. “Colt said to forget that name. He said I�
��d feel better if I helped him. He said I’d find home again.”

  Ash sighed. Colt was the emperor of false promises. Here he was, promising her a home, when all that was left of her real one was a shell of a house with no occupants . . . and no family. “You’re my sister, Rose,” Ash said, and pointed to the door, where Eve was cautiously peeking in. “Eve is your sister too. We might not be the home you’re used to, but I promise that we can be your family.”

  Rose’s forlorn expression hardened, her eyebrows folding down in an unmistakable scowl. “Colt showed me what you did to me,” she snapped. “That bad man tried to kill us, and you and Eve ran away and left me in the barn, under the wood and hay with that man’s dead body.”

  Ash’s stomach lunged. She was referring to their previous life, almost a hundred years ago, when the three of them had been adopted by a farmer in Maine. When a violent neighbor came to fulfill a vendetta—to kill the sisters—Ash had tried to lead him away from Rose’s hiding place in the old barn.

  But then the barn had exploded. Ash and Eve had presumed Rose dead in the rubble and left the state altogether to start over in the South.

  Only Rose hadn’t been dead after all. She’d returned years later to exact her own vindictive revenge on her older sisters for leaving her behind.

  “You left me so you could be a family without me,” Rose snarled. The house around them rumbled. Dust rained from the ceiling. “I was all alone!”

  Ash’s vocal chords were paralyzed. She’d barely heard Rose utter more than three words in a row in the brief time she’d known her . . . and now she’d snapped out of her mute stupor to go on a tirade against Ash and Eve. All because Colt had manipulatively shown Rose a memory that would make the two of them look like the bad guys. No wonder Rose was willing to follow Colt to the ends of the earth.

  Ash knelt down in front of Rose. She took the picture out of her hands, set it aside, and then grasped the girl’s hands suppliantly in her own. “We never meant to leave you behind . . . but there’s no excuse. No words I can offer you to make it better. But Eve and I, we can make up for it as best we can now. What do you say?”

  Rose stared silently at her, which she supposed was as much of a tacit agreement as she had earned for now. At least they’d had a relatively human conversation without anything blowing up in the process.

  “Now,” Ash said, nodding toward the window. “There are some nice people who are very dear to me that I’d like you to meet. Do you . . . do you think you could try to not explode this time?”

  As Rose followed Ash out of the room, the girl moved so soundlessly that she could have been levitating behind Ash. Wes and Eve gave them a wide berth as they came out, as though Rose were an overflowing barrel of nitroglycerin—which in a lot of ways she really was. The four of them descended the stairs and then exited the house to finally begin introductions with Ash’s parents.

  Only when they stepped out onto the stoop, Thomas and Gloria Wilde were no longer alone.

  Ash’s parents were writhing in the grass. Her mother was moaning something about snakes and compulsively brushing off her body when nothing was actually there. Her father was on his butt, scuttling backward away from some invisible creature that seemed to be attacking him.

  Epona loomed over them, her sadistic smirk trembling with excitement as she telepathically filled the minds of the Wildes with nightmarish visions. Colt lingered patiently by the mailbox with the enormous ax strapped to his back.

  A third boy, whom Ash didn’t recognize, was leaning up against the driver-side door of the Escalade in the driveway. He was probably only five-foot-six, but his black muscle T could barely contain his barrel chest, which had the sort of thick, stocky, almost steroidal build that might belong to a wrestler. He had a goatee that tapered down to form a dagger point beneath his chin, and he appeared to be Latino in origin.

  Ash, Eve, Wes, and Rose had all frozen in front of the house. Ash wanted to run to her parents’ aid, but Epona wagged a finger in her direction as if to say, One more step, and I’ll really make your parents suffer.

  Eve jutted her chin out in the mysterious boy’s direction. “That’s Itzli,” she whispered to Ash. “Aztec god of stone and sacrifice. I met him once, when I ran away to Vancouver. He’s Colt’s favorite enforcer . . . and contract killer.”

  So a hit man, a deranged nightmare goddess who wanted nothing more than to murder Ash in a jealous rage, and Colt . . . and her parents were rolling around in the grass, right in the cross fire.

  Colt clapped his hands together. “Everybody ready for our happy little field trip to hell?” he chirped. “Did everyone get their permission slips signed and remember to pack a brown-bag lunch for the big yellow bus?”

  “No one’s going to the Cloak Netherworld, Colt,” Ash said. Her blood was literally boiling the more she watched her parents suffer. “Rose is with us now. Let my parents go, and maybe I won’t rip the heart out of your chest right away.”

  “Fine,” he said. “Then I guess I’ll just have my colleague put them out of their misery. Itzli?”

  The Aztec hit man started across the lawn toward her parents. He reached toward the ground just as a stone sword emerged from the soil, and he plucked it free. It must have weighed a hundred pounds, but he brandished it like it was made of tinfoil.

  Ash recognized this all for the bluff that it was—Colt had no bargaining chips if he killed the Wildes now—but both Wes and Eve lunged across the lawn to intercept Itzli.

  Itzli turned and thrust out a hand.

  A thick slab of stone burst out of the yard, and Wes and Eve collided with it at a full sprint. The two of them dropped, dazed, to the ground. Before Ash could get to them, three more stone walls sprang up around Wes and Eve. The tops of the stone slabs angled in until they formed a point over the box.

  When the massive stones finally stopped moving, Wes and Eve had disappeared behind a gray prison of seamless stone. She could hear the muffled slaps of them pounding on the inside of the foot-thick slabs, but Wes’s super strength had vanished with the sunrise. And what were Eve’s weather abilities going to do to the heavy rock? Erode it away over a thousand years?

  “Did you at least leave them an airhole?” Colt asked Itzli. “I don’t care if your Aztec brother asphyxiates, but I need the stormy one.”

  Itzli grumbled, held up a finger, and twisted it in the air. Rock dust rained down on the lawn as an unseen drill punched the tiniest of holes in the prison roof.

  To Ash’s further surprise, Rose walked casually past her, heading for the other gods ahead. Ash caught Rose by the wrist. “What about what we talked about up there?” She pointed back to the bedroom window. “You don’t understand what’s at stake here, Rose.”

  Rose jerked her arm free. “You want me to wait to feel better. He promised I’ll be happy tomorrow.”

  “His promises are full of—” Ash started.

  “He keeps his promises,” Rose said. “You just leave me alone.” Her voice softened. “When he puts us back together, you won’t be able to leave me . . . and I’ll never be lonely again.” With that, she turned and joined the other gods near the mailbox.

  Ash glanced next door, where their neighbors had come out to watch the spectacle. Mr. Glassman had his cell phone out, and Ash could hear the approaching wail of police sirens. A cruiser whipped around the corner at the end of the street, gunning for the house, even though the police officers inside of it had no idea what they were getting themselves into.

  Itzli looked bored as he turned to the road. Another flick of his hand and a stone wall exploded out of the asphalt.

  The Crown Victoria collided with it at a full forty miles an hour before the police officer driving it even had a chance to apply the brakes. Ash couldn’t see behind the wall, but the cruiser’s horn blared . . . and no one seemed to be getting out of the car.

  “You know what to do?” Colt asked Rose, and she nodded. “Good girl,” he said, and patted her head. Patted her like she was a do
g.

  Still, she smiled.

  Then she hurled an explosive blast across the yard. It detonated near the stone jail cell containing Wes and Eve, sending a massive crack through one slab, though unfortunately not enough to liberate its prisoners.

  When the explosion cleared away, a jagged rift had ripped through the fabric of space and time, a window to a dark realm on a different plane of existence.

  Epona arched her fingers over Ash’s parents, and both of them rose to their feet. They’d stopped moaning and were no longer fending off imaginary creatures, but they weren’t conscious, either. Instead they sleepwalked toward the open portal. Epona and Itzli followed close behind them, with the latter twirling his stone sword at Ash. Any funny business, she was certain, and he’d be delighted to shish-kebab her sleeping parents.

  Colt and Rose were close behind, and Colt motioned for Ash to join him. “Come, Ashline Wilde. You need to see what happens next.”

  Ash didn’t have much of a choice. Her parents’ lives were at stake. Wes and Eve were trapped in a prison that they wouldn’t likely be able to break out of until nightfall, when Wes’s strength was reinstated.

  So she did the last thing she thought she’d ever do:

  She willingly followed Colt and his evil partners through the portal and into the Cloak Netherworld.

  DEATH’S BRANCHES

  Monday, Part II

  When the portal snapped shut behind Ash, she found herself sprawled on a familiar beach. The sand was black as a starless night, and stormy waves crashed against the shore, as though the ocean could sense the intruders. Out at sea, where the thunderclouds churned and grumbled, a large ship protruded from the waters like a gravestone, and if Ash looked carefully, she could still see the bloated corpses of sailors bobbing over the ocean swells.