Afterglow

by Karsten Knight

  This was it—the Cloak Netherworld.

  The place that Ash had prayed she’d never have to return to again.

  Colt flexed his back and touched the ax strapped across it to make sure it was still in place after they’d passed through the rift. Then he gestured for the others to come closer to him. “Stay near me as we make our way to the tree,” he instructed all of them. “The pipe buried in my body will give me freedom to pass safely through the landscape here, but I can’t guarantee how far the sphere of protection will extend.”

  They formed a tight caravan as they headed toward the tree line ahead. Colt made Ash walk out in front, with Ash’s parents marching hypnotically behind him. Every time she even tried to look back at them, to strategize some way to break them free, Itzli leaned menacingly between Thomas and Gloria and pressed the edge of his stone sword to one of their necks.

  On Ash’s last visit the forest had been made up of enormous black calla lilies, but now it had transformed into a thick, impenetrable rainforest. Lines of brambles as sharp as razor wire and as thick anchor chains hung between the trees in tight lines.

  Clearly, the Cloak had tried to prepare for Colt’s arrival. They must have underestimated the poisonousness of both Colt and the wrath artifact entombed within him though . . . because when Colt stepped up to the tree line, all of the vegetation began to wither. The thorny vines liquefied onto the soil, and the trees groaned as they dried up, until they cracked and toppled aside. With each step Colt took, a path formed through the previously impassable forest. Even the grass browned and dried up under his feet as he walked slowly but confidently forward.

  Halfway through the forest, they were attacked by their first Cloak.

  The creature appeared in their path, where Colt’s aura was gradually gnawing through the trees. It materialized in humanoid form first, only eight feet tall, with a black oily coat and that wavering blue flame of an eye.

  The closer they approached, however, the more its body degenerated into something wild and animal, a supernatural beast that had crawled out of a tar pit. It dropped to all fours. Its legs articulated back, and its body grew bloated. Its gray fangs lengthened and sprouted an extra row.

  And when the animal instincts became too much for it, it reared back onto its haunches and pounced for Colt.

  Ash experienced a brief moment of hope while it lingered midair that Colt hadn’t thought this through, that the Cloak were finally going to put a stop to his deadly antics once and for all. She pictured the Cloak’s inky talon plunging into Colt’s chest, cracking open his ribs, and tearing out his heart with a snap of its claw.

  Instead, when the Cloak was only a few yards away, it struck some invisible wall in the air formed by the extreme concentration of hate and evil . . . and it simply evaporated. Its body exploded into a million particles of darkness and rained down around them like confetti.

  These attacks happened several more times throughout their journey—from the dying tree canopy overhead, from the sides—but always to the same result with deadly efficacy. Even though Ash would never have called the Cloak friends, exactly, there was something truly chilling to see a being so otherworldly, so omniscient, dying in the blink of an eye.

  By the time they reached the great stone dais—the hub of the Netherworld—the Cloak had given up altogether. It was snowing on the dais, which ended abruptly in a cliff that overlooked a vast and chilling nothingness—just a gaping void. Ash could theorize that if you fell off the edge, you might simply fall for eternity.

  The real attraction here, however, was the towering life tree, which was every bit as breathtaking as it had been when Ash first gazed upon it. The tree was a skyscraper of spiny wood and gnarled branches and thick, vibrant leaves . . . and if you looked closely enough you could see the faces of imprisoned gods just visible through the foliage. They had been plugged into the tree the way Eve had been while she was imprisoned here. These were the most sordid gods that history had to offer, preternatural beings so vile and destructive to the people around them that the Cloak had crossed the threshold between worlds and taken them “off-line.” So long as they were imprisoned here, they couldn’t be reincarnated like the other gods; instead they were supposedly rehabilitated by the tree’s cleansing powers—the same cleansing that gave the Cloak their life energy and restored them after they came in contact with evil.

  Across the stone amphitheater, at a safe distance for now, the remaining Cloak had gathered and coalesced into a single entity. Ash had seen them do this before. Their oily, viscous bodies just melted into one super-Cloak, thirty feet tall. Twenty collective blue eyes flickered out of its amorphous head, but the flames were dimmer, less vibrant than usual. With each Cloak that had just perished trying to protect the Netherworld, Colt seemed to have chipped away at their overall life force.

  However, even recognizing that they were about to die, the Cloak maintained an eerie calmness. They had solemnly accepted that their time had come.

  Colt didn’t even give the Cloak a casual look. He just strode across the dais and drew the enormous ax from its sheath on his back. Then he wheeled back, spun a hundred and eighty degrees, and drove the head of the ax into the tree trunk.

  The Cloak’s life tree had stood tall for centuries and imprisoned some of the most powerful, vengeful beings to ever roam the earth . . . yet with just the first swing, the ax cut a third of the way through its intimidating trunk before it stuck. Ash decided that even if the wood had been reinforced with titanium or carbon steel fibers, the blade that Modo had fashioned would have cut through it as though it were a warm stick of butter.

  As Colt pried the ax from the trunk and prepared for another swing, the branches of the tree rustled with discontent overhead. Colt took another massive swing from a different angle, sheering through another third of the tree trunk. The rustling grew louder, and at first Ash hoped that maybe the tree was coming to life and preparing to fight back.

  Instead it was something far, far worse.

  The gods imprisoned in the enormous tree were being liberated.

  One by one they dropped out of their stations where they had been attached to the tree like acorns. Their bodies plummeted toward the stone dais below, but the vinelike plant fibers that had wired them into the tree slowed and stopped their fall before their bodies could splatter on the stone.

  And as they dropped, their eyes flickered open. They were gods of every race, men and women alike, some of them dressed in ancient, foreign garb. One of them was a nightmarish creature, with dark sinewy wings and red, glowing eyes. As they reawakened from what had been centuries’ worth of slumber for some of them, they dazedly reached back and snapped the vines suspending them from the tree, like marionettes casting off their puppet strings. Among them Ash even recognized two from her visions—Tane and Tangaroa, the forest spirit and the sea god she’d condemned to death in that sea cave on Maui. They showed no signs of knowing Ash, so they must have been imprisoned by the Cloak during their last lives.

  Ash looked over at the Cloak super-creature—Jack, as it called itself. It hadn’t moved from its perch, but with the power draining from the tree, Jack’s massive dark body was hunched over, one hand bracing itself against the earth. Its blue flame eyes looked dimmer than ever before.

  Colt must have noted the fallen Cloak too, because a triumphant smile—the grin of a true trickster—was smeared across his face. He gazed up into the branches one last time, probably to make sure that all the gods had been successfully relieved of their botanical prison.

  He drew back the ax, and, with all his accumulated vengeful hatred for the Cloak, he drove the blade home.

  This swing didn’t even catch on anything. It sheared straight through the remaining portion of the trunk and kept right on going through the other side.

  For an agonizing moment, the tree precariously tottered upright in one last act of defiance. But then gravity caught up with it, and it fell in the direction of the cliff. The awakened gods ha
d emerged from their stupor enough to stumble out of the way before it crushed them, except for one blond god who didn’t even see it coming. One of the enormous branches of the tree struck him in the chest as he was climbing almost drunkenly to his feet. The force of the impact knocked him off the edge of the stone dais, and with a quick yelp he tumbled into oblivion.

  None of the gods—Colt, Itzli, and Epona included—looked like they cared enough to mourn his loss.

  With the tree destroyed and Jack collapsed in an oily, melting heap, Colt climbed up onto the stump that remained of the life tree. The awakened gods gathered around him, and Ash noted that none of them looked particularly confused by Colt’s appearance. In fact there was a recognition, a respect, in all of their expressions.

  Because they’d all met the trickster in their previous lives.

  Because they’d maybe even looked up to him like a boss, or as their king.

  For all appearances, Colt was a made man among the gods, the crime overlord who had directed the morally dubious deities for hundreds of years.

  Epona flashed Ash a sarcastic thumbs-up. The nightmare goddess had directed Ash’s parents to sit cross-legged on the stone dais, while they stared catatonically off into nothingness.

  “Brothers and sisters,” Colt boomed over the dais. “Today is a great day. We have finally brought about the extinction of the vile shadow creatures that have meddled in our affairs since the dawn of our race. We have freed you from your eternal, dormant purgatory here in the Netherworld. And now, as one, we can return to Earth as the triumphant superior race.”

  The crowd of gods offered a positive reaction to this: nods and cheers of agreement. Ash had never heard Colt give a damn about making the gods some “superior race,” but she had encountered quite a few evil gods who felt that way—gods who were sick of living silently among the mortals, gods who longed for a new era when they would be worshipped, even feared once again.

  Gods who were willing to kill to see that happen.

  And now, trickster that he was, Colt was telling these power-hungry deities exactly what they wanted to hear. He’d be perfectly content to rile them up and unleash them upon the world if it meant he could manipulate them to do his bidding later on.

  “The world has changed a vast deal since many of you last saw it,” Colt went on. “As the gods retreated to the shadows, choosing lives of anonymity and banality over the dominance we once held, the humans have almost completely forgotten about us, made us footnotes in the history books as they worship their new idols—wealth, technology, sex. Well the time has come for us to reclaim our rightful throne.” He hoisted the ax over his head. “The time has come for us to step out of the shadows, as one. The time has come to remind the human race that to us, they are ants.”

  Colt stepped down off the stump. He motioned someone to join him, and Ash couldn’t initially see who it was through the crowd of gods . . . until Rose stepped into view. He took her hand and looked lovingly at her. She returned his gaze with a bashful affection, the kind of crush that a child might have on an adult.

  Ash had witnessed many horrors these past few months, but the bond Colt was fostering with Rose . . . Just watching the two of them together knotted Ash’s insides like a wet dish towel.

  Colt let go of Rose’s hand and turned back to the assembly. “We need to rescue one more member of our family first before we’re ready to strike—one of our finest, fieriest warriors,” he continued, and Ash had no doubt he was referring to Pele. “So we will gather in the solitude of an ancient forest on Earth for just two nights . . . and on the third day we will sweep across the world as an unstoppable flood and re-establish our authority, no longer as mortals . . . but as gods once more.”

  A cheer rose up from the freed prisoners, a riotous frenzy as they all became swept up in Colt’s powerful presence. On cue, Rose doled out a series of explosive blasts that ripped portals into the air all around the dais. The floating windows back to Earth all showed the same backdrop of a familiar forest that was near and dear to Ash’s heart.

  Towering trees with trunks of burnt umber.

  A daffodil afternoon light filtering through the green canopy.

  And in the distance, just visible through the thicket of trunks, the faux-wooden buildings of a boarding-school campus.

  Colt was convening his council of murderous, evil gods back at Blackwood Academy.

  Where Ash had first come into contact with her fellow gods.

  Where the bloodshed began.

  The gods all poured through the inter-dimensional rifts, and Ash could hear joyous, crazed laughter from the other side as they gratefully left the Cloak Netherworld for their home planet . . . the very planet that they were about to immerse in a plague of violence and fear.

  Epona jerked on some imaginary reins, and Ash’s parents hopped to their feet like they’d been shocked by a cattle prod. The current of gods carried them out into the redwood forest as well.

  Ash started to follow the flow toward the forest, but Colt, who had lingered behind with Rose, shook his head at her. “I’m afraid we must part ways for one night, Ashline . . . though I know you’re anxious to remain in my presence.”

  Ash spat on the stone in response.

  Colt whispered something to Rose, and she nodded and cast a new fiery orb toward the back of the dais, where the Cloak lay unmoving. It ripped open the air next to Jack, and through it Ash saw the backyard of the Wilde residence.

  “Return to New York and collect your older sister,” Colt instructed Ash. “That will give me time to make preparations without the two of you meddling again. You and Eve will have until midnight tomorrow to meet me at the banks of the redwood forest. Come to the stone lighthouse just offshore, where you will begin your rebirth as Pele. If you fail to arrive on time, or refuse to follow my exact directions upon your arrival, or resist in any way . . . then I will be forced to crush the two mortals who took you under their wing for the last sixteen years. If you cooperate, then I will allow them to live, although in a few nights’ time, ‘life’ for any mortals will never be the same.”

  With that he drove his ax into the stump of the life tree, and left it planted there, a flag claiming the Netherworld for his own. Then he and Rose both jumped through the last of the closing portals to Blackwood, before the seam in the air closed altogether.

  Ash knew that she only had a limited time before her own portal back to Earth vanished, but she couldn’t help it—she jogged over to where the Cloak lay and knelt down beside it.

  Jack’s enormous mouth hung open, and only shallow, wheezy breaths whistled through his teeth—although Ash had never even been sure if the creature breathed, or ate, or did anything remotely mortal, for that matter. The blue flames that made up his collective eyes were winking out one at a time as his collective consciousness died.

  Still, his voice was strong as he spoke to Ash for the last time. “Colt has gained the allegiance of many of his followers by promising that in killing us, it would restore all your memories in the next lifetime.” He drew in one long, ragged breath, before he continued. “But the reality is just the opposite—with us gone, the damage to your memories from previous lives will prove permanent.”

  And now Ash had glimpsed the true genius behind Colt’s scheming. With his regenerative abilities, his brain repaired itself lifetime after lifetime, so that he had a monopoly on remembering his extensive past. Meanwhile all the other gods were cut off from their own.

  Colt had just secured that monopoly from now until eternity. Even if Ash somehow succeeded in destroying him in this life, she’d forget all about him in the next, and the cycle would begin anew. He would continue to use the other gods, and they’d never be the wiser.

  Ash was overcome with a heavy exhaustion and a sense of futility. Tears welled in her eyes. There was almost nothing human to Jack, to the Cloak, yet she still felt a mixture of anger, sorrow, and fear at his imminent death.

  The anger is what came out first. Sh
e pounded the stone dais nearest Jack’s face. At this point all but one of the blue flames had been extinguished. “It didn’t have to go this way,” she shouted at Jack through her tears. “I warned you this would happen. You could have ended all this and saved so many lives. Instead you’re going to die because you couldn’t be more like us.”

  “No,” Jack whispered, as the final blue flame gradually dimmed. “We are dead because you could not be more like us.” The last flame flickered out and Jack was gone. His body simply dissolved into tiny black particles, which a low wind blew toward the abyss.

  The Cloak were no more.

  Ash wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. There was nothing left for her in the Netherworld, so she jumped through the open portal and landed on her grassy backyard in Scarsdale just as the rift snapped shut behind her.

  Back on Earth, Ash moved quickly to the edge of the house and chanced a look toward the street. Her boring suburban neighborhood had transformed into a crime scene since she had left. It looked as though the entire Scarsdale police force—and maybe some units from nearby towns as well—had responded to the crashed squad car. The paramedics tended to the two officers who must have been in the car; one was being loaded onto a stretcher, and the other was pressing an ice pack to his head. Either way, Ash was relieved to see both of them alive.

  The stone prison containing Eve and Wes hadn’t changed in her absence. At some point she’d have to go at it with the sledgehammer her father kept in the garage, but not now, with twenty police officers and half the neighborhood watching. As long as Wes and Eve weren’t asphyxiating in there, they would have to wait.

  She had another order of business to take care of first, anyway. Ash returned to the Wildes’ patio and took out her cell phone. She scrolled through her contacts until she came to the S section and found the number she’d never once called since she had programmed it in before summer break.

  Serena Andreotes was a petite blond girl who’d been a classmate of Ash’s at Blackwood Academy. Despite her incredibly expressive gray eyes, which flickered with vitality and near constant amusement, Serena was entirely blind.