Afterglow

by Karsten Knight

  She was also the reincarnation of a Greek siren.

  While other gods like Eve and Ash had powers that manifested themselves physically in the elements, Serena’s abilities were far more subtle. Her telepathic voice could reach anyone in the world, anywhere in the world. While it didn’t involve actual words per se, and it wasn’t as forceful as mind control, her siren’s call could project emotions into the minds of those she called. It was Serena who had drawn several gods, including Ash, to the Blackwood campus, by appealing to those gods who felt a need to belong. They had never even realized until later that it hadn’t been their own idea to matriculate at a boarding school in the redwoods.

  Serena picked up on the second ring, and before they could even go into pleasantries or small talk, Ash unloaded an abbreviated version of everything that had happened in the last few weeks onto her. The blind girl listened in near silence, although when Ash reached the part about Raja’s death, Ash heard a crackling sound over the receiver—Serena tightly clutching the phone in her hand.

  When Ash concluded her story, there was only a brief silence before Serena said calmly, “Just tell me what you need me to do.”

  Ash took one last minute to contemplate whether the plan forming in her head was really the right thing to do. Lately, allowing others to help her in her quest had proven a death sentence for just about anyone involved—Rolfe, Aurora, Raja. Ash hadn’t exactly pushed any of them in front of a bullet, but they’d all died because in hanging around Ash they’d wandered into Colt’s web of trickery as well. To that end, she never wanted to ask for anyone’s help ever again.

  But the game had changed. This wasn’t just about preventing Colt from tampering with her soul anymore; it wasn’t just personal. He’d freed a cellblock’s worth of crazy, malevolent gods, riled them up with his trickster rhetoric, and now intended to submerge the world in pure chaos until the gods ruled the human race as its merciless enslavers. From the events that had recently happened while Ash was in Miami, she’d seen how much trouble and destruction four power-hungry gods could rouse.

  With an armada of them under Colt’s direction, it would be genocide.

  Ash had no choice but to ask for help this time. “Reach out to any god with a good heart left in them. Summon them to drop what they’re doing and find a way to our meeting place in Crescent City, California, by tomorrow afternoon. Ultimately, it will be their choice whether or not they want to fight, but for those brave enough to join me, we’ll storm the Blackwood campus . . . and we’ll strike those bastards down.”

  “That much I can do,” Serena offered, “but the siren’s call is no exact science. I can hone the frequency all I want, but there’s always a chance that one of Colt’s people could pick up my broadcast too. That may have been how Colt found you on the Blackwood campus in the first place, you know. If anyone overhears, Colt may know we’re bringing a wildfire to his forest.”

  “Maybe so,” Ash said. Despite everything, she couldn’t help the killer smile that tested the waters of her lips. “But you know the thing about wildfires and forests? Even when you see one coming, you can’t put it out.” She turned to the sliding door to observe her own reflection in the glass, and when she put her hand to the pane, she left a softened, molten imprint. “Even when you see it coming . . . it’ll still burn everything in its path to the ground.”

  PART III: CALIFORNIA

  A FIERY DYNASTY

  Maui, 1832

  There’s no way you’re going to give birth to your child on the middle of a dark bridge in a dank, cold city like Boston. So even as you feel yourself go into labor, you carve a rift in the air and crawl through it.

  Back to Hawai‘i.

  On the banks of Haleakalā, alone on a bed of hastily gathered palm fronds, you bunch up your knees and push. You push until you feel the splitting agony, unlike any pain you’ve experienced before. You push until your screams echo down the volcano, until you feel a sudden give and a soft thud in the bed of leaves—

  —until you hear a high-pitched cry that’s not your own.

  It takes all the strength (not to mention the courage) you have left to draw yourself up onto your elbows, use your knees to pull yourself into a sitting position, and get your first look at the creature you’ve just birthed.

  It’s a girl. She lies on her back in the leaves, just between your legs, and she stops squalling as soon as your face comes into view. In fact she stops squirming at all and studies you intently. There is a moment when, despite everything that’s happened, you feel the first jolt of love for this life you’ve created. During the course of your pregnancy, you’d often wondered whether you were capable of motherly affection, since you never really had a mother of your own.

  Perhaps you would have been a great mother, had it not been for the events of the last few hours.

  But all it takes is one turn of the child’s head for you to see her in profile and recognize just how deeply she resembles her father.

  That instant of recognition washes away the foundations of love you were just starting to experience.

  You know that you must get rid of her before that affection resurfaces.

  There can be nothing left to remind you of him.

  So, even as the baby coos at you, maybe confusing your tight hold on her as affectionate and warm, you stride determinedly down Haleakalā.

  You do your best to quiet the child on your descent into the forests, toward the shoreline. You pass Waimoku Falls, where your “intimate journey” with Colt began. The child, who you’ve refused to name lest you get more attached, could have been conceived under the falls for all you know.

  You have every intention of making it as far as Kīpahulu, but when you reach Ohe‘o Gulch, you hear someone singing.

  The woman is bathing in one of the larger pools, where the stream makes a short drop off a basalt cliff and into the basin below. These pools were one of Tangaroa’s sacred spots, another place where water and volcanic rock have come together. He thought of it as an allegory for the union the two of you might have had one day.

  What’s more, you recognize the bathing woman, who’s dipped up to her neck in the water. You haven’t always been as friendly with the locals as Tane once was, but there were certain favorites you’d met on the islands—people you might even call friends. She is one of them—a mother of two who lives with her husband down in Kīpahulu.

  Well, she’s about to inherit a third child.

  You get as close to the pool as you can without making your presence known. The baby, who has fallen into a fitful sleep, twitches in your hands as you lay her down at the grassy edge of the water.

  Then you dart back into trees.

  The baby senses that your touch is gone, because she wakes with a resounding shriek that stops the bathing woman in the middle of her song. The sound is so heartbreaking that you can’t help but stagger through the brush a few steps back toward the child, to rectify the impetuous, anger-driven mistake you’re probably making. This child didn’t ask to be brought into the world. Didn’t ask to be born of such a conniving father, who was so vile that even the dark, unworldly creature had desired him dead or gone.

  But the woman in the gulch is already swimming for the water’s edge, toward the newborn child.

  You vanish into the trees and through the bamboo forest before she sees you.

  That night, alone in the enormous, arid crater of Haleakalā, the madness infects you.

  Dusk comes and goes. Clouds swirl around the summit, and you try to lose yourself in them, but instead they just provide a blank canvas to paint the awful, too recent memories of Colt, and his mistress, and the dark executioner who’d taken him.

  Every time you revisit that memory, your rage grows.

  Every time you revisit that memory, the earth shifts beneath you.

  The rumbling intensifies. You lose yourself in it, willing the magma up out of the earth. This crater—a red, dry bed of porous rocks—reminds you of your existence now,
lifeless and barren. You killed Tangaroa, Tane, Papa, and Rangi before you left. Colt swims in the belly of an unfathomable beast. And your love child will live her life without ever knowing you.

  You pluck an ahinahina from the rock bed and hold it up—the spiky, resilient plant is the only living thing capable of growing here, where the porous stone soaks up the rain. You’ve always admired the plant for its ability to thrive where other things could not.

  Now you let it smolder in your palm.

  As it burns, a rift tears through the crater bed. The trembling jaws of stone open up to the sky, and the first flickering glow of molten rock throws shadows against the crater wall. Part of you desperately wants to stop the fires from coming, knowing full well that an eruption now might destroy the villages below. You picture with horror the lava cascading down the shallow slope, toward the helpless child you just abandoned, whose tiny little heartbeat you swear that you can still hear all the way up in your castle in the sky.

  But then another darker, primordial part of you bubbles up, with a single word.

  Good.

  You couldn’t stop the fires now, even if you wanted to. So you stand at the edge of the once-dormant crater and watch the molten earth rise up. Soon it will fill this crater and spill over the edges. Soon the pressure beneath the earth will grow so intense that it will burst outward and rain rock and fire down into the Maui jungle.

  Amid the dancing firelight you notice an odd shadow slowly growing over the basalt.

  But when the dark blue fires begin to spring up on its body, you see that it’s not a shadow at all.

  The oily creature glides along the rim of the crater, faster and more agile than you would have ever imagined. Its dark arms firmly wrap around your biceps in an unbreakable hold. Where it touches you, your body goes eternally cold, never to feel warm again. Even the lava pooling in the crater starts to cool as your concentration wanes, embers dying in the night air.

  Thirty blue eyes flicker in the wind, and the gray mouth of the creature finally opens to speak. “Your own kin sleeps in the village below,” it rasps, “yet you would still bring destruction to the island?”

  You should probably struggle to break free, to flee down the volcano and take refuge in the jungle. Instead you let go. You let the creature absorb you into the light-less womb of its gelatinous belly.

  Before the world goes dark, the creature offers you its final words:

  “You will get a second chance, Pele. You will walk the earth again, to hopefully bring life where you have brought destruction and catastrophe before.” There comes a long silence.

  “But first,” the creature continues without apology, “we’re going to have to break you.”

  THE HORNET’S NEST

  Tuesday

  It wasn’t the first time Ash had gathered with other gods on a California beach, but it was the first time she’d gathered with this many.

  When she, along with Wes and Eve, had arrived at the Crescent City airport in the morning, she felt this strange mixture of fear and relief at the thought of no one responding to Serena’s call for help. Her fear stemmed from the fact that they might have to face Colt’s new pantheon of evil gods on their own, a few versus twenty, and that Colt might grow one step closer to his reign of terror over the human race. It would be a relief, however, that she wouldn’t have to put any innocent strangers in harm’s way.

  For better or worse, as she stood with Wes, Serena, and Eve in the warm Pacific breeze on a beach just outside Crescent City, gods began to filter in. They were coming from all over, so their flights were staggered, and they all wore the same perplexed expression once they discovered the “welcoming committee” waiting for them at the beach. Serena’s siren call had only broadcast a desperate sense of urgency for the courageous at heart to assemble at this location. One by one, Ash had to fill them in on details when they arrived. Some seemed angry to have been lured away from their everyday lives; some continued to look dazed, feeling like they’d somehow sleepwalked through the last twenty-four hours as they traveled halfway around the world to convene with a series of strangers on an unfamiliar beach. Most of them had trouble swallowing Ash’s story as she explained it; she couldn’t blame them for wondering if she was a complete whack-job.

  When the shock wore off, all the gathered gods shared one thing in common, however: They all seemed relieved to come in contact with others of their own kind. Remaining camouflaged as a mortal was a taxing job for people who had to conceal such extraordinary, supernatural gifts.

  Serena had come up with the idea of turning the assembly into a barbecue. The idea of loafing around the beach like they were on spring break, chowing down on burgers and hotdogs, felt a little off-kilter to Ash, especially given that they were possibly going to war later that same day. But they did need to fuel up, and the food helped to diffuse whatever tension the newly arrived gods were feeling as they tried to soak in the story Ash was spinning for them.

  It was also worth it to watch as Serena, blind though she might have been, manned the charcoal grill like a culinary master.

  The best surprises were two arrivals that Ash knew well. First, Ixtab—pronounced “Esh-tawb”—the Mayan goddess of the gallows. Ash had met her only once in Miami, but felt a deep affection for the girl. Ixtab led a tough life. Her gift—if you could call it that at all—was that whenever a person in the world died through violence, Ixtab telepathically traveled to the victim’s side to help him find peace in his final moment. Because of this, she drifted in and out of apparent focus constantly, almost as though she were epileptic. Ash was just grateful to see her alive, since the girl had vanished without a trace in Miami.

  The second familiar face was Ade, the Zulu thunder god. With Rolfe, Lily, and now Raja all dead, Ade and Ash were the remaining gods from Blackwood, unless they counted Serena, who was a weird, weird chick, and more a harbinger of doom than an actual friend. Tears had pooled in Ash’s eyes when she saw the Haitian boy crest the dune—he was hard to miss, since he had a broad-shouldered, muscular body that seemed incongruous with his boyish face. He closed the distance between them in no time at all, and suddenly his arms were wrapped firmly around her. The last time she’d encountered him, he’d been drugged and sedated as the hostage of a crime syndicate in Miami. Not that the circumstances of their reunion now were much better.

  When he pulled away, he scanned the group of gods that was milling around them. “Raja’s not here yet?” he asked.

  Ash set her lips in a grim line. All she could do was slowly shake her head until he understood. He looked down at his feet. Ash wondered if he felt the same survivor’s guilt that she was starting to experience, as her friends dwindled in number around her.

  Ixtab pulled Ash aside at one point. “Thanks to my abilities, I’ve actually made a few out-of-body trips to the Blackwood campus, where the Dark Pantheon is gathered.” Ixtab was able to identify some of the evil gods they would be up against too: A Mayan bat demon named Camazotz and a brutal goddess of the dead named Hel from Norse mythology, to name a few. “They’re so hotheaded and volatile from having been imprisoned all these years that they’ve been murdering each other over petty, nonsensical disagreements,” she explained.

  “Good news for us,” Ash said. “The more they diminish their own numbers before we get there, the better.”

  But that didn’t seem to put Ixtab at ease. “Yes and no,” she said. “These gods, Ashline . . . They’ve lost all perspective. Whatever humanity they had before the Cloak locked them away, it’s flaked away over the course of time and left something raw and destructive in its place.”

  Ash didn’t even hear Eve come up behind her on the beach. “It’s the life tree,” Eve said. “The Cloak were wrong. They thought that gods-turned-evil were just flawed models that they could harvest for their tree, and the tree would rehabilitate them over time, correct the flaws, and produce a stronger, more selfless person. But it has the opposite effect.” Her eyes went glassy, and Ash coul
d tell she was thinking of her short stay in the leafy prison. “While you’re in that tree, you’re not just left to your own thoughts—you can feel the darkness of the others in the tree as well, flowing through it like toxic sewage. It scorches you, poisons you. And when you’re finally freed, all you can think is: Someone has to pay for what they’ve done to me.”

  Eve had never talked about her time in the Cloak prison before, so this was news to Ash. And Eve had only been attached to the tree for a little over a month. She couldn’t imagine the kind of venom that the others might have accumulated after being locked away for centuries.

  “There’s more,” Ixtab continued. “While Colt waits for you in a stone tower off the coast, a Celtic goddess has been stewing mutiny among the Dark Pantheon. Colt had promised the safe passage of you and your sister before, but don’t expect these gods to honor that. When we head into battle in those woods, you’re just as vulnerable as the rest of us.”

  Epona, Ash thought darkly. She spared the girl’s life back in Massachusetts, and now the girl was convincing the hornet’s nest to sting her. No surprises there.

  Gradually, the sun approached the horizon. The food had been mostly devoured, and the sense of restlessness was palpable. Most of the twelve arrivals were complete strangers to Ash—gods from pantheons ranging from Central America to the Far East. There were, however, two other recognizable faces in the mix: Papa and Rangi. Without access to memories from their previous lives, they clearly didn’t recognize Ash and Eve, nor did they, fortunately, remember that Pele had murdered them two lifetimes ago. In fact Rangi and Papa hadn’t even arrived together. This is how it’s supposed to be, Ash thought. Everyone gets a fresh start.

  Ash knew it was time, but suddenly she wondered what sort of solace or motivation to fight she really had to offer these people. While the threat of the Dark Pantheon was very real, “the world is at stake” was such an abstract and broad and almost ridiculous claim for anyone to wrap their mind around. But she needed to say something.