Afterglow

by Karsten Knight

  The two of them had been so fixated on the cougar that they didn’t hear the other creatures creeping up behind them until a bear stepped on a dry leaf. Ash spun around to find not one but five undead animals surrounding them, with Hel a few paces to their rear. Her nappy, twig-littered hair ran all the way down to her waist, and she flashed them an ugly, taunting smile.

  As Ash and Erebus backed into a redwood, not daring to turn their backs on the pack of bears and coyotes that was slowly closing in on them, Erebus whispered to Ash, “Now would be a good time to cast a little light for me.”

  Ash didn’t question Erebus, even though she knew the zombie animals wouldn’t fear fire like a living creature might. She just launched a fireball down into the ground in front of them, which erupted in an impromptu bonfire.

  The firelight bathed the zombie animals in its red glow, casting long shadows behind them.

  Ash watched with morbid delight as Erebus raised his hands . . . and the shadows of the animals came to life.

  The silhouettes emerged from the soil, no longer in two dimensions but three, and the distorted, darker versions of the zombie creatures were even larger and more terrifying than their originals.

  Hel blanched as she saw the silhouettes turn on her. She didn’t even have time to run before the pack of ravenous shadows pounced. Her awful, earsplitting screams only lasted a few seconds before one of the shadow bears ripped out her throat with its teeth.

  Instantly the five zombie animals in front of Ash and Erebus crumpled lifelessly to the ground, once more becoming rotting cadavers, as they had been before Hel disturbed their eternal rest.

  “Killer shadow puppets?” Ash said, impressed, and toed the black-bear carcass in front of her. “And I really thought I’d seen everything . . .”

  Erebus gave her a humble grin and shrugged. “You know what they say about being afraid of your own—”

  In a flourish of ugly translucent wings, the red-eyed bat god—the one Ixtab had identified as Camazotz, a demon of sorts from Mayan mythology—dropped out of the mist and raked his sharp talons across Erebus’s throat. The shadow god immediately grasped his neck to cover the wound, but blood just oozed out between his fingers and down onto his T-shirt.

  Ash released a vengeful cry and lunged for Camazotz, but without even turning around, the bat god dropped to his hands and bucked out with both of his legs, like a rodeo bull. His feet connected with Ash’s stomach, and she tripped over an exposed root as she fell backward.

  Ash was on fire by the time she even got to her feet. Camazotz stood between her and Erebus, who was curled up on the forest floor, still applying pressure to his neck. There was less blood pumping out now, which could mean that the demon’s claw had missed the boy’s jugular . . . or it could just mean that he was already running out of blood. Either way, Erebus was going to need medical attention soon.

  Just as Ash stepped forward, preparing to flame broil the bat god, a strange sensation came over her. The corona that had erupted around her started to dim, the flames retracting back into her body against her will. Her lungs felt heavy, and she realized that the air she was breathing in was suddenly devoid of oxygen. Her mouth opened impotently, trying to draw in fresh air, but the burning in her lungs only worsened.

  That’s when Sila stepped into view from where she’d been lurking under the cover of mist. Her fingers were curled tight, and she never took her gaze off Ash. “Traitor,” Ash rasped. The girl had to be on Colt’s payroll, which meant the story she’d told them about her brain-dead sister was probably bullshit, too. At least Ash no longer needed to guess who’d alerted the Dark Pantheon to prepare an ambush for them.

  With the Inuit air goddess stealing Ash’s oxygen, it was impossible for Ash to tap into her fiery abilities. Camazotz and Sila watched her intently, content to let her asphyxiate. Even as the inky spots blossomed in her sight and Ash began to panic, she noticed a large outline appear in the mist behind the two sinister gods.

  Ash staggered to the right, which prompted Sila to laugh. “Moving around won’t get you the oxygen that your lungs are so desperately yearning for,” the Inuit goddess ribbed her. “The vacuum goes where you go, Pele.”

  Ash dropped to one knee a few steps later. “Not searching for air,” she croaked. “Just moving out of the way.”

  That’s when Ade sent a hard current of thunder into the two standing gods. The blast of thunder bowled both of them over, but the less fortunate Sila collided with a nine-foot-wide redwood headfirst before dropping to the ground.

  Camazotz landed closer to Ash. He struggled to his feet with his hands covering his explosively ringing ears, but the concussion from the thunder had discombobulated him. Ash pinned his right wing to the forest floor with an angry drive of her boot, then leaned in close so he could hear her. “I knew another winged god once,” she said, referring to Aurora. “I liked her far better than you.”

  With a fierce twist of the bat god’s head, she broke Camazotz’s neck, and he slumped back into the dirt.

  When Ash finally removed her foot from the dead god’s wing, she turned her attention back to Erebus. Ade was kneeling over him and wrapping a section of his own T-shirt around the shadow god’s throat. Ixtab had also managed to find her way back to them, and Ash was relieved to see that no gods or undead animals had torn the Mayan girl to shreds.

  Erebus was moaning something in a low rasp—Camazotz’s claw must have nicked his vocal cords. “I don’t think his jugular was hit,” Ade said, and Ash felt a wave of relief. “He might sound like a James Bond villain from now on, but he’s going to be okay.”

  “Do you think you can navigate your way with him to the Blackwood campus?” Ash asked Ade, who nodded. This part of the forest was a cell phone dead zone, but Ade would be able to call for help from campus. “I’m hoping it will be god-free since all the bad apples seem to be out here in the woods. But if you come across anyone who shouldn’t be there . . .” Ash spread her hands. “Make their ears ring in the afterlife.”

  With no time to waste, Ade scooped up the fallen god as delicately as he could and hurried off into the mist. Ash and Ixtab continued through the forest in the direction they hoped would reconnect them with Wes, Eve, and the others. Midnight was fast approaching, and even though Ash had committed to battling it out with the Dark Pantheon first, time was dwindling down to the deadline Colt had given her for meeting him at the lighthouse.

  The woods were disconcertingly quiet as Ash and Ixtab walked through the mist. Ash tried to not read into this—Wes and the others weren’t about to start shouting and giving away their location to any other demented gods who happened to be lurking nearby. Still, she couldn’t keep her imagination from traveling to dark places. The thick mist around them was a blank canvas that was just asking for morbid thoughts to be painted upon it. . . .

  A curious sound finally interrupted the silence, quiet at first, but growing louder. It was the sound of a rope swinging rhythmically back and forth. As they traveled toward the noise, a shape appeared through the curtain of steam: a large pendulum of sorts, a thick object swinging from the bottom of the rope.

  Once they took several more steps through the trees, Ash recognized it for what it was: The rope was a vine.

  The object at the end of it was Papa.

  She was dangling upside down by one foot, the vine fastened around her ankle. Her hair swished around her face as the rope listed back and forth. The earth goddess was still alive, but there was a gash across her skull and a growing bruise where she’d been struck with a blunt object. Her eyes squinted in and out of focus at Ash and Ixtab, dulled by whatever concussion she’d been dealt.

  Ixtab drew a pocketknife from her jeans and immediately started toward Papa, preparing to cut her down. Ash paused in her tracks, sensing that something was afoot. “Ixtab, wait—” she whispered harshly to the knife-wielding goddess.

  There was the creak of a second vine, somewhere in the canopy above. Ash realized the ambush that was
happening, but even though she rushed forward to tackle Ixtab to the ground, she didn’t reach her in time.

  Ixtab never knew what hit her. On the end of a long vine, swinging like a deadly pendulum, a boulder-size clump of thorns slammed into Ixtab. It lifted her up in the air, with the long, Jurassic-size thorns sticking into her like she was a pin cushion. The booby trap finally dumped her unceremoniously against the trunk of a tree. She sat there, slumped like a broken doll against the colossal redwood, multiple stains of red soaking into her tank top.

  Ash sprinted for the girl, dodging the pendulum as it made a slower second pass in the opposite direction. Ixtab was wheezing hard with shallow breaths—the brambles must have pierced her lungs.

  A figure dropped out of the trees, landing between Ash and her fallen friend. She recognized Tane, the Polynesian forest spirit, both from her visions and from when Colt liberated him from the life tree. He must have also been the one uprooting those redwood trees back on the 101.

  Ash thrust out both hands, showering Tane with dual spouts of fire, but his powers were quicker on the draw. A series of barklike plates slid over his entire body, an organic armor that covered him from head to toe. It finished in a helmet with bestial ears and eye slits exposed just enough for Ash to see his green, glowing eyes staring out at her. Most wood might burn or scorch, but Tane’s new wooden plating meant that Ash’s fire just washed around him innocuously.

  Redwood bark. He’d armored himself with redwood bark, one of the most fireproof of all the world’s trees.

  Sure enough, when Ash finally turned off her internal pilot light, Tane had only suffered a light singe to his bark. He looked down at the black marks on his armor and the steam rising off them as though Ash had just scuffed his favorite sports car. Then he wound back with his arm and backhanded Ash with the hard, spiky edge of his forearm. She tumbled back so far, she nearly wound up back in the path of the swinging bramble ball.

  Ash touched the bloody edge of her lip, but stood tall and resolute as Tane strode toward her. “You’re not the first plant god to try to kill me,” she said, spitting a bloody wad at Tane’s feet. “You can join the last one in the compost pile.”

  “Ignite all you want, Pele,” Tane growled. The jovial spirit of the Tane that Pele had known two hundred years ago was gone, replaced with something inhumane and vicious. “But you can’t make a bonfire out of fireproof logs.” Tane held up both arms, letting the thorny quills grow longer and sharper out of them. Then he lunged for Ash, preparing to skewer her.

  A gunshot resounded through the woods. Tane’s body stiffened mid-flight and Ash sidestepped him as he crashed limply down. He landed helmet-first on the bramble pendulum, shuddered, then went still.

  At the base of his neck, where the wooden armor was thinnest, a single bullet hole smoked faintly.

  Ash looked over toward Ixtab. The girl was still slumped against the tree, but she held a pistol stiffly out in front of her. It must have been concealed in her waistband all this time—she hadn’t been kidding when she’d said she intended to fight with more material means.

  Once Ixtab was sure that Tane wasn’t getting up, her gun arm fell weakly to her side. “Fireproof,” she rasped, using her last breath. “But not bulletproof . . .”

  Her quaking chest seized after the last word, and though she died looking at Ash, her eyes stared piercingly into an altogether different world.

  Ash knelt over the girl and wept. She barely had enough strength to gently close Ixtab’s eyes. The Mayan goddess of the gallows had seen enough of this lifetime. Ixtab had spent most of her days comforting others in their final moments and shepherding them into the beyond—it was the blessing and the burden of her powers.

  But when the gallows goddess died, who was there to comfort her in her final moment?

  Eventually, Papa’s moans snapped Ash out of her mourning. Ash picked up the switchblade Ixtab had dropped and used it to saw through the vine. Just as Ash sheered through the last plant fiber, she managed to catch Papa before she could drop headfirst to the dirt.

  “Thanks,” Papa mumbled dazedly after Ash was sure the woman was lucid enough to stand on her own two feet. Papa’s eyes focused and refocused as she recovered from the concussion. She didn’t regain her bearings until her gaze fell upon Ixtab’s blood-stained body. “I’m sorry,” the earth goddess said. “You knew her well?”

  “No,” Ash replied. “Yet she was still one of the most selfless people I’ve ever known.”

  A primitive scream sounded through the mist, followed by the galloping of hooves. Difficult as it was to see through the steamy forest, Ash knew the girl riding toward them on horseback could only be the wretched Epona. As Epona came into view, Ash saw that the insane redhead had a long, sharp-tipped spear cocked back and ready to throw. She aimed the metal javelin at Ash.

  Ash was sick of all these games, all this detestable violence. Papa, too, stood her ground with no small amount of contempt.

  “This one’s for Ixtab and Rangi,” Ash said, and let a single, explosive flare burst from her open palm.

  The flare struck the ground just in front of the wild mare and ignited into a crackling fire. The horse, which had been charging like it was in the front line of a Civil War cavalry charge, bucked wildly at the sight of the flames, throwing Epona from the saddle. She flipped over the fire before landing hard on her back.

  Epona tried to regain her footing and reach for her fallen spear, but Papa waved her hand at the soil beneath the Celtic goddess. The earth around her liquefied in a matter of seconds, and Epona plunged into the quicksand.

  For a moment, Ash thought the girl was going to drown, but Epona’s head resurfaced through the muck. Her red hair and freckled cheeks were filthy with mud, and she groped around wildly for the edge of the sand pit with panicked, unsure gasps.

  Papa wasn’t done with her yet. The earth goddess drew her hands back, and just as quickly as the soil had liquefied, it hardened back into a solid. Epona let out a series of frightened, mousy squeaks, but to no avail—the hard-packed earth locked around her, burying her from the neck down.

  The image nearly made Ash laugh. It reminded her of the time she’d encased Colt in rock up to his waist.

  While Epona continued her impotent struggle to escape, groaning with exertion, Ash whispered something to Papa, who smiled darkly.

  “What’s so funny?” Epona snarled, only her head visible above the quicksand. “Are you freaks joking about how you’re going to kill me?”

  Ash shook her head. “We’re not going to kill you, Epona,” she said, and waited long enough for Epona’s face to soften with hope. “But,” Ash continued, and gestured to the now hard-packed soil beneath her feet, “I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but you’re buried up to your head in the center of a natural valley in the forest floor.” She glanced meaningfully up at the sky. “And the forecast tonight calls for rain . . . a lot of it.”

  There might have been mud coating Epona’s face, but Ash was sure that even the girl’s freckles must have gone white as she imagined the natural crater filling up, the rains flowing down the slopes and pooling around her head, her mouth and nose slowly disappearing under the rising water level. . . .

  “My best advice?” Ash knelt down and slapped the side of Epona’s face lightly with her hand. “Drink real fast.”

  They left Epona, whose fruitless efforts to free herself were accompanied by small, sobbing shrieks. Once they were out of earshot, Papa said to Ash, “The forecast tonight called for clear skies, didn’t it?”

  “It did,” Ash said. “But when your sister’s a storm goddess, there’s always a chance of rain.”

  “Speak of the devil,” Papa said.

  Because they’d stumbled upon Eve in the mist.

  Eve was leaning against a redwood, looking a little bored. At her feet, Ash recognized Tangaroa, the Polynesian sea god, whose body was still convulsing with the electricity Eve had pumped into him. Ash could even see the blackened, fester
ing welt on his chest where the lightning bolt must have struck.

  “Like dropping a toaster in a bath tub,” Eve said casually.

  Tangaroa’s eyes rolled back into his head finally, but his body still continued to twitch posthumously.

  Not too far away, Ash heard Wes’s voice calling for her. Papa opened her mouth, about to summon the night god over to them, but Ash caught her by the elbow. “Listen, Papa,” Ash said. “Eve and I need to go take care of something . . . alone. But my noble boyfriend is going to want to tag along. Could you do us a solid and distract him for a few minutes?”

  Papa frowned uncertainly, but then nodded. She hurried off into the fog, which was already starting to dissipate now that Tangaroa was dead.

  “You ready for this?” Ash asked her sister.

  “Yes.” Eve’s eyes crackled with static electricity. “This was just a warm-up for what I’m going to do to Colt. I brought a little backup plan too, in case we need a distraction. . . .” Eve opened the knapsack that she’d kept on her back, long enough for Ash to see the music box inside.

  Hopefully it wouldn’t get anyone blown up this time.

  Together they headed in the direction of the coast, away from the sound of Wes’s voice. It pained her to leave him behind, especially when she couldn’t be sure there weren’t other gods from the Dark Pantheon lurking in the forest. He’d no doubt be furious that they’d confronted Colt without him, but this final battle was for the Wilde sisters alone.

  The walk lasted several miles, until the trees finally thinned, and the swooshing roll of the ocean emerged through the silence. And when they stepped out onto the pebble-strewn beach, it wasn’t hard to locate their destination.

  A half mile up the coastline, a colossal stone structure rose out of the shallows like a middle finger flipping the bird to the Pacific horizon. Itzli must have had a really good time creating the nightmarish lighthouse, because he’d designed the limestone exterior to look almost like a massive coral reef, complete with jagged rocky fingers that reached off into the night. The sadistic bastard, Ash noted with scorn, must have an artistic streak.