Afterglow

by Karsten Knight

  At the lighthouse’s impressive summit, backlit by the glow of a fire, a man stood at the edge, staring down the coast in their direction. It was impossible to distinguish any of his features from this far away, but it had to be Colt.

  “I think it’s time to go break up with our old flame,” Eve said to Ash.

  Ash nodded in agreement. “And let’s not let him down gently. . . .”

  CALDERA

  Wednesday, Part I

  As Ash and Eve passed through the entrance into the dark interior of the towering lighthouse, the first thing they noticed was the staircase. Ash illuminated her hand at the same time Eve let an electric luminescence glow around hers, two torches floating in the dark. Thick stone steps spiraled around the inside walls, a helix wrapping around the tapered shell of the tower. They eventually disappeared high above, through an aperture in the ceiling.

  Ash immediately started for the stairwell, but Eve caught her by the wrist. Eve opened and closed her mouth several times; whatever she wanted to say, she was fighting tooth and nail not to let it come out. “Look,” Eve said once her lips finally cooperated. “Anything could happen up there, so I just wanted you to know . . . shit,” Eve said, unable to get it out on the first try. A glossy coating had formed over her eyes, glistening bluish white from her electric torch. “I spent so much of my life being a bitch that sometimes saying something human is like trying to vomit up a bowling ball.”

  Ash rubbed her sister’s arm and smiled wanly. “Lovely image.”

  “The point is,” Eve continued, “I hope you realize that I never ran away from Scarsdale because of you.” She gazed up to the roof, where their hostage parents presumably awaited them. “I didn’t even run away because of them. I just woke up every morning in my bed and saw what a monster I was gradually becoming. I mean, there’s teen angst, but the awful, hurtful things I started to say to everyone, the parties, the drinking, the fights at school . . . I lost control. I walked all over our parents, and then my friends at school, and eventually . . . even my best friend.” Her wet eyes fell on Ash. “It was like this out-of-body experience. No matter how much I kept telling myself that I needed to be a better person, my mouth just kept saying the same caustic shit, and my fists just kept on swinging. So I ran. Far away. I did it to find a fresh start, but every time I found myself alone in a bathroom—in rest stops, in hostels, in abandoned apartments where I’d squat—I always ended up looking at myself in the mirror, thinking, ‘You used to be such a good kid, Eve. What happened to you?’ ”

  “You may think you’ve said or done things so terrible that you can’t come back to us,” Ash said. “But then why have Mom and Dad still spent the last year clinging to every hope that you’d eventually come home? And as for me, I went to hell and back—literally—to find you. We never gave up on you.” Ash pointed to the stairs. “So let’s go up there, save our parents, kill an unkillable trickster . . . and if we make it out of this alive, I promise we won’t have to wait until our next lifetimes to make a fresh start . . . together.”

  Eve gave a dark, curt laugh. “Be careful how you use the word ‘together,’ considering there’s a psychopath up there trying to blend us into a single brain for the rest of eternity.”

  It took them a solid three minutes to travel up the spiral staircase. While it was tempting to run to the top to confront the trickster and his hit man, Colt probably wanted them to show up out of breath and too bedraggled to fight.

  When Ash climbed the final step and popped up onto the lighthouse’s observation deck, it was like walking into a cocktail party full of people she never wanted to see. Colt and Rose stood together at the edge of the platform, looking out over the Pacific Ocean like they were just some happy couple on a Caribbean cruise. Itzli stood guard next to Ash’s parents, who lay in a special cell the stone god had constructed for them. There were no sides to it, or bars, like a normal prison—instead the Wildes lay on one slab of stone, while a second, thicker slab that must have weighed at least a few tons loomed several feet over them. It was supported at each corner by four precarious-looking supports, also made of stone. If more than one of the supports gave way, the top slab would make a short drop and crash down on Thomas and Gloria. It looked heavy enough to pulverize bone if that happened.

  Colt smiled when he realized they’d arrived. He checked an imaginary watch on his wrist. “Right on time, ladies,” he said, then gestured around at the lighthouse. “What do you think of our lighthouse, now that you’ve had the tour?”

  Ash shrugged and cast an unimpressed look at Itzli. “Shoddy workmanship. A three-hundred-foot stone tower, and you don’t even install an elevator?” She pointed to the stone booby trap containing her parents. “That canopy bed doesn’t look too sturdy either. I mean, seriously guys—are you gods, or are you two boys in a sandbox building castles out of Legos?”

  Itzli remained stoic, but Colt laughed gaily at her joke, like they were sharing a friendly bottle of wine over dinner. “I’ve missed your sense of humor, Pele.”

  Ash shuddered. In his mind, Colt truly did see the three of them not as individuals, but as fragments of one person. To him, they were all Pele. “You know,” she said. “I’m not sure how well you really remember the old Pele, because I’ve had a chance to relive a few visions of her, and she wasn’t exactly a stand-up comedian. She was more along the lines of a—what’s the word for it . . .? Oh yeah: a crazy bitch who electrocuted and burned her friends alive. All for the sake of some lying, lonely trickster who washed up on her shores.”

  “You loved me!” Colt screamed. In an instant he switched gears from his grinning trickster-self into crazed, unrestrained malice. He worked so hard to maintain an air of control all the time; Ash had only seen him completely lose it like this twice before. “I gave you the gift of a glimpse into your old memories, let you peer into the looking glass of time so that you’d realize that we loved each other. Deeply. Loyally. Enough so that, yes, you were willing to cremate anyone that got in our way. Yet even after bearing witness to the greatest love story of all time, you still fight this. Why? Why won’t you let me fix you? Why won’t you just let me love you again? Why won’t you let yourself love me back?”

  As absolutely insane and illogical as Colt had become, his outburst made him transparent just long enough for Ash to see him for who he truly was: a scared, lonely boy. He might be in the body of a college-aged student, but his brain was struggling with the weight of a few thousand years’ worth of memories. Finding Pele again, for him, wasn’t just about romance or sex or world domination—she was the only person volatile and unhinged enough to get him. To understand all his whack-job idiosyncrasies, to revel in his millennia-long history of conquests and trickery.

  To maybe even love him back—the whole him.

  After seeing this fractured, almost human component to his soul, Ash decided to try a tactic she’d almost given up on with him: appealing to his humanity, or at least what little of it that remained. “Colt, as much as the way you’ve gone about this has been twisted and warped and hurt a whole lot of people, I don’t doubt that your love for Pele was very real. And I’m not saying the Cloak were right when they split our soul into three pieces like they did. But that doesn’t mean that putting us back together, against our will, is right either. Maybe we were fragments at one point, but those fragments have grown into full souls, different personalities that are too big and too diverse to squeeze back into the one-brain container they originally came in. There’s no going back.” She took a step toward him. “Love isn’t just about fiery, unrestrained passion, or two kindred spirits. It’s about choice. It’s about choosing to be with that one person whose fire burns so bright in our eyes that the other six billion people in the world don’t even feel like an option. You just know.”

  Colt laughed sardonically and gestured around him, then back in the direction of Blackwood Academy. “Considering all that I’ve done to get you back, I think it’s pretty clear that I’ve chosen you.�
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  “Yes, but I have to choose you, too!” Ash shot back. “We would have to choose you. To choose the life you’ve somehow already decided for us. But this . . .” She pointed to the stone prison and her parents lying inside it. “This isn’t choice. It’s coercion.”

  Her logic fell on deaf ears—Colt’s face returned to its normal placid state, and he started talking as though their conversation hadn’t taken such a dramatic detour. “In order to reunite Pele, the three of you are going to have to return to the stormy, primordial fire from which you came. Together, you must draw a volcano from these waters. Then, with your minds quiet and your hearts focused, you must bathe in its crater . . . then you will rise from the lava as one.”

  “Wait, wait, wait.” Eve held up a hand. “Your plan to mold us back into Pele . . . is to have us sacrifice ourselves in a volcano? In case you were unaware, one of us—me—is not fireproof like the others.”

  “There is no healing without pain first.” Colt smiled ironically. “Trust me, I would know.”

  “And if we don’t?” Ash asked, even though she already knew the answer. She looked to the stone prison that held her parents. The supports quivered, and Ash could now see that Itzli was actually concentrating on the stones to get them to balance like that. Should his concentration break . . .

  “Let’s not ask obvious questions, Ashline. Banal conversation is beneath you,” Colt said. “But if you need it spelled out: If you two attempt to fight this in any way, if you try to take out either me or my associate with a strong gust of wind, or lightning strike, or explosion, or burst of flames—hell, if you sneeze the wrong way in our direction—the vibrations could easily topple the stones supporting that top slab. It will crush your parents instantly like a boot to an egg. Have you ever seen a juicer squeeze an orange until every last drop drips out the bottom?” He let the image sink in until Ash could visualize the blood seeping out of the stone corners.

  Only now did Ash truly see the impossible choice Colt had put before them. In her head she’d envisioned that she and Eve would outsmart the trickster, somehow using their powers to both rescue her parents and prevent Colt from gluing them back into the supergoddess they came from.

  But the risks involved were too great, his booby trap too well-conceived, and now they would have to choose: retain their individuality and kill Colt, while almost definitely sacrificing their parents, or submit to Colt’s bidding so that he might let their parents live.

  To Ash, the choice was a horrible yet obvious one. The only reason that the Wildes were involved in this was because they had had the heart to adopt two orphaned baby girls sixteen years ago and give them a shot at a good life. They had nothing to do with Colt’s disgusting quest, yet it was they who might die for it. Her parents were also mortals. They only had this one life on Earth, aside from whatever the afterlife had in store for them. Even though Ash might lose part of her individuality as Pele, at least a piece of her—and of Eve, and Rose—would have a chance of coming back lifetime after lifetime.

  When Ash turned to Eve to gauge her reaction, she saw that her older sister was looking at their parents, who were helpless and still as corpses. There were tears in Eve’s eyes again. “I took them for granted,” she said, her voice breaking. “I took them for granted when they made so many sacrifices for us. It’s about time . . .”

  She couldn’t get the last part out, but Ash could see the rest of the sentence written in her eyes.

  It’s about time we make a sacrifice for them.

  Ash didn’t see any other option. Thomas and Gloria Wilde had taught her everything she knew about family and love, and now Colt would use both of those “weaknesses” against her. Ash and Eve didn’t say anything to each other after that; they just both stepped sullenly up to the edge of the lighthouse platform together.

  Three hundred feet below, the Pacific waters looked calm, but they wouldn’t be for long. Ash held out her hands. Although her abilities had grown in spurts over the last few months, she’d never accomplished anything quite on this scale before. It was going to take all the energy that she had. Even gods weren’t without their limitations, were they?

  Ash shot a vengeful look over her shoulder at Itzli. “You better concentrate hard on those supports,” she told him. “It’s going to get a little bumpy, and if anything happens to my parents, it’s you who will be bathing in the volcano.”

  Itzli nodded once.

  Ash returned her attention to the waters. When she reached out, she could feel the sandy sea floor hidden beneath them, then the earth’s crust beneath that. She let her consciousness descend down, down until she could feel the geothermal warmth, the molten furnace within the earth. Her fists tightened as she harnessed that power. A single word escaped her lips in a rasp:

  “Rise.”

  The waters had been dark before, except for the moonlight reflecting off them. But now an orange glow pulsated from the depths. It grew brighter as more magma trickled up through the fissure she’d cracked in the earth’s crust. Steam rose off the sea until at last the lava piled high enough that it breached the surface.

  The molten rock bubbled up in a fierce yellow before it cooled and died to orange, then red, then hardened into rock. But even as that rock hardened, more lava piled up and took its place, slowly forming an anthill-shaped cone.

  The base of the volcano kept growing wider, starting the size of an inner tube barely visible from Ash’s perch, to the width of a car, then a semitrailer, then a basketball court. All the while the summit continued to rise higher: five feet, ten feet, twenty feet. The fissure on top caved in on itself, forming a crater, and more lava spilled out over its rim.

  As it continued to rise, Ash could feel the power surging up in her, and for one out-of-control moment, she wasn’t herself. She could feel what it was like to be Pele again, taste it, the devastating, earth-rending power that no one being should wield.

  Eve extended her arms. With her hands spinning in small circles, a stormy wind descended upon the rising volcano. The gales twisted and shaped the soft molten rock, smoothing its contours into a gentle slope. Eve, too, seemed to be tapping into a taste of what it was like to be Pele, because now and again blinding lightning bolts would hammer down near the top of the mountain, blowing away sections of rock, only for her winds to smooth the gouges over again.

  Rose, too, joined them, sensing the opportunity to use her own gifts. Until this point the volcano’s formation had been a fairly fluid process. However, as soon as Rose pointed to the crater, an explosion rocked the summit. The volcano spewed a fiery boulder into the air. The boulder left the crater with such incredible speed that the enormous, burning cannonball sailed up into the sky, penetrating Eve’s dark storm clouds. Far off in the distance the boulder finally dropped back through the clouds, but its trajectory had carried it so far away that the tank-size stone looked like a tiny fiery marble as it plunked into the sea.

  Ash took her gaze off the process long enough to make sure Itzli was holding the stone prison steady despite the heavy vibrations. In that brief look she also caught Rose’s expression illuminated in the flickering firelight, a crazed grin gleaming on her face.

  When the volcano had risen nearly to the height of their stone lighthouse, Ash finally felt the last reserves of her energy dry up. She dropped to one knee and dry-heaved a few times, so exhausted that she felt nauseous. Sweat dripped from her bowed head.

  Colt was applauding gleefully. “Good, good! Do you see how coming together makes you that much more powerful?”

  “Right,” Ash grumbled. “Because raising whole volcanoes out of the ocean is that useful in everyday life. So what now—we just go over there, climb Mount Pele, and go for a dip in the lava?” Her typical defensive sarcasm was still coming out, but it sounded oddly flat and without resonance, since she realized that she was about to possibly vanquish her individuality as she knew it.

  Colt nodded. Now that the end was so near, he seemed to be enjoying every word ou
t of her mouth with an intense sexual ecstasy. “Your Pele instincts should take over when the time is right. The three shards of you have always been magnetically drawn back to each other; you just have to give them the right circumstances to merge.”

  “And what guarantee do we have that this will work?” Eve asked. “Where did you look this up, anyway, Wikipedia?”

  “There is an old seer in Hawai‘i, a man who can gaze into the future and wander its many branching roads,” Colt explained. “Each century he is reborn, just like us. These days he’s regarded as a kook, a crazed homeless man who spends his days fishing beer cans out of recycling bins to turn a dime. However, those who stop to listen to him discover that his ravings aren’t madness—they’re prophecy.”

  It must be the same man who’d prophesied the destructive touch of the Driftwood Stranger.

  And he’d certainly been right about that one.

  Ash wanted to stall longer, but she could find no more questions to ask. It would be better to get this over with before her self-preservation instincts took over. She cast one last look at her sleeping parents and wondered, Will I still feel the same way about you both when I return as Pele? Will I still love you, still be capable of loving you? Or will I look at you as disgusting, expendable mortals and cut ties with you completely?

  Ash stopped in front of Itzli on her way back to the staircase. He was taller than her, but she raised herself up so that her nose nearly touched his. “If my parents aren’t here, alive and unscathed, when I get back, we’re going to play a little game of rock-lava-lightning.” She leaned and whispered into his ear. “And we won’t be playing best out of three.”