Afterglow

by Karsten Knight

  “Attachment is weakness,” he said in a hard Spanish-sounding accent—the first time Ash had even heard him speak. “Freedom is strength.”

  “And evil is cowardice,” Ash added before she backed away.

  It was time. She turned, heading for the hole in the platform, mentally preparing herself for the short but torturous journey that lay before her: three hundred feet down the stone steps, wading through the water to the offshore volcano, then up to the crater on top, where the lava boiled like a stew in a Crock-Pot. How would it all go down? Would she feel their consciousnesses melding together? Would it be a fluid move into Pele’s brain, with her awake the whole time, or would Ashline Wilde have to die first for Pele to rise out of the primordial womb of the volcano? Would her memories—all of their collective memories—transfer over in Pele’s rebirth? Or would the last thing she saw be the warm, liquid touch of the lava folding over her body like a blanket before everything went black?

  Ash had so many questions, and the five minute journey it was going to take wasn’t enough time to come to terms with any of it.

  At the top of the spiral staircase, she became aware that only Rose was following her. “Come on, Eve,” she started to say.

  But when she turned to look at her sister, a fist hit her square in the nose.

  CHARRED HEARTS

  Wednesday, Part II

  Ash’s world rocked as the blow hit her face. Hot and sticky blood poured out of her mangled nose, and she dropped to her hands and knees, more out of surprise than from the pain that had erupted where she’d been struck. When the initial daze wore off enough for her to get her bearings, she looked up . . . and saw that the fist that had struck her belonged to Eve.

  Eve massaged her knuckles, which had a single brush stroke of Ash’s blood smeared across them. “You fucking bitch,” Eve seethed, as furious as Ash had ever seen her—and that was saying something. “This is all your fault.”

  Before Ash could ask what the hell Eve was talking about, Eve picked her up by the front of her shirt with one hand, drew back her other, and then cuffed Ash across the cheekbone.

  More flashbulbs burst in Ash’s vision, and she staggered across the platform, so far that she nearly toppled off the edge. As the light cleared from her gaze and she stood on two wobbly legs, she saw that the fight had effectively frozen Itzli, Rose, and Colt, who were all watching in suspended animation. Colt had counted on Eve and Ash fighting back against him and Itzli . . . but he hadn’t anticipated the two of them fighting each other.

  Of course Ash hadn’t anticipated that either, so she could barely raise her arms to defend herself before Eve swung her hand from left to right and a heavy current of air hit Ash from the side. This succeeded in throwing her off-balance, and she tumbled across the stone landing before flopping hard onto her back.

  Eve loped toward Ash and knelt down on her shoulders before Ash could pick herself up. Colt was calling out for Eve to stop fighting and embrace her fate, but Eve ignored him. In fact Eve had positioned herself so that her back was now turned to Colt.

  “I hate you, Ashline!” Eve screamed with such ferocity that spittle flew into Ash’s face. However, even as Eve’s teeth were bared in a wolflike snarl, she whispered something audible only to Ash. “That volcanic flesh trick you did back at the museum—how strong is the stone?” Her eyes flickered just briefly to the stone prison and their parents.

  That’s when Ash figured out exactly what Eve’s endgame was.

  Instead of answering her, Ash bared her own teeth, and with a banshee wail she shot out both her arms into Eve’s chest.

  Eve flew up into the air and landed ten feet away on her back. The hit from Ash and the landing had both been incredibly hard, real. This wasn’t a theatrical fight where they pulled punches—it had to look completely real; neither of them could hold back.

  Colt was clearly about to intervene, so Ash knew the time to hatch their plan was quickly expiring. She circled around so that she set herself up just where she thought Eve might want her to stand, directly between Eve and their parents’ stone cell. Ash tried to relax her body for the powerful hit that she knew was about to come next.

  Everything happened incredibly fast. Eve expelled a hard gale that lifted Ash off her feet, throwing her backward. Her airborne body slipped right between the narrow gap separating the two stone slabs, so that she came to a stop lying between her two prostrate parents.

  Ash let the volcanic flesh armor every inch of her body. It ripped open her clothes in shreds as the layers of igneous rock coated her skin, and what little didn’t tear apart soon burst into flames. She knew that the heat must be scorching her parents, but they had worse injuries to worry about.

  Itzli snarled, getting ready to drop the slab on Ash and her parents, fed up with this whole ordeal. Colt screamed, “Wait!” but Itzli looked like he was done taking orders from the trickster. The Aztec stone god pulled back his arm to knock the supports free.

  He never saw Eve’s gale of wind coming. It him in the chest, and with a very effeminate final squeak he flew off the edge of the three-hundred-foot stone lighthouse he’d built.

  Without Itzli’s concentration to steady them, the supports gave way to gravity, and the three-ton stone slab collapsed. Still flat on her back like a turtle, Ash braced herself and caught the rock with the flats of her forearms and her shins, like the slab was a tabletop and her limbs were its legs. Even with her own body armored with fiery rock, the stone was so heavy that she thought her bones might break. Then she and her parents would all be flattened.

  Out of the corner of her eye she caught a glimpse of her mother’s sleeping face, comatose and distressed from whatever sedative they’d used to keep the two of them under. Her parents had always seemed so strong, vivacious, and composed, resistant to the wear and tear of middle age. Ash had hardly been aware that they were getting any older at all . . . that is until now.

  She had no doubt it was because their two children had both run away—first Eve, then Ash. It didn’t matter that Ash had only run away to boarding school, instead of a life of delinquency. It didn’t matter that she made occasional phone calls home, or Skyped her mom for an awkward conversation from time to time. Maybe she hadn’t cut them completely out of her life like a tumor, the way Eve had, but she’d pushed them away just the same, albeit with a lighter touch.

  Eve was right. They had made so many sacrifices for their adopted daughters.

  The emotions of all this renewed Ash’s strength. With a war cry that could probably be heard as far as Blackwood, she arched her back. She let the steam build up in her limbs as though they were pistons.

  And then she hurled the three-ton stone slab off her with so much force that it flew off the side of the tower. Once Ash made sure that her parents truly hadn’t been squashed by the slab, she let the volcanic armor soften back into flesh. She stretched her sore arms and legs, and joined Eve at the edge of the lighthouse. Down below they could see the slab, broken into pieces, a shattered stone commandment in the tide. Itzli’s body floated facedown in the shallows next to it.

  “You’re really developing a thing for throwing people off buildings,” Ash said.

  “My only wish,” Eve said, “is that the lighthouse had been taller.”

  Their parents were safe, but there was still the matter of Colt and Rose. Colt was standing at the edge of the lighthouse, tensed and ready for action. Ash could see in his eyes that he knew he’d lost this round. But Colt was regenerative, just like his powers—you couldn’t maim him or cut him out of your life. If he got away now, he’d just find a way back into their existence, again and again, until he finally succeeded.

  Colt turned and took a wild leap off the lighthouse, trying to pull the same stunt he had back at RazorWire Laboratories. He would just hit the water below, take the pain, let his body mend itself quickly, and then escape off into the night.

  Eve was ready for him though. A massive updraft of tornado-force winds caught him mid-f
light, and for a moment his body hung in the air cartoonishly, his limbs windmilling. Then the gust tossed him right back up onto the lighthouse platform. Eve sent a heavy current of lightning through his body to subdue him, and Colt writhed on the stone, his body shuddering with a violent seizure.

  Before Ash and Eve could converge on him though, they heard a strange sound: It was the tinkling of a music box.

  Rose sat on the edge of the lighthouse platform, cradling the music box that Ash had salvaged from her old home. She must have spotted it poking out of Eve’s abandoned knapsack and grabbed for it in a moment of anxiety, hoping that the familiar song would comfort her.

  Only this time, when the melody reached a certain point, the gears inside caught. Rose frowned and then wound the key several more times. Again the glockenspiel-like music danced lightly on . . . until it reached the same point in the song. The box must have been damaged when Rose exploded back in Central Park, after hearing it the last time. Now, every time the music snagged on that one note, Rose grew increasingly distressed.

  The rumbling of the offshore volcano crescendoed suddenly, and the stone lighthouse bucked hard under their feet. The unexpected earthquake caught Rose by surprise, and the music box slipped out of her grasp.

  Ash watched in horrified slow motion as the music box hit the stone platform.

  As it bounced over the edge.

  As Rose let out a half-sob and reached unsteadily for the familiar toy.

  And as she lost her balance and slipped right off the edge with it.

  Ash and Eve both cried out, but it was Colt who wailed the loudest. Ash started to take a step toward the lighthouse edge to look down, but the thought of what she might see in the water below was just too much to handle.

  Colt rolled onto his side, practically foaming at the mouth as he glowered viciously up at the two remaining Wilde sisters. There was no love left in his eyes. “Look what you’ve done!” he snarled. “Now I’ll have to wait until the next lifetime to put you back together.”

  “That’s what you’re worried about?” Ash shrieked at him, wiping the wetness from her face. “A bloody battle between gods, your right-hand man is splattered on the water below, a little girl just accidentally took her own life . . . and you’re worried that you’ll have to wait another eighty years to get your Frankenbride?” Ash ignited her hands. This was it. This was the final push she needed to end Colt’s life, even if it was in cold blood. He had nothing left to defend himself with, and Ash was still ready to rip the heart right out of his chest.

  Before she could lunge for him, the rumbling of the volcano deepened even more. Something was wrong. Ash reached out to the volcano with her mind, and she could feel the heat reaching critical mass, feel the pressure building inside it.

  And just like that, the crater on top exploded. A salvo of enormous fiery stones rocketed up into the sky, burning bright, burning hard. The dump-truck-size boulders left the earth with such velocity that they punched a hole right through the clouds and continued upward. Eventually, they would reach the top of their arcs and hurtle back to the earth.

  Most concerning, when Ash reached out with her mind to the fiery stones, mentally tethered to them by their shared volcanic origins, she could feel the trajectories they would follow.

  And as one of them ran out of steam, miles above, she could feel it begin its descent.

  Heading down toward the lighthouse.

  In that moment she saw exactly what she had to do. Because of his abilities, Colt theoretically could only die if his heart were removed . . . or completely destroyed.

  Ash placed her hand on Eve’s shoulder and squeezed. “You’re just as strong as I am. Carry Mom and Dad down the stone steps as fast as you can.”

  Eve was crying again, and Ash could see her own image reflected in her sister’s glossy pupils. The two sisters had never looked more alike. “What are you going to do?” Eve asked.

  “See this through to the end.” Ash wrapped Eve in the tightest hug she could, but released her before Eve could hug her back. They had no time.

  Ash dove for Colt, who was crawling his way toward the edge. He, too, seemed to have noticed the comet that had reached the peak of its arc in the sky above them and was heading back toward earth . . . back toward him. Ash caught him by the shoulders and pinned him to the ground. He writhed, struggling to free himself like a worm caught in a bird’s beak, but she just clamped her burning hands into his shoulders. Rage had made her stronger than ever, and there was no escaping her now.

  “This is what you wanted, isn’t it?” Ash screamed into his face. Fire wreathed her head, and she brought her nose down to his. She wanted Colt to experience terror, true terror, in his final moments on earth—even if they were to be her final moments as well. “You and Pele, together until the end?” She pressed her scalding lips to his in an angry, violent kiss. “Well you’ve got your wish.”

  When she pulled away, Colt’s charred lips healed themselves, and he stared up at her in defiance. “You may have stopped me this lifetime,” he says, “but I’ll be back. You’ll wake up a century from now with no memory of all this, and I’ll just charm my way back into your life. You can’t out-trick a trickster, Ashline.” He let out a crazed laugh.

  Ash continued to stare into his eyes. She didn’t want him to be the last thing she ever saw, but she also didn’t have the courage to watch the fireball come down. The air around them quivered electrically, and she could feel the umbra of the enormous comet coming down to destroy them both. Ash might be fireproof, but that would do nothing to save her from being crushed by the volcanic boulder or the three-hundred-foot fall afterward. This was her death sentence, her burden.

  A hand wrapped around the back of her shirt, and in the brief second before she was yanked back, her first crazed thought was that Colt had somehow grown an extra arm.

  The phantom hand heaved her backward across the stone platform, and a gust of wind carried her the rest of the way to the stairs. When she finally recovered herself and looked up, she discovered that Eve had replaced her, kneeling on top of Colt. She sent an electric current through his struggling body to immobilize him, then turned back to Ash over her shoulder. “Go!” she cried out to Ash. “Go live your life, and live it better than I did.”

  “No!” Ash croaked, but almost no sound came out. Above Eve and Colt, the magnificent, catastrophic ball of stone hurtled toward the platform, growing larger by the moment.

  “I promise you,” Eve yelled over the approaching roar of the comet. “I promise you I’ll be a better sister in the next lifetime.”

  There was no time to say good-bye, because Eve hit her with one last gale that tossed Ash backward down the stairs. She didn’t stop rolling until she landed on her unconscious parents, whom Eve had tucked partway down the staircase. And because there was no time left, Ash swallowed her quaking tears, scooped up her parents with all the superhuman strength she had left, and sprinted down the steps.

  She only made it halfway down when the fireball hit. The thunderous blast knocked Ash off her feet as the behemoth slammed into the top of the lighthouse. It sheared the platform on top clean off.

  With her parents in a heap at her feet, Ash drew herself up protectively over them. She focused on keeping her front side cool, then let a curtain of fire erupt out of her back, which she’d armored once more with igneous stone. As the rock debris from the pulverized platform above showered down on them, the fiery armor acted as a protective shield.

  And then it was over. Ash dropped, exhausted and faintly smoking, into a heap beside her parents, who were just starting to stir from the fading sedatives. Even as they blinked and mumbled in unconsciousness, Ash just lay there staring up at the sky through the gaping open jaws of stone where the platform used to be.

  Eve was gone. She waited to see some flash of lightning, or some shooting star through the constellations above, one of those mystical signs people always saw in movies to remind them that their dead loved ones were
still out there somewhere.

  But this wasn’t the movies. There was only an unbearable quiet, until Ash’s mouth was able to form the one thing she wished she’d had more time to say up top:

  “I promise I’ll be a better sister next time too.”

  CERULEAN SEA

  O‘ahu, One Month Later

  Ash had been leaning against the trunk of the palm tree for over an hour, watching the one-story house across the street.

  She still wasn’t sure she could go through with it.

  She’d been out on the islands for nearly three weeks now, researching Hawaiian family trees, practically living in the libraries and town halls while she combed through public records. She’d started in Maui, where she’d nearly destroyed the entire island almost two hundred years earlier after she’d summoned Haleakalā to erupt. The culmination of her search had led her here, to a suburb of Honolulu, where a woman named Kalama lived.

  If her research was correct—and there was no way to know for sure, since a lot of it was guesswork—Kalama might be a descendant of the baby girl Pele had abandoned two centuries ago, right before the Cloak dragged her away . . . the very child that Pele might have incinerated if the Cloak hadn’t stopped her in time. In fact, after nine generations, there were actually more than forty people on the islands who might trace their lineage back to Pele’s abandoned love child.

  Which meant that Ash had forty great-great-grandchildren—most of them older than her—living and working and raising families on the islands.

  The thought of it was almost too weird to handle.

  Still, she’d felt compelled to seek one of them out. Maybe it was just plain old curiosity, or maybe she felt some element of remorse for abandoning and almost murdering the child. Maybe she wanted proof that the visions of her previous lives hadn’t been strange dreams.

  Maybe after all the death and destruction that had sullied Ash’s life in the last two months, she just wanted to see that something good had come out of her tumultuous, deadly relationship with Colt Halliday.