Wildefire

by Karsten Knight

  “That’s completely flawed logic.” Ash balled her hands into fists. “You were going to watch me burn alive!”

  Eve rolled her eyes. “Always the drama queen.” She relinquished her gaze on her reflection and locked arms with Ash. “Come on. My bike is hidden just off school grounds, and I thought we could take off to Crescent City for the day. Maybe do a little shopping. You’ve got a dance on Friday, if I heard correctly, and you were never one to turn down the promise of a new dress. My treat.”

  Eve succeeded in pulling her sister along for a few steps before Ash could firmly set her feet. “I’m not cutting class. I’m walking the line with the headmistress as it is. If she finds out that I’ve taken her ‘prospective student’ out cavorting in the city for the day . . .”

  “Don’t be a pussy.” Eve tugged disgustedly at the 266

  sleeve of Ashline’s sweatshirt. “Given your frumpier-than-usual appearance, I’m sure the headmistress would agree that your time would be better spent with spa treatments and retail therapy than sitting in class collecting chalk dust on this dumpy smock of yours. And the best part? I can guarantee the local weather will be spotless. .

  . . As long as I stay in a good mood.”

  Ash huffed and reached over to button Eve’s shirt back up. “Take the money you would have spent on our spa treatments and buy yourself a plane ticket to JFK. I know two people in Scarsdale who could use a visit from you more than I could use a makeover.”

  Eve’s face caved. The previously sunny hallway instantly darkened. A not-too-distant grumble echoed out on the quad. “They are not your parents,” Eve hissed, sending a heavy torrent of wind rushing down the hallway, which knocked open the double doors to the school with a sharp crack. “And they are certainly not mine.”

  “Fine.” Ash started to walk backward down the hall toward Monsieur Chevalier’s classroom. “Do whatever you want. Go electrocute some rabbits out in the woods—I don’t give a shit. I’m going to class.” She turned her back on Eve.

  But Eve wasn’t done with her yet. “I want to meet the others.”

  Ash stopped. “Others?”

  “I followed you Sunday. I saw what your friends did to the poachers, and I was very impressed.”

  The class change bell chimed in its electronic monotone.

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  As though they had been waiting with anticipation to spill through the door, students flooded out of the classrooms around them, filling the space between Ashline and Eve.

  Still, the sisters locked eyes through the fray.

  “Well, I’m not going to be the one to make introductions,” Ash called through the thickening sea of students that separated them. She backed down the hallway toward her next class, maneuvering through the human chaos. “Have fun on your joyride. I hope it rains.”

  “Oh, it will.” Eve’s last words were nearly lost in the din. “And as they say, when it rains . . .”

  Then Ash lost sight of her in the ocean of denim and backpacks. Farther down the hall she saw the double doors slam closed.

  By lunchtime nausea had burrowed into Ashline’s stomach like a parasite. Even the chicken marsala at the cafeteria—her favorite—tasted like oatmeal, and with the knowledge that her sister was out there roaming the forest, waiting, watching, it was all she could do to even keep her two percent milk down.

  When Jackie went up for seconds, Ash raised her glass to toast the empty seat in front of her. “To Eve.”

  Her sister may have made her world feel like it was on the brink of the apocalypse every time she came near, but if Eve continued to put the kibosh on Ashline’s appetite, she might just slim down to a size four in time for the masquerade ball.

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  Just then she spotted Raja across the dining hall heading fast for the exit. Ash jogged over and intercepted her.

  Raja gave her a once-over. “Ash, you look—”

  “Like dog shit. I’m aware,” Ash said quickly. “Listen, is there any way you can gather the other three and meet me in the chapel after the last bell?”

  “That depends. Is this a social gathering? Or a we’re-in-imminent-danger conversation?”

  Ash bit her lip. “Let’s just say you can leave Monopoly and Chutes and Ladders in your room.”

  Raja’s posture deflated. “Damn it. And a quiet night of board games was just starting to sound like a nice diversion.” She trudged out of the dining hall with a half-hearted wave. “See you after two.”

  With the responsibility of wrangling the others turned over to Raja, Ash suffered through last-period physics before she made one last go at aerating her room. The smoky smell had miraculously faded to only a trace. On her nightstand she found a small mountain of air fresheners on top of a note from Jackie:

  Figured after last night these

  were a safer bet than scented

  candles.

  —J

  Ash smiled and draped the air fresheners over one of the box fans, which she aimed at her bed, and she prayed 269

  to the God of all things fresh and clean that it would accelerate the deodorizing process.

  Then she made the trek back over to the chapel and sat down in the front pew. While she waited, she closed her eyes and imagined Serena singing from the lec-tern, let the phantom voice take her to a place of higher tranquility.

  She was just starting to doze off when the back doors parted and the four others entered—Ade, then Lily, followed by Rolfe and Raja, whose hips were nearly touching. They remained silent until they reached the pew behind Ashline, when Rolfe said to Raja, “You promised there was going to be an all-you-can-eat buffet.” Raja raised her hand like she was preparing to cuff him, and he mumbled a soft, “Liar.”

  “Thanks for coming, guys.” Ash rose from her seat.

  “I’ll cut to the chase. I just wanted to warn—”

  The back doors thundered open. Eve had traded her schoolgirl outfit for a flowing black floor-length dress that billowed behind her like exhaust. For all of her abrasive-ness, Ash had to admit that Eve sure knew how to make an entrance.

  “Sorry I’m late!” Eve clapped her hands together excitedly. “Oh, splendid. You’ve gathered everyone together for me.”

  Ash stayed quiet. Ade, recognizing the panic-stricken look on her face, stood up and spread his hands in anticipation of trouble.

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  But Eve ignored him as she swept down the central aisle. Her eyes played around the chapel, drinking it all in—the confessional, the altar, the high ceilings.

  “You must have a real sense of humor to hold a meeting of the gods in a Catholic church. I mean, I knew you weren’t crazy about Hebrew school, but this is distastefully sacrilegious.”

  Ash blocked her path when she reached the head of the aisle. “I think you should leave.”

  Eve tapped her sister’s face playfully. “Relax, peach.

  I’m not here for you.” She finally acknowledged the four bewildered students sitting—or in Ade’s case, standing—

  in the pew next to her. “I’m just here for some . . . social networking.”

  “They don’t want what you’re peddling, Eve,” Ash said.

  “Just because you don’t give a damn about your future doesn’t mean your friends don’t either. They have every right to hear what I have to say, and if they’re not interested, they have every right to return to the doll-house with you.”

  Ash gritted her teeth. As talented as Eve was at inducing anxiety, she unfortunately also had a point. It wasn’t up to Ash to dictate whether or not the others should put their lives in jeopardy for the dream of some sort of half-baked immortal existence.

  “Fine,” Ash said. “But you better tell them everything, or I’ll fill in the gaps.”

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  Lily gestured between Ashline and Eve. “Given the close resemblance, the fact that I don’t know many Polynesians, and the clear demonstration of love between you two, I’m going to take a flying leap and guess that you’re Ash’s sister?�
�

  “Bingo.” Eve placed her palm on Ashline’s shoulder.

  The tiny hairs on Ash’s arm stood on end under the low hum of the electric current. “And let me start by getting off my chest everything Ashline could possibly say to deter you from hearing what I have to say. Yes, I have not always been the best sister to Ashline. Yes, I have made my fair share of mistakes.” She paused. “Yes, I did kill a girl last year.”

  Rolfe, who had until now found the exchange mildly amusing, shut his mouth. Raja fidgeted in her seat.

  “But who among you didn’t cause some collateral damage when you were first discovering these special gifts you’ve been given? Who among you didn’t at one point hurt somebody?” she challenged them, her eyes tracking from one to the next, until she paused knowingly on Ade, who glowered at the floor. Like a defeated Atlas, he sat down at last, as if the burden on his back had grown too heavy for him to remain standing.

  She let her hand fall from Ashline’s shoulder and took a distancing step away from her. “My sister doesn’t yet know what it’s like when the transformation first happens. But she will. It’s not like being a god comes with an instruction manual. We’re all new at this.”

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  While the others listened, and Ash eventually wandered over to a separate pew, alone, Eve repeated everything she’d told Ash on the rooftop on Sunday night—

  about their amnesiac rebirth every generation, about the other gods holed up in a penthouse in Vancouver living the high life, about Blink’s plan to destroy the Cloak.

  “It’s not just our immortality that’s at stake,” she concluded. “Blink is reasonably certain that with the Cloak gone, he will be able to find a way to restore our memory from our previous lives, and we’ll be able to retain new memories from here on out.”

  “Maybe there’s a reason why we don’t keep memories from one life to another,” Raja said slowly, and folded her arms in front of her chest. “Maybe that’s our way of having second chances.”

  “Or maybe,” Eve argued, “if we could remember, we wouldn’t be doomed to repeat the same mistakes time and again, lifetime after lifetime.”

  Ade shook his head. “For all our supernatural abilities, as far as I can see, there’s nothing supernatural about our ability to handle remorse. If we retained thousands of years of memories, it could completely corrupt any chance we have at being good and just human beings.”

  “We’re not human beings!” Eve slammed her fist down on the pew in front of her, then regarded the others incredulously. “Are the rest of you sane? Or does everyone else agree with Gloom and Boom over here?”

  “Ignorance is bliss,” Rolfe replied.

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  Eve snorted. “Ignorance is cowardice.”

  “Oh, I’m definitely a coward. I’m terrified of snakes, bugs, rejection,” he said, counting each one off on his fingers, “public humiliation, and big black creatures with fiery blue eyes that want to eat me. But even a coward knows a fool’s errand when he hears one.” He slipped past Lily and exited the pew. Before he reached the door in the back, he added over his shoulder, “Oh, and I’ve heard the surfing in Vancouver sucks.”

  “I’m a weather goddess, moron,” Eve said, and pointed at herself.

  “I don’t care for your aura,” Raja said, and got up.

  “Playing high school student might seem like ignorance to you, but if you ask me, so is walling yourself up in some Canadian penthouse and pretending like you and your sorority are that much different from everyone else.”

  Ade rose to follow Raja out, but Eve stepped in front of the pew to intercept him. “No love between thunder gods, Ade?”

  He brushed past her without stopping, and the church rattled subtly as he spoke. “I know a cold front when I see one.”

  Lily, who had remained quiet the entire time, didn’t budge from her seat at first.

  “What about you, o quiet one?” Eve asked.

  “I don’t know.” Lily’s eyes grazed the empty pew next to her. “But everything is worthy of consideration.” Then she floated past the girl in the black dress and out of the chapel.

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  Ash, who had been biting her tongue the whole time to keep from butting in, now tasted the tang of victory.

  “You were right. It was better to let them make their own decisions.”

  “Don’t look so smug.” Eve’s jaw quivered, though with anger or melancholy, Ash didn’t know. “You sure get a real kick out of cutting your older sister down.”

  “You know,” Ash said, “until now a part of me genuinely believed that you were doing all this because you missed your little sister.” Ash crossed the aisle to Eve, and her voice quavered as they came chin to chin. “But I just realized that what you really want is someone to perch on your shoulder like a little parakeet and tell you that what you’re doing is the right thing. So please, go ahead and keep pretending like you’ve got it all figured out; the truth is that you’re just as insecure as everybody else.”

  Ash made it all the way to the doors before the simmering Eve made her parting shot. “So what are the two of you doing tonight?” she asked. Ash lingered in the doorway, so Eve, practically purring with pleasure, continued, “On your date?”

  The doors slammed shut behind Ashline.

  By the time she stumbled back to her dorm, it was already time for Ash to get ready for her date with Colt. “Who schedules a date for five o’clock?” she muttered as she stared in the bathroom mirror, drying her hair.

  At first she’d thought the time had to be a fluke, something he’d mumbled out of his half-conscious mouth in 275

  the back of the truck bed as the tranquilizers wore off.

  But sure enough, he had texted her this morning to confirm, with only a cryptic addendum saying that their date would require “the last tides of daylight.”

  While dates and daylight and Colt all sounded wonderful, Ashline just wanted to know what the hell she should wear.

  Fortunately, when she returned from the bathroom, someone had made the decision for her. Draped over the foot of her bed, on a coat hanger and wrapped with care in plastic, was a knee-length espresso dress made of . . .

  “Shantung silk,” Ashline said, impressed, as she felt the material under the plastic. On the bed next to it was a note that read:

  Figured we were about the same size.

  Matching shoes in bag next to bed.

  Return on penalty of death.

  Have fun.

  —Raja.

  A sentimental smile melted across her lips. Discovering you were a god might have made a sociopath out of Eve, but Raja was acting more and more like a human every day.

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  With five minutes to spare before her chariot arrived, Ash admired her reflection in the bathroom. Given that before now she hadn’t even remotely attempted to “clean herself up” since she’d arrived at Blackwood, she was almost a little surprised that the makeup, the hair, and the whole ensemble came naturally to her.

  “Still got it,” she said to her reflection.

  “Yes, you do!” Jackie shouted from the doorway, and flashed a camera in her direction.

  Ash nearly dropped the hair iron, and blinked away the phantoms of light that were now parading across her line of vision. “Come on, Jackie. This isn’t the first day of school. Do we really need to commemorate tonight with pictures?”

  “Of course,” Jackie said. She snapped two more in quick succession. “You have to have something to paste into a scrapbook to show your nine strapping half-Tahitian, half-park-ranger children.”

  Ash brandished the hair straightener at Jackie and snapped the mouth open and closed like an enraged croc-odile. “Out!”

  Jackie giggled and hopped up so that she was sitting on the edge of the sink. “Oh, two more things before I leave you to your date with Smokey the Bear. First of all, I’m not sure what sort of blackmail or arm-twisting was involved, but Ade asked me to the masquerade ball, so thank you for whatever
part you played in that.”

  “Zero blackmail; minimal arm-twisting,” Ash replied.

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  “And you’re only welcome if you make out with him in front of Chad Matthews and his girlfriend at the ball.”

  “Deal. And second,” Jackie continued, “I took the liberty of removing all of the box fans from your room, lowering the blinds, and plugging in an electric air freshener I found buried in the supply closet. Good thing that smoke detector is still out of commission, because you never know if things might heat up enough in there later—”

  “Out!” Ashline screamed.

  When Colt rolled up outside East Hall, Ash was grateful to see that he’d traded the chicken coop on wheels for a forest green, recently polished Pontiac. He popped open the passenger side door, and just as she went to squeeze down into the seat, light flashed behind her. She caught Darren leaning out the window with a camera, while Jackie laughed hysterically in the background behind it.

  Ash shook her fist at her paparazzi and slammed the door as the next flash went off.

  “Whoa,” Colt said. He was eyeing her, from her face, to the elegant straps of her dress, down to the tapers of her waist, and following her tennis-toned calves to the clasps on her gladiator sandals.

  Ash buckled her seat belt. “Can I assume that ‘Whoa’

  is boy-speak for ‘You look beautiful?’”

  “Well, sure.” He adjusted the collar of his faded flannel button-down. “But I think it also translates to ‘You look a little overdressed.’”

  Ashline pulled at the dress, suddenly feeling like she 278

  was wearing a grain sack instead of silk. “We’re . . . not going to dinner?”

  But Colt just laughed darkly and shifted the car into drive.

  They passed through the front gates, and Ash traced her fingers over the dashboard. “I was expecting a pickup truck or maybe another retro monstrosity. For a combination park ranger and college student, an ’81 Firebird seems a bit . . . extravagant.”