Afterglow (Wildefire) (10 page)

Colt needed an ax.

Aside from medieval warfare—which wasn’t exactly Colt’s style—axes were most commonly used to cut down trees.

And if a real ax could be used to cut down a real tree, then a specially made ax could be used to chop down a specially grown tree.

Which left the question: Where on earth was there a special tree that Colt would want to get rid of?

When the answer dawned on Ash, her elbows slipped off the windowsill. “Oh my god . . .,” she whispered.

She’d asked herself the wrong question when she wondered where on “earth” this special tree was . . . because it wasn’t on earth at all.

The Cloak Netherworld revolved around a towering “life tree,” a mystical organism that the oily creatures apparently drew their power from. The tree was also a sort of jail for gods who the Cloak had taken off-line, ones who they’d deemed too sadistic and dangerous to exist in circulation anymore. Each of those gods was plugged into the tree to rehabilitate them, like acorns on an oak, to teach them selflessness and peace by forcing them to exist as part of a communal organism, for the common good.

Both Eve and Colt had at one point been imprisoned within that tree . . . only Colt was so wretched a soul that his very presence had proven toxic to it.

Now he intended to chop it down. It could prove the end of the Cloak . . .

 . . . and it could jailbreak a whole lot of twisted, deranged gods.

That still left one last question though. Colt needed Modo, alive, to build him the tree-killing ax . . . yet Eve, who supposedly now sided with Colt, had attempted to murder Modo the day before.

What’s your angle, Eve?
Ash wondered.
Why destroy the very tool your would-be lover needs to complete his vile mission? Unless . . .

Ash pressed her hand to the glass pane, which was cool beneath her palm. Pictured the look that her sister had given her before she drove away. Listened again to the words Eve had heralded yesterday before Ash subdued her:
You don’t know what you’re doing, Ashline. If you knew who he is—what he is—you wouldn’t be protecting him.

Ash let her forehead slump against the window.
You have got to be kidding me
, she thought. Her next words she actually uttered out loud, because they were so ludicrous, so unfathomable that she needed to hear them to believe them.

“Eve . . .,” she whispered, “is on my side?”

Friday

It was a restless and
haunted eight hours of sleep back in the hotel room. Ash woke up at least once an hour to gaze at the empty bed where Modo should have been. In between she suffered through nightmares, from which she would wake up sweaty and with only a loose grasp of what had happened in the dream. Only vivid but fleeting images remained, burned into her memory upon waking—of giant falling trees, of her body wreathed in fire as she held hands with Colt . . . of flames spreading throughout a city as Pele allowed it to be consumed in lava. People screaming up and down the streets. Fire devouring everything. Everything.

She prayed that these were truly just nightmares, and not visions of the future.

By morning Ash was short on options. She couldn’t in good conscience stop Modo from making the ax unless
she rescued Jenna before he created it, and she couldn’t rescue Jenna without knowing where they’d taken her. Colt was smart enough to keep Modo’s girlfriend in some secluded location, away from Modo, so the metallurgy god wouldn’t try anything stupid.

What Ash needed was to talk to someone higher up than her.

Someone omniscient.

She needed to have a conversation with the Cloak.

After devouring a quick breakfast in the lobby restaurant, Ash hopped in Modo’s car and drove out of the city. The Cloak were a strange race. As powerful and all-knowing as they were, they had a weakness: They were allergic to hate and violence, though not exactly in the way a human might be allergic to peanuts or dairy. When they were exposed to it, they transformed from a wise, sentient super-race into uncaged, animal-like monsters. For that reason they could only tolerate quick visits to Earth before retreating to their home world, where only their magnificent tree could detoxify them.

Ash wasn’t sure precisely how the “hate allergy” functioned, but she had noticed that the Cloak more frequently appeared to her in natural settings—the woods, the ocean. That much at least made sense, since cities and populated areas were more likely to be tainted with hate and violence . . . whether it was residual or fresh.

So with that in mind, she kept driving down Route 117 until she hit the town of Lincoln, fifteen miles
outside Boston city limits. There she parked in a dirt lot just off the road and headed out into the woods. A few joggers and locals walking their dogs populated the trail here and there, but by the time Ash crossed a train trestle and veered off the path, she found herself alone.

She’d never actually summoned the Cloak before, so she cupped her hands around her mouth and called the name “Jack” over and over again. It was the human name with which the Cloak identified themselves, as if it somehow made them more mortal and less terrifying.

Ash was about to give up and wander, defeated, back to the car, when she heard the softest rustle of leaves, just behind her. “Calling our name?” an inhuman, gender-neutral voice said into her ear. “That’s a new trick.”

Ash spun and found herself gazing upward, face-to-face with one of the Cloak. The single fiery blue flame that it had for an eye drifted just slightly with the breeze that was blowing through the woods. Its oily black flesh moved fluidly around it, more like an ink than a skin. Its teeth were bared, a massive gray bear trap of a mouth that looked like it could chew through a tree in one bite. Ash couldn’t be sure whether it was smiling or about to devour her . . . or possibly both.

She tried to swallow the lump of fear in her throat. “I didn’t know how else to reach you,” she said, trying to take a casual step away from Jack. “It’s not like you guys carry cell phones or check your e-mail.”

Jack didn’t laugh. “I don’t have long here,” he said.
“Even in the wilderness the hate from other areas of your world blows like a foul wind. In time it won’t be safe here for us . . . or for you.” Beneath those words Ash heard what he was actually saying:
In time, you won’t be safe from us.
Even though Jack had only materialized for less than a minute, Ash could already see how his inky body was starting to bloat outward, growing less humanoid and more animal in shape.

“I summoned you because of Colt,” Ash said, skipping to the chase. “In order to fuse me and my sisters back together, he’s decided to get rid of you . . . and to do that he’s commissioned Modo—Hephaestus—to forge an ax to chop down your life tree.”

“We know,” Jack replied calmly.

After a few seconds, when Jack offered nothing else, Ash shrieked, “Then stop him, damn it!”

Jack shook his head, which was starting to elongate into more of a snout than a face. “You know that’s not how we operate.”

Ash did, and it was infuriating. The Cloak had been charged with overseeing the gods, the way the gods were originally supposed to oversee the humans . . . but according to their bizarre, inhuman code of ethics, they refused to directly meddle in the affairs of the gods unless they decided it was absolutely necessary.

Of course Ash guessed that from their perspective, the few times they’d meddled had only given birth to more problems. When they’d split Pele into three goddesses,
they’d created sisters who warred among themselves. And when they’d stripped the gods of their old memories to give them a better life, they’d opened the door for Colt’s manipulations to flourish, lifetime after lifetime.

Ash couldn’t think of a time more urgent than this for them to at least try again. “Forget your stupid hands-off policy, Jack. Colt is coming for you. With a big-ass ax, too, which he’s going to use to go Paul Bunyan on your stupid tree if you don’t step in and stop him now. Don’t you get it? He is going to kill you.”

Jack snarled a little, his back bucking with uncontrollable spasms. It wouldn’t be long now before the hate really started to leach its way into his consciousness and transform him. “Even with the ax he can only get to the tree by traveling through our Netherworld, at our mercy.” His voice sounded strained and phlegmy now, his words echoing up from the back of his throat. “And should he somehow succeed, we don’t fear death the way that you do. All of you, humans and gods alike, base all your rash decisions on your fleeting mortality. You’ve convinced yourselves that behaving like you will die tomorrow is the admirable and adventurous way to live. That,” he said, spitting out the word as though it left a bad taste in his mouth, “is what we call a stupid policy.”

Ash pounded her fist on the trunk of the birch tree next to them. With the heat rising in her, she left a faint char mark on the flaking bark. “You could probably end all this in a second,” she protested. “Instead you’re going
to stand by and watch me struggle, on my own, to bring down Colt Halliday? While more humans and gods die at his hands?”

Jack dropped to all fours as a pair of clawed arms emerged from his body where there had only been a dark amorphousness before. Ash had never seen the transformation progress this far. “You are missing the bigger picture, Ashline Wilde. Back in California, when you were first discovering your abilities, we sent you a scroll with instructions. Do you remember what it said?”

Ash nodded impatiently. “ ‘Kill the trickster.’ I could have gotten a head start if you’d told me my target was also my fucking boyfriend.”

Jack ran a talon down the birch tree’s trunk, scoring a line through the char Ash had left. “When we gave you that task, we were looking for someone to show us that this world is worthy of being saved. We were looking for . . . a champion. And if the best this world has to offer can’t vanquish the worst it has to offer—if good cannot ultimately triumph over evil—then give me one reason why you deserve our intervention.”

Ash could see that it was a lost cause trying to convince Jack and that she was quickly running out of time. There was a hunger in his eyes, as though he were absorbing the violence of the world like a sponge . . . and that hunger had fixed Ash as its prey.

She was backing away now, as Jack sauntered forward. His mouth parted, and each of his gray teeth
glistened with the same oil that writhed over his body. “If you won’t help me directly,” Ash implored him, “then at least give me a push in the right direction.” She thought back to the cryptic directions the Cloak had once delivered to her and her friends and how they’d provided her with visions of Rose to set her on the correct path. “You were never against dropping a hint from time to time to help me stay the course. So tell me this: Where are they keeping Hephaestus’s girlfriend?”

Jack paused and cocked his snout to the side, as if deciding whether to answer her question. “Greymoor Hotel . . . top floor,” he growled out finally, each word a struggle. “You’ll find . . . her there.”

“Alive?” Ash asked, but just then Jack bellowed and lunged for her. Ash held up her hands to shield herself, as his gray jaws snapped open. . . .

And then, like that, his body burst into a million particles of darkness that evaporated as he returned to the Netherworld. Only the spectral image of his blue flame eye lingered in the air in front of her, shimmering until it faded, but it left her with a very clear message that Jack had left before:

We’ll have our eye on you, Ashline Wilde.

As Ash returned to Boston, Jack’s final hint wasn’t sitting well with her. In the last few months Ash had found herself in several kidnapping situations. First there were
the mercenaries who tried to toss Serena—the tiny, blind siren that Ash went to school with—into the back of a windowless van. Then she’d had to rescue Wes from being tortured in the humidor of a cigar shop, and just a couple of days later she nearly died rescuing Ade, her thunder god friend, from a mafia safe house.

Those environments all seemed fitting under the category of “places to kidnap someone or hold them hostage.” Shady, secluded, populated with men for hire.

The Greymoor, however, was one of the finest four-star hotels in downtown Boston. With its sweeping views of Boston Common, right in the heart of the city, it was about as conspicuous a place you could choose to bring a captive. Ash’s parents stayed there on business trips, for crying out loud. At four hundred dollars a night it wasn’t exactly the kind of hotel where you dragged a college-aged girl, bound and gagged, through the marble lobby and expected a bellhop to help you haul her over to the elevator on a golden cart.

Ash earned a few looks of disdain from the concierges on her walk through the Greymoor’s regal lobby but she couldn’t look
that
out of place—surely they must be used to spoiled teenagers staying with their loaded parents. So she walked with an air of self-entitlement through the elevator’s silver doors and rode it all the way up.

Ash’s uneasiness only grew when the doors parted and she stepped out onto the twenty-seventh floor. The luxurious top level was adorned with all sorts of abstract
modern sculptures, and Ash was having a real hard time imagining some girl gagged and tied to a chair behind one of these doors.

So
, Ash thought, looking at the four top-floor rooms
. I have a one-in-four shot of choosing the right one on the first try.
She glanced up to the ceiling at the fire alarm that was silently blinking red every few seconds, and she felt her lips forming a smile that they reserved only for when she was about to do something particularly devious.
Time to improve my odds.

With the same flicking motion that one might use on a lighter, Ash ignited her thumb and held the flame up to one of the ceiling’s steel sprinklers.

It only took a few seconds. As one, the sprinklers on the top floor all whirred on, sending curtains of water raining down over Ash and everything else in sight. Red lights pulsed down the hall, and the fire alarm picked up to an almost deafening level. Ash reached up and melted the nearest one so she could hear better.