Wildefire (21 page)

Behind them, all too late, Ashline heard the footsteps of the incoming soldiers. Twelve camouflaged mercenaries, with rifles to match, spread out across the canyon, blocking their point of exit. Sure enough, Ash spotted among them the familiar, recently broken nose of the man she had clubbed with the walking stick nights earlier. He smiled at her with contempt. His fingers wrapped tightly around the barrel of his rifle.

“The name’s Wolfe,” the mercenary said to them with the pleasant air of someone introducing himself at a tea party. “Pleased to meet y’all.”

“What do you want?” Raja asked him. “Has the gov-ernment come to collect some science projects?”

“Government? No.” Wolfe snorted. “A private investor. Fascinated with the science of myth, or some hocus-pocus like that.” He shrugged and squinted up at the overcast sky, as if the weather were of more interest to him than the potentially dangerous students he and his men had surrounded. “Personally, I’m not an academic; I don’t really give a damn about science
or
myth. Money, however, speaks to me. And half a million a head for the five of you speaks loudly.”

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“Hell,” Rolfe said from the back of the pack. “Your investor could have just paid me half a million to turn
myself
in.”

“That’s the idea,” Wolfe said. “Number one thing you learn in the military is to keep things clean. Sometimes that means giving up a little to get a lot. So I’ll offer you one of two deals. Deal number one: You can walk out of this canyon with us and we’ll take a short trip up to the airfield at Crescent City, where my charter plane is waiting to take us to Miami. Ranger Rick over there wakes up tomorrow with a whopping headache. In return for your cooperation, I’ll put ten thousand dollars in an account for each of you to access when she’s done doing whatever it is she wanted you for in the first place.”

Lily laughed darkly; Ashline gave her points for bravery.

“You want to pay us two percent of the bounty that some psycho investor in Florida is paying you to kidnap us? Two percent? My monthly allowance is higher than that.” Lily dropped to her knees and mock pleaded with him. “At least offer to pay for my college education, please.”

Wolfe snapped up his rifle so quickly that it could have been an extension of his arm. His hands were steady as he glared down the sights, which he had trained directly between Lily’s eyes. “Option two: I unload a few tranquilizer darts at your head and see if the venom is as potent on you as it is on humans. And if that ain’t the case, then we start using bullets and find out later how much you’re worth dead.”

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Rolfe stepped forward, his face as serious as Ashline had ever seen it. “Ten thousand dollars sounds nice, but I like my internal organs the way they’re arranged now.”

Raja slipped up beside Ashline, who was glancing nervously between Wolfe and the unconscious Colt. “If it’s true that your powers really haven’t blossomed,” she whispered so only Ash could hear, “then when the shit hits the fan, you better make a run for the mouth of the canyon.”

“But Colt—”

“He’s worth nothing to them.”

“What’s it going to be?” Wolfe asked, his face still pressed to the side of his rifle. “Come quietly or come
very
quietly?”

Ade smiled. “I was never very good at quiet.” His hands shot outward, and thunder boomed through the canyon. As Wolfe went to pull the trigger, the space in front of him distorted and he sailed up into the air. His tranquilizer dart shot helplessly into the sky. Wolfe came crashing down onto the hard stone trail thirty feet ahead of them, and lay unmoving.

A chorus of shouts echoed from the soldiers behind them, but Ade spun and held out his hands again. The next wave of thunder deflected away the incoming barrage of tranquilizer darts, and several of the men toppled to the earth in the wave’s wake.

Before they could recover, Rolfe had closed his eyes.

From out of the sky several winged creatures woven from 204

strands of light swooped down on the soldiers with blazing talons bared. Immersed in chaos, they fired rounds off into the air at the swarming light creatures. Some of the soldiers had abandoned their tranquilizer rifles in favor of their sidearms, and the bullets began to fly.

“Ade!” Lily shouted over the gunfire. “Can you corral some of them toward the ferns?”

She’d barely finished asking the question, when a wave of his hand sent three of the mercenaries nearest them tumbling across the ground until they collided with the canyon wall. Rather than the men bouncing off, several green tendrils sprouted from the wall and wrapped around their torsos. The men screamed as the vines pulled them flush against the earth and rock. The ferns continued to germinate around them, and before long their faces vanished behind the curtain of green.

Meanwhile the winged light wraiths were beginning to dissolve as Rolfe’s concentration fizzled. He lunged for the nearest soldier and caught the barrel of his rifle. Right as the mercenary pulled the trigger, Rolfe jerked the barrel so that it pointed at one of his comrades, who had just unholstered his pistol. The dart caught the other soldier in the Adam’s apple, and he dropped face-first to the rocks. Rolfe’s hand fixed around the scruff of the other mercenary’s neck and hurled him into the canyon wall, where he met a similar fate at the hands of the ferns.

“Ashline!” Ade shouted, and paused long enough to send a wave of thunder at a rogue soldier, whose head 205

slammed into the rocks before his rag doll body rolled into the stream. “Get going!” He pointed down the canyon.

Ash hesitated, feeling entirely impotent and helpless for the first time since that night with Eve and Lizzie on her roof. But a tranquilizer dart whistled by her face, and Raja gave her a hard shove, screaming, “Haul ass, Wilde!”

With a last glance at Colt’s body, still resting undisturbed in the stream under the logs, Ash stumbled in the opposite direction from which they’d come, trying to put as much distance between herself and the darts and bullets and mayhem as she could.

The canyon blurred through her tears. Wasn’t she supposed to be a goddess? While the others had thunder, and the forest, and light, and death under their control, what did Ashline have to protect her? Just soft, mortal flesh and an ever-shrinking life span.

After a minute of full-on sprinting that would have made Coach Devlin proud, Ash stopped to catch her breath. She had made it around a bend in the canyon, effectively separating herself from her four classmates and the small army of mercenaries. Ade’s thunder had ceased to rumble the canyon floor, and she could no longer hear the battle cries of the mercenaries. Either her friends had overcome the soldiers, or . . .

Something clicked to her right—a revolver, as its hammer snapped into place. The barrel pressed against her temple, and she had no doubt the ammunition waiting within was not a venomous dart but a true-blue bullet.

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Wolfe, out of breath, grinned triumphantly at her, though his eyes darted fearfully back down the canyon.

“At least I’ll leave here with one bounty,” he said. “The coward of the bunch, if the way you ran crying from battle says anything about your character. Fortunately, the price on your head isn’t adjusted for bravery.”

Deep within her skull, summoned by the cold of the steel barrel against her skin and the stab of the word coward, something ignited. She could feel the flames kindle within her like an unattended bonfire. “Hunting down high school students?” she snarled. “You call that making a living?”

“I call it early retirement, actually,” he said. “Now get walking.”

But Ashline remained immobile. The flames of her inner torch leapt higher, and higher still, their fiery fingers grasping at the cracks and searching for escape, for anything to kindle with. Her palms itched. Some distant force commanded her to turn and let her fingers constrict around his thick, veiny neck. In fact, the more she considered it, the more it sounded like a mighty good idea, even if he did have a gun. Her fingers curled, her nails bared—

Before she could act on the impulse, a tanned hand—

not Ashline’s—fastened itself around Wolfe’s wrist.

Raja’s eyes narrowed at Wolfe. “You should have pissed off when you had the chance.”

Wolfe made like he was about to turn the gun on 207

Raja. But a low, guttural groan slipped out of his mouth, weak at first, from the throat, then bellowing straight up from his belly. His fingers trembled, then his entire hand, until the gun dropped harmlessly out of his grasp and onto the canyon floor. Ashline watched in horror as his arm withered. The muscle and fat dissolved right out from beneath the skin. The hair fell out from his knuckles, then all the way up his wrist, forearm, and bicep and right up to his bare shoulder, replaced with an ocean of age spots that soon leprously freckled his arms. He tried to jerk the arm free from her clutches, but Raja’s grip held true.

His face was next, as the poison of age spread through his body. His neck, thick with muscle, now wilted, thinning, thinning until Ash was sure she could fit her entire hand around it. Both eyes recessed into their sockets. His cheeks withdrew into the cavity of his mouth, and as his drying lips parted, she could see his teeth grow brittle and then rain down onto his tongue like icicles falling from the gutter.

At last Raja released him, and the aged man, sobbing explosively between rasping breaths, dashed toward the mouth of the canyon as if he had somewhere to go.

But he didn’t make it far. Lily had appeared beside them, her expression grim. She held out her hand just as Wolfe limped over a patch of soft earth.

A nest of roots penetrated up through the soil and coiled around his ankles. Wolfe dropped to the earth 208

and tried to claw his way forward. His fingers left trails in the dirt as he struggled to tear himself free. Vines sprouted around him, long green ropes that lashed themselves over his body, pulling him facedown into the soil. His screams sounded through the canyon mouth, and as the three girls watched in silence, his entire body sank into the earth until the soil swallowed his muffled cries, the dirt crumbling and filling his open mouth. In a last-breath attempt to rebel against his fate, Wolfe’s hand shot up through the surface, but it was too late.

His wrist muscles tensed one last time before going slack completely.

Soon his hand slid into the depths like the prow of a sinking ship, the last vestige of the man called Wolfe.

There was no trace that he had ever been here in this canyon, except a slight disturbance in the earth, as if it had recently been tilled, but Lily fixed even that. She cocked her head to the side, and a small patch of ferns blossomed from the soil. In their center sprouted a single blue orchid.

“Well, that was gruesome,” Ashline said, feeling more than a little nauseous. She pointed at the flower. “Do those even grow in Northern California?”

“No.” With a closed-lipped smile, gentle but sadistic, Lily stared at the small mound in the earth. “But I just needed to see something beautiful emerge from something so ugly.” She turned and walked back down the canyon.

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“I don’t even know you people anymore,” Ash said to Raja, only half-joking.

Raja shrugged. “Or maybe you’re just finally getting to know us. Maybe we’re just finally getting to know ourselves.” She gazed at her hand, the same hand that had grabbed hold of Wolfe’s wrist, and she turned it from side to side. Then she jogged away, back to rendezvous with the others.

Alone in the clearing Ashline cautiously approached Wolfe’s grave and knelt down beside it. With some hesitation she extended her arm and played her fingertips over the ferns, soft to the touch, as if she were running her fingers through her own hair.

A sudden weariness fell upon her like a blanket, and she was tempted to place her head on the pillow of ferns and rest, just rest. . . . But then she remembered Colt, presumably still unconscious down the canyon, and she managed to seize hold of her own puppet strings and manipulate her tired joints until she could stand up.

When she reached the other four, they had gathered around Colt, whom they hadn’t moved from the stream.

In the canyon around them there were no signs of any soldiers, any rifles or handguns, or any signs that struggle had ever occurred at all. After watching Wolfe succumb to his fate, Ashline decided it was better not to ask questions to which she didn’t want the answer.

“Remember,” Ade was saying, “when he wakes up, we 210

tell him he slipped off the log and hit his head. With any luck he won’t find the puncture wound.”

Rolfe pursed his lips at Ashline as she approached.

“Or maybe he’ll find it and think it was a love bite.”

Ash crouched down beside Colt and ignored the water running through the shins of her jumpsuit. “He seems to be breathing fine.” She slapped him a couple of times on the cheek, but he didn’t so much as bat his eyes.

“I already tried that,” Raja said.

“Yeah, I didn’t actually think it would work.” Ash dipped her hand in the stream and splashed some water onto his face. Still no dice. “Can someone carry him back to the truck? There might be a first aid kit there.”

Everybody looked at Rolfe, who deadpanned back at them. “Sure, sure. Of course the Norse warrior god should be the one to carry the unconscious mortal.” But he dipped down, and as though Colt’s body were made of papier-mâché, Rolfe effortlessly lifted him out of the stream. “Sorry, Prince Charming,” he apologized to the unconscious park ranger cradled in his arms. “Normally I’d buy you dinner first. But on the bright side, there will be no photographic evidence of this to haunt you later.”

“That’s what you think.” Raja trained her cell phone on the two men, and the camera snapped before Rolfe could look up. “Don’t worry,” she said afterward, and grinned at the image on her phone. “The look you’re giving him is very tender.”

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After a hike that seemed far longer than their original trek to the canyon, Rolfe plopped Colt down in the back of the truck. Lily climbed behind the wheel—she was the only one who knew how to drive stick—with Ade in the navigator seat. The truck rumbled to life, and as Lily grabbed hold of the stick shift inside and switched gears, the vehicle lurched forward onto Davison Road, heading south.