Wildefire (28 page)

“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.

276

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.”

Colt took his eyes off the road to gawk at her. “You know cars?”

“Yes. I can also count to ten and write my name.”

She sensed he was still waiting for some explanation, so she said, “I don’t have any brothers, so Dad dragged me to car shows. It wasn’t until he tried to enroll me in a mechanics class when I was twelve that I had the heart to break it to him.”

“Not to worry. I figured changing spark plugs was better left for the second date.” Colt patted her knee. Molten fire burned all the way up to her thighs.

Barely ten minutes from Blackwood, Colt pulled over to the side of the 101. The Firebird crackled to a stop on a patch of dirt, and he cut the engine. “We’re here.”

“‘Here’ is a relative term.” Ash wiped away the fog on her window and cupped her hand around her eyes to see out. “This just looks like any patch of forest.”

“That’s the point.” He popped the trunk and stepped out of the car.

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Ash reluctantly climbed out onto the desolate 101.

Peeking through the backseat window, she spied a wicker picnic basket resting on top of a flannel quilt in the claus-trophobic backseat. “Picnic?” she asked, hopeful.

“Yes, but only after,” his muffled voice replied from inside the trunk, where he was rummaging around for something.

“After . . . ?”

He snapped the trunk closed and in his hands held the two items he’d been looking for—a bulky-looking camera with a long zoom lens, and a tripod to go with it. He shook his head at her. “You know, if you were one tenth as patient as you are sarcastic . . .” He handed her a thick coil of black rope over the hood of the car. “You mind holding this? Thanks.”

Dusk was quickly sinking its teeth into the horizon as they started in from the edge of the forest, Ash with the rope slung over her arm, Colt with the camera dangling from around his neck and the tripod in hand. They had maybe an hour before the woods retreated into darkness.

Ash was struggling to keep pace with him in her god-forsaken sandals—at least they weren’t heels. “As much as I appreciate a little mystery on a first date,” she said, slightly winded, “I have to admit that following a guy I barely know into the woods with only a length of rope and a camera is what my mom would refer to as a
bad
situation
.”

Colt laughed. “I came up with this idea a few months 280

ago when I was doing patrols,” he explained. “I was wandering off the marked trail, and I ended up in this small clearing with a little tree growing in the middle of it, all alone. The whole space just gave me this eerie, cool vibe, like it had never been touched by humanity before.”

“What made you think that?” she asked. “There were no strip malls in sight?”

“Just a feeling. Growing up I was always fascinated with the great explorers—Magellan, Cook, Lewis and Clark.” He sketched a line with his finger around the thick trunk of a sequoia. “Back before we’d touched every last inch of the earth and photographed it with our satel-lites. Back when you could actually be the first person to ever lay eyes on a piece of land.” His eyes were distant, piercing the fabric of this universe and gazing into another, back to a simpler time when his adventurous fantasies could have come true. “All of the virgin rivers, and the primeval forests, and the uncharted coastline . . .”

“You’re not going to break out into song, are you, Pocahontas?” she asked. When his eyes flickered back from his parallel universe looking a little hurt, she sighed.
Go easy on the sarcasm, lady,
she scolded herself. “I get it, though. You step into a clearing in the forest, and maybe, just maybe, you’re the first person to ever set foot there. Somewhere out there is a place that started like everything else when the earth was a hot, boiling teakettle of lava and rock, and then rock turned to soil, and from the soil rose the grass, and eventually these 281

absurdly tall redwoods. And after five billion years, not a single soul has even so much as laid eyes on the place.”

“Now you get the picture.” His charming grin made a return, and he stopped walking. “Well, here’s the fun part. I want you to pick a direction and just start walking.” From his pocket he produced a narrow piece of fabric. “Wearing this.”

“A . . . handkerchief?”

“Blindfold.” He wrapped the black fabric around his eyes and tied it behind his head, knotting twice. Then he held out a second identical blindfold, which she took reluctantly. “I don’t need my eyes to sense hesitation,” he said. “You don’t trust me?”

She caved and tied the blindfold around her eyes, plunging the woods around her into darkness except for the twilight filtering through the pores in the material.

“I trust you. But if I ruin this dress bumping into a redwood, I’m going to let Raja kill you first.” She groped around blindly until she found his wrist and slipped her hand into his. He squeezed back to let her know he was ready, and she led them in a new direction.

They made a full minute’s progress before they collided with their first tree, and from then on Ash moved more cautiously, with her fingertips in front of her as a feeler. If they came across a fallen log, however, she knew she was doomed to end up on her face in the mud with a ruined dress.

“Now,” Colt’s voice said softly, “I want you to wait 282

until you get a feeling like you’re standing in some place new, some place . . . untouched. Then squeeze my hand to let me know you’ve found it.”

At that point Ash changed directions and took them farther off course, growing increasingly disoriented. How much distance had they put between themselves and the 101? Could they be looping back, wandering out into the winding highway just in time to get hit by a logging truck?

But even as the last image floated through her mind, a curtain of tranquility quickly descended. Her steps slowed until she came to a stop on a bed of leaves. She cocked her head up toward the canopy. For all she knew, they had just burst through a rift between dimensions and emerged into a jungle in the Cretaceous period.

She squeezed Colt’s hand. She could practically hear him smiling.

He opened the tripod. She heard the clack of metal on metal as he screwed the camera onto the base. The weight on her shoulder lightened as he took the rope from her.

With a snap he clipped it to the camera.

“Here we go,” he said, and they started walking in a straight line away from the tripod. Fifteen feet later he stopped her and, taking her by the shoulders, aimed her back in the direction of what she assumed was the camera.

As soon as he placed the end of the line into her palm, it dawned on her exactly what Colt had planned.

“When you’re ready to take the picture, pull the line 283

gently, and it will depress the shutter button—but not too hard, because you don’t want the tripod to tip over.”

He slipped his hand around her waist.

She poked him in the ribs. “You better be smiling.”

Then she set her head near his collarbone and pulled the cord. Even through her covered eyes, she could see the white pulse of the flash.

He started to move away, but she reeled him back in.

“Is it set up so we can take a second picture?” she asked.

“You know, just in case the first one didn’t come out, and we lose our only proof that we were the first people ever to set foot here?”

He squeezed her hand again as an affirmative.

“Good,” she whispered. Her free hand traveled up the rolling sinew of his arm, over his shoulder, and up his neck until it rested on the side of his face. She felt his hands firmly settle and then tighten on her ribs just below her breasts, as he pulled her toward him in anticipation. As she raised herself up onto her toes, he was bending down to meet her halfway.