Wildefire Series: Wildefire Part 24

The tin cup hits the floorboards.

The puddle of broth soaks into the dust.

The men and the little girl have switched positions.

The son is slumped, unmoving, over a workbench. The father lies in a lagoon of blood on the pile of newspapers, mouthing the same three words over and over again: "Diosa de la guerra . . . Diosa de la guerra . . ."

The girl, now on her feet, holds up her trembling blood-soaked hands. Gravity pulls her tears to the earth.

The mother falls to her knees, whimpering.

"Lo siento," the girl sobs in the mother's language.

Then in English: "I'm so sorry."

The house explodes.

Back in Berry Glenn, California, Ash woke with a scream.

The image of the woman's face just before the explosion, the unwillingness to live written in her dead eyes, careened right out of the vision and into Ashline's bedroom. She dove out of her bed, grabbed hold of the metal wastebasket, and immediately threw up.

After her stomach convulsions had subsided, Ashline crawled slowly over to her laptop and flipped it open. She winced as her eyes adjusted to the glow of the screen, but she managed to open her Internet browser and navigate 290 to a Spanish-English translator. With trembling fingers she typed in the three words the dying man had repeated right before his b.l.o.o.d.y, fiery end: "Diosa de la guerra."

She clicked enter.

The three words that returned sent Ashline scrambling for the wastebasket again. Only this time nothing came out as she dry-heaved.

G.o.ddess of war.

As those three words faded from her mind, a different image floated to the surface-the date on the newspaper in the vision.

This year.

May 3.

Two days ago.

If the events in the vision had just occurred two days prior . . .

And if what Ashline and Eve were seeing in these nightmares weren't echoes from their previous lives, or lost relics from childhood . . .

Then the girl in the vision was not Ashline.

And the girl in the vision was not Eve.

Ashline curled up around the wastebasket and hugged it to her chest.

"I have a little sister."

291.

PART III: SPRING WEEK.

MATCH POINT.

Wednesda y Ashline had never been so grateful for game-day jitters.

Her match against Patricia Orleans was technically scheduled for five p.m., but the whole school had started referring to it as "sundown," as though she were headed to a gunfight at the OK Corral. Just strap two six-shooters to my hips and call me Wyatt, she thought as she high-fived what felt like the hundredth hallway pa.s.serby.

Bobby Jones, bless his warped and immature heart, decided the best way to win points with Ashline was to start a chant for her in the lunchroom when she emerged from the stir-fry line. He mounted a lunch table and wielded a megaphone, which whinnied mechanically as he powered it on. "Come on, everybody," he ordered the cafeteria in his best impression of a professional cheerleader. "Let's show Ashline some Owl spirit!"

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The audience hooted in unison.

With the help of his fellow soccer hooligans, he started a rousing chant of "Go, Wilde! Go, Wilde! Go, Wilde!" which, fueled by Bobby's charisma and ma.s.s hysteria, caught fire across the dining hall. By the time she reached the table with the rest of the women's tennis team-where Bobby and his teammates had ceremoniously decorated her plastic seat with streamers-she was grinning, an impressive feat, considering that she was still standing in the shadow of what had quickly become the worst Tuesday of her life.

She had somehow burned her handprint into the chest of her would-be boyfriend, and they'd parted on such awkward terms-a few uncertain words, a friendly kiss on the cheek-that Ashline wasn't sure she'd ever see him again. She had a little sister that until this week she had known nothing about, the lab rat of some experiment gone awry, who was now terrorizing villages in Central America. And her psychotic older sister was off lurking in the shadows.

For a few hours at least, she could just be Ashline Wilde, the number one tennis player at Blackwood and the only hope her school had to reach the top of Coastal Conference Athletics. Forget championing the school, she decided; she was going to win this one for herself. G.o.d only knew she needed a victory now more than ever.

When the final school bell chimed in F-block British Literature, she knew she should head to the locker room and suit up, take some warm-up shots, maybe convince 296 the trainer to put some heat on her knee, which had felt stiff and swollen since Monday's practice. But she had one detour to make first.

After she forged through the sea of last-minute well-wishers and shouts of "good luck," she navigated a course up the stairwell to the third-floor room where she had fifth-period history every day. Fortunately, Mr.

Carpenter was still there, erasing some final notes off the chalkboard. His freshman cla.s.s must have been covering the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, because he was just polis.h.i.+ng away the words "Hanging Gardens of Babylon" when Ash sidestepped a few stragglers who were heading out the door.

"Ms. Wilde." Mr. Carpenter set down the eraser and clapped his hands together to rid them of chalk dust.

When he ran his hand through his receding hairline, he left a smudge of white chalk on his forehead. "Did you forget something?"

"No, I . . ." Ash took a hesitant step into the room. "I actually came to ask you a few questions."

Mr. Carpenter gestured to one of the desks in the front row as he slid down into his overstuffed chair, which, with its bandages of masking tape, had seen better days. "I hope you didn't come to ask advice on tennis techniques for your big match today." He prodded at his wiry arms apologetically. "Never exactly been the athleti-cally inclined type, though I'll have you know I was on the golf team in my day."

Ash laughed and settled down into one of the desks.

297.

"Don't worry. My serves and my backhand are just fine.

But I know you've mentioned in cla.s.s several times that you were a cla.s.sicist before you were a historian, and that you have a particular soft spot for mythology."

"Indeed." He folded his hands on the desk. "I've never heard you express any interest in mythology before."

"I was wondering," she said, searching for neutral ground, "if you knew anything about Polynesian mythology."

He leaned toward her suspiciously. "Are you just trying to humor an old man? Maybe hoping for some boring lecture to distract you from the match you have in two hours?"

"Listen," Ash said. "I grew up a Polynesian chick raised by white Jewish upper-cla.s.s parents in a white Jewish upper-cla.s.s neighborhood, and they weren't exactly overflowing with information about my heritage.

Let's just say I've finally taken an interest."

"A commendable answer," he praised her. "Now, what do you want to know? Any specifics?"

She glanced at the clock-Coach Devlin would rip her a new one if she didn't make it locker-side by half past, so there was no time to beat around the bush. "What can you tell me about-" In her mind she flashed back to two nights prior, watched herself from above the bed, her body surrounded by flames but not once burned. "About the G.o.ddess-" It was last night, and Colt was writhing on the floor, his flesh still sizzling from her touch, the handprint on his chest simmering. "The G.o.ddess of fire?"

298.

His eyes lit up. "Not fire," he corrected her. "The volcano G.o.ddess-the G.o.ddess Pele."

"Pele," Ash whispered, repeating it as if the name itself were ablaze. "Pele" spoken like "pay-lay."

She was hearing her name for the first time.

"Easily one of the most fascinating figures in all of Polynesian mythology," Mr. Carpenter was saying whimsically.

"And what was her story?" she asked. "Was she at least . . . good?

Mr. Carpenter made a thoughtful sound. "Hard to say, really. I confess that I'm no expert when it comes to the mythology of the oceanic peoples. It would certainly depend who you asked, and where you asked it. We're talking about stories that have as many versions as there are islands in the Pacific." He must have noted that his pupil's face had collapsed with disappointment. "But I will say this. What Pele giveth, Pele can taketh away."

She frowned. "What do you mean?" I really just want you to tell me that I'm not a beacon of evil like my misguided older sister.

"Well, think about it. The Polynesian islands- Hawaii, for instance-were all created through the work of volcanoes. Here you have an expanse of ocean, but somewhere on the sea floor you have magma pus.h.i.+ng up, up, laying over itself"-he rose out of his chair-"up farther until the cooling lava forms an island in the middle of the vast and sprawling blue."

Mr. Carpenter wandered around to the front of the 299 desk. His patchwork chair had suddenly grown too small to constrain his imagination. "Then a traveling people settle on this new island, on the sh.o.r.es of the volcano that has risen out of the ocean on Pele's shoulders." His eyes darted to the windows and the milky light filtering in. He lowered his voice. "But every day you feel the rumbles of dissatisfaction coming from deep within the earth, and you see the summit of that volcano. And deep down you think- you know-that the same volcano that gave you life and land could, with one devastating explosion, take it all away again. Your house, your land. . . . Your life."

Ashline gazed into her open hands, tracing the life lines across her palms. Her fingers flexed in and out.

"So you ask me if Pele was good," Mr. Carpenter finished. "But my response is, What the h.e.l.l is good anyway? "

"Did Pele have any family?"

Mr. Carpenter clucked. "What mythology is complete without a dysfunctional family? It's what makes them so much like us."

So this is what it meant to be a G.o.ddess-the creator and bringer of life, the harbinger of death, the source of a thousand stories on a thousand islands . . . and none of those stories could have predicted that a volcano G.o.ddess would wind up sitting in the cla.s.sroom of a preparatory school, preparing to go to combat with a tennis racket in hand.

"I'm losing you," Mr. Carpenter said, misinterpret-ing her distant expression for disinterest. "You've gone to 300 some faraway island of your own. Tell me, do you remember anything from the island where you were born?"

"Yes," she lied. She hoped her smile might help to dam the tears in her eyes.

But that was the problem.

Ashline couldn't remember.

She could barely feel her feet touch the gra.s.s when she left the academic building.

"Pele . . ." She kept saying it out loud. Maybe if she repeated it enough, it might stop sounding foreign to her, or it might offer her whispers from any of her past lives.

Or, maybe, it might at least restore for her some feeling of home and peace.

But the name brought her none of these things. "Pele"

wasn't a stop on a journey toward understanding. It was a four-letter void.

Still, she had to share her discovery with someone before her big game. She visited Raja's room in East Hall first, only to find it empty. She knew Lily lived on her floor as well, but she wasn't sure exactly where, so she scanned the dry-erase boards one by one for Lily's name as she moved down the hall.

She nearly walked right past the room. The door was wide open, and inside, Lily sat in profile on her mattress, upright and rigid.

She wasn't alone either. On the carpet next to her bed, Rolfe knelt in a scattered heap of books and binders.

301.

From the irritation that had replaced his mellow funny-man demeanor, Ash couldn't help but wonder whether he'd dropped all of his school supplies or whether Lily had shoved them onto the floor.

"-never asked you to play therapist to my love life,"

Rolfe finished saying to Lily. He was furiously stacking his books into a pile. Once he'd collected the last of them, he picked up the stack and started to pivot toward the door.

Ash instinctively ducked off to the side just in time.

Another second, and Rolfe would have caught her, framed in the doorway like an awkward third wheel.

But Ash made no move to leave. Am I really going to eavesdrop on this conversation? she asked herself.

Yes. Yes she was.

"Rolfe, you can strut around campus like a peac.o.c.k with a surfboard," Lily snapped. "But when the honeymoon is over-and it will end-that girl is going to get bored of you faster than you can say 'Cowabunga.'"

"Right," Rolfe said. "Because you know her so well."

"You don't find it the least bit suspect that she waits until the day after she finds out you're a G.o.d to start inviting you over for sleepovers?" A beat. "Oh, shove that surprised look up your a.s.s. It's a small hall, and if you expected her roommate not to talk after being s.e.xiled three nights running-"

"Keep your voice down," he said to her in a harsh whisper. "Your door is open. What if she walks by?"

302.

"You're the one who left it open. You were never afraid to be alone with me before."

"Yeah, well, that's because you used to know when to keep your mouth shut!"

"That's funny," Lily said in a husky voice Ashline had never heard her use before. "Coming from the man who used to love how talkative I would get."

Rolfe growled, and his footsteps moved briskly for the door. Ashline started to back away frantically, trying to figure out whether she could tuck herself away into a door frame before he spotted her.

"I bought a dress," Lily said suddenly from inside the room. Her voice was so quiet, Ashline barely heard it out in the hallway.

Rolfe's footsteps stopped instantly, and it got so quiet that Ash could hear the whisper of a shower in the bathroom down the hall.