Karsten Knight - Afterglow

Colt used his fingernail to scratch a big X through the Cloak’s blue flame eye in the painting. “Funny you should say that, since when you think about it, it’s their fault I have to keep killing you in the first place.” From Mnemosyne’s crestfallen expression, Colt knew she realized that in a twisted way, he was right. When the Cloak had tinkered with the brains of the gods to deny them access to their old memories—to give the gods a fresh start every time they were reborn—the procedure had only failed on two of them: the goddess of memory and the Hopi trickster whose regenerative abilities healed the amnesia.

The two of them alone had full, unfettered access to their former lifetimes.

And that’s exactly why Mnemosyne had to die. Only she knew all about Colt’s millennia’s worth of deception and manipulation and murder. Only she could warn the other gods and goddesses of the webs this trickster was spinning. Without her, his monopoly on the old ways was complete.

A lifetime spent in hiding and isolation had clearly taken its toll on Mnemosyne. Her eyes had sunk in, and her body looked so frail from malnutrition that a strong Arctic wind probably could have blown her off the edge of a fjord. Still, her gaze remained resolute. “You’ve got all the gods on your payroll convinced that if they help you exterminate the Cloak, it will bring their old memories back. . . . But it’s just the opposite, isn’t it? If the Cloak die, they can’t undo the brain damage, and the amnesia will be rendered permanent forever.”

Colt just smiled. “Part of being a good trickster means telling people exactly what they want to hear. A few false promises and they eat right out of my hand. Hell, some of them are so stupid that I could take an apple from the supermarket and convince them that it was the forbidden fruit of knowledge if I wanted to.”

“Knowing you,” Mnemosyne said, “it would more likely be a poisoned apple.”

“You know,” Colt went on, “I might have found it in my heart to let you live your cold, sad existence here a little while longer . . . but then you had to try to warn Ashline Wilde that I was coming. If I hadn’t intercepted your messenger before he got to her, you could have put a real damper on my love life.”

“You leave that girl alone,” Mnemosyne snarled, her caved-in cheeks drawing taut against her high cheekbones. It was the first time she’d shown any real emotion since he had arrived at the church.

“You know I can’t do that.” Colt bent down, opened the door to the stove, and plucked a hot, burning coal right out of the furnace. He held it out to Mnemosyne, and even as much as she hated the trickster, she still flinched as she watched his palm blister under the smoldering stone. “I crave her fiery touch,” he said, closing his eyes and tightening his hand into a fist around the stone. As the odor of smoke and burning flesh hit his nostrils, he was momentarily lost in reverie, fantasizing about the volcano goddess, Pele, who had first captured his heart five hundred years ago. He’d loved her when she was an outlaw in 1920s New Orleans; he’d loved her when she was a protectress of the Hawaiian islands a hundred years before that.

“The volcano goddess that you once loved is gone,” Mnemosyne said.

His eyes snapped open. “Because they took her from me!” Colt raged, stabbing a finger at the painting of the Cloak. “They had no right to break her the way that they did.” Two lifetimes ago, after deciding that she was too powerful and too volatile, the Cloak had split Pele’s soul into three pieces, three goddesses: a conjurer of fire, a summoner of storms, a wielder of explosions. Colt had pledged to put the pieces of her soul back together at all costs, and then he would be reunited with his beloved once more.

Ashline Wilde was one of those pieces—his favorite one—and soon she would love him again.

Colt finally dropped the hot coal to the floor and then held up his hand for Mnemosyne to see. The deep burns and festering blisters all vanished before her eyes, replaced with smooth skin. “All I want is to heal her. To make her whole again. Do you know what it’s like to love someone so intensely that you’d tear the heavens down just to find her again?”

Mnemosyne just shook her head, and the look of borderline pity she gave Colt made him feverishly angry. “You’ve confused love with obsession. If you truly cared for Ashline Wilde, you would let her go, let her blaze a new life for herself, with no memory of you. Instead you see her as a toy that keeps being taken from you. And you dare to call that love?” She pointed to his chest. “No, there’s no love left in that heart of yours. Just the faintest, crippled shadows of it.”

Colt quaked with seething anger. “I’m going to enjoy hanging you from the rafters.” He unslung the length of rope that he’d coiled around his shoulder; his trembling fingers struggled impatiently to tie a hangman’s knot.

With a resigned sigh, Mnemosyne wandered over to the opening in the back wall and clasped her hands behind her back. There was nowhere for her to run, so Colt allowed her to take in the scenic view of the fjord and the frozen bay one last time.

“There’s a lot that you can learn from the Arctic, Kokopelli,” she said, using his true godly name—the one his people had given him thousands of years ago, before he’d forsaken them. “Up here the polar night lasts all winter. Suddenly the constant darkness makes the days bleed together until time loses all meaning. After weeks of this, months of this, you start to honestly believe that you’ll never see the sun again.” She tilted her head toward the horizon. “But then one morning, when you’ve lost all faith, you look out to sea, and there it is—a sliver of gold peeking its head over the eastern waters.”

In response Colt started to stalk slowly toward her, holding out the noose.

Mnemosyne turned bravely to face him as her executioner marched forward. “Even the longest darkness has an end,” she said, “and yours is almost over, Colt Halliday. You just don’t know it yet.”

With that, before Colt could dart the last few steps to secure the noose around her neck, Mnemosyne dropped backward through the gap in the church wall, down the steep cliff face of the fjord. Colt rushed forward just in time to watch the Greek goddess of memory leave a crimson smear on the ice and rocks below, before the Arctic waters swallowed her body.

“Always a dramatic exit,” he muttered.

In her stockpile of equipment to forge a living up in the bitter north he found a torch, which he ignited in the coal furnace. Then he wandered over to the painting of the Cloak and held the burning end against the mural until the wall went up in flames.

As the inferno climbed into the rafters, and the firelight danced around him, Colt let the intense heat wash over his face, once again imagining that he was back with his fiery beloved. With Mnemosyne gone there would be no one to stop him from reuniting with her.

Together, trickster and volcano goddess, hand in hand, they’d light the fuse.

And they’d watch the world burn.

The aromas from the Italianrestaurants and bakeries were at war in the streets of Boston’s North End, a hunger-inducing mix of fresh bread, marinara, and cannoli. At this time in the early afternoon the cafés of the old Italian neighborhood were nearly empty, the narrow lane just as desolate, except for a few cooks and bakers smoking cigarettes and leaning against the brick storefronts. Ash could feel their eyes keeping pace with her as she walked down the street, sensing the tourist among them.