Karsten Knight - Afterglow

“I didn’t mean you any harm,” Colt pleaded with her, sounding like a little boy who’d been caught shoplifting candy. “I wasn’t going to try to mold you back into Pele, you have to believe me! I just . . . I just couldn’t stay away from you. The attraction was too strong.”

Johanna shook her head. “All you had to do was leave me and my sisters alone. To learn your lesson. But you tracked me down anyway. And you tried to feed me lies from the moment you introduced yourself in that bar. The only thing you were too stupid and arrogant to lie about was your name. Of course, even if you’d changed your name, I still would have recognized you. Names can always change, but flesh—” She pointed to his bare chest, where she’d burned him. “Flesh never lies.”

Johanna—the girl he once knew as Ashline, and before that as Lucille, and before that as Pele, and in the many lifetimes their paths had crossed throughout history—opened the door to the shipping crate but lingered in the entrance. “I warned you that persistence can be deadly, Colt. Fortunately—or maybe unfortunately—for you, I’m not going to kill you. But I am going to leave you someplace where you’ll never harm me or my sisters again.”

Colt came at her hard this time, sprinting toward her and the door. Maybe he thought he could pull hard enough that his restraint would snap clean off the floor, but she’d welded it herself, with her own fingers. The chain held fast, and she could hear his ankle break. He howled and dropped to the floor, and came at her on his hands and knees, like an animal. Spittle flew from his mouth.

Johanna looked down upon him now with pity, as his extended fingers clawed at the toes of her work boots. “I’m not going to sugarcoat it for you,” she said. “If you’re truly invulnerable the way the books say you are, then I guess that means you won’t asphyxiate or drown in this container the way a human would. The bad news: Eternity in here is going to be very boring . . . and very wet. That’s why I’ve been kind enough to leave you a present.” She nodded back toward the nightstand. “I recommend you read it as quickly as you can while that lamp still has fuel left.”

With that, Johanna stepped outside the container and slammed the door shut, muffling Colt’s bellowing inside. She wrenched the lever handle closed, and then with her torch-hot fingers she welded the steel seam closed.

Johanna camped out outside the entrance of the crate for an hour, staring off into the night sky. She heard Colt struggling for a long time. She wouldn’t put it past him to try to break his own foot again to pry it free of the shackle. Ironically, his regenerative abilities probably healed him too fast for that to work, and even if it did, escape was futile.

Eventually, Colt stopped screaming and pounding at the inside of the crate. Even his chain had stopped rattling, so he must have been lying still on the quilt.

Shortly thereafter, the Renaissance blared its horn and pulled out of the dock. It took several hours after that for Johanna to completely lose sight of the New Zealand coast, at which point she knew she was far enough out to sea for what needed to happen next. She pointed her finger up in the air and fired a single firework, a flare that burst into a million fireflies at the peak of its journey.

Joaquin was there in under a minute. She heard his lumbering footsteps on the stacked shipping crates before he even said anything. Still, she waited for him to come up behind her, draping his elephantine arms over her shoulders as affectionately as a giant his size could.

“It’s done?” Joaquin asked.

She nodded. “He came, just like Ashline anticipated he would.”

He spun her around and held her out at arm’s length. “And you’re positive you want to follow through with this?”

Johanna considered this for just a moment. She walked over to the shipping crate and ran her hands over the metal doors. If this were just about her, just about revenge, she might have talked herself out of it.

But Ashline and Evelyn Wilde had stopped Colt the last time, not out of malice, but for the love of their families.

Now Johanna had loved ones to protect too.

“Thousands of years’ worth of accumulated wisdom and memories,” she said, and she half-hoped Colt could hear her inside. “And all he had to do was learn from one mistake.” With that, she tapped twice on the shipping crate door and stepped away.

Joaquin lifted his head to the night sky. As the moonlight bathed over him, his eyes turned an inky black. His already rippling muscles swelled.

He walked over to the side of the shipping crate, pressed two hands and his shoulder against the metal wall. Drew in a deep breath.

And he pushed the shipping crate off the edge of the boat, into the water.

Johanna and Joaquin sat together with their legs dangling off the boat, watching as the Renaissance left the sinking container behind. The dark Pacific waters swallowed it before it even reached the end of the boat.

“You know, there’s a silver lining to Colt Halliday’s story,” Johanna said.

Joaquin slipped his hand through her hair and planted a kiss on the top of her head. “And what’s that, love?”

“If Colt hadn’t done all those awful things to get Pele back, Ashline would have never written that story . . . and I would have never found you again.” She smiled, and the moonlight illuminated the tears of nostalgic joy in her eyes. Her hands cupped the side of his face, and her eyes were a hundred years deep as she peered into his. “Some loves are too small for just one lifetime, Wesley Towers.”

Inside the shipping crate, Colt slammed against the wall, then the ceiling, as the container fell off the side of the ship. There was a tremendous whoosh as it hit the ocean and sank beneath the surface, at which point the crate’s rotation slowed. Meanwhile, water slowly trickled through the seams around the doors.

Two minutes and an eternity later the crate struck the seafloor, and Colt’s world was righted again. He had to untangle himself from the chain, which had coiled around his leg like a metal boa constrictor while the container spun.

Miraculously, the antique lantern hadn’t smashed during his prison’s descent or been doused by the water, although from the dimming light he could tell it was almost out of fuel. He picked it up and started with some trepidation toward the corner where the “gift” Johanna had left for him floated in the rising ankle-deep water.

The three books were tied together with a red bow. His trembling fingers managed to unknot it on the third try, and he held up the book on top.

The title read: Wildefire .

He flipped to the soggy first page. The flickering light of the lantern illuminated the words in a vengeful crimson only long enough for him to read the very first sentence, before the lamp consumed the last of the kerosene and immersed Colt’s underwater prison in darkness for good.

“Ashline Wilde,” the book began, “was a human mood ring.”

Let me begin by saying that all young-adult authors, myself included, are neurotic, emotionally unstable worry-warts prone to extended periods of paralyzing self-doubt and angst—which is, I suppose, why we are so well-qualified to write from a teenage perspective.

On outward appearance, when you see us at book signings or author events, we may seem cool as a cucumber (an expression that I’ve never entirely understood, since most cucumbers that I’ve encountered have been room temperature at best). But in the three years since I entered the tumultuous world of publishing, I have yet to meet an author—debut or established, contemporary or fantasy, human or cucumber—who hasn’t developed Chicken Little syndrome in the weeks surrounding the launch of his or her latest book. This anxiety ultimately boils down to one question: Who on earth is going to read this book?