Wildefire

by Karsten Knight

  Blackwood won the coin toss, so Ash took the line and pulled the ball from her shorts. She toed up to the paint, gave the ball a few practice bounces. The crowd hushed. And then she flipped the ball straight up into the air, and her racket hammered down.

  Ash was headed for the left corner of the court before she realized that Patricia was actually sending the ball hurtling toward the opposite side. She changed directions on her heel, but it was too late. She went sprawling to the ground with her racket outstretched, but the ball touched down right on the paint before it took its second bounce and dribbled into the corner.

  The referee shouted, “Game!” Ash slammed her racket to the clay before picking herself up; she made sure her back was to the ref when she repeatedly swore under her breath. Ash had taken the first set, and Patricia the second. Ashline had steamrolled out into the final set, taking the first four games, with only two more needed for the win. But for the last ten minutes Tricia had decisively 309

  trammeled her, winning six of the last eight games. They were tied, six games apiece, and a final tie-breaking game would determine the victor.

  From the opposite end Tricia called time and headed for the visiting team locker room. On Tricia’s way across the court, Ash noticed that her opponent had an almost undetectable limp and was favoring her left foot.

  “Wilde!” Coach Devlin shouted. Ash hobbled over to the bench, where the coach pressed a water bottle into her hand, but Ash shoved it right back. The last thing she needed right now was more weight in her stomach, and there would be plenty of time to rehydrate later. Instead she grabbed a towel from the bench and mopped at her forehead.

  “You see what just happened there?” the coach whispered to her.

  “She’s limping, I know.”

  “Slipped and came down on her left foot wrong when she charged the net in that last game. It would be very unsportsmanlike for me to suggest that you try to fire off some quick shots to her left,” Coach Devlin mused.

  “Loud and clear.” Ash tossed the towel onto the bench.

  “Good.” Coach clapped her on the back. “Now pretend like every serve is a single nail you’re hammering into the lid of her coffin.” She shoved Ashline back onto the court.

  Tricia emerged from the locker room with her stride 310

  even and her leg magically healed. To Ashline’s immediate surprise, her combatant actually approached her instead of returning to her own side. Tricia tilted her head back, and her face came into focus beneath her little red cap.

  Ashline nearly dropped her racket.

  “Where is she?” Ash hissed.

  “You mean that chick with no sense of humor?” Eve asked. “Taking a long nap on the shower floor. Hopefully she’ll wake up in time to catch her bus.” She tugged at the tight tennis shorts. “Good thing we’re about the same size.”

  Ash took a step toward her. “I am not playing against you.”

  “Yes, you are.” Eve tossed her racket playfully from hand to hand. “Because if you’ll notice, the stands on which everyone that you know is sitting—your friends, your teachers . . . your boyfriend—are made of metal.

  Conductive metal.”

  “You wouldn’t.” Ashline’s throat went as dry as the Gobi, and she suddenly wished she’d taken that drink when she’d had the chance.

  “That’s the game, partner. You win this match, I disappear off to Vancouver and I stop hounding you.

  Patricia wakes up with a massive headache, maybe thinks she slipped and hit her head in the showers, has to take a bus ride home being consoled by her classmates about a match she doesn’t remember losing. But if you lose, then you quit pretending to be Suzy Valedictorian, dump 311

  Blackwood like an ugly prom date, and come with me.

  And if you try to run or give anyone any reason to believe that something is amiss . . .” She looked ominously to the sky, and a bleak wind picked up. She leaned in and whispered into Ashline’s ear, “I will fry everyone.”

  Ash looked up into the stands. Colt was clapping along to one of Bobby’s chants. The referee was watching the two athletes with particular interest. “Guess I don’t have much of a choice.”

  “We’ll shake on it, then.”

  Ash took her sister’s hand, and instantly her eyes blanched white with pain and a bright haze swallowed the whole court. Electricity sizzled through her fingers, and her body trembled from her head out to her extremities. She could feel the blood vessels rising to the surface of her skin, and she clenched her jaw so tightly that she thought her teeth would shatter. A tinny whine pierced her eardrums.

  Eve finally released her. She did an about-face and headed for the opposite side. “Your serve.”

  Ash took a moment to collect herself as the seizure passed and the searing white faded from her eyes. Then she gathered control of her limbs and made the trip back to the line. The ringing soon died away, replaced with the stomp, stomp, clap of the home team audience. Soon Bobby Jones and the rest of his body-painted male cheerlead-ers started in on a chant of, “Kick some Ash! Kick some Ash!”

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  At the line, Ash inhaled deeply, flushing the last of the electricity out of her system. Come on, she instructed herself. She bounced the ball in front of her. She was the top-ranked varsity tennis player. She was the one in control. Bounce. It had been years since Eve participated in nay sort of competitive athletics, and whatever she was doing with her time in Vancouver, it wasn’t making court times and improving her backhand at some posh country club. Bounce.

  Ash tossed the ball into the air. Her racket made hard contact.

  The ball sailed straight into the net.

  “Fault!” called the referee.

  Ash shook her head and pulled another ball from her pocket as the manager flitted across the court to snag the loose one.

  “Focus,” Ash whispered to herself. Double bounce.

  Take all of your jitters and force them into the ball.

  She lobbed the ball and brought her racket up to meet it. This time the ball cruised over the net—

  And strayed out of bounds by a solid two feet.

  “Double fault!” the referee shouted, met with the dis-gruntled groans of the home team.

  For the next serve Ashline took a more conservative swing, and the ball landed in bounds, but in a blur Eve was there to field the shot, sending it right back her way.

  The ball approached faster than Ash had expected, but she was ready for it, loping across the court.

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  A hungry wind swooped down from the south. Just as Ashline’s racket swept forward to intercept the fuzzy green meteor, the gust caught the ball and sent it bouncing in the opposite direction.

  “Love–Thirty,” the ref announced. It was all Ash could do not to heave her racket across the court.

  Her rage propelled her next two serves over the net with ruthless precision, back-to-back aces that, even with her bag of supernatural tricks, Eve was at a loss to field in time. However, the third serve came off the tip a little on the sluggish side, and Eve sprinted for the corner in time, volleying it back over the net.

  It headed for the back corner, within easy reach of Ashline, and moving slowly. What Eve compensated for with fast reflexes, she lacked in technique. Ash trotted over ready to make an easy return over the net.

  With a crackle, ice crystallized on the clay beneath her as her left foot came down. She pitched forward onto her face, and her racket only clipped the ball, sending it hurtling at the referee’s tower. He leaned back to let the ball jet past him into the visiting team stands.

  “Thirty–forty! Match point!”

  Bobby seized the moment to incite a new chant. He rose to his feet with the others, stomping on the stands as he bellowed “You’re an Ash-hole!” at Eve.

  They were all totally oblivious to the fact that the girl they were mocking had electrocuted people for less.

  Seeing her fans on their feet renewed Ashline’s 314

  courage.
She drew herself up as tall as she could, let her spine extend, and rubbed her elbow where it had scraped the ground during her fall. There was blood on her fingers, and she massaged it into the ball, the violent red on the electric green like some sort of twisted emblem of Christmas.

  She stepped up to the line. With a crushing blow she placed another sizzling ace down the right-hand side.

  Eve moved in a blur but missed the ball by a fraction of an inch. The momentum carried her toward the visiting stands and onto the clay floor. Another Southbound player dashed over to help her to her feet, but Eve shoved her away viciously and pulled her cap down more tightly on her head.

  The next serve Eve volleyed back in a high arc that was coming down close to the net, if it was going to clear it at all. This time Ashline expected the ice that crystallized beneath her feet. She rode it forward, sliding until the soles of her shoes scratched against the surface of the clay. With a leap that nearly took her over the net, Ash caught the ball and slammed it down her opponent’s throat. The ball zipped between Eve’s legs.

  The Blackwood side erupted as “Advantage Wilde!”

  echoed from the speakers. It was match point, and Ashline was one serve away from sending Eve home. But as Ash returned to the baseline to the raucous chatter and shouts and clapping and stomping of the home team fans, she felt queasy. Would Eve keep her word if she 315

  lost? Or would she enact her revenge anyway? She had murdered Lizzie Jacobs in cold blood . . . but was she so far gone that she could send a lightning bolt forking down into an innocent crowd?

  Ashline was dribbling the ball, waiting for the crowd to hush, when the sickening feeling crept into her sinuses.

  Her ears clicked. Her stomach plummeted as if she were free-falling from an airplane, and as the pressure shifted dramatically, her skull felt like it was folding itself into an origami crane. The court tilted in front of her, and even as her vision distorted into a kaleidoscope of pain, she could still see Eve’s sadistic smile beneath the brim of her hat, enjoying every second of the torture she was inflict-ing on her little sister.

  Ash breathed through her nose. She bounced the ball once.

  I’m going to send you away, she thought.

  Bounce.

  Away, never to return.

  Bounce, catch. Bounce, catch.

  And I never—

  Bounce.

  Want to—

  Catch.

  See you—

  Toss.

  AGAIN.

  The ball hung in midair, dangling frozen above her 316

  like an apple waiting to be plucked. The fire surged from her heart into her shoulder and all the way up to the tips of her fingers. And as her arm came down, swinging the racket like the hammer of Thor, she took every last frustration from the past week, every broken promise her sister had ever made, every ounce of Ashline’s wasted love for Eve, and she channeled it into that ball.

  It flew as true as an arrow, and from the get-go it was clearly too high to land in bounds, but that wasn’t its intended trajectory. The green ball glowed faintly orange with heat, whistling as it sizzled over the net. Eve had time only to raise her racket in front of her face as it continued its flight toward her head.

  But not even the racket could stop it. The racket strings twanged and burst inward, seared completely through by the fireball, which continued on its course for another six inches before it struck Eve in the face.

  The force of the ball knocked her backward out of bound and her head connected with the ground first. Even from across the court Ash could see a small cloud of dying embers, carried away by the wind.

  The Blackwood stands exploded, and before the faculty could even meekly protest, the whole mass of spectators flooded the court. The mob closed in around Ashline, blocking her line of vision. Eve disappeared in the deluge of fans.

  The soccer team fought their way to the front, their painted bodies squeezing in around her until Bobby and 317

  Stephen Drake hoisted her up onto their shoulders. Now, from her higher perspective, she caught sight of Eve shov-ing through the crowd toward the visiting team locker room. Her hands covered her face, but she took them down just long enough to bowl over one unlucky student.

  The locker room door closed behind her.

  Ash slipped down off the shoulders of her band of merry men and burst through the line of painted soldiers.

  As she cut a path for the locker room, the people filled the void behind her, and the celebration continued as if she were still there in the center of it all.

  In the visiting team locker room, Ash heard a groan.

  Patricia Orleans was just beginning to stir on the floor of the shower, naked and lying under a steady stream of cold water. Ash didn’t have time to worry about her. The back exit was slowly hissing shut. She sprinted across the tile, catching her reflection briefly in the mirror; her contact with the body-painted boys had slathered her uniform, arms, and one of her cheeks in green.

  Eve was nowhere in sight when Ash crashed through the back doors, but Ash headed in a beeline for the forest anyway. Her bad knee, which had stayed true for the entire tennis match, had now grown tender again, but she limped on as quickly as she could manage.

  Any residual heat from the spring day instantly dissipated into the dusk sky. It began to drizzle, and as the temperature continued to plummet, the drizzle soon transformed into snow.

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  She stopped ten yards into the wood, unsure where to go. There was no heavy breathing, no footsteps, no rustle of leaves on the forest floor to follow. With the weather changing this rapidly and the snow now coming down in thick clumps, Eve couldn’t be far off.

  Ahead, resting on a rock, was the red tennis cap Eve had taken from Patricia.

  “Do you think it happens this way every time?”

  Ash, who had bent down to pick up the cap, whirled around. Eve sat with her back against one of the redwoods. Her bangs, her shoulders, and her eyelashes were all collecting snow, which she refused to brush off. She hugged her knees to her chest, and for the first time in a long while she looked truly small to Ashline, swallowed by the vastness of the trunk.

  She looked almost human.

  “Do you think,” Eve continued, staring off into the snowy oblivion, “that we have this same relationship each time we’re reborn? This push and pull, this give and take . . . Does it always work out like this? Or, if this were a different century, would we have gotten along?” She touched the scorch mark on her cheek where the burning ball had collided with her face.

  Ash dropped the hat back to the ground. “I don’t know.”

  Eve smiled slightly even though her eyes were brimming with tears. “Do you think, maybe in the other times, I wasn’t the bad girl? That I was the do-right, the beacon 319

  of light, and you were the screwup, the runaway, the bad daughter?”

  “I can only tell you who I am now,” Ash replied, “and who I want to one day be. Maybe you should start focusing on this lifetime.”

  Eve used the trunk to pull herself to her feet. “Why bother? If I’ve already screwed up this one so bad, all I have to look forward to is the next, right?”

  “Eve, I really do hope you find what you’re looking for, that you restore the cycle, that you can find a way for us to all be reincarnated again for another hundred lifetimes.” Ash choked back tears as she summoned the courage to say what she wanted to next. “But as far as this lifetime goes, we’re through.” When she heard the cold words hanging in the space between them, she knew they were true.

  There was a pause while Eve stood, unmoving. She opened her mouth, as if she were preparing to break down and sob.

  Instead she hunched over and bent her neck back like some sort of vicious wounded creature. Her mouth gaped open wider than seemed humanly possible. And a death-rattling howl pierced the air.

  The fierce gust caught Ash in the chest so hard that she rose up off her feet. Her head snapped back and hit the rock behind
her, and the forest went fuzzy with pain.

  When Ash, groaning, finally regained her wits and sat upright, Eve was gone.

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  The only thing left of her sister was the distorted impression in the snow where she’d been leaning against the tree like a wounded soldier, a twisted snow angel of pain and violence quickly being erased by the white.

  Ash had a present waiting on her bed when she returned to her room. Colt had apparently tried to find her after the tennis match, and when she’d gotten lost in the fray, he’d given up and handed the envelope off to Raja. Ash noticed that the silk dress and gladiator sandals had disappeared from her bedroom chair, so Raja must have made the swap.

  She carefully ripped open the top of the envelope and pulled out the letter. As soon as she did, two earrings dropped out onto her comforter. They were made of gold with ruby gemstones, and they danced like firelight when she held them up to the lamp.

  The letter read:

  Dearest Ash,

  I think you’ll look charming

  in these when you wear them to

  masquerade ball on Friday. And the

  best part—they’ll match my cuff

  links.

  Your smitten burn victim,

  Colt Halliday

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  Ash couldn’t help but smile, and she wiped a few rogue tears from her eyes. She dropped the letter facedown onto the bed and immediately tried on the earrings.

  Just as she was headed for the mirror to see how they looked, she discovered that there was more written on the letter’s reverse side. She picked it up and continued reading.

  P.S. I’ve enclosed the pictures

  from the other night; I developed

  them in my darkroom and did not

  look at them, so you could be the

  first and only person to lay eyes

  on this special spot of ours in the