Afterglow (Wildefire) by Karsten Knight

Author:Karsten Knight [Knight, Karsten]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
Published: 2013-11-11T18:30:00+00:00

As Ash, Eve, and Wes followed the flow of guests through the grand halls of the Met, they earned their fair share of admiring or envious looks from the normal museum goers. At first Ash figured it was just because they looked real sharp in their black-tie formal wear—Ash and Eve in cocktail dresses of, respectively, red and gold, and Wes in the three-piece tuxedo from the men’s big-and-tall section. But after a girl shyly approached them to ask Wes for his autograph, Ash burst out laughing when she realized what was going on.

“What?” Wes snapped, then lowered his voice. “Do you . . . do you think they recognized me as the Five-Borough Vigilante?”

“No,” Ash said when she finally stopped cracking up. She shifted the satchel slung across her dress from one shoulder to the other. “You bear a striking resemblance to a certain player on the Knicks. They probably think we’re your arm candy for the night.”

“Ugh,” Eve groaned in disgust. “I’m no concubine, especially for a professional basketball player.”

Ash figured that most of the museum donors would be on the older side, but when they emerged onto the moonlit rooftop gardens, the three of them really didn’t look that out of place. In addition to the more mature patrons she’d expected, there was a smattering of young donors too—probably real estate brokers, Wall Street types, or dot com entrepreneurs, she guessed.

Fortunately, Ash didn’t immediately have any Colt sightings on the crowded rooftop, although it was tough for anyone to stand out among all the men wearing tuxedoes. Instead she wandered carefully through the crowd, with Eve and Wes in tow, while she went from glass case to glass case to investigate the new exhibit. The items the curator had chosen to represent each one of the sins weren’t much on first look—mostly timeworn relics that looked like throwaways from Antiques Roadshow.

But when she stopped at each of their glass encasements to read the plaque below, she felt a growing sense of awe. For instance, at the installment for the sin of pride, there was a gold-trimmed mirror. According to its caption, the mirror had purportedly belonged to the Countess Elizabeth Bathory of Hungary—or the Blood Countess, as she was known later in history. Bathory had been infamous for a sense of vanity so intense that in order to preserve her youthful looks she’d allegedly stooped to black magic by torturing and murdering young virgins.

According to some accounts she actually bathed in their blood.

“Jesus,” Eve muttered after she read the caption. “Maybe she should have just tried Botox.”

When Ash skimmed through the captions of the exhibit’s other antiquities—gluttony, envy, lust, sloth, greed—they were just as unsavory. But it was when she finally came to the wrath artifact near the far end of the exhibit that she felt truly sickened.

For all appearances, the wrath object looked like a tobacco pipe, although oddly it was made out of a scuffed bronze metal. Only when Ash peered closer did she recognize the pieces that had been sculpted and welded together to form the pipe.

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