Afterglow (Wildefire) Read Online Free

won’t find him there. He’s working the fair tonight.” Before Ash could ask, “Fair?” he reached into his backpack and pulled out a flier.
    The one-page handbill was printed to look like it was on old, beige parchment, to match the headline across the top:
    King Edward’s Feast
    It was an advertisement for a freaking Renaissance fair.
    The pictures showed women in corsets and men in chain mail, with jousting and court jesters and medieval magic shows.
    Tom leaned in, and at first Ash thought he was making another pass at her. Instead he put his greasy fingertip on a picture toward the bottom, of a boy with olive skin dressed in medieval garb. Ash guessed he was of Mediterranean descent, possibly Greek. His curly black hair fell to his shoulders, which were covered in chain mail. It wasn’t that his face was unattractive, but there was something grizzled and timeworn about his skin that made him look much olderthan a college student. He sat on top of a horse, with a lance under one arm and a metal helmet cradled in the other.
    “So that’s Modo, huh?” Ash said. “How can I get to this dorky little festival?” Since she had arrived, she’d barely had time to drop the bag of clothes she’d thrown together at a cheap hotel, and she wasn’t old enough to rent a car.
    “It has a small fan base among the MIT kids, so they charter a bus to the fair. If you hustle to campus, you might make the four o’clock shuttle.”
    Ash stood up, already programming the engineering school into her cell phone’s GPS. “I won’t need a student ID to board the bus?”
    “Nah, they don’t check it.” Tom smirked. “And even if they did, you could easily pass for an engineering student.”
    “Why’s that?” When Ash realized what he was implying, she crossed her arms. “Do we need to have a discussion about cultural stereotypes? I’m Polynesian.”
    “Maybe we can discuss my ignorance over dinner?” he asked hopefully.
    But Ash was already on her way out the door, heading for the subway. The fourteenth-century lords and ladies of the Renaissance fair were about to get a special visit from a twenty-first-century goddess.

    Ash slept most of the bus ride, having pulled an all-nighter to catch her early morning flight out of Miami. The next thing she knew, her seat was being jostled as the students behind her stood up. She blinked away the thin veil of sleepand stepped down into the dirt parking lot with the others.
    After paying the entry fee to get in, Ash’s first thought as she entered the fairgrounds was: I am completely under-dressed.
    She knew she’d been the only one on the bus wearing jeans, but this was ridiculous. As far as the eye could see across the wooded marketplace, people were dressed in tunics and trousers and dresses. Some of the women rocked elaborate braids, while the men donned feather-tipped caps and leather helmets.
    So much for looking inconspicuous , Ash thought.
    She wasn’t quite ready to go flashing a picture of Modo around to random strangers, playing the “Have you seen this knight?” game, so she decided to take a walk around the compound. The fair basically consisted of a series of wooden storefronts and huts, each containing some type of medieval craftsman. Weaver. Corset maker. Even an artist painting the profile of a squirming schoolgirl who wouldn’t stop giggling.
    Ash took extra care to scan the lines at the archery and knife-throwing games, since she figured those would be the first logical places a typical twenty-year-old guy might go at a fair like this.
    However, it wasn’t until after she wandered past the sword-swallowing act in a circular amphitheater that she heard a suite of sounds that caught her attention.
    Hammering.
    The crackle of open flames.
    Ash wasn’t sure if it was the rhythmic clank-clank-clank of metal striking metal, or if the fire was somehow calling to her, but she felt herself magnetically drawn to the blacksmith’s open-air hut. Even despite the