Afterglow (Wildefire) Read Online Free Page B

play?”
    Ash punched Modo in the arm, eliciting a whiny “ow” from him. “I am not,” she enunciated, “a stripper. I am a god like you who has come here to save your ass from a group of other gods who are far less friendly.” Every timeshe said the word “god,” his confusion deepened, and it was then that she had an epiphany.
    Modo honestly had no idea what the hell she was talking about.
    “You seriously don’t know?” Ash asked. “I figured it out within five seconds of seeing you, and you have no freakin’ clue what you are? Who you are?”
    He just stared blankly at her.
    “Hephaestus?” she said, sounding less sure now. “You know, the Greek god of the forge and metallurgy?” Maybe the forward approach wasn’t the brightest plan after all. Modo was starting to look like a rabbit that had been backed into a cave by a coyote.
    He shrugged free of her grip, and his hand tightened around his hammer, as though he might need to defend himself. “Are you completely off your rocker?” he rasped. A group of boys chowing down on turkey legs gave them weird looks as they walked by, so Modo switched back into his theatrical voice. “I mean, what sort of strange sorcery is this, mage?”
    Ash slapped him on the back of the head. “Modo, I know you’re under the impression that I’m a nut job, but take a moment to connect the dots: You’re a Greek boy . . . with a crippled leg . . . and despite the fact that it’s well into the twenty-first century, you’re a fucking blacksmith.”
    “Listen, cupcake,” Modo said. “It’s no secret that I like women who are into the whole fantasy role-playing thing, too. But even if I didn’t have a girlfriend already, you areseriously starting to freak me out—and that’s saying something.”
    Ash growled in frustration. It was never easy—but then again it had taken some convincing two months ago for Ash to finally accept the truth about her own identity.
    Well, she’d just have to convince him, too.
    She snatched the hammer out of his hand, grabbed him by the wrist, and forced his fingers down onto the flat of the blade. Then, with her free hand, she touched the other end of the sword.
    He yelped and jerked his fingers away. Where the blade had almost completely cooled down before, Ash had heated it right back up so that the metal glowed orange against the anvil.
    “If I’m not a goddess, then how the hell did I do that?” Ash ran her finger along the length of the sword, which whistled under her fingertip. “And if you’re not a god, then why aren’t you burned? I bet you’ve never been so much as singed a day in your life. You’re just conditioned to associate heat with danger . . . when it holds no danger for you at all.” She pointed to the smoldering furnace in the back. “You could probably stick your hands in those coals and be fine.”
    This seemed to give Modo pause. He was starting to look at least a little reflective. Maybe he was reviewing the last twenty years of his life, all his time spent around fire and forges, struggling—even hoping—to remember a time that the flames had left a mark upon his skin.
    “I was where you are barely two months ago,” she went on. “And unfortunately, just like me, you don’t have the luxury of taking time to let it all sink in. Of sorting through the lunacy of what I’m telling you. Of wondering why the news that will change your life has to come from a complete stranger.” She put her hand on his chest and let a swell of warmth pulse through the fabric of his tunic. “But when you start to realize how my crazy theory fills all the cracks that have been accumulating in your life, you’ll be left with four words: I am a god.”
    For a moment, given the way he was staring into the embers crackling out of the furnace, Ash thought that her little speech had done the trick, that Modo would cave and come with her. This oblivious engineering student somehow factored into Colt’s dark