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W I L D E F I R E

K a r s t e n K n i g h t

SIMON & SCHUSTER BFYR

NEW YORK LONDON TORONTO SYDNEY

Ded

—TK

Ack TK

SIMON & SCHUSTER BFYR

An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020

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Copyright © 2011 by Karsten Knight

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Manufactured in the United States of America 2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data TK

ISBN 978-1-4424-2117-2

ISBN 978-1-4424-2119-6 (eBook)

CONTENTS

Lightning Rod

XX

PART I: THE REDWOODS, XX

Eight Months Later

Sleepwalker, Thursday

XX

Blue Flame, Friday

XX

The Beach Scrolls, Saturday

XX

Interlude, Central America

XX

Chain Gang, Sunday

XX

The Burning Bed, Monday

XX

Handprint, Tuesday

XX

Interlude II, Central America

XX

Match Point, Wednesday

XX

Midnight Movie, Thursday

XX

Masquerade, Friday

XX

Sibling Rivalry, Friday

XX

Extinguished, One Month Later

XX

LIGHTNING ROD

Ashline Wilde was a human mood ring. Sixteen years old, and she was a cauldron of emotions—frothing, bubbling, and volatile. She had never heard of “bottling it all up inside.” She was as transparent as the air itself.

And as she loomed over her combatant in the dusty Scarsdale High School parking lot, it didn’t take an answer key for the gathering crowd to decipher her mood du jour.

Ashline was pissed.

Lizzie Jacobs touched her split lip and gazed with a mixture of fury and awe at her bloodstained fingertips.

One right hook from Ash had laid the skinny blond girl flat out on her ass. “What the hell, Wilde?”

“What’s the matter, Elizabeth?” Ash massaged her knuckles.
Goddamn,
that had hurt. “You couldn’t find your own boyfriend?”

1

“Oh, I could.” Lizzie brushed the dirt off the seat of her designer jeans as she used the hood of a nearby car to rise to her feet. “He just happened to be yours at the time.”

A chorus of “ooh” echoed around them.

“With all the guys who come in and out of the revolving door to your Volvo’s backseat, you had to get your paws on Rich, too?” Ash asked. The crowd hollered again. Summoned by the promise of bloodshed, students flooded out of the high school’s back doors, the circle around the two girls growing thicker by the minute.

First rule of school yard fights: It didn’t matter who you cheered for, as long as someone got slapped around.

“Ashline, wait,” a deep voice called. Somewhere in the sea of hoodies and popped collars, a varsity letter jacket wormed its way through the crowd. Rich Lesley finally elbowed in to the periphery of the inner circle. He stopped dead when he caught sight of Lizzie’s bloodied face. At six-foot-four he stood a full twelve inches taller than Ashline, but he still shrank back when his soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend turned around. His sandy hair bobbed as he searched for an emergency exit, but the crowd that had been so eager to let him through had now knitted together to block his escape.

It was the first time she’d seen him since Tessa had reported the horrible news to her in last-period chemistry. As Ash had stormed out midclass, she’d imagined all the awful things she would say to him,
do
to him even.

2

But faced with the boy who had abruptly tossed their three months together out the window like an apple core to the freeway, she couldn’t even pretend to be anything but hurt. Maybe it was the naïveté that came with having your first real relationship, but nothing about their romance had screamed “summer fling” to Ashline.

“Really, Rich?” she said finally, her voice sounding far more pathetic than she’d intended. “It’s bad enough that you cheated on me,
during school
. . . but Lizzie Jacobs was the best you could do?”

“Hey!” Lizzie protested from behind her.

“Shut up, bitch,” Ash said, raising a hand to silence her. “The grown-ups are talking.”

Rich shifted his tennis bag from one shoulder to the other. At one point or another every man dreamed of two women fighting over him, but this clearly wasn’t what Rich Lesley had imagined. “I don’t want to talk about this here.”

“I’m sorry,” Ash said quietly, unconsciously twisting the Claddagh ring that Rich had given her. Its heart was still pointed inward. “Is there some place quieter you had in mind to humiliate me?”

For a moment, when he tugged at the hair that was starting to grow over his ear, when his posture slouched as if he were deflating, when his feet shuffled restlessly in place, Ash thought she saw a specter of the old Rich, the same Rich she’d seen in his cellar the day his parents had announced they were getting a divorce. For a moment she 3

felt like maybe it
was
just the two of them, alone again, lying in the bed of his green pickup.

But then the world around him seemed to coalesce, and the crowd snapped back into place. His eyes hard-ened. “The only person who’s humiliating you,” he said,

“is
you
.” His fingers settled on the zipper of his tennis bag as if it were a holstered gun.

Ash leveled him with a stare that could harpoon a marlin from a hundred yards. She pointed at his bag.

“What are you going to do, coward? Swat me with your tennis purse?”

Momentarily girded with courage, Rich turned and smirked at Reggie Butler, co-captain of the tennis team.

“If only she’d been this passionate when we were dating.”

One second Ashline was standing in the middle of the circle. The next second Rich was curled in the fetal position on the ground, howling in pain, holding his tennis bag in front of him like a shield to prevent further irrepa-rable injury to his groin.

“You have something to say too, Butler?” Ash asked.

“No, ma’am,” Reggie said, and after one glance down at his squirming friend, he defensively held up his hands.

“Personally, I think he deserved it.”

“Traitor,” Rich rasped from the ground.

“Christ, Wilde.” Lizzie came up beside Ash, who had temporarily forgotten all about her. Lizzie planted her hands firmly on her hips and peered down at Rich with no particular touch of concern. “Didn’t your parents teach you any manners?”

4

Ever so slowly Ash rotated her head to the left, her eyes piercing out from behind her bangs.

“Ooh, right,” Lizzie said. “You’re just some crazy bush child that your parents came home from vacation with.”

Ash raised her hand and touched the skin over her cheek, at once painfully self-conscious of how her skin, the hue of earthen clay, clashed against the backdrop of her predominantly white school. She spent the better part of each day feeling like a grizzly in the polar bear cage, and now Lizzie Jacobs was poking her with a stick through the bars.

The crowd had fallen uncomfortably quiet as well.

Oblivious to the silence around her, or perhaps driven by it, Lizzie wiped the blood from her still-bleeding lip. “Where do you think your parents are right now?

Chanting in a circle back on Tahiti? Fishing with a spear?

Or are they poking needles into a little voodoo doll, controlling you, and that’s why you’re acting like such a—”

It really wasn’t Ash’s intention to knock out anyone’s teeth during this altercation. But Lizzie hadn’t even finished her verbal portrait of Ashline’s birth parents when, in a blur, the Polynesian girl’s hands wrapped around Lizzie’s skull and threw her across the circle. The momentum carried Lizzie uncontrollably toward a familiar green pickup.

It was one of those genuine oh-shit-what-did-I-just-do moments when everything slows down. Lizzie’s face smashed into the truck’s side mirror—so hard, in fact, 5

that the mirror snapped clean off and clattered to the ground, cracking in half on impact. Meanwhile Ash watched with a cocktail of glee and guilt-ridden horror as the light flickered behind Lizzie’s eyes and her eyelids drooped. Lizzie Jacobs was three quarters of the way to Neverland by the time she landed on the pavement, her outstretched arm mercifully providing a pillow for her head as she went down.