Drowning in Fire (11 page)

Griffin started to pace, soggy leaves parting beneath his boots. “Why?” he asked, but as soon as the word escaped his lips, he knew the answer. It made him nauseous.

“If she finds the Source and brings back the raw magic,” Bane said, “she will be greater than our Queen. Higher than
ali’i
, higher than any Chimeran in any of the island clans is allowed to dream. It will erase all her shame and make her into something new. She’ll be untouchable.”

“But you said the Source killed the Queen.”

Chief licked his lips. “That’s the belief, yes. Legend says that she did find it, that the power was hers for one brief moment before it destroyed her. It’s why no Chimeran has gone searching for it ever again. Because we don’t believe it was meant to be found. That we may borrow its magic from afar, but death will come to anyone who touches it.”

Great stars,
no
.

“Why didn’t she tell anyone else?” Griffin asked, a thought coming to him. “If all she wanted was glory and the chance to save face, why didn’t she announce what she was going to do to the entire Chimeran valley? Wouldn’t this kind of thing give her major status?”

The chief looked down, suddenly and strangely silent.

Bane jumped in. “She is desperate and depressed, Griffin, a lethal combination. Claiming to go after the Source would only bring her more scorn. We believe in proof, nothing less. Valor and strength that can be seen and tested. She’s on a suicide mission with no promise of glory at the end. Only a chance, and a very small one at that.”

“So she has nothing left to lose,” Griffin snarled, turning away so he wouldn’t have to look at the Chimerans as he thought it all through.

“No,” Bane said. “She doesn’t. And it all started with you.”

“What do you want me to do about it now, three years apart and with her gone?” Griffin snapped over his shoulder.

No response. Because Bane didn’t know. He was sick with worry over his sister—even though he wasn’t officially allowed to feel such—and he’d chosen to take it out on the man who was easiest to blame, even if the blame wasn’t entirely Griffin’s to shoulder.

Griffin got it. And he couldn’t say that he wouldn’t have done the exact same thing, being in his position.

The story made sense in his mind. His heart didn’t want to believe it, but the terrible squeeze and aching in his chest told him that it was true.

If Keko had taken off from the Chimeran valley yesterday morning, by the time she called Griffin she could have gotten to some town with a phone. Their conversation had seemed so cryptic at the time, but made a world of sense now. She’d known exactly what she was doing, what she’d wanted. What she had to do to get it. She’d sounded like someone saying good-bye when they knew they would never come back.

Goddamn it, why was the chief so quiet? Did he feel
nothing
for this woman who’d given him years of service and was of his own blood?

Griffin spun in an uneven, frustrated circle, scrubbing cold hands through his short hair. Did he wish he hadn’t known? Did he wish she’d never called him? Was there anything he could do?

“Keko will—” Bane began, but that’s as far as he got before the earth ripped open a short distance away and a voice poured out of its depths.

“THIS WOMAN MUST BE STOPPED.”

The voice crackled up through the forest, shaking the bare trees and making the stars go blurry. It was made of a million sounds at once: angry as fire, ethereal like a whisper, melodic like bells.

In the distance, Griffin saw the other Secondaries around the bonfire mobilize, scrambling for the forest, running toward the sound. Running toward Griffin and the two Chimerans.

In the foreground, a sapling shivered and tilted to one side, crashing into another. Under the moon, at the very edge of where the firelight reached, an irregular circle of cracked mud and scrubby brown grass
shifted
. He stumbled backward, out of its circumference. The ground churned as though in a blender, rocking and spinning and turning in upon itself.

The air and water elementals coming from the bonfire finally reached him, skidding to a stop when they noticed what was happening.

From the hole in the earth, dirt and roots and stones crawled on top of one another. Grass and mud wound around an invisible form, piling higher and higher, until it assumed the shape of humanoid legs. Clay and sand pushed up and around the legs, forming a torso. Branches shot out to form arms, little twigs for fingers. The dirt rounded atop the neck to form a head, and yellow-green grass sprung up from the scalp, curling around the face that started to appear decidedly female.

As the small nose pushed out from the round cheeks, the eyes turned otherworldly green, and the hair transformed to white wispy silk, he recognized that face. Aya. Daughter of Earth. Not completely of the natural world, but not entirely human either.

By the stunned and silent expressions shared by everyone around the broken circle, no one else had ever witnessed such an appearance of an earth elemental. Not even the premier. Before, she had always simply walked out of the shadows on human legs to join them around the fire.

“Listen to me.” Aya’s voice tumbled back into a normal register, closer to the feminine tones Griffin remembered from years earlier.

She turned to Griffin and the Chimerans, the movement incredibly fluid. As she did so, her body changed, solidified. Her skin turned the warm brown of a tree trunk, then shifted to the burnished tan of sand, only supple and humanlike. A foot made of roots pulled free from the clinging earth. By the time she set it back down it was solid, her toes curling over the mud. Leaves wove themselves around her body, cloaking her in a loose garment of glistening brown. The more Aya moved, the more human she appeared. More human than the last time Griffin had seen her, as though she’d developed further into this body, if that was even possible.

She raised a twig arm, and the leaves and flowers at the tip shifted into fingers. She pointed one at the chief. “Kekona Kalani must be stopped.”

The chief blanched under the weight of Aya’s declaration, his mouth going slack, his shoulders slanting toward the churned-up earth.

The premier pushed ahead of the Ofarians. “What did Kekona do now?”

Aya’s green eyes flashed with an inner light that reminded Griffin of deadly ice. She answered the premier but kept staring at the chief. “Kekona seeks power to change the world.”

Bane shoved forward. “That’s not true.”

“No?” A very human lift of pale eyebrows. “Kekona is looking for the Fire Source, the root of Chimeran magic. She thinks it’s harmless—
you
think it’s harmless—but that root is buried deep in the Earth’s core. It’s part of the foundation of this world, and the Chimerans have only been allowed to borrow it. If the Source is disturbed in any way, it will alter life. It will create death. If Kekona touches it, fire feeding fire, she could destroy continents or create new ones. Massive destruction that the Children of Earth would have no way to counter.”

The silence that fell over the wood was as ominous as Aya’s words. More revelations, more shock. And by the horror and distress and utter paralysis making twisted masks of the Chimerans’ faces, this was something not even they knew.

And Keko was already gone.

“The Children of Earth guard the Source. It’s one of our many duties, to keep the power sacred and safe, to protect it from disturbance and to protect the Earth from its wrath. I’m telling you now, if you do not find Kekona and stop her, my people will hunt and kill her, just as they did the last woman to lay claim to what was not hers.”

The Chimerans shared a look. “The Queen,” Bane whispered, reaching big hands up to clasp around the back of his head.

The premier thumbed back his cowboy hat. “Kekona has caused enough problems for the Senatus and for all Secondaries. She must be dealt with.”

“No,” Griffin protested, because Keko’s own people had not. “Don’t.”

Aya turned to him. The top of her white hair barely came to Griffin’s shoulder, but her presence was massive. “Don’t what?”

“Just . . . don’t kill her.”

Aya’s eyes flashed green again, but in a different way. Griffin couldn’t pinpoint exactly how.

“She must answer for her actions outside of Chimeran law,” said the premier to Aya. “Will you allow us to go after her?”

After several long moments, Aya ripped her eyes from Griffin to consider the premier, and though there was no wind among the trees, her leaf cloak and spider-webbed hair undulated. “I could return to my people Within now, tell them what’s happened, and give the order to hunt.”

Griffin wanted to object again, every muscle in his body straining forward.

“But a thousand years ago,” Aya continued, “there was no Senatus. No cooperation between our races. I’d hate to erase something we’ve built so determinedly without careful consideration. Can I trust you, Premier, to find Kekona before she reaches the Source and give her suitable punishment?”

“You can, Daughter. Absolutely.”

“Wait—” Bane started.

Aya nodded, ignoring the Chimeran general. “If you don’t succeed, if Kekona reaches the Source, she is ours and there will be no compromise. Agreed?”

The premier shoved his hands in his coat pockets. “Agreed.”

“You don’t want a war with us,” Aya added with a glance at the earth under her feet. “We will swallow you.”

Bane growled, a lick of flame passing from eye to eye. Why wasn’t the chief saying anything? Why was he just standing there, looking like he’d been bound and gagged?

The premier raised his voice. “Kekona will be found and stopped. I’ll immediately appoint a search team to get to Hawaii, and Chief can assign a Chimeran scout as a guide.”

The chief ground fingers into his temple. “Let me think about this—”

“There is no ‘thinking,’” the premier began, and the two men devolved into an argument over how exactly to go about the search. Griffin might have been mistaken, but it seemed as though the chief was actually trying to steer the premier away from going after Keko.

Damn his culture. Damn the rules of status.

Griffin stood there, a cold that had nothing to do with the weather seeping into his bones. They were going about the search in the wrong way. They weren’t properly taking into consideration their quarry. They were forgetting about Keko’s determination, her drive. Her spirit.

“Wait. Stop.” Griffin grabbed the premier’s arm and spun him around. A dangerous move since he still wasn’t part of the Senatus, but he wouldn’t be ignored. Not now.

The premier looked at Griffin’s hand upon his arm, then slowly raised his eyes. “Things sure have gotten more complicated since you showed up, Ofarian.”

Griffin released him but refused to look away, refused to back down. Yeah, maybe a lot of shit that had happened recently could be traced back to him, but if they were going to blame him for starting it, then he should be the one to bring it to an end.

“Keko will not be hunted and trapped like an animal,” he said. “Being chased by strangers who are intent on stopping her will only feed her purpose. Don’t you get it? She will fight and fight and fight until she gets what she wants, and she won’t stop running until she gets to the Source, if only to prove herself. Bane?”

The Chimeran general nodded haltingly. “He’s right.”

“What are you suggesting?” the premier asked.

Griffin licked his lips, stood tall. “Let me go after her. Alone.”

“Why you? Because she was your lover?” The premier sneered at that last word. “How do I know you won’t help her?”

“Because the Senatus means more to me.” He nodded at Aya. “And the protection of the Source, the earth itself. I want Keko brought in as much as you do. Let me prove my loyalty.”

Keko’s life meant most of all, but he couldn’t say that. Not when the premier eyed him so warily. Let the Senatus leader think Griffin wanted revenge for her trying to start a war. Let them all think whatever the hell they wanted, as long as it would allow him to get to her first. As long as it would allow him to save her life.

“I’m telling you, if she knows she’s being hunted, you’ll never find her. I have the best chance. I am water. What better way to fight a fire?”

“I second this.” A most unexpected endorsement from Aya. Griffin looked over at her, and there was that look in her eyes again. Something . . . unsaid. Something meant only for him.

“Chief?” prompted the premier.

In the span of his pause, the chief drew two breaths, neither of which brought forth fire. “I agree with what you think is best.” He bowed his head, and Griffin could not read his face.

The premier came toe to toe with Griffin, his voice low and authoritative. “If you find Kekona Kalani and bring her to me before she finds the Source, before she causes any more trouble for any of our races, I will know you have the Senatus’s interests at heart. If you do this, you will win your seat among us.”

FOUR

Away from the dispersing Senatus, after retreating deep into the darkness of the old-growth forest, Aya folded herself back into the earth. With an aching sense of loss, she let go of her human body and merged her being with the land, returning to the true form of a Daughter of Earth. The borders between Aboveground and Within blurred and then disappeared.

It was getting harder and harder to do. One day she’d no longer be able to transform back and forth like this. But she’d made her choice, and she gladly lived with it.

Through rock and dirt and clay she rolled. Around and under and through a great maze of roots and aquifers, she sent herself digging. She knew the layout of Within as well as the minute details of her human skin, and she followed the striations in the earth like a road map. She searched for her home, hidden in the earth’s crust by the planet’s oldest magic.
There
. She found it, burrowing faster and faster to reach it. The feel of the earth around her was beginning to suffocate and press in.

She couldn’t wait to be free. She couldn’t wait to live in a house, with windows that allowed in the breeze, and windows that permitted light, and a door that let her come and go easily and of her own accord.