Drowning in Fire (8 page)

Two months ago. And all this time he’d been commanding the Chimerans. Pretending that he was still the most powerful one of them, still the most respectable. Playing the hypocrite as he stripped her of title and pride.

“Did you know something was wrong then? That something was happening to you?”

“Yes.”

Keko whirled, snatching a vase holding a mostly dead flower from a nearby table. She hurled the vase against the wall, just to the right of the
ali’i
’s head. It exploded into a million pieces, water shooting across the plaster. The acrid odor of decay plumed around them. Chief didn’t budge, didn’t even flinch.

“How have you hid this?” Her throat stung with the volume. “
How
?”

He swung the matchbook around from where he’d been hiding it behind his body, looked at it for a moment, then tossed it to the couch. “I’m not the only one.”

Keko blinked. “What?”

“I mean”—and the harsh, slow tones of the
ali’i
returned—“that I am not alone. There are other Chimerans like me. Others whose fire has died.”

She glanced at the matches, thinking that some other Chimeran would have had to have smuggled them into the valley. Someone else had to have known about the
ali’i
.

“It’s some sort of disease, Keko. I don’t know why it strikes, or who it will hit, but the numbers are . . . growing.”

She pressed the heels of her hands to her forehead. “A disease. And you’ve been able to hide this how?”

He looked to the candle, and then down at his fingers that had held the flame. “There are some Chimerans, healthy ones, who know and who . . . help us. Give us flame when we need it.”

“Cover for you.” A subtle, secret passing of fire from one hand to another. And it had worked. “Who else? Who else is afflicted?”

He shook his head. “You can take me down, but I won’t betray the rest.”

What a fucking deceiver. “So you’ll protect and hide others exactly like you, but throw your general, your own family, into the Common House.”

“Two completely different things. You made a terrible mistake. And you broke
kapu
.”

“I know what I did. But at least I’m admitting it.” She advanced toward him. One step, then another. “Who. Else.”

Chief just shook his head.

“I see. So in keeping their secret and by not sending them to the Common House, by not exposing their ultimate weakness, they protect you, too.”

His silence was answer enough.

“It doesn’t matter.” She waved a hand. “I don’t want them.”

I want you. I want to be ali’i.

“It’s been going on longer than you think,” he said. “Longer than I’d imagined. Maybe going back to the Queen. This thing . . . it’s not new.”

It was horrifying information.

It was useful information.

She started to back toward the door, her bare feet going toe-heel, toe-heel on the tile that now felt like ice.

“What will you do?” Chief started to follow. When she did not respond he cried out, much louder, “What will you do?”

She looked to the bank of smudged windows overlooking her aunt’s dead garden. The moon hadn’t risen yet and it was so very dark outside. It was the same within.

“I came here,” she said, “to actually beg you to give me another chance. That’s not what I want now.”

“What do you want? Do you want me to accept your challenge? Do you want to be
ali’i
?”

Her life’s most precious dream, wrapped up and handed to her.

Except that Chimerans never wanted anything that couldn’t be fought for and won with sweat and power and magic, and this, to her surprise, was no different.

Her gaze found the small black lava rock that he wore on a rope around his neck—the very stone that the great Queen had picked up the day she’d grounded her canoe on Hawaii and declared it her people’s new home. Keko had wanted to wear that rock her whole life, to feel its scratch on her skin and its weight against her chest. To know the Queen’s power and hold her blessing.

Looking at it now, Keko thought something entirely different, and she stood there for a long time, trying to wrap her head around it. Trying to figure out what it meant.

The great Queen had had a purpose in bringing her Polynesian people to this string of islands over a thousand years ago—a worthy purpose. A heroic purpose. The first Chimerans had loved her for it, and had followed her willingly across the ocean. Keko knew now that she, too, needed a purpose. She wanted her race to look up to her not because it was required, but because it was desired. She would not get that through begging. She would not get that through blackmail or trickery.

The only way was to earn it.

Yes, she could challenge Chief right now, and she would win his position, but it would be false. Yes, she could expose his lies, but that would also expose other innocents who would in turn be cast out, and where was the honor in that? She would assume power over a stricken people, carrying with her this terrible secret of their affliction. How would ascending to
ali’i
now do anything to help them?

When she was
ali’i
, she wanted power and glory for all her kinsmen, not less for others through no fault of their own. She wanted strength, not scandal.

The lava rock moved on Chief’s chest as he breathed. Waiting for her to speak. To decide.

Every night since Keko’s fall, she had prayed hard to the great Queen for her blessing, for answers, for explanation, for a way out. And tonight, it had finally been given.

“What will you do?” Chief pleaded.

Personal revenge was a single sentence away. Except that rash, emotional decisions had destroyed her in the first place. She’d done enough damage. Now she needed to heal.

The Queen—through the events of this night—had finally given Keko the answer. And Keko embraced the sacrifice that it required.

She lifted clear eyes to the
ali’i
, feeling absolutely sure of herself for the first time in months. Maybe years. “Thank you, Uncle.”

Turning, she went for the door.

“For what?” he shouted at her back. “For
what
?”

He couldn’t come after her, she knew, or he’d risk the clan knowing he’d allowed her audience. Let him wonder. Let him fear. It was powerful fuel.

She slipped back into the night, the answer she’d wanted and all Chimeran power in her hands.

TWO

“I don’t like it,
sir
.”

Griffin hated when David called him
sir
in private, but of course that’s why David did it: to show his ultimate displeasure with his leader and best friend when no one else was around.

Griffin stared down his head of security. No room for friendship right now. The two men had managed to draw solid lines between personal and professional, and it had served them well in the five years of Griffin’s Ofarian leadership.

“Don’t have a choice,” Griffin replied. “The Senatus premier invited me back to a gathering after three years. Me. Not an Ofarian contingent. I’m not walking in there with my cabinet behind me and a row of soldiers along the flanks.”

David made a frustrated face and pinched his lips between his fingers, staring out the windshield of the car in which they sat on a sloped South San Francisco neighborhood street.

“Not after we just narrowly dodged a war with the Chimerans,” Griffin added, much quieter. “Not after what happened the last time the Senatus invited me to sit around their fire.”

Thinking of fire made him think of Keko, as always. He shook his head at his lap, still unable to believe how she’d suddenly reappeared in his life two months ago . . . and then had disappeared again, leaving him unexpectedly shredded.

Three years apart from her, he discovered, hadn’t cut into any of his want.

Griffin unfolded himself from the car and David followed, pushing out from behind the steering wheel. “Fine. You’ll come with me,” Griffin said over the roof. “Gwen’ll meet us there. That’s it. That’s all I’m bringing.”

David ran a hand through his curly blond hair and nodded tightly, knowing there would be no further discussion on the matter. “I’ll make sure you’re safe, that all the roads to the gathering are clear.”

Their eyes met, smudging that line between personal and professional. “I know you will.”

David jogged around the hood and hopped up onto the sidewalk. The mild winter day was punctuated by music streaming from an open window. A Primary man washed his car in his driveway. A couple walked their mutt, heading for the two Ofarian men. The working class neighborhood was where Griffin had grown up, and it smelled and felt the same. Wonderfully the same.

He let the couple and the dog pass by before saying to David, “They’re throwing me a peace offering. As they should. The Chimeran chief owes me a massive apology, I owe them a first-person account of Keko’s capture, and then we’ll be back on even footing. I hope.”

David grinned. “So you’re saying it’s good that your ex-lover has a jealous, angry streak?”

Griffin laughed ruefully, and it hurt. Thinking of Keko usually did.

“Are you ever going to tell me what happened three years ago?”

David had been with Griffin in Colorado two months back when they’d discovered Keko being held captive by one of their own, and the revelation of Griffin’s previous liaison with the Chimeran woman had come to light. But Griffin had never spoken of the awful misunderstanding that final night three years ago around the Senatus bonfire. It would only undermine his already tenuous position among his own cabinet and his Ofarian detractors, who still possessed a powerful voice.

An image of the mighty Makaha, reduced to sagging in the snow and dirt, half his arm black, his mouth open in a scream, assaulted Griffin’s memory. Followed quickly by one of Keko, and her horror and shock and disgust. And then her back as she’d turned away.

“Maybe someday,” Griffin replied.

After the incident, he’d appealed to the Senatus many times, but his stance that Makaha had attacked first fell on deaf ears. So he’d given up trying to make contact, but had not given up on his dreams. He still desperately wanted to be part of the Senatus, but he realized now that he’d rushed the process before. He’d barged in waving his opinions like flags, but after witnessing their fractured system and lack of true communication, he knew now that he needed a new approach. He just didn’t know what that was.

David may have been more right than his joke intended. The chance to move forward with the Senatus had risen from the ashes of any possible future with Keko. Ash. Yeah, that’s what they were now. Griffin tried to see that as a good thing.

“Will Kekona be there?”

Griffin shrugged, feigning ignorance by checking his watch, but he remembered all too well what Cat had told him after she’d returned from Hawaii two months ago: Keko’s generalship had been given to Bane. He also knew that that action would’ve destroyed her. And there was nothing he could do about it.

As he caught David watching him, he knew that no amount of nonchalance would fool his friend, but that David would also never press for information Griffin wasn’t willing to give.

Griffin peered across the street to the picture window of the second-floor apartment, alive with the flicker from the TV. “You sure you want to sit out here tonight? Call up Hansen to be on watch. This is beneath you.” He said that last sentence with a grin.

“Nah. I’d rather handle it myself. Kelse is working late anyway.”

Griffin understood. Back when his main job had been the safety of Gwen Carroway, the woman everyone had thought would be the next Ofarian leader, her protection had been his life. He’d hated handing over the responsibility to anyone else.

“I’ll be just a couple hours. Want me to bring out leftovers?”

“Hell, yeah.” David patted his gut as he ambled over to the bus stop bench across from the Aames’s apartment. Perfect sight lines in all directions.

Griffin shouldn’t need all this protection in his own city, his own childhood neighborhood where he was about to have Sunday dinner with his family, but after the assassination attempt by Wes Pritchart five years ago, and the detractors that had since grown more vocal once his “relationship” with a Chimeran had come to light, they couldn’t be too careful.

Griffin jogged to his family’s building and inserted his key, the same one he used to wear around his neck when he was young and his parents had been away on duty. Inside, the same stairs still creaked. The same carpet still welcomed him into his parents’ place, only now it was flattened and darker with permanent stains.

“Hey, Pop.”

Griffin’s father sat wide-legged on one of the couches making an
L
around the TV. He looked up from the baseball documentary whose volume was cranked all the way up to compensate for the driving beat of the music pumping from his sisters’ room.

“Griffin,” Pop said with a nod toward the TV. “You’d like this. All about the Yankees.”

Griffin grimaced and chuckled. He loved baseball, hated the Yankees.

Pop lifted a beer bottle to his smiling lips. “I think your mother could use some help.”

Nothing like a visit home to remind you that you aren’t leader of the Ofarians in every way.

“Sure,” Griffin said, sliding around the pinch of furniture cramped into the tiny living room. How his parents had raised nine kids in here, he’d never know. But they’d stuck to their “Keep Ofarians Strong By Population” creed and had never once complained.

Until Griffin had helped overthrow the old Board. Until he’d been given command. Until his father had to take a position in a Primary security firm to pay the bills. After that, the issue of struggling Ofarian classes and touchy Primary integration sat right in the middle of the dining room table along with the mashed potatoes and pork roast. Pop thought that being born into and serving in the Ofarian soldier class was the greatest honor ever, and its reduction in numbers was a slap in the face. He never missed an opportunity to tell Griffin as much.

But then, Pop had never been an assassin.