“Tell me,” Griffin demanded. “Great stars, just tell me. She called me and I”—he struggled mightily with how much to say, how much to reveal—“I don’t know what to think.”
The chief’s eyes widened. “She called you? When?”
“Yesterday afternoon. She didn’t say anything, only good-bye. Where the hell is she?”
“It should come from you, Chief,” Bane said.
By the strain on Chief’s face, Griffin knew that the head Chimeran did not want to tell him. That this little separate powwow had been Bane’s idea, and that if the chief did not talk, Bane certainly would.
With a long, slow sigh, Chief reached up and removed a thin, plain rope from around his neck. On it was strung a black rock no larger than a quarter, lumpy and nondescript. Griffin had noticed it before—it was the only thing he’d ever seen the chief wear on his torso—but he’d never given it much thought.
Now the chief held it out to Griffin.
He didn’t take it, didn’t even touch it. “What is it?”
Chief remained as even keeled as Bane had been dramatic. “It’s the symbol of the new Chimeran lands, of the islands that would eventually become Hawaii,” he said. “When our Queen first set foot on the Big Island, she picked up this very rock, held it up, and declared that she’d finally found our new home. That was fifteen hundred years ago.”
Behind the chief, Bane folded his big arms.
“And?” Griffin prompted.
The chief regarded the rock with a dazed sort of wonder as it swung on its rope. “The Queen brought our people across the ocean from Polynesia in search of one thing: the Fire Source. The food our powers need to breathe and exist in this world. It is pure, raw fire magic. She felt it call to her from the other side of the water, and bade her people to follow her to find it. This stone is the symbol of her quest. Of her love for her people. Of her leadership and bravery and selflessness. She is a goddess, in our eyes.”
So much to learn. And the Ofarians had once thought they’d known everything . . .
“What does this have to do with Keko?”
Bane came to the chief’s side and they exchanged a serious look. Chief looped the rope back over his neck. “Keko is trying to succeed where our great Queen failed.”
Dread nearly took Griffin off his feet. “What do you mean, ‘failed’?”
“The Queen knew the Source was somewhere on the Hawaiian Islands. She could sense the raw magic but didn’t know where it was, how to get to it. All she knew was that if she could find it and tap into it, she and her people would know more power than they ever dreamed.” The chief glanced away. “She spent her whole life searching. When she finally found it as an old woman, it destroyed her.”
Griffin swallowed several times to try to get moisture into his mouth. “And you . . . you think Keko is going after the Source.”
“We don’t think. We know.”
“How?”
“She left a note in my house. Yesterday morning before sunrise. Bane was with me when we found it. And Keko was gone.”
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.