And then she would succeed where the Queen had not. She wouldn’t be Chimeran if that kind of stature didn’t make her fire flare with anticipation and longing.
Keko hunted for something very specific: a signpost left behind, a marker from the ancients. Over the course of her life, the Queen had carved thousands upon thousands of prayers into lava rock all over the Big Island. These prayers called out to the Source, asking for guidance. Almost all of these prayer carvings had gone unanswered, left to bake beneath the sun for future generations to question, but one had actually worked. It was that rock that Keko sought.
Travel was slowgoing, traversing the hilly landscape somewhat inland from the water, weaving in and out of tall, straight trees that bent in one direction under the constant force of the ocean wind. Keko took her time, analyzing the Queen’s legends, making sure she headed in the right direction. She didn’t fear pursuit.
Chief wouldn’t try to stop her because even if she succeeded and earned the Queen’s name, he would be healed. Bane, out of duty and because of Chimeran rules, would be forbidden to search for her. She wondered if Chief would tell Bane about the disease, then decided no. He would want to protect himself. Chief would let her brother think Keko weak and stupid and desperate.
She put the two Chimeran men out of her mind, because there simply was no point in thinking of them. No going backward, only forward.
But the problem with not thinking about her brother and uncle meant there was more space and time for Griffin to slink in. It happened in the most unlikely of places, following random, unrelated thoughts. Memories and images of Griffin, sliding into the blank minutes of her life.
Griffin, kitted out in soldier gear, stalking into that Colorado garage where she’d been held prisoner. His pale-faced shock when he realized she was the captive. The desire that still floated behind his frustration and anger.
The open set of his mouth as she pressed her hands hard into his shoulders, pinning him down. Riding him until they both came with their eyes wide open.
The way he’d slowly run his hands and eyes over her body that last night in the Utah hotel. Memorizing her lines and curves. So many parts of him had been lost to time and she wanted all those details back. She should have memorized him, too.
Suddenly she wished she hadn’t burned his jacket, for reasons that had nothing to do with the wet weather.
It was raining again, though it looked like it might pass over quickly. Keko turned her face to the sky and let the new droplets hit her cheeks and closed eyelids. Water, water, everywhere, each strike a little bit of Griffin.
She’d been right to call him. A paralyzing doubt had overtaken her the seconds before she’d dialed, but the moment she heard his voice she knew she’d done the right thing. Only now did she realize she hadn’t actually apologized for the whole war thing. Words like that didn’t come easy for her, but maybe Griffin understood.
Or maybe he didn’t, and she’d succeeded in making everything worse by not spewing out all the things she longed to say. Now she’d never get to, and it was that loss of a chance that hurt the most. He would never know how much she regretted blaming him for her capture, how ashamed she was of her subsequent actions.
She wondered if he would think her quest foolish. The stern Ofarian leader, the Senatus hopeful, might appreciate her desire to take back what had been lost, to lead her people in her own right. But the man who’d murmured to her in bed about new chances and dreams for his race, that man would sympathize with her need to find the Source, no matter the cost—even though she would never be able to tell him the reason why without compromising innocents. It created a heartrending polarity.
Keko realized her feet had stopped walking right in the middle of a macadamia nut tree farm. He was doing it again. Griffin was making her veer off her path, steering her mind in directions it didn’t need to go, and he wasn’t even here.
With a violent shake of her head, she gritted out “Stop it!” and exorcised Griffin for good. She’d said her good-byes, and that was that.
FIVE
“I already know you don’t like it,” Griffin said, pulling out his old soldier’s vest from the back of the closet and tossing it on the bed, “so don’t even think about calling me ‘sir.’”
David scowled from where he leaned a hip against the blond wood dresser. With a hand scraping through his hair, he turned his head to look out the long bank of windows framing the slope of Hyde Street, Alcatraz hazy in the distance.
“No backup,” David muttered. “No nothing. It sucks and it makes me look like a shitty head of security.”
“No, it doesn’t. Not when I’m ordering you to stand down. Not when, technically, no Ofarian knows where I am or what I’m doing. If anything, I’m the one who looks shitty, but I’m okay with that. Hell, I’m used to it.”
David pushed off the dresser, its legs scraping an inch on the hardwood floor. “At least let me put up some soldiers in Hilo. In case you need them.”
Griffin threw a small backpack onto the bed to join the vest. “Absolutely not. The second Keko suspects I’m there for any reason other than to stop her from throwing herself into a volcano or whatever the hell it is she thinks she’s gonna do, she’ll put up a massive fight or she’ll vanish. No soldiers, David. Just me.”
“Fuck.” David gave Griffin his back and stared out the window, arms tightly crossed.
Griffin understood David’s frustration. After all, Griffin had had David’s position once. The major difference was that Griffin had just barely tolerated the old Chairman, while David was a brother in all but blood.
Gwen came into the bedroom holding a small cardboard box. “This just came for you.” She squinted at the PO Box return address. “From Adine?”
He took the box but didn’t open it, just tossed it next to his vest.
“What is it?” Gwen had never been one to mince words. Sometimes the Ofarian woman reminded him of a diluted version of Keko.
Griffin glanced at the box, debating whether or not to say. Which was dumb because there were no two people in the world he trusted more than those in the room with him right now. “Signature sensor,” he said.
Gwen reached out and tapped his forehead. “Is yours broken?”
He ducked away from her touch. “It’s, ah, something Adine has been working on for me. Something other Secondaries might be able to use. Something that enhances our own abilities.”
Gwen glanced at the box. “What do you mean?”
“It should, if it works right, be able to track signatures long after a Secondary has left a scene. Like a trail.”
“Adine can do that?”
Griffin shrugged. “Something she’s been playing with. Mixing technology and magic. I asked her to do this for me on the side, but by the way she jumped on it, I wonder if it was something she hadn’t already been pursuing. Which might scare me if it wasn’t Adine.”
The half-Secondary woman had no magic of her own, just an otherworldly brain when it came to anything with wires or code or technology. The Ofarians had saved her life, then had got her settled on her own two feet in the Primary world, so Griffin got a pretty steep discount on her otherwise astronomical price of services.
“Kind of like what Kelsey is doing with medicine and magic,” Gwen said.
At the mention of his doctor wife, David finally turned around. He scanned the sparse items laid out on the bed: the vest and the box with the sensor, a long knife in a leather holder, packets of freeze-dried food, a small first-aid kit, sturdy boots, and a single change of clothes.
“The vest still fit?” David smirked. “You’ve been behind a desk for the past five years. Got a little soft around the middle.”