That wouldn’t happen to Griffin. He refused to believe it would. He was leader of all Ofarians. And his purpose was paramount. Not even all the powers of the universe—this one and the next—could deny him that. He didn’t fucking care if that was arrogant. He had to believe it. He had to put his trust in it.
As a cloud of steam, he crossed streams and soared over tree canopies, darting through leafy sugar cane farms and scaring feral cats. The drain on his energy taunted him. He could feel it seeping away, his magic and his will squeezing every last bit out of every last drop of strength before he reached for the next. But he was gaining ground. If he was lucky, he’d catch up to Keko before nightfall.
Then all of a sudden he lost the trail, one hill looking too much like the other, the vapor form messing with his awareness. He had to go solid again, had to check the signature tracker, or else he’d be doing even more damage by heading too far in the wrong direction.
He hated to do it, to waste energy on retransformation, knowing he’d have to turn vapor all over again, but he did it, coming back into his body on the edge of ranchland, ten or so cows lingering in the distance. It took longer than he’d thought, and when he swung his pack around his body and ripped open the zipper, the tracker wasn’t fully operational.
He panicked, muttering, “No, no, no! Come on, work!”
He zapped it with more magic, pulling out every last particle of water from its surface and innards. When he turned it on, it took a long time for the screen to flicker into color, even longer for it to register his own signature and the dragging line of Keko’s residual path. The images were patchy, and blinked in and out. The device vibrated oddly, like it was struggling to work. Quickly, he memorized what he saw on the screen. Turned out his aim was only a little bit off, and he made his course correction, committing to memory her new direction.
Next time he came back from either water or vapor form, he feared the sensor would not work at all. Never had any tech felt so unstable or glitchy in his hand. Usually Ofarians had to expend extra energy to transform not-living articles, but he’d never had to worry about tech not working after re-transformation. Perhaps it was the specific mix of magic and technology that Adine had used. Perhaps Ofarian powers didn’t play so nicely with whatever it was that she’d injected into the circuitry.
He’d have to bring that up to her when he returned to San Francisco—no doubt her genius mind could come up with a solution—but for now he had to make the blip of information it fed him count.
He turned to water, and then vapor again, his magic trembling with exertion, and headed back out, riding the air. He zoomed around the dark slashes of twilit trees. He curled around wind-wracked bushes bursting with flowers. He rode as many correct currents as he could, and had to fight against others to keep on his designated path. Push and pull, push and pull.
In the middle of the night he could feel his magic dying. Lowering himself to the ground he assumed solid form. He collapsed in sleep for a few hours, shoveled food in his mouth to build up his strength, and then started out again. Broken daylight just cracked the horizon.
He hadn’t wanted to be right, but he was—the tracker didn’t work at all. But he remembered which direction Keko had gone. And he liked to imagine that he could feel her now, that he was getting close enough for his own Ofarian senses to do their thing.
He also took reassurance in knowing that she had to rest, too, and that she didn’t know she was being followed. If he slept four hours to her seven or eight, and wrung as much water magic out of his body as he could, maybe he could catch up to her when night fell again.
But that single dose of food and brief rest wasn’t nearly enough, and his magic only lasted a few hours. His molecules started to shift midair and he had to drag them along like dead weight. In the last few miles, the burn on his psyche and the ability to hold his form together became simply too much. He had to choose: continue to try to hold his vaporized body together and push just a little farther with no guarantee what it would do to his human form, or turn himself solid and go on by foot.
Before he could decide, he lost his grip on the vapor, the last finger of control releasing the final bit of magic. It happened above ground, before he had a chance to lower himself and find his feet. His body coalesced, its solid form sucking in the vapor, and then he fell, snapping through branches and bouncing off huge, arching banyan tree roots, to hit the ground hard.
He tried to get up but he had hardly any energy left. Breath sawed in and out of his lungs. His sight wavered. Every muscle protested movement, but Griffin ignored every complaint.
He hauled himself up, leaned against the banyan tree and got his bearings, and continued after Keko on foot. Weaving, weak, he needed every yard, every step, every inch. He had to keep moving.
And then, when dusk came, he finally sensed her.
She was a prick of light in the corner of his mind, a low and steady buzz setting into his blood, pulling him forward. Though his feet were leaden, he pushed on because there was a good chance her signature could go cold, and without the tracker he’d lose her.
She was moving slowly, methodically. So carefully that even in his exhausted state, he closed some distance between them as dusk gave way to night. As he drew nearer, the sound of a waterfall grew louder, obliterating the otherwise eerie silence that cloaked Hawaiian nights.
He trudged into a thick stand of giant ferns that looked positively prehistoric in scale and shape. Pushing aside the drooping fronds and charging forward, he almost pitched himself into a steep ravine, the dramatic drop-off ending a hundred feet at the stream bed below. Moonlight filled the space between one side of the ravine and the other; it was deep but not so wide across, maybe thirty feet. Peering to the right, it seemed to empty into the violent ocean a good mile or so away. To the left, it carved a big slice out of the dramatically sloped land, but the deepening darkness hid just how far up it went.
On the opposite side of the ravine, scaling the nearly vertical pitch hand over hand, was Keko.
She was a spider, the way she climbed so easily. A spider who breathed fire. Every time she released her hand or bare foot, a quick, brilliant fireball exploded from her mouth, lighting her way, showing her where to grab next. Griffin watched the scene play out in flashes, like an old-time movie, until Keko finally hauled herself up over the lip of the ravine and rolled to her feet.
Keko. Great stars, he’d found her. He’d found her and there was this chasm yawning between them. If he’d had any strength left, he could climb down and then back up in pursuit. If he’d had any magic left, he could swirl into vapor and reform as solid right in front of her on the other side. But he had neither, and though the ravine wasn’t all that wide, it was too far to jump.
Across the ravine, the moonlight played with her skin and settled into the crevices between her muscles. He was just close enough to see it all, just far enough away not to reach. She wore a tank top, loose, frayed denim shorts, and a pack that crossed over one shoulder, the strap lying diagonally across her back. She was sweating, glowing, breathing hard.
And then she turned around. Stared across the open space. Stared hard . . . right at the spot where Griffin crouched behind a fern.
“I know you’re there.” Her voice burned through the darkness. “The question is, how many of you there are, and whether you think you can actually stop me.”
True to Keko, she did not back into the shadows out of sight, but instead came right up to the cliff edge—facing her unknown hunter. The dark hid the fine details of her face, but he could picture her challenging expression, her intense glower.