I wasn’t surprised she’d gone missing. From the first moment I’d met her, she’d made it very clear that she wanted to get off Serenity and find her long-lost father and brother.
“Have you talked to her father?”
Laka gave a frustrated snort. Granted, contacting Okalani’s dad was an obvious thing to do. But you’d be surprised how often people don’t actually do the obvious.
“He won’t take my calls. I went to the address in the telephone directory. His ex-wife says he’s gone, and good riddance. I thought she might be lying, but there are initial divorce papers filed at the courthouse.”
“What about your son?”
Her expression saddened, growing haunted. “My son is dead. He was killed in a vampire attack after one of his high-school football games.”
“I’m so sorry.” I was, too. Few football games are held at night because of the risks, but with the days so short in the fall and winter, sometimes games end after dark. The police do the best they can, but accidents happen. Tragic.
“Thank you. Losing him to Ricky was hard. But his death … perhaps you can understand now why I tried so hard to keep Okalani from coming to the mainland.”
I did, actually. The siren Isle of Serenity has never had a vampire, never known a werewolf attack. The mental control the queen has over the island residents would force them to leave. I could understand Laka’s desperation, knowing her daughter was on her own in circumstances unlike anything she’d ever experienced. That didn’t mean I could help her. “Laka, I’m a bodyguard, not a private investigator. But I know of a couple of reputable—”
“No,” she interrupted me. “Please … Okalani likes you, she trusts you.” I started to explain that I wasn’t trained to find people, but she interrupted me again. “But you’re very good at uncovering the truth, Princess.” Okay, now she was interrupting thoughts I hadn’t spoken. Was she was rummaging around in my head?
I intentionally let my thoughts about her daughter go blank, focusing instead on the room. The curtains at the balcony doors were open, letting in lots of bright sunlight that gleamed off the wide, white trim of the baseboards and made the pale peach walls look even paler than usual. I loved my big desk, which had two visitor chairs facing it; there was a second seating area in one corner, with a couch, a side chair, and a low table. Behind me was a large gun safe. Painted a dark forest green, the safe was a new addition to the office décor, and one I wasn’t entirely pleased about.
I saw Laka’s face register confusion for a moment before she looked directly at the gun safe. Got her. Sirens are telepathic. The “siren call” people talk about is a psychic compulsion, not some sort of music in the air. While it’s considered extremely bad manners to intrude into other people’s heads willy-nilly, many of the sirens I’ve met do it a lot.
Most of them can carry on conversations both audibly and mentally with equal ease. I’ve had to work hard to get good at that, but I don’t really like doing it unless it’s an emergency. It creeps people out. Hell, it creeps me out. I still haven’t mastered keeping others out of my thoughts. Then again, I’m only one-fourth siren and my abilities were brought out by the bite of a master vampire who was trying to turn me. I may technically be a siren—and the multi-grandniece of Queen Lopaka—but I hadn’t had a clue about that part of my heritage until the bat bite.
Laka eavesdropping on my thoughts without permission ticked me off. A lot.
Stop it! I growled the words in my head. I was sorely tempted to show her the door, enough so that I started to rise from my seat.
Laka flushed, but kept talking, desperation forcing her words out in a rush. “Hear me out, please, Princess. Ricky, Okalani’s father, has always been clever and charismatic. Charming enough to win people over, to convince them of whatever he wants them to believe. He talks his way into good jobs, and people who meet him would swear he isn’t capable of stealing or conning people out of their money. But he is.”
Something swam through her dark eyes, some memory that she wasn’t yet ready to reveal—and I wouldn’t dive into her head to pry it out. I sat back down, inhaling the thick scent of flowers that surrounded her. “When he was with me, on Serenity, I used my powers to keep him in check. Too many of my fellow sirens would have been easy pickings for Ricky, since at that time money didn’t have much value on Serenity. I didn’t allow him to take advantage of people. He hated that. He said I was manipulating him, making him into someone he wasn’t. In a way, he was correct. I could make him do what was right. But I couldn’t make him want to do it. Perhaps I was wrong to try to make him become a more ethical person. He grew to hate me, and to hate all sirens, because of what I did.”
“So you sent him away.”
I tried not to put any particular emotion in my words, but my feelings probably showed in my mind. I don’t like that the sirens have historically considered men nothing more than tools of procreation. Their female-centric culture throws away male partners and male children like so much trash.
Laka’s chin came up, her expression conveying pride, stubbornness, and hurt. It was an old wound, but I could tell from her expression that it still ached. “I did. I let him take our son, but I kept Okalani away from him.”
I thought back, remembering what she’d said to me the first night I’d met her, the night Okalani had teleported herself onto my friend Bubba’s boat. I’d nearly killed the youngster, thinking she was an enemy intruder.
“You told me before that he was bitter about being sent away?” I made it a question.
She sighed. “Yes. He was … is. It makes no sense to me. He hated me for making him law-abiding, but he hated it even more when I rejected him.”
“And you think he’ll take it out on your daughter by rejecting her?”
She shook her head and her expression grew hard and grim. “Oh, no. He won’t reject her. He’ll use her.”
The way she said that … an image appeared in my mind. A darkened building, figures in black, and a floor-to-ceiling vault door. Whether it was my own vision or projected into my head by Laka, I suddenly understood why she was so panicked.
“You think he would use Okalani’s gift to steal things?”
Her jaw tightened, like it wasn’t something she wanted said out loud. But I’m like that. If it can’t be said out loud, it shouldn’t be thought. “I would rather not think he is capable of outright theft.”
A moment’s thought provided all too many ways Okalani could be of terrific use to a con man and thief—the possibilities were endless. A simple variation of the old shell game, where instead of being palmed and moved, the ball would simply disappear into Okalani’s hand while she stood several feet away. An apartment full of priceless antiques one minute, the next … empty, the thief chatting with the owner throughout the robbery. A murder suspect seemingly in two places at once, with witnesses in both places. I hid all that in my mind as best I could, and erected what few barriers I knew to keep Laka out. She didn’t need to know how dark my thoughts were.
The siren looked beseechingly at me. “Please, Princess … please help me find my daughter.”
Scooting back my chair, I opened my center desk drawer and pulled out a leather case that held alphabetized business cards. Flipping to “P,” I selected one from the mix of private investigators and handed it across the desk. “Call Harry Carson. He’s one of the best I know. I’ll do some looking around and I’ll talk to Okalani if I find her, but he’ll find her if I can’t.”