Drowning in Fire

TWELVE

A Chimeran should never take happiness from warming someone who was not one of their own, least of all an Ofarian, but as Keko wrapped her arms and legs around Griffin’s body and sent a steady, low stream of heat into him, she couldn’t help but love how it made her feel in return. To give that gift to someone. To him.

He didn’t lift himself off her and she refused to unwrap him. Until all of a sudden it got to be too much. His breath on her neck, the light sifting of his fingers through her hair, the precious weight of him . . . everything in opposition to the urgency they had just given in to.

Sex changed everything. And nothing.

They were still the same two people who had formed an undeniable connection three years ago. Today that connection had been cemented, tied up tight with lock and chain, and tossed into a safe with six-feet-thick walls. Absolutely unbreakable, no matter the tool or weapon.

They were still the same two people with vastly different, conflicting goals.

Keko needed space. More time to think. Control over her emotions.

“Well. Now that we got that out of the way.” She nudged his shoulders, and after a pause, he pushed up over her. She wriggled out from underneath him and rolled away. The space between them was invigorating. The space between them was empty and useless.

“Ah.” He blinked, his insanely thick lashes clumped together with wet. “I see.”

He pulled himself out of the pool with impressive strength, water streaming off his body.

She got to her feet. “What exactly do you see?”

He waved a vague hand in her direction. “How it is with you. I’m still not going anywhere.”

“Not trying to drive you away. Just need to think. To process all this.”

“Like I said, I get it.”

She opened her mouth for a retort, for argument, but he watched her serenely and there was no fight in him. No challenge. He was letting her make her choice and giving her every means to do so.

The vow he’d made rang in her ears. The speed with which he’d given it still made her reel, pressing her to believe that he truly wasn’t here for the Senatus. That she should just tell him about the Chimeran disease and get the Source’s location.

Sex changed everything. And nothing.

It was dumb to stand there and moon about it. She was a woman of action, and if she stood next to this waterfall too much longer with Griffin, she’d be tempted to persuade him to get back into it with her.

She cranked up her inner fire and let the heat take care of the water droplets still clinging to her skin. A thin layer of steam coiled off her body, swirling around her limbs. As she pulled her hair over one shoulder, wrung the water from the mass, and then raked heated fingers through it to get it dry, Griffin watched.

The weight of his stare struck her hard in the heart, right where she couldn’t afford to feel him. But she couldn’t look away from him either.

Holding her gaze, his lovely mouth filled with even lovelier Ofarian words. Water wicked away from his skin, the droplets pulling away as though tugged by invisible strings. They grew fainter and fainter the farther they drew away from his body, until they dissolved altogether and he was standing there, naked and dry.

It was then she realized he’d managed to uphold the veil of mist above and around them the whole time they’d had sex. How much power and control he must have, to divide his magic like that and still make her feel like she was his sole focus when he’d been inside her.

Space, Keko. You need space.

The old tank top and shorts were beyond useless now, but she had a new gray tank and a pair of jeans left in her pack, and she pulled those out. Griffin watched her the whole time.

“Got any more of that soup?” she asked.

“Yeah, a couple more,” he replied. When he bent over for his own pack, his body listed to one side and he had to catch himself on a rock.

“Whoa there, big guy. You okay?”

“Fine.” He tossed her his last two cups of dried soup and yanked out a black T-shirt and black shorts from his own pack. She loved him in black.

The whole exchange was surreal and awkwardly domestic, making her feel like what they’d just shared hadn’t happened. That was what she’d wanted, right? This space?

She went to the pool, scooped up water into her hands, made it boil, and dumped it into the cups. Above, the mist veil flickered, winking in and out like the static that often came through on the Chimeran radio that connected the convenience store gateway to the valley. Fear made a little slice through her mind. She turned around, worried, only to find that Griffin had propped his back against a rock, and had fallen soundly asleep. The mist disappeared entirely.

With the veil no longer hiding them, they were exposed to potential tracking by the Children. Griffin had held on as long as he could, probably assuming they’d have found their way back into an inhabited area by now so he could crash in relative safety. He hadn’t counted on her seduction dragging out his energy, but then again, neither had she.

A day ago she would have seized this opportunity of his unconsciousness and scrambled out of this ravine and as far away from him as possible. How much had changed. Technically she could backtrack to the Queen’s prayer and carve a new one again. She could stand there and stare at the star map until she thought she could decipher it. But there was too good a chance the Son of Earth would come back for her, and an even greater chance she’d never understand the angles in that mass of stars.

She needed Griffin. She hated to admit it, but she did. And he’d shielded her from spying eyes after the attack. It was her turn to stand watch over him.

Keko dragged his vest over and slid out the giant knife strapped to the back. Then she settled against her own rock a quiet distance away and let Griffin have his much-needed rest. She kept one eye on the ravine that extended out to the ocean and the other on the Ofarian.

He twitched in his sleep. A tense, sharp concentration of his stomach muscles, as though he’d been punched. He didn’t wake, but a harsh grimace twisted his face. For a moment she considered shaking him, but then his body stilled and the deep grooves between his eyebrows smoothed.

He’d given her his vow. Made upon his people’s most sacred objects. She couldn’t get past that and, really, that had been his point, hadn’t it? Ever since he’d found her here on the island, he’d been denying his involvement with the Senatus and trying to convince her he was here of his accord. Had he succeeded? She laid the knife across her knees and considered him.

Griffin’s conviction ran as deep as the legendary Source. He wasn’t one to half ass anything. He wouldn’t go after something unless he could do so with absolute concentration and one hundred percent effort. And he sure as hell never went after anything if he didn’t believe in it whole-heartedly. In that they were too much alike.

He’d only ever wanted the Senatus. He’d only ever wanted Ofarian advantage. If she told him about the Chimeran disease she would give him such a weapon to wield, but through his oath he’d turned that down, sight unseen. He denied his presence had any involvement with the Senatus and she was . . . daring to believe him.

What had changed for him, this shift in objectives? Did it even matter? He had what she needed and she had his word.

Out of nowhere, Griffin’s body gave a violent jerk. His big arm sliced awkwardly through the air to land across his chest. His hand made a fist. No, wait. The curl of fingers held a phantom gun.

“Griffin?” She moved to a crouch.

He convulsed, his body twisting to one side, one knee coming up as if to protect himself from a blow. A groan shot out of his throat, followed by a string of unintelligible mumbles, but then she distinctly heard something about “orders.”

She started to crawl toward him, wary but worried, unsure what to do. This time the bodily twitching did not stop, but instead got more pronounced and intense second by second. The sounds that came out of his mouth were like garbled one-way conversations trying to patch through a spotty communication device. His closed-eye expressions shifted from fear to rage to cold fury to sadness.

Setting the knife down, she knelt before him and gave his shoulder a gentle shake. “Griffin, wake up.”

It happened too fast. Too fast for even her reflexes. Griffin snapped awake, coming instantly alert. With a snarl he snatched her around her waist, flipping her up and around his body. She landed on her back and he came down on her, all his weight pressing her into the rock. The knife handle was in his hand, the blade tip at her throat. How the hell did he—

“I have my orders!” Spit hit her cheek. The fierce, hoarse cry ricocheted through the leaves.

In her warrior’s heart, Keko knew she could throw him off. Knew she could inhale and draw her fire out, and either blast him far away or knock him out with its force. But that same heart realized that the Griffin she knew was not the Griffin with the wild, murderous eyes who loomed over her now. This was not Griffin the Ofarian attacking Keko the Chimeran, intent on preventing her from getting to the Source. He was panting, sweating, the knife tip trembling against her skin.

“What orders?” she whispered.

Griffin blinked, clarity and reality rolling back into his eyes. He crumpled, shoulders collapsing, the knife falling from slack fingers. The crushing weight on her arms and torso lessened, but he didn’t get off her, instead just pushing back to sit on his heels, his chest heaving, spasms jerking his limbs.

He searched her face. “Keko?”

She raised her arms and showed him her empty palms. “What orders, Griffin?”

“Oh fuck.” He rolled off her, going into a heap, his back to her, and tried to catch his breath.

She sat up and carefully nudged away the knife. “You were dreaming.”

“Haven’t had that one in a long time.” He dropped his head into a hand. “A long time.”

This was crossing over into unmapped territory for them, but she’d never been afraid of a little exploration. Like her, he didn’t want pity or attention because of something personal, but she simply had to ask. “Why now, do you think?”

“I don’t think. I know.”

It wasn’t the sex. “Orders” had nothing to do with that. Attacking her with a knife had never followed sex before. But they’d been in a pretty harrowing battle yesterday, and she suddenly recalled his reaction after it had all ended, the haunted look when he’d touched the tree after the earth elemental had left it.

“The earth elemental. The fight,” she said. He agreed by not answering.

She rose and moved the few steps over to face him. He didn’t look up as she lowered herself back to the ground, but he also didn’t flinch away when her knees brushed his.

“Was it about someone you killed?”

“No.” Now he looked up, met her eyes. And in them she saw a shattered soul. “It was about all of them.”

They were more alike than she ever would have guessed.

“I see all of them,” he said, and his voice sounded like it had dropped off the edge into a bottomless chasm. “One after the other. In the same order, first to last. Each of them playing out exactly as they happened. Every detail, the same as what I saw. What I heard and smelled. What I felt.”

She made herself sit perfectly still because she knew he didn’t want to be touched. “How many?”

“Twelve.” His voice was utterly flat. “Twelve Primaries.”

Her eyes widened, even more pieces completing the picture of this man. “Why them?”

“Because it used to be my . . . job.”

She thought back to what he’d told her in the Utah hotel room. “I thought you were Gwen’s protector.”

“I was. But when her dad, the former Chairman, wanted a Primary taken out—a Primary who found out about us who wasn’t supposed to know, or a Primary who violated terms of our contracts—he used me.”

She couldn’t breathe. For all her body was made for, she couldn’t take even a simple breath to power the human lungs of her existence. Suddenly she was back around a bonfire in the Utah mountains surrounded by anxiety and threats.

“That’s what that was about,” she was finally able to say. “When the premier ordered that Primary scholar’s mind scrambled and you got upset. Because that’s what you had to do once.”

His expression hardened. “I had to kill. What they’ve been doing is worse.”

“But that’s what put you on edge. What might have made you mistake Makaha—” She cut herself off when his glare turned to blades, because she was more than aware that part of the blame belonged to her. “I mean, I understand now why you were so angry. You’d been poked hard in a wound, and then rubbed raw. It didn’t make sense to me before. Now it does.”

He didn’t like her knowing this, she could tell. He wasn’t ashamed or embarrassed by having her witness the nightmare, but he was pissed off he’d had to reveal it at all. He’d been trying to bury it for all these years, keeping himself behind a desk and surrounding himself with politics so he wouldn’t have to go out into the field and risk resurrecting old ghosts.

“I’ve killed, too.” When he looked at her in a silent way that said he was listening, she added, “More than twelve.”

“When. Who.”

“About five years ago the Chimeran clan from Molokai came over. They invaded our valley, wanted to take down our ali’i. Wanted to raise themselves up and make us all their lesser.”

“What happened?”

She shrugged. “We destroyed them. They had small numbers. Their clan was dwindling and that was their last effort to make a name for themselves.”

“Did they kill a lot of your clan?”

“Yes. My parents among them. They were excellent fighters but they were older. A lot of our younger, untried warriors died, too.”

He took a deep breath she recognized as one meant to calm himself. The mark of a leader trying to keep his head. “The difference is, Keko, you were protecting your people against a clear threat. Someone tries to kill you or your family, take your home, you fight back. I get that. But that secretary in Toronto who walked in on her boss as he was using Mendacia, just as the illusionary magic was kicking in? That completely innocent woman who opened the door at the one wrong second out of the entire day? She deserved to die because of that?”

Keko sat there, transfixed, listening to this from an entirely new perspective, one she hadn’t ever considered because her training had never allowed her to think that way.

“The Chairman sent me after her,” Griffin went on bitterly, his face nearly unrecognizable, “and I went because I fucking had to. I had a clean kill planned out, but I must have made a noise she didn’t recognize because she turned and saw me. Saw a strange man coming after her in her own house. I saw her fear. I saw her awful confusion. She had absolutely no idea who I was or why I was there. Only that I was there to kill her.”

He popped to his feet and she had to tilt her head back to look at him. The muscle in his jaw did that clenching thing again, the thing that made him look mean even as his eyes softened. “When the Son of Earth came after you and I knew you were having trouble accessing your fire, that you were probably seconds away from dying, I went after him. I attacked and went for the kill even though I knew it would trigger the nightmare. I just have to deal with what I’ve done.” He bent down, snatched his vest from the ground, stuffed the knife into the back holder, and zipped the thing over his chest.

She got the signal. He was done talking and they were moving out. She rose, a little unsteady from the shock.

“You know what?”

It was his tender tone, completely flipped around from what she’d just heard, that stopped her, made her look up. “What?”

“Fuck the nightmare. If the Son of Earth comes after you, I’ll do it all over again.”

• • •

Another couple hours’ hiking to get out of the green tangle and across the main highway, and then they turned down a long, winding road high above the ocean. It was right at the line when day started to curve toward dusk, and the light had a golden quality to it.

A row of modest one-story homes with overflowing garages and rusting cars in their driveways stretched up ahead, their front doors opening to one hell of a view of sparkling blue water. A hand-painted sign out on Route 19 pointed to a B and B and Griffin steered them toward it. Keko had tried to protest—she’d refused to hitch a ride, too—but they both needed food and a good rest. And he needed a phone.

Even in their dirty states, they didn’t stand out. The island was crawling with people walking along the roadsides, thumbs jutting out, their whole lives contained in their backpacks. He didn’t worry about being noticed as they trudged down the road—not from Primaries who puttered around their front yards and not from the Children of Earth. If their theory was correct, they’d left the Children’s territory the moment they’d left the wild.

The B and B was a Victorian-era house with a wraparound front porch, moist from the humidity. The owners lived in the mid-twentieth-century home set farther back on the slope, and they accepted cash from Griffin, no ID required.

Griffin and Keko were the only guests, but he only booked one room.

Key in hand, he unlocked the heavy wooden door and let it swing inward. The room was clean but basic, done in faux bamboo furniture and draped in tropical prints. He stepped inside, noting the single queen bed, and didn’t hear Keko’s footsteps following. When he turned around, she’d backed up against the porch railing, her face slightly pale as she peered into the room. It had started to rain. Again.

“I’m hungry,” she said. “Are you? I’ll find us some food.”

He didn’t know what she’d brought with her when she’d set out from the valley. “Need money?”

She patted her pack awkwardly. “I’ve got a little.” She backed down the porch, avoiding his eyes. Before bounding down the steps, she added, “I’ll be back.”

Something in her eyes told him she wasn’t even sure that was true. Two things kept him from going after her right then and there: One, she didn’t know how to read the star map; and two, he was finally alone.

Propping open the door with his boot, he snatched the phone sitting on the table by the bed, dialed quickly, and stretched the curling, tangled cord toward the porch. Standing in the open doorway, watching Keko walk barefoot in the rain toward a dense row of connected shops done in the same old Victorian style, he listened impatiently to the ringing on the other end of the line.

A man picked up, sounding skeptical. “Yes?”

“This is Griffin Aames. Get me the premier.” The Air’s hesitation pissed him off. “Don’t even think about giving me the runaround. If he’s there and alive, I need to speak with him.”

“One moment.” There was shuffling, and muffled voices.

Keko disappeared from view, taking the awareness of her signature with it. He tried not to let it worry or bother him, but he found himself mumbling into the receiver, “Come on. Come on.”

Night descended, the steadily falling rain making the evening grayer and drearier. Minutes passed. He paced in the doorway, the phone cord stretched to its maximum as he went out onto the porch, trying to see if Keko had gone through one of the doors in that line of shops, or if she’d just kept walking.

A fumbling of the phone on the other end, then a familiar voice, resigned and tired. “Griffin.”

With the time change, it would be after midnight at the air elemental compound in Canada. Griffin didn’t care.

“What the fuck.” To hell with propriety and diplomacy. “We had a deal, Premier. I come after Keko alone. The Children agreed to this. Keko is theirs only if she gets to the Source.”

“Whoa, whoa.” The premier sniffed and sounded like he took a drink of something. “Slow down. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Really.” Griffin gripped the slick porch railing, holding back a biting laugh and a shout of rage-induced frustration. “A Son of Earth attacked us and you’re telling me you had no clue.”

“Us?”

Griffin bowed his head, letting the rain hit his neck and run through his hair. “I found Keko. I’m with her. And this fucking earth elemental turns into a tree or possesses one or something, and almost kills us both.”

The premier sucked in a breath. “Is the Source safe?”

“Heard of any natural disasters lately?”

“So our deal is still on.” It wasn’t a question.

Griffin squeezed his eyes shut. “Look, I’m upholding my end. You sure as fuck better honor yours.”

The premier inhaled as though he had a cigarette between his lips. “I sanctioned no attack, authorized no breach of the deal. I gave you my word. Aya gave hers, too. I’ll bring this up with her immediately.”

“Tell her to leave us the hell alone. If you want the Source safe, I need more time.”

“If all I wanted was for the Source to be safe”—another smoke-filled inhale—“I would just let Aya and the Children do their thing. Let them take care of it themselves. This is about giving you your chance.”

A sick feeling twisted Griffin’s gut, like he’d finally gotten a bite after nearly starving and the food had gone rancid. He stalked back into the room. “I’m handling this,” he snarled, and slammed down the receiver. It felt good to do that. You didn’t get to do that with cell phones anymore.

He stared at the phone for a long time, wondering exactly what he’d just done. By warning off the Children of Earth, he’d bought himself much-needed time with Keko—time to find out what secret she was protecting and what she was going to do with the map that was in his head. More time just to be with her.

And yet he’d also basically reconfirmed with the premier that he’d trade Keko for a Senatus seat.

But would he?