“Mr. Kim,” I said. “What is it? I mean, he had it wrong. His copy of the book has been altered so he doesn’t even have the correct prophecy, right?”
“I want you to remember I tell you this against my better judgment,” Mr. Kim said. “But I have decided you are right. If I ask you to trust me, I need to be completely honest with you.
“His copy was altered. However, most of the alterations were subtle changes in those sections that dealt with the location of the artifacts. We wanted to throw him off the trail. We put our emphasis on keeping him from finding those relics. And since it was a very difficult job to construct such a careful forgery, we had to be judicious. So the other parts of the text…have not been altered.”
“Huh?” I said.
“According to the book, Flavius was instructed by Mithras to ‘find that which is closest to the Goddess of Light and destroy it.’ Scholars disagree on the details, but it’s clear that Flavius believed Queen Naromi was the living incarnation of Etherea. The night before their last battle, he sent assassins into her fortress to murder her beloved sister, Princess Dharom. Etherea was enraged with grief, and it is said that this rage led her to defeat Flavius in battle.”
“Okay. Fine. Great story. But I don’t see what this had to do with me. All this happened thousands of years ago, and if you ask me, those people seem a little crazy. Besides, I’m not Etherea ‘reborn.’ I wasn’t ‘reborn’ at all. I was just plain born. So I don’t see why you’re so worried.”
Mr. Kim shook his head.
“That’s why the book is so complicated and difficult to understand. In many ways the entire text is a massive riddle. You must understand the subtleties of the Kuzbekistani language. The English word reborn is a translation of the Kuzbekistani ‘charlom,’” Mr. Kim said.
“So?” I said.
“Charlom has more than one meaning in that language,” he said. “It also means chosen.” And he looked at me to make sure that I got it.
And so help me, I did. And I didn’t like it. Because it meant that I didn’t have to be reborn as Etherea; I could have been chosen to be her, later on. Just like Simon was Mithras’ chosen. Somewhere, somehow, some dark forces had picked the two of us to act out this little drama. And if that was true, then the part about “that which was dearest” being taken from me was also true. And that meant—I looked at Mr. Kim.
“No,” I said. Tears started flowing from my eyes, and I couldn’t stop them.
For if this was all true, then someone, one of those “dearest” to me, was going to die. And if Queen Naromi wasn’t able to stop it and she was, like, queen of a whole country, what would I be able to do? How could I save Pilar?
“But…” I tried to dry my eyes. “How can you tell if someone is chosen? I mean, how do you know Simon is Mithras and not just crazy?”
“Because I saw it happen,” he said. Oh. “When Simon fell into the Mithrian temple and I went in after him. Simon and I spent about an hour exploring the temple. It was quite fascinating, really. It was remarkably well preserved for being abandoned in the desert for thousands of years. Simon was awestruck. He took pictures and seemed unable to pull himself away from the place. Still, we were on a mission and I reminded him that we needed to get back to our camp. He agreed, but before we climbed out, Simon went up to the stone altar at the front of the temple, took a sheet of paper and pencil, and knelt to trace one of the carvings.
“But when he touched the altar, something very strange happened. First, a howling wind came up inside the temple and began to blow through the room and swirl sand around us.
“Then the large carving of the bull’s head on the wall above the altar began to change. The eyes of the bull began to glow with an eerie red light, and the light grew brighter and brighter until it filled the temple. A ghostly sound, a moaning, seemed to come right out of the walls. Then a voice spoke in a dead language that I’d never heard. I admit that I was frightened. All this time Simon’s hands were on the altar as if he were frozen in place.
“Then the voice stopped. It grew quiet and the wind fell and the light faded. After it was gone completely, Simon slumped to the ground, unconscious. It took me several minutes to revive him. When he finally came to, his eyes were dark and troubled. I asked him if he had heard the voice.”
“‘Yes, I heard it,’ he said.
“‘I couldn’t understand it. I’ve never heard a language like that before,’ I told him.
“‘I understood it perfectly,’ he said.
“‘What did it say?’ I asked.
“‘It said, “You are chosen. You shall free me.”’”
Well, if that wasn’t enough to give you goose bumps. Mr. Kim told me that he didn’t believe Simon at first. He thought maybe they had released some kind of primitive booby trap in the temple. Or maybe it was some type of hallucination; perhaps something in the air inside the temple had affected them.
Simon, however, was convinced that he had found or unleashed some force. As he studied what they had found and learned the history of what had happened to Mithras and the Romans, he became convinced that he was Mithras reborn in human form. Maybe he was. Maybe that was what the voice in the temple was telling him.
“You know the rest,” he said. “He became obsessed with Mithras, and that obsession has led us to this moment.”
“Yeah, well, maybe he is, but nothing like that happened to me. No wind, no howling, no voice in a weird language choosing me. I’m just me! So, I’ve upset Simon’s plans a couple of times and gotten in his face and given him lip. That doesn’t make me Etherea,” I said.
Mr. Kim looked at his lap again. His body language told me that he had something else to tell me that I wasn’t going to want to hear.
“NO!” I said, trying to keep my voice low. “No. Do you hear me? It’s not true. It can’t be.”
“I’m afraid it is true, Rachel. You are Etherea. Etherea is you.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
If I Can’t Resign, Then I Quit
“Well, I don’t want to be,” I said. “I unchoose me.”
“Rachel.” Mr. Kim spoke quietly and his voice was as gentle as a whisper. “It is your destiny. In life there are those who are given many paths from which to choose and those who are given only one. You must walk this path. It is who you are.”
“You’re wrong!” I didn’t want to hear this anymore. Alex, Brent, and Pilar were kind of coughing and fidgeting in the front of the plane like they were desperately trying to hear what we had to say.
“Can they join us?” I asked Mr. Kim.
“Of course, but Rachel, you must never tell any of them, especially Pilar, what I’ve just told you about that part of the prophecy. It is for the best if we keep that from them,” he said.
Great, so I get to bear all of this by myself. So far being a goddess pretty much sucked.
I waved them to take seats near us, and then I told them that Mr. Kim and especially Mr. Nutcase Blankenship were completely mistaken. That fruitcake could think that I was this Etherea person all he wanted. But I was definitely not her. No way, nohow.
They all looked at each other with expressions of discomfort on their faces.
“What?” I said. “What? Why is it I feel everybody knows something I don’t?”
“Rachel, we saw it,” Alex said.
“Saw what?” I said.
“What you did,” said Brent.
“What are you talking about? What did I do?”
“You made the flashlight light up. And you were the only one who could walk through the wall of light,” Alex said.
Well, shoot. In all the excitement I had forgotten about that part. It kind of put a hole in my “I’m definitely not Etherea” theory. Stupid facts. Still, there could be some other explanation. Sure.
“I got strange energy readings of you with the spectroscope,” Brent said. “Somehow your body was giving off an electromagnetic charge that was the exact same frequency as that wall of light in the cav
e. That’s why you could pass through it and none of us could.”
“Well, that’s a handy and marketable skill,” I said. “Wait until the boys at college find out about that. I’m sure I’ll have no trouble getting dates.” I wanted to scream. “I thought you said it was static electricity from the lava or the iron in the volcano or the rocks in my head or something. How do you even know you were reading that thing right?” I said.
“I was,” said Brent, trying not to look insulted.
“Rachel, Etherea was the Goddess of Light. She had—” Mr. Kim started to say.
“I KNOW SHE WAS THE FREAKING GODDESS OF LIGHT! Okay? You’ve told me that a million times! But I am not her!”
Truth was, I didn’t care about the goddess part. I cared about the “my best friend getting killed” part. I couldn’t be around her. I would have to leave, quit the Academy and go home, or back to Juvenile Detention, or hop a train to Costa Rica or something. Because that freak was out there, and if I stayed he was going to try to kill my friend. I would have to convince everyone that all of this was just one giant mistake. Maybe I would send a letter to Blankenship, telling him that I was resigning as the Goddess of Light. If he had any problems with that, he could take them up with the Gods and Goddesses Review Board, or Mt. Olympus, or wherever reincarnated gods went to resolve their disputes. And, to be safe, I would just disappear.
Then, of course, they delivered the death blow to my last desperate hope of denying my destiny.
Mr. Kim got up and went to the front of the plane. He opened his briefcase and took something out of it.
“There’s something you need to see,” he said as he walked back toward me. “A few years ago we found this in Dharom, Kuzbekistan. Dharom is the city named for Queen Naromi’s sister.” He handed me a photograph.
I looked at the temple photo. It showed all kinds of carvings and stuff in the rock walls. In the middle was a base for what had been a statue, but now there were just feet and legs attached. The statue had either crumbled over time or been destroyed by looters or something. There were words carved into the pedestal.
“Do you see the symbols carved into the base of the statue?”
I could see carved there, but I had no idea what I was looking at.
“When those symbols, which are in the ancient Kuzbekistan alphabet, are translated into the modern Kuzbekistani language, the closest translation is the phrase chaaba churl leghenin. In English the closest translation is ‘She conquers darkness.’”
“So? I don’t get it,” I said.
“Neither did I at first,” said Pilar. “But then Alex and Brent told me about what happened in the cave and with the flashlight.”
Pilar picked up a pad of paper she’d been holding on her lap.
“It’s an anagram, Rachel. Chaaba churl leghenin is an anagram for Rachel Leigh Buchanan.”
That was when I fainted.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
I Am So Out of Here
We were back at the Academy and walking through the atrium. It was late at night and the place seemed almost deserted. I felt like I had been in shock ever since Mr. Kim showed me that photograph. How could my name end up on a statue from thousands of years ago? It had to be some kind of weird coincidence. Coincidence became my favorite word. I just chanted it in my head over and over again. Like a mantra. Coincidence, coincidence, coincidence. Somebody just carved some random letters years ago, that was all. Just one big two-thousand-year-old coincidence. Blankenship thought I was Etherea because he needed an enemy for his twisted little game to work. But I just couldn’t believe this stuff about me. There had to be some other explanation.
Those carvings on the base of that statue could mean anything. Maybe it was translated wrong. For all anyone knew, that carving could be an ad for a local pizza joint.
Alex and Brent and Pilar went on ahead down toward the residential wing. I stopped to tell Mr. Kim my plan. I thought I would wait until Pilar went to class in the morning, then pack up and leave. I didn’t have much stuff anyway. I would leave her a note telling her I had decided Blackthorn wasn’t for me after all. Then I’d have Mr. Kim put me on a plane to somewhere. With all of his contacts, there had to be someplace I could hide. That way Pilar would be safe. That was all I cared about.
What a pitiful goddess I made. Goddesses should go out and kick some butt. Instead, I would be the goddess of running and hiding.
Just as I was about to share all this with Mr. Kim, we heard Pilar scream. A very loud scream. It filled me with terror.
Mr. Kim and I took off down the hall toward our room. Alex and Brent had heard it, too, and came running back from the boys’ wing. We burst into my room and saw Pilar standing there, looking terrified.
“What is it, Pilar?” said Mr. Kim.
Pilar pointed to my desk. Since my desk tends to be kind of messy, at first I didn’t notice what she was pointing at, but then I saw it. We all did. It was a smaller version of the gold medallion that Simon wore, with the carving of a bull’s head. There it sat, big as life on my desk.
“He’s here,” Mr. Kim said. “Mithras was here!”
And there it was. Blankenship had proved that he could reach out and get me wherever I was. And it made me realize a few things—like how he always knew where we were going to be and what we were up to. Somehow, someway, he’d managed to infiltrate Blackthorn Academy. He had someone on the inside. And now he was so intent on destroying us, he didn’t even care if we knew that. He wanted to mess with my head. Well, he was doing a really good job of it.
I also realized that I really didn’t have a choice here. Like it or not, I had to finish this thing. If he could get to me here, he could get to me anywhere, and even me disappearing might not stop him from going after Pilar. So the only thing I could do was fight him. I needed to stay here, where Mr. Kim had my back, and where I could watch over Pilar. I was going to make that creep suffer. He was going to wish he’d never met me.
We all stood there, too stunned to know what to say. Suddenly I thought of something.
“The book!” I shouted. I turned and ran out the door and back toward the atrium and Mr. Kim’s office. All of them followed behind me. It seemed like we were running in slow motion. Like time had slowed down somehow because we were afraid of what we might find. We shot into Mr. Kim’s office. I ran to the bookshelf, flipping the little picture frame forward on its spring. The door popped open and we all went down the stairs, down and down and down, until we opened the door and burst into the situation room and saw that our worst fears had been realized.
The wall safe where Mr. Kim had kept the book was standing wide open.
The Book of Seraphim was gone.
SPY GODDESS MANGA SAMPLER!
FROM
THE CHASE FOR THE CHALICE
In her next adventure, Spy Goddess Rachel Buchanan kicks butt, manga-style! Blackthorn Academy is sending her and her friends on a mission to Japan. But can Rachel handle her spy assignments: 1) taking down Blankenship’s band of ninja assassins and 2) surviving as a brassy, sassy American girl in the middle of Tokyo? And is that “tension” between Rachel and Alex something Pilar should start worrying about? Heck, is it something Rachel should start worrying about? Better make time for assignment 3) repeating the phrase: “I do not have a crush on my best friend’s boyfriend!”
READ ON FOR A SNEAK PEEK.
Spy Goddess books by Michael P. Spradlin
Live and Let Shop
To Hawaii, with Love
The Chase for the Chalice
Copyright
TO HAWAII, WITH LOVE. Copyright © 2005 by Michael P. Spradlin. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieva
l system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Spradlin, Michael P.
To Hawaii, with love / by Michael P. Spradlin.—1st ed.
p. cm.—(Spy goddess; bk. 2)
Summary: Headstrong Rachel Buchanan and her friends sneak away from Blackthorn Academy and set out to find a mysterious artifact before it falls into the hands of her nemesis, Simon Blankenship, a journey that takes them to the volcanic shores of Hawaii.
ISBN 978-0-06-059412-1
[1. Boarding schools—Fiction. 2. Schools—Fiction. 3. Spies—Fiction. 4. Friendship—Fiction. 5. Supernatural—Fiction. 6. Hawaii—Fiction.] I. Title. II. Series.
PZ7.S7645Toah 2006 2005005076
[Fic]—dc22 CIP
AC
First HarperTeen edition, 2008
EPub Edition © April 2010 ISBN: 978-0-06-201765-9
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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To Hawaii, with Love Page 15
