Henchgirl (Dakota Kekoa Book 1)

by Rita Stradling

  But, seriously, was the universe conspiring against me? I did not think I could sink any lower. But lo and behold. I just told off one of the dracons you never tell off in front of the spider queen of propriety and other evils. I told off a dracon probably even my grandfather wouldn’t consider saying the most blasé negative comment to. And to make matters worse, I did it while his dragon father was here.

  Glenda was too close and I could feel the heavy tendrils of her soul probing me, searching me for weaknesses she could exploit. I straightened my neck, and rolled back my shoulders and gave her the one thing she would not expect from me, an apology. “I’m sorry, I did not know who he was, and even if I did…” I cut off the thought, it wouldn’t help me. I sighed and admitted, “My training did not really focus on my manners, too much.”

  “Dakota,” Stacy’s voice called, and happy for an excuse to escape Glenda, I looked for my sister and found her standing trying to prop up my mother who was falling out of her chair. It looked like a toothpick trying to hold up a walrus.

  “Oh, no,” I said and then I yelled, “Hey, Bobby!”

  I turned to see that Bobby was on the dance floor, but suddenly he vanished and then appeared directly beside me. Bobby grabbed me and pushed me behind him. His soul rang with tension, like he thought we were under attack.

  “Not me,” I said, a little startled by his reaction, “Stacy.”

  He vanished again to appear next to Stacy, taking her place. He pushed my mother into her chair, then leaned against the table laughing. My first thought was that my uncle must be drunk; he drank enough to intoxicate a rhino. I dismissed the thought, though, his soul was too alert. I honestly had enough to dwell on without adding my uncle’s eccentricities.

  Glenda turned to me, looking like she might start talking so I mumbled a hurried, “I have to go, goodbye.” I rushed away, not looking back as I escaped my aunt.

  The band played, my uncle joked and the only thing remarkable about the rest of the night was how unremarkable I felt. Even Lorelei and Bobby stopped trying to drag me into their conversations. I could not really blame them; I did not just ‘fall from grace’ I dragged everyone down with me. Honestly, they were better people than I was, I would be pissed if the situation was reversed.

  My mother woke once, in a pool of her own drool, her wet hair sticking out straight from her head, she was alert only for long enough to look around and say, “Deagan looks so handsome in his suit…just like his father.” Then she slumped back into her chair, already snoring. She did not even stir as I wiped her face off with a napkin, trying but unable to salvage her make-up.

  I opened my purse hoping that some cash would magically appear in my purse and I could sneak out and call a taxi. My phone lit up, silent but displaying a number I did not recognize. I forgot that I had turned my cell phone on silent. I fumbled to answer the call but missed it. As I headed for the door that led outside to some sort of courtyard where the smokers kept frequenting, I scanned through my phone log. I had forty six missed calls, twenty of them from the unknown number. The rest of the numbers were more usual, Mele, the twins, other random friends from school. Forty six calls all in the last couple of hours was… unusual. Plus, my closest friends knew that I was busy with my family; they knew my phone would be off.

  “Where you heading?” Bobby said, appearing beside me, though I think this time he used mundane methods of sneaking up.

  I did not look over at him as I started to dial Mele, I said, “Just going outside for a phone call.”

  Bobby followed me out the door and I looked up to see him just standing there next to me. We were the only ones in a small fenced in courtyard. I stopped dialing and glared up at my uncle to say, “Eavesdrop much?”

  He just leaned back against a wrought-iron fence that did the job of keeping drunken guests from falling down a flower covered slope, but did not obstruct a magnificent view of the volcano. Bobby rolled back his shoulders clearly getting comfortable. His soul was calm now, the tension gone. “I’m supposed to be watching out for you girls.”

  He had to be screwing with me, I knew it.

  “Bobby,” I said, “I just want five minutes to call Mele. There is no one else here, okay? My virtue is intact. Now scram.”

  “Alright, you cranky kid, but you better come right back the moment you are finished with your phone call. Do not go anywhere else, not even the bathroom until you’ve checked in with me. You have five minutes until I come back to check on you.”

  “Wow, you take your chaperone duties seriously,” I said, rolling my eyes.

  “You bet your butt I do,” he said, pushing off the fence and walking back into the reception center.

  Before Bobby was even out of the courtyard my phone lit up again, it was the unfamiliar number. I answered with a, “Hello?”

  “Dakota, Dakota, is that you?” a clearly distressed male voice said over the line. There were sounds of many voices in the background, like the guy was in the middle of a crowd or party.

  “Yeah, who is this? I can barely hear you.”

  “It’s Keanu. Here I’ll go outside. I’ve been trying to call you for an hour…” I could not help the smile that crept unbidden up my face at hearing his name. After everything that happened, Keanu called me— like twenty times in an hour…

  I heard a voice I recognized in the background, Mele saying, “Let me talk to her.” Then I remembered, the party, they were all at his party. Great… this was probably a group drunk-dial.

  I wished so badly I could be there, instead of at this party.

  I said, teasing, “Calling twenty-one times, I thought you were just joking when you said you would call me whenever you wanted.”

  “Hey, can you hear me now?” Keanu said, not sounding at all flirty.

  “Yeah—”

  “Honua is gone,” he said, “I picked her up and drove her here. I was watching over her all night, and then she went in the bathroom and did not come out. She vanished.”

  Chapter Eight

  “Wait, come again?” I said.

  The fact that Keanu not only had a party, but had taken my friend Honua was so far from my thoughts that it took me a moment to register what he was saying. That’s how this all started, Keanu invited Honua and me to his party and I gave him my number because I was worried about her. I had been so fixed on my own problems I had completely forgotten to worry about Honua, or even that I had a reason to.

  “Honua is missing.” he said, “She went in the bathroom and did not come out. We had to break down the door, but she wasn’t in there.”

  “Do you think she ran home or something? Was there a window, maybe?”

  “That was the weird part, Dakota, the window was locked from the inside. Could you try to call her for me? The number in the school directory just keeps ringing, and I don’t even know where she lives.”

  “I’ve only called from the directory, it’s her mom’s number and I’ve never been to her house.” I said. “Wait, didn’t you pick her up?”

  “Yeah,” Keanu said, “I picked her up at the mall. I’m thinking about calling the police, but...”

  “No police,” I said, my automatic response. I was going over there; the last thing I needed to encounter was police. I rushed to make an excuse, “The police aren’t going to look for Honua when they get there, they’ll just arrest all the underage drinkers.”

  “Do you think that you could come over, you’re the only friend of hers I know?”

  “I’m going to find a ride over there right now,” I said.

  “I’ll give you a ride,” a voice said, startling me.

  I spun.

  “Dakota?” Keanu said in my ear, “You there?”

  I stared up at a pair of drake serpent leather dress shoes, then pant legs, then up more and into the terrifying and beautiful face of Wyvern Manderson.

  He sat on top of the wrought-iron fence, gazing down at me, his expression and soul impossible to read. “I’ll give you a ride,” he re
peated. Then he offered his hand.

  I took a step back toward the door leading into the reception center. “I have to—” I trailed off what I was going to say, because what I was going to say was, ‘I have to report to Glacier.’ I instead said, “My uncle will give me a ride.” The moment I said it, I knew that telling my uncles would be a terrible idea. Glacier was on soldier detail for my grandfather, he was his chief bodyguard. And, I doubted Bobby would even let me go. The first rule of guarding a group is to not let them split up. Not that he was guarding me and my sisters; really, he was just taking this chaperone thing so seriously.

  I was actually surprised Bobby did not follow Wyvern out, now that I was not alone in the courtyard. But… I did not remember hearing the door to the courtyard opening either.

  I peered back at the half-dragon; he almost looked as if he was floating, sitting on the top of the fence with only open air behind him. He reached down, offering a pale long fingered hand.

  I did not take it.

  His voice came out like he was summoning the last bit of patience in him. “It sounds like you are in a hurry. Going through the party will take too much time.” He smiled down at me, but the smile was colder than his ever-present glare. “You are afraid of me,” he said this as if it was a fact.

  As Bobby would say, ‘no shit’. But what I said was, “No. I was just wondering how you sneaked past me without me seeing you.”

  “Take my hand now and I’ll show you,” he said, his hand steadily reaching out to me.

  The whole situation was too weird to break down. All the questions I had: ‘why was he here?’ ‘why was he spying on me?’ or, the most baffling of all, ‘why was he helping me?’ really weren’t important. What was important was he was right. If I went back into the party, it was more than likely that I would not get out until Bobby said so.

  “I don’t need your help up,” I said, “I’ll follow you.”

  He did not insist, just jumped down to the small lip of ground between the gate and the slope and walked along it at a quick pace. Doing what I had been wanting to do all night, I kicked off my purple heels; I crouched down and jumped up, it was a stretch and my fingers just caught the top metal bar of the fence. In one motion I pulled my body over while twisting to land facing away from the cliff on the lip of land. I caught up to Wyvern who sped up the moment I was within ten feet of him.

  The slope cut off abruptly, where a service road tunneled under the reception center. Wyvern jumped down and while he turned, probably to catch me, I landed beside him. My bare feet gave the slightest twinge as they hit asphalt, but I did not flinch.

  He gave me a look, surprised perhaps that I did not want to be carried around, but we did not have time for his sexism.

  “That way?” I prompted.

  Wyvern did not answer; he just broke into an outright sprint down into the tunnel.

  As we sprinted, I noticed that underneath the reception center was where all the action was really going on: wait-staff bustling about, a couple of them standing around smoking probably on break, trucks lining up to drop off loads in a freight entrance and rows of cars lined up in an employee parking lot. We emerged on the other side of the reception center at the main road a dozen or so yards from the main entrance where the valets stood.

  Wyvern headed away from the valet desk and the reception center entrance, up the hill to a car lot.

  “Wait,” I said, “Don’t you need to get your keys?”

  “No,” he said without turning around or explaining anything.

  When we stopped at the lot, I felt like smacking him, it was one of those lots where they crammed the cars with no space between them. The valets would have to move eight cars to get out Glacier’s van. Bobby’s bike was just as locked in with cars surrounding it too closely.

  I was about to suggest we head back to the valet, although we would run the risk of being seen leaving the party, when Wyvern flagged down the attendant. Thankfully, his rental car was parked on the outside of the group.

  I jumped into the passenger seat of the small sedan rental car.

  Wyvern drove like we had just robbed the party; the burning rubber smell from our car’s tires managed to sting my nose even though the windows were up.

  We had not even spun out of the resort entrance by the time my phone went insane.

  Where are you? Bobby texted.

  When I hesitated, not sure what to say, I received the message: Where are you? Found your shoes. I’m searching everywhere. Call me now!

  I texted, I’m fine, just caught a ride home.

  Bobby wrote: Who took you?

  Right as I received the message from Glacier: text me your location for immediate retrieval.

  When I ignored phone calls from both of my uncles, Glacier just kept texting me that same message over and over, text me your location for immediate retrieval.

  To Bobby I wrote: I’m fine. See you at home.

  Bobby: No you’re not fine. Grandfather has ordered your immediate retrieval. Get away from whoever took you and find a secure location and contact me. Were you taken by Wyvern Manderson?

  I did not know how to answer that one. But a small spiteful part of me thought: now they care; now that they think I snuck off with a boy, they care.

  Glancing over at Wyvern as he weaved between cars on the road, I felt a pulse of fear. He did not ‘take me’, that was stupid. But his soul was so strange, being a half-dragon with an immense quantity of power, I would usually have a hard time even being so close to him, but his soul had a subdued feel. Not subdued exactly, subdued wasn’t the right word, his soul was restrained, held back, as if he was funneling all his energy and emotions into a giant sack; I could not see what he was feeling, but I knew that there was an incredible quantity of energy there, just out of my senses.

  He had not asked for directions, but so far he was going the right way.

  The little economy sedan was not what I would have picked out of a line-up for what car Wyvern would have rented; I would go with something wastefully expensive and flashy. The car interior had that distinctive smell of rental car and a slight tang of cigarettes.

  I spun to look at the road and grabbed the granny-handle as Wyvern cut onto the shoulder to pass two cars that had teamed up to enforce the speed limit.

  I really did not want to look a gift getaway driver in the mouth, however, it was strange, him helping me, and with this sort of urgency.

  If I told my uncles where I was, they would ‘retrieve’ me, and there was less than no chance that I would be allowed to go find Honua.

  When a human went missing due to supernatural means, sometimes their families had been rich or powerful enough to solicit my grandfather’s help, or hire ‘the family’ to recover their loved one who had been sucked into the darker side of our world.

  The law stated that no supernatural creature could infect or take blood or life-energy from humans who were not willing. But infected and dracons were like any other New Anglo citizen, some followed laws, most did not. And the honest truth was most ‘willing’ donors weren’t willing for that long, but once one was sucked in, it was almost impossible for them to climb back out. Most humans were just not capable of surviving long in the enticing but deadly trap that our world created.

  The recovery jobs were never given to me. Recovery jobs more often than not turned into assassin work and my gun was named ‘Contingency’ for a reason.

  Only once was I invited in for a recovery job, and only in the reconnaissance team. My uncle Herald, grandfather’s ‘right hand’ on Waibibi, had requested Glacier for a politically-loaded recovery job and Glacier had brought me in. Herald had ‘detained’ a vampire from the local coven, my job was to interrogate the vampire and discover how the anti-vampiric human senator, who had been kidnapped, was guarded.

  I rocked the interrogation, found out everything, obviously, as I could dig into his emotional memories.

  Glacier recovered the senator that day, but the pro-human leg
islator already had two pointy-canines and a preference for A positive. Nothing we could do. The job was all-in-all forgettable, but Glacier told me something on the plane ride home that I never forgot. When I told him that I wanted to do recovery work, that I would be perfect for the job, he stopped me.

  He turned a look on me that was startling in the amount of expression it contained. I could sense that there were so many disappointments he carried that were revealed in his look. “I know you Dakota,” he said, “And no, you don’t. Losing a person is not like losing your keys; you don’t just look around and find them. Every moment that you don’t find them, they’re more lost. Even if you’re quick, even if you’re smart, you never get there in time. Even if you find them, save them, they’re never the same person who was lost.”

  In the car now, my hands started to shake around the phone. I needed to stop freaking myself out.

  Honua was probably just hiding out in some back room of the mansion. Or maybe she ran home, the bathroom lock could have been faulty, snapped into place when the window slammed. It made a lot more sense than the alternative that she vanished into thin air in a house that was a magical dead-zone.

  I needed to get there and comb the house; if she wasn’t there I would find out where she lived and stake-out her house.

  “Turn left here, north,” I said to Wyvern as I scrolled through my phone contacts. I know I tried to text Honua’s phone number in the directory once only to find out that the number I texted was a landline that did not accept texts. Why Honua’s mother would list a landline phone number for contacting her deaf daughter, I would never be able to figure out. But now I could search my old text messages hoping for the message that did not go through. But scrolling back further and further, ignoring the messages that kept overwhelming my phone from my uncles, I could not find the message.

  “Did you even try to text your missing friend?” Wyvern asked, not glancing over. His expression looked like his soul felt, contained, controlled and guarded.

  “I can’t find her phone number,” I mumbled as I turned back to my phone to delete yet another message from Glacier.