Now, I examined myself in the mirror; besides a sallow bruise the size of the big island on my left shoulder, I looked untouched. All the asphalt and lava-rock debris had pushed out of my skin and washed off and the cuts had mended to smooth skin. Magic was like that, it erased every mark of the fact that you had almost died; the horror and beauty of staring death in the face became just a faint echo in your memory.
Perhaps the events, the many times I brushed against death echoed in my soul; but I would never know. The only soul I could not sense was my own; I was limited to just living with my confusing emotions.
I made a haughty face at myself in the mirror and told my reflection in a low voice, “I lied when I said I would be slumming, you’re the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen, please, be my girlfriend?”
“Um, I don’t think so,” I responded in a normal voice, I made a falsely sympathetic face, “You’re about as appealing as a brain-dead slug.”
In a low voice again, I said, “Please, be with me.”
“Beg all you want—”
“Dakota?” Clara’s voice said from right outside my bathroom door, “Are you okay in there?”
My reflection’s face turned the color of ketchup. “I’m fine,” I called, quickly toweling off my already dry hands.
“Your friend Keanu is here,” Clara said, “Right outside the door.”
I swung the door open, stepped out of the bathroom and was in Keanu’s arms. His embrace wrapped around me as I waded in his whirlpool cerulean soul.
“Aren’t you mad at me?” I asked while squeezing my eyes shut. I was not ready to look up at his face, not wanting to show him what a weak child I had turned into as I was surrounded in his oceanic soul. I was careful not to let any of his soul into me as we touched or to let myself venture into him, this was not the time for passing out.
He tucked my head under his chin so I felt his neck move on my cheek when he chuckled. As I pressed against him I realized he was wearing the same dirty clothes as yesterday, and he smelled like the scene I had just laboriously washed off.
“Maybe I’ll be mad later,” he said, leaning down to whisper in my ear, “But, I was almost positive you were dead, I saw the dragon fly off with you.” He squeezed me tighter to his chest. “I’ve been trying to get to you since you knocked me out, but one thing after another stood in my way. I’m just happy you’re alive.” His arms, which had been tight around my chest, loosened as if he thought he was suffocating me or something. The intensity of his words were a little… surprising.
I had known Keanu liked me, liked flirting and joking around with me. But Keanu liked everyone, joked around with everyone and flirted with most of the girls in our school, in an offhand sort of way. He just had this magnetism about him, this ability to draw everyone’s attention, that and his godly good looks…
As I pulled away to look up into his face, for the first time I entertained the idea that, for some bewildering reason, Keanu actually cared about me.
I had to swallow down how much I wanted it to be true. It was stupid, the slippery smooth emotion that I felt churn in me as I looked into his eyes; the white of his eyes were bloodshot and pupils the color of burnt sienna.
But then a voice inside me, my inner merciless self-honesty, who happened to sound a lot like my grandfather, reminded me that even if Keanu cared, it was not for me it was for a human who did not actually exist. This whole thing between us was a ruse, I was just pretending.
The theme of my life, the motto that I had ingrained in me since birth, played through my head: the only people who matter are those who are related by blood, everyone else is replaceable.
Keanu is expendable, I could not forget that.
The only reason I fought to save him was to preserve my mission. Keanu was the key to infiltrating the Hale compound. For me to complete my mission, Keanu had to be alive. Beyond that, Keanu and I had no possible future. If he even caught wind of what I was…
As he lowered his head down and the churning in my stomach picked up pace, my answers and excuses fissured like a window hit by too many rocks.
“Who are you?” my littlest sister’s excited voice said.
The scene around us snapped into focus. I broke out of Keanu’s arms, realizing that not only was Mele watching us from the couch, all three of my sisters were in the living room and could easily see us through the open door to the guest room.
I had a moment of disorientation; I should not have been feeling this way, losing track of my surroundings. It was wrong, like Keanu’s soul just had this way of pulling me under, muddling all my finely tuned senses and defenses. Keanu had an uncanny ability to weaken me.
I needed my charm bracelet back now.
Clara stood a few feet back, trying to usher away Stacy, who was giggling like a maniac and trying to see past Clara. “Who is he? Why’s he kissing Dakota?” Stacy asked Clara, “Why is he so dirty?”
“Don’t be rude, Stacy,” Clara scolded as she tried to usher a wiggling Stacy into the kitchen.
Keanu did not look the least bit embarrassed; he swung his arm around my back and gently ushered me out of the guest room. He smiled that perfect smile at Clara and Stacy and said, “My name is Keanu. I’m the guy who’s trying to be your sister’s boyfriend.”
“Are you mentally ill or something?” Lorelei said as she slumped onto the couch beside Mele, stealing the remote and changing the channel from the news to cartoons.
“Lorelei!” Clara said sternly.
I stepped back from Keanu. “Keanu, meet my sisters, Miss Dumb-ass,” I said, gesturing to Lorelei, then I pointed out Stacy saying, “That one is Miss Obnoxious and this is my older sister, Clara.”
“Actually she mixed us up,” Lorelei said, not taking her eyes from the TV, “I’m Obnoxious, that’s Dumb-ass.”
“No I’m not!” Stacy said, as she escaped Clara and stomped her feet all the way to join the group on the couch, arms crossed.
“Nice to meet you,” Keanu said.
“We need to talk,” I said, turning back to Keanu. “I need to tell you what happened and I need your help.”
“Yeah you do,” he said with an amused huff. “We should head out to the car, Auli is waiting in it.”
Oh, joy.
I said, “We should probably leave our siblings out of this. Do you think we could slip off somewhere to talk?”
“I’ll make a public announcement if you try to keep me out of this.” Mele said loudly from the couch. “I’m not even kidding, Dakota.”
Well, crud.
I did not even manage to shake Auli, we ended up all piling into Keanu’s SUV. Keanu’s car would be as clean and well maintained as Glacier’s van if it did not have sand embedded in the carpets and the faint yet distinct smell of the ocean. As I looked around at his car, I realized I constantly worked from various guy’s cars now; wow, that was a bad sign about my recent life choices.
“I talked to Honua’s brother,” I began, but then paused. I took off my sandal and ran my toe across the top of the car’s carpet, making engrained sand pop up like a hundred tiny kernels.
Auli and Mele sat in the back and Keanu in the driver’s seat; they silently waited for me to speak.
Now that I had gathered this group together, I was not sure what to say. It did not help that I was sitting undampened, in a car with three anxious humans. Their souls’ collective tension was so high that it seemed to congeal into one big mass of awful.
This was an assignment. I needed to report the status of the assignment in clear and concise terms to accomplish my goals. Trying to sound both soothingly professional and fittingly, but not overly, emotional, I said, “He plans to kill Keanu, unless we can find Honua in the next three days.” I turned to the group, planning on proposing what I was willing to reveal of the plan I was still forming and convincing them to play their chosen parts but I stopped.
It was strange, usually I could predict my panic attacks, they usually followed a predictable manageable
pattern. There was no reason for me to have one now, but as I glanced into the back seat at Auli and Mele sitting close together, I felt my heart rate accelerate faster and faster. I spun knowing I had to get out of this car.
“I’ll be right back,” I mumbled, opening the car door and practically falling out. I swallowed the invisible cotton balls that had filled my mouth. “Don’t come in the house…” my voice trailed off and my vision could not quite focus on Keanu’s face so I just looked in the general direction of his blur. My voice was a distant sound, but I managed to finish my statement, “I’ll come out.”
My legs turned me from the car, the familiar scenery of my driveway passed as though in a bumpy distant movie reel. My legs, detached from my mind, knew the way. All I could hear was my heart pumping a quickening rhythm that climbed up from beneath my rib cage into my throat; like a hand playing an escalating staccato up my chest, hammering the last rhythms of my life. Without a gage of time or space, I was in my house, the door was closed and I was slumped at the bottom of the door.
The rhythm grew faster. My vision started twinkling out as the air grew thicker, heavier a viscous fluid that I could not suck past the cotton balls clogging my mouth and throat.
I’m going to die. I’m going to die. I’m going to die. This time, I’ll die.
“Dakota?” my mother’s voice shouted. She was a small round blimp in a distant corridor. Her morning ‘hair of the dog’ tumbler crashed to the floor and then she was beside me. She fiddled with my fingers, and distantly I knew that I was supposed to do something, but I could not think past the throbbing, beating in my head.
My own personal hell, not only was the air too solid to breathe, it now smelled like vodka morning breath.
I was pulled from the hard floor onto my mother’s lap. My mother’s voice shouted in my ear, “Lorelei, come here! Clara get a towel and a paper bag!”
As if she had not just almost blown out my eardrums with her shouts, my mother whispered into my ears, “Feed it into your ring. You’re home, you’re safe, everyone is safe, your heart will slow down….”
What did she know? It was beating faster, and faster, and faster.
Her fingers wiped the wetness coating my cheeks.
My hands crossing my chest, I rocked up and down, trying to fight my lungs into operation. My head was a cloud, sinking to the ground. This one would kill me. This one was going to cause my death.
“Where is her dampener?” my mother yelled as Lorelei’s green eyes lowered to my level and a paper bag covered my mouth and nose.
“I’m safe,” Lorelei said, “I’m safe Dakota, I’m alive, I’m here.” My heart rate should have slowed at this, but this time seeing Lorelei safe did not break my terror, this time I was going to die.
“Lorelei is safe, Dakota,” my mother whispered. Then she shouted, “The ring doesn’t seem to be enough! Where is her bracelet?”
“Bobby hasn’t come by yet,” Clara said as she descended in front of me. She used a coarse towel to wipe sweat from my forehead and then my clammy palms.
“The plane is going to crash.” I said because I had to. The words were muffled by the paper bag. When Lorelei pulled the bag away, I said it again between labored breaths, “The plane is going to crash, he’s going to die. I’m going to die. Am I going to die? Am I going to die?”
My family looked at each other and distantly I knew that something I said did not make any sense and I could not breathe again so I grabbed Lorelei’s hands and pulled the paper to my mouth.
“Call Bobby now,” my mother shouted. And for some reason she sounded like she was crying behind me.
Clara sounded like she was crying too when she said, “Uncle Bobby, could you please return Dakota’s bracelet now? She’s having a panic attack,” she paused, “A crime scene? Can someone take your place? Please, now? It’s a really bad one. She’s confused…”
“Maybe she’ll just pass out this time,” Lorelei said as she mopped sweat from my face.
There was a red haze around them, a cloud redder than pain and colder than death. The world narrowed to a single tiny dot, a light no wider than my pinky nail. All I could hear was my irregular heartbeat, beating out a funeral march.
Then my metal charm was in my hand, and the haze settled, the silt streamed out of my eyes. I squeezed onto a little metal charm shaped like a palace, until the ridges bit into my hand.
“I can’t stay,” Bobby said as I looked up to see him standing above me. He wore his usual leather jacket and jeans, but his hands were covered in white latex gloves. He crouched down behind Lorelei trying to see into my face. “You going to be okay? You feeding it into the ring?”
Of course I wasn’t. It was the original reason that my grandfather had created the ring portal for me, but I had not even thought of it when I was in the throes of my panic attack.
Bobby reached out like he would feel my forehead, but looked at his gloved hand and thought better of it. “I thought we agreed you would stop having these.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I would give you a hug, but I don’t want to get corpse on you.” Bobby said.
I pulled the bag away from my mouth as I asked, “What?”
The corner of his lips cringed down showing gritted teeth as he gave me an, ‘crap, I wasn’t supposed to say that’ expression. Then he vanished.
Stacy peeked out from where she was hiding behind a wall. When I waved at her, she stepped out and walked toward us. She sat down and curled into a ball beside Lorelei.
My mom’s arms wrapped around me but she knew better than to squeeze me. Her voice quavered when she asked, “Honey, you know daddy is not coming back, right?”
I blinked, confused on why she would ask something like that but then I realized I had been saying the things I used to say when my father would leave for his business trips, for then I was always positive that my father’s plane would crash. Ever since my father died, the panic attacks had centered on my sister Lorelei, that she was missing or taken or dead, when I could not find her.
I had not had a panic attack about my dad since I watched him die at my feet.
Looking around at the tear stained faces of my family, I realized I just singlehandedly smacked my sisters and mother with the one trauma we never brought up.
“Yeah, I know,” I said, so exhausted I could not push out of my mother’s soft embrace. “I don’t know what brought it on.” I said to the unspoken question in all of their faces. And I did not. I had talked face to face with a full-blooded dragon, faced a scaly-dragon, been kidnapped by and bargained with a half dragon, yet it was sitting in a car with three humans that had given me a panic attack.
“I’m sorry,” I said again, as the group around me seemed to sag and relax.
My whole body reverberated with clammy warm tremors making me feel hollow and nauseous; my heart beat a slower, more steady rhythm as I drained the panic into my ring.
Even though we all knew it was coming, the sound of my cell phone ringing in the kitchen made us give a collective jump.
“Go tell grandfather she’s okay,” Clara said as she ran her fingers through Stacy’s hair. “You should probably talk to him yourself, Dakota.”
“Please, no,” I responded as Stacy ran for the phone.
Clara nodded and said, “Alright. I’ll get you a glass of water.”
“Then I have to go,” I said, taking the towel from Lorelei so I could more effectively wipe off the sweat that soaked me. “They’re waiting for me in the car. I should change.”
“You should sleep,” my mother said, but she did not fight me when I laboriously climbed out of her lap. It had been a long time since I even let her pretend to be an authority figure over me.
Ten minutes later I had toweled off the sweat, guzzled two glasses of water, eaten a hunk of bread, changed my clothes and otherwise collected myself. My mother poured herself another drink while my sisters returned to their activities as if nothing had happened.
&nb
sp; It was our little tradition, my family’s unspoken pact.
As if my mother knew my thoughts, she lifted her morning screwdriver up in a toasting motion as I reached for the front door. I nodded my head, giving her a half-smile.
“Your grandfather wants you at his house at six,” my mother called right before I had a chance to leave the house.
“I can’t,” I called back. “I’ll call and tell him I’m fine.”
“He told Stacy it wasn’t a request; your grandfather won’t have a second to spare today until dinner,” she said.
Well, crud.
Why didn’t I just talk to my grandfather when he called? I was always shooting myself in my foot. It was already afternoon. I had been in the house for so long, for the better part of an hour, I would not have been surprised if Keanu had left without me.
Thankfully, the black SUV still sat exactly where I had fled it. The day around it was beautiful, not a wisp of cloud in the baby-blue expanse; there weren’t even clouds perched on the jagged green peaks of the West Mabi Mountains far behind my house. The air was warm, so warm that if it hiked another couple degrees it would be hot. The trade winds whistling through the peaks, however, cooled the air.
My mind felt clearer, like I had taken a refreshing nap rather than being carried away by a category-five-brain-hurricane. My mind might have reordered itself during the panic attack, however, every other part of my body wanted to either shake or throw up.
Opening up the car, I climbed up into the passenger seat and smiled up into three annoyed and expectant faces.
“My mom just found out I was kidnapped last night, I barely escaped the house. We should go before she changes her mind,” I said.
I was not surprised when Keanu nodded like this was a perfectly reasonable explanation. Parental tyranny was a ‘go-to’ lie for me; it usually worked, as most of my friends unquestionably accepted that parents were authorities.
It was a set-up, anyone who was angry with me would look like a jerk, but Auli obviously did not mind sounding heartless. She said, “Thanks for calling and telling us you were going to take this long.”
Henchgirl (Dakota Kekoa Book 1) Page 18
