Henchgirl (Dakota Kekoa Book 1)

by Rita Stradling

  “Your father was infected by the dragon. Dad thought you might have been too, but he let you go.” He laughed. “That is just too rich. It makes so much sense. That was why she was working so hard to keep me away from you.”

  “Lena?” I asked completely confused.

  “Auli,” Keanu said. “I always wondered why she was trying to keep you away from me. She thinks she’s so smart but it’s actually why I noticed you in the first place.”

  I was completely confused.

  “Auli probably even saw you get infected that day, didn’t she? Auli was there in my father’s office that day too. After my father let you go he was going to track you down to make sure you had not turned into some thing; but Auli watched the entire fight play out from under my father’s desk and convinced him you weren’t infected. She lied to him and I bet she recognized you the moment you came to our school. She knew an infected had infiltrated our school and tried to keep it from us.” He shook his head. “The funny thing is the only reason I noticed you at all was because she was trying so hard to keep you from my notice.”

  Auli was protecting me? Honua was one thing, she was my friend. The idea had never, ever occurred to me. Auli had made every attempt to make me feel rejected and ostracized. She had watched her own father murder her sister and my father; and even at eleven, she had lied to her father to protect me? Under her father’s desk she would have had a perfect view of when I put my hand on the dragon and scared it away, she must have known this entire time I wasn’t human.

  In the weirdest way, it all fit, she was one of only a few people who knew about the lapse in the office security. She had come to our house and warned Mele away. She might have been protecting her family too but she had been willing to betray them to protect me and, maybe, help Honua. Obviously even though I could see souls, I wasn’t very good at reading people.

  “I actually thought I liked you,” Keanu said, with a shiver. “I kissed you. I feel like up-chucking.”

  “Ditto,” I said. “And guess what, Keanu. You did not just kiss an infected, I’m a dracon. So was my father.”

  “Well, then I’m even more proud of my father for killing him,” Keanu said.

  “Do you know what an aspect is? We inherit magical qualities from our dragon ancestors. I have two,” I said as I moved Contingency to my side, “One of my aspects is that I can shoot a falling coconut into perfect halves from a hundred yards away—”

  He lifted the hose.

  “Drop the hose,” I said.

  “You scared of getting your clothes wet?” he said with a lazy grin.

  “I know it’s a water portal, Keanu,” I said. “You obviously can make them. You’re sending the human’s through and killing infected people with it.”

  Wyvern grabbed me by my hips, immediately grasping the situation.

  Afraid that Wyvern was going to carry me out of there, leaving Mele, I shouted, “Wait! You might have killed those women, Keanu, but you did not mean to, did you? You did not look them in the eye like you’re looking me in the eye. You did not care about them the way you care about Mele, did you? This is a different kind of murder. Isn’t it?”

  His gaze flitted to Mele, and then narrowed on me.

  “I’m not like you Keanu, I have no problem becoming your murderer if it will save Mele and Wyvern,” I lied. “I can shoot you before you raise that hose. Back off!”

  Keanu smiled at me, “You might be one of them, but I know you Dakota, you’re not going to shoot.”

  With one quick movement I shot Keanu in his hand.

  He screamed, dropping the hose and in the same moment Wyvern grabbed me by the waist and ran carrying me.

  I looked back to where Mele was still standing there. She looked over at us and started to move after us when the water hit her.

  I did not waste my breath telling Wyvern to stop; I took aim at Keanu who was using his other hand to spray Mele. If I was the one running I could probably shoot but as it was Wyvern running, and running fast, my aim was thrown when I shot and missed Keanu by an inch.

  But something I could not see happened and the water moved off Mele.

  “Shit!” Keanu shouted. Something like acid ate up his shoe. He kicked the shoe off sending it flying.

  Then something streamed out of Mele’s outstretched hands, shooting directly at Keanu.

  Keanu dove out of the way and in the spot where he had just been the ground sizzled. Mele’s skin seemed to glow, her veins like glowing green rivers under her skin.

  There was a loud growling sound that might have been happening for a while, I did not know, but suddenly bikes were streaming around us.

  Wyvern put me down and we stood watching as probably a hundred bikes drove past us, after that, pickup-trucks, island cars and wave-rider vans followed. They did not stop at the water ward, either. They drove right across. Three bikers pulled up to where Keanu was holding his shot hand on the ground.

  I recognized Scruff stepping off one of the bikes. Two of his other buddies stepped up and around Keanu.

  “Scruff!” I shouted, “The Hose! Put your hand in the water! It’s a portal to the girls!”

  Keanu tried to crawl toward the hose but one of the Hells’ Hogs put a boot on his back and stepped on him.

  Scruff gave me an almost terrifying smile on his craggy face. “That’s two I owe you!” he shouted.

  I held out my arms to the sea of cars and bikes that had Mele’s mother’s yard forever destroyed and with the house surrounded, I replied, “This one you’ve already repaid.”

  “Alright, baby girl, I will be seeing you soon,” he said. He put his hand in the water, winked at me, and then vanished.

  A bike rode up beside me stopping.

  “Shit! I missed it,” my uncle Bobby said, he fumbled his phone out and started filming as eight more bikers passed through the water portal.

  Whichever Mabiian Heritage Society member was guarding the girls on the other side of that portal was in for one hell of a surprise.

  “Your videos are always blurry anyways,” I told Bobby.

  “Hey, no comments from the girl who isn’t really here,” he said with a wink.

  “Thanks,” I said to him.

  “You did this, didn’t you?” Bobby asked.

  “I had nothing to do with it,” I said. “I just came because Mele ran off upset.”

  “Alright,” he said, his expression told me he knew it was a lie but he would let it go.

  Alika, who had been on one of the bikes that had passed us, stopped beside Mele. Mele was no longer glowing but was dripping wet. Alika climbed off his bike and shrugged off his leather jacket, hanging it over her shoulders.

  Even from here, I saw the tears coursing down her face.

  Alika wiped Mele’s tears away with his thumbs and whispered something to her.

  She looked like she laughed-cried at whatever he said. Then she nodded.

  She climbed onto his bike and he climbed on behind her, appearing to give her instructions. Then the bike started driving forward…at about three miles per hour.

  Wyvern was still holding me by the waist.

  I rested my head back against him.

  There were probably three hundred Mabiians, jumping out of the back of pick-up trucks, climbing out of cars, banging on Lani Alana’s door.

  “I don’t think your dad is going to be re-elected!” I yelled at Keanu, who was still eating dirt.

  “Hey, Fatso,” I called, “Auli Hale is cool.”

  He nodded. “Don’t worry about it, we know.”

  “Hey Henchgirl,” Bobby said, “I can only repress the memory of seeing you for so long. Get gone.”

  Wyvern and I walked, hand in hand, to his Vervari.

  “What should we do now?” I asked.

  “Well,” he said, opening the car door for me, “I was going to offer you a job.”

  “A job?” I said, standing in the open car door.

  “I hear you’re a pretty good tour-guide,�
�� he said.

  “I am a fantastic tour guide,” I said. “But it’s going to cost you. I don’t come cheap, you know.”

  He smiled at me, like we were talking about something else entirely. He said, “Oh, I know.”

  Chapter Twenty Six

  “All I want for my birthday is to stay right here,” I said, kissing Wyvern again.

  He leaned in to where I was standing with my back against my closed bedroom door. “Tough,” he said, “I’m taking you to dinner and I have something for you.”

  “No you do not,” I said, “You promised on your honor you wouldn’t.”

  “I promised that I would not spend any money on you,” he said, smiling down at me. His beauty still made my head swim at times these past couple of days; this was one of those times.

  He pulled a box out from his suit pocket and handed it to me. For a second a tiny trickle of nervousness leaked through where the hand he had on my hip brushed against the inside of my arm.

  Now feeling really nervous, I took the box and opened it. Inside a velvet lined box was a single pearlescent dragon scale.

  I swallowed down yet more anxiety. It felt really important, like it meant something big. I just did not really know what it meant. I managed to smile at him.

  He kissed my forehead.

  I whispered, “For my eighteenth birthday can I have all your baby teeth?”

  He laughed. “I’ll talk to my nursemaid; see if she still has them.”

  I touched the scales’ surface; it was just as I remembered. The feel of the scale made the concern that had been plaguing me rise; I had to tell Wyvern about what I did to our souls.

  I had been meaning to tell him all week, but every time I tried I just could not make myself do it.

  Wednesday, after what happened at Mele’s house, we had driven to the other side of the island to wait for Honua at Kali’s house. Four hours later, a dazed looking Honua had staggered in supported by Scruff.

  While Honua sat in a drug haze held in Kali’s arms, Scruff had filled us in on what had happened after he left through the water portal.

  The Hells’ Hogs found the girls in a summer-camp-like compound on an estate on our nearest neighboring island of Kabikabi. They had found Honua in one of the camp beds, heavily sedated.

  Scruff did not tell me what happened to the girls’ captors, I did not ask.

  Scruff called and had some of his boys drive over a boat from Mabi. While they ferried the women and girls over, the girls told them what had happened.

  Some of the west-side girls and women said that they had simply come home and their sprinklers had been on high, they had walked toward their house through the water and then had suddenly been somewhere else.

  The girls from the east side had many different stories. One story was that there had been a heritage festival at the community center on Saturday where a group of high school girls were supposed to perform a dance. They had dressed in a class room and their dance teacher told them that they each needed to use the restroom before the performance. She excused them one by one to use the restroom. One-by-one they fell through the portal to Kabikabi. The dance teacher had then sent herself, following the girls through the water portal.

  There were a few more stories like this. People who they had trusted sending the girls through portals that Keanu must have opened. Keanu had been a busy guy opening portals all over the island all weekend. I realized he probably left right after lunch Friday to open so many portals and get back in time to meet us to go to the beach. Keanu was probably planning to ‘portal me’ at or after the beach, since I could not go to his party. Wyvern throwing shells at Keanu that day probably saved my life. But, from the sound of it, Keanu had not actually sent any of the other girls through personally except for Honua.

  The girls said that a Heritage Society woman gave a speech to them all on Sunday. She said that Honua could not understand what she was saying because Honua’s mother had ‘turned to evil,’ and Honua was hideously disfigured from it. She had called Honua a ‘high risk’ case and had told them all about what had happened when a ‘dragon stole Honua’s mother and forced her to do the unthinkable.’

  Honua had turned into a boar and tried to gore the woman.

  They must have known what Honua was, however, because they had immediately tranquilized Honua and kept her sedated day and night for the next three days.

  Wyvern and I had stayed and spent Wednesday night on Kali’s couch, curled up into each other.

  The next morning I opened my eyes to a beautiful girl sitting directly in front of me, smiling. ‘I knew he would love you,’ she signed.

  ‘How are you?’ I mouthed back, not moving out of Wyvern’s arms.

  ‘Good now,’ she signed. She had held out a piece of paper that had been more than just crumpled. ‘I went to get this,’ she signed.

  It was a list of girl’s names, over a hundred of them. Reading down the list, I saw Honua’s name, mine, Mele’s. This must have been what she had taken from Senator Hale’s office.

  ‘If only I did not wash my hands,’ she signed with a sad smile, ‘I could have given this to my grandmother Saturday.’

  ‘I’m glad you’re safe,’ I mouthed to her.

  ‘Me too,’ she signed, ‘thank you.’ She had grabbed my outstretched hand, squeezed it, then stood up and walked out of the room.

  Though Wyvern had originally promised to kill Keanu, he had not. I think he might have, not only did Keanu kidnap Honua, he tried to kill all of us that final day.

  Not knowing the extent of Keanu’s power, the bikers had locked Keanu in Mele’s house while the Hells’ Hogs tried to pacify the mob outside. Before Scruff had returned to Lani Alana’s house, Keanu, Auli and Mele’s mom had disappeared. As far as I could tell there was still nothing on the news about the disappearances or deaths, no one calling out Senator Hale. If anything, his speeches had become more radical or at least the one on the news I threw the remote at yesterday was.

  My cover had been blown, big time. I was still getting used to that. There was no returning to school or my normal life. I would have to start fresh soon.

  Wyvern and I had spent the rest of the week exploring the island, visiting Honua and her mother once a day and then sleeping at my house. But every so often when he would look at me or kiss me or say something that made that zing happen in my soul, I could not help but remember that I had taken a piece of his soul and exchanged it for mine. Everything I was feeling, everything he was feeling, could just have come from that. At the root of the looks and the touches and even the attraction could be a lie.

  Touching the scale here in my room, I knew I had to tell him. I knew that if we were going to keep going ahead with…whatever this was that we had between us, he had to know what I had done.

  I swallowed, and looked up to meet his gaze, “Wyvern, I need to tell you something.”

  The grin he gave me was so sincere that zing feeling just shot into me.

  “What?” he asked.

  “I love your present so much that I think I might start collecting body parts,” I said.

  I would tell him after dinner. I would.

  “You really don’t know what it means, do you?” he asked.

  “Are you going to tell me?”

  “No,” he said, unsurprisingly. “Put it somewhere safe, then we’ll go to dinner.”

  I elected to put it in my eastern-print portal purse, thinking that a stone box with no opening deep within my great-grandfather’s castle in the Dragon Kingdoms was about as secure as was possible. Also having it on me at all times just felt right, even if it did make me a little creepy.

  I was wearing yet another of the dresses my mother constantly thought I needed. We drove up the volcano in an area I had rarely gone to. There were a number of event centers and mansions and not much else.

  We parked in front of what looked a lot more like a mansion than a restaurant. There were quite a few cars in front of the house and some motorcycles as
well…I recognized the cars.

  “Oh, no,” I said, “Retreat!”

  Wyvern grinned impishly. “I don’t think so.”

  He pulled right up to the middle of the driveway, parked blocking in ten cars, jumped out and came around to my door.

  He opened the door, standing there, waiting for me to get out.

  “It’s not too late to escape,” I said desperately.

  “Yes it is,” he undid my seatbelt and scooped me into his arms.

  “If you don’t put me down I will shoot you!” I said. “I am armed!”

  “Shoot me,” he said, not afraid at all.

  I should have shot him. But I did not, not even when he carried me into the event center and my sisters, Mele, Honua, Braiden, Alika, and my uncle Bobby jumped out yelling, “Surprise!” in the foyer. Glacier was there too but he just stood there.

  With the exception of Glacier, they were all wearing all-too-happy-with themselves smiles. This was okay, this was fine. I liked these people.

  “Tell me it’s just you,” I said, begging them to say yes.

  “No,” Lorelei said, “Everyone else is just too important to jump out and yell ‘surprise.’”

  “But we’re not!” Stacy yelled.

  “This is mom’s big event?” I asked.

  “It will be fun,” Clara said, consolingly, “Happy Birthday, Dakota.”

  It would be just like my mom to steal all my money so she could throw me a party I did not want. She probably did not even see how screwed up that was.

  Clara walked up to where Wyvern was still holding me in his arms. “We’ll make sure she doesn’t run,” she told him.

  He kissed me once on my head, and then set me down.

  ‘Where are Chris and Amy?’ I saw Wyvern sign at Honua. Chris and Amy were Honua’s brand new security team that had arrived Thursday.

  ‘Locked in a closet at my house,’ she signed back. ‘Mom will let them out in an hour.’

  ‘It’s not safe here. I told you not to come,’ he signed.

  From what I saw, Wyvern and Honua almost entirely spoke in sign language with each other.

  ‘You tell me a lot of things,’ she signed, and then she walked to my side and took my hand.