Eden Burning

by Elizabeth Lowell

  “Golly, Uncle Chase,” Sandi said, staring at his hands, impressed and horrified at the same time. “What did you do to your hands?”

  He smiled crookedly. “Played with fire.”

  “You get burned?”

  “All the way to the bone.”

  Sandi’s blue eyes widened. “That musta hurt a lot.”

  “Yes.” Then he added softly, “But I hurt the fire more.”

  Only Nicole and Lisa heard the words.

  Only Nicole understood them.

  She looked away from the rain-clear depths of Chase’s eyes to his taped fingers. Her hands trembled as she picked up her knapsack. She could still hear his reckless, relentless drumming driving her dance higher and higher, taking her to a level she had never danced before. He had seemed godlike, invincible.

  But he wasn’t. He hurt and bled just like everyone else.

  “Okay, gang,” she said. It was an effort, but she kept her voice neutral. “Which kipuka?”

  “Kamehameha Iki!” everyone said instantly.

  It was a unanimous vote for a lush, hidden kipuka more than halfway up Kilauea’s slope. They had named the kipuka “Little Kamehameha” for Benny, who had led them to it.

  “How about it, Lisa?” Nicole asked. “You feeling up to that kind of a scramble?”

  “I’ll help her,” Mark said. “Right, squirt?”

  “Me,” Benny insisted.

  “Me, too,” Chase said. Then he asked Nicole, “Is the kipuka in one of Kilauea’s active rift zones?”

  “No. Why?”

  “Bells went off on the rim this morning.”

  Instantly the children came to attention. They knew about the alarms wired to every seismograph at the volcano observatory. Whenever harmonic tremors lasted for more than ten minutes, bells went off, telling anyone with ears that seething, molten stone was pushing its way closer to the surface of the land.

  Years ago the patterns of magma movement had been so predictable that the alarms were hardly necessary. But since 1975, when a big earthquake hit the mountain, everything had changed. The mountain had shifted, closing off old avenues for the release of magma without opening any noteworthy new ones.

  Before the earthquake there had been four spectacular surface eruptions for every invisible intrusion of magma beneath the surface of the land. Now the ratio was reversed. Land was still being born on the Big Island, but it came silently, almost painfully, as though the mountain and the molten rock labored against invisible bonds.

  In its self-made chains Kilauea was a much less predictable volcano. One day the mountain would shrug off the restraints, because nothing could stand for long against the immense forces at work beneath the gentle Eden of the land. When Kilauea finally broke its chains, the fires of creation would leap free again. Then fountains of incandescent rock would shoot a thousand feet high in a dance as beautiful as it was powerful.

  “When? Where?” the children demanded. Like everyone else on the island, they wanted to get front-row seats for the big eruption, if and when it finally came.

  “It already was. Don’t worry,” Chase added as he saw the disappointment on their faces. “You didn’t miss anything. It was an intrusion rather than an eruption.” To Lisa he said, “That means the liquid rock never broke through to the surface. It just sort of squeezed between the cracks in the solid rocks down below.”

  Mark made a disgusted sound. “Another creeper. Man, I’m gonna be old and gray before I see a real eruption.”

  Chase laughed. “I doubt it. The hotshot pool will be claimed within a few weeks. Bet on it.”

  “I tried,” Mark said indignantly. “Dad wouldn’t let me.”

  Nicole managed not to laugh out loud as she looked at her watch. “C’mon, troops. Pele and the volcano wait for no man.”

  “How about women?” Chase asked blandly.

  “Nope,” Mark said. “Pele’s a goddess. They don’t wait for anything. Steve better hurry.”

  By the time Nicole had herded everyone to the bus stop along the island highway, Steve came running up to join them. As the children paired off in the seats, Nicole found herself with Chase. She slid onto the bench seat, carefully leaving enough space for two men to sit down.

  Chase filled it.

  The children spent the bus ride betting pickles against peanut butter on just when and where the mountain would blow. They peered out the windows, hoping for some sign that soon they would be up to their lips in pickles or peanut butter and dancing fountains of lava.

  As usual, the top of Kilauea was swathed in clouds and rainbows, telling the children from the wet side of the island what they already knew: it was going to rain. It rained almost every day, but only for a short time. They accepted it the way mainland kids accept sunshine or snow or smog.

  Nicole spent the bus ride half listening to the kids and wholly wishing she wasn’t so aware of Chase beside her, of his muscular thigh resting against hers whenever the bus rounded a right turn, and it seemed like the road was made up entirely of right turns. The first time she felt the heat of his skin against hers, she had flinched like she had touched burning stone. The second time his leg brushed hers, she flinched, but not as much.

  By the fifth time she had tamed her reaction to a slight tremor when she felt his hair-roughened thigh touch hers.

  Just over halfway up Kilauea’s gently sloping flank, the bus made an unscheduled stop to let them off at the spot where an unmarked trail led to a popular island picnic spot. With Benny in the lead, they followed the trail until it unraveled into ferns, shrubs, and towering ohia trees.

  As soon as the picnic spot was behind them, everyone shifted into hiking formation like a well-drilled team. Benny still led the way. Mark moved up to third place, behind Lisa. The other girls followed Mark, and Steve closed ranks after them, ready to help if needed. Nicole brought up the rear to keep an eye on everything.

  Chase fell into line after her.

  As she struggled through the overgrown stretches or scrambled down and up a steep ravine, she tried not to think of him just behind her. Some of the time she succeeded, but not often. Her skin tingled with a feminine awareness that was new and unsettling. She told herself it was simply nerves. She didn’t believe it. Nervousness felt cold, not hot.

  Even though there wasn’t any real trail to follow, no one was worried about getting lost. Benny had an uncanny sense of place, a kind of three-dimensional memory that allowed him to see and remember forest landmarks that were invisible or unremarkable to other people. After the first few hikes everyone simply relaxed and trusted him to get them in and out of any place.

  Having heard all about Benny’s fey skill in the wild, Chase wasn’t concerned about memorizing the trail—or lack of it. Other than noting changes in direction and obvious landmarks, he enjoyed the view directly in front of him.

  Nicole’s legs were long and graceful, strong and smooth. He remembered what it felt like to have that silky golden flesh next to his own darker skin. The memory was so vivid that he was almost grateful when his hungry train of thought was derailed by Mark’s cheerful voice.

  “Let’s hear it for ocean jokes!” the boy called over his shoulder.

  The kids all groaned in happy anticipation. Punning had begun.

  “Do you know where fish come from?” Steve called out over the girls’ heads.

  “No, where?” they chorused.

  “Finland!”

  There were groans all around, then a pause.

  “Why can’t a shark sing ‘do, re, mi’?” Sandi asked.

  “Don’t know,” Lisa said bravely. “Why?”

  “Cuz it doesn’t have any scales!”

  “Drown her!” Steve yelled, laughing in spite of himself.

  “Was there a porpoise to that joke?” Mark asked slyly.

  He smiled and bowed, acknowledging the round of boos that was his reward.

  There was a long pause while they went over a rough part of the path.

  “Fi
nished?” Mark asked. “Maybe we should move on to bird jokes.”

  “You mean like the one about the owl that was so lazy it didn’t give a hoot?” Chase asked. His innocent smile gleamed beneath the midnight slash of his mustache.

  Nicole groaned.

  “Is that a sketch?” Lisa asked eagerly. She turned to look at Nicole for an instant before giving her attention back to the uneven ground beneath her feet.

  Before Nicole could answer, Mark jumped in. “If a hummingbird does in his brother, it’s fratricide. If it’s his father, it’s patricide. What is it if a hummingbird does in a stranger?” He waited for a long moment of silence before he said triumphantly, “Humicide!”

  Chase stopped walking, threw back his head, and laughed without restraint, enjoying his nephew’s agile mind.

  The sound of Chase’s laughter rippled over Nicole like a warm, invisible net, wrapping around her, tugging her closer to him.

  “Sketch!” demanded all the children except Mark, who waited modestly for Nicole’s decision.

  “Sketch,” she agreed. “I’ve been punished enough for one day.”

  When everyone groaned, she smiled and pulled out her sketchbook and pencil. With a few swift strokes she captured Mark’s face as it had been while he enjoyed the groaning applause of his friends.

  She also captured something beyond the moment, the quality of his intensity and his unfolding strength, the man growing beneath the boy’s handsome, smiling surface. The sketch didn’t flatter Mark; it appreciated what he was and what he would become.

  Chase saw Mark’s pleased grin while he watched the sketch forming. He also saw the quick, shyly admiring looks his nephew gave Nicole when she wasn’t paying attention to him. The glances told Chase that Mark had more than a little bit of a crush on her. Remembering what it had been like at that age, Chase doubted that Mark was even aware of why he enjoyed being with Nicole so much.

  And then Chase wondered if Nicole knew.

  She added a bloodthirsty hummingbird diving at Mark’s ear with humicide buzzing in its feathery little mind. The boy laughed with delight and took the sketch to show everyone else.

  Watching the interplay, Chase realized that Nicole knew about Mark’s fragile, unformed feelings toward her. The sketch told Mark that she approved of him, while the crazed bird shifted the boy’s response to laughter. Deftly, very gently, she had made certain that Mark would have no reason to be embarrassed by his adolescent awareness of her as a woman.

  Chase appreciated her tact, and at the same time wished she would show half as much gentleness to him. Surely she knew that he regretted what he had done.

  Even as the wistful thought came, he dismissed it with an ironic smile at his own expense. He might want her consideration, but he himself had shown damn little consideration for her feelings. He was lucky that she didn’t tell him to check out the kipukas in hell.

  Benny led them from the thickly overgrown forest and across a smooth lava flow that had only a few lonely streaks of vegetation on its stony surface. It took the rain, sun, and wind a long time to break down pahoehoe’s glassy surface, creating cracks and crevices to capture dust and shelter seeds.

  Chase wondered how old this particular lava flow was. Relative dating was easy enough—the older lava was almost always underneath and the newer was on top. But whether an eruption was one thousand or seven thousand years old was a matter of opinion, not to mention outright shouting matches among the scientists. Even the kipukas were hard to date. In the tropics, trees didn’t have well defined seasonal growth rings, for the simple reason that there were no well defined growing seasons. In Eden, all the days were pretty much the same.

  The surface of the land wasn’t that unchanging. Between one step and the next, pahoehoe gave way to aa lava. It had a much rougher surface, which allowed dirt to gather and ferns, shrubs, and grass to grow, and finally ohia trees. Born of fire, living on top of the living volcano, ohia had developed an ability to shut its pores when poisonous gases sighed out over the land. Other plants died, but not the ohia. It just held its breath until there was good air to breathe again. Unless the poisonous fumes continued for a long time, only direct fire could kill the hardy ohia.

  Within a few hundred feet of the aa flow, the forest resumed as though the river of molten stone had never existed, had never burned away the old and created the new.

  Overhead, clouds swooped low across the land, trailing streamers of warm rain. It came down hard, passed quickly, and left every little crease and crack of the land alive with water. Rills and narrow waterfalls danced through the green ravines, enjoying a brief white rush of life before sinking into the porous lava and disappearing. Some of the rainwater would reappear as springs and streams farther down the mountain. Most of it would simply vanish, returning to the ocean through seeps far below the breaking waves.

  The landscape got rougher, as though barely cooled lava had been churned wildly with a huge stick and then left to harden. The children scrambled forward with the confidence of hikers who had been there before. They helped each other over the worst spots and went on without a fuss.

  Chase noticed that Mark waited to see if Nicole needed help, only to be sent on with a wave of her hand. She went up the lava jumble gracefully, hesitating only once when her foot slipped on the rain-slick leaves of a plant. Instantly Chase moved to her side, caught her arm, and supported her until she had her balance again.

  The feel of his fingers on her bare upper arm made her heart lurch. Heat washed over her, followed by an instant of weakness. She was acutely aware of the texture of his skin and of the tape that protected his fingers.

  She took a sharp breath and was surrounded by the hot male scent of him. Unable to stop herself, she looked up at him and saw his pupils widening in primitive response to her. For a moment she saw again his face above hers, his eyes dark with passion as he covered her body with his own.

  Her heart stopped, then beat frantically.

  “Nicole?” he asked quietly. “Are you all right?”

  She closed her eyes, but that only increased her awareness of the man standing so close to her. Her eyes snapped open. “Yes. You startled me. I’m not used to—”

  When Nicole abruptly stopped speaking, Chase finished the sentence for her.

  “Being touched by a man who isn’t ‘safe.’ ” His eyes searched hers. “It’s all right. You know I won’t hurt you.”

  Then he heard his own words, and his mouth turned down. He had hurt her very badly, and he hadn’t even touched her while he was doing it.

  “Not like this,” he said. “Physically. You can trust me that far, can’t you?”

  Numbly she nodded, for it was the truth. Even when he had believed her to be a gold-digging little whore, he hadn’t hurt her. His hands had been careful rather than harsh on her body. He had made her feel . . . good.

  “Nicole,” he said, his voice low, “let me make it up to you.”

  “There’s no need.” Then, quickly, before he could put into words the objections tightening his lips, she said, “You were better to me than my husband ever was, and he never felt guilty. Why should you?”

  Chase remembered the instant when he had undressed her and she covered her breasts in defensive reflex. He hadn’t understood then, but now it made the kind of sense that turned his stomach. “Did he hurt you in bed? Is that why—”

  “Uncle Chase!” Mark called from the top of the lava flow. “Is everything all right?”

  Relief washed through Nicole at the interruption. Now the uncomfortable conversation would have to end. Eagerly she turned toward the boy.

  Before she could speak, Chase did. “Everything’s fine. Nicole has a pebble caught in her shoe. Go on ahead. We’ll catch up in a minute.”

  Mark hesitated until Chase turned around to face him fully. Even twenty feet away it was impossible to miss the command in Chase’s gray eyes. The boy waved, turned away, and scrambled to catch up with the other hikers.

  “Ans
wer me,” Chase said, but his voice and his touch were far more gentle than his words.

  “He didn’t beat me, if that’s what you mean.”

  “That isn’t what I asked.”

  Suddenly Nicole wanted to scream at Chase’s insistent questions. Can’t he see that I don’t want to think about it, to talk about it, to remember? In her anger at his insensitivity she forgot to retreat, forgot to be humiliated by her own lack of response as a woman.

  “You went to bed with me,” Nicole shot back. “Can’t you imagine why a man would get impatient and—and careless? A corpse doesn’t have any feelings to—”

  “Shit.” Chase’s mouth covered Nicole’s and his tongue thrust between her teeth, stopping the scalding flow of words.

  After the first overwhelming instant the kiss changed. His tongue touched hers slowly, tenderly. He sipped from her mouth as he had sipped from the heart of the flower.

  Although the caress itself was very gentle, she couldn’t have retreated from it if she had tried. His arms held her with a certainty that made her feel both fragile and completely safe. He was reassuring her with his touch that he wouldn’t hurt her physically.

  In that, at least, she had been right to trust herself to him.

  The knowledge made warmth swirl in delicate currents throughout her body. The sensual heat softened her, changed her, made her breath into a sound wedged deep in her throat.

  Her small, husky cry shuddered through Chase. He lifted his mouth and looked down into her face, wanting to tell her how very much he regretted the cruel things he had said in order to make certain that Dane never again thought about having an affair with Nicole.

  The sight of her reddened lips made Chase forget everything but how good it had felt to join her mouth to his. With the same ravishing tenderness he had used on the flower, he caught her lower lip between his teeth.

  She felt each serration of his teeth as a separate caress, felt the tip of his tongue tasting and stroking her captive flesh, felt the tiny, sensual shocks as he tugged softly on her lip. She wanted to stop breathing, thinking, to do nothing but feel.