Drowning in Fire by Hanna Martine Read Free Book Online Page B

and pockets of a soldier now smelled like any other article of clothing in the Big Island’s Chimeran valley, but if she closed her eyes, she could inhale and recall his scent.
    There was no point in keeping it any longer. She knew very well what she’d done. The consequences of her actions had transformed her world. She didn’t need to be constantly reminded of what she’d lost. Or whom.
    With a fling of her arm, she tossed Griffin’s jacket over the cliff on which she stood. The warm Hawaiian wind caught it, flinging it about, but Keko easily hit it with her fire, the spout of flame from between her lips striking true. The jacket caught, dancing on the air as it burned, as it fell down, down, down, to flutter as ash into the ocean waves far below.
    Take it back , she thought at the water, at Griffin. It’s yours .
    “There you are.”
    The male voice came from behind, drifting up from lower down the slope that dropped off into the Chimeran’s hidden valley. Shading her eyes with her hand, Keko peered over the ragged face of rock she’d climbed to get up to this spot. Makaha stood where the winding trail ended abruptly, his face turned upward, the hair that was now too long brushing his shoulders.
    “Do you need me?” she called down.
    He grinned, and the sight of it hurt her heart. Three years after Griffin had taken half of Makaha’s right arm in a storm of ice, and she was finally able to speak with her oldest friend on equal ground again, the disparity of their stations and status within the clan erased.
    Because she’d fallen just as far down as he.
    “Hold on,” she told him. “I’ll come to you.”
    He couldn’t climb, after all.
    The rock tore into her fingertips and toes as she scrabbled her way down, faster than what was probably careful. On the last few feet, she shoved away from the rock and leaped, dropping into the dirt right in front of the man who used to be one of the most ferocious warriors of the race. Makaha . Fierce. He’d been named well, but Griffin had snatched away that meaning, turning it into a joke.
    “What’s going on?” she asked Makaha, hoping against hope that it might be something of worth. Something she could use to get her status and dignity back.
    His grin saddened but didn’t die, because he knew very well how she felt. “Nothing. The final drums for dinner came and went and I knew you hadn’t eaten all day. If you hurry there might be something left.”
    Scrambling for scraps after the ali’i and the warriors and the rest of the Chimeran people had eaten their fill. This was her life now.
    She pressed a hand to her hollow stomach. She barely ate these days, but she didn’t really miss it. She didn’t need that massive amount of energy anymore. Not for beating clothes against rocks in the stream. Not for dragging garbage to the trucks to be hauled up and out of the valley.
    “Yeah,” she said, her voice hollow. “Okay.”
    Makaha didn’t move. The stump of an arm gestured to her spot up on the cliff. “Was that what I think it was? That fire?”
    She thought of the jacket’s ash, floating on, and then mixing into the waves, and said nothing.
    Makaha stared hard at her. He’d caught her once, a little more than a month ago, with the jacket draped around her shoulders, her nose buried in the collar. But he’d left her to her own grief, her own regrets, her own anger. Makaha’s thoughts about Griffin were his own, and rightfully so. They’d never spoken directly of the Ofarian who’d hurt them both in different ways.
    With a terse nod down the slope Makaha said, “Come on. Let’s go be pitiful together.”
    He could joke because he’d accepted his status. Moved on. To Keko, the very idea seemed foreign.
    Yet she followed him down into the valley, turning her back on the myriad blues and greens of the ocean that surrounded her island home. Water, water, everywhere. She would never be able to escape him.
    The ground flattened out, a ring of dense