Hot-Blooded (2 page)

Kai groaned behind Mahina and lifted his head from his tipped-over position in the seat. He’d avoided the impact when the door caved in. Thank God.

A quiet rattle nabbed Keahilani’s attention. Dread anchored to her gut, and gravity dragged it down. No. No. No. Mahina would be okay. She had to be.

She wrestled the door and with great effort, wriggled her sore arm free and scrambled for the seatbelt. Mahina’s chest crested with another rattle.

Mahina … oh God, Mahina …
Her pulse increased to an impossible speed, flooding her ears with wild thumps, goading her into action. The belt sprung loose, and Keahilani’s hands flew to her mother, who was such a horrific mess, she didn’t even know where to start.

Flag someone down for help. You can’t fix this yourself.

“Makuahine?” The high pitch of Kai’s normally low voice startled her.

Keahilani yanked the door handle and shouldered it open. The grisly rattling spurring her on, she stumbled out of the car. Searing pain shot down her leg. She caught herself before face-planting on the pavement and limped into the road.

The asshole on the bike that almost hit them was long gone, but a car headed their way. She waved her good arm in an exaggerated arc. Eyes wide, the driver slammed into park and pulled out a cell phone. “I’ll get help.” Keahilani nodded her thanks. She awkwardly galloped back to her ‘ohana.

Kai tumbled out of the backseat, wincing, eyes watering, brows knitted together in a tight weave of physical and emotional agony. A furious bruise bloomed on his cheek. “She’s gonna die.” His voice cracked. “Mahina’s gonna die.”

Keahilani ignored him and rounded the car to the driver’s side. Avoiding the bloodied bag of flesh trapped in the seat, she studied the accordion of metal and gave it a gentle tug. Nothing happened. She grasped the panel with one hand, the handle with the other, and put all of her might into pulling it open. Kai appeared beside her, sniffling, shoulders heaving. Barely controlled panic rolled off him. With his help, she managed to budge the door open. Mahina jerked as the air hit her, and blood flooded out of her side in a rush.

Kai tugged his shirt over his head and stuffed it into the wound. He smoothed Mahina’s wet hair. “Makuahine. Makuahine, can you hear me?” The sudden calmness in his tenor frightened Keahilani more than the blood did. Her brother was right. Mahina—her mother, her sister, her best friend—was going to die.

A lump clogged Keahilani’s throat, but the approach of a wailing siren didn’t give her time to grieve. Kai knelt beside their mom until the paramedics barreled up with a gurney and took over.

The ensuing moments were yet another blur in the blizzard of unbelievable events. Someone asked if she was okay. They helped her to the side of the road and checked out her and Kai. Red and white lights whirred. Urgent voices chattered. A line of cars backed up the highway. Dazed, Keahilani followed when a paramedic guided her into the back of the ambulance with Kai and the bundle of splintered pieces that used to be their mother.

Doors slammed behind them, locking her into a wheeled mausoleum. She couldn’t do this. She couldn’t be trapped in there with her mother as she died. Panic tore through her, weakening and electrifying all at once.

The engine roared, the siren shrieked, and tires spun.

No, no, no. This couldn’t be happening.

“I’m dying,” Mahina whispered on a shallow current of air. The garbled words blended with what Keahilani feared was blood filling her mother’s punctured lung. They were almost a plea. Whether for relief, a merciful end, or escape, Keahilani wasn’t sure, but she felt as if she was the one who’d been crushed by the door.

Clutching the crisp white sheet on the gurney, Mahina tensed and arched her back. More blood seeped through the bandages the EMT slapped over her abdomen. God, so much blood. The horrible rattling inside her chest picked up. Thick creases of anguish and fear marred her unusually pale face, gobbling up her
ha
, her very breath.

“Be still, Mahina.” Trembling hand squeezing her mother’s, Keahilani shot her gaze out the ambulance window. Not too far from the hospital, but the way things were going, it might not matter.

Her mother could not die. Could
not
.

“Makuahine, you gotta stay awake. Let me know you’re still with me.” Keahilani kissed her mother’s clammy cheek. Forbidden droplets poised at the corners of her lids. A fresh rush of adrenaline surged and prevented those damned tears from falling. She had to be strong for Mahina. And for Kai.

She glanced to her twin in the seat beside her, head stuffed in his tanned, shaking hands. Damp brown waves of hair framed his thumb and fingers. The unbearable siren stifled what must have been chokes issuing through his dry lips.

“The doctors will help you.” Keahilani didn’t believe the words any more than her mother or Kai did. Even if her mom had a chance, the family had no insurance. Odds of getting quality treatment were nil. The haole doctors were interested in
paying
patients, not “moochers” off their precious system. If you couldn’t help them cover their golf expenses at the country club or the mortgage on their multimillion-dollar suites at the tourist-dominated condominiums, they’d provide only the most basic services because they had to. People like Mahina were nothing more than quickly forgotten chores marked off over-filled to-do lists.

Keahilani clutched her mother’s hand tighter and wiped her nose on a lifted shoulder. Another deep rumble of fluid inside Mahina’s chest fought for control of a space designed only for air. Mahina’s body rose from the gurney again. She emerged gasping, nails digging into Keahilani’s flesh. With a glut of super strength, her mother commandeered Keahilani’s T-shirt, balling the thin, faded cotton. Her bloodshot brown eyes widened, and frightening acceptance dawned over them. She swallowed a couple times in quick succession, her gulps like those of a fish left on a dock to die.

“My garden. You must protect my garden. You know where it is, huh? You remember?” Her words transformed from desperate pleas into unyielding demands.

Keahilani nodded. “I remember. But I won’t need to tend to your plants. You’ll be here to do it,” she lied.

Somehow Mahina’s eyes popped even wider, and her grip became painful. Heated droplets pooled in Keahilani’s palm.
Blood.

“No. Death hunted me for years, and now he’s found me. My secrets—
our
secrets—lie near Kula within the slopes of Haleakalā.” Her brows wrenched together. “Protect them.”

Why would Mahina care about her stupid plants at a time like this?

“Keahilani!” She tried to sit up, but the straps across her chest stopped her. “Promise me!”

“I promise.” Keahilani pressed her lips together to keep the emotion at bay, but an eruption was overdue. Boiling sorrow welled from deep within, tainted by the injustice of her mother’s situation. Waves of regret rolled off Kai beside her, clashing with the whiff of death surrounding Mahina. The combined stench overwhelmed her, suffocated her, lured the burning lava higher up her gullet. She tried bargaining with the impending explosion.
Mahina needs you to remain calm. Don’t upset her. If this is her end, honor her with your silence.

“How much longer?” she demanded of the driver through clenched teeth.

“Three minutes.”

Mahina didn’t have three minutes.

Ironic how fast life could transform into death. One moment, they’d been driving to Lāhainā Harbor to see Bane surf in the
groms
competition. The next, a freak car crash robbed her not only of her mother’s life, but her entire family’s. If Mahina hadn’t been rifling through her bag for that damned cigarette instead of paying attention to the road, they’d probably be sitting on the beach now, cheering for Bane as he dominated
ka po‘ina nalu
and showed the haole surfers how it was done.

Keahilani had always feared smoking would kill her mother.

She hated being right.

Mahina’s breaths decreased to mere whispers of garbled air. Her dark eyes lost focus. Her hold on Keahilani loosened.

“Stay with me, Makuahine. Come on. Wake up.” Keahilani tapped her mother’s cheek a couple times. Kai lifted his head, his face streaked with tears. He leaned closer.

“Makuahine.” His voice cracked.

Their mother latched onto Keahilani and Kai in turn. “‘Ohana is everything. The blood is everything …” The words were barely intelligible. The ghost of a smile passed over her parted lips. The gurgle kicked up again with her inhale.

Keahilani held her own breath and counted the seconds.

Five … six … seven …

The word “‘ohana” surfed on the wave of Mahina’s lengthy exhale.

The ambulance driver slammed the brakes and took a sharp right into the emergency entrance at the hospital, jostling the three bodies in back. Two reacted. One didn’t.

Kai shook their mother. Her vacant gaze remained fastened on Keahilani, her final word forever emblazoned in Keahilani’s mind.

‘Ohana.

As shadows converged and undiluted rage consumed her, she channeled the heavenly fire she was named after, pushed it out from her core, and unleashed all of her anger and frustration and sorrow into a vocal eruption. “NO!”

The ambulance windows rattled and sent the petrified EMTs scrambling to cover their ears.

When the last echo of the word died on her lips, the searing heat cooled like lava expelled from the darkest depths, forced to chill in the unyielding harshness of reality. Left with cold blood and too many memories, Keahilani threw herself over her mother’s lifeless body. “No …,” she cried.

Kai’s shaky hand pressed into the small of her back. “We’re alone.” His frame quaking, he nuzzled her shoulder.

‘Ohana was all they had left.

Chapter Two

Three days later, Keahilani, Kai, Manō, and Bane stood at the edge of Mahina’s hidden garden near Kula. It had been years since Keahilani last visited, but the land was just as she remembered. Except maybe for the dulled sunlight that seemed to have lost its edge, thanks to the clouds overshadowing the grim occasion.

And a hint of something ponderous like invisible shackles tying her to the mountain.

At this higher elevation, the temperature was cooler than Pāʻia, near the coast where the family lived. The young winds at the feet of Haleakalā darted this way and that, invisible godlings playing tag and making mischief with the sullen family members’ dark hair and clothing. With each shift of air, calming waves of fragrant, rich lavender mingled with the scent of sun-kissed earth.

But the delicate smells didn’t relax Keahilani as they had in her youth. The storm raging under her skin hadn’t broken since her mother’s passing. It had intensified. Unwilling to upset her brothers further, she kept her anger under tight rein during the day. At night while they tossed and turned, wrestling their dreams for sleep and mostly losing, she slipped away from their rent-free, Section 8 apartment to the dark beach nearby and … dwelled.

She listened to the music of the ocean’s swells and crashes, but those usual comforts did nothing to soothe her. She inhaled the gentle sea breezes, but they couldn’t calm the rage. She dug her toes into the sand but found no grounding, only searing, empty longing for the way things were.

Dissonance consumed her.

Their lives might have been pretty shitty before, but at least they had a mother who loved them unconditionally and who kept the ‘ohana together no matter what. Those days were over. Keahilani had only Pele’s fire and the bitter taste of ashes in her mouth.

“Are we gonna do this?” Kai’s soft voice awakened Keahilani from her dark musings.

She glanced at her twin and nodded. Kai had depended on Mahina as much as the rest of them, if not more so. He was a momma’s boy through and through. Now he’d been shoved into the role of man of the house, a job Mahina had tried to impress upon him for years, which he’d shunned at every turn.

Keahilani worried about him. Since the accident, her eternally optimistic brother had taken an uncharacteristic shine to silence and had withdrawn into himself. An outsider would have pegged his behavior as normal for a grieving son, but Keahilani sensed something deeper than bereavement. Some mechanism inside Kai had snapped, like a lock clicking into place, keeping others out—including her. Call it a “twin thing” or a sixth sense, but he had
changed
. Permanently. His slow slip into darkness frightened her a little. He seemed to be treading the same path as she was. Both journeys were sure to end at a door that opened into a new level of hell. Keahilani shivered.

Beside Kai, their middle brother Manō stood as still as a statue. Veins bulged from his crossed arms like two-lane highways navigating rounded hills of muscle and sculpted valleys of sinew. His black eyes were as dead as ever; his short-cropped hair defied the winds. His name meant “shark.” Mahina had chosen it well.

All of Mahina’s offspring were tall, thanks to their
haole
father’s marker on their genetic bingo cards, but Manō was a damn giant, wrought with metal piercings and slathered in tattoos—most notably, an intricate tribal shark swimming along his thick biceps, up the column of his neck, with parted teeth ending in a malevolent grin just below his ear. If she didn’t know him, she’d have been petrified of him. Sometimes she was anyway.