The Shining Stallion (3 page)

She looked back over her shoulder. Instead of saying good-bye, she said, “I really love your library.”

She'd almost made it through the door when Jonah said, “Don't forget. Tomorrow you'll take over Francie.”

“The goat,” she said.

“Fourth of July dinner,” he corrected her.

She sighed, crawled the rest of the way through, then pulled herself to her feet.

Jonah had nearly closed the door when he added, “About the books, help yourself. Anytime.”

D
arby opened her eyes and blinked into the darkness.

She heard hooves, lots of them, like an entire herd of horses, moving closer and closer.

She sat up in bed, then sagged against the window frame. She managed to raise her eyelids long enough to look out her window and see darkness. Though the restless hooves moved on, sounding as if they'd passed by the house, there were no horses out there.

Darby flopped back down in her bed and pulled the covers up to her chin. It must have been something like a branch rubbing against another branch, she thought groggily. Invisible night horses didn't exist.

Darby had just found a comfortable position and
drifted back to sleep when it happened again.

She sat up in bed. What had wakened her? This time it wasn't a ghost stampede.

At home, she would have recognized most sounds before she was fully awake. A car alarm might have roused her, or a late bus shifting gears, maybe a lovelorn cat. But she wasn't at home and Sun House sat silent except for the squeak of her bedsprings and the soft rustle of sheets over her pajamas.

Darby leaned forward to listen.

When the sound came again, she recognized the click-thump of a back hoof grazing a carefully placed front hoof. Then—
thud!
—weight bumped against the house wall.

Darby scrambled to her knees and spun around to stare outside. She expected to look down on a rumpled mane, or wide nostrils tilted up at her, but night blacked out everything. Her forehead pressed against the glass, she saw only a moon, thin as the edge of a dime.

But she'd heard a horse. And this time it was no dream.

‘Iolani Ranch saddle horses weren't locked up at night, but most stayed in the lower pastures, grazing.

Had Hoku escaped again? No, everyone on the ranch was as determined as she was to keep the filly safe.

Navigator, then? The big brown gelding had kept her company while she cleaned out the tack room
yesterday before dinner. Darby guessed it was possible he'd returned and somehow recognized her window.

Wide awake now, she eased her legs from the bed.

Since Jonah slept right down the hall and Darby didn't want to wake him, she rocked from bare heels to bare toes as she headed for the door. She'd read that such a gait was actually quieter than tiptoeing.

Slipping out into a city night would have been risky, but on Wild Horse Island, she had nothing to fear.

A rug slid underneath her on the polished wooden floor and Darby steadied herself against the wall, just as hooves thudded again.

There was a light switch within inches of her hand, but she didn't click on the front porch light. If she were a horse exploring the night, a sudden blast of brightness would scare her away.

But she had to open the door.

She turned the doorknob slowly, hoping the
snick
of metal drawing out of the doorframe wouldn't spook the horse. Then Darby slipped through the barely opened front door.

A dark shape froze as her eyes found it.

The creature couldn't know she was still waiting for her vision to adapt to the night. Darby scanned the shade under the candlenut tree. That's where there'd been motion, then stillness.

A breeze stirred the leaves.

There!
Starlight showed her a swath of gleaming blackness. The sheen was too far above the ground to be a panther slipping through the shadows, and too low for an ebony owl spying out dinner from a branch.

Standing stiff so that no sound—not even her arms brushing her sides—came from her, Darby listened.

If she could tell that something was hiding nearby, why weren't the dogs barking?

Canines could see and hear better than people could, and their sense of smell was about a hundred times more powerful than humans'.

Stop holding your breath,
Darby told herself, then exhaled in tiny increments.

Maybe she hadn't heard hoofbeats, but heartbeats.

Maybe nothing was wrong, except that her mind had knit a disturbing dream out of leftover worry.

That was probably it, Darby told herself. Her punishment had turned out to be not so bad and her mind was still dealing with its relief.

Maybe.

Determined to find out if her imagination was running amok, Darby took a large step off the porch.

The horse exploded from cover.

Darby heard hide scrape tree bark. She smelled soil and leaves dug up by hooves. A whirlwind snatched Darby's hair and waved the ends against her cheeks.

She heard it. She felt it. She even smelled hot horseflesh. But she didn't see a thing.

The dogs didn't bark. Hoku didn't neigh. And now she was alone.

The kicked-up dust made her sneeze. As she rubbed at her nose, Darby tried to be her usual analytical self.

“Okay, let's look at the possible explanations,” she said out loud. Her voice was higher pitched than usual.

She sat down on the front step and laced her fingers together. Looking at them, she told herself to think, but her pulse was still pounding as her mind replayed what had happened.

Darby heard boots as the door opened wider behind her.

Dressed in khaki pants and a pressed shirt, Jonah stood in the doorway.

“It's five o'clock, time to be up,” he said.

Darby nodded. Her teeth almost chattered in her eagerness to tell her grandfather what had happened, but she wasn't sure how to explain.

Staring over the ranch yard, Jonah asked, “They bothering you?”

“Who?” Darby knew her grandfather's teasing tone. This wasn't it.

“The
menehune
.”

“No, it wasn't little people,” she said. Sometimes he sounded serious about weird stuff, and he'd told
her before about the
menehune
, who could help or hurt you. “I heard a horse.”

“Yeah?” Jonah stepped off the porch. Hands on hips, he surveyed his surroundings. “When?”

“Just a few minutes ago.” Darby shifted uneasily on the step. If he asked her to describe the horse, she was sunk.

“Which horse?” Jonah asked.

“I didn't exactly see it. More like, I woke up when I heard hooves moving around. And when I came out here, the horse wasn't gone, but it wasn't really here, either.” Darby shook her head. “What I mean is, I could barely make it out under the tree. It held so still”—Darby's hands moved to make a frame in the air—“it just blended in. Then, when I stepped off the porch, it bolted. And I couldn't see what color it was because there was no real light.”

Out of breath, Darby waited for Jonah to respond to what might have been the longest string of words she'd put together since she'd arrived.

“Could have been a dream. A night
mare
, you know?” he joked.

“I thought of that,” Darby said. “But it smelled like a horse.”

“Maybe a spirit horse, then. There's the Shining Stallion of Mauna Kea—a mountain over on the Big Island. He's been stealing mares and breaking down fences for a couple hundred years.”

“I don't think—”

“He's sighted at daybreak and nightfall.” Jonah gestured at the uncertain light around them.

“Here?” Darby cut in.

“Moku Lio Hihiu?” Jonah gave a skeptical shrug as he pronounced the Hawaiian words for
Wild Horse Island
. “He's been spotted on Sky Mountain and near Two Sisters. There's even a waterfall named for him down in Crimson Vale. But me? I always thought those were stories to scare off people from places that the paniolo don't want to share.”

“How would that work? People would be drawn to a story like that, not kept away, wouldn't they? I mean, ‘the shining stallion' sounds pretty cool.”

“He's a menace, this horse. A killer.”

A throwback to a vicious ancestor?
Darby wondered, thinking of what she'd heard about her own filly's great-grandsire.

“Oh.” Darby considered Jonah's explanation for a few seconds. “But is he really real?”

“People believe what they want to believe, but
I've
never seen him,” Jonah said.

Me either,
Darby thought, but that didn't mean there hadn't been something breathing under that tree.

She studied the tree for a minute. Its leaves looked like maple leaves, though Auntie Cathy had told her it was called a candlenut tree. Supposedly its pods could be set aflame and they'd burn like candles. Too bad they hadn't spontaneously combusted and
given her light to see the horse.

Jonah must have noticed her lopsided smile.

“I'm not pranking you, Granddaughter, just telling you what people say.”

Darby sighed. “He's probably just a tall tale, then, right?” Darby gave Jonah her most scholarly look. “Or a ghost-stories-around-the-campfire legend?”

“Something like that,” Jonah said. “Because I've only seen two horses with murder in their eyes.”

Darby didn't like the sound of that. She loved horses with all her heart, but they were big muscular animals with flashing teeth and heavy hooves.

“But if it was a real horse—maybe a wild horse,” she said, thinking of the black horse she'd seen in Crimson Vale, “he'd only come onto a ranch with people around if there was something wrong. Right? Or if”—Darby's breath caught, thinking of Hoku—“he was here to steal mares?”

“Can you see Luna allowing that?” Jonah asked, but for an instant, he looked troubled. Before Darby could ask why, Jonah asked, “Do you know how to make coffee?”

She wondered if she'd ever get used to the way her grandfather's mind hopped around like a Ping-Pong ball.

“Kind of,” Darby said, even though her mother always set up a coffeemaker and all Darby had to do was flip a switch. She was tired of admitting she didn't know anything. Besides, she'd figure it out.

Dumber people had learned to make coffee, right?

“You do that while I go let the dogs out,” Jonah instructed. “If there's a strange horse around, they'll find 'im. Then we need to talk.”

 

Darby changed into jeans, boots, and a long-sleeved yellow shirt. She buttoned the cuffs. If it got too hot, she could roll them up above her good-luck charm. But only if she was alone.

She kept calling it her good-luck charm, but she didn't know what it was or how she'd ended up with it yesterday.

Auntie Cathy had told Darby that something in her room smelled “musty.”

Feeling a little insulted, Darby had gone to her room and, hands on her hips, taken a deep breath. Instantly her nose had wrinkled. She'd smelled what Auntie Cathy had been talking about and
musty
was too nice a word for it.

Darby had sniffed. She'd patrolled the perimeter of her room. Finally, she'd looked under her bed.

Disgusted, she'd retrieved the mildewed jeans she'd accidentally kicked under there after she'd come in exhausted from battling riptides, then hiking home with Hoku.

Darby had picked the jeans up with the thumb and forefinger of one hand and covered her nose and mouth with the other. Then something had fallen on her bedroom floor.

This.

The toothpick-thin braids were bound at each end with stringy stuff she recognized as coconut fiber. There wasn't much left of its centerpiece shell. And that was probably her fault.

Darby thought she'd tripped on the necklace, mistaking it for a vine, as she'd made her way down to Hoku in the cove below the pali.

Darby touched the pale nub of shell. Sharp and cracked off at an angle, it must have snagged on her jeans and stayed with her as she rescued Hoku.

She smoothed the pad of her thumb over the braids. They were smooth and black.

How cool would it be if the hair had come from the shining stallion Jonah had told her about? And what if it wasn't a good-luck charm, but a talisman or amulet? She could never remember which one of those was worn as protection. But if this one had horsehair from the land and shell from the sea, maybe…

Stop,
Darby ordered herself. It was an interesting souvenir of how brave she and Hoku could be together. Daydreaming about anything more could wait.

Back in the kitchen, Darby checked the cabinets and shelves for a coffeemaker and couldn't find one, but she did find coffee beans. Shaking the airtight jar, she saw that they were hard, oily beans. Dark brown and the size of her little fingernail, they were totally different from the ground-up,
powdery stuff her mother used.

They smelled great, she thought, opening the jar, but she wished they'd come with instructions. Why hadn't she watched as Auntie Cathy and Jonah made coffee? Her only idea for making coffee was soaking the beans in water, like tea in a bag. But that seemed wrong.

Well, all coffee required hot water, so she put water in a pan, set it on a stove burner, and switched it on to boil.

While she tried to figure out what came next, she munched on a handful of the granola Auntie Cathy ate every morning. It could be sweeter, but the dried fruit bits weren't bad.

A glance at the kitchen clock gave her an idea. She could call her mother for help.

“Honey, I'm so glad to hear from you!” her mother rejoiced. “You are definitely coming with me when I come back to Tahiti! It is amazing. I'd forgotten—being bred in the tropics…”

While her mother rattled on excitedly about Tahiti, Darby poured granola into a bowl and began picking out pieces of dried fruit.

“…just feeling at home, here. Your grandfather notwithstanding, I bet you're feeling the same.”

Feeling at home?
Darby drew a deep breath. She hoped her mother wouldn't zero in on her hesitation. Sometimes it was like she could read minds.

“I love the ranch,” Darby insisted, “and Hoku is
the best thing that's ever happened to me.”

“I'm so happy things are working out,” her mother said in a marveling tone.