Henchgirl (Dakota Kekoa Book 1) (37 page)

That was the only reason.

“I see,” my grandfather said, “Next time make sure to wear your dampener when you’re with her.”

“Okay, I will,” I said. Then we hung up.

“Can I get you anything?” Clara said.

“Some water?” I said. My face fell into my palms.

Wyvern sat next to me and Mele across the table.

“You must think I’m constantly going into fits,” I said to Wyvern.

“I knew about your panic attacks,” Wyvern said, “It was in your medical records.”

I looked at him, “There is something wrong with you.”

“Your grandfather released them to my steward, so I can protect you,” Wyvern said. “It happens every time with a contract—”

I raised my hand to stop him, “It’s not like you don’t know everything else.” If I was mad at him for that right now, I would have to get mad at him for all his invasions of my privacy and I just did not have the energy.

After Clara gave me the glass of water, I sipped it slowly, and then raised my eyes to see Mele very intently studying my charm bracelet.

“Who just called you?” Mele asked.

“My grandfather,” I said.

“How did he know you were having a panic attack?” she asked.

“I called him,” Clara said before I could give a decent lie. Obviously she did not call him; she was with us the whole time.

“She called him before I went outside, I was already starting a panic attack,” I said.

“So it wasn’t Auli who caused your panic attack?”

Crud
.

“No, I just said that,” I said. “It makes him feel better if there was a cause that could be avoided.”

“Like Auli’s waterfall soul?” she said.

This was bad.

“I say weird things sometimes when I have panic attacks,” I said. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

“Auli seemed to think it did,” Mele said, she finally raised her eyes from my dampener. “You know you can trust me, right?”

“I do trust you,” I said, “I trust you with
my
life.”

“Okay,” she said, rubbing her face which looked drawn and pale. “I meant to ask you yesterday…what did that witch say about making me a charm that would let me cross water wards?”

I could not believe I forgot.

Here I was, wearing my deadly dampener.

I dropped my hands under the table and Mele tracked my arm’s movement with her gaze. Quickly, I unfastened my dampener and dropped it onto my jeans, hoping that the material separating the bracelet from my skin would be enough if the charm really was deadly.

When I focused back on Mele, I saw that she wasn’t asking lightly, she looked like she was going to cry. Before this moment, I could not have ever have imagined Mele crying yet there were tears waiting on her eyelashes for me to say no.

I could not tell her. I could not say to her, ‘sorry, the one hope I dangled in front of you very likely would kill you if you tried it.’

“She said it will probably take a couple days to make,” I said.

Mele sighed, and then gave a small relieved smile. “But she’s making it?”

“Yeah,” I lied.

I’m going straight to the lowest level of the human hells.

“Good, it would be nice to wear clothes that fit me.” Mele laughed but she did not sound happy. “I’m just going to take a nap in your guest room, is that cool?”

It was barely eight in the morning, but she did look exhausted. Whatever infection she caught from Wyvern was taking it’s time to surface. She was probably knocked out from the changes in her body.

“It’s yours,” I said. To Clara and Wyvern I said, “Please excuse me, I seriously need to shower.” I stood up.

“I’m going to have to go with you,” Wyvern said.

I spun, staring wide-eyed at him.

He smiled and said, “Kidding.”

Chapter Twenty Two

An hour later I was clean and I had reentered my room feeling like I just had had my first big break in this search for Honua.

Wyvern sat at my desk watching the surveillance footage. Not on the bed. That was a good thing. My gaze caught on the unmade bed without my mind’s consent.

Forcing my gaze away, I sat in the chair Lorelei must have brought in from her room last night.

“It was Auli,” I said.

Wyvern just looked at me, gave me an exasperated look and shook his head.

So not the reaction that I had expected.

“What’s that look for?” I said, defensively. “Her soul is exactly like her father’s.”

“You want it to be her because you don’t like her,” Wyvern said.

“It fits,” I said angrily.

“No it doesn’t. You think it was Senator Hale’s daughter for the sole reason that she has a soul like her father’s. That doesn’t make sense to me.”

“Her father is a killer,” I said. “She has the same soul as a killer.”

Why wasn’t he following this?

“If someone is a killer, does it show on their soul?” he asked.

“I don’t… maybe…” I said, “But she was also one of three people who were there when Honua disappeared,” I said.

“Which you did not think was incriminating evidence against Keanu Hale,” he said.

“But she’s obviously very protective of her family. Were you not there when she just showed up and told Mele, her best friend since birth, to stay away from her family? I mean, she’s always on a mission to keep me far away, but she loved Mele. The moment Mele gets tossed from the water ward Auli tells Mele to get lost. Doesn’t that show you she’s a little nutty? What if she found out that Honua was sneaking around her house…?”

“And what about all the other girls that are disappearing?” he asked.

“She could be helping her father take them,” I said.

“Maybe I should have hired a real detective,” he said.

Ouch.

“Fine,” I said, turning to my computer. “You’re the boss, boss. If you don’t agree with someone it must mean their ideas are idiotic—”

He reached over and scooped me onto his lap. When I struggled he bear-hugged me so tight I could not move.

“Ugh,” I said, “I am so filing for sexual harassment.”

He chuckled into my hair. “You’ll need your arms for that.”

I stopped struggling realizing that Wyvern was about fifty times stronger than I was and trying to escape was wasting my energy.

“I’m not saying that she did not do it,” Wyvern said. “I’m saying that you think it’s her because you don’t like her and you don’t think it’s her brother because you like him.”

“I have been studying them for years,” I said. “And, I can see souls. Don’t you think I have some right to judge?”

“Perhaps you do. Just don’t decide that it’s her yet. My promise not to attack Keanu was for three days, you still have the rest of today and tomorrow.” He paused. “Except, we’re going to be busy tonight.”

“You’re not serious,” I said. “Honua has been missing for three days and we actually have some suspects...”

“We don’t have a choice,” Wyvern said. “My father is out of the volcano and he wants to meet you.”

Oh this was just getting better and better. “I think I’m coming down with something, possibly the plague,” I coughed. “It’s deadly and contagious.”

“Not to me,” he said and then he kissed my neck.

“But to everyone else, so, you and I will just have to stay here.” Wow, I just said that out loud.

“That will just have to be our plan for tomorrow night,” he whispered, kissing my neck again.

My eyes closed. And I tried and failed to force my mind away from thoughts about what kissing him on the bed had felt like, and how maybe we could try it again, like, say, right now.

Perhaps he had the same thought and thought better of it, because he set me back in the desk chair.

He said, “The security team arrived earlier this morning—”

I closed my eyes, forcing myself back into the job at hand. “Good, I really need to see if Honua’s friends knew what she was planning and who her contact was in the Hale estate.”

Going to school might turn up nothing but I was stumped and wasn’t quite ready to storm up to Senator Hale and Auli and demand they produce the girls they stole.

I had glanced through the screen shots that Lorelei had taken before my shower and unfortunately I had not recognized any of them. I had kept a small hope that they were members of the Hells’ Hogs; while I did not know every member of the club, I seriously doubted that the clean-cut office-assistant looking movers were secret club members.

“Do you think I’ll be able to make it by lunch time?” I asked.

“Make it where?” Wyvern said.

“To school,” I said.

“You’re not going to school,” Wyvern said.

“But you said that when the security team-”

“That was before we went to the water witch,” he said.

Oh, yeah, the water charms killing people thing. I kept forgetting. But, really…I said, “Wyvern, the witch said that it wasn’t the charm—”

“We’re not discussing it,” he said. “I sent the human in your security team to your school today.”

“Somehow you think I gave you permission to control my whole life but I did not.”

“Baby, you did,” he said, not ashamed at all, “At least where your safety is concerned.”

“No, this is because I let you kiss me,” I said.

Big. Fat. Mistake.

“No it’s not.”

“Yeah, it is. I let you kiss me and now you’re not respecting my opinions or my ability to do this job.”

“If your grandfather saw this much risk in an assignment, would he send you on it?” he asked.

“There are always risks—”

“This much foreseeable risk of dying?” he said.

“No,” I admitted sullenly.

“I’m glad to hear it,” he said.

“What can I really do for you if I can’t get into all the places you hired me to get into?” I asked.

“You’ll figure something out,” he said.

“Ugh! Fine! But you should call your human and tell him—”

“Her,” he corrected.

“—tell her that she should break into Honua’s locker. All of the students' digital activity is threatened to be monitored so she probably should not even bother with Honua’s digital records. The school issued book-bags for some of our homework, if she can find Honua’s that should be checked as they’re really only used for passing notes. When I asked your mother if she had Honua’s book-bag, she said it wasn’t brought home that day. It’s a chance.”

If only Honua had forgotten her phone that night, all her communication was by text; unfortunately it must have disappeared with her.

He patted me on the back and said, “Good work.”

It only made me more annoyed. With nothing else to do I started watching the office security footage from where Lorelei had left off the night before. Senator Hale went through documents in his office for a minute, then left. After that, nothing.

The job was long and tedious and I started to feel guilty that I had Lorelei do it for seven hours. After two hours and only getting through four hours of no one in the office I stood up to stretch.

Wyvern was reading off a tablet in the other chair.

“We should check the news,” I said. “I know we’ve been busy but if all these girls are missing and dead then shouldn’t it be a big deal on the news? I mean, we haven’t been around a lot of people who care about humans but my mom and Clara watch the news and Lorelei and Stacy go to public school…don’t you think that someone would have mentioned it?”

He typed something into his tablet, and then scrolled through it. Then typed some more. “You’re right,” he said, “There’s no news about disappearances since there were a series of girls that disappeared from that club Midnight.” He looked up at me. “That’s why you were there?”

“Yeah, but that’s unrelated and already dealt with. Deaths of infected people go unreported and not covered by the news all the time however these infected all had water charms which meant they were probably living as humans. Human deaths get reported around here. And a human dying while being exposed as really a vampire, let alone three humans being exposed as vampires, would be huge news.”

“Do you think whoever is killing them is controlling the press?” he asked.

“It could be or they’re not getting reported,” I said. “I mean on the other side of the island the news is what you neighbor tells you, there’s no controlling that. But on this side, if it’s not covered by ANN or MLB it’s just not known. Also, on the other side people don’t ever report to the police, it’s just not done. They report to the club and the club doesn’t talk to the press. But on this side if there were girls going missing, people would be at the police station, calling the news and showing up at city hall. So either all the girls are getting taken from the other-side or the parents on this side are somehow being convinced not to talk. If we could only find out the identities of the other missing girls, we could talk to their parents.”

I sat back down. I could always try to get the information from Scruff, I would bet that he knew all the missing girls’ parents’ names; I had no doubt that the club was investigating the disappearances themselves. However, it would be ‘club business’ and I knew anything that was club business would be a waste of my time to ask them about. I could easily find out just by asking around on the other side of the island but from the way Wyvern was acting I knew that he would never let me go without him; and Scruff had said the people over there were ready and waiting to shoot Wyvern.

“Bobby,” I said, remembering. “Bobby had teleported over during my panic attack on Sunday, he was wearing latex gloves and said he did not want to get corpse on me. He investigates for my grandfather, that’s a big part of what he does. What if my Grandfather is investigating the same thing we are?”

“That’s a big jump,” Wyvern said.

“Not on a small island,” I said, feeling more confident. “You said there were no murders or disappearances since the Midnight disappearances and the last one of those was a week before last Thursday. What’s the likelihood that there are more than four murders being covered up in the past couple of days?”

“Unlikely, the population on Mabi is just under two hundred thousand,” he said.

“Wow, you knew that off the top of your head?”