CHAPTER
32
The Other One Who Returned
The phone call came before dawn, waking Shae on the morning of the day she’d expected to go to the family house for dinner with her grandfather and brothers. When she picked up the phone, she was astounded to hear Hilo’s voice.
“Stay where you are,” he said. “I’m sending a car to pick you up.”
“Hilo?” For a second, she was not sure it was him.
“You have to come to the house, Shae.”
“Why? What’s wrong?” The grogginess of sleep fled at once. She’d never heard Hilo sound near panic. “Is it Grandda?” There was silence on the other end, so deep she might have heard her own voice echoing down a well. She squeezed the phone receiver. “Hilo? If you won’t talk to me, hand the phone to Lan.”
Something in the pause that followed filled her with the truth a split second before she heard the words. “Lan’s dead.”
Shae sat down. The phone cord pulled taut and Hilo’s words stretched thin as thread, barely reaching her from the other side of a vast gulf.
“They got him last night at the Docks. Workers found his body in the water. Drowned.”
She was staggered by the depth of her grief, the suddenness with which it arrived. “Send the car. I’ll be ready,” she said. She hung up and waited.
When Hilo’s large white Duchesse Priza pulled up in front of the apartment
building, she walked out without locking the door or turning out the light.
She got into the back seat.
Maik Kehn turned over his shoulder, sliding her a look of compassion so sincere she would have wept, if it had not been too early for that yet.
“I need to stop by the bank,” she said.
Maik said, “I’m supposed to take you straight home.”
“It’s important. Hilo will understand.”
Maik nodded and pulled the car away from the curb. She gave him directions to the bank, and when they arrived, he parked and got out of the car with her. He was loaded with weaponry—moon blade, talon knife, two handguns. “You can’t come into the bank like that,” she said.
“I’ll wait outside the door.”
The bank had just opened. Shae went in and requested access to her safe deposit box. The manager said, “Of course, Miss Kaul, come with me,” and showed Shae into the back room with its wall of small steel doors, then left her alone.
Shae had not unlocked her safe in two and a half years. When she turned the key and opened the box, irrational fear gripped her for an instant. What if it was not there? But it was—her jade. All of it. Even before she reached inside, she felt the tug of its power setting off a tide in her blood like the moon’s gravity pulling on the ocean. She counted every stone as she put on the earrings, the bracelets up both her forearms, anklets, choker. Then she closed the safe deposit box door and sat down on the ground, her back to the wall, and hugged her knees to her chest.
It had been so long since she’d worn jade that she felt the rush coming like the wave of a tsunami looming before it engulfs the beach. She did not tense or cringe from it. She raced alongside and let it sweep her up in its inexorable path. She rode it high, let it carry her simultaneously above her own body and more deeply inside it. She was inside the storm; she was the storm. Her mind spun in elated disorientation—the kind that comes from returning to an old house and opening the drawers, touching the walls, sitting in the furniture—remembering what was once forgotten. Guilt and doubt rose in opposition, then fell, carried swiftly away by the flood.
Shae got up. She walked out of the bank and back to the Duchesse with Maik Kehn. She got into the passenger side front seat, and Maik asked, “You want me to take you to the house now, Kaul-jen?” Shae nodded.
They did not speak during the drive. Shae’s mind was being torn asunder so that her face and body did not know how to react. Someone observing her, such as Maik Kehn, who occasionally slid a glance in her direction, would think that she was frozen, that she felt nothing at all.
Lan being dead opened a chasm of desolation in Shae so vast she could not see the other side. Her eldest brother was the rock in the family, the one she felt she could always count on no matter what. He had never been unkind or judging toward her, had always given his attention to her and respected her even though she was much younger than he was. She wanted to be alone with the pain of her loss but also could not help reveling in the rediscovery of her jade senses. The sense of euphoria in her own reclaimed power was inescapable—and it suffused her with terrible remorse. And all the while, another part of her was thinking clearly, if feverishly, toward vengeance.
When they arrived at the house, she walked past the sentries and found Hilo standing in the kitchen, his hands leaning heavily on the table so his shoulder blades jutted up and his head seemed to hang between them. Like Maik, he dripped with weaponry. He appeared in control of himself, almost thoughtful, but his jade aura heaved and roiled with the fiery consistency of explosive lava. Fists flanked him left and right, so the family kitchen was crowded with ferocious, waiting men, the collective aura clamor of their jade- adorned bodies assaulting Shae’s reawakened sense of Perception so much so that she paused to brace herself before entering.
Elsewhere in the house, she heard Kyanla quietly sobbing.
Hilo raised his head to look at her but didn’t move.
“I’m going with you,” she said. “I know where we should go.”
Hilo straightened and came around the table toward her. She tried to see into his eyes, but they were as black and distant as she felt. The Horn placed his hands on her shoulders, and pulled her close, and laid his cheek against hers. “Heaven help me, Shae,” he whispered into her ear. “I’m going to kill them all.”