Lokahi Read online

  He wasn’t upset with me.

  He was afraid.

  Chapter 2

  “All right,” I said firmly, sitting down on a fallen tree trunk where the sand met the scrubby woods several minutes’ walk north of Turtle Bay. I patted the empty spot on the log beside me. There was a shadow surfer stretched out on the beach by my feet, who I ignored. “I’m not driving now, so you don’t have to worry about me flipping out and killing us both. And there’s nobody else around to overhear. So, talk to me, Zane.”

  He sat down, the look on his face somewhat embarrassed. He wrapped an arm around my shoulders and gave me a friendly squeeze, which felt heavenly. “It’s not that big a deal, really. I’m sorry if I scared you before. I guess I just zoned out for a minute.”

  “Not buying,” I replied.

  He sighed and dropped his arm. The temperature around me fell ten degrees, and I quickly reached back, grabbed his hand, and put it around my shoulders again.

  He looked at me oddly.

  “I keep telling you,” I explained. “Every time you do that, it’s like giving a toddler an ice cream cone, letting him take one bite, and then stealing it away again.”

  He chuckled and pulled me closer. “Sorry.”

  “Apology accepted,” I said with a smile, snuggling in. “Now, I mean it. Talk.”

  He looked out over the ocean. It was a classic late summer day. The sky was mostly blue, but with patches of low clouds scudding by in quick succession. The air was warm and the breeze mild. The surf was nearly flat, but little lines of waves still rolled onto the beach, transforming into spray as they crashed into the twisted coils of black lava rock that lined this stretch of the North Shore. The frothy seawater swirled lazily in the shallow tide pools, some escaping back into the ocean, the rest sinking deeper into the coarse brown sand.

  “I don’t know what to say,” Zane remarked quietly.

  “Tell me what you’re afraid of,” I pleaded.

  He procrastinated for another long, agonizing moment. “I’m not sure,” he said finally. “But something weird is definitely happening to me. Something I don’t understand. It has to do with my imagination and… seeing things in my head.”

  “What kind of things?” I asked, keeping my tone matter-of-fact. I knew from personal experience that the absolute last thing he needed was to worry about whether I thought he was losing his mind or making it all up — or both. I didn’t doubt him in the slightest, and rationally he should know that. But as cool as Zane had always been with my abilities, he still couldn’t seem to wrap his head around his own.

  “I’d guess you’d call them hallucinations,” he said miserably.

  “I would not,” I disagreed. “Hallucinations are when your brain plays tricks on you. Chemicals misfire and show you things that aren’t really there. That’s not what’s happening when I see the shadows. It’s not what happens when you see ghosts, either. What makes you think that’s what’s happening to you now?”

  He dropped his arm again and stood up.

  Drat.

  “It’s not that I see things out there… in the scene in front of me,” he tried to explain. “What’s been happening is that, sometimes, when I close my eyes and I’m kind of… you know, drifting? Then another scene will pop into my head. Like a dream, but clearer. Just as clear as this beach looks to me right now. I can look at it and look into it and see everything in it. I can even sort of move around it, just by thinking about where else I’d like to go. But it’s not like I’m actually walking around, touching things. All I can do is see it, like a vision. But I can’t control anything about it, and then I wake back up or somebody gets my attention and it’s just gone.”

  A gust of wind tossed Zane’s blond curls about his face. I hated to see him so troubled. There was very little that got him down, and I suspected that as strange as what he’d admitted was, it probably wouldn’t sound that scary to most people. But most people didn’t understand. They didn’t know what it was like to lose control of your own brain, to have no idea what was happening in your head, to honestly worry about whether the wellspring of your private mind, the part of you that nobody else could see, was supernatural… or pathological.

  I couldn’t stand it. I stood up, wrapped my arms around his waist, and buried my head in his shoulder. Bliss.

  “There’s nothing wrong with you, Zane,” I assured him. “At least, nothing that isn’t also wrong with me. You know we’re weird. Both of us. Especially both of us together.”

  I raised my head and gave him a knowing smile.

  He returned it.

  I’d never had a boyfriend before, so as far as how his touch made me feel, I had nothing to compare it to. He’d never had a steady girlfriend either, but when he insisted that the effect I had on him was above and beyond normal teenage chemistry, I believed him. The nature of our effects on each other differed a little, although exactly how, we had trouble describing. But the chemistry thing and the bizarre abilities thing were definitely intertwined. My abilities had grown stronger after I met him. Both our abilities grew stronger the closer we became.

  “You think it’s some… ‘gift?’” he asked cautiously.

  I nodded.

  “But what?” he questioned. “What’s the point? It’s not like the shadows or the ghosts. The things I’ve seen are just… well, boring. Nothing even happens!”

  “That doesn’t mean anything.”

  “But how can you be sure?” he countered, frustrated. “It’s so different from the other things. How do I know it’s not some funky side effect of the concussion? Or the blood loss? Or some other physical problem? There’s no other way to make sense of it!”

  My mind flashed on a memory of the glazed look he’d had in his eyes back at the pool, and my pulse began to pound again. Could he be right? Could it be a seizure? He had just swum laps. He was tired. But you don’t snap out of a seizure just because someone yells at you. And you don’t have lucid visions of boring, ordinary real places, either.

  No. Zane was perfectly healthy. He was fine.

  He was developing some new ability — I was sure of it. We hadn’t actually exchanged the big “L” words yet, but he certainly acted like he cared, and if what he felt for me was anywhere near as strong as what I felt for him…

  That magic word. If.

  I preferred to think positively.

  “The shadows made no sense to me for most of my life,” I reminded. “Whatever this new ability of yours is, it might not be fully developed yet.”

  He pulled away enough to face me squarely. “You’re really not worried that it’s not an ability?”

  I smiled at him. “Not for a second. So cut out the dramatics and deal, okay?” I took his hand, swung us both around to where we were facing up the beach again, and started walking. “Let’s analyze what we’ve got so far. What ‘scenes’ have you seen, exactly?”

  His eyes twinkled at me a moment, his expression tender. Then he leaned over and kissed me on the cheek.

  Triple bliss.

  “When it first started happening,” he began as we walked, “it was just flashes. Random stretches of beach. Most often at night. I tried to talk myself out of worrying about it because I’m always thinking about the beach. But even then, I knew it was different. The images were just too clear, too real. Too three-dimensional. Then gradually, they started lasting longer. I had one where I was looking at the inside of the Foodland. Do you believe that? I mean, why? And then, there were a lot of times I saw…” He hesitated. “Well, your house.”

  I stopped walking. “My house? What about my house? Am I in it?”

  “No, no,” he laughed. “It’s just, like, rooms in your house. Empty rooms.”

  “Which rooms?”

  He smirked. “Well, yours, mainly.”

  I exhaled roughly.

  “Well, you asked!” He laughed again. He swung my hand and pulled me until we were walking again. “I don’
t try to do it. It’s just that sometimes, when I’m thinking of you, I’ll start to see an image of your room. Not you, just your room. But only a flash. A couple seconds, maybe.” His expression turned sober again. “What could that possibly mean?”

  I considered the question, but came up blank. The idea of his having visions of my room was almost as disturbing as his reading my mind. “When you zoned out at the pool earlier,” I asked. “What were you thinking of then?”

  He looked around where we were walking. “Actually, I was thinking of here,” he answered. “You said we should come here, and I thought that sounded nice. The next thing I knew, I was looking at it.”

  I arched an eyebrow at him. Now we were getting somewhere. “Exactly where along here? You mean this whole beach, or this exact spot?”

  He considered a moment, looking forward and back. “Well, I don’t… I mean, we don’t come here often enough that I have all the landmarks memorized.”

  “Of course you don’t,” I said, stopping again. “Which is why, if you do remember specifics, we’ll know it’s not just a memory — or a hallucination. What do you remember?”

  Zane concentrated for a second. He looked up the beach a few yards to where a log of driftwood lay roughly perpendicular to the surf. “I remember seeing that,” he answered, pointing. “A little boy in red swim trunks jumped over it. He was running ahead of his parents, and he jumped over it one way and then the other, and then they caught up with him and he ran on.”

  I blinked at him, surprised. “I thought you didn’t see people. Only empty scenes.”

  He seemed surprised himself. “Oh, right. Well, I guess I see people sometimes. Not people I know or anything. Just background people.”

  I chuckled. “Background people?”

  “I guess that sounds stupid, doesn’t it? It’s just that I’m not really watching them. They’re just… there.”

  I stared at his confused expression another moment, then walked towards the log. There was no one else visible right now either up or down the beach. There weren’t any little footprints in the sand around the log, but that was no surprise, as it was high tide now and the water was regularly lapping over the whole area. “Well,” I said speculatively, “I guess we can rule out your having visions of your own future, anyway. There’s no little boy in red trunks here now.”

  Zane looked relieved. “I don’t want to see the future,” he said thoughtfully. “Not unless I could change it, anyway. That would be awful.”

  I started to point out that just because he hadn’t seen his own future didn’t mean he hadn’t seen the future, but I decided not to go there. “Well, it’s close to high tide now. Was it high tide when you saw this log before?”

  His forehead creased with thought. “It would have to be. Close to it, anyway. Waves were definitely hitting where the boy was jumping, and his parents were walking in the dry sand, and there was just a narrow strip of it up the beach, like now.”

  “What else did you see?” I pressed.

  “I moved on around that bend,” he continued, pointing ahead to where the shore jutted out, then cut away again. “I could see a long way from the other side, and there were no other people around. It looked so calm and peaceful… I started to really enjoy myself. But then there was something annoying… Oh! The bottle. Somebody had stuck a water bottle on the end of a branch. It annoyed me that I couldn’t throw it away. And then… And then you yelled at me and nearly shook my head off.”

  I ignored the jibe. I was a woman on a mission. I walked on around the bend and looked up the beach. There was a shadow couple walking toward us, holding hands. But Zane couldn’t see them. There was only one living person in sight, a man far ahead of us standing knee-deep in the water who appeared to be fishing. “Did you see him before?” I asked.

  Zane shook his head. Then his eyes moved to the tree line, and his pace quickened. This stretch of the beach was rugged, covered with rocks and debris that were difficult to walk over, and by the time he slowed down enough for me to catch up with him, my already abused leg muscles were complaining again.

  He stopped walking and made a sharp intake of breath.

  “What is it?” I asked worriedly.

  He gestured upwards with his chin. I raised my eyes to see an empty blue plastic water bottle sticking off the end of a dead tree branch.

  Wow.

  I smiled at him. “See there!” I said proudly. “Delayed effect of concussion, indeed.”

  Zane reached up, pulled down the branch at a lower point, and pulled off the offending recyclable. “Well,” he said, not altogether steadily, “at least I can get it down now.”

  I gave him a hug around the shoulders. “What you saw was real, Zane! This proves it.” I laughed to myself. “Someone else might argue that you must have seen that bottle before, even if you didn’t consciously remember it. But we both know there’s no way, because if you ever saw it, it wouldn’t still be here!”

  “True,” he agreed. “So… am I seeing the past, or what? It can’t be the future.”

  I kept holding him. I would hold him all day if I could get away with it. “Well, we really don’t know for sure. It’s been more than two hours ago now that you saw what you saw.”

  He threw me a nervous look. “It is just past high tide, isn’t it?”

  I nodded. Near high tide, the water level rose and dropped more gradually, so the window of time during which the boy could have jumped over the log into a wave could be broad. The events he saw could have happened after he envisioned them, but before we got here. He could have been watching them in real time. Or it could have all happened a month ago.

  “We’ll figure it out,” I assured. “And if it has a purpose, we’ll figure that out, too.” I fixed him with a fake stern look. “Just don’t go all geeked-out superhero on me this time, all right?”

  He smirked.

  I loved that he was a good guy who liked helping people. But his desire to help ghosts in need — particularly that whiny Australian girl — could get inconvenient. Zane seemed to feel that if he’d been given a gift, he had to use it, and it was a responsibility he took very seriously. But in my humble girlfriend’s opinion, there was such a thing as going overboard.

  The idea of being able to tell the future was distressing to him, and I understood why. If there was one thing Zane hated, it was feeling helpless. He didn’t even remember the time he’d spent as a wraith, but I knew he remembered the frustration of it. I could see it in his eyes just now, when he talked about wanting to get the water bottle but not being able to grasp it. Being able to see the future, but having no power to affect it, would be hell on earth for him.

  On the other hand, if he could affect it, I would most likely never see my boyfriend again. Lacey and I would spend all our Friday nights together binge-watching mindless television while chugging diet shakes and sending texts no one answered.

  I shuddered at the thought.

  Zane crunched the bottle in his hand, stuffed it in a pocket, and hugged me back. “Hey, I am what I am,” he replied, his usual healthy ego apparently still intact. “There’s no telling how many damsels in distress I can save with this new and fabulous ability to find trash on deserted stretches of beach.”

  I sucked in a breath and said nothing. He was kidding, of course. He was always kidding. But I wasn’t. Whatever this new ability of his turned out to be, his putting it to good use like the kind-hearted guy he was would almost certainly involve both distress and damsels. It was a good thing I wasn’t the insecure type.

  Really, I wasn’t.

  He stepped away from our hug, but kept hold of my hand and led me back down the beach the way we had come. “Let’s get to that snorkeling. We can work up a good appetite for your reward dinner.”

  My stomach rumbled. I’d been starving for an hour already. Swimming laps always made me ravenous. “I get dessert too, right?” I bargained. “I think I’ve earned it.”

&
nbsp; He stopped walking and looked at me. His eyes sparkled affectionately, and he gave me one of his most knee-weakening smiles. Then he reached out one hand, brushed my wild black curls behind one ear, and kissed me.

  Chapter 3

  Zane seemed lost in thought again as we walked across the crowded parking lot of the shopping plaza in the North Shore town of Haleiwa. It was early enough that we should still be able to get a table at the popular Mexican restaurant, but the tourist business at the adjoining shops was brisk, and nearly every parking spot was taken. We strolled past the art gallery, various clothing and beach supply stores, specialty snack shops, and a realty outfit toward the bright red-painted doors of La Ola.

  “I hope Matt’s working tonight,” I mused. “I guess it’s pretty likely. He seems to be working every chance he gets now. Lacey said she hasn’t seen him in a month.”

  “He’s here,” Zane murmured, looking down at his feet.

  I tried to catch his eyes, but he seemed fascinated with the ground in front of him. “How do you know?” I asked.

  He looked up at me and blinked uncertainly. “What?”

  I stopped walking. “I asked how you know that Matt is working tonight.”

  His eyes flickered with distress. “Did I say that?”

  Whoa. Could it really happen that subconsciously? “Zane,” I asked pointedly. “Were you having a vision just now?”

  He considered a moment, then took a deep breath and started walking again. “Maybe. I… well, yeah. I guess so. I was thinking about La Ola and I imagined Matt working inside. It was… just a flash. Nothing earthshattering.”

  He sounded thoroughly annoyed with himself.

  I frowned. An attitude adjustment was definitely in order, here. And where exactly was the happy-go-lucky surfer wraith who kept insisting that my seeing dead people everywhere was the greatest thing ever?

  He reached out to grasp the metal pepper-shaped door handle, but I stopped him with a hand on his wrist. “Wait. What kind of shirt was Matt wearing?”