“I wasn’t going to disagree,” I said, closing my eyes again, turning inward as a shield against the pain—focusing on the boys, pouring my heart into them—as if that might help. “Someone . . . go and harass my grandfather.”
“Rest, Maxine,” Grant said. “I’ll take care of it.”
I believed him. I folded my hands over my hard, round stomach. Sleep would be impossible, I told myself. Just ten minutes of doing nothing would have to suffice. Ten minutes only. Maybe in that time, the boys would wake up. Maybe things would get back to normal, just a little, and I’d be able to begin the hunt.
Into the Labyrinth. Into the unknown, chasing fire, and eyes that wanted nothing more than to devour. I was terrified of those eyes. Frightened of what Jack might have seen, frightened that his own fear of the possibilities had led him so far astray from me. But what choice did I have? I couldn’t just let everyone I loved waste away without trying, even if the attempt was crazy, even if it was a long shot and made no sense.
You will risk everything, whispered the darkness. Do nothing, and you will at least save something.
You can see the future now? I asked, uneasy.
But the darkness said nothing—merely curled even tighter around my heart, crushing it in its cool coils. My pulse skipped a beat, my breath caught, but then I found my rhythm again and relaxed.
The pain came in waves. The boys continued to pull against me. I rode with them, flowed into their fight, and that, too, was another kind of rhythm.
I dozed inside their agony. I fell asleep. I didn’t mean to. It shouldn’t have been possible. I didn’t even realize what had happened until I opened my eyes and it was dark all around me. Night had fallen.
And I was completely alone.
CHAPTER 25
ABOUT a year after we first met, Grant and I went to an upscale restaurant in Seattle where a party at the table next to us was eating an entire roast suckling pig: crispy and dark, a gnarled, juicy parenthesis. I’m not squeamish, but there was something horrible about it. I blamed my mother—all her stories about humans cooked just like that, by the demons in the prison veil.
I never got the nice fairy tales.
Grant had a different reaction to the roast pig. He told me a story.
When he was fifteen, his mother moved the entire family to Hawaii. His father didn’t care. He had a young, exotic wife, he was in love, and his business let him live anywhere he liked. Specifically, a little town named Hawi, on the northern tip of the Big Island where the volcanic rock gives way to lush.
It should have been paradise, but Grant had the howli experience: a white boy in a public school full of native Hawaiians, Asians, and mixed-race Asians, where mainland English was a second language under the best of circumstances. He didn’t have any real friends. Some of the kids were mean. One boy who sat behind him would ask every day: When are you leaving, white boy?
Grant was an outsider. And for a kid who was already different, more different than anyone else in the world, that was exactly what he didn’t need.
He spent a lot of time by himself. It was safer that way. Safer for him, for other people around him. He didn’t want to be tempted into doing something he shouldn’t. Secrets, after all, could be dangerous. And unlike my mother, his never told him the truth about what, and who, he was. All he had to go on was instinct, and a good heart.
Thank God for good hearts.
Two months after moving to Hawi, four months before his mother would decide to return to the mainland—just in time to reveal she was dying of cancer—Grant heard some boys talking about a hidden beach, one of a hundred, or a thousand, that make up the coast of the Big Island. Only word of mouth will let you find them: on paths that cut across lava fields, state parks, front yards, descending along cliffs and through jungle.
He got it in his head to find that beach. Trail wasn’t hard to locate. It started at a little compound that catered to white hippies from the mainland, who’d rent out cottages during the winter, and garden, and meditate, and practice weaving Zen mantras into their Rastafarian hairdos. Just beyond those gardens, on a dirt path that led to a wire fence with a broken gate, the trail zigzagged down a steep hill, into a valley, into a jungle.
It was beautiful. He was excited. The path was dark, narrow, walled in by thick-bladed grass as tall as a man. Hiding all kinds of things.
Such as the wild boar that trotted onto the path in front of him less than a minute into his hike.
A beast, he told me. Something out of the storybooks, as big as a Volkswagen. Stout, powerful chest, heaving sides: thick ropes of muscle sliding beneath its sleek black skin. Two long, sharp teeth jutting from its lower lip.