Blooming in the Wild Page 0,97

“Help her,” he begged, struggling at his restraints again. “She’s—too pale. She’s supposed to be smiling, happy, alive.” He fought for words to describe what he’d seen, what had happened.

Pele raised her hand, and he fell back, wincing at the agony of ice that gripped his side.

“I know what has happened,” she told him. “It is why I am here. To take her.”

She bent to gather Bella into her arms, and Joel stared, grief driving the pain from his mind. “No,” he choked. “No, don’t take her. I-I need her.”

She looked down at him, the secrets of the ages in her burning, ebony eyes. “But is your need enough?”

“Enough for what?” he gasped.

But she disappeared in a hiss of smoke and steam, taking Bella with her.

She was replaced with the faces of strangers, leaning over Joel. They wore flight uniforms and headsets. “He’s waking up,” one of them said. “Joel, can you hear me? You’re in a Coast Guard chopper. You’ve been shot. Stay with us, man. We’ll get you to the hospital. You’re gonna be fine.”

Joel looked blearily for Bella but saw only an IV bottle rocking on a portable stand, and an empty space. Letting his eyes drift shut, he slid back into the darkness.

Bella felt as if she had been pulled from her body like a giant rubber band, stretched as far as she could go, and then released to slam back inside her battered, bruised and burning psyche.

She lifted her head slightly and then let it fall back to the hard, hot floor under her head. Sick, so sick.

Had she been drinking? She’d never had a hangover like this, not even when she and Claire helped Melia drown the sorrow of being dumped by her boyfriend and ended up finishing three bottles of wine.

She had the flu; that was it. Or cancer. With a sob of misery, she closed her eyes again and gave in to the cold shivers that racked her, even here in this heated space.

Finally, the slow pulsing beat that throbbed through the floor carried her with it, soothing, healing, and reenergizing. She drifted, breathing in and out, reassured by the voices that chanted for her. Her voices.

“‘Ae, little sister. All is well. You have saved us, and we in turn saved you.”

“Now rise,” commanded a new voice. Feminine, yet resonant with power, the voice reverberated through Bella’s being. Like her voices, the owner spoke Hawaiian, liquid and lovely.

Lifting her head, Bella was astonished to realize that she now felt well, if a little weak. As if she’d awakened from healing sleep after being ill. She clambered to her feet, realized fleetingly that she was naked, only her hair falling around her. But it didn’t seem to matter here. She turned to face the owner of the voice.

At once she knew in whose presence she stood. She gazed in awe at the woman who sat at ease on the throne of hardened lava at the end of the cave. “Pele.”

The woman nodded regally. “And you are one of mine, yes? My young ho’omalu.”

Bella’s nerveless legs gave out, and she dropped to her knees, staring in awe at the goddess of Hawaiian volcanoes. “I—I am? I mean, yes. I am a Ho’omalu. I just found out that my father…” Her voice faltered to a stop, and she blushed hotly as the goddess smiled, amusement clear in her obsidian gaze. Of course the patroness of the island knew all that.

“I mean that you are a true ho’omalu guardian now,” Pele corrected. “You have served me well, young Bella.”

“I have?” Bella reeled as memory crashed through her—Na’alele, and the maelstrom of violence that had erupted.

She lifted her hands and stared at them. They looked so normal, just slender and tanned, with short nails and the little scars where she’d cut herself with florist wire. But at Na’alele, she’d watched golden power stream from them, and she’d nearly used it to bring down the mountain.

She curled her hands in her lap, shame burning in her cheeks. “I—I killed those men. They were going to kill us, but—but I nearly destroyed innocent people as well,” she choked.

Pele rose in one swift motion and glided to stand before Bella. She held out an imperious hand, and without thinking, Bella placed her own in Pele’s, warm and powerful, and rose to stand before her.

“She gave you a terrible poison,” the goddess told her. “Distilled from my good earth, but made to enslave your human kind, weak and trusting. She wished