They dropped their gear. Songoree kicked off his boots and pulled his shirt over his head. Matt Reece watched him strip, admiring the dark skin that was lighter from waist to knees, and how something about that body seemed to smile at him. Once he removed his own clothing, an overpowering tenderness seized him, and he wanted to be hugged. He stepped in front of Songoree, and arms enfolded him. They stood locked together, the sun and wind playing on their skin. It was not what he had felt with Vishal, but it was an agreeable substitute.

  Songoree gave him a nudge. “Let’s go, cowboy, before the tide changes.”

  He pulled back to look into Songoree’s eyes, which were gleaming with triumph.

  They each grabbed a board and attached the ankle straps that roped them to the board. They walked to the surf, and a minute later he found himself in knee-deep water. Before him, rollers crashed, immense, almost suffocating. But he examined them with a new strength. Energy forced its way from deep in his chest to the surface.

  Songoree charged a wave and leaped on his board—fearless and bursting with confidence. Matt Reece waded straight in, determined to show this stallion he had vivacity as well. He moved farther out and was about to leap on his board when another surfer came out of nowhere, riding a wave. He shot past Matt Reece, a dolphin absorbed in his acrobatics.

  That same wave bowled Matt Reece over. He slammed against the sand and tumbled under the foam with a nose full of water. Gaining his footing again, he choked out a laugh while drunk on the lightness, bright and fast and buoyant, of a helium buzz in his brain.

  He retrieved his board and glanced out to sea, only then appreciating how large the waves were. That close, they towered over him, dark movement unrolling out of sheer mass. It was thrilling and terrifying, but he was too intoxicated to be afraid.

  Another wall caught him in a thundering wallop. It pulled at him with a powerful undertow, but he managed to grab hold of his board and pull himself on. He faltered until he saw Songoree sailing down a toppling precipice, intent upon his own rite of passage. Matt Reece lay in awe, his mind microscopically close to the meaning of life, but then he received another baptism of wild surf. His thoughts, desires, and whole sections of his history flowed from him as the undercurrent pulled him farther out. He didn’t care. In the same freedom he experienced while running with Kantaka, he felt happy, clean, and yet less than he had ever been, as if something more than just his clothing had been stripped away.

  Total freedom was not to be, however. Something gripped his neck, roughly, and he realized Songoree was muscling him toward shore. His joy doubled with the thought that they were sharing this mind-blowing freedom—the amazing light, the surf, the power of the undercurrent were all being played out for their pleasure. Again, he felt close to understanding that thing that had eluded him all his life. He could feel it, but he couldn’t put it into thoughts. All he could do was put himself in Songoree’s hands and enjoy the ride.

  An apocalyptic tower grew out of the sea, tumbling in on itself with a roar that sounded like the ending of the world. They were still too far out, besieged by the receding flow. They rocketed toward heaven, up the face of that monster, and were hammered down to hell. He had the breath knocked out of him as he pounded the sand. He held on to Songoree, and he had no fear.

  The next thing he knew, Songoree hauled him up the beach while he vomited seawater. He took gasping lungfuls of air before Songoree said, “Enough for today, cowboy,” sounding like an overprotective nanny.

  “No. I’m fine,” he rasped. “Let’s do more.” He hated that he had yet to ride a wave. He hated more that they had fallen into a nanny/child relationship. Moments ago they were stallions racing through a universe of liquid omnipotence. He refused to abandon that sensation.

  Songoree laughed, and the sound made him laugh too. Within that howl, he seemed to shrink while everything about Songoree grew larger: the white of Songoree’s smile, beads of water clinging to his hair, narrow hips, heavy sex, and his shoulders that shivered.

  Songoree leaned into him, his face hovered close, and they kissed. It was not an act of passion, but one of searching, and done with such tenderness that Matt Reece was stunned. He tasted salt, like a two-hundred-proof margarita. Suddenly, they were stallions again, equals.

  Songoree pulled away, not so far as to lose the scent of his breath. His gaze felt like moments ago when they tumbled at the whim of the undertow. He reached into the cooler, drew out two beers, and opened them. He passed one to Matt Reece. They drank deeply, letting the brew wash away the salt taste. When they finished, they dropped their empty cans back into the cooler.

  “Come on, cowboy. Time to take you back to my place and throw a saddle on you.” He slapped Matt Reece’s ass.

  “It’s going to be like that, is it?”

  Songoree shot him a half smile and nodded.

  THEY PULLED on their clothes, stored their gear in the back of the Dodge, and hopped in. Songoree draped an arm over his shoulder and pulled him close. They kissed—a sensual, leisurely press of lips. “I’ve waited a long time to find someone like you,” Songoree said. “Now you’re here and you turn out to be FBI’s most wanted criminal. This is mind-blowing.”

  Matt Reece laid his head against Songoree’s shoulder. “I’m sorry.”

  “Hell, I wouldn’t want it any other way.”

  They drove back along the same highway. By the time they crossed to the southern side of the island, the sky was darkened by a storm front blowing up from the south. Raindrops splattered the windshield. Gloom consumed the sky; colors surrendered. Even the reddish-purple sunset to the west became grays and blacks. Songoree slowed the truck as the rain grew heavy.

  He craned his neck to stare up the face of the cliffs. Wind carried the rain up the bluff, not down, and he could not see the top of the ridge now. The sky lit up with lightning, and thunder echoed off the cliff.

  They saw impala in the headlights, and Songoree had to brake hard. They were the herd that they set loose earlier that day. They turned their eyes into the lights, and those eyes glowed red. By twos and threes, they leaped to the ditch at the inland side of the road, scrambling for cover.

  Matt Reece said, “Where the hell do they think they’re headed?”

  “They’re probably wondering the same about us.”

  Flinty gusts came off the ocean, almost blowing the truck into the cliffs.

  “We shouldn’t have played hooky,” Matt Reece said. “They’ll need our help at the docks with the animals and the horses. You think Lilikoi will give us hell?”

  “Christ, as crazy as she gets,” Songoree said, “there’s no telling what she’ll be like.”

  “Crazy? She seems fine to me.”

  The color drained from Songoree’s face. “Can I speak in confidence?”

  “I assumed everything we tell each other is just between us.”

  Songoree turned his head and kissed him on the temple. “She’s had some hard lessons. We all have, and with what’s going on in the world, there’ll be plenty more.”

  “What’s your hardest lesson?”

  Songoree thought for a moment. “Lord knows I’m no scholar, but I’d have to say that when things are gone, they’re gone forever. Ain’t no goin’ back.”

  “Amen to that.”

  “She ain’t been the same since her mother died. They were close.”

  “Yeah. I noticed those scars on her wrists.”

  “She blamed her father. He’s damn smart when it comes to business, but dumb as dirt about how to treat people. Lilikoi’s mother was his maid. He knocked her up and tossed her out. According to Lilikoi, she carried that pain for years and then died of a broken heart.”

  Matt Reece stared into the oncoming darkness.

  “That’s why he gives Lilikoi anything she wants,” Songoree said. “She’s his only child, and he’s trying to make it up to her.”

  He turned the words over in his head. “I guess that includes luring Kenji and me here so we could cure her grandmother?”

  “Funny thing,” Songoree said, “about the time she cut her wrists, I was set to quit this job and move back to Honolulu, where there’s some gay action. But seeing how unhappy she was, I just couldn’t leave.”

  “You think she’s over it? Suicide, I mean?”

  “I think rounding up all these animals gave her a grand purpose. But I don’t think she’ll ever be ‘over it.’ She’s fragile, on the inside anyway. She always will be.”

  “Can I trust her?” Matt Reece asked.

  Songoree was silent for a long time. Finally he said, “She’s the best of us. She’s capable of amazing things, and it’s all wasted here. Her passion is too immense for this island. She’s like those tigers we keep penned up in a cage. It’s a shame. Her life was meant to be different.”

  Matt Reece snuggled into his new boyfriend, staring into the black storm, considering Songoree’s words as if they were a contract with the world to come.

  Chapter Forty-three

  THUNDER ROARED, and the wind bent the palms. Songoree slowed the Dodge as the worst of the violence passed over them. Then they saw a strange sight on a narrow beach a stone’s throw from the highway. Men bearing torches were carrying a litter on their shoulders.

  Songoree parked the truck, and they rose up to see better. Matt Reece could see little more than their heads and shoulders jostling in the torchlight, but all the men wore an assortment of native adornments, primitive headpieces decorated with feathers and animal fur. By the torchlight, he saw the litter they carried held a human body, and between the rumble of thunder, he heard the thumping of drums.

  Songoree grabbed his weapon, and they leaped from the cab. “Oh fuck,” he said, and sprinted toward the procession. Matt Reece followed. They ran to a figure in the forefront, and the procession halted before them. The leader wore a carved gourd helmet adorned with feathers and shark’s teeth, and except for two gaping eyeholes, it covered her head. A beak was carved between the eyeholes, and set below that were two rows of teeth, upper and lower, making her appear like a cross between a bird of prey and a shark. The mask was simple yet forceful, projecting an image of wild savagery.

  Behind him, from somewhere near the shoreline, drums gave a resonating beat.

  “While you were off lollygagging,” the masked leader said in a voice he recognized, “your blood killed Gran. She died in pure agony.”

  Matt Reece felt the need to defend himself. He had wanted no part of this blood-swapping business. But he said, “Lilikoi, I’m so sorry.”

  “Sorry? That’s the best you can do? Sorry? You fucking asshole.”

  He sighed. “No need for brutality. I put that down to the intensity of your grief.”

  “You can put it wherever the fuck you want, shithead.” She charged by him, and the men carrying the litter trailed her.

  The procession stopped at a network of logs woven into a funeral pyre that stood five feet high, and crouched only a yard from the water’s edge. A strong scent of gasoline fouled the air. The pallbearers placed the litter atop the logs and jammed their torches into the pyre.

  Flames shot fifteen feet high. The drums and chanting grew in volume. Songoree joined in. Only Matt Reece didn’t sing. He was struck dumb as the heat drove him back, watching orange fire belching chuffs of smoke.

  Lilikoi set her helmet on the sand. Dressed in only a wrap that hung halfway to her knees, she held up a knife in her right hand, and she began to dance.

  Songoree told Matt Reece, “She’s performing the Dance of Great Sorrow. We use this as a way to honor the passing of a loved one.”

  Lilikoi began to chant. Her body swayed as her feet moved in slow circles. Her arms wove patterns on the air. They seemed to sculpt the words she was singing out of the sky. Her voice rose and fell in a melancholic scale.

  Matt Reece knew with a heaviness that weighed him down that Kenji caused this death, and millions more. There was only one way to stop the killing, and he had it on that flash drive at the house. He had let this tranquil island life distract him from sharing that information with the world, and this death was a wake-up call.

  She moved from one foot to the other, her supple body showing unusual strength, a cat stalking its prey. The dance built in momentum, and her movements became powerful.

  Songoree whispered, “She’s mimicking the fight she’ll have with her father.”

  Behind her, the fire blushed crimson, sending sparks high in the night. She seized a handful of her hair and the knife slashed, cutting off a hunk close to the scalp. It was carried off on the wind. The knife slashed again and again until she was nearly bald. She slit three shallow cuts across the meaty part of her left shoulder. Fine lines of blood trickled down her arm. She did the same on her right arm.

  Songoree said, “Our custom is to cut the hair and mark the body to show our anguish. In the old days, some people knocked out their teeth or put out their eyes.”

  The dance slowed and became graceful again. Songoree told him that this part of the dance mimicked a gentle wind blowing through the trees and the waves lapping the beach, showing that Gran Kamamalu’s mana, her spiritual power, had merged into the fabric of life and was now in everything that they could see.

  She came to a standstill. One by one, they hugged her. Matt Reece folded his arms around her and held her. Her warmth seemed to ease the sorrow in his heart.

  The fire raged another thirty minutes, and the pyre fell in on itself, growing hotter, until the rising tide consumed what was left. The drums grew silent, and the singers stood watching the waves draw Gran Kamamalu’s ashes into the sea’s bosom.

  Matt Reece suggested he drive Lilikoi back to her house. She nodded. Songoree surrendered the keys to the Dodge, and Matt Reece led her to the cab and they crawled in. It was a long, slow drive up the mountainside.

  MATT REECE ushered her into the house and turned on the lights in the living room.

  Lilikoi stood gasping—not fighting for air, but rather, repressing a scream. She rushed into the kitchen, splashed her face with cold water, picked up a dish towel, and patted her cheeks dry. “They brought this to the island, and now they’ll pay. Once I kill him, he’ll finally understand.”

  “Your father?”

  “And that frostbitten bitch. I loved him once, even after he turned out my mother and married that ice queen. His motto is: ‘Destroy or die.’ He will never understand what life is about, and only one thing can penetrate that wall of gluttony—a bullet.”

  No doubt she had the ability to kill another human, even her patriarch. Nevertheless, he felt the awkward urge to laugh. Much as he tried to stifle it, he did snicker. Not a genuine laugh, but rather a sympathetic shrug turned into sound. “How can I help?”

  “You could never kill anyone,” she said dismissively.

  He grew angry, because he knew it was true.

  “I was like you,” she said. “All that time he tortured my mother, I wanted to kill him, but I couldn’t because I loved him. So I tried to kill myself instead. Now he means nothing to me.”

  That was something he could identify with, and he kissed her on the cheek.

  “Tell me about your other father,” she said.

  “He was never abusive, yet he was often not there for me, for anybody. When he was at his desk writing, he had this wonderful magnetism—this glow—that made you feel like you were sitting under a sunlamp or something. But then he went back to the booze and the sunlamp burned itself out. He’s tortured, and I never could figure out why.”

  She hugged him.

  LATER, THEY lay on her bed with him holding her. They talked of their days to come, how they would comfort each other. They might at some point even have sex. It was not something he was interested in, but he felt she needed a rosy future to believe in, something to focus on besides this terrible loss. They thought up names for the children they would make to repopulate the world, children that would live forever—funny names, sometimes, so they could laugh—and they talked about the house they would build far from this island, filled with wood furnishings and Persian rugs and brass lamps. They talked of traveling the world to see what was left after the war. “Lima, and Cusco, and Machu Picchu,” she said. “Surely no one will bomb Peru.”

  They talked through the night, while rain washed away everything outside. They were swallowed by the thrum of falling water, knowing that nothing of humanity would survive the storm, not a footprint, not anything. It felt as if they were the last people on earth. And then she kissed him, parting his lips with her tongue and drawing the breath from his lungs.

  When he pulled away she said, “Let’s not wait.”

  “I don’t love you like that.” But even he heard doubt in his tone. Either you do or you don’t. Love’s the one thing that is unequivocal.

  “Screw romance. Love is a sucker bet. I loved Patrick, and it crushed me. I’m talking sex. Sex is like ice cream. You don’t worry about calories; you dive in and gorge.”

  She moved her hand across her forehead, as if brushing something away. He knew it was the thought of Patrick. He held no interest in screwing her, especially if it was simply meaningless sex, but he also felt her desperate need to be intimate. Could he do it for her? And if he did, what would that mean for his budding relationship with Songoree? He smiled. “Well, my favorite ice cream is passion fruit.”

  A glint crept into her eyes, and the muscles in her throat moved, but she didn’t speak. Earlier she had displayed a deep and abiding grief. Now he saw only regret, and again, he was left with the impression it was remorse for pushing his brother away.

  The rain grew louder, yet the air inside was still and carried a slight sweetness.

  They kissed as he took her in his arms. She pulled back and hesitated long enough for him to know that she, like he, was contemplating this betrayal to Patrick. She pressed her face against his shoulder, and he could feel the wetness of her tearstained face. Yes, she had begun to cry. He asked her if she was sure about this, and she didn’t answer. They came together again and kissed with animallike force. All that before had been shielded became unshielded, all vulnerabilities exposed.