Dangerous Depths (The Aloha Reef Series #3) by Colleen Coble
For my son, David,
whose strength and loving heart was the inspiration
for Bane in this book. May you always stand strong and
care for others the way you do now.
Prologue
Koma Hamai sat in the warm Hawaiian sun with his fishing net strung out on the volcanic rock. He muttered an ancient chant as he mended the net with gnarled fingers. Hansen’s disease had numbed the nerve endings in his fingers, and net mending was a hard job but one he found satisfying. There was nothing better than seeing something broken become useful again.
The ocean boiled and foamed with blue-green ire as it spent its power on the rocks, then came to lap at his feet with a cooling touch. He heard a sound behind him, back by the fishpond, probably one of the many axis deer that romped the jungle along the edge of the sea. When it came again, the furtiveness of the sound penetrated his contentment.
He stood and turned to investigate. The apparition staring back at him was like nothing else he’d ever seen in this life. From the head to the hips, the thing was round. Dark eyes stared out of a hard helmet, and the rest of its body was covered with some kind of green skin that looked as tough as a lizard’s. Koma backed away, forgetting his fishing net, then bolted and ran for his cabin. As he ran, he prayed his ninety-five-year-old legs would run as fast as they did when he was twenty, but with the limp from his broken hip, he knew he’d never outrun the monster. He didn’t want to end his life as food for Ku. Surely the thing chasing him was the Hawaiian god who built the first fishpond.
A predatory hiss sounded behind him, and he spared one final glance at the strange being. Ku aimed what looked like a speargun at Koma. He fired. The old man stumbled and the spear barely missed his back. He recovered his balance and ran for his life to his cabin.
Tree branches whipped at his face when he entered the jungle, but he was safe here. He knew these trees and paths the way he knew his one-room cabin in the dark. He paused, sensing no pur-suit. He peeked through the leafy canopy and saw the being moving off in the opposite direction. Ku never looked back as he moved off through the trees. Why not follow him to his lair? Koma was able to move without a noise through the jungle. He hurried after Ku along an almost impassable path to a cabin so overgrown with vines it was nearly invisible.
By the time Koma returned to his own cabin, the creature had grown in his mind to a height of fifteen feet and sprouted fangs.
One
Leia Kahale rubbed an aromatic salve of crushed ginger, aloe, and other natural ingredients gently into the deformed hand of the old woman seated in front of her. Hansen’s disease was manageable these days, but the scars were not so easily erased. The sight of her grandmother’s missing fingers and toes had ceased to make Leia flinch long ago. To her, Ipo Kahale was the most beautiful woman to ever grace Moloka’i’s shores.
“That feels much better, Leia,” her grandmother said in a hoarse voice. Leprosy had taken her vocal cords as well as her lips and nose, and her words had a flat, toneless quality. “You should have been a doctor.”
“My mother agrees with you, T?t?. I thought you had a pact to always take up different sides of the fence.” Leia put the salve down and stood. She was nearly a head taller than her grandmother’s five feet, and T?t? was practically skin and bones. Leia stepped out from under the shade of the coconut tree to test the pulp of the mulberry bark she was fermenting in wooden tubs of seawater. The odor of fermentation had been the most distasteful part of learning the ancient art of making bark cloth, but now she barely noticed the sour tang. She stirred the mess, then eyed the strips of tapa, or kapa as the Hawaiian version was called, she’d laid out for the sun’s rays to bleach. They could stand some more time in the strong sunshine.
“Kapa obsesses you,” her grandmother observed when Leia joined her on the garden bench again. “I was never so driven.”
“I wish I had your talent for the painting of it.”