Free Don’t Bite the Messenger by Regan Summers Page A

his right cheek flapped away from his face, and a thick slick of blood followed him. I backed away, pulled my hat tight and ran around the neighboring apartment building. I kept running. Over chain-link fences, through the narrow slots between government row-houses. My lips formed Malcolm’s name, but I couldn’t hear myself saying it.

Chapter Five
    The problem with paradise is that it’s small. For the most part, the real world leaves it be, but the real world is greedy and expansive so paradise has to stay small to remain pristine. It’s quiet, too. Uneventful. I suppose those are parts of the definition of peaceful . They’re also components of the definition of boring .
    I traded the Piilani Highway for the Mokulele, the wind wicking the day’s humidity from my skin like a lizard lapping dew. Sugarcane fields jostled in the passing headlights of shiny rental fleets and sun-faded local cars. The national bird refuge smelled unpleasantly swampy. It had been a dry spring.
    Traffic all but disappeared a mile down the Hana Highway and the night whispered by, gentle and easy. I flipped up my rearview mirror to dim the headlights bobbing along behind me, breathed in the sweet air—overlaid with salt from the sea—and thought about nothing but the rumble and twist of the road. I could zone out while surfing and driving, but I couldn’t surf at night and there are only so many miles of road on a small island.
    I was about a million miles away from the self I knew. Maybe the last few years had hardwired me for tension, repeating patterns of buildup and release, because the more I tried to relax, the itchier I felt inside my own skin. At least in Anchorage I could have driven away at any time. If I wanted off the island, I couldn’t just go.
    “Leave,” Malcolm had yelled.
    I’d gone, and the memory of seeing him outnumbered, of feeling the force of the explosion was like a dream in which I wanted to run but couldn’t. Maybe he’d needed help but I’d left him torn to pieces in the snow. Maybe he would have come with me, and I could have woken to find him beside me these last few months. Maybe there was nothing left of him to find.
    I shook my head, refocused on the road.
    I’d hitched my way out of Anchorage and into Canada. In Whitehorse, for the first time in my life, I stole a car. When I crossed the border in Whitlash, Montana, a day and a half later, it had a new license plate, and I was a jumpy brunette by the name of Sydney Kildare. It took me a week to recognize my own reflection. I dumped the car in Spokane, flew to Los Angeles and scored a standby ticket on American Airlines to Maui.
    I’d lost my down payment on the house on Oahu. So much for Sunset Beach, but I figured it was worth it not to go the one place vampires knew to expect me. Even if it was only Lucille. Hopefully they’d think I died in the explosion.
    I parked the convertible 1970 Bronco under the carport and sat for a moment listening to the engine cool and the sound of old-school reggae leaking out of my landlord’s house twenty yards behind me. I slipped out of the truck, smoothing my skirt over my damp bikini bottom and fixing a tank top strap that had slid off my shoulder. The sunburn I’d cultivated in my first month had finally given way to the deep tan of a habitual surfer. My hair had grown into a sleek, if very short bob, and red highlights were developing in response to the sun. I actually looked like a real girl.
    Over the music, a baby insistently made itself heard. I smiled. Mine Kabasawe had almost been born in the back of the Volkswagen Rabbit I’d bought with cash when I first arrived on Maui, not able to completely relinquish my dream of Hawaii. Her mother, Leilani, had gone into labor at the slow French café I’d been having lunch at in Paia. I’d tossed her into the Rabbit and made the hospital in Kahului in twelve minutes flat, despite road construction. It was the most fun I’d had since …well, a long