Free Shark's Teeth (Marla Mason) by T.A. Pratt Page A

probably, for not having a really specific question in mind. Divination worked better when the diviner didn’t generalize, but her clearest thought had been, ‘‘Find me something interesting,’’ and it would be just her luck if ‘‘interesting’’ in this case turned out to be ‘‘unspeakably horrible’’ or even just boring old ‘‘deadly.’’
    The shark’s tooth pulled hard enough to tighten the string painfully around her wrist, then sagged, its purpose accomplished.
    ‘‘Hey,’’ Marla said to the person sitting on the sand.
    He was a large Hawai’ian man, aged somewhere between thirty and sixty, naked except for a sort of skirt made of seaweed piled messily around him. He sat in the sand with his feet stretched in front of him, soles just out of reach of the lapping waves. He stared at the water with an expression of infinite loss and, maybe, just a hint of impotent rage.
    Since he ignored her, Marla sat down beside him. ‘‘Aloha,’’ she said. She didn’t think she’d ever said the word ‘‘aloha’’ before in her life, but when in Maui...
    Now he glanced at her. ‘‘Aloha, haole.’’
    ‘‘How-lee?’’ she said. ‘‘Huh. Spell that for me?’’
    He looked at her more directly, and a bit quizzically, but he complied.
    ‘‘Ha,’’ she said. ‘‘I thought so. Spelled pretty much like ‘a-hole,’ isn’t it? Let me guess. That’s the local equivalent of gaijin, gringo, gweilo, muzungu, right? Outsider, foreigner, maybe a little dash of white devil?’’
    ‘‘That’s right, wahine.’’
    ‘‘I’ll assume that’s a nicer word. But you can call me Marla.’’
    A moment’s hesitation, and a slight nod. ‘‘I am... call me Ka’ohu.’’
    She looked out at the water. ‘‘Pleased to meet you. As for the other thing you called me... Well, you’ve got me there. I am an outsider. This isn’t my place. I don’t even especially want to be here, but my friend has the money, so he picked the destination. I’m a... I don’t know what you call them around here. A sorcerer. A witch.’’
    He took this assertion with equanimity, as she’d suspected he would. ‘‘We say kahuna,’’ he said. ‘‘Keeper of the secrets.’’
    ‘‘Good, that’s nice. Keeper and maker and taker and trader and occasional abuser of secrets.’’ She looked up at the sky. ‘‘I had a whole city of secrets in my keeping. I looked after it, did my best to take care of it, to protect the people there, to make life better for everyone. I risked my life, and more than my life, more times than I can count, in service to that place. And when I made one little mistake... Okay, a few large mistakes... the people there forgot everything I’d done for them, and they cast me out. Exile. So that’s what I’m doing here. I’m happy to be an outsider. I’m not even exactly a tourist. I don’t want to go native. I’m just here because the place where I’m not an outsider has been lost to me.’’
    He nodded, but didn’t take his eyes from the sea.
    ‘‘So what have you lost?’’
    ‘‘Only myself,’’ he said. ‘‘An outsider, with magic. Someone like you. He has taken power from me.’’
    ‘‘If you lost something important, then you and I have more in common than I have with the person who took it from you, even if he is an a-hole like me.’’
    Now the man smiled, and Marla saw he was missing most of his teeth. Not all of them, but several, and the remaining teeth were smeared with the blood oozing from his gums.
    ‘‘You’ve got to tell me the name of your dentist, so I can make sure I never, ever go to him.’’
    ‘‘Do you have sharks where you come from, Marla?’’ He might have been addressing the waves.
    ‘‘Sure, my city’s on a bay on the east coast of the mainland. Sometimes we get sharks, though not often.’’
    He nodded. ‘‘We have many sharks here.’’ He paused. ‘‘I am a shark.’’
    Marla mulled this over. She’d known many