Killing Spell

by Shay Kauwe

Genres: Native American & Aboriginal

Synopsis

In this spellbinding fantasy debut set in a future where language magic reigns, a young Hawaiian woman must solve a murder to clear her name.

Kea Petrova is dealing with more than her fair share of trouble.

At just twenty-five years old, she’s the youngest of five Hawaiian clan leaders living on the Homestead in outer Los Angeles. Nearly 200 years ago, when a catastrophic flood submerged the Hawaiian islands and unleashed magic into the world, these clans forged a treaty with the city, establishing a new Hawaiian homeland. But that treaty is about to expire.

Kea struggles to keep her small clan afloat, scraping together rent each month through odd jobs and selling her own crafted Hawaiian language spells. While her talent for language magic is her saving grace, she feels like a shadow of those who came before her. Just when she thinks things can’t get any more complicated, the murder of Angelo Reyes—LA’s most prominent Filipino activist—turns her world upside-down.

Angelo was killed by a death spell—something that, due to the properties of each school of language magic, can only exist in Hawaiian. With independent spellsmithing being technically illegal, Kea quickly becomes the prime suspect, known for her spellwork on the Homestead. To clear her name, she must unravel the mystery behind Angelo’s murder and confront LA’s most powerful (and dangerous) players, each wielding their own type of magic. The clock is ticking—can Kea save herself, her clan, and the Homestead before it’s too late?

Release date: November 11, 2025

Publisher: S&S/Saga Press

Print pages: 384

Sample

Chapter 1

CHAPTER 1
Kea, I need you.

I flinched at the sound of the voice in my head. Makani’s sympathetic talent of telepathy, though benign, was always unsettling, like a pinch right at the temple.

Closing my eyes, I focused on sending him a response. Your chores better be done if you’re goofing off.

Something followed me into the coop.

In a heartbeat, my irritation turned to ice-cold fear. I dropped the plastic basket of wet sheets I was holding and ran to the backyard, which overlooked the ocean. Our usually small house felt like a gigantic barrier as I sprinted across the dry grass toward the garden. The coop came into view, a ramshackle construction made of weathered wood, and one of our hens, Fiona, flopped out. She clucked disapprovingly at me; her leg twisted at a funny angle as she hobbled away.

The chalk of the ward around the entrance had been wiped off by the door, leaving a smudge of grayish residue on the wooden planks. Clearly Makani’s handiwork. I swore under my breath. I’d told him a thousand times to stop pestering the birds.

I’m scared.

There was no time to be mad. I hadn’t been expecting a fight, so I was stuck only with a leiomano in my back pocket. While relatively strong for a woman of my height, I wasn’t that strong. If something big had gotten into the shed, I had little hope of success in beating it to death.

I gently tapped the door with my left shoulder while pulling out the flattened oval club, holding it at an angle in front of me. The sheen of polished wood and sharp shark’s teeth looked intimidating, but it wasn’t a hunting weapon. In the shed, I wouldn’t have the space to move freely or build power into a good swing. I’d need to get it, whatever it was, out.

The door cracked open a hair’s width, and I peered inside. A pair of hazel eyes stared back at me from my cousin jammed under the birds’ perch. Feathers, blood, and dead chickens lay everywhere. A low, guttural hiss emerged from the darkness, irritated by the thin stream of light I had let in. The air, speckled with dust and fluttering pieces of stray hay, was heavy and hot.

Makani’s chest rose and fell with quiet, strangled breaths. He squeezed his eyes shut and shot me a message.

It’s behind the door.

Not daring to startle the thing, I twisted my head to look at the spaces between the bolts and spied a patch of scales hidden in the shadows. Stretching from the frame of the door to the wall, the creature was too large to be any normal animal. It had to be a magi.

The hissing stopped as the beast shuffled. I lost sight of it and became acutely aware of the blood rushing through my veins. Tensing my muscles, I leaned closer to the door, desperate to figure out what kind of magi it was.

A black iris flashed in the empty space, narrowing in on me, and the hissing turned to a growl. I sent Makani back a single command.

Move!

He crawled from his hiding place just as the magi lunged for him. I slammed my shoulder into the door as hard as I could, sending the beast squealing as it was knocked against the back shelves. Makani screamed. He squirmed forward on his stomach to the side of the perch that was protected by a metal grate. The magi’s head swiveled to focus on his retreating figure.

“Hey, ugly!” I shouted, stomping my feet to attract its attention.

The beast snarled, stepping into the light from the open door. A mo‘o. About five feet long, the lizard creature had sharp teeth made for rending meat, and smooth scales covered its entire body in a sickly Granny-Smith green that faded to pale white around its lower belly.

Just a baby one. I could take care of it.

Figuring my forearm would hurt less, I dragged the sharpest tooth of the leiomano down the front of my arm, wincing as I pressed in deeper to scratch up the skin. A trickle of blood welled to the surface and dripped down in a thin line.

The mo‘o raised its head so that its bulging, white neck flared like a balloon. It sniffed the air. Once its beady black eyes found the source of blood, it stilled and turned its undivided attention onto me. Good boy.

Magi might be born from magic, but ultimately, they were just animals. They couldn’t reason or use logic the way a person could. No talking dragons, or singing unicorns, or any of those other stupid stories you read about in fantasy books from before the Flood. Magi were dangerous but dumb.

I turned my back to it and ran.

Feral instinct took over as the magi smelled blood on my retreating figure. Prey. Hunt. Food. It rushed after me.

Running down the hill toward the beach wouldn’t work as my blood would likely attract more creepy-crawlies from the water, so the front of our property was the best bet. My bare feet slammed against the dry grass as I lured it to the front lawn, but I wasn’t fast enough. The mo‘o was on my heels. My palms got sweaty around the wooden handle of the leiomano, and I swore to arm myself better next time I did the laundry.

Waving my arms wildly to keep the mo‘o from ascending the back stairs onto the porch, I ran parallel to the rickety frame of our house. As I rounded the corner, I banged on the walls to make noise, releasing a shower of chipped dry paint in my wake. Sun-bleached flakes rained down around me, filling the air with the dissipating scent of sour milk.

It worked. The mo‘o slithered in my direction with its mouth wide open, ready to chomp down as we made it to the front lawn. If it sunk its teeth into me, I’d get a nasty cut. But we didn’t have any money lying around for stitches, so I wasn’t looking to take chances. I’d have to cast something. My jaw locked as I planted my feet and pivoted to face the mo‘o. Breathing deeply, I ran through a list of words I could use that could make this damn thing stop moving.

Russian could work. It was simple and effective when there was an obvious target and I didn’t need to bother with definite articles, but I needed a word that rhymed with begat. Maybe run was the wrong idea though. Did lizards really run? At eight feet away, it certainly felt like it.

Scratch Russian. I didn’t have time to figure out a rhyme to make the spell work. My other trusty language, English, was always a no-go on the fly. Any attempt on my end to be poetical fell flat no matter how many Shakespearean arts, thous, or foes I threw in, even though it was an established fact that a good sonnet would work wonders. Emphasis there on good.

Hawaiian it had to be.

Six feet away now, the mo‘o crawled closer, a furious pace infecting its approach. Five feet. Hawaiian was so vague though. A simple stop might work, but it also might stop all the internal organs in both my body and the mo‘o’s from functioning. Only four feet left. Three. There was no time.

Keeping eye contact with the beast, I crouched low and dug my fingers into the lawn, entwining brittle blades of grass in my grip. With my other hand I dropped the leiomano flat to the ground and pressed hard on top of it for balance. The mo‘o was nearly right in front of me, its breath warming the air so close that I could feel the heat on my nose.

Reaching for the mana from my core, I said the first word that came to mind. “E ho‘opa‘a.” Stick.

Magic surged out of my hands and into the ground around us, rising up like a sudden breeze from the dirt. The lizard stopped moving. It writhed, tossing itself back and forth, but its efforts to escape were futile. My spell kept its legs glued firmly to the earth around it.

I breathed out a sigh of relief.

One-word spells weren’t supposed to work, but they always had for me. Sort of. They had an effect, that was enough. Call it a quirk of my mana, an unexpected benefit to being absolute crap at all other kinds of magic. I tried to lift my left hand off the leiomano so that I could finish the job and found that my spell had worked a little too well. I was also firmly stuck to the ground.

Dammit.

I really should have stopped using one-word castings years ago, but when in a pinch, I had a bad habit of saying whatever popped into my head. The joke was on me, though, since they rarely worked how I wanted them to.

The mo‘o spat at me, struggling against my magic’s hold as I strained my neck toward the house. “Sisi!” I could hear the TV blaring inside. Giving it a minute, I baked in the afternoon heat, three feet away from a floundering giant lizard. “Sicilia!” I yelled again, louder.

The screen door on our porch swung open and Sisi, my teenage sister, appeared. Her hands were on her hips, and there was an irritated crease carved through the sun-freckled skin of her forehead. With Sicilia’s light-brown waves and emerald-green eyes, people usually did a double take when I explained that we were related, though I never really understood why. She and I looked a lot alike.

We both had deep-set, almond eyes that turned down slightly at the ends, wide, flat noses, and full lips. Our features were nearly identical, but we were different in our coloring. While Sisi was fair, I had brown everything. Brown skin, brown hair, and dark-brown eyes that could only be described as penetrating.

Sicilia was chewing a piece of bubble gum, apparently oblivious to the spitting mo‘o on our lawn.

“A little help?” I asked.

The gum snapped in her mouth, and she shot a disdainful glance at the magi. “What am I supposed to do about that?”

“Kill it,” I explained through gritted teeth, trying not to let my irritation bubble out.

Sisi’s gaze fell on the weapon below my left hand. “You do it.”

“I can’t,” I stressed.

Sicilia’s hair was wound into a lazy topknot that spilled precariously to the side. The tita bun was a nice complement to her attitude. “Doesn’t look like that to me.”

I didn’t have the patience for this. “I’d love to take care of this myself, but I cast something and if I release the smithing, I’ll end up unsticking the mo‘o too. I’d be right back where I started.”

To emphasize how bad that would be, the mo‘o made a snarling noise and gnashed its teeth together, trying to lunge forward. Its feet didn’t budge, but the beast did spit some of its saliva onto my cheek, making me recoil. Unfortunately, my spell held tight, and the only thing I could manage to do was jerk my head back a few inches. Gross.

My magic had a track record of fighting against every good intention I threw at it. At ten, I’d tried a common Latin spell to find my grandmother’s lost keys and ended up with every pin, screw, and nail in the house flying at my face. I quickly learned that the only way to tame my magic into doing what I wanted was by using spells I’d smithed myself, but that took time, patience, and talent. Sadly, I was in short supply of all three.

Sicilia gave an exaggerated sigh. “Let me get my crossbow. I’m not getting lizard guts all over my favorite shorts.” The screen door slammed shut and I was left alone.

As I waited for Sisi, I glanced around at our lot, trying to ignore the heat of the sun bearing down on me. A few generations ago, our family had built a single-story plantation-style house on the New Hawaiian Homelands, affectionately referred to as “the Homestead,” which stretched across what had been Manhattan Beach. In the days before the Flood, this area had been packed with the homes of the wealthy, smashed together so close they almost touched. Nowadays, the residential area had been razed until nothing was left but hills, dirt, and sand.

The house, once a forest green, had faded to shades of dull sage over the years, but the wooden planks of our porch and stairs were still a rich mahogany. Out back, we’d planted mango, avocado, and banana. The trees seemed to grow taller and tastier from the trade winds that pushed in from the ocean and with a little help from Papa Ivan’s green thumb. Our home stood on a grassy area at the top of the closest hill to the water, which, even by Homestead standards, was too close to the ocean to be safe. The sea was home to an abundance of magical creatures, or magi, and no sane person wanted to live near it anymore.

Despite the danger of roaming magi that regularly stumbled onto our land, I loved our home. The crashing waves were a soothing, steady backdrop for our daily chores, and more importantly, our house was on an apex of powerful mana. Mana, or magic, was all around us and streaming in rivers toward the depths of the forests and oceans. It pooled around beaches like the one we lived on, making us stronger. However, that strength came with the price of being in the middle of magi birthing grounds. It didn’t bother us much. We were too small of a clan to be picky about the luxury of a safer lot farther from the shore. And magi were far easier to deal with than people.

Sicilia reappeared at the door, crossbow in hand, and aimed for its stomach.

“Shoot it in the head!” I shouted before she let the shaft fly. “We need the meat.”

Sisi pulled a face but obliged, and the bolt whizzed through the mo‘o’s head, sending a splatter of blood onto my shirt. The oversize beast convulsed as the arrow hit true, then finally, it lay still. Its beady eyes went matte.

Willing my mana to rush out through my arm, I ended the spell. “E ho‘oku‘u.” Release.

The snap of the magic breaking tingled as it let go of me. As I cracked my knuckles, I touched the tips of my fingers, feeling the mana disperse. I handed the leiomano to Sicilia, grateful that I hadn’t needed to beat the lizard to death with a piece of wood smaller than my forearm.

Sisi took the weapon from me and flicked the tooth that was still red with my blood. “Are we desperate enough to start eating magi?” she asked, her face tight.

“It killed most of the chickens. The only one I saw alive was Fiona,” I said. Eating lizard for dinner was the least of our problems. Without the coop, we’d be short on the meat and eggs needed to feed five hungry mouths.

Sisi grasped the situation quickly. “Did Makani try to chat with the birds again?” She popped her gum and made a hand puppet as she talked about our cousin’s new weird hobby.

I planted a palm across my face in response.

“Great,” Sicilia said, drawing out the word with a few extra syllables. She mumbled under her breath. “I’m going to smack him upside his head.”

I dusted the grass from my hands onto my denim shorts. “You can have him when I’m done.” First, I’d wring Makani’s neck, then chop up the giant lizard for dinner. Perfect Friday night plans for any twenty-five-year-old.

I stomped over to the shed and kicked in the door to assess the carnage, counting five dead hens scattered throughout the coop. Our rooster was running around in panicked circles on the floor, while our most temperamental hen slept nonplussed on a top shelf.

A growing migraine pushed on my temple.

We’d lost the majority of our flock in a single afternoon. Two hens weren’t going to be able to lay enough eggs to feed us all. Even if we could salvage some meat off the mangled corpses, it wouldn’t make up for our loss in production. I mentally calculated how many more jobs I’d need to take on in order to replace the dead hens but soon gave up. Math wasn’t my strong suit.

A soft cough came from the floor.

“Come out this instant, or I swear to god, I’ll give you the dirtiest lickens’ of your life,” I said.

Makani crawled out from under the roost, covered in straw and chicken shit. His eyes were all fire. He sported a scratch on his head that was dripping blood down his cheek, and his arms were crossed defiantly at his chest. Other than the mean glare, he was a cute kid with copper-colored skin and a curly pouf of black hair.

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” he said.

“You know the rules. If you don’t have an adult who can put the ward back, you need to stay out,” I explained, struggling to keep my tone level.

He shrugged. “Whatever.”

I bent to his eye level. “It’s dangerous to remove the wards.” I gestured to the coop. “Now, we won’t have enough chickens to lay eggs for us.”

“I don’t care.” Makani sniffled. “I hate eggs. If you like them so much, buy more birds.”

“We don’t have the money to buy more,” I said.

“Then get more,” he said flippantly. As Makani continued ranting, he began to cry. “You’re the head, so it’s your job to take care of our family. You were the first person I called but you didn’t come in time. It’s your fault they’re all dead.” Makani looked down at his bare feet and clenched his fists at his sides, refusing to look me in the eye. He wasn’t talking about the hens anymore.

“Makani,” I said hesitantly, reaching out for him.

He flinched away from my touch, his whole body shaking, and raised his hands to his face. I spotted from under the cover of his fingers fat droplets of tears as they hit the straw on the floor of the coop, fading to a darker shade of brown among the dirt. “I hate you, Kea. I wish you were dead instead!” He took off, dashing behind me.

I tried to grab the back of his shirt, but Makani was already running at full speed toward the edge of our property and down the hill that dipped to the beach. I covered my eyes with my hands and took a deep breath, which came out shakier than I wanted it to. My guilt and frustration had coalesced into a ball that made my stomach hurt.

Taking Makani in to live with us had been a given when his parents passed, but the extra mouth put pressure on the family budget that I hadn’t yet been able to balance. His mercurial temperament was even more difficult to adjust to. I’d read more parenting books than a young woman ought to, and while I realized his mood swings were normal, even expected, it didn’t make dealing with them any easier.

It wasn’t that I was mad, exactly. I looked up into a sky so blue it was making my eyes water.

It’s just so hard.

But I couldn’t say that.

Makani was right about my responsibilities as his older cousin and, more importantly, his guardian. Yet, his cutting assessment of my own failings was a reminder I didn’t need. I already knew I was ill-suited to being our clan’s head. I saw it every time I looked into his eyes, eyes that were the same color as his mother’s, my aunt’s. I missed her. It left a gaping empty hurt in the pit of my stomach. For Makani, that puka was larger, deeper. It was a black hole that gnawed on him from the inside out.

I peered over my shoulder and looked at the remains of their old home about a mile away from our property. Half of the house was hollowed out from the blaze that had been set in the raid, and the white walls of what remained were stained with gray soot. Exposed beams in the roof had let in rain and sun in equal parts. Every so often, a piece of decayed wood would crack and topple to the ground with a thud. When Los Angeles had taken the Palakikos’ plot, they’d pushed their border out to just beyond the perimeter of the house and on the edge of ours. The stones of the city’s protective ward were shiny and new, unlike the decrepit Palakiko home that LA had never bothered to demolish, almost as a warning to the rest of us. I kept sight of it like a snake in the grass.

As Los Angeles grew larger and space became more limited, the city’s sprawl expanded ravenously. They’d offered our people exorbitant prices for their properties, with the promise of Board protection and apartments hidden behind LA’s powerful city ward. The Palakikos had had enough. They’d been moving back the city’s ward stones little by little, pushing back against LA. Someone or something had tipped off the Board to their antics, and Los Angeles showed up in full force, wiping out most of the clan in less than an hour. Anyone left alive had either assimilated or been taken in by one of the other clans.

After that, I understood how things worked. Our treaty and two-hundred-year lease with the government didn’t matter, nor did the pretty words that came out of the Board’s mouth. The Homestead only stood because they believed this land too dangerous to be of any value.

“Girl!” A familiar voice caught me off guard and I looked up to see Nana Kulia glaring at me from the back porch.

I took one look at my grandmother, her brilliant white hair flowing down her back in stark contrast to dark skin that shined like she’d rubbed coconut oil on herself—and promptly turned around.

“Are you walking away from me when I’m talking to you?” Her voice boomed, and despite being a grown woman, I grimaced. “Don’t make me chase you down this hill! You know that I’m too old for that. I could fall and die.”

I turned toward her slowly, sticking my forefingers into the loops of my waistband with a sheepish smile on my face. Nana used that line about dying at least once a day. Probably because it worked.

“Come here this instant, Kealaokaleo Petrova,” she commanded, leaning heavily on her wooden cane. My full name stretched out on her tongue like a curse.

I marched back to the house as if walking to my own execution. As soon as I made it to the creaky stairs, Nana Kulia smacked me on the back of the head with the flat of her palm. It didn’t hurt. Much.

“Your temper will land you in deeper trouble if you don’t watch your mouth, girl. You can’t be running around yelling at Makani,” she scolded.

“You used to do worse to me when I was little,” I grumbled, rubbing the tender spot on my scalp. “How’d you even find out so quickly?”

She narrowed her eyes at me. “God is always watching, Kea.”

I looked over her shoulder and spied Sicilia peeking from the kitchen. She lowered her head and began furiously chopping vegetables.

“God and Sisi, maybe,” I muttered.

“Are you sassing me?” she asked.

I stopped my eyes from rolling and lowered them instead, knowing that my big mouth would just get me another slap. “No, Nana.”

The expression in her brown eyes softened. “You better not be. Now, go make up with your cousin.”

“I can’t,” I complained. “I’ve got to skin the mo‘o and pluck the chickens that it killed.” Not to mention fix up the coop, browse the online job boards for more freelance work, and pick up a few things from the store. Our to-do list was a never-ending battle that I was always on the losing side of.

Nana Kulia made her hand into a fist and rapped me on the head with her knuckles, lightly this time. “Sisi and I will take care of the mo‘o.”

My cousin Newt rounded the corner as I was being scolded. “I can help, too. Do what you gotta do, Kea.”

I glanced behind him at the dead magi splayed on the dining table. Newt must’ve carried it into the house when I was dealing with Makani because Nana hadn’t been able to lift anything heavy since the last raid knocked her around. At the time, we hadn’t had the money to see a proper doctor, so she walked with a limp to this day.

“You figured out how to cook it?” I asked my sister, over Newt’s shoulder.

“Even got a recipe,” Sisi said. “We’re apparently not the only ones who’ve tried eating them.”

I didn’t know how to feel about the fact that there were magi recipes floating around the internet: kelpie soup, chupacabra tacos, baked chimera. The notion made my stomach churn, and I didn’t know whether to be grossed out or relieved. I pushed away the nausea and settled on grateful. With my family’s help, I’d have time to run to Bobby’s for some groceries and ease the pressure of another chore from my mind.

I leaned in to kiss my grandmother on the cheek before scooting behind her, into the house, and grabbing my keys off a hook on the wall.

“Make up with your cousin!” she shouted at my back.

I hurried out of earshot without answering and shut the garage door behind me. I’d worry about Makani later. He needed time to cool down before I’d even be able to get within three feet of him without him shooting daggers at me, or in his case, throwing overripe bananas at my head.

My pocket buzzed and I pulled the phone from it, glancing down at the notification. Seeing the name, my heart dropped. Basilio.

I really need to talk to you.

Things have gotten complicated.

Please respond.

Apparently, there were a lot of people I needed to make up with. A flash of molten lava lit up my core. My life was held together by spiderweb strands, and I didn’t have time to feel responsible for a head who had willingly left the Homestead, who had given up, who had abandoned us. Abandoned me.

My finger paused over the message, my chest tight, and I pressed delete.