The Bid

by Jacquelyn Frank

  It was extraordinary. Purely extraordinary.

  Then, suddenly, Hanna sat up with a gasp of shock.

  “Lukan!”

  Before Jhon could question the outburst she was flying off the bed, trying to redress her tattered clothing onto her body as she ran for the door. Jhon realized she was acting in haste and not thinking and he leaped up to stop her.

  “Stop! Hanna, you can’t leave the room like this!” He grabbed hold of her arm and pulled her to a halt.

  “No! Let me go! I have to see!”

  “And everyone in the house will see you naked? I think not.” He turned her against her straining body movements and hustled her over to the wardrobe.

  “Let me go! You don’t understand!”

  “I understand that if you run out there baring a spine full of spots your servants are going to ask questions I know for a fact you don’t want them to ask. Calm yourself down and put something on!”

  “Oh. Yes. You’re right,” she said, hurrying to grab one of his tunics from the closet. She threw it on over her head and was racing back to the door before he could clothe himself to follow her. She was halfway down the stairs before he caught up with her.

  “What is so damn important all of a sudden?”

  “Don’t you see?” she demanded as she raced for the doors to the family den. She passed her hand over the lock and cursed the mechanism roundly when she did it too fast for it to read. She slowed down almost indiscernibly to do it again, but luckily it was enough to make it work. The doors clicked open and she shoved her way into the room.

  There, on his hands and knees and naked among the milling cats, was a grown man.

  “Lukan!” Hanna cried again, racing into the thick of the rustling family to throw her arms around him. “It worked! You’re here! I was so afraid…. I wasn’t sure it would really happen!”

  That was when Jhon realized he was looking at Hanna’s brother, the second oldest of her litter. He remembered then what she had told him, about how he would only shift out of the Otherside if and when the elder sibling mated while in bellcat form.

  He had forgotten all about it. And so had Hanna, in the moment. He didn’t doubt that. He had seen the very instant the realization had struck her. Jhon had known it was somewhere on her agenda, but neither of them had even been trying to make it happen. It just had. Now Lukan was there, able to walk on two legs for the first time in his life. Fascinated, Jhon wondered if he would know how to talk, how to walk. Did he even understand what had happened to him?

  Of course he did. All he had to do was listen to Hanna speak to him and he knew that Lukan understood. Also, he remembered what it had been like to be the cat. It had been no different for him than it was being the man he now was.

  Less emotional about the transformation than Hanna was, Jhon moved through the family to offer a hand to Hanna’s newly reborn brother. He was a handsome man, with rugged, angular features and vivid green eyes that were set off in stark relief by his pitch-black hair. Lukan looked up at the hand Jhon offered and then, with a decent case of the shakes running through him, he took the proffered assistance. Jhon braced his feet as Hanna wedged herself against her brother and together they got him to his feet. Then Lukan turned those startling green eyes onto Jhon and spoke his first words.

  “Thank you,” he said. And it was understood just how deeply that thanks was meant to go. He wasn’t just thanking him for his help in standing, but for his help in bringing him fully into a life that had long been denied him.

  “Any time,” Jhon said with a grin.

  Hanna meanwhile was doing less to help him stand and was doing more in the way of hugging him to death. Realizing how overwhelmed the other man clearly was, Jhon pulled her away from Lukan and turned her tearstained face against his chest as he held her close. He watched carefully as Lukan got his balance and Jhon realized all the skills of bipedal life were going to come easily to him, but would still take a bit of doing.

  “I should get you some clothes,” Hanna said, finally starting to think like the clearheaded woman of logic Jhon knew her to be. She pushed away from Jhon and hurried to do so, leaving Lukan alone with Jhon and the family. But it was immediately clear that Lukan had little interest in his sister’s mate. Instead he bent over, risking unbalancing himself, and began to systematically butt his head affectionately against his brothers’ and sisters’ heads. He scratched them all lovingly between their ears as Jhon had often seen Hanna do. He buried his fingers in their fur and rubbed them fiercely between their hipbones. The reception he got for his loving attentions was dramatic. Every cat in the room and in the gardens came to take part of Lukan’s new forms of affection. To Jhon’s eye, however, he still acted more like a cat than he did a man. It was clearly going to take some time for him to make the adjustment.

  Hanna returned right away, instantly fawning over her brother as if she had never seen him before and, Jhon supposed, she really hadn’t. Oh, they had known each other well enough in cat-to-cat form and on cat-to-humanoid levels, but to Hanna this must be like welcoming home a long-lost brother…or even a brother gone off to war for all of his life. They were siblings and strangers all at once. Jhon could easily see how Lukan would be a stranger even to himself in this situation.

  They helped Lukan figure out clothing and how to dress himself, and then, as if she were taking a member of royalty through her house for the first time, Hanna led Lukan from the room and showed him around the house he had probably never seen before. It made Jhon wonder if she had ever let them out of the enclosure at all. Even when there were no servants around. But, he realized, there were always guards posted on duty and she could never have done anything that would open her up to questions.

  No. Lukan had never once been outside of the enclosure.

  Suddenly, the chains of slavery paled in comparison. They were prisoners, all of them, of the curse of being locked in the Otherside. It came very sharply to Jhon just then how very hard it must have been on Hanna to stay out of the auction parlors and away from the only resource her family had for freedom. He had judged her so harshly, but the truth was she had to bear the responsibility of more freedoms than just his own. For her to have taken a stand against slave auctions had no doubt cost her very dearly. He also had a suspicion that Najir had attended that auction without his mistress bidding him to. In fact, he would bet that the loyal servant had been haunting auction houses quite diligently on her behalf without ever letting her know.

  And how like Hanna to not question him about the hows and whys of how Najir had happened to be there. She just accepted it on faith. It gave Jhon a whole new level of respect for his homeworld companion. Najir, on the surface, was easy to figure out. He was heavily motivated by whatever saw to Hanna’s happiness, but Jhon knew there was more depth to him than that. Najir kept quiet about himself and his origins in every other respect. Perhaps one day Jhon would be allowed the opportunity to figure his new friend out, but he had a suspicion it wouldn’t be anytime soon.

  The remainder of the afternoon was spent showing Lukan the finer points of being a person, like how to manage eating utensils and food that was cooked instead of raw. Eventually the day wore him out and Hanna found him a room he could call his own in the family suites. When Jhon closed the door on Hanna and himself at last, Hanna immediately turned to him and threw her arms around his neck. She hugged him so tightly and for so long that she was in danger of strangling him. Jhon had little choice after a while but to pick her up and carry her to her nearby room, eventually settling them both down on a divan together with her in his lap and his hand stroking down the length of her spine.

  “Oh Jhon, I cannot tell you how happy I am,” she breathed against his ear after a while. “You will never know how grateful I am to you. You have been the sole reason for this. You have given my brother new life.”

  “I think you had more than an equal part in these matters,” he corrected her. “And Najir as well. A great many drops of fate made this
particular waterfall possible.”

  Hanna moved suddenly to face him, her warm thighs straddling his lap and her hands clutching insistently at his shoulders as she looked him in the eyes. That pretty blue color of hers and the intensity he found within them had the power to take his breath away.

  “I feel the most spectacular joy, Jhon. To have my brother here with me as he was always meant to be is something I long ago lost hope of ever expecting to experience. And yet I don’t want you to think for a minute that I have forgotten what price you had to pay in order for it to come about. I will never forget that again.”

  “I didn’t think you would,” he assured her, reaching forward to kiss her dark little mouth gently. “Enjoy Lukan free of guilt, Hanna,” he said. “You do deserve the right to do that. Your family has been heavily weighed down by this curse of the Otherside. I only spent the briefest of times there, but it was long enough to know just how aware I was of who and what I am. I cannot imagine being trapped in a place where all of your life must be spent outside of your true potential.”

  “I had always thought that it was hard for them to miss what they had never known,” she pointed out, “but at the same time they are confined to that room and the enclosure and are not free to see and do whatever it is they want to do. I often thought of taking them to the country place, freeing them to run the range of the vast property we have there and at least give them the illusion of freedom.”

  “But that would mean giving away your seat of power, Hanna. And I think we all understand that you cannot afford to do that. Not with enemies at your heels and so many dishonest Masters in the COM. The people of this city and those in your family are best served with your voice of truth and reason in the COM.”

  “That is what I tell myself,” she sighed. “But some days it is harder to swallow than others. Today is one of those days where I am torn right down the middle about it. Just earlier I was so grateful I had the power to do something to help you and other slaves like you, and now I see Lukan shakily making his way through the last few hours and realize what an injustice I have done him by not letting him taste freedom until just now. Here he is a full-grown man and he knows little or nothing of the world that he hasn’t heard from my two lips.”

  “Tell me, how do you plan to explain a new brother to those who know this household so well? Even the Baron seems to know exactly who every member of your family is. Something of a disadvantage to living in the public life.”

  “It will be yet another sacrifice. I can never publicly proclaim him to be my brother. He will have to be introduced as a cousin. We are known to have family in the country places, so it will be easily believed. It will also explain how he will seem so uncomfortable with city life and the ways of the things around him as he learns to live in his new form. But if history tells me anything, it’s that learning how to emulate being a person will be the easy part. The hard part is going to be wanting to remain a person. Living a life of an animal is very uncomplicated. I cannot say the same for life as a person.”

  “Agreed,” Jhon said grimly. “He did look a little like a man in shock. It will be a hard transition for him. It is even possible that he may not want to be the person he now is. He may wish to be the bellcat instead.”

  “At first, perhaps,” she agreed, “it is natural to prefer to stick with what you know. But a part of Lukan has long wanted to know the freedom of shifting in and out of the Otherside. It is his birthright.”

  “And what of Ashanna’s reaction to all this when she finally finds out?”

  “What of it?” Hanna asked curiously.

  “You don’t think there will be a problem? Everything she does is to gain attention for herself and standing in this family. With another person to compete against, I don’t see her swallowing it well at all.”

  “Do you really think so?” She pondered it for a long moment. “All of this time I thought she was merely being spoiled and selfish.”

  “Perhaps there is some of that, but trust me, she does what she does for the sake of gaining attention. And though you think her behavior proves otherwise, she is eager for your approval. Why wouldn’t she be? You do not give it lightly. Especially not to her.”

  “She does nothing to deserve it,” Hanna said with a frown. “She goes out of her way to get into trouble. She knows how I hate anything that draws attention to this family.”

  “Yes, but you never give her leeway for mistakes of youth and always having lived in the shadow of a very impressive older sister. Hell, your parents even named her after you. Everything she does is a cross between striving for an identity of her own that will get the same recognition you get, or she does it out of impulsiveness from her youth. She is at that age where one of two things will come of it. She will either find a way to make her own mark and learn to be satisfied with her own place in the world, or…”

  “Or?”

  “Or she will turn on you, Hanna, and try and take what you have from you. It’s the laws of your own people that could aid her, just as they have aided Majum in his bid for power. All he had to do was kill everyone in his own family until it got to a point where he could step into power. Now, I am assuming he has no direct birthright to being Master of the House of Majum, or he would have done away with his nephew as well. He may yet still do so. You yourself said time was growing short. The boy will come of age soon and either he will be a perfect puppet for Majum, letting the Baron rule by pulling his nephew’s strings, or he will kill who he has to until he is in power once again. Power is all that man cares about. It’s hardwired into him to get it by any means necessary.”

  “I am afraid for Kell, then. Majum’s nephew. He does not strike me as a stupid boy without a mind of his own, nor does he seem as perverse as his uncle is. Oh, I have no doubt that the Baron can dupe him as he has duped many others in the COM for many years, but it will not last for long with Kell. One day he will catch the Baron in his deceit, and if he is not careful Majum will have him killed as he seeks a more biddable marionette. Unfortunately there is a long, strong line of family on Kell’s branch of the tree. I wouldn’t put it past Majum to cut through every last one of them if that was what it took for him to one day assume the real power of Majum House.”

  “Just as he is determined to cut through every one of this House to destroy the power of yours.”

  “Well, it will not work. There are ‘cousins’ galore to take up the mantle of this House. When he strikes one of us down, another will always appear.”

  “True, but the pain you will all suffer in the meantime.” His hands tightened around her arms. “And regardless of the endless train of brothers and sisters you may have, there is only one Hanna Drakoulous, and I don’t want anything to happen to her.”

  The sentiment visibly touched her and he saw her eyes and features soften toward him. It was a look that had a peculiar and powerful effect on him. Jhon reached up to brush a thumb over the rise of her cheek and she turned her face into his entire palm with a kittenish nuzzle. He smiled at the affection, then pulled her to the kiss of his lips.

  “Ah, Hanna,” he breathed into her mouth, “you have the most unusual power over me.”

  “Really?” She quirked up a brow. “I think I like the idea of that,” she said smugly.

  “That’s all right,” Jhon chuckled, reaching around to catch one shapely buttock in his palm, “because I know I have a great deal of power over you as well.”

  “Mmm,” she purred. “That you do.”

  Ashanna sat in the dark tavern wearing men’s clothing and with her feet propped up on the table before her. It wasn’t that women weren’t allowed in such establishments, it was just that advertising the fact to the kinds of patrons that attended a dark corner place like this was likely to get her into trouble. As it was, the servers were women and they wore very brief and provocative outfits, clearly as a way of luring in customers. But Asha could easily see the bruises they sported at the edges of their clothing from the hard pinches and
rude grabs of the rowdy patrons; apparently the owner didn’t care enough about them to do anything about it.

  But that was often the way of things in the Low City. Since Asha had spent most of her life in the High City, she had never really been exposed to this level of callousness until about two years ago when she had started hanging out with her new group of friends. They were all highborn like she was, second and third siblings of High Houses, who just happened to find a thrill in walking around the more dangerous streets of the Low City. They would frequent the taverns, gamble in the odds houses, and party with less sterling types down at the docks. It was actually kind of exciting to see the short flyers come in with their cargo, sitting there wondering where they had just come from, and wondering how they might one day sneak aboard one of them and stow away to the coasts where they could pay for passage off that miserable planet of their birth.

  Asha was not trapped there by law like her sister was. She was free to come and go as she pleased, actually. By law, anyway. But then there was the law of Hanna to contend with. Even her brother had been allowed to leave the city, but Hanna had put her foot down at leaving the planet. And all because of the nature of who and what they were. Hanna was afraid that somehow, somewhere, their secret would get out. Hanna was always afraid.

  Well, maybe it was okay for Hanna to live a life throttled by fear, but Asha refused to do so. One of these days she was going to find a way to get off this miserable planet and away from suffocating family secrets. She was going to explore the vast unknown of space and other planets. She didn’t know how exactly it would all come about, but every step she took was one step closer to the inevitable. She didn’t just come out to the Low City to go slumming and to get herself in trouble. She came out here to gamble. She was going to take her allowances and multiply them again and again until she was certain she had what she needed to get out from under her sister’s thumb. That was why she had needed to get out of the godforsaken country sooner than her sister had planned. She couldn’t earn as much money as quickly as she could here and couldn’t do it with as much anonymity and secrecy.