Her words were those he understood, though he did not understand how. “Thank you,” she had said.
Two words. So heartfelt he felt like she fed them to Ulric. He had been starved for the food of her mouth without realizing it.
That short speech had occurred exactly a year after her liberation from the marauding Fragment.
Everyone had begun talking at once and Natasha had simply covered her ears, overwhelmed by their response to her brief speech.
His people only knew her name because she had written it in the dirt for the women.
The Keeper of Words, as they called her, had interpreted the strange symbols and sounded out the complicated name. Natasha had put her hand to her chest and they had known it was she who went with the symbols.
They had a name to call her, at least.
Since that time, Natasha would sometimes shyly come to visit with Ulric. He did not press. In the clan of the tree, it is not typical to entertain females who are not a mate in one's private chambers.
Ulric is unmated.
There are not many females. Ulric is Alpha of his clan. It is his sole purpose to locate females for the clan. It is not his role to take the females he finds—for himself.
Yet, Ulric aches inside. Alpha is a lonely position of great responsibility and unflinching fortitude in the face of hopelessness. While the numbers of the First Species dwindle, those of the Fragment increase. Thanks to the Travelers using his world as their dumping ground for the unsound minds that flourished here.
He had cautiously hoped that Jim, now that he was altered, would see the need to support the Men of the Tree.
What kind of world produced males such as the Fragment? The world from which Jim hailed.
“Is this—may I come in?” Natasha asks.
Ulric swings his legs over his sleeping platform and cups his fingers in a gesture that speaks for his invitation. “Of course,” he replies and Natasha hesitates.
“Come,” he repeats softly.
She moves to him and Ulric is struck by her beauty. It is not a typical beauty, though Ulric is hard pressed to believe any female does not have at least one beautiful attribute. Females are too scarce not to view them all, as the rarity they are.
Natasha is not small, like Adira. She is long of bone, as the Select, Calia—but built more robustly. Large hips and breasts, small waist, and tall enough to look at his shoulder rather than his chest.
If only she would consent to the change.
Not all females will change with blood share. But in his bones, Ulric feels that Natasha might.
That Ulric might have what she needs in his blood to complete her. And in turn, Natasha might possess enough blood of the tree to become.
Ulric cannot protect her as well if they leave the woods. He must cling to the shadows. Most of the clansmen cannot tolerate even that. But Ulric is Alpha and the shadows harbor safety from the heat of the sun.
Though the smoke from the fires set by the Band had cocooned Brom, Tab and himself long enough to secure their deaths. The shrouding of sunlight from smoke was a strange occurrence and most rare. Ulric had been grateful for it.
Natasha and the mundane females are not as safe. Every female has been given blood share. Roughly half have changed. The others remain as they were. Including Elise and Calia.
Those with Band blood resist the change. It is though those ancient blood ties are too old to provide the bridge that would allow it.
Then there is Jim.
It is confounding. Ulric has no explanation as to why Jim changed—only the speculation he spoke of.
Perhaps he was too near death, his body grasping at whatever might save him.
He pats the bedding beside him and Natasha carefully lowers herself to the platform.
Ulric's teeth set at her anxiousness and stiff bearing.
It has been three cycles since her assimilation and still, Natasha worries about her potential to be harmed. Not in the forward part of the brain that all beings use each day—but in the deepest recesses of her mind. Her fear hides there, festering though she is not consciously aware.
Ulric hates these moments.
His love for this female hangs like a trembling weight between them. Undeclared.
Unrequited.
“Have you found a male?” Ulric asks in forced nonchalance without meeting her eyes. The memory of their last conversation still rings in his ears.
Natasha shakes her head roughly. “No, Alpha.”
He sighs, cupping the back of her head. His body reacts to her nearness and he silently curses, adjusting his legs.
A shaky sigh escapes her and she shivers at his touch.
In fear, Ulric is sure.
“Keep giving the males a chance. No harm will come to you here in the clan of the trees.”
“I know,” Natasha claims, yet she still trembles beneath his fingertips.
“Do you still fear me?” Ulric asks, his breath held like a tight fist buried in his chest.
Large eyes, the lightest brown he has ever beheld, regard him with hurt surprise. “No, Alpha.”
He turns away from Natasha before those eyes end him.
“Good.”
Ulric feels her presence as she stands but he does not turn to watch her go.
She does not say goodbye but he feels her absence like a small death.
Ulric's shoulders sag. With everything that has happened in the last week, he finds the idea of her committing to one of the clansmen almost more than he can bear.
But bear it he must.
Chapter 18
Jim
Okay, the pity party stops now.
Jim strides to the railing of his treehouse and swings over the edge in a freefall.
His powerful arm hits the first vine and wraps, swinging neatly to the next platform.
Two more arcing plunges later he hits the platform that leads to Adahy and Elise's shared treehouse.
No problem with those two shacking up in the tree clan.
Not like the Clan of Massachusetts. God, that was a rub for those clan turds.
Jim guesses that as long as none of them leave, they can all be tree people.
Well, in Jim's case, he's out of options. Being as how his DNA strand just got the Roto-Rooter. Yeah.
“Jim!” Elise calls out with a smile.
He smiles and hers slips a little. Oh yeah, that ugly mug of his. His own smile flatlines and Elise's face falls.
“I am so sorry, Jim—I did not wish to upset you. I am unaccustomed to your new appearance.”
Jim had to give it to this world. They avoided insult like the plague. “It's okay, I know I'm ugly.”
“No,” she vehemently shakes her head. “Not ugly—but different. You are neither man nor ape.”
“Gorilla,” Jim says and he sounds like a supreme grouch, even to himself.
Elise studies her soft-soled lace up shoes.
“Hell—I'm sorry, Elise.”
“Why Jim apologize?” Adahy asks as he walks out onto the platform.
Jim swipes at his nose. It still burns from the fires of last week.
“I'm being an ass.” Jim shrugs.
“Why ass?” Adahy quizzes him, placing a hand on Elise's shoulder.
Jim laughs. Partly in frustration and because Adahy can be really funny. This speech thing is a hassle. “I do not want to be an ape.” Jim shakes his head. “I mean a gorilla.”
Adahy studies Jim. “You still Jim.”
Jim nods. He totally is. He keeps forgetting he's half-gorilla now and startles himself when his reflection presents itself in a clear pool of water or the scrap of busted mirror hanging on the wall inside his treehouse.
“Yeah,” he concedes, but not like he believes it.
Adahy shrugs his broad shoulders. “Adahy is Adahy. And Iroquois. And a man.”
Jim frowns. “Yes, I understand.”
Adahy moves forward and places his hand on Jim's chest. Just above his heart.
&nb
sp; “Jim still Jim, here.”
Ah.
Adahy isn't just funny. He's brave. And there's something so brilliant about someone who can break shit down to its basest level. Adahy does that awesome.
He's a friend to Jim. Not because of what Jim looks like, or what he can do for Adahy.
Nah, Adahy just sees what Jim's about. And that's all he needs.
“Thanks, Adahy.” Jim claps the warrior on the back and Adahy gives that crooked grin.
To him, it's all solved now. Jim needed straightening out. Adahy provided.
End of story.
If only life were that simple.
*
Elise
“Who is that woman?” Elise asks the small female who speaks like Jim, and who looks as Jim did before his change.
Adira gives a casual glance to the other side of the bathing pool. Slow spirals of steam lift off the surface, mingling with much cooler air.
The mist obscures her but Elise is curious.
Some of the females can change into this other form that Ulric possesses—Brom as well. And the male, Tabben, from their sister clan. Ulric calls the process of their change, shifting.
An odd term.
“Natasha,” Adira says dismissively.
“She is different, like you.”
Adira nods. “Kinda like me. But she doesn't talk much.”
Elise feels her brow knit. “She is not clan? Or—and I do not sense—she is Select or of Band blood.”
“Nope, she's a mystery.”
Elise gives Adira a shrewd look. “You do not care for this Natasha?”
Adira's lips quirk. “She's fine. I just want to be friends with other girls that are from where I'm from. I suspect she is, but she won't talk to me so screw it.”
Elise translates and her lip flattens. Adira must come from privilege.
Those who have never known adversity are usually not prone to be compassionate with others.
After all, they do not share the same perspective.
Mayhap this Natasha has been through atrocities.
“How did she come to be part of this clan?” Elise asks softly, still looking at Natasha.
“She was with the Fragment.”
Elise gives her a sharp look. “Truly?”
“Yeah,” Adira says then adds, “Ulric killed all their asses.”
“I see,” Elise replies as her heart silently rejoices for each death.
Adira studies her. “You're glad those guys are dead.”
Elise cannot lie. “I am.”
“Why? You're Band,” Adira's brow scrunches, “or something?”
Elise begins to walk, making her way around the perimeter of the hot spring. “Or something,” she replies almost to herself.
Natasha has a unique look.
She is big of bone, tall—very much like Calia. Her skin is dusky, like Jim's used to be. But where his inky hair was as straight as one of Adahy's arrows, this woman's is curly to the point of kink. It is very long.
As Elise steps nearer, those large doe eyes find Elise then quickly glance away.
They are the lightest brown Elise has ever seen on another.
When she is within touchable distance she stops.
Natasha's head rises. Her eyes skate away.
“What—how may I help you?” Natasha asks softly.
“It is not how you might help me, but how I might help you.”
Natasha's eyes briefly hold Elise's and then fall. “I do not know you.”
Elise takes a cleansing inhale.
I must help where I am able. “I do not know from whence I came, for the Fragment held me since childhood.”
If stone could wear an expression, it would be her face. When it begins to crumble, small chunks of the armor that Natasha has worn for years falls away, and the vulnerable and tender woman beneath is revealed.
Natasha's hands shake.
Elise grasps them both.
“You are not alone, Natasha.”
Tears fall from those soft brown eyes, splattering their linked hands.
Elise allows the swamping grief to claim Natasha. Her skin reddens and the crying becomes sobbing.
Elise holds her until it stops.
When she finally pulls away, Elise repeats her words. “You are no longer alone.”
Natasha's face looks stiff as she gives Elise a watery smile. “I know that now.”
A scream erupts from the silence and the women leap to the shore, turning to see what's happened.
Elise is so grateful she had not disrobed.
A man has Adira, his arm wound around her slim neck.
His eyes meet Elise's.
She knows him, and he knows her.
Elise has committed a hundred faces to memory. Many of which have moved on into death.
Elise swiftly looks up. The sun is high—the Men of the Tree rest.
While the Fragment prowl.
“Not again,” Natasha says.
“Never again,” Elise says like the vow it is.
*
Jim
Jim tries to ignore his growing case of the creeps.
Can't do it.
He'd left Adira to her own devices down at the hot spring.
There are no guards.
It's such a deeply hidden location, they've never had a Frag attack there. In fact, the Frag don't usually enter this neck of the woods.
Jim laughs to himself. Neck. Woods.
Nice.
He snickers to himself. Things might get a little toothy.
He knows what his dad would say. The same thing he said when Jim was growing up.
That he was easily amused.
Jim is. Always has been.
That's why he's interested to note his instincts are being plucked. He certainly wasn't in tune to anything instinctual back home. That had all changed with a little time in the sphere world.
Yeah, that'd sharpen up the old sixth sense right away.
And right now he felt his alarm bells clanging.
Fuck it.
Jim will just ape down there and see what's what. It'd been a few hours since his feel-good chat with Adahy and he'd put away enough food to feed a herd of starving elephants.
He hesitates. Adira might give him hell again for his boner or all the other lame things he seems to set himself up for in her presence.
She's able to tongue-tie him in a nanosecond.
Jim debates, his eyes catching the sun slanting between the branches.
Ulric warned him of letting the sun touch his skin.
He remembers his exact words.
The sun is our enemy, the shadows are our friend. And for you, Jim, only true darkness will you abide.
Ulric is kinda poetic, but it still deflated Jim. He was all ape, and now (though the fangs hadn't sprouted yet) he might be a gorilla vampire too.
The not knowing sucks.
He'd already taken a sample of himself. But this complicated of a genetic assessment takes three days.
It's been forty-eight hours.
Jim moves to the railing, leaning over, letting his long and dextrous new arms dangle.
A scream bursts the air and Jim stands up so suddenly he hits his head on a rafter.
“Ow—fuck!”
He doesn't waste time, leaping over the railing and foregoing a twined vine, he sights the platform four meters beneath him and jumps.
Four platforms and three minutes later he's on terra firma.
He races through the woods, hands grabbing branches as he hurls himself like a bullet on a known trajectory.
Noise of his approach is swallowed by the sounds inside the woods.
But they lay silent as he tears through an environment native to his new form.
When he bursts out of the thickest part of the trees where it empties to the steamy banks of the hot springs, what he sees bottoms out his stomach.
Adira is clutched by a Fragment.
Not just any Frag either.
One of his own.
“There's one! Nail him.”
Jim crouches, growling from deep within his chest and leaps.
Fangs burst painfully from his gums as his body charges weightlessly through the air toward the man he worked beside.
Who now holds the pain in the ass Adira in a choke hold.
He will not hurt a hair on her head.
A sting pierces his shoulder and he rolls, smoothly jogging to where he holds Adira.
“Jim!” she whispers.
Jim sways. Her face tripling.
What the hell?
“I'm sorry!” she says.
A black circle fills Jim's vision.
Another sting like a killer bee pierces Jim's flesh.
The ground meets his palms. Jim shakes his head, his vision shimmering.
“Grab the monkey-boy. Careful of those fangs—they'll end you boys.”
“What about the girl?”
“Take her.”
Jim is heaved over on his back.
He looks up at faces he recognizes.
And who don't recognize him.
Of course they wouldn't.
Jim hisses.
They leap back.
But then something hard and permanent weighs in on his skull.
And all that he is goes to black.
Chapter 19
Jim
Jim feels like bile splooge.
Every piece of him sets loosely connected together, like a jointed doll. His head swims in a vague, fog-like sludge.
Adira. Jim's eyes snap open as he automatically tugs at his hands and legs. He surveys his feet.
He vaguely makes out zip ties at his ankles.
Fucking swell.
They're plastic—and a favorite for Travelers from his world via the Pathway. Simon had made sure of taking some along. They survive the journey. That dick hole had stumbled along into Ulric's spot in the woods and swiped Adira. Loaded Jim up with some heavy tranqs and here he lay. Trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey.
Nice.
His nostrils flare and he identifies four unique human scents. All male—one female. Adira. He'd know her scent anywhere.
Her screams too. Gooseflesh ripples over his skin at the sounds she makes. His stomach lurches, the reaction must have something to do with his apeness. Or maybe—Jim doesn't dig hearing a girl beaten. Yup. Probably that.
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