by Melle Amade
“What’s a goanna?” Callum asks.
“His cousin.” Zan nods her head at Roman.
Roman rolls his eyes. “It’s a lizard. Totally primordial.”
“So, the ancestors in the Dreamtime created themselves as animals,” Dad continues.
“Are the Aborigines shifters?” Aiden shoots a quizzical look at Zan.
She ignores him.
“There are some,” Dad says. “The ancestral beings roamed the earth and sang the world into existence. They sang songs of trees, and trees existed. They sang songs of mountains and lakes and streams…and all these things came into being. When their paths crossed, they sang songs of love and friendship, of war and strife…and these things came into existence. Everything that is, the ancestral beings created through their own words, by the songs they sang. The paths they traveled are called the songlines.”
The fire snaps, and a spark flies into the air. I feel like I’m just discovering my father for the first time.
“It was a normal childhood growing up in the outback,” he says. “You guys wouldn’t get it, but there wasn’t a neighbor for literally hundreds and hundreds of miles. Australia is the same size as the continental United States and most of it desert. But the population is the same as Los Angeles. So, there is a lot of empty land across the country. Miles and miles and miles and hours and hours and days of nothing and no one.”
Callum raises his eyebrows and exchanges looks with Aiden.
“My Auntie Bell did a class for the kids,” Dad explains. “There were five of us living on the farm. We were mostly self-reliant, making our own things. We’d hunt at night, and my parents and the others told us the stories. I have so much shifter history in my head… So many stories were passed on to me. When they told me the stories, at first I thought it was just made up for entertainment.”
“I thought the same when my parents started telling me shifter stories.” Roman smiles.
“Right?” Dad nods. “They couldn’t possibly be real! But then, well, there were two of us there that were the oldest children. Me and Jimmy. When we turned sixteen, an old Aborigine man, Clifford, came by. He took us for a long walk out in the red desert. We thought it was going to be a hunting trip, but then he made a fire and started singing. We knew he was singing the songlines, but he didn’t tell us what it meant, and we don’t speak his language. Then he cut us.”
“He did the Bloedhart?!” Zan says. “Just like that?”
Dad nods. “Just like that, we turned into shifters. I flew up into the black night sky. The stars… The stars were so close. A cape shrouding me. Like nothing you’ve ever seen out here.”
Dad’s face shines in the firelight, as if it’s coming from inside him. It’s like he’s explaining exactly how I felt the night I first shifted, when I flew up from the cave and into the dark.
“What was the other shifter?” Zan asks, her face as enthralled with the story as I feel.
Dad smiles. “Jimmy? Jimmy was a dingo. To me, it was so sad that he was stuck on the earth, but it suited him just fine. He was always grubbing around in the earth, digging up goannas and emu eggs. Being a dingo… Well, even if he hadn’t been a shifter, he would’ve done exactly that same thing.”
“What happened?” I ask. “Where’s Jimmy now?”
A cloud passes over Dad’s face as he shakes his head.” I can only think he’s dead, Shae,” he says. “I never saw him die, but he must be. Else, he would have found me by now.”
“But what happened?” Callum asks.
“The other children were much younger than us,” Dad continues. “You guys probably don’t understand this, but even where I come from, shifters try to breed at the same time.”
“Breed?” Aiden asks.
“Yes,” Dad says.
“We try to have children at the same time so that a group of people can grow up together and watch each other’s backs. There are so many enemies out there. So many predators. If we’re not vigilant, we’re hunted. Either by Plunderaars, your kind,” he nods at Callum and Aiden, “or by humans.”
“Hunters?” Zan asks.
“Yeah,” says Dad. “The Alliance of Righteous Humanity.” He picks up a stick and pokes a log in the fire.
“Did you ever see one?” Callum asks.
Dad shakes his head. “Mostly I just thought we lived in this miraculous place where iron oxide ran through the veins of the earth, turning all the ground into red dirt, blood-red dirt. And I could fly up into the blue sky, with the white clouds and live in the stars forever.”
I’m drawn away with him, flying in the blue, blue sky over the red, red earth until he pulls me back with his words.
“So, our clan was five kids. Jimmy and me were the oldest. Then there were three girls. Karin, Diane, and Mary. None of us siblings. By the time I was born, the Passiefs had a system of gathering together and marrying different people off and then sending the new couples off together to create settlements. They didn’t tell anyone where they went. It was the way of keeping safe. Karin was a year younger than me. Diane and Mary were a year younger than Karin, so when they found out we were shifters, we spent a year wondering what type of shifter Karin was going to be.” He grins. “It was the talk of our little compound for a year.”
“Isn’t it just whatever your parents are?” I ask.
“Yeah,” Dad says. “But where we’re from, all species interbreed.”
“How is that possible?” Zan asks. “Nuvervels die.”
Dad shrugs. “Maybe our shifter ceremony is different. I never saw one of us shift into two animals.”
“Why didn’t her parents just tell her what the options were?” I ask.
Dad shakes his head. “Our parents didn’t tell us much of anything. They said our only business was to survive, and to stay focused on daily survival. Now that I know the world, I understand my parents didn’t know much. Neither did the other adults in our compound. They were pretty sheltered from the world.”
“She wasn’t a crocodile?” Zan asks.
“No.” Dad smiles. “She was a peacock.”
“Whoa.” Roman nods. “Cool.”
“I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure that was the truest form of shifting that Karin could have been. See, Karin was super smart. Of all the five families living out on the compound, she was easily the smartest of all of us. And she wanted more than our protected life in our protected community. She knew in another year we’d all go to the gathering and be married off and continue to live the same kind of sheltered life that we’d been living. It wasn’t what she wanted herself. She wanted to go out and find her own life, her own husband.”
“She left?” I ask.
Dad nods. “Shortly after the shifter ceremony, we woke up and Karin was gone. She left a note saying that we shouldn’t worry, that she was just going to find a husband, and she’d be back. But nobody was sure that would happen because Karin always had a bit of a wild streak in her.”
“What’d you guys do?” Aiden asks.
“Her parents left to go find her and bring her back,” Dad says.
“But wait, how did they even know where to go if they hadn’t been anywhere before?” I ask.
“They didn’t. But they were parents. So, they crawled up into the old dusty SUV that we usually used for going into the Alice—”
“Alice Springs?” Zan asks.
Dad nods. “But they knew she wouldn’t go to the Alice. They knew she would want bigger places, so they headed straight over to Adelaide, then across to Melbourne and up to Sydney. We sat back at the station waiting to hear from them, waiting to find out where Karin was and how she was doing, even though we knew they were looking for a needle in a haystack.”
“What about Diane and Mary?” I ask.
“Well, we didn’t know what they were going to be,” Dad says. “But that’s how long it took to find Karin. A whole year. What we didn’t know is that there was a colony of shifters in Sydney, and Karin found them. Because our parents didn’t tell
us anything, we didn’t know that there were two different kinds of shifters.” He shrugs. “Maybe our parents didn’t know. But Karin came across a group of Plunderaars.”
We all exchange looks, and for the briefest second I see Zan, Aiden, Callum, and Roman understand what it’s like to look at a Plunderaar through the eyes of a Passief.
“By coincidence, it was the night that they found Karin’s body that Diane and Mary did the Bloedhart,” Dad continues. “Diane became a sheep and Mary… Well, Mary was a platypus. She was pissed about that, but she liked water so she settled into it.”
“What happened to Karin?” Zan asks.
“She was brutally tortured and murdered,” Dad says it like he’s just relaying the facts, but my body stiffens with every word. “They found her body pushed out of a three-story window in Kings Cross, which is the red-light district of Sydney, or it used to be before the casinos opened. But she died long before she hit the ground. Her fingernails had all been pulled from her fingers, and her eyes had been scratched out.”
Zan and I recoil. Roman’s eyes are huge in the firelight.
“I snuck the newspaper articles away from my parents because I was sick of them not telling us anything. By then I was twenty, and I thought I could handle things.” He shakes his head and digs the stick farther into the fire. “I don’t think you can ever handle things,” he says. “But you need to know, and the only way I know how to tell you is straightforward. The whole truth.” His breath escapes like he’s been holding it for years.
I’m not sure I want him to go on, but there’s no stopping him now.
“So, the paper said that it looked like she’d been attacked by wild animals,” Dad says. “She had bite marks all over her. But we all knew what happened.”
“I thought they said there were no Passiefs alive!” Zan exclaims. “That Passiefs hadn’t been seen for a hundred years!”
“What the Order publicizes and what the Order does are two completely different things,” Dad says. “You should read Machiavelli sometime. The Prince. Tell your people one thing and rule a different way behind their backs. That’s most politicians, but it’s definitely the Order. They have assassins that go everywhere looking for any trace of a Passief. Then they kill them.”
“But what happened to everybody else? How did you end up here?” I ask.
“The night I read that article about Karin, I took to the skies. I loved Karin. Not in the way I love your mother, but I grew up with her. She was one of the few people I knew. She was family.”
I glance at Zan. I can’t imagine if she was tortured and murdered, eaten by wild animals. Our hands instinctively reach out for each other’s.
“The sky was black, but the stars offered no comfort that night,” Dad says. “There was no comfort for years. I went for a long flight to rid myself of the graphic details in the article. But it didn’t work. I kept seeing them.”
Even now the weight of the past sags my Dad’s shoulders down. His hands, normally so warm, are cold as I squeeze his fingers, but he doesn’t respond. He’s deeply engrossed in his past, finally sharing it after almost a lifetime.
“I slept that night where there was nothing. Just a dried-up creek bed and the remains of a ghost eucalypt. It was freezing in the desert at night, but so was I. In the morning, I had made the decision I would never shift again.”
“Never?” Three of us repeat the word at the same time. I don’t know if it was Roman or Callum or Aiden. All I can do is stare at Dad.
“You never shifted again?” I ask.
“I walked home. It took days. I’d flown a long way the night before. But I thought… Well, I thought of all that was going on in the world, and I didn’t want any part of it. I wanted to live as a non-shifter.”
An image of my exhausted Dad trudging the red horizon, framed by the bright blue sky, flashes before me. How could I not know all this about my family? I always just imagined he was from some small town in Australia much like Topanga. A normal teen, going to school, getting a job, and somehow growing up and moving to America.
“I was still ten miles away from the station when I saw the fire. It was raging towards me, and I knew that it had taken the station. But I’d sworn I’d never shift again, and I meant it. I meant it. Even in the face of a raging bush fire, I wasn’t going to shift and outfly it. Instead, I sprinted to the nearest dry creek bed. I ran and ran and dug and dug and dug as quickly as I could. I buried myself in the sand just in time, with just a little hollow of damp soil next to my mouth, so I could try to breathe as the fire raced over me.”
“Like one of those desert frogs,” Roman murmurs.
“There’s not a lot of scrub in the outback,” Dad says. “I passed out lying there, but the fire was gone by the time I woke up. That last ten miles to the station was the longest walk I’d ever experienced in my life.”
“Did you find them?” I ask.
“Yeah.” Dad’s Australian drawl slows. His eyes burn with loss and the vivid memory. I think he’s about to stop talking, but he seems resigned to tell the story. He takes a deep breath, and when he exhales, he continues with a strong voice. “All of their bodies were laid out in an orderly line in front of the charred remains of the house. I just stood there staring at them and realized that they had been executed. All of them. My aunts and uncles, my parents. Diane and Mary. When they had been torturing Karin, they had been getting information on where to find the rest of us. I didn’t blame Karin. You never know what kind of pain someone can handle, but now, I was all that was left.”
Zan’s hand is over her mouth in horror. The stick that Callum’s been digging into the dirt snaps.
“I don’t remember much of the days and weeks that followed,” Dad continues. “I wandered around out there in the desert. I knew I should hide my tracks, but I didn’t care. I didn’t care if they found me and killed me. I’d lost everything. My parents, my aunts and uncles, my cousins, my home, my land, everything. Without them, I had no idea where to go or what to do, and that was just fine by me. Finally, I found myself somewhere up around Darwin and got on a container ship as crew.”
“You just left?” Aiden’s voice is quiet.
“Yeah.” Dad nods. “I just left. I lost myself in Asia for a while, then whatever ship I was on landed in New York. To this day, I don’t know all the places we went to get there.”
My mind reels from Dad’s story.
“Mom?” I ask.
“She found me in this place—” Dad cuts off his words, and I can see in his eyes that he’s weighing how much to tell us. I don’t push him. He’s already told me more than I ever dreamed was possible. “I was lying passed out in a pool of my own vomit.”
I shake my head. “So, you didn’t meet jogging in a park.” How much of what I think is my history is true?
“No.” Dad’s blue eyes stare at me over the fire. “Your mom took me home. I still have no idea why, but when I woke up and saw her looking at me, I knew I’d come home again.”
“Mom.” I shake my head incredulously, my brain reeling. “Did you know?”
“That she was a shifter?” Dad asks.
I nod.
“Yes,” he says. “Well the first day we met she had a wicked rage attack, so I knew she was a wyte. There was a one in our group. Uncle Barry. He’d never had the ceremony, so nobody even knew what type of shifter he was. He’d have these awful fits of rage, and we’d restrain him. When your mom started having fits of anger, I knew she had the same disease.”
“It’s not a disease,” says Zan.
“I know it’s not…now,” Dad says. “But I didn’t know that then. I had no idea. I hated everything about shifters. I hated the fact that we shifted. I hated the Passiefs. I hated the Plunderaars and more than anything, I hated the Order. And I hated the part of me that could shift, because it took away everything I’ve ever loved.”
“The Order did that,” I say.
“Yes.” Dad nods. In the glow of the fire with the shadow
s dancing across his face, he suddenly looks aged. “And now you’re all sworn to them.” Dad looks around at all my friends who are quiet and serious.
Aiden’s face is grim.
“We’ll protect ourselves,” says Callum.
“We’ll protect each other,” agrees Zan.
Dad nods. “I know there’s good strong support here. This isn’t the Australian outback, with five couples clinging together, trying to raise a new brood of shifters. You’ve got the Van Arends and the Ravensgaard, your history books, and even science.”
He makes eye contact with each of my friends as he lists their skills and capabilities. My chest surges with pride. I’m blessed with great friends.
“But you don’t know the assassins of the Order. They have a few. The real assassins make Vasquez look like a house cat.”
“But we’re supposed to keep this a secret for…what? How long?” And why? Why would we want to keep this a secret? Why can’t we tell people what is going on? Who the Order is and how it’s run. But even in my close circle of friends who know everything about me, I don’t dare to bring this up. It reeks of rebellion and two of my best friends lead this Muiderkring.
“You’d be surprised at how ignorant people can be,” Dad says. “Most people want to be ignorant. The truth is, it’ll take a long time for people to piece it all together. First they’d have to want to know the truth.”
“The truth is, she’s a raven,” Callum says.
“Yes,” Aiden agrees.
“So, because you were discovered,” Dad say, “they’ll assume that either I’m a raven or I’m nothing. The card we are playing is that I’m nothing.” He nods around my circle of friends. “Are we clear?”
We all nod. But I can’t get the visual out of my head.
“My grandmother? My grandfather?” I ask
“Rob and Jenny Bradfield,” Dad says. “November 28,1970. That’s the day they died.” He makes it clean and clinical, just names and numbers.
But it doesn’t wipe out the vision I have of them, the charred, blackened corpses of my ancestors lying side by side on the blood-red earth.
