by Q. Zayne
“That’s hard to believe.” Severe understatement. Yet I couldn’t deny how this place drew me, how the bones of the earth here and the deep scents of the woods satisfied me, fulfilled me as intensely yet differently as mating with Lida did. And now she allowed me to love her. I knew she was right, this was my home.
“You must face it Ian, you’re old, improbably old.”
I shook my head. I’d trusted her, followed her through all this, opened my heart—and now she hit me in my face with my age?
She grasped my arm.
“Listen to me, my love. All those old tales in your realm about people who lived for hundreds of years, those are remnants of the true knowing. Humans used to know about us. You’re destined to be the leader here. We need you.” She lowered her lashes. I saw the palest freckles in curved stripes down her cheeks. “I need you.” Her breasts rose and fell with her emotion.
My heart surged uncomfortably. Blake would chide that I was going to give myself a heart attack, although he’d approve of the increase in exercise. He’d envy me Lida.
I reached for her and she surrendered into my arms. I smoothed her hair.
“I love you, Lida.” So many things I needed to ask her, but for now, I felt happy to have her in my arms and be at peace.
For the moment, no one was trying to kill us. I didn’t expect the break from danger to last. I’d seen the rage and madness in the eyes of our enemy. He’d come after Lida. From now on, I had to be ready for him.
The Trouble With Time
I watched the big pale sun rise through the brush that hid our den’s entrance. First day of my life. Under other circumstances that might seem hokey, but here it was true. I found my true mate after a lifetime alone. And I’d come home. I found my purpose in life here, that weighty thing, my destiny, here in the lands of my ancestors. I was meant to protect our kind. Serving as a protector has been a duty of Bear for lifetimes, to back before recorded history. It’s a sacred role recorded by first people.
All I needed to do was to kill the invaders’ leader and all would be right. I stepped back into the shadows and paced. Was that so different from the strangers thinking they needed to kill shifters to restore balance? It was an uncomfortable thought. What did anyone ever get with killing except more killing? Or fear and anger, people pitted against each other for lifetimes or generations? But the usual social mechanisms of imprisonment or banishment gave no satisfaction. I wanted revenge. I didn’t think I was spiritually evolved enough to let go of that.
Lida padded up behind me and put her arms around my chest. She rested her chin on my shoulder. I held still as a human cat friend does when an unfamiliar cat deigns to come near. It was the first time she’d touched me first other than to present herself for sex, or her sweet morning kiss. I was so moved I blinked repeatedly as her warm breath came out in steam plumes near my face. Her soles were so thick from a lifetime barefooted that she didn’t feel the cold of the stones. I envied her, yet I was already less of a tenderfoot.
I let all thoughts slide away, finally, feeling her closeness, her heart beating against my back.
“Your time is running out. I can tell you how to get back.”
“Good try, but you don’t get rid of me that easy.” I grinned, but I wasn’t feeling it.
“If you stay to help me, your time will have passed in your world.” She squeezed my arm. “It’s been months there.” Her voice was small. I suspected she hadn’t wanted to tell me about the time difference because she wanted my help.
My strained smile failed. It was like the shift from being mellowed on a couple glasses of wine to being stone sober. I stretched my mind to comprehend it. My time will have passed in my world. Meaning everyone will be dead. The pleasant and efficient Jan at the front desk, jocular and consistently reprimanding Blake—my one real friend, considering I had to keep crucial details about myself secret. How would Blake react if I told him the truth, that I shifted into the form of a bear at will? Looked like I’d never know. I’d always related to comic book heroes. They knew that spilling your secret put the people you cared about at risk as much as it stuck your own hide in the cross hairs.
I cared about Blake and enjoyed his easy, crooked smile, his warm, calm touch. Maybe he’d instinctively related to me the way humans related to wild animals, taking care not to spook me by moving in too close, too fast. Hell, I’d miss him.
My pregnant patients had their babies months ago without me. Much longer in those realms, the young mothers would be grandmothers, then lying in their graves.
I looked into Lida’s eyes. There was no question. Not just because she was the hottest woman I’d ever made love to in my life, not because I wanted to do more things to her, some of them bad things I’d only dreamed of and felt guilty imagining, and not because she looked so damned crazy-vulnerable despite being such a smart, brave, and strong shifter. I had to stay with her because I knew our hearts and fates were as intertwined as if we were one being. Her outcome affected mine. I didn’t want to go anywhere without her.
As I thought it out, pine shadows lengthened, insects died, star systems were born. The wheel kept turning.
Okay, as crazy as it was to think, in the time I spent here my house might fall off its pylons into the Pacific. It wouldn’t be mine anymore anyway. Snap your fingers and the seven years it took to declare me dead would be gone. At least I left a legacy.
The proceeds from the house, the cars, my summer place, my art collection, my antique weapons, all of it would go to medical scholarships for underprivileged youth, the bright men and women who’d have no shot at med school in our increasingly divided society. It hurt my heart watching how most of the ‘haves’ kept it all and the ‘have nots’ had less and less while the rising costs of education—and hell, even just the basics of living in California—closed the gates of opportunity for a better life more each year. If even a few people who wanted a medical career got a chance because of what I left behind, then my life had as much meaning as I could hope to achieve. I was good with that.
I shook myself out of my time-travel musings. Hard to buy it, no matter how long I turned it over in my mind. While a few weeks passed for me here, every thing and person I’d known for the length of my memory rotted and turned to dust. Damn, that was harsh.
Gave me a new insight into the sacrifices of the strangers. Had they been explorers? Lida said the passage closed. They couldn’t get home. As bitter enraged as I felt toward their leader, I considered what he must have left behind and the hard isolation of being stuck here with no hope of return. Being responsible for all of his kind in a strange land. We just gained something in common. As little as I wanted to feel compassion for him, I did.
Lida held her finger to her lips. “Don’t speak. Think it through.” Light caressed the soft waves of her hair spilling over my shoulder and raising goosebumps as she moved. I craned my neck and tilted my head to get a good look at her so close up. I couldn’t decide if she was the most beautiful at dawn or in the changing light of evening. Perhaps right now, when the sight of her burned my heart. Yes, because soon it will be dark and the lack of efficient lighting meant I wouldn’t see her clearly again until the sun rose.
I brought my mind back to the decision. There was no decision to make. I couldn’t leave her.
I forfeit everything, but gain a longer life. A life with Lida. Countless years stretching before us and the chance to leave a legacy of change and become the stuff of legends here.
But pairings such as ours are forbidden.
I have to stay with her. This is a choice. That’s why Lida wants me to think it through. I have to be clear about what I’m doing, the sacrifices this entails. Because there’s no way back. It’s like a gate between realms closing in a movie. If you stay, everything else in your life is over. It’s a weighty thing.
I’d never get to see Lida in yoga pants, and I’d really like to. I could never take her to the opera or to an antiques mall to look for Samurai swords. W
e’d never get to travel the world together, or if we did, it would be the future world. What would it be like to go back one day, barely changed by my slow-lane life here, and find Blake’s grave, and a gap like a missing tooth on the coast where my house once stood. And who would I be then? I’d be in California with no medical practice—not that I was sure I still deserved one—no property, no bank accounts, and my ID would be that of a man declared dead long before. I snorted. I’d be without reputation, after all my fears about destroying myself by mounting Lida, it turned out I had no future as Dr. Montgomery.
My life in the place where I’d made my home was over.
Who would clean up after me, go through my effects, as they say. I’d meant to make a will, but only got as far as the scholarships. Well, you’re never ready, that was the thing about mortality.
The dimming light cast long shadows on her face. The sadness on her features and her furrowed brows were from more than the dying day.
“I’m not leaving you, Lida.” She waved my words away. “What is it? What’s troubling you?”
“Their leader was going to keep me. As his property.” Her nose wrinkled. “I pulled you into danger. The strangers wanted to experiment, to see if he could make me pregnant and if I could bring forth viable offspring for them. Their women are infertile, they say. I don’t know the details, but it might not have occurred to them that perhaps it’s the men shooting blanks.”
It wasn’t a matter I cared to debate. My belly roiled and my muscles pumped. I dug my nails into my palms to distract myself and keep from shifting. His making her captive and making such casual use of her as though she were breeding stock made me livid. I wanted to smash his nose bone into his brain and wrench his arms out of their sockets to beat in his head. I shook with the intensity of my desire to avenge her.
“Calm down! He didn’t—he wasn’t able to mate. He tried, but he couldn’t get hard.” She held me tight, her body pressed against me. “He tried many times. He kept me tied down when he tried to mate with me, afraid I’d shift into tiger and kill him. He was right to be afraid.” I turned and held her. She buried her face in my chest. “Each time he failed, he blamed me and hit me. Their healer has been working on a potion to help him perform. They have rigid rules about everything. They planned days of purifications, out of fear I was making him sick.”
“It would seem that strategically he’d want to have an expendable male take the risk.” I’d gotten drawn into thinking about it, and I did not want to think of any stranger, anyone of any kind, mounting Lida for mating. If anyone touched her, I’d tear his hands off and his cock, too.
“That’s not how they think. The leader must be the first one to explore new things and he’s under pressure to create an heir, the same dynastic pressure humans have had for thousands of years, only in their society females count as heirs and from what I gather, always have.” Her calm, measured tones seemed to have a purr to them no matter what the topic. I wanted to wake up to the sound of her voice for the rest of my life.
“What is his name, the alien leader?” I pictured him clearly in my mind, pictured him screaming in pain, about to die.
“Karok.”
“Because of Karok, you came to me.”
She squirmed in my arms. It was strange to think of, that this brutal, though impotent, invader brought us together.
“Yes. I heard of your parents left with a boy child. From Miren, I learned how to reach your realm. I thought if I could get to you soon enough, you’d still be alive —”
“And not too-too old.” I gave her my most charming smile.
“Not too-too,” she agreed, and poked me in the chest.
Centuries ago an Egyptian queen wrote to a neighboring ruler seeking a husband. I’d always imagined how desperate she must have felt. I could barely imagine how Lida’s life must have been. As strong and skilled as she was, she had to be able to sleep. She’d become prey and living alone made it all too easy for the strangers to retake her.
Understandable that she sought someone to have at her back. I didn’t ask about the buffalo. Suffice it that for her, there was no mate. I got chills at how all the small details added up to us finding each other and how any change in the threads of the tapestries that made up our lives would have made things turn out otherwise. If I’d married, if the passageway to the strangers’ realm hadn’t closed… I held her tight and took a deep breath. I couldn’t stand to think of all those possible story lines where we’d never meet, never mate, never love.
I’m staying with her. It’s my only recourse, so I’ll accept losing everything else. And one other little detail: fight the leader of the aliens who wants Lida for himself. A fight to the death. Things were pretty primal here.
From the highest place out of sight of the cave, I searched the landscape for signs of the strangers. I wished for the simplest field glasses, even an antique pair of binoculars. What would it take to grind a lens in a place with no technology? It boggled my mind. Was there suitable sand? Could I get it to a high enough temperature? Was there any kind of pot I could melt it in that wouldn’t be destroyed if I could get it hot enough? And then how to shape and polish it. It seemed impossible. For now I’d have to accept the limitations of things as they were.
Mist rose over boulders and scrub. Hares bounded through the meadow. An eagle, perhaps Miren, glided past. I’d never had to listen to too-loud music, phones ringing or all those high-pitched electronic beeps and ear-assaulting engine noises indoors and out, or have my image recorded everywhere I went all day long. No one here poisoned the water, the air, the food.
The eagle dipped toward me, nodded, veered away. I waved. Yes, Miren. She’d helped Lida reach me. Bless her forever. At least we had some allies here.
I had to live without my phone, my cars, my boat… okay, okay. No point enumerating it all. It was a different pace here. The sooner I accepted that, the more I could enjoy my life. As much as I cursed the inefficiency of this place, where instead of being able to locate Karok with an instrument powerful enough to see their cooking fires from miles away I was stuck on this hill straining my eyes, I’d never have to watch another car crash victim die. Never have to examine the wounds on an abused child ever again. The anxiety that one nation’s cretinous president or another would destroy the world could be laid to rest.
I scanned the landscape in all directions. Now that I wanted to find our enemies instead of evade them, they were no where to be found.
My immediate thought had been to attack him. Just go right after him and throttle him with my bare hands if I had to. Make his face turn purple and his tongue stick out, watch the veins burst in his eyes as I snuffed his life out. Yet I had never seen him away from a group of his kind. Unlikely I could catch him alone, and ludicrous to imagine I could fight a group of them. Even in bear form I was slower than I used to be, past my prime. Damn it.
As much as I wanted to attack him, it wasn’t feasible.
The sun went down on my second day keeping watch for signs of them. Going in search of them would only waste energy. As I’d discovered in my walks with Lida, even though my fitness was improving, this was tiring terrain and it took hours on foot to get from place to place. I didn’t want to leave Lida alone. We’d seen no sign of the straners, but I doubted Karock had given up on his plans for siring an heir. What else could he do? Watch his kind die out?
My vigil had one good outcome. I noticed the buffalo, a pair of coyotes and some hawks heading west.
Here, in the realm of my ancestors, I might save some lives. We might save entire species, the two of us.
I stopped at the cave to tell Lida what I was doing, kissed her sweet lips, and set out to follow them.
It didn’t surprise me to come upon a meeting of shifters. Despite a few unwelcoming stares, I joined them. The fact that they hadn’t invited Lida was a bad sign. My presence cost her her acceptance among them.
It wasn’t an easy meeting, but by talking to the shifter elders, despite
many of them maintaining their disdain for me, I learned the strangers were known to have a sense of honor, even though they hunted us like animals. The discovery of a wolf shifter speared and skinned near the temple prompted the meeting. It seemed a deliberately brutal and provocative gesture.
Miren, the eagle, had seen me best Karok when the hunters surrounded me in the boulders. She spoke in my defense. Her speech made more of the shifters willing to suspend their animosity, or at least refrain from displaying it.
It wasn’t full acceptance, but it was progress. I bowed to her and nodded to the rest of them as I took my leave to tell Lida the news.
It was disturbing that the strangers had returned to the temple since Lida’s escape. They’d been in our territory and might still be here. They’d killed and left the body. However foreign they might be, no hunter left a kill in a land of scarcity without a reason. They wanted us to know they’d been here. I grabbed a stick and twisted it between my hands until it cracked, envisioning Karok’s neck.
They got so close, yet with such stealth, I’d seen no sign of them. Horrible to think their murder of the werewolf might be retaliation for my raid on their camp.
How had they evaded my watch? Maybe they camped without fires. If I planned to attack, I’d stop giving away my location, too. Time to stay on alert, prepare for more aggression from the brutal hunters. I’d shift to bear for all my meals, eat everything raw. Protect Lida with my life.
I never met the werewolf, but I felt his death. They murdered him while he was alone in a sacred place, a place that had been safe for generations before the strangers arrived. There were few enough shifters here as it was; they couldn’t be allowed to kill any more of us.
Karok had to die.
Battle
I lumbered to the temple in the pre-dawn chill, making breath angels with my snout. I arrived at the center of the pillars as the sun rose. My claws clicked on the ancient stones as I flexed my now-stronger, more limber body. I delighted in my thick pelt, my powerful teeth and claws. Me, all bear, out in the open, no longer a secret shifter. The place was healing me.
