by White, Jade
For a moment, Kristen was afraid he was going to tear the steering wheel off of its hinge as he strangled the leather wrapping around it.
“I’m not going to let that happen again. No, if it’s me they want, then I’ll let them have me. But this needs to end, now. And I don’t want you involved… you or our… baby,” Rodney’s voice softened and he reached toward her, his hand settling on her abdomen.
It wasn’t like she couldn’t understand how he felt, he had tried to run from his past for so long, and it had finally caught up with him against his will. And now, worst of all, the things he valued most in the world were in the line of fire. She placed her own hands over his, felt the wide spaces of his fingers cupping her stomach.
“Rodney, I know that you want to finish this yourself. And I know that you only want to protect me. But I’ve been protecting myself for a long time – I can handle myself.”
“Kristen, this isn’t a game, it’s-”
“Someone is threatening my mate, and my child,” she said sternly, her eyes forcing his to look at her. He didn’t look like the strong man she had grown to love. There were cracks in his defense, weaknesses that were starting to show through. I am his weakness, she thought – it was because of her that he was willing to take on an entire gang of Tigers. It was because of her that he was now cornered, with no other choice but to fight.
But I can also be his strength, she admitted, and stiffened her upper lip.
“They hurt Gloria, and for that I have as much of a right as any to go after them. But I won’t let you go alone. You can’t ask me to merely stand on the sidelines, not this time,” she insisted.
A tense moment passed between them, interrupted only by the occasional car passing. Rodney leaned his head against the steering wheel. “If I lose you… I can’t… I can’t even-”
She touched his arm. “You won’t,” she promised.
It was hardly enough to reassure him, but she hoped it would do. She could only imagine the sort of dilemma he was facing. For her it was very clear – she needed to protect the people she loved: Gloria, Rodney, her unborn child. She had already failed to protect Gloria, and now it had emboldened her to do her best for those who remained.
But for Rodney it was different. He had once belonged to Theo and his gang, and the fact they had showed up again would have felt as if he’d brought them full circle. It’s not your fault, none of this is, she wanted to say, but words would be useless. Neither of them could escape their own feelings. All they could do was ride them out.
Rodney pulled out of the hospital and headed uphill. This was where some of the swankier buildings and residences were piled onto precipitous hills overlooking the whole valley and the lake below. It was also where the town cemetery was located, stowed away in a small flat bench of land beside a small creek. Admittedly, she hadn’t spent much time up here, simply because it was a long and tiring walk. But she did find the place very peaceful.
Even in autumn, with winter almost at their doorstep, the place held a certain eerie kind of magic, as if suspended in the air. She followed Rodney’s lead as they parked the truck and walked through the iron-wrought fence, a tall sloping black thing that looked like the entrance to a super-villain’s lair.
“I don’t smell anything out of the ordinary,” Rodney said, stopping short ahead. He had put on a black Gore-tex jacket and it crinkled with each movement. He lifted the slim ridge of his nose and tested the air. “Only leaves and rot.”
Kristen looked around. Whoever was the groundkeeper must have gone on vacation, because all of the graves were covered in a haphazard mess of dead leaf matter. The tall oaks here were thicker, bigger around then the ones in town, as if the town itself had started with the graveyard and then meandered its way down to the lake. She wrapped her arms around her and her gaze followed the cobblestone path that led slightly upwards to where the tree line hedged the graveyard. Here there were evergreens, fir and spruce that stood straight up like green and black sentinels, and the air grew cooler as the two of them walked warily under the canopy. With the graveyard behind them, Kristen felt as if they’d passed into another world.
“Kristen,” she heard Rodney whisper, “if we do find Theo, what exactly is our plan?”
“What was your strategy if you planned to meet him alone?” she queried. “First we bargain, and if that doesn’t work-”
“It won’t” he said callously.
“I know. But if it doesn’t, then we make him leave.”
“Just the two of us,” he said, doubt flooding his voice. The forest around them grew darker, denser. Underfoot there were pine needles and humus, and the dark chthonic smells of the earth bubbling upward.
She reached for his hand again. “That’s all there is,” she said, trying to sound strong. But in fact she was just as nervous. The image of Theo’s mangled face was still frozen in her memory, a snapshot of a twisted Shifter who had sulked too long on revenge to be called either animal or human. What sort of a chance do we actually have? she wondered. It would have been a different matter if she were back in the Enclave – there she would have support, other Shifters, a veritable army to back her up. The two of them hiked further, following a well worn trail through the woods that might’ve been a deer path. After about an hour, they both unanimously agreed to stop and take a breather.
“Can you feel it?” Kristen asked, leaning her hands on her knees.
“Yea,” her mate murmured, “something in the air. I can taste it alright. It’s a scent, but so faint it’s almost like I’m imagining it. This must’ve been where Gloria came to.”
“If that’s right, then they should be over the next knoll,” Kristen replied.
The two crouched low, wending their way through the underbrush of ferns and low growing shrubs, which tore at their clothing. In a way, it felt thrilling to be back in the wild, to have the earth moving under her belly. But she knew it was just a restrained fear. Am I fool for following Rodney? she wondered, and could almost picture the growing child inside her, dividing cell by cell as it grew. She had never put much faith in the idea of a maternal instinct, but she was learning many things she had taken for granted were wrong in the real world.
I need to protect my baby, the thought was like a mantra repeating itself over and over in her brain. She knew that if she were truly human, she wouldn’t have thought twice about packing up her things, retreating back to Seattle with Gloria until things were safe – but that’s not the Shifter way, she reminded herself. A Shifter couple stayed together, no matter what: they fought, ate, cried, hunted, and made love together. And whatever happened, they faced danger together, too.
Rodney put a finger to his lips as she crawled on her belly toward him and looked over the edge. Below them through a veil of thin ferns and meager cedar saplings was a small clearing. Half a dozen liquid forms circled below, their orange and black tails flicking left and right. Tigers. There were more of them than Kristen had predicted and in the center of the clearing, barely visible, she made out one that was larger than the rest.
It was hard to tell from this distance, but it was very obviously Theo. His tall muscular form was poised and elegant, but his shoulders were hunched forward, and it gave him a very domineering effect. His face was a mess of lateral scars where the fur hadn’t grown back, and one of his eyes had a discoloration, which was fearsome, and seemed to command the other Tigers at his feet.
Unlike their leader, these were scrawny in comparison, ribs drum-wrapped and faces shrunk. One of them was limping on his left paw as he circled, and another was missing half his tail. The stories about growing up rough that Rodney had told her weren’t an exaggeration – these were survivors, no doubt about it. But other than Theo, they’ve done little else but survive, she thought pitiably.
“What do we do?” she hissed.
Rodney held up his hand in a gesticulation she took to mean as wait. The way the Tigers below were acting, it was as if they were preparing to move out. One
of the brood, a lanky looking Tiger who might as well have been a lieutenant, stopped short in front of Theo. Theo was standing on his haunches as he watched his gang below, and a low growl emitted from his lips, followed by a very human nod. The lieutenant bowed its head in some form of deference, and then turned and let out a yipping sound to the throng below.
All at once, they took off at a gallop, heading east. Rodney forced Kristen and himself lower under the cover of ferns as the sound of heavy paws thudded by, not twenty feet away, heading back down the mountain toward town. Kristen could only hope their scent didn’t carry, but in moments they were gone.
“Where are they going?” she asked.
“I don’t know. But if Theo is looking for me, they’re probably trying to encircle the town. Don’t worry, Gloria is probably the safest person in Nelson right now.”
“So what do we do?”
Rodney pointed with his index finger back down the cedar gulley. Only a few Tigers remained, the one with the limp and another smaller runt, and of course Theo. He remained perched on the mossy rock for a moment longer, and Kristen felt her anger wrench at her stomach again. He was the one that hurt Gloria, she thought. Somehow she knew it, in the core of her being. And I will make you pay.
“There’s only three of them,” she muttered.
“Easy,” he cautioned, “there might only be three, but one of them is Theo, and that alone is reason enough to move with caution. I suggest we confront them on two fronts, what do you think? Move down to the right,” he indicated where the limping Tiger had settled in against a tuft of moss, licking its paws, “and I’ll come in on the left.”
She nodded. “Kiss me first,” she said.
Rodney was already moving toward her on his belly, and held her tightly. “Be careful, love,” he said. “I mean it. Let me make the first move.”
She nodded again, and reluctantly watched him go. Now it was up to her. Still moving on her belly she clambered carefully through the small canopies of ferns. Everything in the grove was covered with moss and it helped to cushion her movements as she advanced. There was no wind, which was both a curse and a blessing – a blessing because at least she didn’t have to worry about its direction while sneaking up on the Tiger, but a curse because there would be no way to hide her scent once it was discovered.
Kristen was sweating by time she reached the vertices of a rocky perch that looked down on the sleepy Tiger. It was impressive, to think there were Shifters who spent more time in Form than not. She wondered what that meant for their minds. There was a clear distinction between the mind of an animal and the mind of a human, and she had always enjoyed the occasional mingling of the two whenever she came out of one Form or another. But to rely so heavily on the animal within – they must lose some part of their own humanity.
She gave a quick survey of her quarry. He couldn’t have been more than twenty in human years, and he looked as if the bone in his leg had been broken, or at least dislocated, at some point in the past. It had tried to heal itself, but there was a large bump where the bone had mended badly. She felt another wave of pity, and tentatively leaned back against her shield of rock as she undid her coat and pulled her shirt over her head.
The cold stone caused goosebumps to rise on her forearms and breasts, and she bit her lip as she undid her jeans and slid out of her panties. Fully naked, she pushed her clothes into a nook of rock, and looked over the side of the perch again. Distant, the regal shape of Theo had settled against another block of stone, and he was gnawing at the remains of some bird.
She waited until she saw the tell-tale sign of Rodney wading through the bushes – except he wasn’t in Form. He had taken off his jacket and was approaching the small enclosure of trees as if he had no care in the world, though his biceps were hard under his T-shirt and his hands were balled into fists the size of grapefruits.
It was Theo who saw him first, and let out a growl. Kristen barely had time to change herself before the Tiger under her was alerted. Her transformation was rapid, almost instantaneous, and she felt the shocking pain of muscles and sinew and bone rearranging under her flesh, but the urgency of what she had to do made it a blur. In moments, a long tail lashed out behind her, and her dark orange plumage caught what little light entered through the trees and made it glow. She growled as she leapt off her perch, and the poor limping Tiger under her had no way to meet her ambush.
They both collided hard, and she used her own weight to push down on his front end, burying his head into the granite and earth as she rolled off of him. He was stunned, but she knew it would only take seconds for him to regain his composure, so she struck out with her hind legs. The force of it caused the younger male to spiral backward with a sharp yelp, and his back impacted against the stone wall he’d been sleeping against. With a crumple he landed and let out a sigh.
Meanwhile, Rodney had the full attention of Theo and the remaining runt Tiger, who hissed like a domestic cat at him as he strode into the clearing. Rodney paid no mind to the younger one, but kept his gaze firmly fastened on Theo. When he came to a stop less than five feet from Theo, the elder Tiger let a throaty growl gurgle from its long throat as it moved on all fours.
Rodney stiffened – in human form, it would take only a single swipe of the long serrated claws to end him, but he was counting on Theo’s arrogance. Kristen moved forward as well, an equilateral distance from both Theo and Rodney, and saw the Tiger’s grim scarred face give her an almost humorous grin. His long teeth were chipped, one was longer than the other, but they were still as sharp as stakes.
The standoff lasted heartbeats, but to Kristen it seemed to wear on forever. It wasn’t until Theo ducked his low head and began to revert back into a human that she finally put herself at ease – but still, she remained in Form, wary, waiting for the slightest provocation to leap into the fray. Across from her, the Tiger runt seemed equally appreciable to the task, raking his claws into the earth like a bull tempting a trespasser. He’s young, and ungainly on his feet, she observed her opponent, but it still wouldn’t take much more than a single claw of his to sever Rodney’s neck from his body. The mental image chilled her to the bone and she crouched lower, her shoulder blades rippling, and hoped her singular appearance would dissuade the younger one from taking action.
Rodney must have sensed her anxiety, and looked at her out of the corner of his eye. His head made a barely discernible shake. Whatever else these Tigers are, they obey without thinking, he seemed to say. The runt wouldn’t attack unless Theo ordered it, so she brought her attention back to him.
His transformation was slower, almost deliberate, as the fur sloughed off his body and great hulking arms loomed out of his paws. His hair was white now, she saw, and was trimmed in a military cut. But his face was the same one she remembered.
“Well, well, well,” he said, his baritone voice like gravel hitting a windshield. It was as if he’d temporarily forgotten human speech, and it sounded unusual and awkward as it spilled over his tongue. “Welcome back, little brother. I see you brought company.”
“Leave her out of it,” Rodney said, his voice deadpan.
“You should have thought of that before you mated. You two are mates, aren’t you? Granted, I could only go on what my scouts told me, but it seems like you’ve made quite a home for yourself in this swamp of a place.”
“I came here for one reason, Theo. To make you leave.”
“And how do you propose to do that?” the elder Tiger said. He turned back to his throne and sat down on a crude piece of granite, crossing one leg over the other. His naked thighs were almost the size of small tree trunks.
“Why did you come back?”
“Why, indeed?” he smirked, “This is my home, too. Or it once was, if you remember. We used to be a family. But they kicked us out, burned us out, until we had to flee…”
“That was your fault, Theo. You killed a man,” Rodney said, taking a step forward.
“I did what I had to, in order t
o protect you… in order to protect all of us!” Theo screamed, “After Craven died, who took care of you, who made sure you had clothes on your back and food in your belly? Certainly not anyone from town, no… it was me! Maybe mistakes were made… but we had to survive, and I’ll be damned if I;ll let you lecture me on that now. I’m back, that’s all that matters.”
“To take revenge, is that it?” Rodney hissed.
“Revenge? Where’s the survival value in revenge? No, to come home. You don’t know what it was like, Rodney… to be hunted. We fled north, where there were fewer people, but it was cold. You don’t know cold until you’ve settled into an Alaskan winter. We lost more than a few of our brothers that first year.
“For too long we’ve been banished. I couldn’t watch them suffer any longer. We’ll take back our farm, and then we’ll take back the town. The way it should’ve been… and if they get in our way, well… but I will not be chased away again. Soon we’ll be a pack again, like no other.”
Rodney shrugged and almost laughed. “Is that why you threatened Kristen? To try and get me to join you? You really have lost your mind if you think I’ll help you after that.”
“We needed to get your attention!” Theo flashed, his anger subsiding as he stood up. “We never would have hurt her. She’s another Shifter, like us! But we knew that if we threatened her, you would come… I didn’t know how else to get you here. I’m sorry… I know it is unforgivable.”
Now Kristen could see there were numerous other scars lining his body, up and down his back and across his arms and legs. Most of them were long gashes.
No doubt he and the others survived by taking down prey, just like our descendants would have done, she thought. But Theo’s were extensive, and it struck her that he must have attended every hunt, spent every spare moment hunting and foraging just to feed his lot. He was misguided, violent, and perhaps the sanity that once belonged to his human side had long ago perished, but he was still their leader and he cared about them, enough to risk his own life again and again.
