Harvest: Dark Urban Fantasy (Shifter Chronicles Book 3)

by Melle Amade

  “Okay,” I acquiesce, backing away. “But we’re going to have to come back tomorrow and talk to them.”

  “Or set up a meeting or something,” Callum suggests. “We can ask Cooper to help us figure it out. Let’s just follow Spotswood rules. For once.” He raises his eyebrows at me, his hand on my elbow walking me swiftly away from the village and the light.

  We move quickly through the shadows of the massive trees, the gloom of the forest hugging as and keeping us close. Our steps are swift, bodies suddenly cold as we’ve left the warmth of the village and the heat of the fire. We’re enveloped in the ancient trees, surrounded by a world that seems to live and breathe around us.

  It’s unrecognizable from where we were.

  “We should be at the truck by now,” I mumble, slowing my steps as we enter a clearing that I’m sure I have never been in before. We all stop and peer into the dark night. As shifters, even with the collars, we have pretty good night vision. I can make out hanging bridges, roughhewn platforms, and rope ladders interspersed around the trees that surround the glen. Everything is overgrown and covered in moss as if it’s been sitting here, unused for years. We’re a good way away from the village, strange anybody would be out here. But somebody was, even if it was a while ago. Somebody built all this.

  “What is this place?” Roman whispers.

  “I’m going to take a closer look.” Without waiting, Callum shifts into a raven, his dark feathers blending with the shadows as he takes to the air. I don’t look and try to stop the yearning flooding through me. My neck burns as my body desire to shift. Roman flinches, too. Our friends have shifted rarely in front of us since we were collared, but every time they do, my skin chills and my neck burns where the collar touches me.

  I know Callum needs to get a quick perspective of the space, but as I rub my hand against the metal loop on my neck, I wish he would have given me some warning. Though I guess it wouldn’t have changed anything.

  It would still hurt.

  Roman’s fingers trail along the deep red and brown grooves of a massive tree that stands near the edge of the clearing. He gets down on his hands and knees and moves around the base, picking up small shards of something. He holds them up in the dim light, shrugging. “Some sort of metal,” he says, putting a sample in his pocket.

  At the center of the clearing there’s a couple of trunks, and on them are a combination of mechanical and wooden devices. I prowl in a full circle, the eerie light of the moon barely seeping through the trees. The wind moves through the glen as devices and metal cranks in the trees. I hear something whistling straight at me and quickly duck to the side as a blade flies right by my head and into the tree opposite.

  “What was that?” I cry, twisting around to find Roman pressing his fingers against a tree and pulling the bark off to find that inside it’s set up almost like a, well, like one of those machines that chucks tennis balls at players. Only in this case, the apparatus is not throwing yellow felted orbs, it’s throwing knives; sharp, deadly knives.

  “You almost killed me!” I yank the blade from the tree, turning it over in my hand.

  “Impossible,” Roman smiles. “You have so many superpowers, nothing can kill you.”

  Callum floats down through the dark, transforming into his human self and landing next to us. “It’s a training ground,” he says.

  We nod in agreement. “Still fully armed.” I shoot Roman a glare.

  “I scoped the area pretty quickly, but it’s pretty big and intricate. It looks like there’s bridges between a lot of the trees, rope swings and even a zip line. You guys should check it out. It’s pretty cool.” Callum grins, leading us towards a ladder that’s nailed into a tree trunk.

  I raise my eyebrows. “Whoever built this was pretty clever.”

  We soon stand on a rope bridge high above the ground that connects two of the massive trees guarding the clearing. I breathe deeply, even if it’s not flying, it’s so nice to be up in the air. Before I can stop myself, I’m running along the rope bridge, crawling up a tree trunk to another platform and then grabbing a rope and swinging out into the open. I curve around to another trunk and grab on, finding little notches all the way up as I start climbing up the rough bark. The holes in the tree disappears a few feet up and I lose my grip, sliding against the coarse tree.

  Right, this is where I learn to climb without the notches.

  Only it’s really difficult. Skin scrapes off my hands as I dig for a hold. I finally stop my downward slip. “Who built this place?” I call to Roman and Callum, who stand on the rope bridge laughing at me.

  “It’s pretty obvious,” says Roman. “The Pomos built it. The more interesting question is…”

  “What were they training for?” Callum finishes.

  “Right,” I say. “Who did they need to protect themselves from?”

  “Leave!” The command thunders through the trees. I yank my head around, but I’m still clutching the side of the tree and can’t see exactly where the voice is coming from.

  But suddenly, a force hits me in the back and flattening me against the tree. I lose my grip and scramble to renew my grip on the tree. Another reverberation hits me like a shock wave and I fall backwards, tumbling through the air. My collar burns as my body desperately tries to shift, but can’t. I glimpse Roman falling from the rope bridge, but Callum shifts and hovers in the air.

  Oomph!

  The wind surges out of my lungs and I lay there staring at tiny drops of blue lights that fill my eyesight. Callum flies to me, transforming into a human and cradles my head in his hands.

  “Shae! Are you okay?” he asks.

  “Who did it?” I sit up, twisting around.

  “What the hell was that?” Roman says, pushing himself off the ground.

  Callum stands facing the perpetrator. She stands shaking and pale in the clearing. Her eyes stare at us, her hands held palm-up to the sides. I see the ripple in the air around her hands and leaves move away from her at her feet. Just like at the rodeo. It came from her.

  “You shouldn’t be here!” She says.

  I push myself up to my feet and Callum, Roman and I step closer together. My heart pounds in my chest.

  “What was that?” I ask her, because although I’m terrified, she just did something. Something… magic. Something like I have seen El Oso do.

  She has magic.

  “What is that?” I ask again because the air is vibrating in swirls around her hands and feet.

  Callum grabs my wrist. “Maybe now isn’t the best time,” he suggests.

  Her eyes are dark with haze as the ground shakes. Her palms are facing up, fingers splayed to the ground and something like a sonic boom explodes from her, flying across the clearing and knocking us to the ground again. Out of the shadows of the trees Hercules races forward, throwing his arms around her waist and arms, pulling her to the ground. Jacqueline lies there shaking as we unsteadily get to our feet.

  Hercules whips his gaze up to us, hair falling in front of his face. “Please,” he implores. “Leave now. You have to leave…now.”

  Callum tugs at my wrist and together the three of us scramble away from the training grounds.

  9

  “What was that?” I ask once again as we make our way back towards where we’ve left the truck and where Callum must have left Cooper and Zan. My breath comes fast and I’m nervous, but I need to know.

  “I have no idea,” Roman says. “That was some crazy shit.”

  “It was like what I saw El Oso do,” I say, breathing heavily.

  “That was nothing like what El Oso did,” Roman says with a vengeance. “He shot some sort of energy. She’s like a sonic boom and an earthquake.”

  “They both harness power,” Callum says. “Whatever she was doing back there, there’s some sort of crazy energy going on.”

  “It’s magic,” I announce. “She has magic. It’s what El Oso has. And… and I think it’s what he’s looking for–more magic. I think i
t’s what my father offered to him and sacrificed himself for.”

  “That’s a whole lot of assumptions,” Roman says. “I get you’re desperate and you want to find a way to rescue your dad, but assuming what she can do, some sort of a sonic-boom-earth-shake, is what El Oso wants… it’s a dangerous assumption.”

  Callum looks sideways at me with questioning eyes. “What are you thinking, Shae?”

  “I don’t know,” I say, looking at my feet as we step through the soft leaf-covered earth. “But what if what she has something El Oso wants?” I ask.

  Roman’s eyes grow wide and a gasp comes out of his mouth. “You want to kidnap her and deliver her to El Oso in exchange for your father?”

  “I didn’t say that!” I exclaim.

  “You thought it.”

  “Well, I- I don’t know,” I mutter. “I’m just trying to figure things out. What if we had something to give El Oso in exchange for my father? It’s going to be a bit easier than just straight out attacking him, don’t you think?”

  “Well attacking El Oso is a really bad idea,” Roman says. “I mean, you know I’ll do anything to help you, but until we find an army or something, we don’t have a lot of power to attack him with.”

  I stop in my tracks, hands on my hips, trying to stop my hands from smacking him. “Isn’t that what you came here for?” I ask. “Isn’t that what you said to me when we were in the Sanctuary? That you were going to come here and help me get my father back?”

  “Yes,” Roman says slowly. “That is what I said. Then.”

  “So, what’s happened in the last two weeks?”

  Roman sighs and looks away. But he’s not one to walk away from a problem or a direct question. He slowly turns his gaze on t me. “What I want, more than anything,” he says, “Is to get this choker off. That’s what I want, Shae, and I don’t know how to and I don’t even think El Oso knows how to. I think, even with all of his power, I just don’t think you can get these things off.”

  “But if we have something to give him, maybe he will try. Maybe he’ll pardon us.”

  “You can’t kidnap a person and hand them over to El Oso,” Callum says. “That goes against everything you’ve ever said you wanted.”

  “Yeah. What makes your father more important than her?” Roman asks.

  “He is my father! And she’s no one to me.” My voice is so loud it startles a bird in the trees. It rushes down and into the underbrush. I watch it scamper as my eyes glaze over with tears. I blink them out of the way because I can’t stand it. I can’t stand the pity I know my friends have for me. They’ve both had losses. Callum lost his mother, his brother, and his father left. Roman’s banished from his family, and his family is banished from Costa Rica both due to El Oso’s judgement. And here I am, so desperate for my father that I’m talking about bartering another human life. And the only way I can justify it -- she’s someone I don’t know. My shoulders slump as the weight of my initial thoughts hit me.

  Callum grabs me and pulls me in close for a hug. I stand there stiffly because I can’t hug him back, I just don’t deserve to hug him back. He’s so strong and supportive of me. I have made every mistake in the book. And I dragged Roman into it. And now I’m talking about destroying someone’s else’s life just to get what I want.

  Pushing back from Callum, I close my eyes. “Everything I’m thinking is wrong. Everything I want to do is wrong,” I rub my face with my hands. “I know that. I’m just so afraid of never seeing my father again.”

  I wrap my arms around my waist and start to walk back to where I think the truck is. But Callum and Roman won’t let me go that easy. “Look,” Callum says as they catch up to me. “Why don’t we get to know them? Maybe they can teach us about their magic or something?” He’s trying to cheer me up, but his voice holds all the doubts that are aching inside me.

  “Yeah, Pomo warrior woman definitely seemed like she wanted to get to know us,” I mutter.

  “There’s definitely something about her that we’ve never seen before,” Roman shrugs. “If we can win her over, who knows, maybe she can help get these collars off.”

  Callum puts his arm around me and I lean in to his support. If we’re going to stick around here and try to befriend her, we’re going to need to band together. If there’s any real way of getting my father back, the magic she has may be the way to do it.

  ***

  I never thought I’d be a farm hand, but as Cooper pushes open the barn door, his pale skin like a beacon in the dim morning light, I smear a trite smile on my face and wave.

  “Morning,” he says, his mouth breaking out in a broad grin. He’s got the body of a guy who has been bucking hay most of his life; broad shoulders, strong biceps and a tan that reaches down his neck but stops at his t-shirt line. He’s exactly the kind of guy you would want on a farm.

  “How did you sleep?” I ask, trying to think of any way to make conversation, which seems to be what I do all the time around here. I don’t want anyone to see what is really going on in my head, which is usually screaming, followed by; How the hell am I going to get out of this place? Even though I have nowhere to go, no money, and worse than that, the metal collar not only makes me stand out in the shifter world as someone who’s been banished, it also makes me look pretty damn weird in the human world too. Even now, Cooper, who is pretty easy-going and friendly, aims his gaze just above my eyes when he talks to me, like he doesn’t want to take the chance his eyes will slip down to the humiliating burden around my neck.

  “I slept awesome,” he grins as he stretches and then strikes a Superman pose. “Ready to take on the day!”

  “Yea.” I point at some random place that hopefully signifies I’m enthusiastic also.

  “Come on.” Cooper crosses to me in two steps, his broad hands on my shoulders as he starts to massage the aches and pains out of them while managing to avoid touching my collar. “Shake out the dreary wearies and let’s do this thing.”

  I can’t stop the smile creeping on my face as I bow my head forward and let his hands kneed out my sore muscles. But when I raise my gaze, Callum and Roman are both looking at me, neither particularly pleased. I step away from Cooper.

  “Okay, I’m good. Thanks.” I smile up at him. I don’t know what really bugs them about him. Cooper is like a big golden retriever. “I’ll start measuring out the grain.” I shrug the thought off as I head for the feed shed that sits just next to the barn.

  It’s no surprise when minutes later Henry, his hair tousled and sticking up on end, sidles up next to me, wrapping his arms around my waist as I bend to shovel oats out of the main bin and into a feed bucket.

  “Hey, little dude.” I stop what I’m doing to kiss the top of his head. “Did you have any dreams last night?” The question I’ve always asked him seems to ease us into the morning.

  “The hills were on fire,” he says, his voice muffled from where he’s pressing it into my side.

  I squeeze him tighter. “It’s okay. Nothing is going to burn here.” The fires in Topanga weren’t that long ago. He’s probably going to have nightmares about them for years.

  “They weren’t bad fires.” He lifts his head to gaze at me. “They were good. You know, like the brush fires Dad always talks about in Australia that burn out the undergrowth.”

  A shiver skims over my skin. I don’t know about fires being good, but I don’t need to create angst if he doesn’t have any. “Hold the buckets,” I say, but he’s already holding them.

  It’s a little weird how we’ve all slipped into a slow routine here. Each one of us has our own chores and we all do what we can to fulfill them before the big task of the day is assigned. I was good at following the specific directions laid out on the feed room wall. I’d been a bit shocked when I’d first seen the whiteboard where aunt Emma meticulously wrote a long list of all of the different pens of animals and their individual feed regime. The types and amounts of grains they should get at exactly what time of day. I had had no idea
this is what went into farming. I thought you just threw a bucket of grain at the animals and they sort the rest out.

  But apparently that’s not how you raise show animals.

  We arrived here just at the end of show season. The main livestock shows of the summer were over, but there was still one more to go, the Redwood Empire fair. These events were serious business, nothing like the Harvest Festival we threw in Topanga, where people bobbed for apples, made pies, and brought in some goats to pet. This was the real deal. The best ranchers in the region competed with cows, sheep and horses to get top honors and bragging rights. And apparently, those belonged to Spotswood Ranch for the last twenty years running.

  For Aunt Emma and the coyotes of Spotswood Ranch, it was a serious competition. It was a little odd that she didn’t have all the other cousins here right now, but when I’d asked about it, they’d vaguely said they were on an important trip to the Midwest.

  Cooper ducks his head as he enters the feeding shed. “There are some changes today so I gotta make sure we get it right.”

  I don’t know if it’s the early morning, but I finally ask the question that’s been bugging me since the first day I realized they competed with cows and sheep at fairs. “How is it,” I ask “You guys can show animals? Isn’t there some sort of conflict of interest?”

  Cooper’s laughter rings out in the quiet air. I glance out at Roman, but he’s already pushing a wheelbarrow full of alfalfa hay out towards the horses in the back pasture. I’m relieved. I don’t want him to think we’re having fun. Roman’s given a few smirks and bad jokes since we got here, but ever since he joined me in my effort to assassinate El Oso, I haven’t actually heard him laugh, not once. I miss that sound. A lot.

  “Conflict of interest?” Cooper asks.

  “You know, like you’re an animal and you’re showing animals. Kind of gives you an unfair advantage.”

  “I’m not an animal whisperer,” Cooper says. He wipes out numbers on the whiteboard as I watch and makes a few adjustments based on text he’s reading on his phone. No doubt instructions from Aunt Emma.