Harvest: Dark Urban Fantasy (Shifter Chronicles Book 3)

by Melle Amade

  “What do you think about, like, I don’t know, a green energetic light?”

  “A what?” Hercules laughs.

  My skin burns and the collar stings as heat moves around my body.

  “A green energy,” I look him in the eye and speak clearly.

  He frowns. “That doesn’t sound like Earth magic,” he says. “It sounds like the magic of man.”

  I’ve got a million more questions to ask him, but as I look out the window I see Aunt Emma get out of her truck and walk into the store.

  “Crap,” I say. “I better go.”

  “Yeah, that’s a good idea,” Hercules agrees. “Don’t want to get her upset with you.” I glance at him sideways because it sounds like he’s got some experience with her, though it doesn’t seem like anyone will tell me what that is.

  I slip out the door quickly and run all the way to the playground.

  “Play dates over,” I call. I motion to Roman so he can see that Aunt Emma’s truck is parked outside Hopper’s Corner Store. He nods quickly.

  “Yeah, we got a lot of work to do back at the ranch. Evie, are you okay getting back to The Lodge on your own?”

  She nods and rolls her eyes at him. “Are you asking me if I can cross the street alone?”

  We’re in the truck and heading back to the ranch when Henry asks Roman. “What did that guy want? He seemed, you know, a bit different.”

  “What guy?” I ask.

  “Oh yeah, he was little odd. I don’t know. He was like some sort of treasure hunter or something. He was running scans on things, like some metal detector type-thing, but it was weird. It was in his glasses. I kind of wanted to ask him what it was about, see if I could try them on, but he didn’t really seem too friendly.”

  “Did he have a really short white hair?” I ask.

  “Yeah, that was the guy.”

  “What did he say to you?” I ask.

  “Nothing really,” Roman says. “Seemed like he wanted directions, but he was asking for directions to Willits, which is bizarre because this is a dead-end valley. You want to go to Willits, you took the wrong turn like fifteen miles back. So, I don’t know. Just a strange guy. The only thing I really didn’t like is it looked like he was packing a knife or something. You think out here, things would be a little bit more toned down. You know, no people packing weapons.”

  “Did he see your collar?” I ask cautiously.

  Roman shrugs. “Yeah. I’m going to rock it as a fashion statement going forward. Just you wait. It’ll be on the cover of Vogue soon.”

  I give a half-hearted smile, but a deep feeling of unease settles over me. It was the same guy I saw earlier, and I don’t think that guy is a treasure hunter.

  “Where are Cooper and Zan?” I ask when we get back to the ranch.

  Callum is at the sink, peeling potatoes, his Ravensgaard ring digging into his hand.

  “They took the opportunity, when Aunt Emma had to run down to the store, to shift and go for a run up in the hills.”

  “You let them get away with it?” Roman says, his laughter hollow. “You got stuck peeling potatoes.”

  Callum shrugs. “I don’t mind. Besides, I think it’s good for them to go out and run around as coyotes. It seems to cheer her up a bit.

  Roman frowns but doesn’t say anything. Instead he heads silently back into his lab.

  11

  My steps are nervous as Roman and I head back into the village. It’s just Roman and me. With the hay all in, we had spent the morning in the garden, but there wasn’t really enough work for all five of us and I was itching to get back over the hill to see the Pomos. Callum said he would stay at the ranch and distract Zan and Cooper. It was a good thing, I didn’t want to wait until night to go up there again. I’m not sure how welcome we will be, but if we can harness their magic and get these collars off, well, we’d have a shot rescuing my dad.

  It seems like we’re arriving right around their mid-day meal time. I click my fingernails together, a bit on edge. What if Jacqueline is there? What if they can all do that kind of magic?

  “What’s the worst that can happen?” Roman’s voice catches in his throat as he seems to pick up on exactly what I’m thinking.

  One thing I do know, we can’t just shift and escape.

  The village isn’t large, there’s about fifteen cabins up with maybe three or four people per cabin. About forty people mill around and sit in the communal eating area, ranging across most age groups, though Guinevere’s the youngest one. There are no small kids. The group is silent, even in conversation, and their hands are constantly moving. I watch as one older man with a gray moustache gesticulates to Evie with a few rapid-fire hand gestures. Evie tugs his shirt and gives him a hug and then moves on. They had a full exchange, but no words have been spoken. It’s the quietest gathering of forty people I’ve ever been to. And all of them seem to be listening and talking at the same time.

  Jacqueline’s mom is squeezing bits of water out of her hand and onto Evie’s head. Jacqueline stands next to them, but she looks up the second we enter the space. Her eyes squint in anger and she beelines for us. Hercules intercepts.

  “They’re guests,” he cautions, his eyes looking at her mother.

  She stops and glares harder, as if the force of her look will make us leave. But Roman is definitely not leaving. The minute he hears that we’re guests, he smiles and plops himself down on a bench of the nearest picnic table. He puts his elbows on the table and surveys the crowd like he’s the King of Prussia. I want to roll my eyes, but I don’t dare take my gaze off Jacqueline, who still looks like she might let a sonic boom on his face.

  “I’ll watch them,” Hercules insists. “Go take care of your mother.” He nods towards Jacqueline’s mom. She leans against an older man, while trying to take her to a seat.

  Jacqueline’s gaze is torn between us and her mother, but finally she darts over to her mother’s side, gripping her arm and steadying her as she helps her rest.

  “Is she okay?” Roman asks.

  “Lydia?” Hercules asks. “Yes, she will be. It’s just draining.”

  I get a flash of the way she produced water after the firewalk and she was doing it again now. I thought it had been a sponge or a cloth or something, but was the water coming out of her hands? Before I can stop myself, I blurt the question out, “Does she have magic, too?”

  Hercules raises his chin at me, but doesn’t say a word.

  “Do you all have it?”

  “No.” He takes out his knife and starts cleaning his fingernails. It’s not a threatening gesture, but it definitely tells me this topic is over.

  Fine. I guess I can’t just barge in here and start asking all their secrets. Maybe I should try to be helpful first.

  “Your sister is a Nuverling,” I say. “It’s…it’s not a good thing.”

  As if she knows we’re talking about her, Guinevere runs up, wrapping her arms around her brother’s waist and grinning up at us. “What isn’t?” she smiles, her eyes bright.

  Hercules frowns at me.

  “Oh, um… nothing,” I stammer. There’s no way I can tell her that being a Nuverling rips you apart on the inside. “You’re twelve?” I ask.

  “Yep,” she grins.

  “Oh, so…” My gaze flutters to Hercules. “You guys can do that at twelve? Shift?”

  “Yes?” Hercules answers, clearly bemused. “Can’t you?”

  I shrug. “I don’t really know. We were told it was different. We were told you can’t become a shifter until you’re sixteen.”

  “Who told you that?” Hercules chuckles. “Sounds like a load of b.s. to me.”

  “The Order. It’s one of the rules. You go through a rite of passage, a ceremony, and then voilà. You’re a shifter,” I say.

  “Sounds like a lot of work.” he says. He stoops down to hugs his sister and pats her head as she dances off. We watch her disappear into the crowd.

  None of the other Pomos seem to pay much mind to
Roman and myself. And I seem to have forgotten we’re intruders here. Except for when I see Jacqueline still glowering at us from her mother’s side. But when Hercules sees me glance at her, he just laughs.

  “Don’t mind her,” he says. “She’s all right.”

  I’m glad he thinks so. So far, I haven’t gotten anything but death-looks from her. If their secret power includes killing with a look, I haven’t got much time left.

  Hercules digs his knife into a crevice in the wooden table. I edge away, but a few moments later we’re served a plate of meat, beans, and some deep-fried dough. I’m not really hungry, but the smell of food is so tempting, I can’t stop myself from pulling my plate closer.

  “Fry bread,” Hercules grins, stabbing his with his knife. “Be careful, it’s hot.”

  I drop mine as the heat burns into my fingers. Roman leans over and blows on his.

  “Is it tough to eat with those things on?” Hercules asks.

  A genuine laugh escapes Roman. The biggest laugh I’ve heard in ages. He seems to relax up here, too. “They could put metal tape over my mouth and I would still find a way to eat.”

  “Don’t say that,” I admonish, a vision of him trapped by El Oso with tape on his mouth instantly coming to mind.

  He waves me off. “Especially when it’s this good.” Roman tucks into another helping of beans and fried bread. I can’t resist the smell and it tastes as good as the aroma promises. The crispy exterior falls away and the gooey center melts in my mouth.

  “Are you all Nuverlings?” I ask.

  “What?” Hercules shakes his head as he finishes chewing a big bite of fry bread and beans.

  “You know, shifting into two animals?” I watch Evie move through the crowd. I hope Jacqueline’s mother has some mad skills up her sleeves to stop the pain that’s coming. Without Zaragoza or my dad, I have no idea what we can do for Evie.

  “No, we’re a straight up quail clan.” He chews thoughtfully as he watches his sister mill through the crowd. “We all knew Evie would be one.”

  “You’re not afraid of her dying?” I blurt out.

  “Dying?” He exclaims. “What sort of crazy do they teach you out there?”

  “No one taught me that,” I say, though I wish they had. It would have been nice to know what I was getting into. I don’t know that my choices would have been much different, but looking back it would have been nice to maybe know a thing or two before I nearly died. “I’m a Nuverling, too,” I say. “At least I was before, before this thing.” I ping my nail against the metal collar.

  Hercules nods. We may not have all the same vocabulary, but he knows the collar’s purpose just like I do.

  “Well, the binding spell stopped the problem,” Roman interjects.

  “The what spell?” Hercules asks.

  “Our warlock did a binding spell, before he was killed by El Oso. It stopped the dove from coming out so even if she doesn’t have the collar, she can only shift into one thing; the raven.”

  “Why the hell would you stop her from shifting into two animals?” Hercules’ mouth gapes open in horror as if Roman is suggesting some horrible crime.

  I want to tell him I can still shift into two. Without the laws of the Order, it seems like I should be able to tell my friends, but I still don’t know how well they’re going to take the truth I’m still a Passief.

  “It was killing her,” Roman says. “She couldn’t control her shifting or what she was going to shift into. It was a dove one time and raven the next; every time it was tearing at her insides. So, we found a binding spell to bind one choice. Now she’s only raven.”

  Hercules stares at Roman, eyebrows raised. “Okay,” he says. “If you say so.”

  “Well, she would be only raven, if we didn’t have the stupid collars on.”

  “Right,” Hercules says as he takes another bite of food. It’s something in the way he says it like we’re missing one of the big pieces of the puzzle.

  “What?” I ask.

  Hercules just shakes his head, clearly not too keen on saying anything.

  I glance around for Evie. She’s still the center of the party, surrounded by a bunch of her people, Jacqueline included; definitely the girl of the hour. Hercules seems to get my thought process. He knows if I don’t hear it from him, I’ll go straight to her.

  “You know where the collars come from, don’t you?” he asks.

  “Yeah, the Order,” I say. “El Oso.”

  “They put it on you, but did you ever wonder why they made a binding collar to control how other shifters shift?”

  I shake my head. The truth is I hadn’t really thought about it. “I’ve been much more interested in seeing how to get the thing off.”

  “To control something,” he says, “You have to understand it.”

  “Fine,” Roman says, his face pale and serious in the flickering sunlight dancing through the surrounding trees. “What do we need to understand?” I can hear the delicate frustration in his voice, his desperation to rid himself of the collar.

  “The metal that makes up your collars comes from the hunters,” Hercules says. “It was invented by the Allegiance for Righteous Humanity.”

  He says it like it’s some big reveal, but I don’t really know what the point is. I shrug. “Okay, so El Oso borrowed the metal from somebody or stole it or bought it. They got the metal, big deal.”

  Hercules squints. “What do you know about the Hunters?”

  “They hunt shifters and kill us,” I say. “At least that’s what I’ve heard. I don’t really know. I’ve never seen one, or heard of one, being a bigger problem than the Order.”

  “Your problem is not the Order,” Hercules says with a snort. “The Hunters are your only problem. Sure, the Order is full of controlling, narcissistic jerks, like that Lord Van Arend guy, but your enemy is the Hunters.”

  Roman and I exchange a look but we don’t say anything. Most certainly we don’t explain Lord Van Arend is the father of one of our closest friends.

  “But the only reason the Order is so ridiculously controlling is because of the Hunters. The Hunters are the worst humans. They make the alt-right look like a bunch of sissy pacifists.”

  “Fine, okay, they’re all jerks,” Roman says. “But what does this have to do with our collars?”

  Suddenly I have a sneaking suspicion the collar is now Roman’s only concern. Would he stay and fight the Order? Perhaps, if he could get the collar off, he might just disappear into the jungles of Costa Rica where his family comes from. He might never come back. I frown at him. I don’t have anywhere to disappear to. A bunch of graves in Central Australia?

  “The Allegiance was formed by a prince of the Kingdom of Six,” Hercules says.

  Great. We’re going back into some mystical fairytale land where everything is shrouded and the truth is dubious. I don’t say anything, but the expression must be on my face.

  “It’s a true story,” Hercules says. “You can look it up.”

  “Ignore her,” Roman says. “Continue.”

  “Don’t tell him to ignore me,” I hiss, elbowing him in the gut.

  “I want to hear this,” Roman insists.

  I bite my lip and nod. As much as I don’t like being told to shut up, I want to hear this too. The more we find out, well there’s got to be some good in it, right?

  “The Kingdom of Six was on the Adriatic Sea,” Hercules says. “It was in the days between the Greek and Roman empires, when six families rose to prominence. They controlled all the shipping, all the slavery, all the people, and all the trade. They were incredibly powerful, but they kept their six kastelas close together in a single bay on the Adriatic. They believed there was power and safety in proximity to other ruling families. Their argument was that if any of them was ever under attack they didn’t want to wait days for reinforcements and supplies and support; they wanted support immediately. So, in fact you could walk in between their castles in a matter of an hour. And you could sail between the
kastelas even faster.”

  “Got it,” Roman says. “Six castles, lots of money, close proximity. How do the collars fit in?”

  Hercules continues as if Roman hasn’t said a word. “The kingdom had originally been started by one man, but he gave privilege to his five brothers and over the years, they married and started families. Each time one of the five started a family, they built a new kastela. And as the offspring grew, they began marrying the offspring between family.”

  “They married their cousins,” I whisper.

  “Yes, very similar, I believe, to the Order’s practices,” Hercules smiles. “The Lord in the central castle was named Lord Deponte. He was the last to marry and his daughter, Musilla, was betrothed since birth to one of her cousins.”

  I glanced sideways at Roman. “Sounds a little familiar,” I murmur.

  “And by good fortune the maiden was truly in love with the boy she was betrothed to.” Hercules smiles, and the way he looks at me makes me feel like he knows he can see all of the things in our lives we’ve been trying to hide from everybody else.

  “The only problem was, on the night of the wedding, right after the young couple had exchanged vows, Lord Deponte discovered something unfathomable about his daughter’s husband. You see, Lord Deponte’s brother had married, unbeknownst to him, a fox shifter. She’d come across the sea from Italy.”

  Roman looks perplexed. “There are fox shifters?”

  “Yes, they’re actually fringe dwellers like us,” Hercules nods. “I’m not even sure if the Order knows that much about them.”

  “So, what did Lord Deponte to do?” I ask.

  “He killed his son-in-law on the bridge outside of his kastela the night of the wedding before the marriage could be consummated,” Hercules says. “Ran him through with a sword. The only problem was, his daughter really was in love with this boy. And when he died, she died too. Lord Deponte never forgave his brother for marrying a shifter. He killed the brother’s shifter wife and the rift in the Kingdom of Six began. The families all crumbled except for Lord Deponte. He took all his riches and, in his anger, spent his life hunting down the shifters. He turned it into a religious calling to get more to join, but the truth was it was simply fear, hatred, and grief.”