Harvest: Dark Urban Fantasy (Shifter Chronicles Book 3)

by Melle Amade

  Hercules laughs. “Evie could use a sparring partner.”

  “Seriously, dude?” Roman’s lip curls.

  “I meant her,” Hercules says, pointing the axe at me. “There’s no one else her size here.”

  “I’m not gonna spar with a twelve-year-old,” I say.

  “You have to spar with the twelve-year-old if you want to have a chance of sparring with anyone older,” Hercules says.

  I glance over at the girl. Crap. How bad is it going to be if I can’t take on a twelve-year-old?

  “You can’t just invite her to spar,” Jacqueline steps up as if she has followed the entire conversation. Her face pales as she glares at Hercules.

  “I think I just did,” Hercules says, raising his eyebrows at the fiery Pomo woman. There’s a glint of attraction in his eyes, but so far, I haven’t seen her look at him like that at all. Normally she just looks pissed. “Are you going to deny Evie the chance to kick someone’s ass? You know she can’t beat anybody here.”

  “I can so,” Evie yells from nearby. With all the silence and the shifter hearing, there aren’t many private conversations going on around here. Maybe that’s why everyone talks with their hands.

  Hercules cocks his head to the side of her smile warming his lips. “You will one day,” he says with a smile. “You’ll be better than all of us one day, but for now we got to find you people you can spar with.”

  “I’ll think about it,” I say. Even though my hearts not in it I’m curious to see if what they do is different.

  “We’ve got a few more people that could spar with you guys,” Roman says, eyeing up Hercules. “Callum seems to be able to get in, but we’ve got Zan and Cooper, too.”

  “Coyotes?” Hercules asks.

  “Yeah. One from here and one from where we come from. You think you can get them in?” He glances at Jacqueline.

  She rolls her eyes. “Why don’t you invite everybody from Spotswood Ranch?” she asks. “Just have them all move up here.”

  “No need to get testy,” Hercules says as Jacqueline walks off. He grins back at Roman. “A friendly match could be good for all of us.”

  But as we get up to go, I suddenly have the sneaky suspicion that we might have bitten off more than we can chew. “Can we really stand up to them?” I question Roman as we return to the truck.

  “If you’re planning to go after El Oso, sparring with someone who has magic is a good start to upping your game.” He grins at me as if we’ve just made a plan to go to some concert or something. I groan. I can feel the bruises already.

  ***

  Apparently, all the hay wasn’t gathered from all the fields and the next day is spent clearing the back forty. Forty acres is considered a small plot of land here, but when you’re the one out there working the fields, man it’s humungous.

  By the time the day ends, every muscle in my body is dragging and I lay flat on the truck bed until it pulls right up by the house. Aunts Emma and Natalie have supper set up on the counter. After scrubbing the dust out from under our fingernails, we all line up and help ourselves to the food; there’s no sitting at the table tonight. Aunt Emma stands in her faded lavender pinafore on the other side of the counter proudly serving us as we file through. Behind her head, on the shelf, is a picture of her and all four of her kids.

  “Eat well, there’s a ton of work to do,” she says to Zan, who are just in front of me in line.

  “When are Maddie and Lacey getting back?” Zan asks.

  Aunt Emma shrugs “Well, you never know. Not with Logan driving.” Zan chuckles with her aunt and a pain of missing my dad shoots through me. Dad and I always laugh together. Mom and I are still learning how to do that, but I’m still not sure we’ll ever get there.

  “Where are your cousins?” I ask Zan as we settle in on bench on the back porch. The lawn gives way to a pasture and sheep are grazing peacefully in the cool evening.

  “Bull shopping,” Cooper grins, throwing himself in a big easy chair on the corner of the deck.

  Callum raises an eyebrow. “Is that a thing?”

  “Oh yeah,” Cooper nods, shoving a roasted Brussel sprout in his mouth. “We want to bring some fresh breeding into the valley so they went out to the Midwest to find a bull.”

  “Don’t you have bulls around the farm?” Roman asks.

  “Well, we raise the best bulls around and everyone buys them, so most of the farmers around here already have some of our breeding in their cattle,” Cooper explains as if everyone learnt this in first grade. “We need to stay ahead of the game by bringing in new breeding.”

  “And you have to go all the way out to the Midwest?” I ask, feeling the surge of energy from the food. The mashed potatoes are laced in butter, garlic and sour cream and taste like heaven in my mouth. I hate diets, but if I was ever going to go on one, I would not do it around Aunt Emma. No way.

  “Well, there are a lot of bulls everywhere,” Cooper explains, “but the best breeders are out in the Midwest. They have the longest strains and most proven lines. It can take a few weeks to look at all the stock. Logan and the girls will be driving around from ranch to ranch checking out the bulls.”

  I can’t help but snicker a little at this. Zan glances up at me through her red curls, a giggle on her lips, too. She raises her eyebrows in an ‘I know’ conspiratorial look. My heart swells as if she’s filling it. Maybe we will overcome everything that’s happened between us.

  “It was a really good opportunity for Lacey, too,” Aunt Emma says, referring to her youngest daughter. “The others have been out there shopping before, but Lacey needs to have experience also. Especially if she’s going to be a vet.”

  Zan’s chuckle is audible this time and my laughter joins hers. I try to hide it, but, come on, really? A shifter who’s a vet?

  “How exactly do you shop for a bull?” I try to cover up our laughter with a question.

  Aunt Emma bites. “You look at the animals he’s sired. You have to visit some of the ranches around because most the time they’ll have sired animals on all the neighboring farms. So, you want to look at as many offspring as you can to check consistency. You can also look at awards and that, but it’s best to eyeball the offspring.”

  I take a deep breath to stop myself from cracking up. It’s a different world. From what I understand Lacey is about our age, maybe a little bit younger. She’s bull shopping in the Midwest.

  Crazy.

  The sun is just setting across the valley, sprinkling lazy golden rays across the deep-green fields. And for a moment I almost forget the horror of my situation. The valley is so peaceful and so idyllic, and my body aches, but now that I’ve eaten, it’s a good ache the kind you get after a hard day of training.

  I glance over at Roman. We don’t have word yet from Hercules if we can spar with the Pomos, but the reality is, we haven’t even been training. If we do get the chance to have a sparring match, we need to start working out.

  “When are we going to start training again,” I ask Callum.

  He frowns at me and his eyes drop to the collar. It’s always about the collar. “Shae, I don’t think –”

  “I can still train,” I say. “I’ve got to do something.”

  I don’t mention the potentially sparring with the Pomos or trying to get Dad away from El Oso. Saying any of that in this large group wouldn’t go over too well.

  “Train?” Cooper cocks an eyebrow at me.

  “Workout,” I shrug, trying to make it sound as non-combative as possible.

  “What do you think you were doing today?” Cooper laughs fills up the deck. “I saw you sweating. I’d call that a workout.”

  “I thought you called it bucking,” I mutter, eyeing Callum up to help me out.

  Cooper smiles. “Yeah, we call it bucking. We call it baling, we call it feeding, we call it working the animals, we call it corn hole, we call it trap shooting.”

  “What are you talking about?” I ask. I mean, I like Cooper enough, but sometim
es he just seems so shallow, like he doesn’t even know what he’s talking about, or what the shifter community is like. He lives up here in some secluded environment, trying to figure out how to breed a freaking cow. As if it’s some sort of science. And I’m trying to figure out how to save people’s lives.

  “We call it everything except training,” he explains. “Because out here, the question everyone would be asking if they saw us doing combat training is: What the hell are you training for?”

  Cooper puts down his plate of food and covers it with his napkin to keep off flies. “Come here, city girl,” he grins at me.

  I look around, but everybody’s just watching, so either I turn him down and don’t go, or else… Yeah, that’s not going to happen. My plate is empty so I drop it on the table and go to where he’s standing by the fence.

  “Get out!” He exclaims.

  Those words are enough to send sparks through my body, I imagine all the cows running towards me as I’m feeding them. I grab the side of the fence and give a mighty leap. In one second, I’m over the six-foot fence. Everybody’s watching me. Callum has a look of surprised smugness on his face. I’m guessing there’s still a look of confusion on my face.

  But I don’t have time to really think about it, because before I know it, Cooper’s thrown something at me. I snatch the hay hook out of the air. Cooper throws a flake of hay at me and I swipe it to the side, precisely aiming it for the feed trough.

  Applause comes from everybody sitting around on the back veranda, well everyone except Uncle Steve. He’s just watching, his eyes narrow, measuring what I’m capable of, I guess.

  “You thought you were just lifting hay bales, but you were doing squats,” Cooper says. “You think you’re just catching flakes of hay, you’re avoiding arrows. Think you’re just trying to jump out of the way of a wild cow? You’re saving your ass.”

  “Not bad,” I murmur.

  “We learned a long time ago, you don’t show people what you’re really doing, but you put everything in to the one thing you are doing.”

  “How you do anything, is how you do everything.” Zan smiles warmly at me and I can sense her pride both in me and in her family.

  My mouth softens as I nod back. “The sign you have in the kitchen over the stove.”

  “That’s not just something we got at the bargain store,” Aunt Emma says. “That’s our house crest.”

  “So now you’ve been doing this for two weeks, maybe you’re ready for some trap shooting,” Cooper says with a grin. “We’ll start tomorrow.”

  “When the barn’s clean,” Uncle Steve calls as he stands up and heads into the house.

  14

  Our phones all go off at the same time. There’s no ringtone or obvious vibration, but I can tell by the way Callum’s, Roman’s, and Zan’s hands all go down to their pockets, they all just got a message like I did. There can only be one person who messaged all of us at the same time.

  Aiden.

  It has to be from Zan’s app.

  We all ease our hands away from our pockets trying to be discreet. Zan starts grabbing plates around the back and stacking them, before she places them through the window and on the counter in the kitchen by the sink.

  “I was thinking of going for a little walk,” she says, stretching her arms and lowering them to rub her belly, as if the giant amounts of beef and biscuit she’s been eating from Aunt Emma’s table has worn her out and she wants to walk them off. She glances casually at me. “Shae, you want to join me?”

  I’m out of my chair in a second, nodding. “Yeah! Totally.”

  “What about the dishes?” Aunt Emma asks.

  “Cooper’s on K.P.,” Zan smiles at her cousin.

  He rolls his eyes. “And Callum!”

  “Mind if I come?” Roman stands up. “Or is this girl talk?” He chuckles to make it seem like we’re not all trying to get out of there at the same time.

  My gaze shifts to Callum. There’s no way he’s going to get out without Cooper joining us. But he just gives me a slight downward gesture with his chin and I know he’s fine staying here. He’ll catch up with us later.

  “What does it say?” I ask, my voice low as we walk through the shadows and light of the cool evening. We head towards the barn where she’s got the computer set up.

  Zan shakes her head. “It’s encrypted.”

  “Okay.” I have no idea what that means. “Didn’t you write it?”

  Zan’s curls wave around her shoulders as she shakes her head. “No, I wrote the code that wrote the encryption. Only the code can break the encryption. And only I can get into the code.”

  Fortunately, it doesn’t take her long to do that. Roman and I hover around her as she sits at the computer, tapping away at the keys.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a computer this old,” I mutter. My voice hangs nervously in the air. I’m secretly terrified about what Aiden might say. His dad was really sick when we left and we haven’t talked to anyone from Topanga in a couple of weeks. I wonder if he has news of my father.

  A black screen with green letters comes up on the computer.

  “What is that?” I ask.

  “The message.” Zan speaks like it should be obvious.

  But I don’t see anything except for a black screen and flashing green rectangle. Zan’s fingers fly across the keyboard as she types in some code. The rectangle disappears and behind it numbers and letters start to flash, slowly filling in as we watch.

  And when it finally shows up, it reads like one of those old telegrams, or maybe I guess like a tweet. I don’t know. I don’t really ever go on Twitter. It’s a really short message, but the words send a chill over me.

  TB declining rapidly. No sign of peace. No word from Viking.

  I don’t know what it means, but the word ‘declining’ can’t be good.

  “What does it say?” I ask Zan.

  It’s Roman who answers. “TB, Thunderbird. It’s his father Lord Van Arend that isn’t doing well.”

  I swallow. I can’t imagine what how that must feel. My heart clenches for Aiden.

  “The Viking is El Oso, right?” I ask.

  El Oso was a northerner, a Berzerken bear shifter from a clan that has almost disappeared. He was originally from the cold countries where the Vikings come from. From a long line of Viking shifters who could turn themselves into bears as they entered battle. But now he’s the only bear from his clan. He joined forces with every other bear he could find and they made a mishmash bear clan and they all took the Berzerken name. They moved their home to Mexico City where they took over Muiderkring South and eventually rule the Order.

  “Is there a war?” I point at the word “peace” on the screen.

  Roman shakes his head. “No.”

  “Peace is your father.” Zan murmurs.

  Right. The dove. Peace.

  I rub my eyes, blinking tiredly at the screen. Zan shuts the computer off as Callum walks into the dim barn. I glance behind him, but Cooper is nowhere to be seen. He must be stuck talking beef DNA with his parents. Callum glances at Zan, but comes towards me.

  I shake my head.

  I need to figure out a way to get out of this collar and get out of Potter Valley so I can find my dad. There’s nothing I can do for Aiden’s father; I’m not a doctor, but I can get my dad. I’ve found something that will help us, I just have to figure out how best we can harness the magic, whether Jacqueline wants to help or not.

  ***

  “I think I figured it out,” Roman says as I walk into the library. He doesn’t look up, so I’m guessing he can tell who it is by the sound of my steps.

  “Really?” I ask. He’s cleared some of the floor space of the library and brought in one of the small plastic tables from the barn. He’s scrubbed it clean and it barely fits into the reading nook.

  “That’s like the dumbest question ever invented on the face of the planet,” Roman says.

  “Really?” I asked with a grin.
/>   “It assumes that the answer received is unbelievable or perhaps is a lie, or that the person saying the answer is not trustworthy.” He holds up his hands. “Don’t say ‘really’ again,” he smiles.

  He takes a pestle and finishes grinding up the last of the herbs he was working on.

  “What is it?” I ask. “And if you tell me it’s, like, the bones of a lizard, I’m going to scream it to my mother and she’s never gonna take it. So, if it is that, don’t tell me. Just tell me something, anything different, so I don’t get really grossed out. Okay?” I say.

  He smiles to himself quietly and continues to grind up whatever is in the mortar. “It’s acorns.”

  “Rea- is that true?”

  “It’s the answer you want to hear, isn’t it?”

  I think on that for a minute. I don’t know exactly what it means. It means either it is bones and he’s not going to tell me, or it really is acorns, or it could be something else disgusting.

  Roman laughs as he watches the confusion move across my face. “Listen,” he says. “I got the idea from the Pomos.”

  “They gave you a recipe?” I ask, completely surprised.

  “Well no, but when we were up there the other night I noticed some of the women were emptying acorns they’d soaked in water. So, I asked them about it and they said that they soak the acorns overnight because it takes out the poison in them. So, I thought on that and looked at the chemical make-up, and I wondered if it could be the one ingredient your mother’s mixture was missing.”

  “Poison?” I ask. “Are you poisoning my mother?”

  To my shock, Roman nods. “A little bit,” he says. “The problem with being a wyte is that you have all the energy of a shifter moving inside you, but there’s no place to get out. So, we have to do this because I have to kill a little bit of the energy. So, as I was testing for the ingredients in Zaragoza’s powder I found everything we would need for it. Ground quartz crystal nutmeg, frankincense, orris root, sandalwood and birch bark. But there was something in there I couldn’t quite get I didn’t really understand. And then I realized it was a Galerina Marginata.”