by Viola Rivard
“I can't believe we're finally doing this,” Jo said. She scooted over to rest her head on Harper's shoulder. “Do you think it's as dangerous as that woman said?”
“There's always a certain amount of risk, but as long as we're approaching them from a place of peace, then we don't have anything to be afraid of. They really are just like humans, Jo.”
“There are some pretty awful humans out there.”
Harper didn't bother to refute that.
Jo continued, “If I die, will you do something cool and name it after me? Like, discover the cure for cancer and name the drug Joanacil?”
“I'm not an actual doctor.”
“Then I guess you'll have to go to med school.”
“How about I become a civil lawyer and write some legislation and name it after you?” Harper waved her hand in a sweeping gesture. “The Joana Act. It'll make it illegal for women to wear two different types of animal prints in a single outfit.”
“Yes, please,” Jo said, cracking up.
Jo was still ranting over pattern choices when Ian emerged from the bathroom. His golden-blond curls were extra tight from having been washed and his t-shirt clung to his boyish figure. Harper could smell the artificial fragrance of men's body spray all the way from the bed.
“We talking about mixed animal prints?” he asked, placing his day clothes on top of the dresser. He turned and wagged his finger at the bed. “I'm seriously not sleeping in the middle. Give me one of those pillows. I'll sleep on the end of the bed.”
Crawling to the end of the bed, Jo grabbed his arm and pulled Ian forward. “Don't be weird. Get up here and snuggle with us, dork.”
Ian gave a melodramatic groan. “We really need another guy in this group. The estrogen is overwhelming.”
Jo clapped her hands together as her head hit the pillow. “Oh! One whose name starts with a K! Like a Kyle, or Keith. Then we could be HIJK!”
“Cute,” Harper mused as Ian settled in between them. She stretched her arms across her friends, but was careful not to snuggle too close to Ian.
“Are we seriously sleeping like this?” Ian grumbled.
“Welcome to my life,” Jo said. Then, with more enthusiasm, she added, “We could be seeing real, live shifters by tomorrow.”
“Don't get too excited,” Harper said. “Odds are, we won't see any for at least a day or two. Even when we do encounter some, they'll keep their distance for a while, until they know we don't have weapons.”
“How do you know that?” Ian asked.
“I read it in a book.”
Jo asked, “What do you think they'll be like? I mean, I've seen pictures and videos of them, but it feels like they're in costume, like once the camera is off and the director shouts, ‘Cut!’ Then, they'll take out their cigarettes and head back to their trailers. I mean, how can people really live like that in America, in the 21st century? Living in caves, hunting animals, warring with one another...”
“Does she always talk this much in bed?” Ian asked.
“Only every night,” Harper murmured.
The familiar drone of Jo's rambling was already lulling her towards sleep. Along the way, she avoided the familiar pitfalls of insomnia: her regrets, her private insecurities, and her fear of what waited for her in her dreams.
One thing managed to catch her on the way down. It was a new form of guilt that had recently metastasized. It was guilt over using her friends. Deliberately putting them in danger, in order to preserve the life she had so carefully built for herself.
The responsible thing, she knew, would be to leave in the middle of the night and return to the wilderness on her own. Or slightly harder, admit to her friends that this was all a huge mistake and that they should return to Boston. Problem was, she was already dead set on going, and if she was going, then it needed to be with Jo and Ian.
If she went on her own, there was a good chance that she'd never come back.
“Harper?”
Jo's voice broke through her storm clouds of emotion.
“Hm?”
“Do you think Diamond is a prostitute?”
Chapter 1
There was a nip of chill in the air, unusual for mid-October. By rights, the weather should have remained temperate for another month, but it was already in the forties and twilight had not yet descended on the mountainside. It was going to be a bad winter.
From her perch on the high branch of the tree, Harper could see the valley below, still dressed in the dull greens of late summer. Though she hated the cold, she was glad they had come when they did. Over the next few days, the mountains would be exploding with yellow, gold, and vermillion, as well as the sickly-sweet scents of fall.
Harper loathed the cold. Moving to a tropical country was on her bucket list, in between becoming a Nobel laureate and learning to speak Cantonese. Her original plan had been to go to the reservation during the summer. That had been over a year ago, and it had seemed that every time they'd made plans, something had come up.
The first summer, Ian had taken an internship and refused to put his life on hold for Harper's “insane, ill-conceived, and suicidal” plan to study shifters. Jo was far more receptive, but had just started a “super serious” relationship with a guy named Jack who wore a fedora. After some serious groundwork, Harper had managed to excise Fedora Jack from their lives, but by then, it had been Fall trimester, and she'd been back for her last year of grad school. She would have gladly put her degree on hold, but both of her friends were still reticent about going.
By the following summer, Harper had her bag packed and waiting at the door. Without her friends, she had no real plan of how she would accomplish everything she wanted to do without going native. She recognized that they were a crucial part of her success, but at the same time she was impatient to go.
As luck would have it that summer, a documentary was released that chronicled a fledgeling documentarian’s weeks in a Canadian pack. It gave an unprecedented glimpse into life inside a modern shifter pack, and ignited a media frenzy. For weeks, you couldn't turn on the television without seeing clips of the documentary, or talking heads discussing whether or not the entire thing had been staged.
A startling number of Americans were inclined to believe that the documentary was nothing more than a well-crafted propaganda piece, produced by shifter rights activists. It didn't help that the producer and her camera man were both MIA, but had conveniently managed to get the footage back to their editor. Harper couldn't blame the media or the public for their skepticism. In the days of found footage films, it was often difficult to discern reality from clever fabrication.
If it had done nothing else, the documentary had served to convince her friends that going to the reservation with Harper was not as ill-conceived as it had initially seemed. Harper suspected that their aims were less fixed on affecting social change, as both of them had developed obvious crushes on wolves in the documentary, but Harper was prepared to the the intellectual heavy lifting.
“See anything up there?” Ian called from the ground.
Harper turned her binoculars on him. “I see a skinny male of vaguely European descent who's presently regretting his choice of cargo shorts.”
Ian flipped her off and then stuffed his hands back in his pockets. “I'm gonna try to start this fire on my own. Should I get a bucket of water first? I'm worried the flames might jump and start a huge forest fire.”
“Just start the fire, it'll be fine,” Harper said, redirecting her binoculars on the valley.
“Yeah, but what if the fire spreads across the entire reservation, and then I'm responsible for wiping out the Appalachian shifter population?”
“Our campfire is going to spread across two hundred thousand square miles?”
“Well, maybe not, but should we chance it?”
“Ian, in the time it's taken you to argue your point, you could have already been at the river.”
He hesitated, and then said, “So, you're saying I should go get the water,
then?”
Ian was laughing as she pulled off a small branch and chucked it at him.
“Okay, okay, I'm going!”
It had been three days since they'd parked at a campground an hour out from Lynchburg. Crossing into the reservation had been easy enough. All they'd had to do was ignore the hundreds of signs warning them to stay on the trail, and then hop the stone fence that had been erected at the turn of the century.
There were no walls blocking off the reservation, or border patrols to keep shifters in and humans out. Just warnings and laws to penalize anyone who disregarded them. They had entered knowing full well that whatever information they gathered would be ill-gotten, and that they'd be subject to misdemeanor charges once they presented their findings. Over the years, Harper had acclimated Jo to lawbreaking, but Ian was stubbornly straight-laced, which was why it had surprised her when he'd suddenly become gung-ho about joining her in her elicit expedition. The potential to meet hot shifter females aside, she thought that he might want to one day use his involvement in the venture as a feather in his cap.
If they accomplished what they set out to do and managed to reinforce the burgeoning notion that shifters were more like them than not, then it could add fuel to the fire of revolution. When Ian eventually followed in his father's footsteps and made a bid for public office, he could regale constituents with his tales of his time among shifters, and how he fought for their equality.
In places like South Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky, local militias sometimes roamed the borders. Shifter sightings were more common there, and each state saw at least one or two attacks per year. From Virginia, all the way up to Maine, wolf shifters were almost never seen, or at least, their sightings were not reported. In New England in particular, there were still people who thought that shifters were a myth, though they were a dying breed in the era of social media and the 24-hour news cycle.
Most reasonable people believed that shifter sightings were uncommon in the north because there were fewer shifters living there. They postulated that the shifters preferred the warmer climate of the southern states, and couldn't hang with the cold northern winters. Harper had a different theory, which was that the shifters in the north were controlled by a handful of strong and stable leaders, whereas the ones in the south were more fragmented and aimless. Harper's goal was to find one such leader, and learn everything she could about he and his pack.
Something darted through her field of vision. Whatever it was, it was large and fast, and when Harper tried to follow it with her binoculars, she found herself at a loss. She released her binoculars. They tugged on the lanyard tethered to her neck and fell against her chest. With a hand to her brow to shield her eyes from the sun, she squinted and scanned the valley. She saw no movement, save for the gentle sway of tree limbs on breeze.
She lifted her binoculars again, and after a few moments, she caught sight of a squirrel perched on a naked tree branch. Had it been a squirrel that she'd seen? Or perhaps a bird that had zoomed by. She didn't think so, and she tended to trust her intuition, but today she had a hard time making up her mind. She hadn't been sleeping as much. She'd been skipping out on rest in order to keep watch, and as a result she was more fatigued than usual. Now and again, her vision would get blurry and she'd have to blink several times to clear it.
“Now I definitely won't be able to sleep,” she muttered.
There was no way she was going to let either of her friends be on watch when the wolves made first contact.
As she climbed down from the tree, she reassured herself that they had not yet passed into a wolf's territory. Or at least, they hadn't encountered any of the telltale signs of doing so. And even by her best estimates, it would still be another week before they reached the outer bounds of the territory that they were headed for.
Ian was arriving back at the campsite as Harper's feet touched the ground. He set his bucket of water down and then crouched to begin working on the fire. Against Harper's recommendation, he'd decided to go full caveman and bring only a basic set of flint rock to build their campfires. Thankfully, Harper had brought her lighter, and after a few minutes of watching him struggle, she came and lit the tinder.
“Hey chef, what's on the menu tonight?” she asked as he produced a steel pot from his oversized camping bag.
“I prefer to be called Master of Non-Perishables,” Ian said. “And tonight we have some fragrant maple-cured beans and a lovely carrot puree.”
“Sounds divine.”
“Beans again?” Jo griped. She had finally returned from “scouting the area” which Harper knew was code for her evening bowel movement. “I take it you didn't spot any shifters?”
“Negatory,” said Harper.
“Boo,” Jo said, taking a seat beside Harper. She stretched out her legs and massaged her calves. “I'm so tired of all this walking. You know, I jogged around campus for four weeks straight trying to build up endurance for this trip and I didn't once consider that I'd be hauling a third of my body weight on my back.”
“I told you not to bring all of that crap,” Harper said. “Check my bag.”
“We're all well acquainted with your stupid bag,” Ian said.
“Seventeen pounds, and I'm gliding through these woods like a forest nymph.”
“And eating all of the beans I brought,” Ian said flatly. “Maybe your bag would be heavier if you thought to bring actual food.
“I'm just helping you to lighten your load, and I did bring food. When your cans run out in a couple of days, you'll be begging for my Soylent.”
“That stuff is so gross,” Jo said. “She tried getting me to have it for breakfast back home. It only tastes good if you blend it with fruit.”
“It's economical,” Harper said. “And you'll be glad for it when there's nothing else to eat.”
They made idle conversation as they ate. Once they ran out of commentary on the landscape and the weather, they drifted to the familiar region of friendly academic debate. When the three of them were together, they tended to bring out their more juvenile qualities, particularly their penchant for bickering. But just as often, they engaged in deep, intellectual discussions on life, culture, and humanity. It was what she liked best about her friends. They could be at the same time, highly intelligent, but also not be up their own asses with their intellect, like most in the academic community.
“I'm gonna go set up the tent,” Jo said after a spell of silence.
Harper nudged her. “Don't. Let's lay under the stars. It's a beautiful night.”
The sun had begun to set, casting the sky in deep blue and revealing a smattering of twinkling lights across the sky.
“It is. I've never seen so many stars in the sky. But it's also cold. I told you we should have waited for next summer to do this.”
“Yeah, next summer, when Ian's doing another internship and you're done with grad school and looking for a job. I'm sure that would be a great time.”
Jo stuck out her tongue. “You're done with grad school and you're still here.”
“That's because I can't hold down a job, duh.”
Jo looked to Ian and shook her head. “She really can't. I'm amazed people keep hiring her, when her longest tenure is four weeks.”
“Six weeks,” Harper corrected. “I used my two weeks paid vacation at the end.”
“They let you do that? That doesn't count!”
Jo got up and went to where the tent was, still packed away in its carrying case.
“Ignore me,” Jo said. “I'm just mad because I can’t decide on my thesis.”
“She's been a few weeks away from her thesis all year,” Harper told Ian. “She keeps submitting her ideas as an interrogative instead of a declarative statement.”
“Yeah, yeah. I'm insecure and lack confidence in my own magnificence,” Jo said. It amazed Harper that Jo was self-aware enough to recognize all of her flaws, but never really took any steps to work on them.
The tent was a quick setup. Jo
only had to put a few pieces into place before it popped open. She crawled inside, setting up the two sleeping bags.
“What was your thesis on?” Ian asked Harper.
Jo answered for her. “The American civil rights movement as a precursor to shifter integration. It was freaking brilliant. I can't think of anything that smart.”
Harper snorted. “You remember my junior year lab partner, Pigtail Amy? She did her thesis on the cultural effects of pumpkin spice lattes.”
“Really?” Jo asked, poking her head from the tent. “What were the cultural effects? Do you think I could do salted caramel?”
Harper shook her head and laughed. “No, Jo. You're amazing. You're going to come up with something awesome, something evocative and thought-provoking. You can do so much better than latte flavors.”
Jo barreled from the tent and pulled her into a bear hug.
“Come sleep tonight,” Jo urged. “You're starting to look slightly less stunning than usual.”
“No way. I told you, I'm laying under the stars tonight.”
“And getting high?”
“And keeping watch. I don't smoke on the job.”
“I could keep watch,” Ian offered. “If you wanna get some sleep.”
Harper dismissed his offer.
Jo issued her goodnights and retired, leaving Harper and Ian to sit in companionable silence. Harper watched him stifle several yawns, before she finally nudged him.
“Go get some sleep.”
“In a few minutes.”
Harper lowered her voice to a whisper. “I know you're waiting for her to fall asleep so you don't have to have awkward pillow talk. Just go in there. I'd think she'd appreciate the company.”
It was the closest Harper would come to outright saying that Jo was interested in Ian. She actually did a decent job of hiding her feelings for him, considering she tended to get pretty obsessive when she dated.
Jo's relationship with Ian had been something of a slow burn. Now preparing for grad school, Ian had been a freshman when he had wormed his way into their duo. Back then, he'd been even more obnoxiously straight-laced and had been more like a kid brother than a potential partner. However, over the past few years, he'd come into his own. By Harper's metrics, he still looked like a kid, but if she tried analyzing him objectively, she could see how most women would find him attractive with his lean build, pretty eyes, and perfectly curled hair.
