“In despair, she called her firstborns for help. The moon and sun, stars and distant planets came together under cover of darkness, sending the living creatures of Mother’s embrace to sleep. Behind the eclipse, they proposed a plan to restore harmony to Mother’s once balanced sphere.
“Children of the Great Mother joined and created the people of the between: neither mankind, nor Mother’s middle children, but a joining of human and furred beast. These middle beings would restore order, liaison with all the animals, whether they walked upright or on four paws, flew, slithered, swam, or galloped, the in between would shift to take on the forms needed to restore balance and grow enlightenment and understanding between all species.
“When mankind first beheld the shifter, he was in awe as would be a mortal to a god. He laid down his flint knife and washed blood of his enemies from his own skin and ended his wars. Humanity followed this light cast by a greater being, respected his fellow creatures, and loved his family—as shown by example of the loyal wolf and the horse, the beaver and the mother bear who will die for her cub.
“Even more came from Mother’s sorrow. Where her tears fell, the dead stood to walk the nights without souls or beating hearts. Where she smiled for joy at harmonious deeds of her children and kissed the light they left behind, wisps of her own spirit joined the world of mortals across her soils. So the vampires and the kindred met the world of plant, animal, mankind, and shifter.
“As the centuries turned and Mother Earth grew by the creatures sharing her, more descendants split and changed with her. Just as the jackals and dingoes came in by the fires and allied themselves with humanity, so the pigs allowed themselves to be herded to his pens and the goats to be milked by his hand. And so other creatures changed as well. Battles started between the many shifter clans. Even more battles raged between the human clans. Before long, mankind’s wonder had turned to fear, and fear turned to hatred. So began the Age of War.
“When the human clans broke apart so did shifters. Wolf and bear became enemies. Horse and deer no longer shared meadows. Otter took to the streams, weasel to the underground, and marten to the trees.
“Through strife and invention of armies and new weapons, the fashioning of bronze swords, the development of iron, of gunpowder, mankind and shifter kind changed forever in a wave of progress spanning thousands of years.
“There were religious divides, racial divides, language barriers, and cultural barriers. Proud of their own people, the humans sought to strengthen these gaps and build higher walls and forge stronger swords. At the same time, the casters emerged, the druids turned their backs on this new age, and the human world looked beyond persecuting itself to pursue others.
“By now the shifters were at war, whole clans and houses falling, fragile species swallowed in bloodbaths. ‘Divide, divide, divide,’ became the rallying cry of all beasts, shifter, human, and total creatures of the wild. Seeing the power, strength, and cunning of shifters turned on each other, the human beings—moved beyond fear to hatred and taking up arms—barred shifter kind from their societies. For a time, shifters were saved from each other in order that they might join against the common enemy of mankind.
“Humans launched a campaign of destruction for all who carried shifter blood, or were believed to be allied with them. This included anyone living too close to nature, as well as anyone using magic, or what seemed to be magic. Shifters, casters, druids, shamans, undead, and the kindred were attacked en masse—beheaded, hanged, burned, driven from their territories, exiled, and destroyed.
“So came the decades of going underground. Casters learned to hind their magic. Mother’s kindred no longer showed themselves to mankind. Vampires disappeared into darkness. Druids and shamans, both nearly wiped out, ran and scattered to the four winds. Shifters alone remained divided in their approach. Some fought back for centuries, some hid in plain sight, living as humans. Some ran, tried to start over, or even renounced the heritage which tied them with the image of man, living as total wild animals as far from humankind as their paws could carry them.
“The age of shifter, caster, and mundane human living openly together was over. The wars were not.
“With the numbers reduced, by the Middle Ages, cults, societies, and bands of humans formed together to destroy the last of the shifters. Throughout the past thousand years, wars have been fought in secret. The humans worked so hard to banish all trace of this now hated enemy, they twisted their long history with shifters into myth and folklore. Over the course of decades, they became unable to recognize which stories were true, which legends, until it had been so long since anyone could remember seeing such a thing, the idea of a ‘man turning into a wolf’ became no more than a tail for drunks, or to frighten children.
“Like the shifters, casters were banned from mundane society. While they burned witches and rewrote their own histories, mundanes accepted stories of spellcasters only in their legends and fantasies. Along with them, the druids, believed to be too close to shifters and kindred, were hunted, murdered, and executed on mere suspicion of worshiping at a druidic circle.
“When shifters went into hiding they lost their ability to fight back in open warfare. Crowded, oppressed, and shoved into unnatural and stifling living situations, they turned once more on each other. Now, though, there were hardly any left.
“Over the past five hundred years, as humanity has eaten its way across Mother like a mange, most of the remaining shifters have been killed. The last herbivore shifters, the mustangs, were destroyed by European wolves in the 1800s, when the great European migration across the western United States eradicated so many total wild species as well. American badgers were also lost—the European badger shifters having been wiped out hundreds of years before. And, so, one by one, we were becoming extinct.
“Across our Great Mother, we remained in the tiniest of pockets, forced to bunch together until we turned on each other to kill even more. The wolverine and the tiger, the dhole and the cheetah are all gone. Others live, we know, or only pray they live, in a few isolated and troubled spots where they cling to their existence in constant fear of mankind, of casters who know what they are, and of each other as they cannot help fighting when pushed too close.
“Some remain wild, like our friend Curnook the grizzly and his family. Some integrate with human beings and take human jobs and send their young to schools. Most dwell in between, a shadow existence troubled by poverty, substance abuse, and violence—in short, most have come to be a mirror image of humanity after all.
“Those gathered before you represent all the species we know to be left in this part of the world. For how much longer, only Mother can say. Yet Mother weeps below our paws. It is up to us to do better.
“What you are seeing is unique. As far as we are aware, ours is the only mixed-clan alliance operating in deliberate close proximity and friendly communication in the world. There may be lions and painted dogs still in Africa, but they do not share territory. There may be Eurasian brown bears and Eurasian lynx still in Russia, but they do not share soup.
“Because of our divides, we will die. History has proved as much. If you follow the course of history and project based on trends therein, it suggests there will be no shifters left to call Mother home within the next two hundred years.
“Murders you say? Deaths across close clans? How could there not be? How could our evolution progress any other way?
“You will have noticed the Sun Valley Clan did not rush out to welcome you here with open arms or wagging tails. When has a foreign shifter pack last stepped onto our bit of Mother’s soil with kind intentions? Ever before?
“Yet we are the great alliance of the Yellowstone and mountain shifters. Our friendship runs from beyond the Canadian border to the Grand Canyon. We heard your songs, we called our own meeting, and we invited you. Never could I have guessed I would live to see the day a caster would lead a shifter to a shifter and offer a hand of friendship. I did not know it was such a world
we lived in. If your words and intentions are as they appear, you have my respect, Witch Cassia, as well as our gratitude.”
Rema stepped back, offering me a bow, along with her shadow-casting companions.
Chapter 35
Daniel, Rema, and Si sat before us. Isaac and Jed sat to each side of my bench, where I was joined by Zar. Kage, Jason, and Andrew had another bench under the smoky rock wall.
As we talked, others occasionally offered a contribution—a bear or fox, wolf or bobcat—though it was mostly Daniel, Rema, and Si—who also sat with coyotes in fur lying or sitting about their bench.
Not in the least surprised by our story of murder, they added more details which they knew of recent history and who might make a habit of slaying shifters in Europe. They would not, however, venture into speculation. There was no, “It could be…” Only, “We know this once happened.”
The most concentrated recent killings of shifters had happened during World War One and World War Two, under cover of so much death, it was easy for other shifters to have a go at each other again, or for humans to murder them. Zar already knew this much, but not about the deaths in North America which Daniel recounted:
During World War Two, thousands of American citizens had been forced into concentration camps on the grounds that they could be sympathetic with the enemy, spies, or enemy agents. Among the uprooting and lives turned upside down, shifters in many communities had been tracked down and murdered with their throats cut or bullets in their heads, and the killers’ trail covered against scent tracking.
This would have been in the early 1940s. Still, it made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
Who had done it? They hadn’t the faintest idea, even to this day.
The foxes did say they knew for certain there were still human societies in the States dedicated to destroying vampires.
“Undead can be a real problem in cities like Los Angeles and New York,” a male said, sitting on a bench with a swift fox in fur curled on his lap. “Anywhere there’s vampire activity like that, you still get mundane societies or cults going after them. But everyone knows that. Including the vampires.”
“Just like everyone knows some people, including both human and shifter, go after shifters now and again,” the thunder-voiced bear murmured. “That doesn’t help our English friends.”
“The killings of shifters have occurred for so long, and been done by so many, history is only going to show you an open book,” Si said. “A tapestry. And on that tapestry is the world. It can only help you if you find someone from the past using the same pattern as now, or you use it as a process of elimination.”
“We’re going by process of elimination right now,” I said. “That’s what’s been taking us so long. How many months will we spend tracking down one suspect at a time and ruling them out while people die at home?”
“If it is the pattern you seek, we can point you that way,” Rema said. “But you will still have to find your own answers. Who knows more about the slayings during the war?” She looked around. “That was no isolated incident in the American West.”
A young male stepped forward. He’d been slouching against the rock wall with a couple of grey wolves in fur so I assume he was one as well.
“Those killings also happened in Europe during World War Two. My family comes from the Irish immigrants. We’ve never kept records that I know of. Maybe Daniel’s right and you’d find more from wolves in Seattle, but I don’t see how. I used to have family still over—in Estonia and Italy. That’s how my grandmother and mom had Old World news. During the war, those same sorts of killings happened there. Now…”
He glanced at the coyotes and away. “I don’t know who did it. But everyone said it was shifters at the time. Funny how they knew exactly how to cover their tracks and exactly where to find the other shifters. I know that’s not an iron clad case. Even so … it takes a shifter? Some of these wolves living in the mountains in Italy … no one would ever know. No one without a nose to track them.
“Then whole families are discovered dead in their homes in those mountains with their throats cut? You can’t just leave a wounded shifter. They might heal. Besides, it takes so much to find most shifters, and a lot to know how to hind your tracks. The way my mom told it, casters or shifters had to find them, and even casters wouldn’t have known so well how to hide their tracks and kill wolves just so.
“Then there’s motive to consider. Why would mundane society want to secretly murder shifters? It’s the shifters, the casters, druids and vampires, even kindred who fight for a right to exist. While the Earth shrinks and time speeds up, different people see the need to cleanse and return a balance to how they believe it should be—right or wrong. Sometimes killing, thinning a herd, removing a living obstacle to your own goals or your own ideas of that right balance, can help. Certain people have been on a crusade to destroy certain other people, in all manners of human and magical life, for generations, centuries. From a single serial killer to genocides of millions, someone thinks they are right and the other person is wrong. When fighting a magical war, sometimes an undercover—and very slow—genocide is the only way to go. Next thing you know, no more shifters.”
“What about since the war?” I asked. “Those are generalities. Anyone else like that in Italy? Anything closer to England?”
He shrugged. “Recently? I wouldn’t know. Yes, we kill each other off. Yes, sometimes humans help. But who, when, how long ago?” He looked at Rema.
“Because we are divided, we are isolated,” Rema said. “That is why you are in this country searching thousands of acres of wilderness on foot, is it not? Our modern age has not made it easier to find a shifter.”
“But someone can find them,” I said. “Someone has had no trouble finding them, even when they don’t want to be found. We found you only because of shifters and casters working together. Now I have reason to believe there are casters involved in these murders. And reason to believe shifters were murdering each other pretty routinely not so long ago.” I watched the coyotes before me.
They would not speculate, only looking back. All the same, I felt a chill thinking what we hunted may be a mirror image of ourselves: a caster working with shifters.
“Will any of you at least give an opinion on this?” I asked. “Who would want to murder shifters and druids, vampires, and the kindred? That bit keeps throwing me. To think shifters would keep on warring underground, sure. And we know they have a bad history with vampires also. But what do they have against druids and elemental spirits?”
“The trouble with speculation,” Daniel said with a slow smile, “is it will lead you to creating conclusions that fit your own ideas. Rather than opening your mind to greater ideas of the universe and Mother and your own deeper soul. When you try to fit a square peg in a round hole you can quite often succeed. That doesn’t make it a match. Only opening up to allow square peg and square hole both to flow to you naturally will bring you truth. As long as you have one and not the other, the seeking continues. And the journey. May we?”
I had to explain about shamanic journeys to the rest. Only Kage and Zar were keen to try it, though I noticed Kage pretended reticence. I hadn’t had a chance for a magic lesson with him since this trip began and I was glad for the opportunity to show him some shamanic fringe magic.
One thing about journeys was collective energy. Yes, you could journey all on your own with a recording of drumbeats playing, but it wasn’t a bit the same. I talked the whole pack into it and they seemed eased by Daniel’s explaining that journeys were not hypnosis. At any point, if they wished, they could get up and walk away. Also, many of those surrounding us were joining in. In fact, this seemed to have been an eagerly anticipated part of the meeting.
Many rough blankets were brought. Benches were moved against the rock, mugs whisked away, and all around the firelight shifters began lying down on their backs.
My pack gathered around me as we settled on blankets, including
Jed and Isaac.
Daniel warned us not to touch, that we would share too much and not experience our own personal journeys that way. Both Jed and Zar had to inch away from me.
“The shaman is one with a foot in both worlds, spirit and this solid interpretation,” Daniel explained for my pack’s benefit as Si brought him his deerskin hoop drum and others settled or stepped back if they were not participating. “You will find you have a foot in both worlds as you journey. Half here, half there. You may see a great deal, smell strange smells, go strange places. You may see nothing at all. Wherever the journey takes you is always where you are supposed to be. Only relax and go there. This journey will be to the lower world: world of plants, animals, and rock or mineral spirits. You can ask them for help, ask them for answers, or ask them a personal question of your own. They are glad to help and always curious to interact with us.”
Daniel went on, telling how he would drum, how we could trance and know it was time to come back when he changed the cadence. Then more about the method and what to expect.
Others walked about with smudge sticks and feathers, wafting smoke. Rema used a rattle to call in spirits of the six directions and five elements. Then more coyote shamans, including Si, joined Daniel in his drumming. They sat, stood, or walked among us while they drummed, sending waves of sound through our nerves and into our bones. It was the most wonderful sensation—and a long time since I’d done a proper journey. A welcome dive away from the pressures of magic and into the realm of spiritual guidance.
Chapter 36
As drumbeats reverberated deliciously down my spine, sending my whole energy tingling, I lay still, eyes shut, with my jacket over me like a blanket, covering my face.
I stood in my meditation grove with the waterfall, moonlight, and cool, peaceful feelings of needing nothing: total contentment. Despite this, I had instructions to follow. Daniel had told us to move on to the lower world.
Moonlight Journey: A Reverse Harem Shifter Romance (The Witch and the Wolf Pack Book 6) Page 23
