by Selena Scott
Alec turned and spat into the darkened woods, as if the thought were so disgusting to him he couldn’t help it.
“That’s the most reprehensible thing I’ve ever heard,” Ruby vibrated with rage and fear. “How can they live with themselves? How?”
“Because on Herta it is believed that shifters are without souls. Or hearts. Or the minds of a regular human. And it’s true that once most Hertians meet a shifter, this place has lulled them into complete and total malleability and submission. Who they are as a person has almost completely dissolved.”
Milla stared into Ansel’s eyes for a moment, silently communicating before she turned back to Alec. “So, we just won’t shift. You said the Struggles only start once you’ve shifted. We’ll stay in our human forms.”
“That would be fine,” he shrugged. “As long as your travels keep you away from the main city. The closer you get to there, the more and more insatiable the urge to shift will be. I’ve never met a shifter who could resist that.”
Milla frowned. She liked a challenge.
Alec looked up at Ruby. “You said your brother was lured through a year ago? What kind of shifter was he? If it’s unusual, there’s a chance I may have heard of him.”
Ruby frowned and looked at Ansel. “Griff isn’t a shifter.”
Alec scoffed. “Of course he is. If he was called through the gate, then he is a shifter. That’s the only reason the gates lure, if there’s a shifter present.”
“But,” Ruby looked at Ansel again, “he’d never shifted before. He would have told me. I’m sure of it!”
Ansel took her hand. “Ruby, I think he may have been an untrained shifter. The migraines you described him having are something that young shifters go through right before they are taught how to shift. I had them when I was around seven years old.”
“Inka and I were eight when we got them. Kain was younger, around five or six,” Milla volunteered.
“Once you learn how to shift, they go away. But it sounds to me like your parents were gone before they could teach him.” He looked up at Alec. “Her parents were killed in an avalanche when Griff was nine. She’s been raising Griff since then.”
Alec frowned. “Were their bodies found?”
Ruby shook her head. “You think they were lured here and we just thought the avalanche had killed them?”
Alec shrugged, and then, sensing the insensitivity in what he was doing, just held her eyes instead. “They were probably shifters if they had a shifter son.”
The group grew quiet as that information sunk in for everyone.
“Well,” Milla threw her hands up in the air in frustration. “Then what’s our next step? How the hell do we find Griff?”
Alec’s eyes looked vaguely amused by her temper but the rest of him held perfectly still. “Young children who come through the gate but haven’t shifted yet are very valuable. Their animal forms can be chosen still.”
“What?” Ansel and Milla demanded at the same time. That didn’t make any sense to them whatsoever. They didn’t choose to be bears. They just were. Same as they were born blond and green-eyed. Bears were in their blood.
Alec shrugged. “They call them choosers, these children. They’re rare and very valuable. If there was a chooser sold in the main city in the last year, you may be able to track him down.” He didn’t mention that no doubt the child’s brain would have already succumbed to the nature of Herta. He may be brought back to earth physically, but he would never be the same again.
Ruby, her stomach roiling with both horror and hope, spoke up again. “Griff wasn’t exactly a child. He was seventeen when he came through the gate. He’d be eighteen now.”
Alec froze, his eyes wide and somehow bright in the night. Wind tugged a cloud over the moon and still, he was bright with something. “Griff, you called him? Holy God in heaven. Your brother is the Griffin.”
“What?” Ruby jumped to her feet. “He shifts into a griffin?”
“No,” Alec squinted his eyes and waved his hand into the air. “Griffins are mythical,” he scoffed as if that would be an obvious bit of information in all this. “They call him the Griffin because he can shift into anything. Yet he’s a grown man. He’s a grown chooser. The only one in remembered history. But he resists the shift. Some shifters can resist the hypnosis of this place. He’s resisting. He’s not been broken yet. The Emperor keeps him in the main city. He covets him for his own slave. He wants to break the Griffin.”
Alec vibrated with tension as he continued. “I’ve seen the Griffin. With my own eyes. Not two months ago. I was freeing a group of newly arrived shifters before they could be sold. In the main city. The Emperor brought the Griffin out in chains to show them what happens to shifters who attempt to resist.” Alec’s eyes darkened and Ansel’s stomach twisted. He really didn’t want Ruby to hear whatever it was that this Emperor had done to her brother in order to make his point.
Alec cleared his throat and moved on from that. “He didn’t have hair like yours, Ruby. He had dark hair.”
“Almost black,” she whispered through hands that covered her mouth.
“And dark blue eyes,” Alec continued. “And a strange mark on his arm. Here.” He patted his own bicep.
“His tattoo,” Ruby’s eyes filled. “It’s of the mountain where my parents disappeared. Oh my God, I was so mad at him when he snuck out and got that. Oh, good boy, Griff. Oh my God. Ansel, he’s here! He’s alive! He’s a shifter. He’s– oh Jesus.” Ruby swayed on her feet and Ansel caught her into his lap, pulling her down and whispering into her ear.
“She needs to rest,” Ansel said to the group, standing up with Ruby at his side, her eyes wide and practically unseeing as she absorbed all the information she’d just gathered.
“You’re safe here, on this mountain.” Alec rose. “There aren’t any dwellings or towns for twenty miles at least. We won’t be interrupted tonight.”
“We?” Milla rose. “Now you’re suddenly going to stay with us?”
Alec measured her with his eyes. “For the night. Yes. Here’s as good a place to rest as any.”
Maybe it was because of the residual effects of shifting. Maybe it was because she hadn’t gotten any rest yet. But Milla didn’t argue when Ansel nodded her toward the tent with Ruby. She nestled into her sleeping bag and almost immediately felt sleep tug at her. But she could feel Ruby’s stiff panic, her whirring mind.
Compassion, Milla reminded herself.
She reached out a hand and patted Ruby’s shoulder. “We’ll find him, Rube.”
Considering it a job well done, Milla rolled over and faced the wall of the tent. She knew the men were both out there. She could hear their breaths, their heartbeats. But she could only smell her brother. It was with thoughts of the scentless man with his bright brown eyes that Milla was ushered into sleep.
CHAPTER THREE
“It will be a two-week hike from here to the main city,” John Alec told them the next morning.
Milla was finding it strange to see this man in the daylight. The sun was warm, warmer than yesterday, and his hair was matted to his head with sweat, making it darker at the temples and forehead. He wasn’t as tall as her brother was, but he seemed to take up so much of the clearing they’d made camp in. Something about his presence, darker than the rest of them, drew the eye. Milla wasn't sure she liked that.
“I’ll go with you for at least seven of those days. And then our ways will part.”
“You won’t take us the whole way?” Ruby asked.
“No. I have no business in the main city unless there is a caravan of new shifters. Besides, I’m known there as a rebel. A shifter ally. The Emperor would love to hang me in the square. I have other business across the mountains and we’ll part ways there.”
“Fair enough,” Milla shrugged, tossing her backpack over her shoulders and pressing her hands to her hips. “Lead the way, Peter Pan.”
Alec frowned at her but said nothing. He showed them his back as he st
arted over the mountain.
And his back was pretty much the only thing they saw for the next two days. He set an incredible pace and Milla begrudgingly respected it. The man was dextrous and fast as he jogged his way through the mountain ranges. The path he chose was winding, but Milla soon saw that it was extremely strategic.
A mile out of the way for berry bushes that refilled a lot of their food stores.
Jogging up the mountain to camp for the night in a sheltered cave on the second night, when it rained.
They skirted wide around a valley where the trees were mostly saplings; they would have been sitting ducks had they chosen to hike through them.
The man didn’t speak much when they were moving. But any time they were sitting or resting, it seemed he loved to argue with Milla. She found herself questioning a lot of his decisions. But she knew it was much more that she was questioning the fact that he was in charge of their group.
“Really? Fording this river is the only way to get where we’re going?” she had demanded that morning.
He’d said nothing, but had smiled that smug little grin of his when, halfway through the river, he’d caught a fish large enough to feed the four of them a very satisfying breakfast.
Though Ruby’s pace grated on Milla probably the most of her three companions, Milla found herself advocating for more rest and slower hiking just to have something to argue with their strange companion about.
“I’m sorry,” he griped at her, setting a snare trap as they argued. “I had thought you wanted to get to the main city sometime this century.”
“Well, what does it matter if we get there quickly if Ruby has a heart attack and dies on the way?”
Milla had glared at Alec hard enough to burn a hole in the side of his head.
“Really, the pace isn’t so bad, it’s getting easier every day…” Ruby had trailed off immediately when Milla had turned that same glare onto her. She’d slunk back into Ansel’s warm embrace and he’d chuckled into her hair.
“Best to let Milla fight this one, darlin’. Considering we don’t even know what she’s fighting about.”
Milla had lost that argument with the mountain man. And their cutthroat pace resumed the next day.
“So,” Ansel had said when the two of them had tromped to a nearby creek to fill everyone’s water bottles. “What’s your problem?”
He’d asked it in that perfectly Ansel way of his. Non-judgmental and inarguable. He wasn’t just asking about her problem, he was telling her there was one in the first place.
She didn’t pretend not to know what he was talking about. “I don’t like him.”
“Why?”
Milla knew she was argumentative and competitive and self-righteous. It was a big reason why her company was so successful. Why she was so successful. But she had to admit, her bone with John Alec seemed to be rather large. It wasn’t that she distrusted him, not really. There was just something about him that grated at her.
“Can’t explain it.”
“Milla,” Ansel turned to her. “We’re in another world, about to storm a city, fight for Griff’s life and our lives, and then find some way to get back to earth. If you’re having some sort of intuition about this stranger, please, for fuck’s sake, tell me.”
Milla’s indignation faded in the face of her brother’s plea. He was right. She was making something out of nothing. She was resistant to the man. But not because he was ominous. A little shiver ran down Milla’s spine. Maybe she was resistant to him because left to her own devices, he would draw her right in. She immediately dismissed the thought as utterly ridiculous. There was absolutely nothing about a man like that that could draw Milla.
“No, no. It’s nothing like that.” She waved a hand in the air. “I don’t think he’s a snake or anything. I just– I’m all out of sorts because we can’t shift.”
That, at least, was true. Both of them were antsy to shift and it had only been a few days in their human forms. They had no idea what they were going to do in the two weeks it would take to get to the main city.
Her words had Ansel falling quiet and there were no more questions about the mountain man.
She tried to pull back on her outright disregard for the man. But she couldn’t erase it completely. She couldn’t stop arguing with him. And when they stopped for any eating or resting they might have to do, Milla often found his eyes on her. It was with an expression on his face that Milla wasn’t used to men having when they looked at her. With her perfect symmetry, high cheekbones, lush lips, sly green eyes, she was used to desire in a man’s gaze. But with Alec, she saw occasional appreciation and mostly confusion. As if something about her didn’t quite make sense to him.
She was pleased to say that everything about him made sense to her. He was a plain, time-hardened traveler. He had hard-won knowledge about his world, but lacked people skills of any kind. There was very little interesting about this man besides the fact that he was a product of an interesting world. Herta mystified and intrigued Milla, even in its horrific treatment of shifters. Not having succumbed to it herself, she observed the nature of this world in a sort of detached, sickened fascination.
And John Alec she observed in the same way. He wasn’t a mystery so much as an unknown. And in five days he’d be gone.
***
The morning of the third day, reality caught up to Ruby. She woke up inside the tent, the shadows of leaves dancing over the canvas. She was hungry. She ached in every place. She felt as if they hadn’t gone any further than they were when they started. Her brother was a shifter, apparently. And being tortured by an Emperor, apparently. And the only man who could possibly help them was leaving in four days, apparently.
And to top it all off, Milla and Alec were already awake and arguing again. Milla insisted it wasn’t arguing. But it sure grated on Ruby’s nerves the way arguing did.
“If you strap it like that, Ladybear, you’re going to have aches across your back in under an hour. Trust me.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about, Peter Pan. This is a camping backpack from REI. It’s been ergonomically designed for comfort. It’s not going to make my back ache if I wear it the way I’m supposed to be wearing it.”
“I don’t know what half those words are, but I’m telling you. You have too many things and too much bag in which to carry them. I see you at night with your hands pressing into yourself right here. You’re aching and for no reason other than your own stubbornness.”
A smacking sound had Ruby rolling her eyes inside the tent.
“Get your hands off my back! If I have an ache there, it’s none of your beeswax. And it’s not because of my perfectly engineered backpack, got it?”
“Fine, you insufferable woman! Have your back aches! They’ll keep you warm tonight! God knows you need a little something to warm you up.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“ENOUGH!” Ruby exploded from the tent. She ignored the way both Milla and Alec jumped at the sight of her. She knew she looked a mess. Her hair was in five directions, her eyes swollen from fatigue and tears.
“I am starving. I need ChapStick. I desperately want a Gatorade, and I would commit murder for a hot bath. But all of those things I would suffer without for years longer if it meant getting one step closer to my brother. But this inane arguing that is plucking my very last nerve? Nah. Nuh uh. Nope. That part of the program is OVER, people. Get your shit together or just put a SOCK IN IT!”
Ruby jumped when she felt a warm arm fall heavily over her shoulder. She was stiff for about a millisecond before she let Ansel fold her into his chest. Tears, which she was getting pretty sick of at this point, tumbled out of her eyes as he guided her into a seated position on a log next to the tent. He pressed a water bottle into her hands and rubbed a slow hand over her back.
“There any place to bathe around here?” Milla quietly asked Alec. He raised an eyebrow at her suddenly conciliatory tone.
“The rive
r isn’t far.”
“Alright.” She couldn’t believe she was about to do this, but you know, the whole compassion thing was apparently sticking. She sighed. “Why don’t you show me where it is and we can get out of their hair for a while.”
She nodded behind her to Ansel and Ruby. Ruby had her head in her hands. Milla could scent her pain and despair from across the clearing. They needed some couple time.
“Get out of their… Oh.” Alec glanced behind him to Ruby and Ansel, instant understanding washing over him. “You mean give them privacy to couple.”
Milla let out a surprised laugh. “I’m kinda thinking that a good cry is more likely, but sure. Let’s give them a little space to do whatever it is they need to do.”
Milla grabbed her bag and told her brother what they were off to do. She must have been right that he and Ruby needed a minute to themselves because he didn’t even attempt to argue with her about going off with Alec alone. He just tersely nodded and instructed her to shift if she even felt the slightest bit uncomfortable with the near stranger. They figured she wouldn’t have to be in bear form for long to overpower him. Then she could shift back and hopefully avoid the Struggles.
But as they walked through the bright, cheery forest, Milla had to admit that it was hard to feel uncomfortable around this guy. He was quiet and careful, respectful of the forest.
He led her down a small ravine and through a stand of pines. She could scent the river on the air.
“Why don’t you have a smell?”
If the question, out of thin air, surprised him, he didn’t show it. “I have a smell.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Yes, I do.”
