Angelica stalked from the office, blowing out the rage and breathing in the calm. At least, that’s what she told herself she was doing. It wasn’t working. So much for all that money spent on therapy. So instead she stormed out of the clinic and walked to the camp, her hands making and opening fists as she walked, which felt slightly more therapeutic, especially when paired with the imagery of her fist sinking into a certain nose.

She stalked the outside edge of the admin complex instead of entering it. She didn’t need to deal with the little Napoleon today, not after the meeting she’d just had.

She saw Taylor leaning against a wall. In a refugee camp in Africa, his Viking ancestry shone like a beacon.

“I take it things didn’t go well?” Taylor asked as she approached.

“Pompous little git,” she said between clenched teeth. “How dare he? I’m here on a voluntary basis; he has no right to treat me like I’m some first-year medical student.” She held up a hand, stopping her own tirade, and took a deep breath, trying to focus on more important things than a dressing down from her boss. “Did you find Charra?”

“No,” Taylor admitted, his own voice laced with frustration and a hint of anger. “Not yet.”

There was a lot he wasn’t saying. She stared at him a moment, thinking there were a lot of things neither one of them was saying. Why was it so hard to talk since he’d arrived? Initially she’d chalked it up to a certain amount of distrust of the people around her, but she was noticing it now, the distance between them. They stood like strangers, not the lovebirds she’d purported them to be. With a sigh she focused her gaze elsewhere, looking around at the growing number of cots and people. There was an entire tent that had appeared since yesterday. How many more would be there by the end of the week?

“Were you able to find out anything?” she asked, knowing she’d given him a task that had to be near impossible under these circumstances. These people were distrustful, as they had a right to be. They’d come from a difficult situation. Why would they open up to an American stranger?

Taylor followed her gaze, his own eyes narrowing. “I found out there’s someone behind the scenes pulling the strings and making the lieutenant here take the fall. He’s an idiot, but he’s a soldier so it can’t be someone of higher rank; he’d just fold over and let him run it. I’m assuming that the person in charge is on-site, then they would most likely be a doctor. Anything less wouldn’t have the authority to pull it off.”

“Wait, someone from the clinic is running the military operations here?” Angelica slumped against the wall next to Taylor and thought this through. It made a certain sense, though how someone would go about doing it was beyond her. Again, the only doctor with that kind of authority was the one who’d just spent an hour letting her know just how far his authority extended in the hospital, in regard to each and every patient.

She didn’t like the connections she was making.

Taylor seemed to be thinking along the same lines. He looked at her unhappily, hands in his pockets. “So far, I would say so.”

“You’ve been here all of an hour and I’ve been here almost three months...” Angelica shook her head, wondering how in the world she could be so dense.

“It’s my job.” He smiled. “Do you think that this Manchester guy could be calling the shots behind the scenes?”

She was glad he’d put the name to it, not her. It seemed saner that way. She thought long and hard before answering. “I wouldn’t put it past him.” She huffed and pushed herself away from the building and began pacing in a very small circle. “But in charge of what, exactly? This is a refugee camp. There’s nothing here but the clothes these people wore getting here. There’s nothing of any value here. It’s at the edge of a poor city. There’s no reason to be secretly in charge; there’s nothing to be had.”

Taylor’s expression made her blood run cold.

“What?”

“Think about it,” he said. His words were terse, but his eyes were sad. “You have young people, especially girls, cut off from their families, isolated, maybe helpless, vulnerable. No one would miss them if they just vanished one day.”

“Slavery?” Angelica spat out the word, knowing it was the thought she’d been avoiding, the connection she hadn’t wanted to admit. “You mean to tell me that it wasn’t enough sloughing through the Amazon, fighting drug cartels, that now we have slave-traders? Taylor, normal people have neighbors who play their music too loud or someone’s dog poops on their lawn. Did you know that most doctors, believe it or not, most doctors go their whole, entire, long, happy lives without ever once seeing someone’s body melt and reform into a cat?!” She grabbed his shirt and almost dragged him down to her level until they were nose to nose. “I’ve seen it twice! That’s two more times than anyone should.”

Angelica collapsed on his chest and felt his strong arms embrace her. She was trying not to cry, not here, not in such a public place where anyone could be watching, reporting to the powers that be that things weren’t exactly lovey-dovey between them. She bit back a sob, a handful of words that had no business being said, and clutched him as though she were drowning.

“I couldn’t hear you,” he murmured against her hair.

“I said I want the suburbs! Wisteria and crabgrass and a garage filled with stuff we never use.”

Taylor kissed the top of her head. “Then why did you join Meadowlark?”

“Because having a house in the suburbs and a nine-to-five office job would drive me bat-shit crazy within a month, and would leave me running naked down the highway screaming in boredom. I know I need the feeling of doing something, of helping people who need me, really need me. I just never figured on all of... this...”

“Give me a minute,” Taylor said, his arms tightening around her. Angelica looked up at him curiously. He shrugged. “I’m stuck on the mental image of you running naked down a street.”

She pulled back enough to swat his arm, hard. “Really, that’s the only thing you got from that?” She couldn’t suppress the smile that tugged at the corners of her mouth.

“No,” he said, his hands on her back, drawing her back into the circle of his arms. “It’s just the best thing from all that.” He bent his head and kissed her tenderly. “We will find the girl,” he promised against her ear. “But it’s been a long time since I’ve held you, and I missed you. And if I tend to picture you naked more often than I do clothed, it’s only because I find you very appealing.”

“Appealing?” Angelica’s face grew warm with pleasure. “I like that. Appealing.” She slipped free of his arms, feeling somehow colder, somehow more alone. “I missed you, too,” she said as she turned and let her hand graze his crotch. She felt his response, though if it was to her touch or the way her body had pressed against his, or the image of her naked in public, she couldn’t say. Did it matter, if it came from being near her? There was something intensely satisfying in that little piece of knowledge.

Of course, this wasn’t the time or place.

She stepped back, lifting her chin, staring him in the eyes. Silent messages passed between them. Promises. Intimacy that couldn’t be voiced.

“Charra,” she said when they’d exhausted all the unheard conversation and had pulled back into themselves. She could see the distance in his eyes. The dark purpose that lurked there. The tiger within.

He nodded. “Charra.” He pulled out his phone and brought up a picture she recognized as being from the video.

“Do you still have my phone?”

He nodded and handed it to her.

“Thank you.” She studied it, checking for messages before slipping it into her pocket. “Do you know that Manchester actually demanded that I hand my phone over to him? As if!”

Taylor frowned. “The young lieutenant said the same.” He tilted his head to indicate the admin building behind them. “I persuaded him to give up that line of inquiry.”

“Teach me that trick,” Angelica said. “I only got away with it because you had it.”

He drew himself up to his full height. “I can try, but you might have to grow a little.”

Laughing, she took his hand and led him back to the bustling camp.

She hated it, the absolute despair and confusion that assaulted her from all sides as she walked through the camp. The air itself felt thick with it. These were people with nothing left from their lives before war and deprivation took it all from them. They had made their way here, on foot for mile after weary mile for the most part, with thieves and guerillas ready to take the last of their meager possessions. That they’d come this far and still survived was a testament to their courage and their infallible belief that there had to be something better than the life they’d lived before.

Every step was torture, not because she didn’t care but because she did. There were simply too many of them and not enough of her. Every step showed her people who needed help, help she could give, simple, easy things that the clinic could handle like abrasions, infections, and malnutrition. The clinic was set up for that, it was configured for that, but so many of them refused the aid they needed.

So much of it is infection of the subcutaneous tissues and fascia, necrotizing fasciitis, superficial cutaneous infection of the skin involving dermal lymphatic vessels... 

She stopped even now while searching for the girl, trying to ease someone’s pain, trying to help, and getting turned away, rebuffed. They were afraid. Afraid of her. Afraid of the big man beside her. They had nowhere to run to or even to hide, so they turned their backs and pretended. They pretended they didn’t speak English, that they didn’t understand the name Charra. They even pretended that Angelica wasn’t there. It was an exercise in futility, in frustration.

Angelica stopped about halfway through the camp, one hand on her sweaty forehead, pushing her hair out of tired eyes. About now all she wanted was to give up. This was like looking for a needle in a particularly large haystack, with the needle a mobile object. For all she knew she’d passed the girl a dozen times already, just missing her as she went about her daily business. She was healed now, after all, so there was no reason to assume she was just sitting somewhere waiting to be found.

She opened her mouth to suggest quitting when she spotted a familiar face. “Taylor!” she hissed, nudging him hard with an elbow in his side. “There! That’s the old woman! She brought Charra to the clinic!”

“Are you sure?” he asked, but Angelica was already in motion.

“Excuse me!” Angelica cried out as they approached the old woman. “You there!”

The woman saw them coming. She looked as though she was about to flee, but at her age and with the slow way she moved she wouldn’t have gotten far. From the frustrated look on her face she knew it, too. She turned to stand her ground, facing them like she was staring down a firing squad.

“Where’s Charra?” Angelica asked, too tired to beat around the bush.

The old woman spat out a stream of language, none of it English.

Angelica threw up her hands in frustration. “I know you speak English.” Angelica narrowed her eyes at the woman, showing that she too was standing her ground. “You spoke it to me already; now where is the girl?”

“I don’t know any girl,” the old woman said sharply and waved her off with a long stick she was using as a cane. “I don’t know. Go away.”

“Listen,” Taylor said reasonably. “We won’t involve you, no one has to know.”

The old woman barked a quick laugh and looked around. They had certainly become the center of attention. Several women had stopped stirring what looked like laundry in a large pot over an open fire. A handful of men looked up, their eyes sharp, glittering.

It wouldn’t take much to incite a riot. Angelica swallowed hard and pressed ahead regardless. “The girl might be in danger.”

The old woman laughed. “No danger until you help! Then everyone in danger! So now you help again? Get everyone dead?”

There was an outburst of noise at that. Agitated murmuring. Discussion erupting in a half-dozen languages.

“Where is she?” Angelica begged with open hands, a plea that could be understood in any language.

The old woman sighed and straightened. She looked Angelica in her eyes and said, “Gone. Taken. They take all her people; she was last one.”

“Taken where?” Taylor asked, stepping forward, one hand on her shoulder as if to say: ‘She’s under my protection’ or maybe more primitively, ‘This is mine.’

Not that she minded. Tigers were possessive that way, and she was comfortable enough with who she was that she could find the thrill in the belonging to someone else without feeling like she was losing any of who she was as a person in the act of being his.

His mate.

She shook herself out of that particular line of thinking and focused on the matter at hand.

The woman only looked around and then shrugged. “I really not know. This time, I don’t. Just taken. Mostly they take female, kill male, but not always. Soldiers come in night. She gone.”

Angelica looked to Taylor, thinking of their earlier conversation. “Slavers?”

“No,” the woman said, interrupting with an impatient wave of her hand. “No slavers. Men break her, beat her, then wait and see. She get better. Now she gone.” She moved slowly into the tent behind her, sitting down on a cot, her back to them. “Go. I know nothing at all. Go!” She pulled her threadbare shawl around bony shoulders.

The frailty phenotype can be used as a marker indicating a critical threshold in decline of homeostatic reserve, or the redundancy of physiologic functions present in human systems used to overcome acute and chronic health insults...

“Listen, come to the clinic; you’ll be safer there.” Angelica reached for her shoulder, but the old woman slapped her hand and spewed words that could only be insults in any language. “I say go away. You deaf and you stupid? I dead now, because of you. You get the girl, me? I die. Now get away from me!”

“But...”

The old woman screamed and batted at her. “I know nothing! I don’t know! Go away! Leave me!”

Taylor grabbed Angelica and steered her out of the tent, away from the crowd which parted before them, a sea of faces showing anger and distrust.

“We can’t just leave her here!” Angelica cried, stumbling in Taylor’s wake, still trying to go back, to right this whole thing somehow.

“Yes, we can,” Taylor insisted, pulling her along and out of the camp proper. “And we will. She told us as much as she knew, even though it might cost her life to do so. We can’t help her, not without losing the girl and all her people, whoever they might be.”

“You think someone will really kill her?” Angelica had assumed the woman was being dramatic.

“She does,” he answered, his expression grim. “But she was still willing to talk.”

“If I put her in the clinic.”

“The girl, Charra, was in the clinic!” he shot back and stopped, drawing her around to face him. They were standing in the shade of a tree, alone, away from the people of the camp and from the hospital staff. Somehow, they’d wound up at the edge of the city, not far from the sanity of civilized life. “There is no place to put her, no place safe. We can only hope she’s wrong and that there isn’t a great conspiracy behind all of this.”

“But what if she’s right? What if they kill her, whoever they are?”

“Then we find out who they are. And we expose them and keep them from hurting anyone else.”

Angelica stared at a passing bus. The whole thing felt surreal, that they should be talking like this in this day and age. “How do we do that?” Her voice wavered as fear clutched at her throat, making it hard to breathe. The cost was too high. Even the loss of one life was too high.

“I have no idea,” Taylor admitted, his expression fierce. “But I’m not going to let that stop me.”