Book 4: Shifter’s Rose
Chapter One
“Harper Bachmann stepped out of her treehouse early as she always did. She adored this new house - it was elevated off the ground to keep her safe from predatory, pure animals that hunted at night, kept her close to the broad, green leaves at the top of the tree and kept her in the path of cool breezes all day long. The floor went around the trunk of a tall, strong tree in a kind of octagon shape, though a rough one. The walls didn’t come quite up to the roof, but that was how the birds could flit in and out, which she adored. This morning was no different. She could see little red and black birds tilting their heads at her, wondering if she would appreciate a visit.
It was hard to believe that only a couple of years ago she had been part of a plan to capture a shifter and submit it to testing. She and her father had hatched the plan. Originally, he was supposed to befriend a shifter, earn his or her trust and then kidnap that shifter to a house out in the middle of nowhere. It had worked, but too well. They ended up with an extra female shifter, a female boar named Emily. She had burst in just as the kidnapping was getting underway and threw everything out of whack. Desperate, her father and his henchmen had just taken both.
When Harper had seen the two young, female shifters, she’d balked. For some reason, she had expected her father to go for a fellow man. It had never crossed her mind that he would use the wounded president routine to seduce a beautiful cobra like Blue. But seduce her, he did. Blue always insisted she’d never actually given the former leader her heart but rather taken pity on him, but the truth had been hard to get a grip on those days.
Anyhow, the whole plan backfired. Harper had found herself surrounded by shifters out for her father’s blood. To her surprise, no one really saw her as a threat. Probably because they’d taken the time to actually get to know her during their captivity and she had done the same. So when the big escape happened and they found The City very different than how they had left it, everyone had just found their own way. She’d been sure that the three of them would be close friends for eons, but instead they were neighbors with a strange, shared memory that none of them ever discussed.
The tree across from Harper’s was Emily’s home. Emily, the young woman who had saved her life, who had been held captive by Harper’s father only to set herself and others free, had chosen solitude for the present time. Harper gave her a silent hand raise, their own silent greeting. Emily returned it and then turned away to make her tea. Harper watched her silent neighbor for a while, hoping she was well.
Emily had been taken in a few years ago by a family of bats that adopted her as a daughter and sister. She loved them dearly and wanted nothing more than a family, but as her bat brothers grew older and her bat parents became more and more reclusive, she found herself alone again. Poor Emily was the only remaining member of her family and it showed. Her eyes held a loneliness that Harper had not come across in other shifters’ eyes.
The other shifters were all thriving in their new environment. What had once been a crumbling, crowded city had been reclaimed by a fresh wave of aggressive green. Trees sprang up through old cement floors, cracking them with hardly a second thought. Tough vines burst through thick window panes, wrapped around table legs and tripping anyone foolish enough to try and salvage the furniture. They’d all had to leave their structures as they became overgrown death traps. The trees, however, proved to be more than they could have asked for in those early days.
After decades of food shortages, there was suddenly more than enough to eat for everyone. Money lost it’s value as new fruits, vegetables and fat, purple bugs became readily available in any nearby tree. All a human or a shifter had to do was reach up and grab their next meal. Hardly anyone cooked anymore - no one wanted to start a fire lest they burn down their own home. Harper had never imagined she would one day pluck a slow, overweight bug out of the air and pop it into her mouth, but the juicy, filling little things were just too good to pass up. Now she ate bugs happily.
A sound under her took her attention away from her neighbor and the birds and down to the ground. Some group was tearing across the heavily covered forest floor, yelling and crying out to one another. She wondered if they were the last of The Alliance and shivered a bit at the thought despite the heat that was already building all around her.
The Alliance. They simply refused to go away. They had started as a peaceful, inclusive group, but those days... The Alliance had become a separatist group of people that only made the occasional appearance. They had a way of interacting and communicating that no one else was able to follow - they had odd objectives and weird ways of bonding.
“We are The Alliance!” they would scream at each other, running and slamming chests together like warriors on the battlefield. Several of them had approached her about joining them in order to encourage others to give their lifestyle a try. After all, she was the descendant of the last president. If they wanted to make a real power play, she’d be their main target. That was why she spent so much time with Grey.
Oh, Grey. Just his name made her heart swell in her chest and beat a little faster. They had been playmates as kids and had shared one secret kiss as teenagers, but now... Something as powerful as the trees and the sunlight was growing between them, something Harper couldn’t even name. Was this love? She suspected it was, though she had never thought of herself as someone capable of falling in love before. Did love make people tremble at the sight of the right pair of eyes? Was love both wonderful and terrifying? Was it the thing that made his voice so beautiful, his shoulders so beautiful and his hair almost too lovely to touch? If it was, it was a force she wanted to be ready to grapple with and hoped that one day she would be able to do so.
A knock at the base of her tree shook her out of her lovely thoughts of Grey and suddenly the real man was there.
Grey had grown into a muscled, confident and handsome young man. The Shifter Revolution had liberated him from a life of service and being out from under the mantle of power had helped him immensely. His father had been a presidential messenger for his entire life and Grey had started down the same path. Once that path was gone, however, he was free to make himself into the man he actually wanted to be; a leader, a poet.
Like so many shifters, Grey had thrown himself into reading. After a small device was discovered in an abandoned mansion that could scan and read any text, the shifters got together and created a reading school. They found all kinds of books and studied the markings that represented different words as they listened to the automated voice read them one by one. Harper had helped a little, but they barely needed her. She’d had no idea that enthusiasm and a thirst for words could be such a great teacher.
She waved down to the shifter who held her heart in his hands and then lowered the lift. The lift was essentially a swing on a pulley except that the rider stood instead of sitting and it went up and down, not back and forth. Grey himself had built hers and then went on to make one for most of the families in the grove. His design caught on quickly and now he was looking into connecting trees through some kind of hanging bridge. He wanted everyone to have a means of getting help, having company and keeping up with all the news.
“Hi.” His face appeared up over the edge of her porch and the sight of his lips moving turned Harper’s knees to water. “How did you sleep?”
She smiled instead of answering as he swung his strong, bare legs over the railing and landed on his feet. He took a step closer to her.
“Not talking to me today?”
“I’m just looking at you.”
“Why?” he asked, reaching for her waist as she walked backwards, away from him. He pursued. “Do I look funny today?”
She nodded. “Very.”
“That’s such a coincidence! I was just about to tell you how weird you look.”
“You’re horrible.”
“You’re worse.”
Harper had nowhere left to go. Her backwards walk had guided her into a corner that held her in one spot. Grey walked up to her, putting his hands on either side and closed his eyes, tilting his forehead towards hers. “I never met a weirdo like you.”
She touched the side of his face. Oh, his jaw. It was sculpted perfection. “Yeah, well,” she whispered, sure that she had some ending to that thought, but she couldn’t seem to find it. His lips were so close. It had been years since their last kiss. Now she could have another one. Maybe she could just kiss him forever. She closed her eyes and gently moved towards him.
“Grey!”
The cry startled them both, making them butt heads. Hurt and annoyed, Grey scowled over at Black Feather, who was yelling from a few trees away. “What?”
“Jeez. Just saying hi, man. Oh, and we need you over here. Minor emergency.”
Gery sighed and pulled Harper a little closer so that his breath fell onto her cheek. His skin was so accustomed to sunshine it felt as if it had trapped some inside. She closed her eyes and enjoyed the moment, knowing he would take off as quickly as he had arrived.
“I better go check it out.”
“Grey, I’m telling you, he’s freaked out by the two of us being together. He always does this.”
Grey squeezed Harper just a little tighter, the stepped back but kept ahold of her arms. “I’ll talk to him. See what’s up. Can I come back for breakfast?”
“You better.”
He smiled at her again and then released her arms, took a few steps away and shifted into his bird form. He was a small, beautiful eagle and flew with widespread, graceful wings that ended in splayed feather tips. Watching him fly filled Harper with pride. He flew so beautifully that it made her ache each time he did a slow flap of his wings. Black Feather was also an Airborne shifter, though no one used that old term anymore.
She went inside to gather up some fruits and vegetables for their morning meal. All of the things they ate were new; big, purple balls filled with juicy, white sections that burst in your mouth when you bit into them, little spiky cones that unwrapped in a spiral to reveal a gorgeous, golden flesh. Then they had crunchy, green cones that had a pleasant, peppery taste and spicy black seeds and then a kind of nut but too soft to be called one. It was white with a purple blush and had a soft fleshiness that complimented the other produce very well and kept a belly full in the morning.
All of these were readily available all around Harper. The fruit came from her own tree, the vegetables from a vine that hung down through the tree’s branches and the new nuts from a little flower that grew just outside her bedroom window. She chopped up the fruit, mixed in the vegetables and sprinkled nuts over the whole thing, her mouth watering the whole time. Luckily a bug flew lazily by and she quickly grabbed it, looked at it’s body, then deciding it was ready, popped it into her mouth.
The bugs were her favorite. Their delicate skin popped in her mouth while a rich, spiced juice ran out. The bugs lived on all kinds of flower pollen and the combination of the different flowers in their system and their time in the sun made them a kind of portable soup. Harper often had to stop herself from eating too many.
Soon Grey returned and the two of them attacked the big bowl of food on her little table. The mix of crunchy sweetness with a peppery kick helped wake the two of them up and gave them some energy.
“Can I show you my plans for the bridges I want to build?” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and Harper shook her head at him. She handed him a cloth and he cleaned himself up properly.
“Sure. Let’s have a look.”
He pulled a small scrap of paper out of his pocket and then moved his stool over to her, sitting as close to her as he could. She caught a whiff of that undeniable man smell; a little sweaty, salty and very warm. It was wonderful.
“Here,” he said, holding his little scrap of brown paper in front of them. It had a series of triangles lightly drawn across it in a line. Harper tried to see what they represented, but she couldn’t quite get them to come together.
“I’m not sure what I’m looking at.”
“Oh.” Grey held the paper up to his face, then further away. “I guess it’s a little rough. Basically, we’ll use dried vines to make a kind of rope, braid the ropes together and then tie them into triangles. Then, we’ll connect those to a sort of pathway, a rope that leads to another place. That will be the frame. Then, we’ll add small branches, salvaged wood, all the stuff as the base so it’s easy to walk across. People will travel across a kind of open hallway, holding onto the vines and walking on a soft floor. So, yeah. That’s it.”
He looked at her hopefully. “What do you think?”
She sighed and regarded the paper carefully, now able to see Grey’s vision a bit better. She imagined jogging across a hanging bridge, the ground thirty feet below her, to go and visit Emily. As much as she wanted some time with her old friend, she was terrified by the idea.
“What about nets?”
“Sorry?”
“Well,” she said carefully, not wanting to bruise his ego, “we’re not all fliers. Some of us grew up on the ground. I can imagine some people and some shifters really panicking halfway across a swinging pathway high in the air. Also, the base could give out. But,” she said hopefully, “if we had nets under us as a safety precaution, it could prevent some real accidents.”
He took the paper back and scowled at it. She didn’t say anything more, she knew he would need a few days to process the edit to his idea.
“Nets. Maybe. I suppose...” He wasn’t talking to her. He was consulting with himself. Grey knew that others looked to him for solutions like these and that if he designed something dangerous that humans and shifters alike would copy and use it before realizing that it was risky. He wanted everyone safe but he also wanted this done. Harper could see the unrest in his eyes.
“Why do you want this done so badly? We’re all managing without them.”
“Like you said,” he responded, resting his head on her shoulder, turning the paper this direction and then that, “not everyone is a flier. Look at Emily. A boar isn’t meant to be trapped in a tree. She barely speaks to anyone anymore.”
He sighed and sat up, looking out across the forest from his place. “I’m afraid that too much time alone will make us all hard and mean.”
She snorted a little laugh at his concern. “Why would you think that?”
He stared into the middle distance, remembering. “Because I know how these thing happen. If you want to build hate all around you, put up barriers. Let creatures separate and forget one another. Soon they’ll be at each other’s throats. Works every time.”