My guts fell through the floor, only Jai’s fingers holding me up, digging hard now. I watched the old men nod and confer.
Another spoke next. Jack’s back was ramrod straight, his white hair spilling over his shoulders, and when he looked at me, the eye shine was all the brighter for the cataracts in his eyes.
“Go back to this place. Get more information. Rob wants war? You’ll be the scout, girl. You can get in where we can’t. We do this? People’ll die. They may anyway.” His eyes dropped down to the ground, as if seeing the previous times that had happened.
I felt their words wash over me, then jerked my shoulders free of Jai’s grip.
“You want me to—” I bit the words off, remembering Nan’s admonitions about speaking to the pack. “They… He wants me to be the one to get those samples from those shifters.”
“Familiarising you with your mates. Wise man,” Rusty said.
“I’m…” I glanced around at the kids who were clustered around us. “I’d be assaulting those men.”
“You would.”
“And I’d… Everything Nan told me was always this, always to run. I stayed, I told Rob and Jai, despite everything I saw.”
“So you did, rabbit girl, as was agreed by your Moira,” Rusty replied. “You can run. Jai’ll chase you. Maybe that’s what you want. But you run, you’ll always be a rabbit, always have sharp jaws on your heels, then around your neck.”
When he straightened in his chair, pushing back his hat to reveal eyes that glittered in the firelight, it was then that I could see it. His back might be curved, his fingers clawed by arthritis, but there was an endless strength here. He knew who he was, where he belonged, what his strengths were and how to use them. He might not be the one to do the fighting anymore, but that was his sons and his sons’ sons’ job now.
“My uncle, Eric,” Jack said, not looking at me or the pack, “he was a union man, down at the railway when it still ran. Young man, full of piss and vinegar. Thought he could use that role to fight for our rights.” He shook his head. “Those councillors, Wallace, Moore, and that bastard, Bailey…” He paused, just watching the fire in the drum crackle. “They couldn’t bring him down, Eric. Had no wife, no kids, no points of weakness he thought. Was smart as billy-o. Too smart. Started getting the workers striking, fighting against the conditions…”
Jack’s eyes flicked up at me.
“They couldn’t take him down in a fair fight. They tried that. They couldn’t stop him with the men. They cut people’s wages, stood over their families. Eric was a leader, born and bred. So they did what they always do with power, they used whatever means they could find to take his. Drugged his beer, with the publican’s help, and waited until he staggered out of the place, trying to walk on home. They came after him then, like wolves on a rabbit’s trail. Prey had become predator.”
His lips peeled back to reveal teeth yellowed by age, but still sharp.
“They beat him down, smacked him until he was on the ground, then beat him all the more.” He paused for a moment, and damn the rules, I watched the fire flicker in his eyes. “We can’t be killed with fists, we heal too well, most of the time. They stomped his chest in, that’s what killed him. The bones pierced his heart, and then there was nothing left to heal.”
I expected more, a moral of the story or something. Anything to explain why this horrible fucking tale was told, but there was nothing. Jai waited, everyone waited, and then at some allotted amount of time I didn’t understand, he put a hand on my shoulder and turned me away.
“C’mon, Shan, it’s time to go home.”
Chapter 15
Jai didn’t say anything on the drive home, nor when we got to his place. He watched me fuss over the dogs, then run up the stairs, following me on silent feet. He was a sentinel, watching over me as I grabbed my bags, pawing through them to see if I had the essentials. I was following the wolf’s advice and getting out of Dodge. I’d ask Jai to drop me home, then pack up the car and the dogs and go.
Nan’s house… I felt a pang as I realised I’d need to leave much of what was in there. People would sort through it, clear it out. That filled me with shame, leaving that for someone else to do, but it also hurt. My whole childhood was in that place. There were framed pictures of faded drawings of mine, old toys, albums groaning with photos. Everything I was, that Mum and Nan had been was contained in that house.
I shook my head though. No place was worth that though, drugging animals, helping what I assumed was a frigging maniac stockpile shifter genetic material. If they were cloning, they wouldn’t just be using sperm, would they? Would they be cutting into the shifters? Taking chunks to build new ones? And how did that work? Was the place full of little babies, crying somewhere? Been raised up to…? I shook my head, trying to eradicate the vision of the pack kids from my mind, because it was them I saw, being fed and looked after, but never loved.
And why? That was the big question my mind shied away from, what the alphas had been pointing us to. What did this place want from us? Why were they going to all this trouble and expense? The place they’d built, the equipment, the capture and transportation of all these shifters… They had to have spent millions upon millions of dollars.
And then I felt the strangest thing. A flash of red-hot anger at Nan. She’d drummed into me how to use our abilities safely and ethically, how to stay under the radar, but never why. Where did this power come from? How did it fit with shifters? She’d told me to be careful of them, but she’d moved onto their land and lived cheek by jowl with them. My fingers went limp as I considered this, and then I heard the sound.
I turned to see Jai pulling an old suitcase down from the top of his cupboard and laying it on the bed, then frowned when he started sorting through his clothes and packing them away.
“What are you doing?”
He didn’t answer, just grabbing shirts and folding them neatly.
“Jai?”
When he looked up, I took a step backwards, slapped in the face by everything I could see in his eyes. There was pain and anger, sadness and resignation. Somehow, he’d ended up exactly where he thought he’d be, and he wasn’t happy about it. I looked down at the bag, at his clothes…
“You can’t come,” I said. “You belong here, with the pack.”
He just kept folding his clothes, staring back at me, the movements done on automatic.
“This is your place, your people. The pack—”
“Don’t tell me about my connection to the pack,” he snapped. He shook his head. “We’ve talked about it often enough. The old fellas made a point of telling me when I knew you were my mate. I think they were trying to warn me. You, your nan, you walk so lightly yet so heavily on the land. Ready to up and go, run, run, run. Nothing holds you to a place or people, but the decisions you make from one day to the next. Us? We stay, we stick together no matter what, endure every bloody thing that’s done, and now these bastards come.”
He dropped the shirt he was folding badly onto his bed and walked around the bed to me.
“I told the alphas when I was eighteen that you were my mate, and they said no, not that one. Do you know how often they say that? I can’t remember the last time. That one's a rabbit, she runs, was what they said. They were trying to help me, stop me from feeling…this.” His fingers flexed, as if they could help him find the words. “I know it's different for you, that you wouldn’t have felt it like I did when we…when I made love to you. For you, it's a slow process, finding your mate, but for us, it's instant. I knew, the moment I first shifted, you were it for me, that I’d only love you.”