Remember who you are. Remember . . .
Thousands of miles away
Cameron Haywood stood at the window of his study in Somerset Hall, the ancestral home of the earldom of Somerset in England. He held a glass of scotch and gazed upon the same stars, though muted somewhat by the distant city lights.
Thirteen years. Had it really been that long since his older brother, Jacob, had been lost in the Ugandan forest with his wife and child? It felt like a lifetime ago. He had never wanted to become the Earl of Somerset. He would give everything to have his family back.
Thirteen years ago, he had done all that he could to find his brother. He had sent search parties, tried to locate the plane, and bribed every official for any information. He’d flown there a dozen times, scouring the impenetrable forest, even calling the names of his loved ones until he lost his voice.
Cameron went to his desk, turning his back to the stars. The sounds of a party going on in his house downstairs gave him no joy at the prospect of mingling among the powerful men and women of England. Today would have been his nephew’s sixteenth birthday.
“Cameron.” His wife, Isabelle, stuck her head into his office. “Our guests are waiting. Duty calls, I’m afraid. Lofty is entertaining everyone with tales, but you know he can’t do that forever. Well, he can, actually, but we shouldn’t let him.” Isabelle almost smiled. Jordie Lofthouse had been the only one who could make Cameron or Isabelle smile in all these years.
“I’m coming, darling,” he sighed. He touched the faces of Jacob, Amelia, and little Thorne in a framed photo on his desk before he went out to meet his wife.
“You look pale,” Isabelle murmured in concern. She looked up at him with those lovely gray eyes of hers, eyes that had bewitched him long before Jacob’s death. Isabelle had married him before he knew his life would change forever. She hadn’t wanted their sudden change in circumstances any more than he had. They’d both wanted to be free, to live a life without the constraints of the titles that had been thrust upon them.
“It’s Thorne’s birthday today. He would have been sixteen.” Cameron rubbed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. Isabelle brushed his dark hair back from his face with her fingers.
“I know. I remembered this morning. Why don’t I send everyone away and we can have a quiet night together by the fire?”
He almost chuckled. “Banish the peers of the realm from the halls of Somerset? As tempting as it sounds, I don’t think that’s a good idea.” He pressed a kiss to her temple. “I shall just put on a brave face and get on with the night. It won’t be the first time.”
Cameron and his wife descended the grand staircase into the waiting crowd below with diplomatic smiles. But his heart, at least part of it, still searched for answers in the dark heart of the jungle in Africa.
Four years later
Thorne heard the creatures long before he saw them. Three animals stumbling through the underbrush of the forest. Their disregard for leaving evidence of their passage left an easy trail to follow. The sounds they made, a unique mix of complex utterances, were musical, like birdsong rather than the deep vocal chorus-like language of the gorillas.
Curious, he crept along the massive stretching branches of the trees above these creatures as he sought a clearer look. They continued to vocalize in their nonsense language as they stopped and sat down at the base of the trees.
He slid lower, using thick vines to support his body as he tried to see their faces. They wore strange animal skins, very different from the kob deer pelt that covered Thorne’s vulnerable parts.
His gorilla family wore no such skins. Their bodies were more compact, and their posture lent them far more natural protection. Thorne felt exposed and vulnerable, so after killing his first deer, he began to wear animal skins as a way to protect himself. He wasn’t quite sure how he’d come by the idea—except perhaps to say he’d dreamed it. Visions of animals like him wearing gleaming pieces of something on their necks and arms. They’d showed him in wild, quick flashes in these dreams how to hunt deer, how to use the shale rocks to skin them. He’d been ashamed to hunt in front of the gorillas, who did not eat deer, so he had gone much deeper into the forest to hunt.
He’d refined his technique now to have a dried bit of leather from the deer with which to fashion himself a way to tie the pelt tight around his waist without worry of it falling off while he swung from vines and climbed.
The creatures he stalked now were almost fully covered in such skins.
One of the creatures removed a covering from his head, and Thorne’s mouth parted in shock. These animals were like him, yet not. Their skin was dark, like the rich bark of a mahogany tree and just like the creatures in his dreams who’d taught him how to survive. Their hands and limbs were not formed like the gorillas’. They were exactly like Thorne’s. For the first time in seventeen years, he was staring at a face like his own.
“Gorilla.”
The word was the only one that he recognized in the stream of sounds pouring from their lips as they spoke to one another.
A sudden, painful flash of memory, an image of a gorilla upon wood. No, not wood—paper.
A face like his gazed down at him, a female with a bright smile and golden hair . . . smiles . . . How had he forgotten what a smile was?
His lips curved into a grin, and he huffed excitedly until he saw one of the creatures lift a long brown stick, pointing it at a small monkey perched on a tree branch not far from Thorne.
The creature held the stick close to his face, and there was a violent bang! Thorne was so startled that he lost his grip on the vines and plummeted to the forest floor. He landed catlike on the ground, not ten feet from the creatures. One of them screamed and pointed at him. The male who held the loud stick turned it on Thorne, hollering. There was another deafening bang!
Pain knifed through Thorne’s arm, and he howled with rage as he stood to his full height. He curled his fists and beat savagely on his chest, bearing his teeth as he’d seen Sunya do a thousand times before. The creatures shouted back, but fear widened their eyes and they scrambled away. In their haste to flee, one tripped, his head hitting the base of a knotted tree as the others left him behind.
Thorne stopped a short distance from the body and crouched, studying him. The creature had different feet than him, and his face held no hair along his jaw and mouth like Thorne. He reached out, his fingers touching the male’s face. His skin appeared smooth, but beneath his fingertips, Thorne felt the bristle of hair, much like his had felt when he’d been younger. Despite his size, perhaps he was not yet grown?
Suddenly the male’s eyes snapped open, and he stared in horror at Thorne.
“Gorilla.” Thorne repeated the word, finding it easier to say than he expected. He tapped his own chest and repeated. “Gorilla.”
“What?” the man said. “No. Not gorilla.”
Not. That word Thorne recognized too.
The male looked him over, as amazed by Thorne as Thorne was by him. Eventually he nodded and tapped his chest.
“Human,” the male said. “Man.”
Thorne stared at him, bewildered as the tongue that he had been born to speak came back to him in hazy flashes.
“Boy,” he said.