Marked In Flesh (The Others #4) Read online

  Holding out one hand to block a potential kick, Simon laid the other hand on her hip and bounced her against the mattress a couple of times.

  “What? What?” Meg struggled to sit up, so he obligingly grabbed her arm and pulled.

  “Time to wake up.”

  “Simon?” She turned her head and blinked at the window. “It’s still dark.” She flopped down on the bed and tried to pull up the covers.

  He grabbed the covers, and the brief game of tug had her sitting upright again.

  “It’s not dark; it’s just early,” he said. “Come on, Meg. We’ll take a walk.”

  “It’s not morning. The alarm clock didn’t go off.”

  “You don’t need an alarm clock. You’ve got sparrows, and they say it’s morning.”

  When she didn’t respond, Simon hauled her to her feet and steered her out the bedroom door and down the hallway to the bathroom.

  “Are you awake enough to pee and brush your teeth?”

  She closed the door in his face.

  Taking that as a yes, Simon returned to Meg’s bedroom and pulled out the clothes she would need. Most of the clothes. Apparently a male wasn’t supposed to take a female’s underclothes out of a drawer unless he was mated to that female. And males weren’t supposed to see the underclothes unless females wanted the underclothes to be seen.

  He didn’t understand why everyone fussed about taking clean clothes out of a drawer. Underclothes smelled a lot more interesting after the female wore them.

  Probably not something human females wanted to know.

  While he waited, he made up the bed, more to discourage Meg from falling back into it than because he wanted to tidy the room. Besides, running his hands over the sheets and breathing in her scent made him happy.

  Why had he thought sleeping in his human form last night was a good idea, especially when it meant sleeping alone? If he had shifted to his Wolf form as he usually did, he could have stayed with Meg, could have curled up next to her in her bed.

  All right, he hadn’t thought staying in human form overnight was a good idea, just a necessary exercise. Six Wolves from the Addirondak packs were coming to the Lakeside Courtyard next week to experience interacting with humans in ways they couldn’t in their own territory. Three were adults who were already dealing with the humans who lived in towns located in and around the Addirondak Mountains. The other three were juveniles who had completed their first year of the human-centric education that would train them to keep watch over the humans living in Thaisia.

  Keeping watch to make sure humans kept to the agreements their ancestors had made with the terra indigene was dangerous work. The Others might refer to humans as clever meat—and they were—but they were also invading predators who grabbed territory whenever they could. And despite what their government officials said, humans weren’t really concerned with the overall well-being of their kind. Humans belonging to the Humans First and Last movement had howled about a food shortage in Thaisia and said the terra indigene had caused it. But it was the HFL humans who had sold the surplus stores of food to the Cel-Romano Alliance of Nations for profit and then lied about it. Those lies had spurred a fight in Lakeside that resulted in the deaths of police officer Lawrence MacDonald and Crystal Crowgard. By doing those things, humans had drawn the attention of terra indigene who usually stayed away from human-controlled places while their intentions were benevolent.

  Those earth natives, who lived deep in the wild country, had decided that the humans living in Thaisia had committed a breach of trust, and all agreements between humans and the Others might be rescinded. Probably would be rescinded. Already there were restrictions on what kind of cargo could be carried by ships traveling on the Great Lakes. There were restrictions on what kind of human could travel from one human city to another. The human governments that oversaw human concerns on a regional level were reeling from the sanctions. If ships couldn’t carry food and merchandise from one region to another, if trains couldn’t carry food and fuel to cities that needed both, what would happen to all the humans living on the continent?

  If the humans who were supposed to be in charge had paid any attention to Thaisia’s history, they would know what would happen to the humans. The invasive, two-legged predators would be eliminated, and the land would be reclaimed by the earth natives, the terra indigene, the Others.

  But that wouldn’t be as easy to do as it had been a few centuries ago. Then, there was little that the humans built or used that would harm the land if left to decay on its own. Now there were refineries that processed the crude oil being drawn out of the earth. Now there were places that stored fuel. Now there were industries that might damage the land if left untended. How much would be harmed if those things were destroyed or abandoned?

  Simon had no answers, and the terra indigene who watched over the wild country—the dangerous, primal beings who cloaked their true terra indigene nature in forms so old those shapes had no names—would not be concerned with answers. Even if everything else disappeared from the world to make room for the new that would be born from destruction and change, they would still exist.

  The terra indigene shifters like the Wolves and Bears, the Hawks and Crows, referred to those forms as the Elders, a benevolent-sounding word for the beings who were Namid’s teeth and claws.

  Meg returned from the bathroom, looking a little more awake and a lot less happy to see him. She was going to be more unhappy when she found out why he wanted to take this walk.

  “Get dressed, Meg. We need to talk.”

  She pointed at the bedroom door.

  He was the leader of the Courtyard and she was an employee of the Courtyard, so she shouldn’t be allowed to give him orders, even nonverbal ones. But he was learning that, when dealing with humans, pack order wasn’t always maintained inside the den. Which meant Meg was dominant in her den and could disregard that he was dominant everywhere else.

  He left the room and closed the door, then pressed his ear against the wood. Drawers opening, drawers closing. Movement.

  “Stop hovering, Simon.”

  She sounded annoyed instead of sleepy. Having sufficiently poked the porcupine, so to speak, he went back to her kitchen and checked out her cupboards and fridge to make sure she had enough people food. Half a quart of milk; a couple of bites of cheese—maybe more in terms of human bites; a small bowl of strawberries—her share of the berries she and Henry Beargard had picked yesterday; a wrapped half sandwich from A Little Bite, the Courtyard’s coffee shop.

  Her cupboard had a canning jar of peaches, a jar of spaghetti sauce, and a box of spaghetti.

  “If you’re poking around for leftover pizza, I ate it last night,” Meg said, entering the kitchen.

  Simon closed the cupboard. Was this a typical amount of food for humans to store in the warmer months? He didn’t have more than this in his kitchen, but he usually chased down his meal and ate it fresh, so other foods were just supplements that he enjoyed for taste and were good for the human form.

  “Did you want something to eat?” Meg asked.

  “Later.” Leaving her kitchen, he went down the back stairs that led to the outer door, confident that she would follow him. Once outside, he took her hand, linking his fingers with hers, a form of contact and connection they’d started a week ago after she’d spoken prophecy about the River Road Community.

  “The grass is wet,” Meg said. “Shouldn’t we walk on the road?”

  Simon shook his head. This morning the road, which was wide enough for a vehicle and formed a circle inside the Courtyard, felt too human.

  How to start? What to say?

  They passed the expanded kitchen garden for the Green Complex, the only multispecies complex in the Courtyard. As a way to help the humans who were working for the Courtyard, the Others had agreed to let those humans share in the harvest if they did their share of the work. There was at least one human checking the garden every day, making sure the plants had enough water—and
the females especially had eyes like a Hawk’s when it came to spotting a weed.

  He spotted a scrap of fur at the edge of the garden but didn’t point it out to Meg. Something had come by to nibble on the seedlings and had ended up being someone’s dinner.

  “You wanted to talk,” Meg said. “Is this about the sanctions? The Lakeside News has printed a lot of articles about the restrictions humans have to obey now.”

  “A lot of howling for trouble they brought on themselves,” Simon growled.

  “People are scared. They don’t know what the sanctions mean for their families.”

  “Trust humans to try to build a beaver dam out of a couple of twigs. The sanctions are simple enough. Any human who belongs to the Humans First and Last movement is not allowed to travel on any right-of-way through the wild country. That means no roads, no trains.”

  “Boat?”

  Simon shook his head. “All the water in Thaisia belongs to the terra indigene. Ships on the lakes and rivers travel on sufferance. Always have.” And the Elementals known as the Five Sisters had already said that any ship that traveled the Great Lakes without their consent wouldn’t reach port. Well, the ship might, but the crew wouldn’t. After all, sinking the ship would soil the lake with all that fuel and debris. More likely, the ship would be set adrift after the easily transferred cargo had been removed. And the crew would become meals for the terra indigene doing the work of taking a human annoyance off the water.

  “What about food?” Meg asked. “The newspapers and television reports said food can’t be transported from one region to another.”

  “Either they’re lying to cause trouble or they were too busy yelling about it to listen.” As far as the Others were concerned, not listening was a big reason why humans, as a species, ended up needing harsh lessons: they refused to understand the warning nips. “Look, Meg, the buying and selling of foods and merchandise among the Simple Life folk, the Intuits, and the terra indigene isn’t going to change, and that includes all human settlements that are controlled by us. Any food coming from human-controlled farms has to be approved by Intuit and terra indigene inspectors before it’s allowed to cross from one region to another. We’re doing that to make sure humans can’t lie again about food shortages here while they’re selling that food to humans in another part of the world.” He huffed out a breath. “But that’s not what we need to talk about. This Courtyard—actually, a select group within this Courtyard—has been given a duty by the Elders, the earth natives who watch over the wild country. And that select group includes you because you’re the one who changed things.”

  “Me?” Meg’s legs stuttered. “What did I do?”

  Simon smiled. “You’re you.”

  Meg Corbyn, Human Liaison for the Lakeside Courtyard, was a cassandra sangue, a blood prophet who saw visions when her skin was cut. She had stumbled into Howling Good Reads during a snowstorm, looking for work, on the run from the man who had owned her and had cut her for profit. As vulnerable and inexperienced as a puppy, she had worked hard to learn her job as Human Liaison and also worked just as hard to learn how to live. Some of the humans who worked for the Courtyard rallied around her, helping her, teaching her, even protecting her. And that changed the relationship those humans had with the Others.

  Simon’s smiled faded. “How much human will the terra indigene keep? That’s what we have to figure out.”

  Meg stopped walking. “What does that mean?”

  “That’s the other thing we have to figure out.” He tugged on her hand to get her moving again, but she just stared at him, her gray eyes the same color as the morning sky.

  “How much human will you keep? What are you supposed to decide? If the terra indigene in human form get to keep things like fingers and thumbs? Because fingers and thumbs are really useful. Henry is a sculptor. He wouldn’t want to do without them. Neither would you.”

  Simon studied her. Maybe human brains really did take longer to wake up than terra indigene brains. When he woke up, he was awake. He yawned, he stretched, and he was ready to play or hunt or even deal with the human work generated by the Business Association and Howling Good Reads, the bookstore he ran with Vladimir Sanguinati. Even though Meg was a special breed of human, apparently her brain didn’t have a speedy wake-up button.

  But he slept with her most nights, and he knew she wasn’t usually this slow. So maybe sparrows were a sufficient call to morning for the body but the brain needed the mechanical alarm clock? Or maybe it was a difference between human males and females? He’d have to ask Karl Kowalski, who was Ruthie Stuart’s mate as well as one of the police officers assigned to working with the Courtyard.

  He started walking again and pulled Meg along for a couple of steps before she moved on her own.

  “It’s not about the shell.” Simon thumped his chest with the fingers of one hand. Then, because this was Meg and they were learning together about a lot of things that involved humans, he told her more than he would have told another human—he told her his own fears. “In a way, it is about the shell. Namid shaped the earth natives to be her dominant predators, and we continue to be dominant because we learn from the other predators who walk in our world. We take their forms to blend in and watch them, learn how they hunt, how they live. We absorb a lot of their nature just by living in that form. Not everything. We are first, and always, earth natives. But because the animal forms have become a part of what is passed down to our young, a terra indigene Wolf isn’t the same anymore as a terra indigene Bear or Hawk or Crow. Those forms have been around for a long time—and forms like the Sharkgard have been around even longer.”

  They walked in silence for a minute.

  “Are you afraid of becoming too human?” Meg asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, you won’t,” she said fiercely, squeezing his fingers. “You’re a Wolf, and even when you’re not a wolfy-looking Wolf, you’re still a Wolf. You’ve said so. Looking human or running a bookstore won’t change that.”

  Simon thought about what she was saying under what she was saying.

  Meg didn’t want him to be more human. She needed him to remain a Wolf. Because Meg trusted the Wolf in ways she didn’t trust a human male.

  He felt a lightness inside him that hadn’t been there a minute ago. Working in a Courtyard, especially for the terra indigene who had to spend so much time around humans, was a danger because there was always the risk of absorbing too much of the human form and no longer fitting in with your own kind. That had worried him, more so lately as his exposure to humans became personal. But Meg wouldn’t allow him to become too human because she needed him to retain the nature and heart of a Wolf.

  He slanted a glance at her, with her clear gray eyes, and fair skin with those rose-tinted cheeks, and that thick black hair that was cropped so short it felt like puppy fuzz. Short and slim, and gaining some visible muscle beneath that fragile skin.

  How much human would be too human for Meg?

  Simon shook off the thought. He had enough challenges at the moment.

  “You don’t have to be afraid of what you might absorb from our human friends,” Meg said quietly. “They’re good people.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I’ve known the bad kind of people.” A grim reminder of the place where she’d been raised and trained and cut for profit.

  He nodded to let her know he’d heard her. “We should consider what we’d like to keep, what we would be willing to make for ourselves if humans weren’t around.”

  She gave him a sharp look, and her voice trembled when she said, “Are humans going to go away?”

  “Maybe.” He didn’t say extinct. Meg was smart enough to hear the word anyway. And he didn’t tell her that the Lakeside Courtyard was the reason the Elders hadn’t already made that decision about the humans living on the continent of Thaisia.

  “Can I talk to Ruth and Merri Lee and Theral about this?”

  “They’re human, Meg. They’r
e going to want to keep everything.”

  “There are a lot of things humans need that I don’t know about. I spent twenty-four years living in a compound as property, living in a cell once I was old enough to be by myself, and I don’t remember how the girls lived before being old enough to begin training. And you know what the Courtyard needs, but surely that isn’t everything either.”

  “By the agreements with humans, a Courtyard is supposed to have whatever the humans in that city have, so if it’s not in the Courtyard, humans don’t really need it.” That was a thin-ice kind of truth that wouldn’t hold any weight if put to the test, and they both knew it. “Besides, if you tell the female pack, Ruthie and Merri Lee will tell their mates, who are police.”

  “Who are around a lot and are helpful,” Meg countered.

  He couldn’t argue with that. Karl Kowalski and Michael Debany were making an effort to understand the terra indigene and were likable males, even if they were human. And Lawrence MacDonald, another police officer and Theral’s cousin, had died recently when a group of humans and Others went to a stall market in Lakeside to give the Crowgard a chance to buy some shinies and little treasures. That field trip ended when their group was attacked by members of the Humans First and Last movement. Almost everyone except Vlad had been wounded during the fight, and MacDonald and Crystal Crowgard had died.

  “You should also ask Steve Ferryman for his suggestions,” Meg said.

  “Meg . . .”

  “Those Elders didn’t tell you that you couldn’t ask humans, did they?”

  He sighed. “No, they didn’t, but we have to be careful about how many humans know about this. The humans who belong to the HFL are our enemies. They’re burrowed in towns all across Thaisia, and they’re the reason the Elders are looking at all the humans on the continent rather than eliminating the badness in one town and reclaiming the land.”

  Of course, he’d already told three humans what was now at stake. He believed Captain Burke and Lieutenant Montgomery could be trusted, but he hadn’t known the third man who had been at the meeting when he told them about the sanctions. Greg O’Sullivan worked for the governor of the Northeast Region, so it was possible that there were already enemies of the terra indigene who were plotting to cause the final bit of trouble that would tip the scales.