The Shifter's Kiss, Book 1 (2 page)

“You called?” he sneered.

She stifled her rising anger. “You’re late,” she said evenly. She jerked her chin at the caravan. “Why don’t you have your freakshow take the trucks to the storeroom and unload while we do this? The sun is going down and I have a village to save.”

Dowd shrugged. “There’s no rush,” he said slowly. He was keeping his distance. She could tell. He looked at Sunshi, whose glow was quickly returning to normal levels. “What’s this?”

Maren stepped aside, hoping he would advance to a pheremonally-optimal location. Already she could feel her own attraction to Sunshi solidifying. Stepping away from her felt like tearing out pieces. It was a good pheromone cocktail.

But Dowd wasn’t buying it.

“This is not what we ordered.”

Maren’s mouth fell open a little bit. “What do you mean?”

He pursed his lips, walking around Sunshi slowly, keeping a safe distance. His boots kicked up little whorls of dust storms.

“She looks very nice,” he said finally.

Maren relaxed slightly. “She is very nice,” she replied.

“Yeah?” he scratched his head. “Well, we didn’t order nice. We ordered
durable.
”

Maren began to feel the panic rise in her chest. Though she couldn’t see them, she knew everyone in the compound was watching her. They relied on her to keep them safe. She could almost sense their thoughts.
What if it doesn’t work? What will we do?

“Listen, Dowd,” she started. “This is Sunshi.” Sunshi executed a small curtsy. “She is the absolute best in pleasure girls.You know this. This is what you got last year, and the year before that, only better. Because I like you. Because we have… history.”

Dowd chuckled. “Oh, please, Maren. Don’t act like you’re doing me any favors.”

“But I am,” she asserted. “Sunshi is redheaded, long, strong, and limber. She has a Placid subroutine installed that keeps her happy even under the most… trying circumstances.” She glanced at Sunshi. The smile had dissolved into no expression at all. The glow was nearly imperceptible.

Dowd shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. Tran doesn’t want these flimsy ones anymore. He has shifters now.”

Maren’s voice caught in her throat. She saw a couple of the men rise up taller. Behind their masks, she could see… what? Not human eyes. Better eyes. Faster reflexes, stronger muscles, deeper urges.

She knew in her heart he was right. Sunshi would last 10 minutes with a shifter who took a new form. A werewolf, a cat… any of those enhanced forms would pull her to pieces. She was as good as dead.

But behind her, hiding in the dark houses, there was a whole group of natural humans. Her cousins and their cousins. After the Rift, they’d found each other and it was like some kind of miracle. She’d been lucky to put together the lab, scrounge up the growth protocols… all the rough materials she needed to keep doing her work in trans-human development. It was so lucky that she had something to trade to keep them all safe. It couldn’t just all be for nothing. It just couldn’t.

Sunshi was fading fast. Her hand began to tremble. Maren desperately needed Dowd to come closer, to get that last whiff of oxytocin.

“Just listen,” she said sweetly, “Sunshi is exactly what you said you wanted. She’s a beauty. She even has my hair, and you know how rare redheads are now.”

Dowd rolled his eyes. “Nothing is rare anymore.”

“You know how rare
real
redheads are.”

“Nope!” he said definitively. “And you know that I can’t come back with anything less than what Tran asked me for.” He whistled through his teeth and waved his arm in a circle over his head. “Boys! Let’s go!”

Maren looked around her, as though looking for help. There was nothing. Dowd and his men were getting back in their trucks. The men who had opened the gates were staggering back toward them, unsure if they should open them again.

There was no one else, she realized. No one was going to help her. If she did nothing, then nothing would get done. Dowd would drive away, and they would all starve within weeks.

There was nothing left. They could try to leave, maybe find a new group, but they didn’t even have the resources to make it over the ridge all together.

And even if they all somehow, by some miracle, did make it to the ridge, they probably wouldn’t make it through a night without losing half or more to the Reavers. And that was a terrible end. Maren remembered seeing Kasey for the last time, smiling atop the wall, then her expression changing to shock… looking over her shoulder… the way her body jerked like a doll’s as she was taken over the side...

Maren shook her head violently. She couldn’t let it happen.

“Dowd, please!” she pleaded and lunged for his hand. He turned, startled.

“No, Maren, I’m sorry.”

She gripped his arm. “Dowd, fine, whatever you want. But next year, ok? You know I can’t just grow them overnight. It takes time! She’s a beauty, right? Just take her, and next year, I will grow you the strongest, sturdiest girls you ever saw. Twins? OK?”

He seemed to soften. He looked down at her hand on his arm, then up to her eyes. She could almost see his smile, those lines around his mouth. She could almost see the old Dowd - her Dowd - behind the dust and sadness. A long time ago, it seemed like forever now, she really thought he was going to make a difference. They were going to make a difference together.

When the Rift first started, it still seemed like there was some negotiation, some strategy that could make everything realign. After all, humanity had suffered countless historical schisms, and recovered every time. Religions clashed, regions clashed, classes clashed - over and over throughout history. And every time before, blood ran until it didn’t anymore, and everyone tried to find a way to heal and persist and face the future together.

That was how Maren saw it. That was how they
both
saw it. When the first shifters arrived - or were born, or invented or discovered, nobody really knew - it seemed like inevitably there would be some peace attained, somehow. Maren and Dowd had worked so long in enhancing and stabilizing the injured, they were sure their work would be useful.

They thought they could, together, work with the shifters and the humans to find a common ground. Maybe humans could be stronger, more versatile like the shifters. And maybe shifters could be more… human. Find empathy and tame their unpredictable animalistic traits.

The trans-genetic advances Maren had engineered alone were significant. With Dowd’s inventiveness, his charm and negotiating skills, how could they do anything but help?

They spent half their collected fortune on a huge advertising campaign, sending out hopeful messages of community and cooperation. We don’t have to be enemies, they asserted. There’s no reason to fear each other just because we are different. Their public relations machine reached the entire globe, it seemed. They organized summits with shifter and human leaders. They really were getting somewhere.

The other half of their fortunes, they sunk into frantic research, trying to find a common matrix for human and shifter improvements alike. Maybe the answer lie in arriving at some kind of hybrid, or at least taking the best of both worlds to make each side feel less afraid of the advantages of the other side.

They really thought there would be some way to live together. Eventually.

But then the Fox River Virus came. The world had never seen its like. It seemed as though any group of more than 40 people was unsustainable. The sickness would sweep through like wildfire, turning them into boiling, fleshy vehicles of virus distribution.

The cities became unlivable. The humans who survived it washed over the surrounding land like a plague, spreading out in all directions, huddled in small groups until marauders or reavers overtook them for their resources.

The shifters started out apparently immune, but then… started to change. Now the reavers took over the spaces between the shifter caravans and small human outposts. Nobody knew where to go anymore.

Except for Tran, evidently. He had something to offer. Part carnival, part haven, Tran somehow had hundreds of humans and shifters in the same place at the same time, all the time. Maren suspected that Dowd had found something, some common genetic protocol that made it all possible.

As he looked into his eyes, she tried to flood herself with fond memories of him, tried to kickstart her own hormonal wave. If there was still some part of him that cared about her, surely he wouldn’t just let her starve, let the whole outpost die… or worse?

Dowd shook his head, almost imperceptibly. Staring down into her face was almost more than he could bear, and he hated that. But he had his orders. Sunshi wasn’t going anywhere. She wasn’t even close.

He began to pull away again. Maren heard the truck doors slamming. She glanced over her shoulder at Sunshi, whose flesh had gone white. She was in full panic mode. Maren grabbed Dowd’s arm again.

“Take me!” she hissed.

Dowd stopped. He turned around slowly.

“What?”

Maren looked around the courtyard. The shadows were so long, everything was night here even though she could see the last rays of sun over the western side of the wall.

“Well,” she hesitated.

“Yeah that’s what I thought,” he sighed and started away again.

“No!” she blurted out and stumbled after him. There were only minutes left of sunlight. She could see the tremor rise up Sunshi’s arms out of the corner of her eyes.

“Look at that,” he said snidely. He had seen her too. Sunshi’s body began to shake and she looked up, up into the darkening sky. She was melting down. She looked like a religious supplicant.

Maren bowed her head, defeated. “Just take me,” she said softly into his sleeve. “I’d be more useful to you than she would anyway. I can grow a whole fleet of your
durable
companions.”

“Not mine,” he asserted.

“Fine,
Tran’s
durable companions. Whatever.”

“I don’t know,” Dowd sighed. He gestured at Sunshi, who was jerking and crumpling to her knees. “You never were very good at balancing stressors. Look at her. It’s not like she doesn't
feel
any of that you know. She’s as good as human, anyway. As good as all of these cowards you’re sacrificing her for.”

Maren hardened her lips. “We will just have to agree to disagree on that.”

He shook his head. “It’s weird that can feel so motherly toward things you have no intention of endowing with the ability to
survive
.”

She wanted to kill him. He was loving it.

“Dowd, you have to take me,” she said through clenched teeth.

“No I don’t,” he said brightly, and started to walk away.

“Dowd!”

He stopped suddenly, and turned around. A smile played at the corner of his lips, creasing those old lines that she used to love so much. He breathed slowly through his nose, watching her, knowing that she had a mental countdown of the available moments of daylight going through her head right now.

Without breaking her gaze, he snapped his fingers. A burly man with his head completely covered stepped over to him with his back to Maren. They bent their heads together and Dowd whispered to him. The man trudged toward the closest truck, got in and started the engine with a belch of diesel roar.

Maren held out her hands, defeated.

“Get in the truck,” he muttered.

She sucked in her breath. “What?” she gasped.

“Get. In. The. Truck.”

“But,” she stammered, “I have to say goodbye…”

“No time!” he called, and began to get in the truck. Another figure stepped out of the passenger side door. He held it open and gestured to Maren.

“But!” she protested.

“Get in or I am leaving without you!”

Maren spun around helplessly. Sunshi was on her knees, eyes finally closed. He was probably only bio-scrap now, Maren knew. Really, she couldn’t have gone anywhere with Dowd.

She looked around the courtyard frantically. A few people left their doors and hurried to the stockrooms, where two of the trucks had rolled over to begin unloading. Tom waved over his shoulder to her. He was the only one. No one else even came to their doors.

She waved meekly at no one and got in the truck.

It stank like shifter in the passenger seat. She was sure there were tufts of hair in the ventilation system. She had no clothes, no gear, no tech. What was she thinking? But she had been out of time. There was no other choice to make.

Turning to Dowd, she struggled for something clever to say, something to turn this crushing feeling of defeat around. He met her eyes with a look of triumph. She wanted to scream, but bit her lip until she drew blood instead.

“Tran,” he said, “will be so pleased.”

Maren sucked in her breath, trying to quell the sick feeling in her stomach. This had been the plan, then. She searched his eyes for some sign that he still held some softness for her, that he wasn’t just going to leave her to Tran’s whims. But she saw only hardness there. Disappointment. Too much time.