Chapter Twelve

They traveled quickly the next morning, taking advantage of the clean sunlight filtering through the trees, after so many days spent in the permanent twilight of the swamp. After a brief shift back to human to discuss their route for the day, Aidan had returned to his cat form and stayed that way. Rachel knew he was there only because he was so convinced she’d never survive without him, but most of the time, she couldn’t see or hear him. He would suddenly appear on a branch ahead of her or pad into sight on the ground, his movements completely silent. She was intensely curious about where he went when he disappeared, how far he ranged ahead of her, and how he got there. Did he remain always in the treetops? Did he double back to check their back trail? Was he hunting? She toyed with the idea of putting a spotter on him somewhere. She had several of the small tracker-dots in her pack. She used them when guiding groups of researchers who frequently had more enthusiasm than common sense, sticking dots on the ones who tended to wander so she could round up any lost sheep more easily.

She wasn’t sure they’d work on Harp. Besides which, she doubted Aidan would agree to being spotted. He sure as hell wouldn’t appreciate being lumped in with lost sheep. The very idea made her laugh, which she quickly swallowed just in case the big bad shifter happened to be lurking nearby and wanted to know what she was laughing about.

They walked steadily through the day, driven by the knowledge that the second ship was out there plotting who knew what kind of disaster. Aidan seemed convinced that they hadn’t attacked yet, though he didn’t share his reasons why. Rachel assumed it had something to do with the behavior of the other animals, small signs that, having spent his life in the Green, he could read. She only knew that Wolfrum would be desperate for the second ship to succeed. If the wholesale slaughter her crewmates had committed was considered a rational first attempt, she could only imagine what a desperate Wolfrum would try now.

She bit into one of Aidan’s sticky sweet trail bars that probably had more sugar in a single bar than she’d eaten in the last six months. Maybe longer. But they’d barely stopped all day, and she needed the short-term energy fix that sugar provided. Aidan, on the other hand, could probably go days without rest, maybe snatching some bloody dinner on the fly. That was an advantage she’d bet shifters simply took for granted, that they could gulp down a tasty rabbit and keep going. No need to make a fire to cook or stay warm.

She eyed his broad back where he was walking ahead of her in his human form for a change. And what a fine form it was. Her thighs clenched, remembering what it was like to have him between her legs, buried deep in her body.

“When did you say your third moon rises next? Fodla,” she clarified, recalling the name of Harp’s biggest satellite. “I’m looking forward to it,” she said with deliberate casualness.

He shot a brief glance over his shoulder. “Not for four months. You planning on being here that long?”

She planned on being on Harp a lot longer than that, especially now that she’d learned about shifters. Where had they come from? Aidan was every bit as human as she was. She had very personal proof of that, but there was also the fact that shifters had offspring with non-shifter females. The basic rule of biology was that if you could breed, you were the same species. But there had to be other genes in there, too. Where had they come from? And how the hell had the colonists’ geneticists made the blend work? She couldn’t ask Aidan. He was very touchy on the subject of shifter origins and existence, and she couldn’t blame him, especially given recent events. She herself had little love for the fleet science labs and would never trust them with anything she learned about Harp or its shifters. But Aidan wouldn’t believe her, so she said only, “I’m a xenobiologist. There’s a lot to study here.”

He grunted wordlessly and kept walking, while she grinned in sudden realization. Aidan had a healthy ego. Hell, he had a healthy everything, but it was his ego that amused her the most. He didn’t want her to stay for science, he wanted her to stay for him. Even if it was only for a brief romance. Although something told her it would take a lot more than that to get Aidan out of her system. There was a strong attraction between them. She couldn’t deny it. She didn’t want to deny it. She’d have to be dead not to desire him based purely on his physical beauty. But it was more than that. He was confident and possessive, irritatingly protective, and all the other things you’d expect in an alpha male. But he was also charming, funny, and irreverent, qualities she personally found very attractive in a man. She’d grown up in a household steeped in the stuffy politics of academia. Her parents were brilliant and loving, but laughter was not something that was often a part of their household. By the time Rachel had gone off to university, she’d been starved for meaningless chatter, for a lighthearted story about something funny that happened during their day’s work. Hell, she would have been happy to hear some gossip about who was fucking whom just for the sake of sex, rather than to get ahead.

She’d bet Aidan had never fucked anyone solely for their political connections.

“Are you watching my ass?” he called back, proving her point. Such utter masculine confidence.

“Maybe,” she admitted.

He laughed, and she felt the warmth of it all the way to her soul. That’s what she wanted in her life. She tried to imagine what it would be like to live in a house filled with that kind of joy and couldn’t do it. But she knew she wanted to.

“Do you know—?” she began to ask, but he shut her down.

“Shh,” he hissed. “I’m listening.”

She scowled at his back, not sure if he really was listening, or if he simply didn’t want to answer any more of her questions. “I was just thinking—”

“Try to think more quietly,” he muttered, and she almost threw something at him.

She picked up a short piece of log that would do nicely. Good heft, well balanced.

“You’d never land the blow.”

She wanted to try, just to prove him wrong, but he was right, and she knew it. So what the hell? She’d only look like an idiot. She set the log down quietly, making a scuffing noise with her foot to cover the movement.

“Good choice.”

God, he was irritating. But the scientist in her couldn’t help marveling at the incredible senses he must possess to be so exquisitely aware of his surroundings. She didn’t want to dissect him—that was barbaric—but she wouldn’t mind running a few cooperative tests. She wondered if he’d agree—

Her thoughts stuttered to a halt as they emerged into an open space with such a clear view of the late afternoon sun that the temperature seemed ten degrees warmer from one step to the next. There was a small hut on the opposite side of the clearing, and… She smelled the water before she heard it. Fresh water. A lot more than the small stream of the previous night, and moving fast.

Aidan didn’t slow, but walked directly to the hut. Reaching high over his head—well above the reach of most adults, including Rachel—he retrieved an ordinary metal key and slipped it into the lock.

She followed him inside, noting the hut’s sturdy construction and thick insulation. From the outside, it looked like an ordinary, almost primitive, travelers’ hut, but it was more. The shelves were stacked with plain tunics, pants, and soft boots, like those Aidan wore, and there was an insulated food container, which opened with a hiss of escaping air to reveal more of the sugary trail bars, along with what looked like dried fruit and other prepared food stuffs, though she didn’t see any preserved meat or fish. This hut had been built with shifters in mind.

“Can anyone use this place? Or only shifters?”

Aidan gave her a curious look. “Why would you think that?”

“Please,” she said dryly. “I may not have your superb senses, but I’m not blind.”

He grinned, probably at the compliment to his senses—there was that healthy ego. “Anyone can use it,” he said. “But it’s rare that anyone other than shifters gets this far into the Green.”

“Rare, but not never?”

He gave her a searching look, then shrugged and said, “You’re here, aren’t you?” He grabbed a thick bedroll and tossed it onto the floor. “We’ll rest here until morning. There’s only the floor, but—”

“I’ve slept in worse conditions. I can hear the river nearby. It sounds bigger than the one last night.”

He nodded. “We’ve reached the Leeward Stream. You’ll want to be careful. This time of year, the spring run-off makes it fast and deep. And no bathing in it, either. It’ll be freezing cold. In fact, let me fetch the water for us, because I don’t fancy having to dive in to save your shapely ass from drowning.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “Make sure you don’t fall in, because I’ll be too busy filing my nails to save you.”

He leaned toward her with a laugh and would have kissed her, but she drew back with a squinty-eyed look of warning. Which only made him laugh harder as he grabbed a wooden bucket and headed outside.

…

Dinner was a cold affair that night. There was no need of a fire for warmth inside the hut, and they were both more interested in sleep than a hot meal. Aidan knew that Rachel thought he was tireless, and he didn’t mind fostering that perception. But while shifters had a lot better stamina than norms, and he could function for days without sleep if he had to, the last few days had taken more than the usual toll on him. He’d slept well the previous night, but between the ordeal on the ship, and then the battle to get them both through the swamp alive, his energy was running as low as he could remember it ever being. A second night’s rest would go a long way to restoring his strength, something he was going to need over the next few days as he raced first to warn Clanhome, and then to find the second ship before they did any more damage to his planet.

Rachel hadn’t noticed, but the key hadn’t been the only thing hidden in the cubby above the door. His cousins had left a message for him, as well. They’d come and gone the previous day, making sure the hut was fully stocked and letting him know that Rhodry was in Clanhome with Amanda, and that they were alerted to the possibility that the crisis wasn’t over. They’d known he’d head for the hut on his way to take Rachel to the city. What they didn’t know yet was that he wasn’t going to the city. Still, he welcomed the news that Rhodry was at Clanhome.

The trees had grown increasingly restive since they’d emerged from the swamp. It wasn’t yet the kind of shocked fear there’d been after the Earthers from the first ship had attacked the Green and taken him prisoner, but more a sense of dread. Had the second ship done something to heighten the trees’ alarm in the two days since he and Rachel had escaped the swamp? And what about the possibility that Cristobal was a target? Historically, the clans were no great friends of the Ardrigh’s and vice versa. Long ago, Rhodry’s de Mendoza grandfather had tried to seize the throne from Cristobal’s much older grandfather. He’d failed, but the attempt had solidified the break between the clans and the Ardrigh. They understood the role Cristobal played in maintaining order and stability on Harp, but if he died, no matter who caused it, it could set off a whole new dynastic battle, thus reigniting hostilities that Rhodry was working so hard to end once and for all. And if that happened, shifters would die on both sides.

Aidan lay on the hut floor, his arms around Rachel where she lay curled against him, and listened hard to the trees’ whispering, searching for something specific that would answer his questions. But there was nothing except an overwhelming sense of impending disaster. There were times when Aidan would have traded all the protection afforded by Harp’s atmospheric anomaly for a simple two-way radio.

“Is something wrong?”

Rachel’s softly voiced question surprised him. He’d thought she was asleep, exhausted from their long day. Not for the first time, he realized he’d underestimated her. Amanda would have chided him for letting stereotypes influence his perceptions. But he didn’t need a lecture from her to be disappointed in himself. He’d been raised in the clans, among women who were far tougher and more capable than their city sisters. There was no place in the mountains for a woman who sat and waited for a man to solve her problems.

On the other hand, he couldn’t exactly tell Rachel how he knew something was wrong, beyond the suspicions they already shared. Shifters weren’t Harp’s only secret. The Green itself, with its network of semi-sentient trees that sang to each other, was perhaps the most important secret of all. The Earthers would swarm the planet if they knew about it, destroying in their zeal the very thing that they claimed to study.

“My cousins left a message,” he said finally. “There’s something ominous happening farther north. Details are sparse, but it seems likely your fr—that is, the other ship has made itself known.”

“No more waiting, Aidan,” she said urgently, pushing up onto one elbow. “You have to go on without me. I know you don’t think so, but I’ll be fine. I’ve done this before.”

“Not here, you haven’t.”

“Damn it, this isn’t the only place in the universe with—”

“Rachel,” he said, and she must have heard something in his voice, because her protest died. “I don’t doubt your skill, but you don’t know Harp. You don’t know how close our ancestors came to dying before they figured out how to survive here, and they were colonists, prepared for the worst. Promise me you’ll wait here until one of my cousins arrives.”

“Aidan—”

“Promise or I won’t go.”

She punched his gut. “That’s blackmail.”

He squeezed her tightly. “Promise, Rachel.”

“Fine. Asshole.”

He sighed in relief, then dipped his head to kiss the soft skin below her ear. “Sleep while you can. We’re both going to need it.”

…

It was still dark when Aidan shook Rachel awake. She scrubbed her face with some of the cold water left from the night before, then stepped outside to see he’d lit a small fire.

“Tea,” he said, handing her a battered metal cup. “And there’s fish on the fire. I caught it this morning.”

Rachel took the cup carefully, sliding her sleeve down over her fingers against the heat of the metal. The hot liquid was welcome, and he’d added a lot of something sweet, like honey. She crouched down to the fire and pulled a piece of white flesh off the fish roasting there.

Aidan was sitting perfectly still, his gaze distant, and his head lifted, as if listening to something she couldn’t hear. Using his shifter senses, she assumed. She waited, taking the opportunity to study him unawares. Without his natural charisma working to charm anyone within reach, he seemed oddly more, rather than less. More handsome, more dangerous. His big personality was just a cover for something even more deadly than his charm.

He returned to himself from one breath to the next. His posture relaxed and he turned to her with a smile. “Did you ask me something?”

She walked around and crouched next to him. Threading her fingers through his hair, she leaned in and kissed him then pressed her forehead against his. “You need to go, Aidan. I’ll be fine.”

Aidan realized something as he stood and pulled Rachel into his arms. Early on, he’d dismissed her claims of experience in the wild, but she was as good a partner as he’d ever had. They’d fought their way through the swamp, side by side. Had each other’s backs more than once. Saved each other’s lives. He knew she’d be all right without him, that whichever cousin he dispatched would keep her safe, and if not, she’d damn well take care of herself.

For all that, he hated to leave her. “Give me a kiss,” he demanded.

She raised her face with a grin, and he kissed her thoroughly, gratified to see she was more than a little breathless when they finally broke apart.

“I need to shift,” he said, almost reluctantly.

She nodded and stepped back.

He cupped her face with both hands and kissed her again. “Don’t die,” he ordered. And then he shifted and leaped for the trees.

…

Rachel would never get tired of seeing that. Aidan’s shift was a beautiful sight in and of itself, with the concealing swirl of light and shadow. But when it was over, a magnificent hunting beast stood before her, and it was everything she could do not to reach out and stroke his golden fur. She knew exactly how soft he felt, how the individual hairs glided like silk through her fingers. But while he’d welcomed her stroking when they lay next to each other, petting him now like a big tabby cat didn’t seem…appropriate. Respectful.

She sighed inwardly. Being a responsible scientist was a pain in the ass sometimes.

It was too late, anyway. Aidan was already nothing but a blur of pale, golden fur as he launched himself into the nearest tree—a standing jump of at least twenty feet straight up. He didn’t make a sound, either, not even when all three hundred plus pounds of him landed on a thick tree branch, or when his sharp claws dug into the bark and he began climbing for the treetops.

Fast, quiet, and deadly.

She watched until there was nothing to see, until her eyes watered from searching, and then lingered longer to listen. The Green was eerily silent. Nothing moved. No rustle of leaves up above, no scratching of claws in the dirt, not even the frantic peep of some small prey. She nodded to herself, then walked slowly back to the hut to wait, closing the door behind her. Once inside, she did a quiet inventory of her pack, checking her medical supplies, re-stocking the nutrition bars they’d eaten, with trail bars from the hut’s supplies. Those had seemed too sweet at first, but she’d begun to prefer the shifter version over her own, once her palate adjusted, admitting that the fruit and honey made them much tastier.

She also packed an extra set of clothes for Aidan. She only wished the hut supplies included clothes something closer to her size. The ones she had on were hopelessly stained, and the ones in her pack, while they’d been rinsed thoroughly, were even worse. Under normal circumstances, she’d have tossed every bit of it into the rag pile. But that wasn’t an option. She wasn’t a small woman, but it seemed shifters were uniformly big men, and their spare clothing came in only one size—too big. But it wasn’t as if this was the first time she’d been dirty on a trek. She grabbed an extra tunic, anyway, thinking she could use it as a nightgown someday. A memento of her time on Harp. The thought made her sad, that someday she’d leave Harp, and Aidan, far behind.

Shaking the thought away, she shoved the tunic deep inside and leaned the resupplied pack against the wall. She checked her weapons next. She’d never seen Aidan carry anything more than a knife, but it seemed as if some shifters carried bows. Either that or they stocked the hut with other travelers in mind, because there was a good supply of arrows in one corner. None of them would fit her crossbow, unfortunately. She still had a few bolts remaining, she’d just have to make them count.

Taking a few more minutes, she used her LED flash to check her map one more time, then folded it away, opened the door a crack and peered out, listening as much as looking. Satisfied, she grabbed her empty canteen and made the trip down to the water’s edge, where she lay on her belly to fill it from the fast-moving Leeward Stream. The stream’s bank was muddy, but she didn’t care. She’d be a lot muddier before the day was over, and that was assuming it was a good day. There were a lot worse things she could be covered with.

Pushing to her feet, she walked back to the hut, where she paused for a moment, once again searching the trees, listening for movement. The eerie silence that had surrounded Aidan’s departure was gone, replaced by the familiar sound of every tropical forest environment she’d ever visited. Oh, sure, there were differences. Every forest was unique, with its own prey, its own predators. But they were never silent unless an apex predator was on the prowl. The noise told her that he was well and truly gone, that he hadn’t done a sneaky double back to be sure she stayed put.

Smiling, she went back to the hut one last time, pulled on her jacket, stowed the canteen in her pack, then picked it up and walked outside. Using the key that Aidan had returned to the ledge above the door—like he thought she hadn’t noticed?—she locked the door and replaced the key, then shouldered her pack and headed out. A quick look at the map told her the second landing site was several days’ walk away, and rather than wait for Aidan’s cousin to come all the way to the hut, she figured to meet him along the trail, saving them both some time. She knew Harp was dangerous, and she’d never have started off on her own at night, but she had confidence in her own skills. A confidence backed up by experience in some of the most dangerous environments in known space. And, knowing Aidan even as little as she did, she knew his cousin—who would, of course, be a shifter, and thus able to travel much faster than she could—would no doubt meet her before the sun passed its zenith. And if she was wrong? If Aidan’s request was delayed? Then, she’d climb a tree and hunker down for the night. It wouldn’t be the first or the last time that she’d gone without sleep on a trek.

But the one thing she wasn’t willing to risk was missing the opportunity to confront Guy Wolfrum. He’d violated every tenet of scientific discovery, betrayed every researcher who’d ever worked with him, looked up to him. But more than that, he’d made her complicit in this most heinous crime, and she wanted to know why. She demanded it.

Checking the position of the sun, she turned in a northwesterly direction and started walking.