“Yes,” she said and her eyes narrowed, as if she was looking at a poacher across the desk and not a reporter.
“I understand that your facility initially ran into some resistance from local authorities.”
I let the question dangle. What I’d said was an understatement. There had been fierce opposition to her opening her rhino preserve in its present location. The most persistent complaint was that it would attract unwanted attention from criminal elements.
“It wasn’t just the authorities,” she said. “There were multiple petitions from villagers asking I relocate it.”
“Did you ever think that they might resent what they see as your “white savior complex?”
I knew it was a provocative question and I was interested to see how she handled it. The continent of Africa is rich in natural resources but for centuries the people who live there have been exploited by everyone from colonial overlords to multi-national corporations. Trickle-down economics is a joke.
“There are seven full-time employees at New Hope ,” she said. “I am the only white European who works there full time.”
“May I take a tour?”
“Of course,” she said. “I’ll arrange for you to be comped.” She smiled, a dimple flashing on her right cheek. “Next week would be convenient.”
“I’d like to stay a few days.” Her smile dimmed a little. “We are not equipped to accommodate overnight visitors.”
“You have dormitories for your volunteers. I’d be happy to bunk there.”
“Come for a day,” she said, “and we’ll go from there.”
She rose from her chair and held out her hand. “Thank you very much for your interest in New Hope, Mr. Arvai. If you check with my secretary, he’ll sort out all the details for you.”
There weren’t really that many details to sort out. I hitched a ride to the reserve with a talkative young guy named Winston who told me he’d practically grown up at New Hope where his father Harrison worked. “He was a “rhino ranger” for the Kenyan Wildlife Service, and then came to work with Aline after he retired.” I estimated Winston’s age at about 18. Unless his father was really old when he was born, Harrison had retired early.
“How old is your father?” I asked.
He looked at me out of the corner of his eye. “Forty-two,” he said. “He was injured in the line of duty. Caught a couple of poachers in the act.”
Harrison was definitely someone I was going to want to talk to.
Winston told me he was Aline’s tech guy. Her husband’s company had provided all sorts of cutting-edge communication technology and he was the only one who understood it. He also let me know that his father thought he was kind of a wimp. “In India, they shoot poachers on sight,” Winston told me. “My father thinks that’s an appropriate way to deal with the problem.”
“And you don’t?”
“Something’s got to be done,” he said, “but this is the 21st century. It feels like we ought to be able to come up with a 21st century solution to the problem. Anyway,” he said, changing the subject, “I’m off to university in the fall.”
“And you don’t think you’ll be back?”
“To visit, but not to stay.”
“Fathers,” I said, and he laughed.
“I know, right?”
Chapter Five
Baby elephants get all the press, but within an hour of arriving at New Hope, I was in love with baby rhinos. Watching the chubby animals following the tourists around like puppies was endearing.
“Rhinos are very social,” an earnest young researcher named Li-Tsui told me. “They love to be cuddled.”
Not what I was expecting.
Li-Tsui had basically been assigned to keep an eye on me and he wasn’t particularly subtle about it. Every time I started to wander off the path, he was somehow there, steering me away. He showed me the mated pair of elephants that lived with a small pack of dogs. He took me past an enclosure where a Bengal tiger lounged, sleepy-eyed. “That’s Sambasi,” he said.
I took a picture of Sambasi.
“You must come see Rong,” Li-Tsui said, and escorted me to an enclosure housing the largest live animal I’ve ever seen. “Whoah,” I said, hoping I sounded suitably impressed, and really, it wasn’t hard to sound impressed because I was. If the refuge wasn’t inflating his stats, Rongo weighed almost eight thousand pounds.
‘Want to give him a treat?” Li-Tsui asked.
“Sure,” I said. Li-Tsui handed me something that looked like an oversize oatmeal cookie.
“It’s his favorite, apple oats.”
Li-Tsui showed me how to hold it in my hand, and watched with amusement as I tentatively held the treat out to the massive beast. Rongo took the cookie almost delicately and I patted his snout while he chewed.
“Come on,” Li-Tsui said, “let me show you the babies.”
I followed him to an enclosure where volunteers were bathing a group of rhino calves, getting totally soaked in the process. I pretended not to notice when he steered me away from a locked door that led to a space that was not on the reserve’s tourist map. I was afraid if I asked him about the secret door it would lead to me being put on the next bus back to town.
“What are they doing?” I asked when we came to an open area where volunteers were gently poking the rhinos with push brooms.
“Teaching them how to use their horns,” he said. I pulled out my phone and took a couple of quick shots of the babies “butting” the brooms . If Uli didn’t want to use the snaps, I could probably sell them somewhere else, Everybody loves cute animal pictures.
That night there was a dinner with the staff and volunteers, what Li-Tsui called a “family dinner,” and it turned out I was on the menu. Even as the bowls of rice and vegetables were passed around, Aline’s crew took turns quizzing me. The most brutal interrogator was Aline’s right-hand woman Elinah, who had returned to the village after working in Nairobi for several years. Winston had filled me in on Elinah, telling me that he thought her return to the village was because she couldn’t handle the big city. That didn’t really seem right to me, though. There was something about Elinah that was haunted. Something that didn’t add up.
The most colorful guy in the crew was Rian, a middle-aged South African who’d made a living as a guide until he was mauled by a lion and had something of a spiritual awakening while in the hospital.
After the dinner, a couple of the staff slapped me on the back and welcomed me to “the show,” but Harrison was more reserved. As we walked back to the room we’d be sharing, he said casually, “I am very fond of Aline.”
“Harrison—” I said, hoping to forestall a lecture, but he rolled right over me.
“I noticed that you could not take your eyes off her this evening.”
No sense in denying it. “She’s a beautiful woman.”
“She’s married.”
I nodded to let him know I’d received his message, but he wasn’t finished. “Her husband is not well.”
That was one way to put it. I’d done my research on her husband long before I ever approached Aline. He was ten years older than she was, which put him around 60, and he’d contracted some weird fever that had put him into a coma. He was currently being treated at a clinic in Basel but no one really expected him to recover.
“You can admire her,” he said. “You can appreciate her,” he said. “But you cannot seduce her.”
“Isn’t that up to her?”
“If you do not leave her alone, you might find yourself he victim of a very unfortunate accident.”
Got it.
My laptop was gone when we got to the room, and I couldn’t figure out what someone might want it for. But as it turns out, a missing laptop was the least of my worries.
Chapter Six
Not long after I arrived, I’d told Aline what McQuaide had told me about the plot to storm her preserve. “What would they do, start a stampede?”
“No, but they might be interes
ted in the stash of rhino horn you have in that shed behind Rongo’s enclosure.”
“You’ve been snooping around,” she said.
“I’ve been doing my job,” I said.
“It’s bait,” she said. “We’ve let it be known that here at New Hope we dehorn all our animals. But we’ve let it ‘slip out’ that we are storing the rhino horn.”
“Why would you do that?”
“The story we’re putting out is that I intend to sell it to the highest bidder in order to fund my research.”
“And people believe that?”
“Bad people believe that other people are just as bad.”
I had to admit there was a certain twisted logic to that.
“That’s insanely dangerous,” I said. “Your security setup sucks.”
She smirked at that. “What you can see of it is just the tip of the iceberg. Winston is a genius, and he designed an asymmetric system that is quite adequate.”
“The guys who are coming for you are hardened mercenaries,” I said. “They have weapons training. They have skills.”
“Simon, I’ve been here for almost twenty-five years. Do you think I’m just winging it here?”
“I’m just afraid it’s going to be a slaughter. I know these guys. I literally know them. And they will do whatever it takes to earn a paycheck.”
“Some things are worth dying for,” she said calmly.
“What?” I said, practically yelling in my frustration.
“Let me show you,” she said.
I trailed her out to the main compound, past where Rongo was sleeping, and into the shed where the rhino horn was stashed. I The smell was awful, old blood and decomposing flesh. But that wasn’t our final destination. She walked down a narrow aisle between two towering piles of horn and came to another locked door, this one requiring a biometric scan.
When the door clicked open, she stood back to let me enter first.
Inside the space was dimly lit, and larger than it had appeared from the outside. There was a watering trough and a half-eaten bale of hay. The air smelled of rhino shit even though there was a huge exhaust fan sucking out the smells. And in the center of the room was a baby rhino. The calf was deeply asleep, curled up on a layer of hay with its feet to one side. It looked adorable. “Meet Bao,” Aline said. “It means ‘rare and priceless treasure.’”
Hearing our voices, the rhino blinked sleepily and lumbered to its feet. Snuffling a little big, he made his way over to us where he bumped Aline gently. She laughed and rubbed him on his tiny baby horn bump.
“I’ve seen baby rhinos before,” I said.
“Not like Bao,” she said. “He’s the only male Southern white rhino alive.”
“You cloned him,” I said.
“We did,” she said.
“And you figure if someone breaks in, they’ll see the rhino horn and not bother looking for anything else.”
“That’s the idea.” She was quiet a moment. “Will you help me protect him?”
“Yes,” I said. “But I want to see your security plans.”
“You’re that worried about this man McQuaide?”
“I’m not as worried about McQuaide as I am about Dilek.”
“The Sudanese?”
“Yes.” I wondered what she would say if I told her that Dilek was a hyena in human form. A year ago, if someone had said something like that to me, I’d have called them crazy. But since I’d acquired my wolf, I no longer discounted any uncanny thing I was told.
“We need to bring Elinah and Winston into this conversation,” she said.
About ten minutes later, all four of us were in Aline’s field office. When I told Elinah and Winston that I feared an attack from Dilek or men under his command, Elinah had simply nodded. “My informant at the ministry tells me men have been arriving from all over the continent and driving to his compound.”
“He’s pretty brazen,” I said.
“He is an apex predator,” Elinah said.
“A big chair does not make a king,” Winston muttered, and I made a mental note to write down his quote.
“Dilek’s clan has nearly 80 individuals in it,” Elinah said, as if Winston hadn’t spoken. “And they all have the ability to man-shape.” Aline didn’t even blink.
“You know?”
“I suspected,” she said.
“Just to clarify,” I said. “We could be looking at a hunting party of 80 hyenas who might or might not be in animal form?” Elinah nodded.
“And you’ve known Dilek was a were-hyena all along?”
“We call them bouda,” Winston said.
“I’ll make a note,” I said. Whether in human or animal shape, hyenas are bad news. I’d seen footage on YouTube of a group of four hyenas taking down a full-grown rhino by first biting off its testicles.
“We could be looking at an Alamo situation here,” I said. Incredibly, Aline smiled.
“We are not unprepared.” She looked at Winston. “Let everyone know. It’s time.”
And with those words, the preserve was suddenly transformed into a fortress protected by tiger pits and deadfalls and all sorts of platforms that people could use to get to higher ground. All of it had been camouflaged before, all of it had been hiding in plain sight.
Elinah set up a team of five village women on one of the platforms. She was armed with a sniper’s rifle but the women were armed with slingshots and rocks They used them for hunting small animals and they were dead shots. They would be very effective against humans.
In the midst of the preparations, Aline suddenly looked at me. “What kind of shifter are you?”
I could have said, “What do you mean?” or I could have said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about?” But what I said was, “How did you know?”
“My husband is a tiger.” The husband who’s in the coma.
By now everyone on the reserve had swung into action.
A white kid with dirty blond dreadlocks, one of the volunteers, interrupted before she could say any more. “Aline, is it time to pour the petrol?”
He meant fill the moats with gas. “That’s our fallback position,” Aline had told me.
“Do it,” she said.
I tried one more time to talk some sense into her. “You need to move your people out. Take the calf and go.”
“And leave the other animals?”
God, she really was like Marie-Ange. “They’re going to murder your people.”
“No,” she said. “They are not.”
“They’re really not,” Winston said. “It’s true Dilek’s got a whole clan but we have something better.”
We are 47 Ronin, I thought.
“We have the whole continent,” he said.
“I don’t understand.”
Winston shook his head at me in the universal signal for Man, you are clueless. “You probably saw a Tarzan movie when you were a kid?”
“Sure,” I said, deciding not to mention I’d seen the one with Margot Robbie twice. In my defense, since becoming part wolf, I don’t sleep much and Hulu has become my best friend. “You know Tarzan’s not real, right?”
“Don’t be an asshole Simon,” Aline said. “Explain it to him,” she said to Winston.
“There are only 27 of us counting volunteers,” he said. “Twenty-eight,” he amended, looking at me. “But there are nearly a hundred animals living here, counting the dogs and Simbasi.”
Simbasi. I began to see what Winston had in mind.
“You want to sic Simbasi on them?”
“The rhinos first,” he said. “They won’t expect that. They’ll start to panic and get trampled and gored. And then Elinah can pick them off.”
He glanced at Elinah, who nodded fiercely. All traces of softness had left her face and all you could see was the ferocious mask of a killer. Aline had told me Elinah had been raped in Nairobi. She’d come home to transform herself into a warrior.
Winston said, “I’ve texted you all The map sh
owing the traps. Don’t wander off the tourist trails.” We all nodded, even Winston’s father, who was looking a little stunned as he processed the transformation in his son.
Chapter Seven
The assault began three days later. It came from two fronts, a wave of hyena-warriors just blitzing the place from the front, and McQuaide and a group of mercenaries coming through the back. At first New Hope held our own. Winston’s trip wires and deadfalls were triggered with precision and did their deadly work. But somehow McQuaide knew about Bao.
Somebody had tipped him off.
“Hold your fire right now,” McQuaide yelled. “Or your little pet is dead.” We all turned to look and saw McQuaid leading Bao by a rope, a large-caliber gun casually pointed at his head.
Bao, so used to affectionate humans had probably greeted the poacher with his little baby horn bump.
“If you don’t let my friends in, I will kill him. And then we’ll come in anyway and kill all of you.” He looked at me. “We’ll start with you.” He leered at Aline. “And you’ll be last. After we’ve all taken a turn with you.”
Winston looked stricken. I saw him half turn toward Aline, but her gaze was focused on the baby rhino. “I can’t make that decision for everyone. I’ll need a moment.” To forestall an argument, she simply turned her back on him and signaled for the volunteers on the ground to huddle up. “How far can your wolf leap?” she asked me.
“About twelve feet. But I’m not sure I can disable McQuaide before he pulls the trigger.”
“I’ll provide a distraction,” Li-Tsui said,, suddenly sounding a whole lot more alpha than he ever had before.
Xièxiè, Aline said. “Thank you both.” She turned back to face McQuaide. “Please don’t kill Bao.”
McQuaide gestured with his gun. “It’s up to you, babe.”
That was my cue. I started walking toward him, my arms spread wide away from my body, trying to look as meek and cowed as possible. “We’ve got pounds of rhino horn stored here,” I said quietly. “If you help us, it’s yours.”
Falling for Shifters: A Limited Edition Autumn Shifters Collection Page 28