Fragile Bonds

by Adelaide Walsh

  She was tall, built like a supermodel—all long, lean limbs, not an ounce of body fat on her—with skin kissed to a honey gold by tropical sunshine and hair that fell in thick, chocolate brown waves right down to her waist. I’d always looked at her with a fledgling sense of jealousy. Unlike Jada, I was built on all curves. Full, stubborn curves which refused to flatten out no matter what I did.

  Jada had no fear when I knew her, was one of the bravest, most cynical journalists I’ve ever even heard of. I once watched this woman walk into a militia camp in the Congo so that she could document double-dealing by a major western arms manufacturer. But two years ago, she’d given up her post and her personal motto of ‘we’re all gonna die eventually’, to become the reigning queen of a pack of Caiman changelings, deep in the forest east of Bogotá. I hadn’t physically seen her since, although we stayed in touch through the occasional text message exchange, but she religiously kept to the pack’s home turf.

  “Jada,” I pulled my estranged friend into a hug. “Married life has been keeping you busy. I’m surprised your reptile let you out to play.”

  She blushed and giggled. Apparently, this new life wasn’t so bad. I’d never heard her giggle before. Most of us lose that ability after a few years in the field.

  “Oh, he’s not the one keeping me close to home. Go get yourself a nice changeling playmate and you’ll understand.” Her eyes glazed over like she was remembering some secret and delicious sin.

  I poked her in the shoulder. “You didn’t haul your ass all the way up here just to brag about lizard man’s dick.”

  She huffed in mock affront. “Lizards are tiny, I prefer larger reptiles.”

  “Gross.”

  She outright laughed and it lit up her face making her impossibly more striking. I grabbed her arm and dragged her into the elevator, stabbing the button for the top floor.

  “It really is good to see you, Jada. But with everything going down right now, I know you wouldn’t be here unless it’s important.”

  Her face fell. Her mouth thinning into a severe line.

  “I need your help. There’s no one else.”

  The elevator dinged and we both shifted, pressed our backs up against the wall before the doors opened. It was nice to know that survival instincts stuck around, even in civilian life. When it was clear the hallway was bad-guy free, I stepped out and led her into my apartment.

  “You’ve redecorated,” she said, examining my haven.

  The floors were a glossy, natural wood stained so dark brown that it appeared black in everything but the direct sunlight. The walls of the open space were a satiny white, which offered contrast to the natural wood of the exposed beams of the ceiling. To the right was my open kitchen, concrete countertops the only interruptions between it and the living area. My living room was a small collection of luxuriously overstuffed taupe couches arranged on a massive, fluffy wool carpet gifted to me by a group of farmers in Morocco after I’d published a story about the human rights violations happening in the region under the ‘fair trade’ label. To the left, stood a gleaming spiral staircase formed of a glossy black metal and natural wood steps that seemed to float up in a corkscrew through the ceiling to the small loft comprised of my bedroom and a tiny spare-room I’d put to use as a home office. When I wasn’t traveling, I rarely had the patience for the cubbyhole of an office assigned to me at the KHG tower. I put together most of my stories from my desk overlooking the shops and restaurants of this bustling neighborhood.

  I waved off her comment, not in the mood for small talk under the black cloud that was this tragic day. I had a country to liberate. I needed to make this fast. “What do you need, Jada. What happened?”

  “You got anything to drink in there?” She nodded toward the kitchen.

  I kicked off my sneakers and padded to the kitchen where I set about digging a bottle of Aguardiente out of my liquor cabinet and filling two glass tumblers, not bothering with ice. I smacked one down on the counter in front of where Jada had perched on a barstool.

  “Now, tell me your troubles,” I said, affecting a fake American accent.

  She swirled the clear liquid around the glass once before slugging back the entire dose and hissed at the burn.

  “You didn’t hear this from me. Far as you’re concerned, I was never here.” I waited in silence. She took a deep breath and continued. “How’s your search for those missing people going?”

  Now she had my attention. “It’s going. Why, what have you got?”

  “Nothing. Just curious.” I gave her a narrow-eyed scowl and refilled her glass. “The Bear pack, ‘bout three hours from here, you know them?”

  “Las Furia, yeah. I know them.”

  “Two hours ago, they lost a lieutenant. High up in the command structure. Guy was on a patrol and something got the jump on him. His partner didn’t see much. All they know is the guy is gone.”

  “What makes you think this is my story? Coulda been personal. Coulda been something the pack is into.”

  She shook her head and stared into her empty glass. “Carro Russo is a Systems Administrator for the privately held electric company that provides power to half the city. He’s the guy behind the rolling black outs.”

  “Shit.” She nodded. But something else had occurred to me.

  “You gotta tell me how you know this. I can’t walk into a Bear pack blind, Jada.”

  She fidgeted in her seat. “Like I said. You didn’t hear this stuff from me.”

  “This stuff being…”

  “You’ve always been different, Adriana. You never did see the differences in people. To you, we’re all just people. Not human. Not changeling. Just people.”

  “You give me too much credit. I’m just like everybody else,” I shook my head. She might have been the more cynical of the two of us when we’d met, but in the years she’d been learning to enjoy domestic bliss I’d changed, too. You can only see so much senseless bloodshed, so many wars between detached wealthy men fought with the bodies of scared and loyal soldiers without becoming desensitized.

  “You gotta understand something about changelings, Adriana. They’re ruthless,” she continued, ignoring my attempt to bat away her praise.

  “I don’t need justifications. Just give me the truth. If I walk into that den with half the information and say the wrong thing, they’ll kill me.”

  “We have a worm in their comm systems. We heard the report. You need to understand that we keep an eye on them to protect ourselves. We need to know if they decide to move against us. If they do and we don’t have time to evacuate, we’re all dead. They’re the strongest pack in the country, five times over. If it wasn’t like this...if the damn packs would just cooperate, things would be different.”

  I held up a hand for her to stop. “Does your husband know you’re here?”

  She smiled and the knot forming in my chest eased a little. “He’s waiting in a car outside.”

  “Jesus, Jada. You fucking scared me.”

  “They can’t know we’re in their communications system.”

  “I won’t narc on you guys, but they’re going to want to know how I found out about the abduction. You know how the packs close ranks on this kind of thing.”

  “Just tell them you have a source. Do your journalism thing. But don’t say a word about us.”

  “So, it’s ‘us’ now. You’re a part of the pack?” That secret, sinful smile danced over her lips again.

  “I might not shift, but I’m as much Caiman as I am human.”

  I finished my drink and then reached up to tear the hair tie out of my hair in a habit born of frustration. It was too damn hot in here, the heat, the weight of this discussion and all it boded for my people weighed heavily on me, giving me a claustrophobic anxiety. I braided the unruly coffee-colored mass over my shoulder in practiced efficiency, just to keep my hands busy.

  “I’m happy for you, Jada. But if I’m gonna find this guy I gotta move. He’s got a few more hours max i
f the Snakes are behind this.”

  “You’re taking this way too well. I expected some ideological speech about privacy.”

  I shrugged. “I’ve had a trojan in the email server one of Dariel’s enforcers uses for weeks. What is it with people tagging me as an idealist? You’re the second person today to accuse me of it.”

  She stood up and rounded the kitchen island. “You’re a journalist, babe. It’s in the job description.” She grabbed my shoulders with both of her hands and gave a slight shake. “You have to be careful,” she said. All humor gone from her voice.

  She didn’t know the half of it. If I was going to go down, I would do it fighting to free my people. And the first step in that fight would be facing down a pack of Bears in the dead of night. Shit.

  “I know.” I moved to pull away, to get moving. Standing here, knowing that a man’s life was on the line, was making me jittery.

  “There’s something else.” She toyed with the glass in her hands, pausing in a long, torturous hesitation.

  I broke the silence before I was tempted to turn around and make a beeline for my Jeep. “Jada, I’m not sure I can handle anymore stalling. Just give me what you’ve got so I can go do something about this.”

  “The Luz Mala...the protections are gone. We’ve confirmed it. What we haven’t been able to figure out is why they’ve disappeared. I just can’t believe that Dariel could be behind this. Why would he make us all vulnerable like that? He might be an usurper, but he’s changeling. Those protections shield us from the violence of the rest of the world. From wars waged on changelings and their sympathizers. What reason could he possibly have for putting us all at risk like this? We don’t know anything else, but we need to be careful. The world outside this continent is not meant for people like us.”

  Rage. Rage bubbled through my body and my hands fisted at my sides. My people were good people, and they had lost so much today. They lost their freedom. Their stability. Their right to safety. They did not need or deserve another blow, and yet here it was. Emmanuel hadn’t been spouting Snake propaganda. He’d known. And yet, despite his near unfettered access to the biggest source of public information in Colombia, he’d kept that knowledge to himself. Kept his sources hidden and chose to let the Snakes handle the dissemination of this oh-so-important information. I refused to allow men like this rule my people. Rape my country. Leech our precious forest of every resource it could produce and leave my home a burnt and smoking shadow of itself.

  Chapter 5

  The moment I crossed into Bear territory, I knew I was taking my life into my hands. I made the three-hour drive in just over two, pushing my Jeep to the limit the whole way. I wasn’t worried about Justice stopping me. Even in times of peace, this was Colombia. Justice had better things to do than patrol the seldom-used roads running deep through the Rainforest.

  Two dark shadows tracked my vehicle, obscured by the dense greenery of the forest framing the road. At least two. Las Furia, the Bear pack I was approaching sans invitation, was not known as a docile pack. The Bears in this part of the world were strong. The strongest, most well-organized and efficiently-governed pack in Colombia, and among the largest in South America. Changelings were notoriously insular, but that deep-seated need to protect their own was often the reason that they failed to amass any actual power. Even in the remoteness of the rainforest, packs cannot exist as an island in this world. Las Furia, on the other hand, protected its members by becoming a political force of nature. The pack’s leaders had understood the need for cooperation hundreds of years earlier, had actually helped the humans establish the first democratic governing structure in this country, and they had remained a visible presence in the area ever since.

  The den territory spanned a massive swath of forested land and was home to a relatively dense population of Bear changelings and their family members. The Bears were apparently free to roam the world at will, and many held jobs, owned homes, went to university in Bogotá, but just like any other tightly-controlled nation, its people were subject to the laws and expectations of the pack no matter where they were. In times of crisis Las Furia had been known to call its packmates back to the den, and it seemed that the Bears took these proclamations seriously. I had never heard of a Bear electing to consciously defy the alpha’s ruling and remain in a human city during a time of closed borders. It was not surprising that the Bears in Bogotá had been called back weeks ago. Not long after the first rumors of Snakes in the city had surfaced.

  The pack was treated, for all political purposes, as an independent nation, and were exempt from many of the human-issued demands made on the people of Colombia, but they were, without a doubt, a part of Colombia. Unlike so many other places around the world where humans and changelings were in constant conflict over land and jurisdictional disputes, the people of the rainforest had come to an understanding, had figured out a way of existing side by side. This parallel governance was truly unique—it offered humans and changelings an amazing opportunity to coexist, to share the technology developed by humans and the cosmic understanding possessed by changelings—but integration remained a problem. Acceptance has never come easy for humans, and because of that, changelings were still one of the chief targets of discrimination. Humans tend to fear what they don’t understand, and nobody but a shifter could ever really understand the changelings.

  My fingers gripped the steering wheel hard enough to turn my knuckles white. I had the beginnings of a plan in my head, but it wouldn’t matter at all if I couldn’t get an audience with the alpha. Despite the fact that these were Bears, half of their consciousness a feral, wild animal, one could not generally crash a pack HQ and expect to be rewarded with a one-on-one with the leader of a changeling group. Just like the humans’ presidents and chancellors and ministers were protected, so too were most alphas.

  The shadows had apparently decided I’d gone far enough. Fifteen hundred feet in front of my Jeep, I saw a hulking, black figure climb onto the road. In the darkness, I could just barely see the form of a large animal sit, dead center, on the crumbling concrete of this decaying forest path. I decelerated, and by the time I reached the figure, the Jeep rolled to a smooth stop. Rather than wait for the Bear to shift or get dragged out of my car by a group of black beasts, I threw off my seat belt and pushed the car door open. I’ve always been more of a face-your-problems kinda girl.

  This pack had just confirmed the abduction of a highly ranked member, they had to be on high-alert for any suspicious activity. I’d expected a welcome wagon, and an interception by a mid-level patrol was sort of built into my plan. By the time I’d stepped onto the road, a misty rain was falling and the figure blocking the way had disappeared into the darkness. My plan was a simple one. Attract some attention and scream everything I knew about Carro—which was, at this point, a substantial amount. I’d used the voice assist on my phone over the last two hours to dig up everything I could, and sift through all the communications I’d intercepted from Dariel’s camp since the abduction—I was relying on my ability to talk somebody into taking me back to the Den. From there...well...I had every confidence I’d figure something out. The headlights from my Jeep lit up the road in a sprawling pool of yellow light as I shoved the door shut and took a hesitant step away from my vehicle. The moon above was entirely obscured by clouds and the thick canopy of leaves overhead.

  “I know about Carro!” I shouted into the sucking blackness of the surrounding night. “I can help. I want to help.”

  The sounds of the forest were my only reply.

  The rainforest is not a silent place. There is too much life in it to ever be silent. In the same way a city buzzes with ambient noise, the rainforest roars at a consistent decibel with the buzz and rattles and clicks and pops and snaps of a billion flames of life, from the microscopic to the frightening mass of the bears that roamed this place. The cicadas in the trees chirped at a deafening volume and the sound gave me the distinct impression I was surrounded, on all sides, by cr
eatures more at home in this place than I ever would be. Some of those creatures were, undoubtedly, watching me right this very moment.

  Changelings were bigger than their animal counterparts. It was clear that the apex predators of this forest were the Bears. But those predators were very conspicuously missing at the moment, a fact which sent a shiver up my spine and fear coursing through my veins. As I looked out into the stygian darkness of the forest, my mind reeled at the thousand different dangers it didn’t see.

  The deeply masculine voice—spiced with a darkness and a dominance I could feel physically pressing against my skin—floated to me from a touchable distance...and scared me badly enough that I screamed before whipping around to face my attacker, completely missing what it was he’d actually said in my surprise. I wasn’t proud of the noise I made.

  I fisted my hands at my sides and stomped my foot like a petulant child.

  “Hijueputa! You scared the shit out of me!”

  The man in front of me did not appear to find my reaction funny. He just leaned in, needing to bend down to get his face an aggressive distance from my own. The lights bleeding from my Jeep did nothing to unveil his features, but his eyes I could see with a frightening clarity. A rutilant gold, the color too metallic to be staring back at me with such a chilling sentience. The shade seemed like it should have been confined to the glittering contents of a jeweler’s portfolio. He was tall, taller than me by a full head, and hostility radiated from every inch of that big body.

  I took a step back, my arms held out behind me. I hoped it would appear as though I was feeling for the car, but in truth I’d made a concealed motion that swept past my thigh and put a hunting knife in my hand. This Bear—and there was no doubt in my mind that this was absolutely a Bear, a changeling violence vibrating in the heat coming off his body in waves—pumped adrenaline through my system. Fear put an acrid taste in my mouth and every survival instinct I had was screaming at me to get away. To put as much distance between this predator and myself as possible. But I stayed my twitching limbs and held my ground.