by Anya Nowlan
Focusing on climbing, he followed closely in Nia’s footsteps. Using all of his other senses and trusting his animal where the man couldn’t hold up to the scrutiny, he set his hands where Nia’s feet had been and scaled the slanted wall of stone slowly. The rocks were moist underneath his palms and when his knees touched them, droplets of water seeped through. Somewhere close by, he could hear a waterfall.
Masking their scent. Clever.
It was damn near impossible hunting someone down during bloom season in the jungle, because the whole place stank like a perfume store. But any predator, and prey, knew that minimizing the chances was something that couldn’t be overlooked.
When he couldn’t find another rock to grab onto, Nia’s hand slipped into his palm again and pulled him up with more strength than he had expected. She was carrying his assault rifle while he had refused to give away his sniper gear bag, but while he was slightly winded, he couldn’t hear her draw a single heavier breath. So she was in good shape. Interesting.
“Are we close?” he asked, standing up and heaving in a deep breath as she tugged him along.
Thor followed reluctantly. It had been hours, they didn’t have any water, he was parched, aching all over and frankly expecting to get shot in the head at any moment. Plus he was fighting the makings of a boner every time Nia’s hand moved a little in his palm, when she brushed her thumb over the skin of his hand or when their fingers entwined. He was beginning to feel like a teenager and he didn’t exactly know what to do with it.
“Almost,” she confirmed with a laugh. “What, tired, soldier-boy? Shouldn’t you be able to go for days?”
“Oh, I’ll go for days if you keep this up,” he grumbled, and he wasn’t entirely sure if the innuendo was voluntary or supposed to be a threat.
Either case, it made him cringe a little.
“Promises, promises,” she chuckled, bracing him against another descent and then a few sharp steps up.
She didn’t hate it.
Somehow, that posed more problems than outright rejection would have. Nia was not making things easy for him and thinking about touching a woman he couldn’t even see was not something that he was supposed to be concentrating on when the world was going to hell in a handbasket all around him.
“Your English is good… Too good. You’re not from around here, are you?” Thor queried, trying desperately to change the topic.
“Oh, I am. Born and raised in the jungles of Borneo, if you’d believe it. Sort of comes with the territory,” she said cheerily, though her intonation dropped a little at the end.
Thor frowned.
“With the territory? You mean you’re… a shifter?”
She glazed over that beautifully, trying to apparently make him forget all about the fact that he’d asked.
“But I spent about five years in New York. Just got back around Christmas, actually. So I guess that explains the language and the accent,” she rattled on.
She probably didn’t notice, but her grip on his hand tightened a little and Thor pursed his lips, considering this new information. She did have a little bit of a New Yorker accent below something a lot more… earthy. But what really interested him was the fact that she wouldn’t tell him if she was a shifter, let alone what kind.
He breathed in deeper, huffing air in through his nose, trying to catch any specific notes in her scent. She definitely wasn’t a big predator, not a wolf, cat or bear, but that still left plenty of options. With predators, there was a certain air about them that they couldn’t really mask even if they tried – even if the beholder happened to be mostly blind at the time – which she luckily lacked.
Had she been any kind of a big shifter with possible sharp, pointy teeth, Thor wouldn’t have felt safe sharing much of anything with her other than maybe a swift kick to the head. Still, he weighed his options and came to the only reasonable decision – pushing the only person keeping him alive in the jungle into a conversation she didn’t want to have was probably not the smartest plan he could concoct at the moment.
“Just a bit more,” she said.
“About time,” Thor responded, falling back into the familiar pattern of being annoyed and grouchy.
And still you’re talking more in a few minutes than you usually do in a year. Maybe you should stop that.
He felt like that might have been more of a pipedream than anything that was actually going to happen.
A few minutes later, with the sound of the waterfall now much louder, Nia’s steps slowed until she stopped completely. Nearby, Thor could hear murmured voices, but the language was alien to him. It sounded local and he immediately tensed up, wishing he had his rifle in his hand. Reflexively, he reached for the knife he usually kept on his belt, only to find that it was missing.
That clever little minx.
The fact that he’d gone so long without actually checking if he had his weapons on him went to show what kind of a state of mind Thor was currently in. His panther didn’t seem to mind.
“Relax,” she whispered, giving his hand an encouraging squeeze that seemed to drain the stress out of his body, to Thor’s great surprise. “These are the good guys.”
“There’s no such thing as ‘the good guys’,” Thor said, keeping his voice murmured and low.
“You’d be surprised,” she replied with a snort.
I doubt it.
Four
Nia
“A little bit more,” Nia said, trying to reach for Thor’s eyes as he dodged out of the path of her hand.
For a blind guy, he was damn fast. She sighed, scooping up another glob of the green paste on the flat wooden stick she was using to spread the paste around Thor’s eyes. When he’d let her, anyway.
Which wasn’t all that often.
“You’ve done your damn magic forest bullshit on me enough, okay. Just admit it, modern medicine is my last option,” he grumbled, exasperated as he attempted to dodge another shot from her.
This time, she got ahold of the collar of his camo-green wifebeater and pushed him back against the stone wall of the cave beneath the waterfall she’d brought him to. It was the only place she could really think of that had guaranteed privacy, and it was also the place she liked to think of as home while the rest of her nosy tribesmen wanted to know and see more of the odd soldier she’d dragged along.
“Hey, unfair! You’re violating a blind man here!” Thor protested, his eyes squeezed shut because the lime green paste was all over his face, including places where it shouldn’t have been because he was being such a goddamn baby.
“Oh my God! Is this what they teach you in the Navy, to be crybabies when someone tries to help you?” Nia asked with a laugh, managing to get the final scoop over his left eye. “There. Now stay still and stop being so fussy.”
“I’m not being fussy,” he huffed back.
He was being so fussy.
With a sigh and a gentle roll of her eye – one that Nia was pretty sure Thor could feel somehow without seeing her do it – she leaned back against her own crevice and settled the little mugs and grinders and herbs away. They’d been at it all day, trying out various things that could give him back his vision. Some had seemed to make things better and some had done the exact opposite. Needless to say, Thor wasn’t exactly a believer yet.
“You just need to have a little bit of faith,” Nia said, rolling back her shoulders.
It had been a long day and she hadn’t exactly slept well over last night. Images of the explosion, the shouting and the gunfire seemed to fill her head every time she tried to close her eyes. A small shudder ran through her, seeming to reverb out from her spine and fill her with cold dread.
There had been too much violence in the forests as of late and it was all because of simple human greed. She hated it more than words could describe.
“It stings,” Thor said, gingerly poking at the paste over his eyes.
Nia smacked his hand away, smiling.
“It’s supposed to sting. Gi
ve it time to work before you go bitching and moaning about it.”
“For a wannabe Earth Mother, you’ve got some lip on you,” Thor said, but Nia could see the makings of a smile on his lips.
So he wasn’t completely without a sense of humor. Good to know. Not that a man who looked like that particularly needed a personality, but it was a boon regardless.
She shook her head, trying to drive the thoughts out of her head. Yes, he was smoking hot, and yes, whenever they held hands she got butterflies in her stomach, but thinking that it was anything other than lust was just stupid.
It has got to be lust, she reminded herself for the umpteenth time. You haven’t gotten any since coming back from New York. No wonder you’re ready to jump the bones of the closest hot commando you can find. He can’t even see. The odds that he’d actually want you are… well, they’re okay, I guess, but still…
Her rambling internal monologue was broken when Thor shifted uncomfortably against the wall, seeming to search for more comfort where there would be none.
“Uncomfortable?”
“I can’t see and I’m stuck in a damp cave under a waterfall spirits know where, with a voodoo priestess who seems to want to use my eyeballs for her frog stew, considering the fact that she’s marinating them as we speak. So, yeah, you might say I’m a little uncomfortable.”
“This will never end, will it?” Nia laughed, poking his boot with her bare foot.
She was dressed in simple shorts and a top the color of the earth and hadn’t worn shoes since she got back home. It felt good, knowing what was exactly beneath your feet. Another thing that came with the territory.
“So take my mind off of it,” he offered suddenly, pawing around himself until he could find the palm leaf filled with meat and rice that she’d offered him earlier. “Tell me something about yourself.”
“What do you want to know?” Nia asked, settling back and pursing her lips as he began eating.
Progress!
“You were in New York? And you’re from around here? That’s a long way to go.”
“It is, I guess,” Nia said, nodding. “But there aren’t a lot of places in Borneo that teach molecular chemistry and biology at a higher level than what you’d find in any American high school textbook.”
“So you’re a bushman scientist?” Thor asked, his slight drawl sounding far too cute.
He has to be Texan.
“Sort of. Though I think ‘bushman’ refers to Australian aboriginals, which I am not. I am, however, from a tribe in Borneo, as you may have been able to tell by now. We descend from early natives, actually. Used to be called the Parivi and… well, I guess you can still call us that,” she explained with a shrug. “Healing and medicine, living off the jungle has been in my blood for as long as there’s been an ‘us’ worth mentioning. I wanted to know why some of this stuff works the way it does and that’s why I went to school all the way in New York.”
“So how does this stuff work?” Thor asked after swallowing a mouthful of meat and rice.
“Honestly? Half of the time, I still have no clue,” she said, laughing. “But I can show you my lab later.”
“You have a lab in the middle of the jungle?”
“I do,” she admitted, nodding.
Thor quieted for a moment, seeming to mull this over as he ate. She frowned, but he didn’t volunteer what he was thinking about and she figured it best not to pry. Thor Dremmons didn’t exactly strike her as an open kind of guy.
Instead, she took a moment to look at his tattoos again, the flicker of the torch she’d brought into the cave lighting his features softly. Night was falling outside and it would get colder soon, but the temperature always remained much the same in the cave – cool enough to live through the hot days, and warm enough to keep cuddly during the night.
Though curling up with Thor would probably be better than just pulling a blanket over my head, she mused, blushing at the thought.
Five
Nia
Nia had lost count of how many times that day she’d been sort of glad that Thor couldn’t see her acting a damn fool around him.
“Can I ask something too?” she inquired, keeping an eye on one particular tattoo he had peeking out from underneath his shirt.
“Sure,” he said with a nod, looking like the oddest spa guest ever with his eye mask and the grime and blood from the previous days in the forest.
“Who’s Ash?”
His hand went reflexively over the site of the tattoo on his left pec, placed high. The corners of his mouth, which had stayed more neutral than downturned, twitched now and Nia could almost feel the temperature drop in the room.
Not a good question.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to pry. You don’t have to tell me,” she stuttered, holding up her hands in surrender though he couldn’t see it.
“No, it’s fine,” Thor said, rubbing the spot of the tattoo as if it burned him to have it on his skin. “She is… she was my mate. Ashley. She died some years ago.”
“Oh,” Nia said, noticing the way Thor’s voice turned completely deadpan when he said that, like he was reciting something he’d learned by heart instead of something that came naturally for him to say. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”
“Thanks,” he responded blankly, and a long silence fell between the two of them.
Nia picked up her own meal and poked at it listlessly, her stomach twisting. Sneaking glances at him, she couldn’t help but notice how his face, so animated when they’d conversed before, was now this expressionless mask that seemed so out of place on him.
After about ten minutes though, it was Thor who started talking again.
“We were just kids when we met. I saw her at a store in Texas, she was visiting some family. It was… It was love at first sight, I guess. I knew. I knew. I ended up moving to Missouri with her and we settled down there, got married, the whole nine yards.”
Thor paused and Nia caught herself holding her breath, as if anything she could say or do would break this moment and cause him to stop talking and clam up again. A part of her wanted nothing else than to make sure that he didn’t feel any kind of pain at all and tell him to stop reliving the memory. But another part of her wanted to know as much as she possibly could about this fascinating man that she’d pulled out of the jungle.
Before she could make up her mind which track to follow, Thor continued.
“She got pregnant and we were ecstatic. I was so sure that we were going to be together forever. I didn’t have a great job and she worked as a checkout girl, but we were getting by. Even had a tiny little house. Not a place I wanted to raise kids in, but it was getting there. But we were just goddamn children ourselves…
“Anyway, she got ill during the pregnancy and we never knew. Cancer. Liver. It had metastasized and the doctors didn’t catch it in time. They both died, Ashley and the baby.”
Thor paused again and Nia moved across the cave, sitting next to him and taking his free hand in hers, squeezing it tight. She didn’t need him to tell her all the details, she could guess plenty of them. Shifter pregnancies, when the woman was a human, often came with high risks. Because of the shifter baby’s fast development, the mother’s circulation was flooded with chemical compounds that were not natural to them, which accelerated healing and growth.
Sometimes, the accelerated growth affected things that it shouldn’t have, though. If the mother already had cancer or similar issues then those could be wildly exasperated, or in certain cases healed completely without the mother ever knowing she was in danger. It was a gift and a curse at the same time, which was why a lot of expectant mothers forewent any sort of full body checkups during the pregnancies.
The only option to solve the problem was often to terminate the pregnancy and then deal with the underlying issue. Very few soon-to-be mothers were willing to do that. Especially with their first children, seeing as the firstborn was so very important to shifter fathers.
“I�
�m not sure why I’m telling you this,” he said after a while, putting down the palm leaf. “I don’t think I’ve talked about it since I left the hospital that day. I buried her and our child, I sold the house and I got the fuck out of Dodge, if you know what I mean. I’ve spent my life since then trying not to look back. I guess it took a moment of not seeing a goddamn thing for that resolve to break.”
He pushed his head against the stone wall with a shallow thud, making Nia cringe. The last thing she wanted was for him to be in any kind of pain, especially the kind of visceral, destructive hurt that came with losing a mate. Though she had not had to go through it herself, she’d seen it happen plenty of times in her clan.
When Nia’s father had died before her mother, the world seemed to lose at least half the colors for her mother. It was evident that Thor’s reaction to the loss had been much the same, if not worse, considering his line of work now.
“You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to. I didn’t mean to pry,” Nia said, curling her other hand around their intertwined fingers as well, guilt rising in her. “I’m sorry for poking at you, I should have known that it wasn’t a story you would want to tell.”
Thor shook his head, grinning a sad smile.
“You had no way of knowing. It feels… it doesn’t feel bad, you know?” he said, frowning as he said it, as if it surprised him.
Nia nodded quietly, feeling him lean toward her a little so their shoulders were together now, his wide and strong and hers much narrower, but still feeling like she had almost as much strength to give as he did. It was an odd sensation, their joint life force seeming to flow through them.
Nia closed her eyes, reveling in the feeling for a bit, the lines of where one of them started and the other ended blurring just enough to make her feel hazy and warm. It was nice, if entirely unexpected.
“That’s good. Sharing’s supposed to help lighten the burden. Didn’t you have any family you could have leaned on after she died? I get the feeling that you went straight for the Navy instead of going home.”