Deep River Shifters 4 Book Box Set

by Lisa Daniels

  It's not right. It's not fucking right. The thought stirred up a furious passion in Anya.

  At sundown, they were allowed to stop, though two people had collapsed from dehydration. Anya didn’t think they’d be seeing those people again from the way the wyrms had converged upon them, whips swishing menacingly. She went back to the village, where the dwindling community gathered in their self-designated leader’s house – there to help soothe moods and fight despair. They needed to fight the evil somehow.

  Inside the leader's hut, the complaints began. Aching backs, burnt skins. Elder Tam helped where he could. People helped treat one another with the remedies they knew, though many of their community also preferred to stay in their homes, not wanting to risk any wrath if the wyrms took offense to these gatherings. For some people, these gatherings kept them above water. Just from having others to care once the scythes had been placed down, and the soils tilled.

  Anya watched as her mother took a salve to help treat her burns. Anya looked at the gaunt, beaten-down faces of people who had lost all willpower to fight. The despair left a tight knot inside, a heat that coursed through her veins, waiting to unleash itself in furious energy. Seeing their rejected expressions made her want to slap their faces out of it. Wake them up somehow. Any chance of making a rousing, heroic speech would be greeted with blank stares and fear. Anya knew the drill, because she’d tried a few times before. Still, for the sake of it, she raised her voice above the murmurs. Because their faces disgusted her, and the defeat that weighed upon their souls made a voice in the back of her head scream soundlessly at the misery.

  “Every day I come back home and I see bruised bodies and ruined souls.” Her speech drifted over the susurrations. People always spoke quietly, afraid of the wyrms' sensitive hearing. Most didn't bother listening. “Every day I see children starving and elders hiding. Every day could be our last day, and yet we let these masters do as they wish to us, we let them break our bones and our minds and our souls. When does it stop? When does all this stop?” Anya waved her hand across the tightly packed room. A few of the younger adults nodded with her, but the elders ignored her, and several couples gave her a rude gesture.

  “Oh, shut up, will you?” a man said, scowling at Anya. “You’ll get us in trouble, wench.”

  “I’m sick of this treatment!” Anya fired back, standing her ground. “And I’m sick of people like you treating your fellow humans like they’re nothing. We get enough of that from the overseers. Do you have no pride? Are you a craven husk of a creature, scrabbling for scraps in the dark?”

  More murmurs. “You should be quiet,” Kendra whispered, tugging on Anya’s shoulder. She had some bandages trailing from her hands, and blood spots upon her wrists. “You can’t draw attention to yourself.”

  “Quiet,” an older woman said, backing the man. She was wizened, with muddy blue eyes, rubbing at a tender spot on her wrist. “You won’t get anything out of this lot, child. It’s admirable that you're not broken yet. Really. But you can’t stir the broken. You see these wretches here for yourself. Some have families, some are just worried about getting food and not being hit. They don’t have time to dream.”

  Horrible words, but they made a kind of twisted sense. Anya just wanted people to be happy for once. To greet their days with smiles, because smiles lifted up the soul. To fight against their masters, because surely, death and resilience were better than being a beaten mule. “I’m not broken,” the man insisted, his dark eyes flashing. “I’m just not stupid. This is our lot. We accept it or we die.”

  Agreement from the others. Anya let out a sigh. She let her hands slump through her dirty hair. So much mud over her body. Her nostrils were long since immune to the odors.

  A man with dark eyes approached Anya from the side. He stooped as he walked, and wobbled, as if in need of a walking stick, and hissed, “Listen, I’ll help you out, here. You can’t keep doing this. We may have informers, willing to rat out to the overseers for some extra bread. You’re doing this too often. I know it must hurt, but you can’t keep it up. We’ve been like this for generations. People like you have gone missing for speaking up.” The man squeezed her shoulder, his brown eyes sad. He had scars all along his bare legs. “I seen it happen to my brother. A rat sold him out for extra meals for a month.” Come to mention it, some of the people here had intense, sly eyes, the kind that sought opportunities wherever they appeared.

  Anya grit her teeth, not satisfied with any of the answers. The oppressive atmosphere of the room stifled her, dragging her down into its pit. No one here wanted to do anything. No one cared. They just wanted to be left alone, to sleep, to eat, to do their jobs without interference. Afraid of the whip, afraid of an overseer’s wrath. Always fucking afraid.

  It made her sick to her stomach. She loathed the fear, simply because she made a choice at a young age. A logical choice. If she didn’t like something, then she needed to change it. There was no point staying with what you hated.

  Kendra encouraged that thinking, hoping to preserve that fresh youth of Anya's for as long as possible. Distracting her from the grim reality of a world that crushed humans down into the mud.

  Yet the years dribbled by, and Anya's measly attempts at stirring the populace amounted to naught. Whenever she grabbed a few people’s minds, something atrocious happened to grind them back into the dirt again. Her dreams of escape always got thwarted, too. The traders who passed through didn’t want anything to do with anyone in the villages, other than bartering goods out of them. She'd tried offering them anything she could, and a few clearly wanted to use her for other things, or planned to sell her on to the next twisted master.

  Nothing felt worthwhile. Nothing worked if you were a vulnerable serf without any powerful lords backing you up.

  Anya felt the influence of despair pressing onto her, teasing her into its clutches. She worried if she kept this up, she’d become the very people she pitied and despised.

  She went to bed hungry, dirty, worn out, knowing she’d need to get up at first light tomorrow to do exactly the same thing. Her mother, grandpa, and four younger siblings slumbered in the tiny hut, with barely any room to move. Two infant boys, snuffling. Two older girls with lank, short hair, and faces as filthy as Anya’s.

  None of them had names, but Anya gave them some, anyway. Sniffle for the oldest girl, Tantrum for the next, and the babies were Chub and Podge. Their unique characteristics contributed to the names.

  “When youse make it past ten years of age, then youse deserve names,” Kendra told them. “Names go to the living. And you prove you are worthy to live by the gods themselves when you make it. Took the gods ten years to make our world, after all.”

  Anya didn't believe a word of it. She didn't think such a concept like gods existed, simply because they allowed everyone here to suffer. What kind of bastard did you need to be to accept such things happening?

  Sleep never came easy to Anya. The sounds and movements of her siblings made it hard to drift off, though she'd had a lot of practice.

  And a lot of discomfort.

  She finally managed a bite of sleep. At least, until the cries came out in the middle of the night, sending Anya bolt upright. Her mother and siblings had awoken, and peered outside the hut. Then, her mother rushed to Anya, face drained of all color. “Overseers. They’re rifling through the huts right now. Looking for dissenters. You gotta get out. You gotta escape.”

  “What?” It didn’t make sense. What dissenters? “I did nothing wrong. Why do you think it's me they're looking for?”

  “It was your speech. I reckon someone reported you,” her mother sobbed, blue eyes clouded with tears, wrinkled face grieving as if she’d already lost her daughter. Her mother acted terrified, and the terror seeped into Anya as well. “Oh, you were my prettiest, my brightest, and we hid you so well, but you couldn’t hide yourself.” Kendra let out a whimper. “Go, go now. Through here – you gotta go through the pit.”

  Trembling, confus
ed, Anya was shoved to the back of the hut where a rug lay, and her mother lifted it up to reveal a small hole. Tantrum and Sniffle hissed her on, and she squeezed through the hole in panic, landing in excrement and pee. She heard her mother place the rug back over the gap, and tried not to retch as she clawed her way through the cesspit towards the small hole used for airing out the stench. No. Don't think about it. Don't think about it–

  She heard the door slam open in her former home, and raised voices bark, “Where’s that little bitch? Is this her family?”

  A murmur. Was her mother crying? Gods, were those monsters hurting her? Anya's blood screamed out then, crying that it belonged to her mother, that she should go back and help her somehow. But what could she do? What the fuck could she do against an all-powerful wyrm? Tears bit at her eyes.

  “It is? It better be, snitch. Where are you hiding her, you filthy rats?” A pause. “Say, or I’ll kill the old man. Say!”

  A snitch. Perhaps one of those sly men in the elder's house had decided killing Anya would be worth a few extra meals in his stomach. Fuckers. Anya choked back her despair as she fled, scrambling through the night, avoiding the areas lit by torches. Her bare feet, slick with human waste, skidded across the dirt patches of their stomped-upon paths. Small mud and thatch huts could be used as cover. It helped that Anya barely reached over five feet tall and stood as thin as a rake – ducking into slits of shadow made it easier to hide. She steered clear of a wyrm in his traditional form, towering above the huts. He had a long, serpentine neck, a bulky body with four legs, sharp claws, and a twitching, jagged tail. Spikes protruded from his back. He thumped along the huts, evil yellow eyes glowing as he sniffed. His scale color appeared dark in the moonlight, and his huge nostrils flared.

  “Smells like a fucking bog in here,” he growled, lips curling in disgust. He displayed his fangs. “Disgusting little creatures.”

  We have to be disgusting. So you won't kill us for being pretty. Anya tore past the village, now running through the wheat fields. She made too much noise in her haste, swishing through the grain, rather than going at a crawl. Any moment now, she expected to hear shouts.

  “We got a runner here! A runner!” The outcry began like baying hounds, and now three full-form wyrms stamped after her, their legs eating up the distance. The wheat scratched at Anya's tattered clothes, and sometimes she stepped wrong, tamping the fibers and sending stabs of pain through the soles of her feet. Her breath ran ragged in her throat, and her lungs struggled to suck in enough air to keep going. Anya made it through the wheat field and into the woodland, heart pounding, not wanting to think about what had happened to her family. Please be alright. Please be alright. I know I’m not supposed to care, but I do. Please…

  Awful images flashed through her mind. The babies, thrown across the room, so that they lay in lifeless bundles in the corner of the room. Or her sisters, taken away to the mansion, never to return. Or her mother, having done everything possible to protect her children, beaten or left for dead. She didn't even want to think about what they'd do to her grandpa.

  Sobs hitched in her throat. Terror consumed her thoughts, not for herself, but for the family she'd left behind. The family she wasn't supposed to care about, because people tended to die too fast and too soon. Dangerous to love, they said. Dangerous to let your heart out of its box.

  The stamps grew louder. She sped up, but couldn’t outrun them. Not if they turned into huge wyrms, crossing the field in strides. Not if they were trained soldiers, and she was just a poor, underfed serf. Also, she smelled too distinctive, covered in manure. Her only chance was to bury herself in something to hide her body and scent, and hope they passed her by.

  Don't think about them. Keep that heart locked up tight. Keep it away from everyone who wishes to harm it.

  Her powerlessness chafed at her. Why couldn't she do anything? Why hadn't she braved the idea of wandering into the wilderness before, hoping to find a place away from all the fucking wyrms?

  She yelped as she ran into a clearing and saw a man there. Shit. Shit! He froze in shock as she sped past. She didn’t look behind her. Didn't want to risk it, didn't want to look back and maybe see him have those horrible yellow eyes. She needed to keep running.

  Part of her wanted to collapse at that point, and give up. How did she expect to escape these monsters? The stomps vibrated nearer. Where from? The guards chasing her, or the stranger in the woods, in a place he had no business being? Whoever chased her, they shortened the gap. Their stomps grew louder. Her heart threatened to burst out of her chest. She then heard a distinctive, cultured voice say, “Oh, bother. Slow down! Stop running!”

  Her heart iced over. Her blood became frozen crystal. She glanced back to see the man running after her in the dark. She sobbed in terror as he seized her by the wrist, easily outstripping her speed.

  “Sorry about this,” he said, before transforming. “Wow, but you're really gross. You know that, right? Where did you land? In a giant cow-pat?”

  Anya let out a piercing scream as talons encased her, and she heard the beat of wings as the monster carried her off the ground.

  Chapter Two

  There was only so long Anya could keep screaming until she decided that her breath was wasted. It didn't do anything to improve the situation.

  Then there was the other peculiar thing. First off, Anya had never imagined that you could get dragons with wings. Wyrms didn't fly. But this thing did. So he... wasn't a wyrm?

  “Are you done screaming yet?” he said, sounding rather irritated. “Because I have sensitive ears, and really, you're not doing yourself any favors.”

  She didn't bother responding to him. Her heart throbbed painfully, and now that she could peek through his talons, she saw the ground a long way off, and the tops of trees and rolling hills. He could flex his claws and crush her to death, or release them and drop her to her death. Screaming at him to release her didn't seem like the best idea right now.

  “Well? Aren't you going to say anything? Hello? It's considered polite to talk to your rescuers.”

  Rescued? Anya blinked her brown eyes in confusion. Her terrified, sluggish mind tried catching up with his words. Hard to think with her blood pounding so fast, with her limbs shaking like wheat in a strong breeze. Hard to think when you were trapped in the claws of a fucking dragon, thousands of feet in the air.

  Part of her fear melted, enough to unblock her throat and provide the dragon with words. “You say you rescued me?”

  “Didn't I? I mean, I can fly back and drop you in the woods again if you want. But I'm pretty sure I saw a bunch of wyrms chasing you, and that you were on your last legs, trying to get away. And in a dreadful state. I might have to take several baths after handling you. As for you – I'll be sticking your head under the water until you're squeaky clean. Don't you peasants ever clean yourselves?”

  His rapid chatter confused her. She didn't have conversation with dragons. Especially not ones that seemed to like the sound of their own voices. Her exhausted mind tried to wrap itself around the concept that he seemed to think he'd saved her.

  “What will you... do with me?”

  The dragon was silent a moment. His wings batted through the air, buffeting the wind on either side. His body lurched forward with every beat, as he propelled himself through the air. “Plenty of things. I plan to take you home first. I live in a drake and human settlement called Tarn. I'll take you there first, get you scrubbed up and fed, because you look like a disgusting shit monster, and then we'll see what to do from there. Put you into one of the programs we have running for the humans, helping rehabilitate them from wyrm slave conditioning.”

  Drakes? Rehabilitation? What?

  “What's a drake?”

  “Why,” the dragon said, vastly amused, “me. I'm a drake. You know, with the flappy wings and sexy scales. Wait. You've never seen a drake before?” When she didn't answer, he made a tsking sound in his throat. “You really are isolated, aren't you? Okay,
quick lesson. There are wyrms. Big ugly things that don't like anyone. There are drakes like me, who don't wish to see humans turned into slaves. And humans. Clear enough so far?”

  Anya closed her eyes, too exhausted to care, to think. He seemed to sense this, and let out a rattling sigh.

  “I'll tell you later. Let's get you back. But please trust me when I say I'm your ally. Drakes are actually supportive towards your kind. And I don't want to see you dead at the hands of those wyrms.”

  Anya nodded, even though he couldn't see it. It wasn't like she had a choice, anyway. She was stuck in this drake's talons, whether she trusted him or not. “Okay.”

  She kept her eyes closed, before a question popped to mind. She cleared her throat and shouted through his talons, “Why do you care... if I live or die?”

  He dipped in the air, causing her stomach to lurch. “Someone has to,” he eventually said. “And others of my kind agree.”

  What a novel concept. Dragons that cared. Anya's world view began slowly crumbling. She always thought... she always assumed that the world was black and white. Cruel wyrms, and suffering humans. Yet, being in the sky right now, she instantly realized that the world was a lot bigger than she expected.

  She'd never left the plantation. For all her talk of freedom, of making a new life for herself, she’d never found the courage to leave her prison.

  Perhaps she was as much a coward as the rest of her people. That idea sank her heart, and again made tears stab at her eyes. The tears came harder when she remembered the people she left behind, their fates unknown. They'd essentially sacrificed themselves to ensure her survival. Six people for one. Didn't seem like much of a fair trade.

  “What's your name, human?” The drake had a soft voice, sounding as if he was one step away from breaking into song. It held a certain poise in it. He also spoke much fancier than her rough plantation accent. More like the wyrms. Except he claimed he was nothing like them. And seemed to dislike them as well.