Shifter Planet (25 page)

Chapter Thirty-Eight

T
he Green was deceptive in so many ways. From a distance, it was a huge, flat forest of almost identical trees. When one was deep in the heart of the Green, however, there was no uniformity. Every inch of it, high or low, was filled with trees in all shapes and sizes, intermingled with dense shrubs and clinging vines that twisted from tree to tree and climbed all the way to the canopy itself in search of sunshine. And the surface, which to the naked eye seemed completely flat from space, was in fact wrinkled and rippled, full of steep ravines and narrow, deep valleys which trapped heat and moisture and created almost jungle-like microclimates in certain places.

Her favorite hot spring was tucked into one of those hidden ravines. And it was only a short distance off their direct route to the city, which, she suspected, was why Rhodry had agreed to the detour. That and the fact that the antibiotics she needed were stashed there. And while the antibiotics may have been her trump card to persuade him, by midday she was convinced she really did need them.

They traveled steadily, eating fruit and trail bars along the way, making good time. The deeper they journeyed into the heart of the forest, the thicker the foliage became, and the more difficult it was to travel on the ground, climbing over and under, and detouring around, the riotous growth. Even so, she’d made this trip many times over the months she’d spent training, and she’d never found it this exhausting. Her leg hurt. Just plain
hurt
. And though she tried to conceal it, she was limping badly after the first two miles or so.

Rhodry had shifted and gone up into the trees after their last stop, wanting to get a better sense of where they were. When he dropped out of the trees this time, he shifted back to human, and watched critically as she hobbled toward him.

“We should stop for the day. There’s no point in killing yourself for a hot bath.”

“I don’t want to stop,” she said stubbornly, limping past him. “It’s not that much farther, and if we get there
today,
I won’t have to walk tomorrow at all.”

He strode quickly past her and stopped, blocking her path. “Amanda.”

She glared up at him. “Rhodry.”

He blew out a frustrated breath and threw his hands into the air. “Stubborn, pigheaded
woman
,” he muttered. He grabbed her backpack, pulled out his clothes and boots, and donned them quickly before stomping off through the trees ahead of her, clearing the trail so she wouldn’t have to work so hard. She smiled. He really was a sweetie.

They reached a narrow valley not long after that, traveling down a gentle slope and pausing where it evened out to a broad plateau before dropping once again into a steep-sided ravine. It was late in the afternoon, the day still warm, the sun’s heat trapped by a combination of heavy canopy and sloping terrain. She paused to rest briefly before the last push, half sitting on a fallen tree trunk. It was covered with lichen and crawling vines like everything else in the forest, its innards hollowed out long ago. Just another lump in the forest floor.

“This is it,” she told him. She was puffing breathlessly, and fighting not to let him know it. She’d used up all her reserves of strength just to get this far. She’d lost at least ten pounds since the trial began, and it was weight she couldn’t afford to lose since most of her body mass was muscle. Her shipboard training hadn’t left much fat on her, and what there was had been whittled away by her training for the Guild trials.

“Are you all right?” He crouched next to her, his big hand a soothing warmth despite the heat of her sore leg.

“Just a little out of breath,” she gasped, resting a hand on his shoulder and faking a grin. “I didn’t get much sleep last night.”

He stood, then sat next to her on the log, dropping an arm over her shoulder and encouraging her to lean against him. When she did, he kissed the top of her head. “I’ll let you sleep tonight.”

“You do, and you’ll be sorry.”

He gave a pleased laugh, and sat with her quietly until her breathing evened out. “So where’s this hot spring?” he asked, inhaling deeply as he took in the forest’s scent.

“Right in front of you,” she said. “You shifters have your heads so far up”—he tightened his arm playfully and she laughed before continuing—“
in the trees
that you forget to look at what’s on the ground.”

She stood before her muscles could stiffen any further, and slowly started down the steep slope, pausing to give him an appraising glance over her shoulder. “You’ll probably have to shift to get through here.”

He shrugged, handed over their gear, and stripped efficiently. She caught the discarded pants he threw to her, then leaned back against the cool rocks to watch him shift. It was something she’d seen many times before, and it never ceased to amaze her. It was nothing like the old werewolf movies they had in the ship’s vid library. There was no gush of fluid, no bursting skin. It was a graceful flow of flesh into fur, shimmering up his body until three hundred pounds of human became pure, sleek feline. Only his eyes stayed the same, slightly almond shaped, with a perfectly round iris of molten gold, giving him the same extraordinary vision in either form.

The huge black cat that was Rhodry arched his back against his front paws, hips held high to stretch his spine with a popping of vertebrae. He stood up and grinned at her, his long pink tongue licking his chops deliberately.

She laughed and wrapped her arms around his neck in a hug. “You’re such a pretty kitty.”

He growled and butted her with his big head, which only made her laugh more.

Straightening away from the rocks, she patted his shoulder, which sat just about level with her hip, and said, “Follow me.”

The hot spring she wanted was very near the bottom of the deep ravine, buried in a jumble of rocks and boulders that was completely overgrown with moss and tangled vines. The dense umbrella of a giant urwillow concealed it even further, its fronds sweeping the ground with a thick and lacy curtain. She pushed aside several of the feather-like branches, and entered the labyrinth of stone that would take her to the heart of the hot spring.

She maneuvered easily through the twisting passage, snickering when Rhodry hissed with displeasure as he tried to fit through some of the narrower twists and turns. As she drew closer to the grotto at its heart, a few wisps of steam from the spring found their way through the maze of rocks to caress her face, letting her know the end of the passage was close. Not that she needed the reminder. Every turn was familiar to her. She’d considered marking the route after her first visit, wary of the many wrong turns that had left her with barely enough space to turn around and retrace her steps. In the end, she’d decided against it, not wanting to make it any easier for others to find. She turned sideways to ease through the last narrow gap, and stepped into a secret garden.

Twenty feet at its widest point and irregular in shape, the grotto was little more than a hollow within the stones, shaped over the millennia by the steady flow of hot water bubbling up from somewhere underground and emerging halfway up the wall on the far right. The spring tumbled over once-jagged rocks, now smoothed and rounded by the water’s course, some pocked with small reservoirs along the way that constantly filled and overflowed as the water made its way to the larger pool at the opposite end.

The air was warm and steamy, and the uneven sunlight confused as much as it revealed as she made her way over the rough ground. Sunlight should have been hard to come by deep within the rocks like this. Luckily, the passage of time and pressure from the steam had joined to create a large daylight hole over the end of the grotto farthest from the pool. The hole was itself covered with a screen of tangled vines, its irregular opening providing at least partial light for most of the day, turning what would have been a dark, dank hole into a secret hideaway.

A stone skittered across the grotto floor as she kicked it. No matter how many times she did this, there was always a fresh batch of loose rock every time she returned. It worried her sometimes, the idea that the ceiling could give way at any moment, collapsing just as it had sometime before to create the daylight hole.

She passed under an overhang of several tons of rock and into a small alcove with a back wall that was riddled with crevices. It was here that she stored camping gear and supplies for her visits, zipping them into waterproof pouches and tucking them into the various cubbies. She located the big halogen flashlight stored there. It was much larger than the one she carried with her, and had a wide, flat base that permitted one to stand it on end as a lamp. Flicking it on, she searched through the cubbies, noting the extra quiver of arrows she’d stored here on her last visit, and finally pulling out a small case with a waterproof seal. She opened it quickly, and dug past the packages of sterile bandages and wraps until she caught the faint gleam of silver which denoted the sealed packs of antibiotic capsules her mother had provided for her treks into the forests.

“Yes,” she whispered, half in relief and half in triumph, quickly tempered by disappointment when she saw that she’d already opened the package on one of her previous visits, leaving it a little more than half full. In addition to the partially used package of capsules, however, there was also a single pressure syringe of antibiotic. A quick calculation told her the syringe coupled with the remaining capsules would be enough to get her back to the city. Enough to knock the infection
back
, though not out. She peeled the syringe out of its sterile pack and pressed it against her leg, feeling a slight burn as the thick medicine spread into the muscle of her thigh. She shoved the empty tube back into the case before Rhodry could see it, not wanting him to know there was a problem. He’d just freak out, and there was nothing either one of them could do about it. She shrugged philosophically and swallowed two of the capsules, chasing them down with the water in her canteen.

An unhappy snarl had her stepping back to the main part of the grotto just in time to see her favorite shifter emerge into the mottled sunlight at last, twisting around to hiss viciously at the tight passage behind him. Tufts of black fur clung to the rocks and floated in the misty air, and she would have laughed, except for the unfriendly glare he was directing her way.

She covered her smile with a casual hand and pretended not to watch as he shook himself from head to toe in disgust, before beginning an immediate inspection of this new territory. Prowling from corner to corner, he snapped his tail back and forth in agitation, and stuck his nose into everything.

Knowing it could take a while for him to settle, she continued her inventory, occasionally crowing happily at what she found. For one thing, there was fresh clothing, including a clean pair of leggings which would actually fit her. The pants from the shifter cache had been too loose and too long, since the shifters were all big men. And she almost cheered out loud at the sight of several small waterproof bottles of body soap and moisturizer and…gods be praised, shampoo.

That was all the incentive she needed. She stripped off her clothes and bandages, loosened the tight braid of her hair, and grabbed the bottles of soap and shampoo. Sitting on the pool’s edge, which was worn smooth by centuries of erosion, she eased herself into the water, mumbling wordlessly in a combination of pain and pleasure as the hot, hot water rolled over her skin, and stifling a shriek of real pain when it hit the still raw wound on her right thigh. The pain was brief, however, as her body quickly adapted, and before long, she was feeling wondrous heat all the way to her bones. She sank down with a groan of pleasure, letting her weight rest on one of the wide ledges beneath the edge of the pool.

Rhodry had ceased his prowling and was now perched on the rocks next to the waterfall on the other side of the grotto, staring daggers at her across the open space like some dark minion of vengeance. She smiled and blew him a cheerful kiss, then let herself slide even lower until the soothing waters were up to her chin, soaking away what felt like months of hard, cold weather.

Eventually, she dunked completely under and soaped her hair, thrilled to finally be able to scrub her scalp clean, loving the silky feel of each strand as the dirt washed away. She shampooed and rinsed again, just because it felt so good, then conditioned thoroughly before winding her hair up into a knot on top of her head, and sinking into the water once again, her eyes closed in utter satisfaction.

With her head resting against the lip of the pool, she let herself float, arms and legs rising to the surface, using the occasional light touch to keep herself from drifting too far.

A rush of familiar sound had her cracking one eye open to see Rhodry shifting form again, his animal flowing away to leave her gorgeous human lover standing in the thin light. He gave her a slow smile, then raised his arms over his head in a lazy stretch. Had she thought before that Rhodry would never preen? Because
that
move had been designed for one purpose only, to show off his beautiful body. Seeing her watching, he gave her a quick wink, then strolled the short distance to the pool and dropped over the edge, his powerful arms lowering his body slowly into the water.

“Shit!” he swore in surprise as the heat scorched his skin, then laughed. “Gods, that feels good.” He submerged completely, and came up with a twist of his shoulders, his long hair flinging drops of water over the surface of the pool.

She floated, watching with hooded eyes as the water sluiced over his dark golden skin, muscles bunching and releasing before he dropped beneath the water once more and disappeared below the surface. A touch on her foot told her where he was seconds before he burst upward with an exultant shout. She laughed out loud, and swam forward to wrap her arms around his neck, tugging on his wet hair.

“Come on,” she said, “I’ll wash your hair for you.”

“Only if you promise not to tie it in a knot,” he said with a wary glance at hers.