Page 20 of Hummingbird and Kraken

Declan stifled a laugh. He’d found a baby gay! This was going to be awesome. “Oh, believe me, he knows.” He made it an innuendo.

Ro’s eyes lit up. “I don’t know many men who like to be… pretty.”

“Well, now you do!” Declan touched his arm. He didn’t need to get into gender details right now. “So how about you? Anyone at home to look pretty for?”

Ro started coughing, like he’d just choked on his own spit. Then he rubbed his broad hand over his chest, like it was sore.

“Ohhhh… So there is someone. Yeah? What’s his name? Or her name, I guess?”

Ro didn’t quite pull away, but he definitely shifted his attention to driving. Declan already had a pretty good idea, though.

“Is he hot?”

Ro gave the tiniest nod.

“Of course he is. And does he think you’re pretty?”

Ro gripped the steering wheel harder. God, masculinity was such a bore.

Declan would just have to work on him. He could already envision just the right colors for Ro’s complexion.

“Alright, I won’t bother you anymore now, but don’t think I’m letting this go.” Ro just needed a friend around while he figured himself out.

Ro looked relieved when he switched the topic to the trees that sounded like rivers. They were just so relaxing to listen to. It was definitely his favorite thing about the area. Well, except for Geir.

Ro told him about their cousins, the birch trees, that had been used for hundreds of years to make something like aspirin. Totally cool.

The drive over was surprisingly short, not even five minutes at the slow speeds of country roads. He’d barely gotten the chance to talk before they pulled into a wide gravel parking lot.

He wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting, but it wasn’t quite this. They’d passed a large store which loudly proclaimed the sale of Indian-made goods. Ro had driven behind it and then entered a small, secluded gate without any signage. Beyond that were mostly modern houses with plastic siding along gravel roads.

He’d been expecting rustic log cabins or maybe a high-tech command center. But these were just houses, and cheap ones at that.

Declan still thought it was pretty magical, though. Because… shifters. And potentially friends.

Once they got out of the truck, Ro started walking with a purpose, so Declan just followed him. They found themselves in a rectangular plaza, which seemed to have an array of homes and small businesses around it.

Declan had so, so many questions that he wanted to ask, but Geir had told him repeatedly last night that it wasn’t his place to explain. He was going to try to hold himself back now.

A few children dashed by, and a small cluster of people sat on the grass at the other end. A dog darted across the plaza, bigger than any dog Declan had ever seen with perky ears, a wide tail, and fur of intermingled gray, brown, and white. Declan wondered for a minute if it had an owner before something marvelous occurred to him.

“Ro,” he whispered, though no one else was around, “is that dog actually a person?”

“Well, that’s a coyote.” Ro elbowed him gently in the side. “But yes.”

“Wow,” Declan breathed. “A coyote.” This was really real.

He watched the coyote disappear between a pair of houses and found Ro watching him with amusement.

Ro led him to the largest building. There was no sign at the entrance, but it seemed to serve the purpose of a central office and community center. The first door on the left was a small lending library with reminders posted to sign books out on a clipboard. On the right, double doors opened into a classic school gymnasium with large, circular tables arranged at one end.

Further along on the left was a small office with four desks and three people working intently at computers. Were all of them shifters? Or just some of them?

They kept walking. Stacked along the right wall were industrial sized boxes of shelf-stable food. Yellow cling peaches. 6 x 105 oz. read the closest one. Saltine crackers, 8 x 32 oz. was stacked above it. Declan figured that they must do their cooking communally.

“They come from the government,” Ro tilted his head to indicate the boxes. “Our old Chief wouldn’t accept the subsidies because of what they represented. First the white people took our land so we couldn’t farm and hunt. Then they shoved us on to reservations and sent in shipments of inferior food, like they were giving us some sort of gift. Now most native children grow up with diabetes and heart disease, too poor to have other choices.”

Declan had been thinking so much about shifters that he hadn’t considered any other aspect of their culture. Ro and his people had been controlled and exterminated by greedy white people for hundreds of years, before the shifter thing even became relevant.