Badlands: The Lion’s Den(20)

“I should get going anyway. I have to get to work,” Flora said. “But before I go, I just wanted to ask – have you guys heard of Cottonwood? One of the lions was telling me about it yesterday.”

“Yeah, what about it?” Madison said, trying to sound casual.

“It just sounds like a much better place for all of you. At least from the way Finn was describing it. You wouldn’t have to worry about being forced into anything you didn’t want.”

Madison glanced around quickly, then spoke with a lowered voice. “We’ve been planning to go there for ages. I just need to get enough Starweed together to last us for the trip. It’s on the other side of the state – there’s all kinds of territory we’d have to steer around, so it would take us anywhere from a week to three weeks, depending on what we ran into, and Sam needs this stuff every day. Ruben doesn’t like it when people leave his territory, though. So don’t tell anyone.”

Flora rolled her eyes. “Right, Madison, first thing I’m going to do is call Ruben and snitch on you. Because he and I are pals like that. Listen, if it were up to me, everybody would be able to leave this territory. But at least I can help you guys. I can bring you more Starweed if you want.”

“Can you? Let’s say three days from now. Just in case Ruben’s patrol saw us head in this direction, that’ll throw them off. I wish I could pay you back for all this,” Madison said, clutching the bag to her chest.

“There is something you can do for me,” Flora said. “I need to do an internet search. Can you help me out?”

“Yeah, I can bring a laptop here,” Sarah said. “I brought mine with me when I came to Darwin. It’ll probably take me half an hour to get it and bring it back here. Can you wait?”

It took closer to an hour, and Flora was on edge the whole time, sitting on the floor in the old warehouse. Would Ruben’s men dare to kidnap her, now that she was wearing Finn’s mark? She didn’t want to find out the hard way.

Sarah hurried up with a laptop bundled under her coat. She pulled it out and handed it to Flora.

“I’ll stand outside and keep watch,” Sarah said to her. “Don’t take too long. For some reason Ruben’s stepping up his patrols these days.”

Flora sat down cross-legged on the floor with the laptop, brought up the Google search engine, and typed in “license plate search in California”. Her typing was still clumsy and awkward. She’d learned keyboarding along with everyone else in school, but once she’d been sent off to live with the Wilkinsons, she hadn’t had the opportunity to practice.

She selected a license plate search website and typed in the plate number. It was the license plate of the car she’d seen on the Wilkinsons’ property last week.

She still shuddered to think what would have happened to her if she hadn’t left work early that day. She’d been working at the Wilkinsons’ roadside farm stand with one of the Wilkinson cousins, who’d fallen asleep. Impulsively, she’d left without telling her. That was against the weird rules that the family had for her – rules she’d been increasingly chafing against as she got older. She was twenty years old, for heaven’s sake. Why did they need to know where she was at all times? If it weren’t for the fact that she had no job skills and nowhere to go, she’d have left their compound the minute she’d turned eighteen.

She’d headed back to the main house that day, and as she approached, she’d felt something was off. An odd, fearful feeling had rippled through her. Instead of walking up to the front door in human form, she’d shifted and slunk up through the underbrush towards the side of the house.

There had been a strange car parked in front of the house. A human had been leaning on the car, scanning the area. A gust of wind had carried the smell to her – silver and lead. He was armed, and he had silver-coated bullets. Why?

Then she’d heard angry voices coming from the back porch, and when she’d snuck over there, she’d heard a strange human yelling at Loren. The human had been tall and skinny, and worn a dark suit.

“Are you trying to milk us for more money?” the human had demanded angrily. “Are you stalling us? Because this is bullshit. You should have had her mated and moved to our property the day she turned eighteen. She could have popped out half a dozen cubs for us by now. More, with the right fertility drugs.”

Flora, who never got cold, had felt a chill like ice water running through her veins.

Whose property? After the mating ceremony, she and Loren were supposed to move to his pride’s property in Northern California. That was what he’d always told her, anyway.