Page 11 of Robb

Euan sounded like he was wildly curious, at least by his standards, but Robb couldn’t bring himself to care.

Because his carefully crafted world had just fallen apart.

Chapter 2

Has there ever been a more obvious trap in the history of obvious traps?

Tahnee flipped her scarf around her neck and strolled down the rain-washed street, looking for all the world like an office worker who’d knocked off early to do a bit of window shopping. But all of her senses were on high alert: the sound of every approaching footstep analyzed, each reflection in the shopfront window thoroughly scrutinized for danger.

The message that had brought her here had come through to the highly encrypted, sparingly used email address associated with the shifter sanctuary that she ran – a secret haven in the Outback where rare shifters could come and spend time in their shifter forms with a complete assurance of privacy.

The email had been so poorly spelled and formatted that she’d been surprised it hadn’t ended up in the spam filter, but she suspected that any mistakes had been a deliberate attempt to throw her off guard.

The gist of the long and rambling letter had been that a couple – ‘Keira and Zak’, apparently – had somehow stumbled across a baby pegasus. Unsure what to do with it, they had looked online and found the website for her sanctuary, discovered the existence of shifters, and now wanted her to take the pegasus in.

PLEASE HELP US!!!!!! it had concluded in lime green Comic Sans font, and now, as she looked at a display of hats, Tahnee couldn’t help letting a small laugh slip out.

Really, they might’ve had at least a slim chance of convincing her if they’d said that they got the details of her sanctuary from a direct message on a private forum, or through some mysterious contact on the dark web, but this was just ridiculous. Tahnee certainly did not run a website advertising her top-secret shifter sanctuary. She could be reckless – or back in her youth she had been, anyway – but she wasn’t stupid.

Certainly not stupid enough to believe that there was a baby pegasus lurking about in a grimy alleyway in Melbourne, anyway, subjected to the dubious care of the mysterious Keira and Zak. They’d insisted in their email that they wanted to meet there so that they could be ‘safely in public’ in case Tahnee was actually trying to lure in the good people of Australia who were trying to help baby shifters and force them into doing her dastardly bidding, but private enough that nobody would see the pegasus.

The whole thing had been a good laugh, and Tahnee knew she was being set up. It was blatantly obvious.

But.

On the 0.00001 percent off chance that this was somehow legit, she’d come to investigate anyway – and the brolga that she shifted into was in complete agreement.

If, somehow, there was a baby shifter involved, she knew that she’d never forgive herself if she’d laughed off its situation… even if that situation was merely the prospect of being stuck with Keira and Zak and their poor email formatting choices forever.

But much more to the point, though, she wanted to know who was doing this – and how they knew about the existence of not just Tahnee herself, but the safe haven that was her pride and joy. She’d spent years building up her fortune, turning pebbles into gold nuggets and costume jewelry into genuine pieces, and then taking care to sell them here and there through a variety of legitimate channels.

Well… mostly legitimate, anyway.

If it hadn’t been for her ability to turn almost anything into gold, her sanctuary would still be the small shack in the middle of nowhere that it had started out as, rather than the modern, grandiose building that rose up from the red earth, its sweeping glass curves, stone walls, and wooden panels somehow seeming to almost vanish amongst the twisted gum trees and waving grasses.

A place where shifters could go, and know that they were safe. And she never charged a cent to stay there. Tahnee didn’t believe for a moment that safety was only for people who could afford to pay for it. Her sanctuary was open to anyone who needed it.

She could afford it. Her gold-making ability saw to that – though she had to be careful, since she neither wanted to tip her hand nor create so much gold that it crashed the market.

The whole place was way off the beaten track to begin with, but she’d employed trustworthy people with knowledge of the local land to make sure that everything blended in naturally as well, even from the air. No one ever knew it was there unless someone else had told them.

It was something that Tahnee was intensely proud of – by far the greatest accomplishment of her life.

And if she’d gotten there by less than honest means… well, she couldn’t say she really cared. Of all the things she could’ve done with her Midas touch, she thought that providing a safe place for those shifters who had rare, mythical, or extinct shifter forms was one of the better options.

And the original shack that had started it all was still there, tucked away in a corner of the property next to a tiny wetland that only just managed to hold on to the ‘wet’ part of its name during the unrelenting summer months.

Tahnee liked to think that the shack kept her honest and reminded her of how she’d started out. And it did.

But, she had to admit, there was also an element of nostalgia to it. As decadent as the current sanctuary was, there was a part of her that liked to retreat to her own unpretentious private area, completely surrounded by predator-proof fencing and local vegetation that she’d curated over the years, which provided a home for a number of endangered species that were barely clinging on to existence in their native habitats.

Her brother, Jarrah, was a brolga shifter just like her, though the other power that ran in their family – the ability to change the chemical makeup of various items – had manifested in him as an ability to turn anything into iron.

He was also a biologist who worked with endangered rock wallabies, and he engaged in a spot of wildlife rescue in his spare time. Every so often he rehabbed an animal that wouldn’t survive if it was returned to the wild, and Tahnee always took them in if they could live harmoniously in the environment that surrounded the sanctuary. It wasn’t exactly by the book, but, she supposed, her brother could be just as rebellious as her in his own way – he was just a bit more subtle about it.

She was as fiercely protective of her animal guests as she was of her shifter guests, and there was nothing she loved more than sitting out on the veranda in the stillness of the dawn over the wetlands, dressing gown wrapped around her shoulders, watching her early-rising friends at the slow, placid start to their day.

It was a sanctuary within a sanctuary… and, really, it was a sanctuary for her as well, a place for her to watch the seasons pass, to witness the blooming of the emu bush and desert pea if there had been enough rain that year, to watch over the quandong trees and saltbush that had long provided her people with sustenance.