Falling in Love with the King of Beasts

HELP! Please jump into the feature page on the app, hit that bright orange "When there's nothing to read" title and scroll down. Directly below the title is a survey asking readers whether they want "Love Triangle" or "Human and Beast". Now, obviously our crew in Anima will qualify for the "Human and Beast" category! Help an author out and vote? The votes are currently neck-and-neck!

*****

GAHRYE

True to the male's nature, Shaw hadn't found the answer offensive. Instead he'd laughed—seemed quite tickled about the idea.

"Smell wrong?" he giggled. "In what way?"

"I cannot identify it, that is why it puts me off."

Shaw seemed almost pleased, which only made Gahrye more confused by him.

"Well, perhaps I can put your mind at ease: The Guardian bloodline has a unique element. We don't know what it does, only that when we are tested in human hospitals, we have a very rare blood type, and often other strange or rare genetic… anomalies."

"Anomalies?"

"Things about us that don't fit the norm. Perhaps that's what you're smelling?"

"Perhaps," Gahrye pretended to agree. "But please don't take it personally. As a reader of the winds I find it difficult to shut my instincts down. And mine… wish to avoid you."

"Because I'm weird, right?"

Gahrye frowned. Did humans normally take that as a compliment? "I suppose so," he said carefully.

Shaw clapped his hands and hacked a laugh again. "Well, one of these days we'll have to have a drink and you can tell me what I stink of that offends you so."

"I would have to identify it first," Gahrye said honestly.

Shaw flapped a hand. "Perhaps I can help you? I know quite a lot of strange things. Sometimes even I'm surprised by what I remember when the right question is posed."

Gahrye stared at the man, but this was what Kalle had encouraged him to delve into with Shaw. He did, indeed, know and remember things she and her grandmother didn't. So Gahrye took his fear in check and went right to the heart of his questions.

"What do you know about the Protectors of old? Were they humans? Is that where the Guardian line comes from?"

Shaw's face brightened and he opened his mouth, but then froze. For half a breath he didn't move, his expression didn't change, then he blinked and tilted his head, chuckling. "My, my. You have gone deep, haven't you? We don't have reports of Protectors for many, many centuries. Millennia, really."

"I know. But I'm curious who they are. How they did what they did," Gahrye said, forcing his voice to be casual. "If there's a way that we can take the traverse more safely, it might help me get Elia across and back to Anima when the time comes."

Shaw shook his head. "I am sorry to say, Protectors are just a legend, Gahrye," he said, looking back down at his notes and shuffling through them. "There is no evidence they actually existed. Some of our ancestors believe they were likely made up."

Gahrye worked hard to not to show his skepticism. What had happened to the strange male—as if he'd started to speak, then remembered something and changed his mind? "What is… your theory?" he asked Shaw carefully.

Shaw's face lit up. "I will be honest, I think they're some kind of allegory for the Creator—I assume you're a believer in the Creator?"

"I am," Gahrye said, though it made him squirm. He had had a lot to argue about with the Creator lately.

"Well, to me, the fact that we know no one can successfully enter the traverse in a group or pair means that the Protectors couldn't possibly be actual Anima. I believe they are a symbol, or a metaphor, written into the stories by some of the old historians. Perhaps not just the Protectors, either. There are others… but my niece is giving me the look that means I'm about to go on a rabbit trail. So I will say this to you, Gahrye—don't take the histories too literally. I believe there's evidence to support this theory through the histories, and not just about the Protectors."

It sounded plausible. There was no doubt that many Anima histories had been altered by the verbal nature of records for so many centuries. As well as the Anima penchant for drama. Gahrye wouldn't have struggled to believe the Protectors were an allegory—except that they were written into histories that included lineage, and records of rulers, many confirmed and correlated facts.

And he'd read a story about one of them that included his physical birth—unique because he was raised in the royal family, as one of their own, adopted. A very rare occurrence indeed. And the Protectors were always given names, often stories were told of them over decades and… why would they change if they were all the same?

If every Anima royal had been served by a supernatural Protector in the Creator, wouldn't they all have been depicted as the same being? Not different ages, histories, appearances, and tribes?

Shaw continued to babble about the use of language and metaphor in the Anima histories, and Gahrye pretended to listen. But in truth, the longer he thought of it, the more certain he was that Shaw didn't want him to discover who the Protectors were, or how they'd done what they'd done. Shaw wanted to throw him off the trail, rather than help him.

Why?

Gahrye wanted to growl. He'd definitely been spending too much time with predators.

Twenty minutes later, he and Kalle left Shaw's office, and Gahrye heaved a sigh of relief. Although the question had been left open about him interviewing again. In truth, he didn't intend to ever give that man another speck of information if it could be avoided.

He waited until they were upstairs and almost back into the suite before turning to Kalle.

"Did you see it?" he asked. He'd learned that his heightened senses often meant that things in body-language of others were more apparent to him than to Kalle.

"The weird way he acted when you asked him about the Protectors?" she muttered.

"Yes, exactly. As if he would answer, then stopped himself."

"Yes, I did catch that, and I don't mind telling you it gave me the heebies. It was like he his computer got stuck processing an equation for a second—did you see the way he froze?"

She was right. It hadn't been the way of a human or Anima who has remembered something and hesitates. He really did seem to stop being aware of himself for a moment.

"Have you seen him do that before?" he asked Kalle.

She shook her head.

Gahrye sighed. The only thing to have come out of this was his resolved intention to discover what was behind the Protectors. How they'd done what they did. Obviously, if Shaw was holding it back from him, he was on the right track.

*****

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