Acharya made a decision. He lifted his body up off the ground with his forearms. The rest of pack reached out to him, asking with quiet snorts and gestures. Acharya ignored them and moved forward. Tara understood what he was doing but didn’t move.

  Acharya moved on an intercept course to the jeep. It wasn’t going too terribly fast and it ran with its lights off. Acharya, waiting till the last moment before he exploded form his prone position and flew into the open jeep ripping the passenger to shreds before tossing him out of the jeep. The driver had enough time to scream in horror and jump out of the moving jeep before Acharya chased him down and stabbed him through the heart and chest with his claws.

  The jeep was rolling to a slow stop. He heaved a sigh of relief as he shifted back into human form and waved his pack mates to the jeep.

  “What have you done?” Mary asked in a hushed voice.

  “I thought we could use a lift, come one everyone, shift back to normal and get in,” he patted the blood covered seat next to him. “There’s more than enough room for everyone.”

  His packmates did as they were told and shifted back to their human forms. Asclepius jumped into the front seat as everyone else avoided it. The three girls squeezed into the back seat, while Aiman slid into the small cargo compartment behind the seats. Without turning on the head lights, Acharya took the wheel and drove the jeep east. He didn’t feel anything towards the soldiers he had just killed. How many people’s lives did he save by ending the lives of those two? What was a scout jeep doing out here all by itself? Its possible they were just on their way to a village to rape and pillage and recruit. He didn’t know, and after running away from these assholes for as long as they had it was nice to ‘allow’ them to help them out a bit on their journey.

  The jeep didn’t have any extra fuel cans, but the gauge was reading three quarters full. They should be able to make good time and travel a decent distance.

  While he drove, he scanned the ground in front of them. He didn’t care about the jeep per se, but he didn’t want to damage it or get it stuck in a ditch when he still wanted to use it, and its mostly full fuel tank.

  As he drove, his mind drifted back to the bultungin he had met with Aiman and Asclepius on that hill near Lake Chad. The smug, over confident, old man said they would never get to Ethiopia. They would, or they would die trying.

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  What really bothered him was what they had learned from the old man’s evasiveness and the story that Aiman had discovered in the library. They had been hyenas who wanted to even the playing field for hunting. When they saw the weapons that the humans could forge from stone, they wanted that ability. Was it so bad to only want to ensure your survival?

  Perhaps, but the other stories of witch craft and gravedigging was a bit disturbing and not something he could easily dismiss. The old man had tried to mesmerize them on that hill. Their learned abilities went beyond that of simple survival.

  But who was he to judge? Did not Malikah have similar abilities when she manipulated pheromones and scents to affect people? The abilities that they had gained over the generations of Shape shifters was not altogether different from the rumors that surrounded werehyenas and their abilities. No one had ever accused a werewolf of graverobbing though.

  Then again there was an influence of Jewish and Christian rivalry there as well. Jewish artisans and blacksmiths, hated for their religious beliefs, but sought after for their skill. People have always had irrational hatreds for Jewish people and their communities. Just as hyenas have been reviled as pests and evil dumb poaching predators that are nothing better than carrion birds.

  The old man had every right to be angry but then, if his matriarch was just as bitter as he was, how would they ever convince her to help in the fight against the vampire houses.

  “The bultungin Matriarch is going to want to know what we will offer her and her people,” Tara said suddenly.

  Acharya glanced back at the native American. “Are you sure you can’t read minds, Tara?”

  The woman simply smiled, “I know that its preoccupied you since we left N’Djamena. And I’ve been thinking about it as well. What could we possibly offer a people who only want is to live and be left alone.” She shook her head. “I know a bit about what it’s like to be pushed from place to place, to be persecuted for land, and the horrible crime of being different.” She said this last with a bit of a sneer.

  Acharya, made a sharp turn with the jeep and narrowly missed a deep cut in the earth, a cut that quickly became a steep dry creek bed. He drove north, hoping that the dry cheek would end soon and they could turn back east.

  “Well, what would you want for your people, Tara? If you could ask for anything, what would your tribal elders or council ask for?” Acharya asked genuinely interested.

  Tara grew silent, “What we want we could never have again.”

  “Your ancestral lands,” Acharya said a bit sadly.

  Tara nodded her head, “It’s the only thing that my people have wanted since we were rounded up and put on the reservation. You’re from Suriname, you have a home, even though your people were driven from India. The people from India didn’t follow you once you had rebuilt and told you to leave everything you built and move somewhere else,” She heaved a deep sigh. “But that’s neither here nor there, my people know we could never go back. The great wheel doesn’t turn in reverse, so we must go forward.”

  “And what does going forward mean for you?” Acharya asked.