The Bear Truth (3 page)

The last thing that I wanted to do was leave Maren’s side. I had no idea what was happening outside the walls of White Oaks, but I knew danger had arrived in my small town. There was the feeling in my bones. I couldn't have described the feeling in my gut if someone had asked me to, but I knew that we were in trouble. We were all in trouble. Not just the Greyelf Grizzly clan, but shifters everywhere. We had had eighteen years of a relatively peaceful co-existence with the humans in the world. We had found ways to compromise with them, and full integration seemed possible now. But the members of extremist groups RAC were not going to let that stand without a fight.

I had convinced Billy to put out the security alert despite his misgivings. That bought me some time. The Summit would not start until the afternoon, so I still had several hours to try to sniff out what I needed to know. It all started with Sheriff Monroe because my gut told me it all started with Markus’s death.

I didn’t tell Maren or Billy that I was going to see the sheriff. Maren would have wanted to come with, and Billy would no doubt have tried to stop me. I felt better having Billy watching over Maren anyways. It was the damndest thing about that. I hated the guy’s guts for the fact that he ever touched her, but when it came down to it, I knew that he would do anything to protect her. I trusted her implicitly after what we had shared, so it seemed like the best course of action to keep them both out of my hair.

I pulled my truck into the parking lot of the hospital. I sauntered in and put on my best smile when I saw the nurse behind the desk.

"I'm here to see Sheriff Monroe," I said.

The nurse looked up from the chart in front of her and frowned. She didn't seem impressed by my charismatic smile. "Friend or family?"

That was an interesting question when I thought about it. He definitely wasn't my friend. I kicked the guy’s ass because he tried to take away something that belonged to me. But, at the end of the day, he was an influential man inside the clan. My brother had trusted him with his life. So I had to make amends if I wanted to be smart about the new political dynamics within my clan. I had played too many things in my past not so smart.

I knew that Markus was probably turning over in his grave because of what happened between me and the sheriff. They had been best friends for years. Markus wouldn’t have wanted that kind of confrontation between us. But really, I didn’t start it, so I wasn’t going to feel bad about it. However, I needed the sheriff on my side. He didn't have to like me, but I wanted him to respect me.

"Family," I said finally. That wasn’t far off from the truth. Being part of the clan and therefore bound to me did technically make him my family. Everyone in the Greyelf Grizzly clan was my family.

It was that train of thought from the nurse’s simple question that brought me back to the conundrum that sat in front of me. I wanted Maren at my side more than I wanted anything in my life. So I had taken her and made her mine. But, in doing so, I had put my family at risk. It was a decision that I made consciously but not lightly, and I would make the same decision over and over again. Yet I had not thought too much about the long-term consequences of my actions.

By taking Maren as my mate, I potentially put everyone in the clan in the line of fire. There were peace treaty agreements that were on the table for discussion and hopefully agreement at the Summit. Not only between the Greyelf Grizzly clan and the Loper clan but between other clans as well.

It was the agreement between the Grizzlies and the Lopers that had encouraged so many of the other shifter leaders to consider putting aside old differences and presenting a united front to the world. After the peace treaties were signed at the Summit, there was to be discussion around a planned strategy to move forward with a full integration with the humans. It was Markus's ultimate vision and dream finally being realized.

So it was Markus's legacy that I had also put at risk with my decision. The animosities between the clans were not going to go away just because I wanted them to. I was going to have to be smarter. I was going to have to think of a way to get Reddon to talk to me.

I stepped away from the desk as the nurse looked up the sheriff's room number. I pulled my cell phone from my pocket and dialed a number. I grimaced even as I heard the voice answer on the other end of the line.

"What the hell do you want? Haven't you done enough damage today?"

"I'm calling to find out if you were able to get Reddon to talk yet." I didn't want to talk to Doc Walton any more than Doc Walton wanted to talk to me. But the man was my peacekeeper whether he wanted to be or not, so I needed to lean on him. "I'd like to talk to him in private before the start of the Summit. I need to make sure that he doesn't try to pull any shit with the other leaders."

"Well, I think that pooch has been screwed," Doc Walton said. "Reddon went back to his hotel and won’t answer his phone. From what I’ve heard, he's packing up. I don't think he has any intention of even going to the Summit this afternoon."

That was bad news. "You’ve got to get in there and convince him to stay. If he leaves, it’ll throw the whole Summit into chaos."

"You don't think I know that?" Doc Walton sounded more than annoyed with me, but I didn't give a shit.

"I think you do know, so it's time for you to step up and show what you can do. You're a council member for the Greyelf Grizzly clan, and I trust you to take care of these kinds of matters. Get Reddon to the Summit." Then I hung up.

After my brief conversation with Doc Walton, I knew that I couldn't stall in my other business any longer. I stepped back to the desk, and the nurse passed a small piece of paper to me. On it was written the number 203.

As I made my way to Sheriff Monroe's room, I knew my feet dragged a bit.  Sheriff Munroe had been my brother's best friend in high school. Since they grew up together, Markus always trusted Sheriff Monroe in pretty much everything. When the shifters finally came out in full force, there were many times when Markus’s life was threatened. He put helped Sheriff Monroe get elected in Greyelf just so he could always ensure he was nearby. Sheriff Monroe had always been nothing but completely devoted to Markus.

I wasn't sure what I was thinking in my mind, but there was something wrong about the whole situation with my brother’s death. Markus wouldn't have gone out to Shulman’s Trail in the middle of the night by himself for no reason, especially right before the Summit when tensions were running high. There was extra security in and around Markus all the time in the days leading up to the Summit. Why he would he have snuck out by himself? It made no sense.

That was what I was there to find out. If anyone knew why Markus was up on old Shulman’s Trail by himself in the middle of the night it was Sheriff Monroe. Hell, Sheriff Monroe probably knew Markus's bathroom routines and what clothes he wore every day of the week. He knew everything about Markus, and yet the man remained aloof and elusive to me.

As I approached the room, I thought about what I had done to Sheriff Monroe the day before. He had been wrong to try to take my alpha claim away from me. But in those last few moments before Doc Walton broke up the fight, I knew that I was capable of killing him. I never killed anyone, despite what the town might think had happened in my past. But in that moment, my bear had taken over. It had wanted nothing but Sheriff Monroe's blood for being so arrogant and so self-righteous. He thought that he knew better than me about the future of the clan. He was wrong.

That was another part of the real rub about the whole thing. I couldn't help but think that Markus had told Sheriff Monroe that he intended for me to be his heir. After all, Markus had been setting me up since the day that he took over as alpha of the Greyelf Grizzly clan to take his place one day. Markus knew that he would never have children. I was to be Markus's legacy.

Maybe that was part of the reason I was out of sorts too. I hadn’t wanted that responsibility. Hell, it wasn't as if Markus ever asked me if I wanted to be the alpha. But that’s who I was now all of the same. I was twenty-eight years old, and I felt it was my God-given duty to be the alpha now that Markus was gone. Which is what made everything so much more confusing when it came to Maren.

As I approached Sheriff's Monroe's room, I saw a doctor walk out. He shoved his hands into his pockets and glanced furtively up and down the hall. When his eyes lit on me, he turned on his heel and walked quickly away. I wouldn't have noticed him except he looked vaguely familiar to me.

"Hey," I called down the hallway. The man moved faster now. He went through a pair of double doors and was gone. I stopped at the doorway to Sheriff Monroe's room. I had two options, I could go after the man, or I could go in and shake down Sheriff Monroe.

He knew more than he had been letting on. I didn’t care what Billy Miller said. There was something about Markus's death that someone was keeping under wraps.

I decided to let the man go. It was just a crazy, irrational thought to consider going after him to begin with. I turned into Sheriff Monroe's room and came to a halt. The room was eerily quiet. I had expected to see Sheriff Monroe sitting up ready to give me an ear full about what an awful person I was. Instead, the shades were closed, and he laid in the bed on his side facing the window. I looked at the equipment around his bed. None of it was on.

Shifters had extraordinary healing abilities. But at the end of the day, we were all still mortal. I had broken bones in Sheriff Monroe's body that would take a normal human’s body months to heal. In the shifter world though, the same injuries would take a week, maybe two at most. Given it had only been a little more than a day since our fight, I knew that Sheriff Monroe would still be fairly banged up. I stepped closer into the room toward the bed.

"Sheriff?" I said softly. If the man was asleep, I didn't want to wake him up. The old expression don't poke the bear hadn’t come about for no reason. There was no response.

I made my way around the bed. What I saw gave me pause. The Sheriff's eyes were closed as if he was in a peaceful slumber. But I realized too late that the eerie silence in the room meant something else as well. I should have been able to hear the Sheriff's breathing and heartbeat. My hearing was keener than most of my kind, and I should have heard his deep breaths in his slumber. I should have almost felt the pounding of the heart in his chest. Instead, everything was still.

"Nurse!" I yelled out into the hallway.

Thirty minutes later, I stood out in the hallway across from the Sheriff’s room. I was surrounded by people, and yet I felt entirely alone.

A doctor stepped into my view. He nodded at me briefly and consulted his chart. "Sheriff Monroe suffered extensive injuries from his accident," the doctor said. "There really wasn't anything that we could do for him outside of making him comfortable."

That was bullshit. There was no way that a man with Sheriff Monroe's healing powers could have sustained such damage that he would not have been able to recover. At least, that's what I had to tell himself. There was no way that what I had done had been enough to kill the man. As long as Sheriff Monroe was alive when he left the bear match, it shouldn't have been a problem.

I stared at his room. The doctor left after I murmured a low ‘thank you.’ I watched as the attendants carefully covered the sheriff's body. The doctor who had just spoken to me stood in the corner writing in Sheriff Monroe's chart. There was a sense of keen loss that I felt even across the hall.

Whether I liked him or not, Sheriff Monroe had been a person in the community that everyone looked up to and respected. They would blame me for that loss. Sheriff Monroe had made the community feel safe for eighteen years. There would be whispers. I knew that it looked bad. I would be held responsible for yet another thing going wrong in Greyelf.

It was in that thoughts that I realized something was amiss. I looked at the doctor standing there in the room and realized it wasn't the same doctor that I had seen leave the sheriff’s room earlier.

It all fell into place, and I felt anger begin to burn in my chest. The doctor had looked familiar to me because I had seen him before. Ten years ago at a drive-in hitting on Maren. The sheriff’s death was no accident. Behind it was the feeling of relief that I didn’t need to feel guilty for it.

I heard the footsteps, and then Doc Walton appeared at the end of the hallway. The older man's hair was disheveled, and he had a look on his face that I had never seen before, uncertainty. Perhaps even, fear.

"What the hell happened?" Doc Walton asked me as he approached. "I talked to insert the sheriff just this morning. He was fine. The doctor said they were probably going to discharge him the day after tomorrow."

“They said the internal damage was too extensive," I said without any expression in my voice. "They said it was an injury they missed and that he's been bleeding internally ever since he was brought in. He slipped away in his sleep."

"So do you believe that?" Doc Walton asked

Tt was a surreal feeling for me. It was the first time I felt as if I was being asked a question by the council member not as a boy, but as an equal. Our relationship was shifting. I realized this was an opportunity for me to truly show that I was the alpha and not just in name only.

"I don't think that this is the right place to talk about that," I said. "There are too many ears here."