A Bear of a Reputation (2 page)

I quickly made my way toward the entrance and let those beautiful green eyes slide from my mind.

I shouldn’t have been surprised to find that I wasn’t the first one to arrive at the hospital. Magda no doubt put out the call on the Greyelf grapevine, and the community had responded in force. I saw Reverend Jones in the corner, talking in hushed tones with Bea Kramer. Bea ran the general store on Main Street. She was also the reason that Markus and Lukas Kasper were in Greyelf to begin with. After their parents died, Bea was their only blood relative. She suggested that Markus bring Lukas somewhere quiet and more stable. I personally thought that Markus had likely just been relieved to have another set of hands to help with the impulsive behavior of his hell-raising little brother. Even then, Lukas had been a handful.

I saw Bea look up as I walked through the doors. I gave her a small nod, and her face scrunched up, and a round of fresh tears began to mark her cheeks. I quickly made my way over to the other side of the room and tried to think of a reason for me to be there other than the obvious one. She lived just a few doors down from my father, but relations had been strained between our families since before Lukas hightailed it out of Greyelf. My father blamed Lukas for my broken heart, although I had tried to hide it from him. That was after berating Bea on more than one occasion for letting Lukas run loose all over town.

The rest of the crowd included several members of the Grizzly Clan that I knew only by sight. I didn’t run in shifter circles, and although things were friendly enough between the humans and the shifters in Greyelf, we all tended to stick with our own kind for the most part. The one time that I hadn’t observed that rule, I had been bitten in the ass.

I was an interloper and an outsider here. I knew it, and they knew it. But I was Earl Lene’s daughter, and it made perfect sense to me why the wily old man sent me to the hospital. If he had shown up, he would have been kicked back out on his ass. The shifters were just barely tolerant of my dad and the stories that he published about their ways. If they suspected the truth, I doubt any of them would ever speak to him again. My dad had been meticulously collecting research and information about each of the individual shifter clans for years. His planned legacy, before he died, was to publish the formative reference guide to the shifter lifestyle.

I had lived in town since I was ten. Most people had watched me grow up here, and so there was an inherent trust that came from being one of “them.” I was always respectful of my sources and fair in my stories. On those that were more controversial, I was fine letting my dad take the byline. I had gone into journalism because that was what he wanted, and, at the time, I was pretty listless. I didn’t have a plan. I didn’t have a clue. After high school graduation, I had been left with little more than a shattered heart and barely the will to get out of bed in the morning. Sending me off to college for four years was probably one of the best things that my dad had ever done for me, but I didn’t think that writing for the town paper was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.

I set my bag in a chair but didn’t pull anything out. Not yet. I smoothed my palms down the front of my jeans and wished that I’d thought to put on a little bit of makeup before I ran out the door. “Little Maren Lene with her mop of unruly red curls.” I swear I had that comment tattooed somewhere on my ass from as many times as had I heard it.

I turned around and then purposely made my way to Bea Kramer’s side. She was taking a few deep gulps of air, and the minister held her hand. I saw his inquisitive look as I approached.

“I’m so sorry, Ms. Kramer,” I said in a hushed tone. “I heard about what happened to Markus.”

I saw her eyes blink before they focused on me. “Maren? What are you doing here?”

“I heard about the accident on the police scanner,” I said, avoiding the direct line of questioning. “Do they know what happened yet?”

“Bear trap,” she choked. “Why he was up there at all, though, I have no idea.”

“Shulman’s Trail is the border for the Loper Clan, right?” I hated myself for inserting myself into this woman’s life like this, but there was no way that Dad was going to let me off the hook without something. I just needed a few breadcrumbs, and then I could slink out of there like the buzzard I was. “Maybe he was supposed to meet someone up there?”

“He wouldn’t have been meeting any Lopers,” Bea said, shaking her head. “Everything is kept under wraps until the Summit.”

My ears perked up. “It could have been a secret meeting, then. It just doesn’t make any sense why he was up there otherwise.”

“Why are you here, Maren?” The minister returned the focus to the original question. “I didn’t realize that you were a friend of the family.” His flat tone told me that he knew exactly why I was there and that it wasn’t to act as a supportive pillar of the community. I was ferreting out information for a story. I still cursed Lukas for talking me into toilet papering the rectory that summer when we were fourteen. The minister hadn’t looked on me kindly ever since.

“I’ve known the Kaspers since we moved to Greyelf,” I said defensively. “I practically lived in the general store’s back lot when I was little. I always admired Markus, and I’m incredibly sorry to hear about this tragedy.” I felt myself growing more indignant by the second, because all of it was true. Never mind if it wasn’t the real reason I was there. It sounded good.

“I thought that all ended when Lukas moved away.” One of the other men in the room stepped forward. I swung around to him and realized that he looked familiar. Joe? Mike? Ben? I couldn’t remember his name to save my life, which was yet another reason that I sometimes questioned my career choice these days.

If there was one thing that I knew, it was when to beat a retreat before things got ugly. I was supposed to tell the story, not be the story. “I’m sorry again for your loss,” I said to Bea, ducking my head. Then I stepped away. The group closed in around Bea as if to protect her from me, and I heard the murmuring.

“You’d think they’d give people space to breathe.”

“Fucking jackals.”

Yep, that was me and my life. I scooped up my purse. Then I wandered over to the other side of the reception desk. There was a coffee machine there in the corner, and I figured I’d grab one for the road. I tried to avoid caffeine pretty much all the time, given my natural insomniac tendencies, but the long drive back to Greyelf at this hour seemed to call for it. My dad was going to be pissed that I didn’t have a direct quote from Bea, but at least I had the nugget that something might be amiss with all of this.

It had been bothering me since the moment I heard that it was Markus up on Shulman’s Trail. Even though the county had finally gotten around to putting asphalt down last summer, I would always remember it as little more than a muddy path that stretched across the National Park Reserve that served as the northern border for Greyelf proper. That was part of the reason that we saw so many shifters in these parts. We lived on the edge of the largest growth of natural woods in the state. It rivaled most national parks in the country, outside of Yosemite, and so it had naturally become a focus for shifters over the years.

I wasn’t surprised to hear Bea say that Markus wouldn’t have been meeting with Lopers unless he had to. There had been a lot of tension between the two clans ever since the original peace treaty eighteen years ago. There were many who believed that Markus should step down and give someone else a try at organizing and keeping the peace between the clans. Personally, I thought Markus had been doing a fantastic job and never understood why the Lopers wanted to upset the apple cart.

I had a bad feeling about Markus’s accident, but it was also the feeling that told me that this was exactly the kind of thing that made for a good story. I cursed the fact that Earl’s blood ran through my veins. I shouldn’t be thinking like that. I was a human being with compassion and empathy. So why was I scooting a few inches closer to the reception desk when I heard the words “shifter accident” drift from the two women ensconced in a whispered conversation behind the desk?

I carefully took a small notepad out of my pocket and started flipping through it as I waited for the old coffee machine to dispense my drink. The whirling and churning noises inside it made it sound as if the thing were on its last legs. I knew that Bea and the rest of the clan members gathered on the other side of the desk wouldn’t be able to see that I was still there. I’d give it just a few more minutes to see if I heard anything else of interest. There wasn’t really any harm in that, right?

“I heard that he was out there for three hours before a car went by and saw him on the side of the road,” one of the women whispered. “He had dragged the trap with him because he couldn’t get out of it. If he hadn’t had the fur to protect him from hypothermia, he would have died practically right away.”

“I heard there was something weird about his fur on the back of his neck,” the other woman whispered just as earnestly. I started to scribble frantically in my notebook. “The driver told me. They brought him in the back, you know. They didn’t want to draw any attention to it because he was still half shifted.” The woman made it sound as if Markus was some kind of mutant.

I felt torn again. I shouldn’t be listening to this. I shouldn’t even be there. I should be at home, curled up in my bed, trying to sleep, just like every other night of the week. I needed to tell Dad that I didn’t want to take over the paper when he retired in a few years. But what else was I going to do in Greyelf? Wait tables at Croseley’s Diner? Help pick bolts and screws at Lehman’s Hardware? The employment options were slim pickings around town. I felt miserable as the desk phone rang, and the conversation stopped as one of the women answered it.

Flipping my notebook closed, I figured I had enough to see what corroborated whatever Dad was gleaning from Sheriff Monroe. As my feet turned toward the sliding glass doors, I saw him. I whirled back around, sloshing coffee all over the front of my sweater. I hissed at the pain but quickly moved deeper into the room.

Please tell me he didn’t see me. Please tell me he didn’t see me.
The words played desperately in my head.

“Maren?”

I wanted to disappear off the face of the earth. It was a voice that haunted my dreams often, even now. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. Then I turned and met the jade-green eyes that I remembered all too well.

“Lukas,” I said stiffly. I could see the worry lines on his face. It was a face that had grown even more handsome in the last ten years. His skin was tanned, and I couldn’t help but notice his broad shoulders that appeared to be stretching the limits of the simple green button-down shirt he wore. His dark blue jeans hugged his trim waist, but what was most impressive was his height. Both Lukas and Markus had always been tall, but as I looked up at him, I realized that he had to have grown at least another three or four inches since I last saw him. Didn’t he have even enough grace to have gotten uglier with age instead of better looking? Then I remembered with a start why he’d be there, and, of course, I felt my stomach churn once again.

“I’m so sorry to hear about what happened,” I said lamely.

His jaw tightened. “What did happen?”

Why was he asking me?
I wasn’t friend or family, which the group on the other side of the reception desk had not-so-gently pointed out to me.

“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “It happened up on Shulman’s Trail.”

“Isn’t that Loper territory?”

I wondered how much Lukas had kept abreast of the goings-on in Greyelf. “It’s a boundary line now,” I said. “Has been for about five years.”

Lukas ran a hand through his thick black hair. “I don’t even know how to process all of this.”

He seemed different to me. Older and more mature for sure, but it was unsettling how quickly we seemed to be falling back into our old pattern. Lukas would run into some situation that he couldn’t deal with, and he’d show up on my doorstep, expecting me to help him navigate through it. And I had done that for years. Always the friend. Always the one he complained to when he got in trouble. Always the one he ranted and raved to when some girl broke his heart because she didn’t want to be associated with a shifter. Lukas always chased the human girls for some reason. All of the human girls except the one who wanted him back.

“I need to go,” I said. I was acutely aware of the fact that I had a huge coffee spill on the front of my sweater and that I looked as if I had just rolled out of bed, which of course I had. “Bea is right over there.” I pointed around to the other side of the reception desk.

“I know,” he said with a slight twist to his mouth. “I thought I was ready to see everyone again, but I guess I freaked out at the last minute. That’s why I was so relieved to see you.” He offered me a tired half smile. “I haven’t spoken to Markus in ten years. Bea will call me every few months or so to tell me what’s going on. I’m still in shock. I pretty much thought that Markus would live forever.”

The two brothers had never been close, and I knew that had always been another sore point for Lukas. When their parents died, Markus brought Lukas to Bea and then pretty much dismissed him as Markus got involved in the human and shifter politics. He gained quite a sympathetic following for the fact that he was so young but had taken on the guardianship of his younger brother, and he played that angle up at every opportunity.

“You should go over there and comfort your aunt,” I said a bit more harshly than I would have liked. “I need to go.” And I did. I could barely stand still, and I felt as if my stomach was going to upend everything left inside it at any moment. I couldn’t stand here talking like we were two normal people who just saw each other yesterday. It wasn’t right. There was so much wrong with the picture that it made my head spin. “Your family needs you.”