Bearing The Long Road Home (Ice Bear Shifters 7) (3 page)

Chloe told herself to remain calm as she dropped off her paperwork and started walking back to her room in the lodging building. She looked nervously over her shoulder, trying to catch a glimpse of the shifter who had left the building just moments before. He hadn’t looked pleased to see her, and had forcefully rebuffed her weak attempt at being friendly. But Chloe told herself not to worry. The man was likely just the unfriendly, reserved type. She’d heard that the shifter clans in Canada were spread out great distances from each other, and didn’t like to mix with strangers at all. This guy was probably just one of those standoffish types. She couldn’t read too much into it.

Chloe let herself into her room and locked the door firmly behind her, double-checking to make sure the deadbolt was secure. Not that this door would have been any protection from an angry shifter, but, still, why make it easier on him if he wanted to attack her? Chloe took several long deep breaths, trying to calm herself. Surely, even if the bear did know who she was, she would be safe as long as she was here on base or in Yellowknife. The population of Yellowknife was about twenty thousand. No shifter would be dumb enough to risk attacking her around that many people.

Chloe slowly peeled off her boots and thick parka. She had arrived here in Canada just over a week and a half ago. When she had applied for the job, she’d received a call back within an hour. The manager had been eager to hire her, and had wanted her to start as soon as possible. He said they’d had a bunch of people quit recently. Turnover here was always high, but apparently a rift among some of the veteran truckers had caused some drama, and many more than usual had left to work for a different company. Chloe had taken a flight to Canada the very next day. She’d started training on the same day she landed, and she’d even had training on New Year’s Day. The company was behind schedule, and they were desperate to get new drivers on the road. Chloe hadn’t minded. She didn’t have anyone with whom to celebrate New Year’s Day, so it was just a day like any other to her.

After a week of training, she’d been cleared for the ice, and the company had wasted no time in putting her to work. She had just come back from her second load to the mines up North, and so far this job had been much easier than she had anticipated. Driving on the ice had taken some getting used to, but as long as you followed the rules and the safety protocol, things seemed to go pretty smoothly. The most difficult part of the job was fighting boredom. The trips were about two hundred and fifty miles each way, and the maximum speed allowed was twenty miles an hour. At that slow pace, and with nothing to look at other than snow and ice (which was blanketed in darkness most of the day, anyway), Chloe found it difficult to keep her mind occupied. Unfortunately, the most entertaining thing to do seemed to be eating. She had stocked up on snacks, and found herself downing more bags of chips than she wanted to think about. Still, she couldn’t complain. This gig would only last about three months, and then she would be free to start over somewhere new. She just needed to keep her head down and work hard—and stay out of the way of that shifter, whoever he was. Chloe didn’t want any trouble. She just wanted to get through the winter.

* * *

The next morning, Chloe set off on another trip. She drove away from base at 5 a.m., onto the pitch black ice road. The sun would not rise for several more hours, and, when it did, it would only remain above the horizon for about six hours. This was six more hours of daylight than northern Alaska was getting right now, but it still left Chloe driving in darkness for much of her journey. Chloe shivered as her truck started bouncing along, more from the unsettled feeling in her stomach than from the cold. Yesterday, she had tried to stay in her room for the majority of the evening. She had ventured out once, to quickly get some dinner to-go from the cafeteria. Other than that, she stayed securely hidden behind her deadbolted door. Something about the way the shifter in the office had looked at her made her feel like he knew something about who she was. Was it possible he was Alaskan? Chloe shivered again.

She wasn’t sure if being out in her truck made her feel better. On the one hand, at least she was alone. If everything went according to plan, she would not see another soul for hours. The odds of running into the shifter out here were much lower than at base camp. On the other hand, if she did happen to run into him, she was miles away from safety. He would be able to attack her without worrying about who might see her, and she would have nowhere to escape to. Chloe took a deep breath and tried to focus on the road ahead. She told herself she was overreacting. She was over twelve hundred miles from home. The odds of anyone recognizing her out here were slim to none.

Chloe made good time, and thirteen hours later she arrived at the mining outpost where she delivered her load of supplies. She would spend the night here, and then head back to Yellowknife in the morning. She kept to herself, and hoped that none of the incoming trucks arriving after her were driven by the shifter. Everything was going so well on this job thus far. She didn’t want anything to mess up her chance at freedom.

Early the next morning, once again hours before the sun came up, Chloe got back out on the ice for the drive back to Yellowknife. Things went smoothly for about five hours, and at 10 a.m. Chloe watched the sun rising over the horizon, finally kicking off the few hours of daylight she would see today. She relished the beauty of the pink and orange sunrise reflecting across the crisp snow and ice, and told herself that the scenery did have its moments, even out here.

She smiled as she crested over the top of a hill in the ice road. Climbing the hills was so much easier when the trailer was empty and thousands of pounds lighter. Chloe’s smile didn’t last long, though. As she came over the top of the hill, she saw a moose ambling slowly across the ice road at the bottom of the hill. Chloe generally wasn’t a potty mouth, but the string of curses that came out of her mouth when she saw the moose would have made a sailor blush.

Even at the slow speed of twenty miles per hour, stopping a semi truck takes some time. Chloe screamed at the moose and honked her truck’s horn, trying to scare him out of her way. But the moose just looked up at her with dazed eyes and continued slowly walking on the road. Chloe’s truck slowed, but couldn’t stop in time, and it struck the massive animal hard on the left side of her front grill. The truck lurched forward and to the side as an awful boom rang across the ice from the impact. The truck’s lurch continued, and it skidded sideways off the ice road and onto the snow. The cab of the truck flipped completely sideways onto the drivers’ side as the semi finally came to rest on the deep snow bank. Chloe’s head smashed against the side of the window, and the last thing she remembered before going unconscious was thinking that the seatbelt cutting into her skin hurt worse than the slicing of a bear claw.

Seth yawned as he approached another ice hill. For the last hour, he hadn’t been able to stop yawning. He wasn’t tired, exactly. Just bored out of his mind. But for the amount of money he was getting paid to sit in the cab of this semi-truck, he wasn’t going to complain about being bored. The only thing he really hated about this job so far was all these damn hills. This was his first trip out on the ice, and he could already tell that he and the hills were not going to be friends. The trip back was a little easier, with no weight on his trailer pulling him backwards every time he tried to climb a hill. Still, getting traction on a hill of ice was no joke.

Seth breathed a sigh of relief as he came over the top of the hill. Another hill down, dozens more to go. He was a little less than halfway back to Yellowknife, so he had hours more of this fun ahead of him. Seth’s sigh of relief soon changed to a gasp of horror as he saw a truck on its side next to the road at the bottom of the hill. He braked as quickly as he dared, stopping several hundred feet in front of the overturned truck. He pulled on his thickest gloves, grabbed a crowbar, and jumped from his truck, immediately being hit in the face by a frigid blast of air. He ignored the stinging cold and ran toward the truck, which was sending up plumes of smoke from the engine. As he approached the wreck, he saw the source of the problem. A large moose lay in a crumpled pile in front of the semi. Seth slowed his run a bit as he approached the moose, until he was sure that the animal was completely dead. The last thing he wanted to do right now was upset a wounded animal that weighed over a ton.

“Hello?” Seth called out, as he tried to see past the smoke and into the front cabin. “Can you hear me in there? Are you okay?”

There was no answer, and the front windshield had become a giant web of crackled glass that was impossible to see through. The smoke rising from the engine was thickening, and Seth was worried that it was going to burst into full blown flames at any moment. Adrenaline pumping, Seth started struggling to climb to the passenger side door, which was facing the sky since the truck had landed on the driver’s side. When he reached the door, he couldn’t get it to open. He wasn’t sure if it was locked, or if the crash had damaged the structure so that the door wouldn’t open. And he didn’t have time to waste figuring it out. He took his crowbar and smashed one corner of the window, hitting it a few times in its weakest spot until the thick glass shattered. He peered into the truck’s cabin and his eyes widened at what he saw.

It was her. The Blizzard. She looked up at him with a stunned, confused expression, as though she had been knocked out and had just regained consciousness. Out of all the truckers out on this road, why had she been the one to crash, and him the one that happened to find her? Everything in him wanted to turn around and leave the cabin. It would be so easy to just say he hadn’t made it in time. Given the condition of the truck, and the fact that it looked like it was about to go up in flames, he didn’t think anyone would question him.

But he knew he could never forgive himself if he did that. He was better than that. He couldn’t leave a fellow shifter, even one from a clan that he hated, to burn alive in the middle of this Arctic wasteland. Seth let out a deep sigh, and lowered himself carefully into the driver’s cabin. He quickly saw that her seatbelt was jammed stuck, pinning her into the seat. He had left his knife in his own truck, and he didn’t think he had time to go back and get it. He looked around to see whether there was a knife somewhere in the cabin, but he couldn’t find one.

“Do you have a knife in here?” he asked the Blizzard. “Your seatbelt is stuck.”

She looked up at him like he was speaking another language. She clearly was in shock from the crash, and probably couldn’t even remember her own name right now, let alone where a knife might be stowed. Seth went to Plan B.

He pulled off his thick gloves, and let out a small roar as he let his hand morph into the giant paw of a polar bear. The paw ended in long sharp claws, which would easily cut through the Blizzard’s seat belt. Seth pulled the shoulder belt away from her body, and sliced through it in one smooth movement. He did the same with the lap belt, and then pulled her up from the seat.

“Can you climb?” he asked, hoping that she was coherent enough to understand what he was asking, and that she would be able to at least make an effort to climb up to the passenger door. She nodded, although she still seemed incapable of saying anything. A large red welt ran across her neck where the seatbelt had restrained her. It oozed blood in a few spots, and Seth winced just looking at the angry red line. His trainer had been right: colliding with a moose was no joke. Seth offered the woman his hands as a step, and he helped launch her up toward the passenger door. As she pulled herself slowly onto the side of the truck, the engine finally exploded into full on flames. The sight of the fire seemed to kick off some sort of survival instinct in the Blizzard, and she scrambled quickly down the side of the truck and started running away from the burning truck. Seth followed closely behind her, pulling himself up and over the side of the truck, and landing with a hard thud on the icy snow. His feet slid out from under him and he landed on his backside. Wincing in pain, he forced himself to get up and run through the pain. As soon as those flames hit a fuel line, that truck was going to blow.

Seth’s feet pounded on the snow behind the Blizzard, who ran toward his truck and then continued past it. Where the hell was she going? He sped up his pace, and caught up with her, grabbing her arms and spinning her around.

“What are you doing?” he asked. “You have to get in my truck and out of the cold. You’ll die of cold if you don’t get somewhere with warmth.”

The Blizzard looked up at him, her eyes still confused and in shock. Seth noticed for the first time that her face was incredibly beautiful. Even with the scratches from the glass, and the pale blue color her skin was starting to take on from the cold, she was undeniably lovely. Seth caught himself and mentally berated himself for even thinking such a thing. She was a Blizzard, one of the clan that had murdered his own clan. He wasn’t allowed to think of her as anything except awful and ugly. The only reason he wasn’t leaving her here to die on the ice was that he was a decent shifter, who didn’t want the blood of a female shifter on his hands.

Seth gave the Blizzard’s arm a gentle tug, and she seemed to snap to reality, running back with him toward his truck. She climbed in the passenger side by herself, and Seth hopped into the driver’s seat, wasting no time in pulling away from the burning mess behind them. He looked over at the Blizzard, who stared straight ahead in silent shock. Try as he might, it was hard to think of the scared, pale woman beside him as a bloodthirsty murderer. She looked more like a frightened child than an evil killer. As he watched, she closed her eyes wearily and leaned her head back against the seat.

Seth’s truck gained momentum and slowly sped up, increasing the distance between him and the wreck behind him. He glanced into the side rearview mirror one last time, just as the small flames of the truck explode into giant ball of fire. If he’d been five minutes later, the Blizzard would have been dead.

And despite his hatred for her clan, he honestly wasn’t sure how he felt about that.