Black Bear Fall: A BWWM Paranormal Romance (Black Bear Saga Book 2) (5 page)

A cool drop of liquid fell on Graces tongue and she instinctively withdrew it and swallowed. She opened her eyes and the three men had taken a step back and they watched her with eager expressions.

The drop on her tongue tingled and Grace could taste a faint flavour of vanilla. She swallowed again and her throat felt dry and scratchy. Grace threw her head back and started to gasp for air as her throat seemed to snap shut to a pinhole. She tried to breath and all she could manage were high pitched whistling gasps. She looked around wildly and the men stood and observed her. She began to convulse in the chair her body wracked by painful jolts. She strained against her cuffs as she thrashed about and her hand broke free from the loosened strap. Her hand flew to her neck as she scratched painfully at her skin leaving long bloody trails. Help me she tried to scream and nothing but a breathless screech came from between her purple lips.

Pain flooded ever nerve in her body each surge reaching untold heights than the one before. Tears streamed from her eyes and she looked at the ceiling as her body was fried with pain. I am going to die she thought as everything around her began to fade. The bones in her body felt like they were on fire and then melting into molten metal and burning her from the inside out. I can’t take it anymore, I want to die she thought as the pain increased to hellish levels. My body is going to tear itself apart was Graces last thought. Her whole body went rigid, her free arm shooting out stiffly in front of her. Her left eardrum burst and blood ran down her neck. She stayed frozen rigid like a grotesque wax work for a couple of seconds and then all power left her body. She slumped in the chair, her head hanging to the side with her eyes open and unseeing. No breath escaped her lips, no blood pumped in her veins.

A
n owl hooted
in the distance and Nathaniel's eyes snapped open. He lay still and listened to the forest around him. Everything was silent. He stroked his wife's arm and she began to stir against him. They lay concealed in a thicket of low bushes, holding each other as they had slept. “It’s time,” he whispered into his wife's ear and she started to stretch out beside him.

They had both fed to satiation when they tracked down and killed a young deer that had got separated from its mother. With full stomachs they had found the first good hiding place and crawled on their bellies far into the tangle of low bushes and fell into their first restorative sleep since waking from hibernation.

They lay beside each other holding hands and both listened to the forest. There was only one sound that they were listening for and that was the clumsy pounding walk of a human. Even when they thought they were being completely silent, shifters could usually hear them in a forest environment. No other creature on the planet could move as quickly and silently as an adult shifter as they moved through the wilderness. Humans seemed like drunks fools in comparison to the balletic precision of a shifter crossing a forest or woodland.

The husband and wife crawled through the thicket of scratching and tangled branches and stood up in the chill night air. Their clothes had been ripped in several places as they left their hiding places, and holes in the rotten fabric exposed portions of their skin. They looked each other over and smiled. He knew how they both looked, like two creatures that had slept for decades beneath the soil. They would need to clean up and change clothes if they wanted to leave the woods and find a new home. Nathaniel looked at his wife and even under the layer of caked on mud streaking her body, her slicked back hair hard with embedded clay and her rotten dress hanging off her in rags, he still thought she was beautiful. He could see how the old stories of vampires or zombies had first started up. His culture was full of stories of shifters going into the earth for long hibernations and then waking up and being spotted by a human. Over time these myths transmuted into tales of the dead rising, or blood sucking vampires out for revenge. These mistakes worked in bear kinds favour and kept their presence mostly secret from the human world.

Nathaniel nodded at his wife and they both took off at a run. He could feel the power in his muscles returning as his eyes picked out the best path to take in the gloom. They moved swiftly through the forest, their ears attuned to the sounds of the forest around them. He flexed his arms as he ran feeling the iron tightness in his muscles return. He would need to feed several more times before he could transform safely, the longer you stayed in the ground the more dangerous your first transformation could be.

They slowed and then stopped as they drew near to the tree line. They hunkered down and watched the houses for movement. The house across from the dividing stream was completely dark. On the back wall of the house a small red light that was attached to a white metal box blinked on and off.

The house that they were targeting had no lights on downstairs and the single upstairs window that faced the back garden had a faint flickering glow coming from behind the pulled down shade. Nathaniel sniffed the air. It was faint, nothing more than an after image like a camera flash when you close your eyes, but he could pick up a trace of the scent from today. He looked at Melissa and nodded. Nathaniel pulled off his one rotten shoe he was still wearing and dropped it on the ground. Melissa copied and took off her flat shoes, one of them coming apart in her hand as she slipped out of them. Nathaniel's clothes ripped off him with very little effort and he dropped them in a pile. The cold air prickled his skin on his naked dirt streaked body. Melissa shrugged off her clothes and threw them on top of the other rotten and torn rags.

They both stood side by side completely naked watching the house from the woods. They didn’t feel the cold against their skin the way a human would and the cool night air felt more like a pleasurable tickle than something to be protected from.

A light switched on upstairs in the hall. A man walked past the window without looking out, his hair stuck up in clumps at the back of his head. He disappeared as he entered the only room on that floor with light coming out of it. Then a few seconds later he left, crossed the hall, switched the light off and returned to his room. Nathaniel and Melissa watched the room with the flickering light and after a few minutes it went out. The house was now completely dark

They moved with speed across the open lawn. A bright white light came on when they were half way across bathing the whole lawn in light. The two froze. Nathaniel stared up at the light, the house was a black shape behind the dazzling rays. He listened for movement, ready to turn and run back to the woods at the first sound. He heard nothing. The light went off and it clicked as the bulb cooled. They ran to the back door and lay against the side of the house and listened. A low hum of electronics came from inside the house. Everything else was silent. Nathaniel sniffed the air, the family didn’t own a dog. He tried the handle to the back door. It was locked. Melissa went to the kitchen window and tried to open it. The window opened outwards with a click.

She climbed in and stood in the middle of the kitchen sniffing the air. Nathaniel watched her through the glass back door, she looked beautiful, a creature of the night surrounded by the clean lines of a modern kitchen. The key was in the backdoor, she opened it and Nathaniel entered. He felt the unease he always felt when somewhere strange and enclosed. They headed towards the stairs leaving a trail of muddy foot prints on the tiled kitchen floor.

They climbed the stairs and stood in the hall. Nathaniel looked down, he was standing on plush carpet, he couldn’t remember the last time he had walked on it. Their image was reflected back at them from the large window in the hall looking out across the back lawn and towards the dark shape of the forest. They looked at themselves, two dirt streaked pale faces looked back. They smiled at each other and listened. Three rooms in total. The closest room someone was emitting a deep rumbling snore, accompanied by a lower register nasal whine. No sound came from the next room. It wasn’t the sound from the room across the hall they were interested in, it was the odour that lead them to the door. Nathaniel could feel his whole face tingle as he breathed in the scent. He closed his eyes and let it entangle him in its web as images of wild bears basking in the sun beside a stream full of spawning trout flashed in his mind.

He opened his eyes and refocused. He stood back and motioned to Melissa. She opened the door and stepped into the room closing the door behind her. Nathaniel crossed to the stairs and stood outside the parents room listening for any change in breathing. The snoring continued. He heard a jolt of furniture and something small hit the carpeted floor in the room Melissa had entered. He tensed his body and waited to react at the slightest change in the parents breathing. They continued to sleep deeply.

The door across the hallway opened and Melissa had the boy in her arms. She had her hand clamped over his mouth and his eyes were wide with fear. Her other arm was around his waist holding him tight against her. She had her teeth pressed against the side of the boys cheek. Most humans tended to shut up very quickly if you threatened them with have their eye ripped out by a pair of snapping jaws.

She crossed the hall and padded down the stairs. Nathaniel smelt the acrid stench of urine as she passed by. He gave her time to get to the back door. The parents continued to sleep deeply. Melissa was waiting outside for him as he closed the back door with a low click behind him. Tears were streaming down the boys cheek, and he knew from the glee in his wife's eyes that she could taste them. She closed her mouth and looked at the boy, deep impressions of her teeth left a semi circle below his eye, she was careful not to break his skin. The boy looked at the bearded and naked man before him and tried to shout. Nothing but a pathetic whimper escaped through Melissa's fingers. They looked across the lawn, within seconds they would be back in the safety of the forest.

The boys eyes swivelled about as if he was trying to will them to stay close to his house. They turned and ran across the lawn. The light came on behind them. They did not slow down as they cast long thin shadows ahead of them. Melissa reached the forest first and Nathaniel was right behind her. They split up and headed in opposite directions, winding and taking a random route through the woods. They did not want to be followed. Thirty minutes later they met at the designated spot, a tree that had fallen over in a storm and was covered in moss and soft with rot.

The couple allowed each other a smile as they went deeper into the woods to wake their hibernating children and introduce them to their new brother.

“
I
don’t trust him
,” said Clarence Boyd as he paced back and forth the length of the one room metal hut they were staying in for the night. “His father, maybe we could have worked with him. Tulimak isn’t right in the head, you seen how he looked at us when we entered the compound. He didn’t exactly give us the grand welcome you expected.”

“Enough,” Nasak said as he traced his fingers across the jagged scars that ran like a patchwork of seams through his hair and across the top of his skull. He ran his thick fingers through the jet black thicket of his beard and looked over at Clarence. “We don’t have to trust him for long. All we need is to find out where the clan now lives and once we do, it is time to begin the real work. The girl, the prophecy it’s all a distraction. I don’t believe it any more than I believe that Tulimak will let us live in peace side by side with our long lost family. It is time for a regime change and in the new world of reconciliation there is no place for someone like him who still believes the mongrels are second class citizens. We belong with our brothers and sisters, not eking out a living fearing capture and experimentation. You know this more than anyone in the group,” Nasak said his voice softening.

Six hours ago Nasak and his closest ally had driven up to the gates of the compound with Grace and Anne drugged in the back. The initial meeting with Tulimak went as well as to be expected and now they had been asked to wait the night in one of the old workers accommodations on the edge of the compound.

“I don’t think I could have gone on any longer when you first found me,” Clarence said. He stopped pacing and sat on the metal framed bed in the corner of the room. Nasak sat across from him stroking his beard and watching his friend. The sharing of stories was part of the tradition of the mongrel tribe. Everyone got the chance to share there story of how they finally found some kind of peace with members of their own kind. The story telling sessions where part bonding experiences and part therapy. Nasak nodded his head as Clarence spoke and he knew that his leader wanted him to go on. Story telling eased the mongrel spirit.

“I was sixteen,” Clarence said as he began his story, “when I was first initiated and found to be a lesser animal. You know how those first few months are. Disconnected from everyone you know and love, dealing with your new afflictions and most days wishing you were dead, but never having the guts to actually go through with it. I was one of the luckier ones and could nearly get away with living side by side with the humans.”

Nasak nodded his head as Clarence spoke. The retelling of their origins always had a relaxing effect on the mongrels, the shared pain brought the group together and fostered a close bond between all of them. Nasak remembered when he first meet Clarence. Apart from slight damage to his left ear he looked almost normal. That was until he took off his shirt and turned around. The length of his back was covered with open sores where boney protuberances from his spinal column broke through the skin. If allowed to continue to grow they started to twist his body into painful positions until eventually he would become so twisted and misshapen that he couldn’t stand up anymore.

“I wandered out of the forest and hitched my way to one of the soot covered industrial towns of the north. I hadn’t started to transform at this stage. My back always felt tender and the skin along my spine always burned to the touch, compared to some other mongrels I saw at the initiation I thought I had got off easily. I fell in with a bunch of kids my age, you know the kind, the ones you cross to the other side of the road when you see them approaching en masse. The group was a mix of skaters, anarchists, drop outs and the lost, all looking for a way out from the confines of society or more usually a hellish home life. I fit in straight away. The others could see I was hurting, that I’d been through something terrible. Nobody pushed for answers, I was one of them, part of a family who accepted me for who I was. I deluded myself that if I ever actually told one of them where I had came from that they would still accept me,” Clarence said looking over at Nasak.

“The humans can be beguiling. There is something about them that can bring out a trait in mongrels, we let our guard down around them thinking that they are they group that will finally embrace us. You know what road that usually ends in all too well,” Nasak said nodding. He lay back on the thin mattress and crossed his arms behind his head, closing his eyes while he listened.

“We lived in the ruins of an apartment block that had been built in the sixties when some local got the idea the town was going to be the next holiday retreat for people leaving the big cities at the weekends. Then they found coal right outside the town limits and that changed everything. Workers moved in by the bus load and over a few quick decades what was once a bustling town with a bright future was now a blackened mining town that no family would want to raise their kids in. People left in droves leaving only the poor and the hopeless. The mines eventually closed leaving half the population unemployed and with nothing to do all day but drink. So many of the young guys in my new family had fathers who had beaten them nightly as they took out the failings of their life on an innocent child. The whole town stunk of ash and soot, it felt like it was in your skin and covering everything around the mine,” Clarence said looking over at Nasak. “You would think you would get used to it, some handled it better than others. There was one kid in our group probably no older then twelve whose hands where chapped and red raw from constant washing and scrubbing. He would talk in his sleep, muttering about feeling unclean and needing to wash. He wandered off one night and we never saw him again. That kind of thing happened a lot to us. As close knit as we thought we where we didn't have the skills to deal with everyones problems. Everyone was drinking heavily at night, sniffing glue, getting high as cheaply as possible. We were a gang of lost souls on a downward spiral.”

“Did you like living among the humans?” Nasak asked.

Clarence studied the backs of his hands and flexed his fingers and said, “I did. They where the first group to ever accept me. My own kind thought I was nothing more than trash, I felt a solidarity with the group that I never thought I would get to feel again.”

“Do you think they would have been so welcoming if they knew what you were from the start?” Nasak said in a gentle voice.

“You know we both differ on this issue,” Clarence said.

“I’m a realist. Your time with the humans softened you to their real nature. If we ever showed ourselves to humankind we would be drugged and imprisoned. A life of painful experimentation would follow and what little life we had would be quickly over. A handful of gutter punks who treated you well isn’t enough to convince me of the inherent good in man kind. I think you are naive to even suggest it.”

“Do you agree with white bear dogma that the humans time is over and a new order should be brought forward?” Clarence asked.

“I trust the white bears even less then the humans. This talk of a world run by shifters has been a bedtime story to our kind since the very beginning. An idea to give us hope that some time we can step out from the shadows and reveal our true selves. It will never happen. How many shifters are there compared to the humans? Even with all the advantages shifters have it still wouldn’t be possible to overthrow them. The human race is the single greatest organism to ever live on this planet, shifters have no way of ever tipping the balance,” Nasak said.

“What if there where more of us, it could be possible then,” Clarence said.

Nasak let out a grunt of disapproval, he was in no humour to return to this subject again with Clarence, it felt like they had gone around in circles for years. “Continue your story,” he said signifying debate was over.

“I was with the group maybe a year when the ruptures started. I’d always had the painful rashes along my spine. One of the girls, I think her name was Ciara used to steal a salve for me from a local drugstore. For a while thats all I needed on my back, it was painful but manageable. I was drinking so much, that pretty much anything I felt was nothing more then static in the background. We used to sleep in a back room of a disused concrete factory whenever some of the local low life's got it into there heads to sweep the old apartment blocks for a chance to beat up on some of us. So on this night we where all huddled in the back room after one of the townies attacks from the night before. I distinctly remember waking up thinking I heard something ripping in my dreams, like the sound of someone slowly ripping a piece of thick cardboard. I lay there in the dark listening to the breathing of the group around me as they slept. There was probably twenty of us packed into a room no bigger than a shoe box. We needed it on those cold northern nights. I lay there thinking it was rats or something probably gnawing on the wiring on in the walls. And then bang,” Clarence said slapping his hands together, “the most excruciating pain ripped through my body. I started convulsing on the floor it was as if someone had stabbed me in the back with ten red hot daggers. I was contorting and twisting trying to reach up and pull them from my back. Everyone in the group started to wake. One of the older guys called Rousen jumped into action, he’d had a younger brother with epilepsy and he thought I was having a fit. He tried to stabilise me, get something into my mouth so as I wouldn’t swallow my tongue. Everyone was starting to panic. The younger kids where backed into the corners held in the arms of some of the older girls. I was screaming in agony, my skin gone ashen grey. Rousen tried to hold me down and when my back arched off the floor he felt them or saw them, I’m not sure. He backed away from me, eyes wide in fear. Take off your shirt man, he shouted at me, his lips pulled back in disgust. As I jerked around on the floor in searing pain I ripped off my shirt, I wanted it off my skin. I didn’t want anything touching me as I felt like I was burning alive.”

Nasak grunted in recognition of the pain that any kind of material against mongrel skin could sometimes cause when your body was in flux.

Clarence continued, “I pulled off my light jacket and shirt and was on my hands and knees panting. A torch was shining on me and people began to scream and scramble out of the room. I heard shouts of he’s a demon, or a monster as they tried to get away from me. Through tear filled eyes I could see my twisted shadow cast onto the wall and I saw them for the first time. Boney protuberances had ripped through the flesh of my back and ran down my spine from my neck to my ass. In the shadow they looked like the twisted stems of plants growing out of me. Rousen was the final member of the group to flee in terror. His last thing to say to me was, what are you? It was said in a mixture of outright disgust and terror. I saw I wasn’t a member of the group anymore, I wasn’t the same as these kids. I’d been fooling myself that I was part of a family. As soon as they saw the real me, everyone ran in terror. That’s all we will ever be to the humans, monsters ripped from their darkest nightmares. The creature under the bed or the creak coming from the wardrobe late at night. They will never accept us as equals. The humans would rather wipe us all out then trust us.”

Nasak turned over and faced his long time friend and said, “The humans fear what they cant control or understand. It is true that they see us as monsters and freaks, something to be feared. It is the shifters that they should really be afraid of. If the news ever broke about shifters living among humans, a hunt like this planet has never seen would begin. They would not stop until every last shifter was destroyed. We, they see as monsters, the shifters they would see as a threat. A human is the most dangerous animal when it is backed into a corner. They usually strike before they become trapped, they are nothing if not resilient. Do you know there was once a time when it wasn’t so clear cut that the humans would be the ones to thrive on this planet?”

Clarence nodded his head, he had heard all the old stores including the ones that all ways seemed the most far fetched.

“Can you imagine a world run by shifters? Maybe some of the calamities that befell our world would of never happened under some one else's watch. We might never know. Tell me again how you met the Fenton travelling show?” Nasak asked.

“After the first night when the bones ripped through my skin I fled the group. I thought as myself as nothing more then a disgusting monster. I had seen the looks on my friends faces, it hadn’t been pity or sympathy. They had looked at me with pure disgust, like they had walked into a room and switched a light on and a giant many legged bug was sitting in the centre of the room hissing at them. Not one of them looked at me with pity or concern and I knew if I hung around they would have done what most people do when faced with a disgusting bug. They would have stomped and crushed me. As the pain seemed to double and then triple in intensity I stumbled out of the room trying to make my escape. Everything was in a blur as I tripped and fell and then got up again. People scurried away from me as I tried to get out of the building. A couple of times when my legs gave out and I hit the floor people seemed to materialise out of the shadows and kick me hard into the ribs. Every kick sent an explosion of pain surging down my deformed spine. Minutes before these kids had been the closest thing I ever had to a family and now they where swooping out from the shadows to hurt me like a bunch of cowards. I made it through the gauntlet of kicks and punches and collapsed onto the pavement outside the factory. I lay on the wet asphalt panting and then the first brick exploded close to my head. Chips of stone sliced though the side of my neck. Then the projectiles started to rain down around me. The kids where grabbing anything they could find as a weapon and hurling it towards me. I ran tripping and falling towards the large lot across the road. Something hit me in the back of the leg and I went sprawling onto my face and seeing stars. People shouted names at me from the dark as bricks rained down around me. I scrambled to my feet and and charged on trying to get across the broken asphalt of the lot and to the safety of the woods. It was the longest thirty seconds of my life trying to escape the missiles being thrown at me. I had gone from peacefully sleeping beside my makeshift family to now fleeing from them in terror in less then ten minutes,” Clarence said and paused.