License to Shift (8 page)

And while she moved backward to the closest sturdy tree, Carl remained eye-locked with the creature. He was talking, pitching his voice low and calm, his words making no sense at all.

“I'm not the threat, Mark. Take a big whiff. I'm bleeding. No danger to her. Go look for more of those things.”

Oh, shit.
Carl was a lot more hurt than he was letting on. Which meant that she had to act now. She was close enough to the tree, she hoped. And she really hoped that she wasn't about to commit suicide. She'd gathered a few rocks as she'd moved. All that she could see while inching herself backward. Gathering all her softball experience into her brain, she adjusted the heaviest rock in her hand and threw straight at the creature's head.

Score!

She tagged it right at the back of the noggin. She thought at first that even with the impact, the rock had been too light to make a difference. But then grizzly turned to look at her. Good…maybe. But she was working on adrenaline now, so she pitched the next and the next and the next.

Three stones in rapid-fire throws, all hitting him not because of her accuracy but because it was that freaking huge. And in case that wasn't working, she started screaming at it.

“That's right. That's me, you big bully. Get away from him!”

She thought Carl would take the opportunity to scramble away from the bear. At least he had a clear field to empty his clip into the creature's head. But instead of doing the intelligent thing, he started screaming at her.

“No, no! Julie, stop it! Don't upset him!”

Don't upset the thing-eating bear? Bullshit. It was pretty damned riled up already. So she whipped the last two stones in her arsenal at it, one of them nailing the beast right on the nose.

It roared in fury and finally abandoned Carl to go for her. Great!

Or not.

She gulped and tore for the tree, kicking away her flip-flops as she scrambled up the trunk.

Ouch, ouch, ouch!

The bark sliced into her hands and feet, but adrenaline kept her from feeling the worst of it. And even with her moving as fast as she could manage, she was still way too slow. She felt the creature's breath on her back as it roared again. And the tree shuddered as a single paw swiped at her feet.

It could have knocked her down. She was sure of it. But by some miracle, that massive paw hadn't connected with her leg. It had simply slammed into the tree trunk, making the whole thing shudder. She swung herself up into the nearest branch, then half leapt, half hauled herself up the next. The tree swayed ominously, but it didn't break. And, damn it, there weren't any other branches higher up that could hold her weight. Which is when she chanced to look down.

The grizzly was standing up, two massive paws stretched against the tree about six inches from her feet. One good jump and she'd be toast. This close, she could hear its mournful lowing and see every pointy inch of its claws.

Damn, damn, damn.

But at least she'd gotten it away from Carl, right? She looked over, hoping to see the man scrambling full tilt for the house. That would be the intelligent thing to do. No such luck. He was running toward her, gun at his side, talking nonsense all the way.

“Don't make any sudden moves,” he called. “Just stay there. And for God's sake, don't throw anything else.”

“Are you crazy?” she bellowed. “Shoot it!”

As if the creature understood what she'd said, it turned its head and roared at Carl. The sound was a loud rumble that sounded a thousand times worse than any movie-made roar she'd ever experienced.

Carl stopped running forward, half stumbling as he gripped his bloody side. But his gun hand was steady as he aimed down at the ground.

“I'm not coming any closer, Mark. I got it.”

Who the hell was he talking to? She didn't see Mark anywhere. Meanwhile, the creature let out another furious roar, though not quite as loud as the last one.

“You're frightening her, Mark. Smell her. She's terrified.”

Bizarrely enough, the creature did seem to sniff. It was probably just a natural predatory instinct, but still. A sniffing bear wasn't a ripping-her-out-of-the-tree-and-eating-her bear, right?

“You have to calm down. You have to remember who you are.”

The bear turned to her, then, lifting its snout up in her direction. If she bent her knees, she could probably kick it. That would discourage it from coming closer, right? But she really didn't want to get her foot that close to the thing's mouth.

But what choice did she have? Any second now, the bear might decide to climb up for her.

“Don't move, Julie!” Carl said. “You don't understand what's going on. Just stay still.”

A bear was about to eat her, that's what was going on. But she didn't argue. If he thought she should freeze, then call her Ms. Popsicle. And then—miracle of miracles—she heard the sound of a police siren in the distance.

Hallelujah!
People with guns were coming. People who would actually use them instead of holding it to the side and putting bullets into the ground. She just had to stay alive until they showed up.

“You hear that, Mark?” Carl continued. “We're safe. She's safe. But I can't get this wound bound up until you get control of yourself. Come on, Mark. Remember who you are.” Carl took a step forward, but the animal reared up, obviously pissed at that. Carl stopped, his hands up in the air. And when the bear growled, low in his throat, Carl took a step back. “Okay, okay. I get it. She's yours. But you're scaring her.”

Julie wanted to snap that she sure as hell was not some bear's, but thought better of it. Especially as the animal dropped down to all fours to face Carl, not her.

Was it going to run away? Or attack Carl? Why the hell hadn't the idiot man run away when he had the chance? It wasn't like there were any more rocks up in this tree to throw at the creature. Fortunately, the thing didn't seem to be attacking anyway. It had just dropped down to stare at Carl, who took another slow step back.

“That's right, Mark. Remember who you are.”

The bear released a long howl that was almost plaintive. And Julie had the weird thought that the two were really talking to each other. Carl and the bear in some bizarre conversation.

“Don't give me that shit, Mark. I'm your alpha, and I say face me as a
man
.” The last word had the vibration of a command. Even Julie felt the power of it, though how a bear was going to understand that, she hadn't a clue.

Meanwhile, she heard the siren stop, and two car doors slammed. Both man and beast turned to the sound, but Carl bellowed first.

“Stay back! Don't shoot!”

A woman officer with short blond hair came tearing around the corner, but she pulled up short at the command. Her partner appeared next, a lanky guy who looked too young to be holding a gun.

“Oh, shit,” the guy said, though it was more like a babble.

The woman held him back by putting a hand on his chest, but both of their eyes were on the bear.

“You're hurt, Carl, and he's out of control,” the woman said.

“Stay out of it, Tonya,” Carl growled. Lord, he was sounding more like a bear every second.

The woman glared, then slowly took a step forward, drawing her pistol as she moved. “Let me do this for you.”

“Don't you fucking dare.”

The woman stopped, and she gestured for her partner to stay back. But she didn't put away her gun. “Stevie,” she said, her voice calm, “go get the tranq gun, will you?”

Her partner blanched. “What?”

“Go, slowly. Now.”

The kid nodded, then backed away. One step. Two. Three. Then, at the edge of the house, he pivoted and ran. Which is when the woman spoke again.

“Okay, Mark. You've got about ten seconds until Stevie gets back. Carl's bleeding, and you're keeping me from helping him. Your alpha is hurt, and you're in the way. So you fucking switch back now, or so help me God—”

The bear moved. No, not so much moved as shimmered. Like a heat wave going through the air, creating a distortion or mirage. Julie was staring right at him when it happened, and she still could not process what she saw. The creature was on all fours when it started…doing whatever it was. One second she saw a huge black grizzly bear. The next, it seemed to shrink in on itself. The nose grew shorter, the hump lost fur. Then she saw skin, rippling with power or pain. She wasn't sure.

Then she saw legs and arms. The hard points of two shoulder blades before a man collapsed downward upon himself. He dropped and curled onto his side as he went. His head was tucked down, buried into forearms that came up and covered his face. But even so, she recognized him. Even lying dirty and howling on the ground, she knew who it was.

Mark.

She screamed.

M
ark transitioned back to a man for the stupidest of reasons. He needed to vomit. He'd learned young to not fight it. There were things that a bear ate that a man just didn't want in his belly. So within seconds of feeling cold sweat on bare skin, he struggled to his paws—hands—and purged with all the violence that entails.

And when he was done, he crouched in the grass and centered himself to the world around him. He found Julie immediately, hearing her tight whimpers of panic and smelling her terror like a dank miasma.

He'd done that to her. She was terrified of him.

Unable to deal with that, he allowed his senses to wander elsewhere. The birds weren't chirping, which might have been ominous except that Tonya and Carl were bickering a few feet away like angry children.

“I told you I'm fucking fine.”

“And I told you that you've been sliced to hell by God only knows what that thing is, so you're going to the hospital where they're going to douse you in rubbing alcohol and antibiotics.”

“Would you just back the hell off?”

“Would you rather I call your fiancée? She'll put you on bread and water for a week.”

Fiancée? Carl had finally proposed? About damned time.

“Leave Becca out of it. And when did you start fighting dirty?”

“The minute you became alpha and thought that made you invincible.” And then abruptly her tone shifted, becoming more professional as she turned to the newest scent, just coming around the corner. “Thanks for the blanket, Stevie. Go ahead and drop it around Mark's shoulders.”

“I still don't understand where he came from,” the young police officer said. “And where the bear went.”

Oh, yeah. Stevie was a transfer from Virginia. He wasn't clued in on the whole bear-shifter thing. Which meant that Mark had to help cover until someone decided to bring the guy into the fold. So he sat back on his heels and rubbed at his mouth. “I was camping nearby,” he lied. “Came when I heard the shots.”

“Naked and unarmed?” Stevie drawled. “Dude, what did you think you could do?”

A blanket settled around his shoulders and—even better—a bottle of water appeared before him. He took both gratefully, rinsing and spitting before he ventured to speak. “Wasn't thinking. Wasn't fully awake until it was too late for me to change my mind.”

Stevie chuckled, though he could tell by the sound it was more a way to relieve tension than true humor. Then the man turned toward the back property line. “How are you doing, Miss Simon? I brought a bottle for you, too.”

“I saw…He—”

Tonya interrupted in her professional tone, quick to stop Julie from talking about what exactly she'd seen. “Feeling a little better, now? I know you probably have all sorts of questions. We certainly do. But it's better for everyone if you settle down a bit first. Drink that water and then we'll talk.”

Stevie shifted his footing awkwardly in the grass, obviously confused by this. “But, Tonya—”

“Trust me on this,” she snapped at her partner. “We've got our own way of doing things here.”

“By stopping witness statements?” Stevie pushed. Obviously, the newbie wasn't a man to just ignore common sense. Good for him. But Tonya couldn't just drop the whole shifter thing on him, either, so she shut him down cold.

“You haven't even made it through your probationary period, Officer Harrison. You still need time to understand all of Gladwin's ins and outs.”

“I don't—”

“Go check on the ME, will you? And help him carry all his crap here. We've got bodies we need to get under wraps. And one living man who needs an ambulance.”

Carl growled under his breath, but didn't argue. Smart man. He wasn't going to win that particular argument. And as Stevie stomped toward the front of the property, Mark judged it high time to come back to the human world.

He slowly pushed to his feet, tightening the blanket around him. He didn't want to look directly at Julie, yet. Dreaded seeing the terror in her eyes. So he kept his head lowered until he faced at Carl.

“Jesus, you look like crap,” he said.

Carl sat on the ground with Tonya standing protectively over him. The alpha looked haggard, and his shirt was a bloody rag. But the clean pad he pressed to his side was barely red. Which meant the worst of the bleeding was over. Carl had been looking over at the nearest body, eyes narrowed with worry, but at Mark's words, his gaze cut angrily back.

“I look like shit?” Carl said, his tone heavy with irony. “Maybe that's because my best friend is trying to get me to kill him.”

Mark shook his head. “You have got to stop torturing yourself. When it happens, it happens. You need to accept it. I certainly have.”

As Maximus of the Gladwin bear-shifters, Carl had the responsibility to kill any feral, including Mark. As bad as it was for Mark to slowly feel, day after day, pieces of his sanity getting lost to the bear, it was ten times worse for the alpha who had to watch it happen to his friend. Who had to wait, gun at the ready, dreading the day he would have to put a bullet in Mark's brain.

“You really need to learn to fight as a man, Mark,” Tonya suggested. “With a gun and a cell phone.”

“I didn't have time to get them,” he said. “
That
was attacking.” Mark looked at the nearest remains and was again hit by that nauseating sense of
wrong
. From what he could tell—and smell—it was a half-shifted human-bear where none of the pieces worked well together. It was just wrong and he flinched away from it. Especially since it was a dismembered mess, and he knew that he was the one who'd done the dismembering.

If he wasn't going to look there or at Carl, there was only one last place for his gaze to go. To Julie, with her horrified brown eyes and her tight swallows as she choked down both water and her fear. He'd been excruciatingly aware of her every moment that he'd been back as a functioning man. Hell, his bear had been focused on her, too, so he might as well face her now and the inevitable destruction of his heart.

He took his time, though, studying her cuts and bruises long before meeting her gaze. She wasn't badly hurt, though there were tons of scrapes and she'd probably feel achy for days. He wanted to lick every wound clean and kiss the worry from her. Not going to happen, he knew, but he could wish for a miracle, couldn't he?

Her face was still pale, her brown eyes shone with tears. She was trying to come to grips with what she'd seen and was balanced on the knife's edge of rejecting everything to declare it a toxin-induced hallucination. Swamp gas or something. Normals were known to come up with the weirdest explanations for shifters. But he didn't want her to be one of those blatant deniers—someone who would stubbornly fight the input of their own senses rather than face reality. So he smiled at her and—without clearing it with his alpha first—just flat-out told her the truth.

“Yes, Julie, everything you saw is real. I'm a shape-shifter. I change from man into bear and back again. When those things attacked, I protected you the best way I knew how: as a grizzly. I'm sorry I frightened you. I'm sorry you had to find out this way. But it's real and you're not crazy.”

She looked at him, her eyes widening to an impossible size, but there was no other reaction to his words. Mark waited in anxious silence, as did Carl and Tonya, waiting to see what route she'd choose. Denial, hysteria, fainting spell? Or maybe she'd be okay with it. Maybe she'd accept it as easily as she might turn on the Syfy channel and drop into one of their mysterious worlds.

She didn't seem to do any of that. Her gaze—like his had a moment before—shifted to the nearby body parts. So he answered her questions before she could voice them.

“Those aren't normal, and they're not right. We don't know what they are, and I know they kind of looked like a bear, but they're not what I am. What…” He almost said,
What Carl and Tonya are,
but that wasn't his secret to tell. “What a lot of people are. There are werewolves, were-cats, were…whatevers. You can't catch it by a bite, and we don't go howling at the moon—”

“The dogs do,” Tonya inserted with her typical dry humor.

Mark shot her an annoyed glare, but then immediately returned to Julie. “
We
don't, and I certainly don't. If you're trying to make logical, scientific sense of this, give it up. We've been working on that for generations. It's magic. Simple, unfathomable magic.”

Julie choked, the sound half gasp, half sob. He went for her immediately, but she flinched back and he froze. She didn't even look at him, but stared at Carl. “Did I hit my head?” she asked.

“No,” the alpha said gently. “It really happened. You're not crazy.”

She stared, her body starkly rigid. It was the stance of a woman trying not to vomit.

“You're in shock right now,” Mark said gently, hating the way her shoulder hunched when he spoke. “Give it some time. It's not a scary as it seems. Some people might even think it's fun. You know, like Hogwarts fun.”

She took a couple deep breaths, both loud and unsteady. But then she knotted her hand into a fist and stared at the tree line. “Hogwarts? That's Harry Potter, right? Or was that a
Twilight
reference?”

Mark gaped at her. He knew what she was doing. Focus on trivialities rather than deal with the big shit. But seriously, who didn't know the difference between Harry Potter and
Twilight
? “Damn, do I have a movie list for you,” he growled.

“Nah,” Tonya inserted. “Read the books. Way better.”

He would have said a lot more except the wail of a siren cut through their conversation. It was the ambulance, coming for Carl.

“Look, I know this is coming at you pretty fast,” Carl said.

“Ya think?” Julie answered with her first show of temper since the danger had passed. Mark counted that as a good thing.

Then Carl cut in. “Normally, we reveal ourselves in a more controlled manner.” He shot Mark a glare, but Mark just shrugged. So he broke protocol. What was Carl going to do? Shoot him? “We need you to not talk about this just yet. There are a lot of people who don't know.”

“Like Stevie,” Tonya said.

“And the ME,” Mark added. Damned if he knew how they were going to get around the woman now.

Carl shook his head. “No, I brought her in when we found Theo. Had to.”

Oh, right. And completely off point.

“In short,” Tonya cut in, her gaze cutting to the front where Stevie was running around the corner with two paramedics in tow, “we'd really like you to confine your freak-out to us. For now.”

Julie shot the woman a glare. “Do I look like I'm freaking out?”

“Yes, you do,” Tonya said. “Though in a quiet way, which I really appreciate.”

Julie looked at them one by one, ending with Mark. “On a scale from one to ten, I'm about twenty-seven on the freak-out scale. I start screaming at twenty-eight, so don't push it.” Then she paused, and her body tightened as if bracing herself. “Any other surprises in store for me?”

“A ton, actually,” Mark said and both Carl and Tonya shot him a glare. “But the worst is over. The rest will come once your logical mind comes back on line. It'll have doubts and questions and whatnot, but that's all perfectly normal.” He shrugged. “At least as normal as this thing gets.”

She looked at him then, holding his gaze while her eyes seemed to fill with all sorts of things he couldn't read. But she didn't speak because the paramedics had finally made it around the scattered body parts to start futzing with Carl.

Mark refused help. That was his norm. Nothing any doctor could do to help him. But he did stand around trying not to hover as they checked out Julie. She was good, but it was reassuring to hear them say it. As for Carl, his shifter healing had kicked in to stop the blood loss, but he still needed stitches. Not to mention a gallon of hydrogen peroxide.

Tonya had to go to the hospital with Carl. That was her job as beta to his alpha. She covered by claiming she'd take his statement. Stevie tried to grasp the opportunity to interview Julie, but Mark forestalled him.

“Tonya already took our statements. We can come by later to give more detailed information if you like, but for now, she's been through enough.”

Stevie didn't like it, but it was hard for anyone to fight Mark when he used his don't-mess-with-the-dying-bear gaze. It was cold, hard, and filled with the subliminal threat to tear the guy limb from limb if he got annoying. The poor newbie caved, though it took him an impressive amount of time to give in.

So Mark turned to Julie as if he were going to escort her back to her house. Even a grizzly could be chivalrous, right? But she was already halfway up the backyard, her face carefully turned away from the body beside her back door.

“Oh, shit,” he mumbled, then jogged to her side. Only, once there, he wasn't exactly sure what to do. He settled for a lame, “I'm so sorry, Julie—”

She held up her hand. They'd made it inside her house, but he was still a couple steps behind her. He desperately wanted to touch her, but her muscles were rigid, and her shoulders hunched. The body's way of screaming
Back off!
even if she was too polite to say it out loud.

He released a sigh. How quickly they'd fallen from where they'd started this morning. Pointless to pretend it didn't gouge a deep hole in his chest. Dying men didn't have the luxury of denying their feelings.

“I…I guess I'll just grab my clothes and go home,” he said. Then he looked at his filthy hands. “Though, maybe I could take a shower first? If you don't mind?”

He could run home filthy. It wouldn't be the first time, but he was hoping to delay their separation. Maybe if she got a little time to process things, he could talk to her after he was fully clean. After he looked and smelled like a man instead of a beast. Maybe.