Once Upon a Shifter (112 page)

“Oh, no,” she said, standing and then picking her way carefully across the room to her shelf, moving past the broken microfilm readers.

“No, no,” she said, staring down at the small wooden bookshelf.

“What?” asked Thomas, unfolding his own tall, thick form.

“It’s all gone,” she said. She scanned the floor desperately, looking for any of the books or periodicals she’d been keeping on that shelf, but she couldn’t see a single one of them.

Behind her, he walked carefully across the floor, and then she felt his hand on her shoulder.

“They’re just somewhere in the mess,” he said. She could tell that he was trying to sound soothing, but his voice had a tightness to it.

Sofia looked up at him, his face at least a foot above her own. She hadn’t known Thomas for very long — just a couple weeks — but it was long enough to tell when he was more worried than he was letting on.

“All my research is gone,” she whispered.

“Come on, let’s get out of here,” Thomas said, giving her shoulder a squeeze. “There’s broken glass everywhere. You already cut yourself.”

Sofia swallowed hard and forced back tears. They were just books, and she was being silly: the most important stuff was on her laptop, which was safe and secure in her bag. At least no one had been hurt during the break-in, and Thomas was probably right, her research was there somewhere.

“Okay,” she said, and let him lead her out.

***

An hour later, Sofia stood by the door to the California History Room, sipping the mug of chamomile tea that Thomas had given her. As soon as they’d called the police, he’d taken her to his office and, over her protestations, gotten out his very small first aid kit, bandaging up her cut finger.

It hadn’t needed more than a bandaid, and not even a big one at that, but somehow, his insistence that he take care of it made Sofia feel better, the way he’d carefully cleaned it, making sure there was no glass in it, and then put medical tape around the band aid itself, just to make extra sure that she wouldn’t reopen the cut.

As she stood there, sipping tea, she watched him answer the police officer’s totally routine questions. He was the epitome of tall, dark, and handsome: at least six foot three if not taller, with a powerful body that suggested a life spent working outdoors more than it did a gym.

Right now he was wearing a plaid flannel shirt that he’d tucked into his brown slacks and rolled up to his elbows, showing off his tattoos.

He had two full sleeves, both depicting stylized forest scenes: on his right arm, a mountain lion stalked around his forearm, and on the left, an enormous grizzly bear. Above them, moving above the elbows, opened a canopy of trees, full of birds and squirrels and everything that lived above the forest floor.

Sofia hadn’t been brave enough to ask to see the rest of the tattoos yet. Then Thomas would have to remove his shirt, and while she wouldn’t have minded, she couldn’t just
ask
.

“Has anyone been interested in his room recently?” asked the office, a shorter, portly man who had to tilt his head back to look at Thomas.

Thomas just shook his head.

“Not that I can think of,” he said, his colorful arms crossed in front of him. “I mean, people ask about this door sometimes, or want to know what’s in the California History Room, but I tell them that it’s mostly newspaper and microfiche, and they’re not interested anymore.”

“And you’re a librarian?” asked the officer.

“I’m the computer guy,” said Thomas. “I keep all the technology running in here.”

“That must be a task,” the other officer said. She was taller and thinner, though not nearly as tall as Thomas, of course.

Thomas shrugged. “It’s not so bad,” he said.

“You didn’t use this room to store anything?” the officer asked. “No technology, or something valuable like that?”

Thomas just shook his head. “The server room is next door,” he said. “Untouched.”

The two police officers looked at each other, clearly both baffled.

“It’s a head scratcher,” the man said. “My best guess is that some bum or junkie thought there’d be something valuable in here, and when there wasn’t, they took a couple of books to sell and then tore the place apart.”

Sofia looked through the doorway one more time. She felt a little sick over the loss of those books. Some she’d read already, but someone she’d only set aside to go through later. Now her dissertation was behind by another month, at least.

“Thanks for coming,” she said.

“We’ll check out all the other names on this sign-in list,” the woman cop said. “But they’re months old. I wouldn’t expect too much if I were you.”

Sofia and Thomas both just nodded.

“We’ll tell Francis that we’re on the way out,” said the male cop. “Let us know if you remember anything.”

“Thanks,” said Sofia and Thomas in unison as the two cops left, their thick shoes pounding up the delicate staircase.

Sofia slumped against the wall, listlessly looking into the room that, until this morning, had been her happy place. She’d
loved
going in there to do her dissertation, finding primary sources on the legends of werebears in the lower Sierra Nevada. Specifically, she was studying the legends of werebears and the early gold miners in Placerville, one of the towns that had sprung up during the gold rush of 1849.

Well, she
had
been studying that. Now, she might have to find something else to study — there weren’t a lot of copies of a books from the mid-1850s that still existed, and someone had just stolen a bunch of them.

“Hey,” said Thomas, his voice breaking into her thoughts. He reached out and took the mug from her hands, slipping an arm around her shoulders.

Even
that
couldn’t quite cheer her up, as acutely aware of his presence as she always was.

“We’ve got rubber gloves and boots in a closet somewhere,” he said. “They’re for flooding and water damage, after that time ten years ago that a pipe burst, but they’ll work for glass.”

Sofia tried to smile.

“All right,” she said.

***

Thirty minutes later, when Francis found the two of them carefully sweeping glass shards and re-stacking the wrecked newspapers, she wasn’t thrilled.

“You’re not even an employee,” she said to Sofia, her hands on her hips.

Sofia looked up at her, a huge chunk of broken plate glass in one rubber-gloved hand.

“You’re not covered by our insurance,” Francis explained, still fretting.

“I promise not to sue,” said Sofia. She dropped the chunk into a paper bag and it made a soft cracking sound against all the other glass shards in the bag.

Francis frowned, clearly unhappy about the situation, but not quite unhappy enough to argue.

“And you,” she said to Thomas, her tone beginning to soften. “This isn’t your job at all.”

“I’ve got nothing on my plate that can’t wait until tomorrow, Frankie,” he said. “I’m not even getting behind, I promise.”

He smiled and looked up at the older woman. It was a smile that tended to work wonders, and Sofia knew it.

Francis sighed, crossing her arms in front of her torso, but clearly losing the will to argue with the two of them.

“Just be careful,” she said. “My husband is coming to nail the plywood over the windows in a few hours, by the way.”

“Thanks, Frankie,” said Thomas, a smile in his voice.

The older librarian left the two of them alone to pick up newspapers and glass.

“You don’t have to help, you know,” Sofia said, quietly.

Thomas shrugged.

“I really don’t have that much to do,” he said. “Unless someone sneaks in soda again in their kid’s sippy cup and spills it into the printer, I’m mostly for decoration.”

You’ve got that right,
Sofia thought.

“Still, you must have something better to do than pick up glass.”

“I like helping you out,” he said.

Sofia felt his eyes on her face, and looked up at him. He was gazing at her intently, just for a split second, and then he looked back down to the floor.

“Someone new around here is always pretty exciting,” he said.

Chapter Two

Finally, six hours later, most of the glass was cleaned up, some of the scattered newspaper re-stacked, and Thomas and Sofia went into the staff bathroom to rinse off their gloves.

They hadn’t found any of the books that she’d set aside for herself, though, no matter how hard Thomas had helped her look.

He’d barely been able to contain his fury about the break-in all day, even as he was trying to comfort poor Sofia, distraught about this setback to her PhD. Who the hell broke into a public library, destroyed a bunch of old papers, and stole something completely worthless like that?

The glass they could clean, the newspapers they could pick up. He even thought that he could fix the busted microfiche reader, but the books she needed were just missing. It was enough to make his skin itch and tingle, his bear desperate to get out and go on a rampage.

And Thomas had a pretty good idea of where to begin the rampage.

“I think I’m going to head over to the Tipsy Miner,” Sofia said. “Do you want to come?”

Her eyes flicked quickly to his in the mirror, and he thought again about how beautiful she was, all red lips and soft curves, especially bent over the sink like she was right now.

Thomas could just see the outline of her luscious body through her dress, and even though she was tired and a little disheveled, it was all he could do not to lick his lips.

“I told my folks I’d go to their place for dinner,” he lied.

He nearly kicked himself, but it was the right thing to do. Of
course
he wanted to go get drinks with Sofia, but he wouldn’t feel okay until he confronted the person he suspected was responsible for this.

“Oh,” she said, looking back down at the sink. She shut her water off and reached for the paper towels.

“Another time,” he said, quickly. He didn’t want her to think he wasn’t interested.

He was
very
interested, though things might also be a little... complicated.

“Thanks for all your help,” Sofia said, holding open the bathroom door for both of them go walk through. “See you tomorrow?”

“See you tomorrow,” Thomas confirmed, and then watched Sofia walk up the stairs, her hips swinging from side to side as she went.

It was a captivating sight.

***

As the sun went down, he was in his pickup truck, gunning it through the narrow, winding mountain roads. The radio here was starting to come in and out, so he reached out and turned it off, his knuckles white on the steering wheel.

He was headed for Glenn’s house, because he had a pretty good idea of who was behind the library break-in.

Glenn was the Sierra pack’s beta, and he considered himself its
consigliere
too, after seeing the Godfather movies too many times. He was best friends with Kane, the pack’s alpha, and the two had outdated ideas about what being a bear shifter meant.

To them, it meant no outside involvement, no being friends or — God forbid — lovers with humans. For Glenn and Kane and most of the men of their generation, the outside, human world was a thing to be hated, and they kept themselves apart from it as much as possible.

The problem was, it wasn’t really possible any more.

As far as Thomas was concerned, their policy of keeping to themselves was actively bad for the pack. He’d gone away to college and moved back to Placerville, but only about half of the kids he’d grown up with had done that — the rest left for life in the big city, preferring bright lights and excitement over the small town where they’d grown up, and Thomas couldn’t blame them.

Last week, he’d made the mistake of mentioning Sofia’s research to a buddy of his, Glenn’s son, and now it had mostly been stolen amidst a pile of broken glass.

If Glenn and Kane disapproved of humans and shifters interacting, they were solidly against humans learning the shifters’ secret. The problem was that Glenn and Kane also weren’t very smart. Sofia didn’t think that shifters were real.

No human thought that. After all, it was completely insane to believe that there were people who could turn into bears, after all.

Sofia was just studying legends, and she thought that shifters were about as real as the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy. She didn’t even
consider
that they might be real. It was the stories she was interested in, but Glenn and Kane didn’t understand that at all. They thought that if they could take the books she needed, they could keep her from figuring out the truth.

She wasn’t anywhere near the truth, Thomas knew. Sofia had no idea that there was a truth to know, and Glenn and Kane were making it worse, not better.

Finally, as the sky turned red and then purple between the trees, Thomas turned into Glenn’s long gravel driveway, gunning his truck’s engine up the steep incline. He parked in front of the big, log cabin-style house, got out, and rang the doorbell.

A tall, plump woman came to the door, wearing a sweater and an apron. She frowned when she saw Thomas.

“Everything all right?” she asked without preamble.

Thomas gave her the same easy smile that he’d given Francis earlier that day, even though it was hard, the adrenaline beginning to pump through his veins.

“Everything’s fine, Mrs. Long,” he said. “Is Glenn home? I wanted to talk to him about something.”

She turned and began walking for the kitchen again, gesturing after Thomas to follow her in. It wasn’t unusual for people to just drop by their house — Glenn and his buddies were notorious luddites who didn’t even like telephones, let alone cell phones or the internet.

“He’s not home yet,” she said, returning to stir a big pot of something with one hand as she sprinkled salt into it with the other. “The boys are out on a hunting trip for more venison, so I’m not really sure where they are or when they’ll be back.”