The Bear's Arranged Mate: A Bear Shifter Romance Novel (9 page)

“Cecily,” she cried, “my poor Cecily.”

The maid had been hit in the abdomen, much like Patrick. There was too much blood, and Sarah felt another sting – she had already seen death today, the idea of seeing it again, in the face of someone she loved beyond words, was too much. She sobbed, her shoulders quaking.

“S’okay, m’lady‘tis a scratch,” Cecily said bravely, and her face changed. “The baby. They took the baby. I’m so so sorry. I tried to stop them, I did. But they were too strong, Bears, all of them.”

She wouldn’t have stood a chance
, Sarah realized.

“You were
so
brave, my love,” Sarah said, stroking the young girl’s forehead, “the bravest girl I know.”

“That’s kind of you to say, mum,” she said, “but I don’t feel brave. I’m scared.”

Sarah knelt down with a sincere smile, and the maid closed her eyes. It took Sarah several minutes to stand back up, and when she did, everyone around her took a step back, as if at any moment she might explode. She was like a tempest, a swirling wrath of fury bubbling in the ether. They had never seen Sarah truly angry – but as she turned and marched back toward Connor she was not the same woman. Something had changed in her, something had snapped.

No, rather something had wrung itself in her, tight and bundled like a rope that would support the vengeance of both parents. She stood in front of Connor, who stared straight ahead, his own visage one of contempt and revenge. The charred remains of the lodge smoldered and Marcus followed his gaze. He was looking out the way he’d come, into the dark depths of the Canadian wilderness where his father had died. Where the Bloodweres had started something they could not undo.

Sarah put her head straight against his collarbone and closed her eyes – his hand came up and touched the back of her head and they stood there motionless.

“What are your orders, my liege?” Marcus asked.

“You, sit down and have someone take a look at that,” Connor said flatly, “we still need you. And I’m not losing any more of my kin today.”

Sarah looked up at him. “What about Cora?”

“The Bloodweres want a war with the Clawgroves and the Greybacks,” he replied in the same monotone voice, but there was something portentous in his throat now, something sharp that promised to cut through the cords of the world. “They’ve got one.”

***

The rest of the day was spent dealing with the arson. Eventually the fire engine from below came up, but by then the Greyback entourage had retreated back down to the village. There was nothing left of the lodge, anyhow. Now it hung above the village like a smoldering reminder of what they’d lost. It was also a beacon, a way of bolstering their hatred and anger into something productive.

There were relatively few casualties, but each time Connor saw another sheet draped over a body, his face only strained harder.
They haven’t just attacked us, they’ve brought this outside the realm of Bears, and into humans
, Sarah realized. If there was one thing worse than killing another Bear, it was killing a human. There could be no turning back.

In one of the old warehouses that housed some machinery, the entourage mingled with survivors from the fire, and Connor tried to mediate his own resources. Some of his guards, including Marcus would keep an eye out for any other Bloodweres, while some of the maids and other envoys would assist with finding food and blankets, and tending to the wounded.

A few triage tents were arranged, but resources were limited.  Marcus made sure that all the most heavily injured were taken by the few transport vehicles in town to a bigger city. In the meantime, everyone else would be on their own. If the Bloodweres came back, they’d have even fewer people and vehicles with which to retaliate. Connor, as well as Sarah, suspected that that wasn’t the case.

For Sarah, time passed as slowly as ever – and yet, before she knew it, the sun was in the west again. She knew that she was in shock, and  this was  what shock felt like. A kind of muted hopelessness, like there was nothing she could do. She could only wait, try to be useful. The whole time, her mind was filled with death and Cora. It wasn’t just Cecily and Patrick, although their faces were frozen in her heart – it was Caroline, too.

But Cora
, every time she thought about her baby, something shifted in her stomach and she felt like throwing up. She valued the sensation of being in shock because she knew that when it wore off, she would be even more of a mess. She didn’t want to feel; it was better to feel empty, hollow, like this. Now, as she went outside and sat down on the curb of the street, and looked up she knew that it was coming back.

She cried into her hands, weeping until there were no tears. Connor finally found her and wrapped his arm around her.

“It’s going to be okay,” he promised, “we’ll find her. I promise. I swear to you.”

“Why did they take her??” she half sobbed again, “she’s just a child!”

“They must have a reason… and that means they don’t want to hurt her. She’s okay, I promise you. And we
will
get her back.”

“It’s all my fault, Connor.”

“What are you talking about?”

“
I’m
the one who said that I should accompany you.
I’m
the one that brought Cora along. It was all a trap, meant for her. And I led Cora into it and tripped the trap shut.”

He made a shushing sound and brought her head closer to his, hugging her more tightly as a fresh stream of tears erupted out of her eyes and her face contorted. “That’s not true. None of this is your fault. You love Cora, as I love you. You would never do anything to hurt her, I know that. What happened, was the Bloodweres.”

“I brought her here,” she insisted.

“You came with me to protect me,” he said, “because you knew that the hope of peace was worth it. You, me, Cora, we’re a family. We’re always together.”

“Oh, Connor, I’m so scared, what if they hurt her?”

He shushed again, and rocked her gently back and forth on the curb. “Not going to happen,” he said, “I made a promise to you once that I would always protect you, no matter what; that I would never leave you. I made that promise to Cora, too. I’m not in the habit of breaking my promises.”

He leaned over her and kissed her and she kissed him back, touching his bristled face.

“I’m ugly right now, don’t kiss me.”

“You’re the most beautiful woman in the world,” he said, “and you’re my wife.”

“They have a day head-start on us. You don’t think they’re coming back?”

“You heard Cecily… I think they meant to take Cora. In which case, they probably want us to follow them.”

“We should have left immediately.”

“And leave everyone here… to die, or worse? You couldn’t do that. Neither could I. That’s what makes us good and decent people. You can try to pretend that you’re not, but I know that you are.”

“What are we doing to do?”

He looked up at the stars and pointed. “You see that? Big dipper. You know the Latin name for that constellation?”

“Ursa major,” she replied.

“That’s right. The large Bear in the heavens. Sailors and explorers would often use the stars to steer their way. They could look up, no matter where they were, and the stars were always there… like a fixed point. A landmark one could use to find their way home.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The Bloodweres are clumsy. They’ve been Bears for so long they’ve forgotten what it means to be in balance with their human side. That will be their downfall. I intend to find them using their weakness.”

“What weakness is that?”

He grinned. “They stink,” he said, and then elaborated, “you smelled that girl earlier right? The one without an eye? What did she smell like?”

“Like… like this place. Like smoke. Like burning.”

“That’s right. It’s a crude way of stirring up trouble, but effective, I’ll grant them that. But that girl hadn’t bathed in weeks. She reeked, and the reek of smoke had stuck to her skin. I would venture a guess that she was among the group  that set the chalet on fire.”

“So, you think the Bears who set the village on fire probably smell like smoke, too?”

“If they’re as ragged and filthy as that girl, I sure do. We’ll set out at first light, follow them by Bear-sign. We won’t stop until we find Cora and bring her back to us. I won’t stop until you’re both safe with me.”

She leaned into his arm and gulped. She felt a bit better talking to him, even if she knew that he was trying to give her hope, where perhaps there wasn’t any. It was still a comfort. She took in a deep breath and wiped at her cheeks and eyes.

“Then we run, my love.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

As promised, Connor was up early the next morning before her. She’d had many strange dreams in the night, and not all of them pleasant. She saw Patrick as a great white bear, coming down out of the forest to guide them. He looked older again, as if it were possible to get any older, but his eyes were kind and happy. He seemed to say with his expression that he had lived a good life. While his life was over, the lives of his son and his daughter-in-law, as well as their first-born, was a chapter that had many more pages to it, yet.

He’d led them deep into the woods, and at some point, they had lost sight of him. Even in the blackness she had heard something only a mother could recognize: the laughter of Cora. That was when she awoke, shivering, in a cold sweat. She tried to shake the cobwebs from her brain as she stepped outside.

Many other bodies were still sleeping around her, survivors from the arson. There were some muted snores and mumblings. When she stumbled out of the makeshift camp, she could see that Connor and Marcus had been constructing something in the wee hours. She winced and saw the purple colors of sunrise just beginning to hint on the horizon – it reminded her of one of her mother’s paintings.

She vowed that when this was all over, she would go back to painting. There were things that paintings could convey, when words were useless. It was the same when she was in Bear form; language became something clumsy and heavy, awkward. There were other ways of communicating, and she suspected that her mother had known that well.

“Feel better Marcus?” she asked, pointing at his abdomen.

He tapped his side. “I may not be as good as healer as a Clawgrove,” he said, patting Connor on the shoulder, “but my weave is good. I’ll be at your side every step of the way.”

“You won’t,” Connor said, smiling complacently, “I need you here. The others will need your protection if the Bloodweres do indeed try to come back.”

“My liege!” he protested, “I can still fight. Please.”

Connor cupped the older man’s head and leaned his forehead against his. “You are our greatest warrior, Marcus. That’s why you need to protect the others. You were the one who trained Sarah… trust in your training.”

“Just the two of you? That’s madness.”

“It’s necessary,” Sarah said, “we discussed it last night, whether or not the Bloodweres expect us to come after them, they are most likely expecting us to
come
en
force
. I intend to disappoint them. Just Connor and I… we’ll be a small enough party that we can more easily evade any Bloodwere patrols we find.”

“And what happens when you find their nest?”

Connor reached down and held up a jerry-rigged harness of leather. Sarah cocked her head. “Is that what I think it is?” she said.

“We’ll need to cover a lot of ground. The best and stealthiest way of doing that would be to stay as Bears. But as Bears, we can’t exactly carry anything with us,” he held up a satellite radio from a bag that was hooked to the harness. “We’ll have some implements here, when we do find their leaders.  When we find them, we’ll give you the coordinates. It will be up to you, then, to strike hard at their heart.”

Marcus stiffened and his face tightened in approval. “I’ll arrange for helicopters and some more of my men from the Estate. Quietly, of course,” he grinned.

Connor and Sarah both began to disrobe until they were naked again. Marcus took their clothes and took a step back as Connor changed first, his shaggy brown hair transforming into a massive pelt. Sarah leaned her body against him and helped tie in the first harness, and then changed herself while Marcus strapped on the second harness.

The leather was a bit uncomfortable at first, but it was a good idea. Both of them looked a little odd, and had they been in human form, might have laughed. Instead, there came a huffing and pawing of the ground. Each had two bags on either side, clipped fast to the harness.

There was no ritual or hesitation as the two Bears moved off – they knew what they had to do and there was a simple and unabated honesty in their departure. Marcus must have felt it too, because he made no effort to say goodbye, only watched them lumber off, first at a slow gait, and then faster until they disappeared up the ridge. A smile spread on his lips, but whether it was because of his confidence in the two parents, his yearning for a much-anticipated revenge against the Bloodweres, or something else entirely, it was impossible to say.

It didn’t take long for Connor to pick up their scent – he had been right about everything. When the Bloodweres turned back into humans, they’d been clumsy, and let the smell of the smoke and accelerant stick to their bodies. As soon as they transformed back into Bears, the smell had stuck with them.
Using their weakness against them
, she thought to herself.

Their loping gait synchronized up perfectly, and she tried to shut down the rational thinking part of her mind – for now, it would only slow her down. Instead, she tried to silence all the other thoughts, and focused solely on the task at hand. That was how Bears thought, in their primal state, anyway. There was something singular and unified in her thoughts, whether it was the trail in front of them, navigating a creek, or the feel of the sun branching down through the canopy of conifers.

All her practice of turning into a Bear on the grounds of the Estate was now being tested, and she found herself actually having to slow down and look behind her as Connor struggled to keep up. He was just as strong as she by virtue of being a male, but there was something more driven and motivated in her. Every time she let her mind wander, she felt a fresh surge of anger and it only served to accelerate her pace and stream her system with more endorphins.

All morning they clambered through the wilderness. At another time, she would have been distracted by all the different scents of a new place, but between the two of them, they were both able to police their focus on sticking to the intangible trail that had been left by the Bloodweres. They weren’t just as clumsy as humans either, they soon found. They clearly weren’t thinking long-term, as their movement through the forest had been swift and awkward, with no thought to covering their tracks. Embedded in soft dirt and on the gravel shores of interweaving creeks, they found evidence of Bear claws. More than that, they’d rubbed their scent off on trees and branches as they fled deeper.

Although they couldn’t communicate with words, at one point Connor barked at her and when she turned, he had a worried look on his face, and his ears twitched, his muzzle pulling back in a snarl. She got the message clear enough.

Either the Bloodweres are incredibly stupid and naïve, or else they’re leading us somewhere. They want us to follow
, she thought.

They kept moving, taking only small breaks to lap up creek water and rehydrate or to pluck their tongues across bushes of huckleberries, which were already ripening in the summer air like slow perfect bruises. It wasn’t until night began to descend again that they stopped. Connor turned into a human, and the heavy leather harness and bags fell off his naked form in a heap on the ground. He noticed that Sarah was still in Bear form and growled, and he moved forward and touched her head.

“I want to keep going, too,” he said, “but you’re exhausted. You may not feel it, but running all day has taken its toll. We don’t know how far the Bloodweres fled. They have almost a day ahead of us, and it’s possible we’ll be on the run for several more days. We need to sleep, and more importantly, to eat… c’mon…”

His voice was like a soothing salve, and quietly she accepted his plea and transformed. Her black hair wrapped around her bodice and breasts like a cloak, and she was silent.

After they’d dressed and Connor had made a small fire for them to sit around, he brought her some food.  It was dry rations, the type she’d had to endure for weeks on end when she’d been training at the Estate. She was used to it, and they reminded her in a way of the old times. It wasn’t that she missed them in particular, but there had been something simple about those days.

It had been a long and weary childhood, but one which was rooted in predictable events. She could understand the call to that comfort.
No surprises
, she thought. At the same time, she knew that if she ever had to go back to that kind of life, it would kill her. Looking back on the past was like catching your reflection in a stagnant pool of water. Her life now was much better, even if it meant more responsibility, even if it had invariably led to so much suffering – it was a hard balance to reconcile in her head.

“How much further do you think?” Connor asked to get her mind off it.

She looked up and bit down on some jerky. It tasted sweet in her mouth, and she realized she was starving as she tore off a slice and spoke through a second bite.  “Right now we’re about a day’s move from the chalet…” she tried to do some quick math in her head, “and taking into account the other events that weren’t officially attributed to the Bloodweres, the arson of the village. I don’t know, I would think maybe a good day’s walk east by north-east.”

He took out a map from one of the satchels and traced his finger over their approximate location. “That would put them squarely in the shadow of the Devil’s Couch,” he said, indicating a rise on the topography, “it’s one of the bigger mountain ranges.”

“Good name,” she observed.

“Just a name,” he said, “but it does have me a bit worried. Still, it would make a perfect hideout for them, if you think about it. Those steep cliffs probably have caves inside them. And it’s far enough out of the way that you wouldn’t get many visitors, human or Bear.”

“It also will be difficult for Marcus to navigate,” she queried, “these high mountain ranges deflect incoming northern winds, funneling them down these two valleys. As long as the weather keeps being nice, it shouldn’t be a problem. But even the slightest storm and that area would be a hazardous maze of wind currents.”

“I hadn’t thought about that,” he realized, and marveled at her intuition again. She had a unique gift for seeing things other people didn’t see; it was what made them both such a competent team of strategists.

“We can make it here, by tomorrow,” she said, indicating another smaller rise, “this looks like a plateau. It’ll give us a good vantage of the Devil’s Couch. I think we should also break from the trail around here. If they
are
leading us into a trap, I’d like to be outside of it when it springs shut. With just two of us, it should be easy to flank them.”

“Assuming they’re actually leading us… and assuming they are actually at the Devil’s Couch.”

“You said it before, my love, sometimes you have to take a risk.”

He nodded and refolded the map, stowing it back in the satchel. The fire in front of them crackled a bit and cast a spark into the ground, which he stomped out blindly. Around them, the sounds of the forest seemed to shrink back.

“How many of them are there, do you think?” he asked again after a few minutes.

She did another bit of mental math in her head, trying to recall all the different paw sizes she had seen and correlated them with the amount of damage she had seen done to the undergrowth. “It would have taken at least five of them to start that fire so quickly in the village,” she said, “but could it be anywhere from ten. However, I feel like this was probably a shock group. It would have needed to be small in order to get away quickly with…” she gulped her daughter’s name, “Cora.

“That woman,” he said, “was talking about someone named Damon.”

Sarah came over, touched his thigh, and ran her hand up his leg. He smiled and reached around, rubbing her back. She let out a little sigh and stood up, swinging her leg over him so she was straddling him face to face, and pulled off her shirt.

“I don’t know if this is a good idea,” he said.

She pulled his head down towards her breasts and he licked her nipple, causing it to stiffen upright in his mouth, and brought his front two teeth gently down on it. She gasped.

“I just want to feel loved right now,” she said.

He smiled and buried his face further into her bosom, squeezing her breasts roughly, and she began to move her pelvis into him, rubbing herself against the hard bulge that had started to form under his pants. She let out a long moan and he felt the length of her spine curve up like a cat’s as she worked herself against him.

In moments, she had pulled his pants down and his penis flipped upward, wet and glistening. She relieved herself of her panties and straddled him again; feeling his penis push up against the folds of her labia, tease at the red button of her clitoris, which was now fully engorged.

“You’re wet,” he said, reaching down and rubbing his finger across her pubis.

“You, too,” she said and grabbed his member in her hand, guiding it slowly up into her vagina.

She let out a sound which could have been pain, and her lips opened again as he impaled her slowly, his penis widening against her, and felt a gush of warm liquid push out of her, coating his sex in a sticky ichor. She groaned again as he grabbed her lower back and pulled her against him. His hands moved down and began to move her buttocks up and down.

She gasped, both hands on his shoulders, and moved her hips, bouncing on top of him. She looked down and saw her pubic hair was wet and matted against her. Running all day, and with all the extra tension, she had been trying to restrain her libido, but now it came out in all its fullness and she pressed her mouth into his.