Scented By The Lone Bear Shifter (Redwood Ridge Shifters #6)

Chapter 1

Chapter One

REESE

Four months a year, I disappear.

The tower sits at nine thousand feet, a glass box bolted to a granite spine, and from up here the whole forest belongs to me.

Crystal Lake to the east. The Silver Queen Mine to the south.

Miles of lodgepole and spruce running green to the horizon where the San Juans bite into the sky.

I've watched this country burn and freeze and bloom back green every summer for thirteen years, and not once have I wanted company while I did it.

My bear likes the quiet too. That's the thing my brothers never understand.

Ezra's got Margot now, Declan's got Ruby, every one of them paired off and nesting like the whole point of being a Redwood is finding someone to crowd your bed.

My grizzly doesn't ache the way theirs do.

He runs. He sleeps under stars. He patrols the borders Sterling assigns me and he comes back to this tower content in a way the rest of the sleuth can't fathom.

The radio crackles. I check the smoke map out of habit. Nothing burning. Good.

Lightning storm came through two nights back and I've been watching the ridgeline ever since, waiting for a strike that smoldered.

Dry summer. Beetle kill on the north slopes makes the timber go up like a struck match.

So I sit with my binoculars and my coffee gone cold and I do the only job I've ever been any good at, which is paying attention to a world that doesn't pay attention back.

The cabin a mile below mine has had a light on since June.

I noticed it the first week. Hard not to, when the only other structure in my sightline is a McCall rental that sits empty most summers.

Somebody took it. A woman, going by the laundry that shows up on the line some mornings and the way the windows fog when she cooks.

She keeps strange hours. Three in the morning the light burns.

Noon she's dark, sleeping probably. I've built a whole picture of her without ever seeing her face.

I shouldn't care. People rent the cabin. They come, they hike, they leave.

This one writes. I can see it from here, the hunch of her at the table, the lamp pulled close.

Sometimes she stands and paces and her mouth moves like she's arguing with the walls.

Once I watched her throw a notebook clean across the room and then walk over and pick it up and smooth the pages flat with both hands like she was apologizing to it.

I told myself I was watching for fire risk. A cabin that runs a wood stove all summer is a hazard worth tracking.

I'm a liar.

The shift comes on me around dusk. My skin gets too tight for the man inside it and the bear leans hard against the back of my ribs, asking. I don't fight him. Never have. I strip on the catwalk where nobody can see, fold my clothes on the rail, and let go.

The change rolls through me clean. Bone and muscle resetting, the world going sharp and close and full of information my human nose can't hold.

I drop to four feet on the platform and shake out my coat and then I'm down the tower stairs and into the trees, moving silent through country that's mine down to the dirt.

This is the part I'd never trade. The run. The cold creek water and the smell of elk bedded down in the draw and the absolute rightness of being exactly what I am with nobody around to need anything from me.

I take the long loop tonight. Down through the burn scar from two summers back, where fireweed grows purple and thick. Along the lake where a moose lifts her head and decides I'm not worth the trouble. Up the far ridge and back, my paws sure on rock I've crossed a hundred times.

And then the wind shifts.

It comes off the cabin below, warm air rising the way it does after sundown, and it carries something my grizzly has never scented in thirty-three years of breathing.

I stop.

Every animal in these mountains has a smell I know. Bear, all three sleuths, the grizzly and the Kodiak and the little black bears of Aspen Hollow. I've crossed paths with rogues and Wardens and mated pairs. I know the scent of my own kind the way I know my own name.

This is shifter. That much my bear is certain of, certain enough that he comes up roaring behind my eyes, certain enough that the breath stops in my chest.

But she's not any sleuth I've ever crossed.

She's cold. Not the cold of fear, not the cold of dead things.

Cold like the air coming off a glacier, clean and old and so far north it makes my chest ache to breathe it.

Cold like a place I've never been and somehow recognize.

Under it there's woman, warm and living, and ink and woodsmoke and something I'll spend the rest of my life trying to name and never managing it.

My grizzly stops breathing.

I mean that. The animal in me, who has never wanted a single thing he couldn't hunt or sleep through, goes dead still in the dark with the wind in his face and forgets the mechanics of his own lungs.

What is she.

I'm moving before I decide to. Down the slope toward the cabin, quiet as I know how to be, which is quiet enough that the deer don't startle. The scent gets stronger and my bear gets louder and the man in me, the part that should know better, has gone somewhere I can't reach him.

The cabin sits in a clearing fifty yards ahead. Light burning in the window. Three in the morning, except it's not, it's barely full dark, and she's awake anyway because of course she is.

I stop at the tree line.

I can see her through the glass. Dark hair loose down her back. Pale skin that doesn't look like it's seen a summer sun in years. She's standing at the counter with a mug in both hands, looking out the window at the dark, at the trees, at the exact spot where I'm standing without knowing I'm there.

And her scent rolls over me again, that impossible cold, and my bear does something he has not done in thirteen years of solitude up here.

He wants to stay.

Not to hunt. Not to patrol. Just to plant himself in this tree line and watch her drink her tea and make sure nothing in these woods ever gets close enough to put fear in her face.

Mine.

The word lands in me with no warning and no permission.

I don't know her name. I don't know what she is.

I know she's the rarest thing I've ever scented and I know my grizzly has decided something about her that the rest of me hasn't caught up to, and I know that for the first time since I climbed up to this tower a boy of twenty and shifted alone under the stars, I am not content to be the only thing breathing on this mountain.

She sets the mug down. Pushes the hair off her face. Says something to the empty room, and the wind carries it up to me in a language that isn't English.

French. Soft and frustrated and talking to nobody.

My bear settles into the dark to listen, and I let him, and somewhere far below us both the man I used to be an hour ago is gone for good.

I don't go back to the tower until the light in her window finally goes out.