Chapter 5
interruption
BOONE
Late spring was officially here, but winter was still being a sonuvabitch about leaving.
Fine by me. My polar bear didn’t mind an early morning dip in the lake on my multi-acre spread.
At temps that low, there was less chance a human would wander past and wonder why the hell a polar bear was swimming in Walker Boone’s private lake.
That cold spring morning, I toweled off after shifting back to human, threw on cargo pants and a SMOKE HAPPENS tee, then cast my line into the crystal-blue water.
Yeah, this was exactly how I liked it, I reminded myself.
No more coworkers asking me for their real orders because they didn’t trust the latest asshole with a Masters of Management diploma on the wall.
Only thing that dude knew how to do was peck out weekly newsletters full of corporate phrase-fuckery like “ensuring best outcomes,” “limiting liability,” and, my personal opposite of favorite, “keeping our insurance premiums sustainable.”
Didn’t matter that I didn’t need human medicine to heal the very few injuries I’d ever sustained in nearly three decades of being a smokejumper with a polar bear hidden underneath.
That dipshit was a desk-riding insult to the men who put their lives on the line every day to battle wildfires in the lower forty-eight.
Probably shouldn’t have punched him, though.
Losing my temper had punched me right on back with a forced retirement package. They called it “accepting an early pension,” but everybody knew that’s corporatese for “get the fuck out before we fire you.”
Anyway, I refused to get too upset about it.
Bought myself a nice spread in the middle of nowhere, Montana.
Had my lake. Had my quiet and a cabin I’d built with my own two hands, just like the old days when I thought I’d be going into construction and settling down in Bear Mountain—the Canadian town that had hired my father to build them a bunch of cabins to go along with the totem caves the Ayaska had exclusively lived in as far back as any of them could remember.
But forget that old dream. I was happy—okay, if not happy, I was fine. Fine with how my life had turned out. Barely even thought about all the stuff that had gone down back in Canada anymore—about the life I didn’t get, thanks to my shit-stain of a brother.
Which was why I frowned when yet another peaceful day of fishing alone on my lake was interrupted by an electronic chirping sound.
My phone.
Thought about ignoring it. For a half a second.
Only a handful of people even had my number, and one of them had been a member of my old unit. He’d warned me that he’d be calling me the second a wildfire broke out that needed extra hands.
With something I refused to call excitement beating in my chest, I switched the pole to my other hand to answer the phone.
Only to frown even deeper when I saw the Canadian country and area code rolling across the device’s screen.
What the hell? I hadn’t gotten a call from Canada in years…. Not since my brother’s ex died and my half-polar-bear nephew had called to tell me he was the new Tuk’Mara. Probably expected me to say his father would be proud or some bull like that.
I just said “Okay” and hung up.
But now Canada was calling again.
I didn’t answer. I wasn’t going to answer. If they wanted to tell me about another funeral I wasn’t planning on attending, they could just leave a voicemail.
Whatever it was, it wasn’t any of my business. And I didn’t want it to be.
I watched the phone continue to beep, rolling that unfamiliar number.
Bear dammit.
At the last minute, I jabbed a finger onto the answer button. Just so I wouldn’t have to bother trying to get into my voicemail system later on.
“Aw hell, don’t tell me another one of you black bears kicked the bucket,” I answered without bothering to ask who it was. “Was it Mak this time?”
“No, uncle, I’m right here,” Mak answered.
He was still in his twenties, but he sounded as weary as a guy my age.
Some kernel of concern tried to scratch at my chest—prickly and unwelcome. But I shoved that emotion all the way down where it belonged. In the basement box where I kept the timeline where I became his father instead of my older brother.
“Then you’ve got five seconds to explain why you’re calling me,” I growled.
“And if it’s about that Joining Ceremony, I already emailed in my ‘no way’ to that lovey-dovey shit.
If you wanna maul up, just do it. Don’t make the rest of us fly out and give you presents for some junk your tribe’s been doing since the goddamn Ice Age. ”
“This isn’t about the Joining Ceremony,” another voice said. Koda, Mak’s older brother. It was easy to guess because he sounded exactly like his uptight birth father, Vik, had at the same age.
“When we’re all mauled, I’m going to teach Zion how to cuss and you how to loosen up. Mara and Koda need at least one dad who knows how to have some goddamned fun.”
The promise I’d made Vik before I knew just how far my brother would go to fuck us over floated across my mind. Back when Mara and Koda were still little, and I thought I’d get to help raise the womb twins. Maybe add a cub of my own to their maul family that still needed a third husband.
But I shoved that down in the other timeline box, too.
Koda, who was now a grown man, not the little boy I’d once thought I’d co-parent, continued. “We’re hoping you’ll do your nephews a favor.”
Mak’s voice came next—my brother’s son, and technically my only nephew by blood. “Yeah, we need you to check in on the mother of our mates.”
I’d trashed that Joining Ceremony invite as soon as I was done reading it, but I’d gotten through enough of it to know that Koda and Mak had gnarled up their family tree branches but good.
The brothers had not only mauled up with the shaman’s oldest and youngest sons, but they’d somehow found two Outsider sisters willing to each take on a maul of three male bears.
Even I was having trouble keeping up on all the math with that one.
“Why the hell would I do that?” I ground out, winding the line up so I could cast it a little farther out.
“Her name’s Bell Winters. She lives in Minnesota.” Koda started filling me in on the details of their case, like my question had been the same as a yes. “Before Christmas, she took back the piece of trash she used to call a husband and went no-contact with her daughters.”
I raised an eyebrow. “So, you want me—the guy who lost your mother to his own brother—to go talk this Bell chick out of making a shitty choice?”
“Our mates are starting to think this isn’t just a bad choice,” Koda answered.
His voice became slightly less level. “She hasn’t RSVP’d for the Joining Ceremony—even with grandkids on the way.
And she didn’t get in contact with them, even after they sent her flowers for her birthday, which was on Mother’s Day. They’re scared….”
Koda’s voice dropped. “Uncle, they think something’s really wrong. Like, she’s-in-danger wrong.”
“Or worse,” Mak added, tone grim. “If it’s bad, we can’t let either of them just walk into that, even with one of us by their side.”
I opened my mouth, but Koda answered my obvious follow-up question before I had a chance to ask it. “Our bears won’t let us leave them alone while they’re pregnant to do it ourselves.”
Oh.
All my dreams of having a maul of my own had ended when their mother chose my brother over me, so I wouldn’t know anything about that firsthand. But I’d heard about how protective bear shifters could be of their mates, even with two other males in their maul.
“Trust me, uncle.” Koda’s level-headed Mountie voice interrupted my grouchy silence. “We wouldn’t be calling you—asking you to drive all the way to Minneapolis—if we weren’t desperate.”
I frowned.
Looked at the fishing pole I was pretty sure would catch a nibble if I just stopped yakking and got off the phone.
Scowled.
Reminded myself that I didn’t owe these two full-grown shifters on the other side of the line a goddamned thing. This wasn’t a fire. This woman had chosen a man over her own daughters. That bad decision didn’t have anything to do with me.
I gripped my fishing pole tight with my polar bear rumbling in my chest. Then I snarled out my answer.