Chapter 9
Mark 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.