Chapter 12 #3
He flashed her a brief smile. “His interest grew over the years, but it wasn’t until this summer that he found more information on that story. Ingredients to a binding spell.” He gestured behind him to the kitchen. “We even tried to re-create it.”
So that’s what that thing in the refrigerator was. She’d found a bottle labeled “Experiment 7” stored behind the beer. It was now on the counter in preparation for the trash. “And? What happened?”
He looked back out the window. From her angle, she could see his head turn slightly as he steadily scanned the environment. “And nothing. I couldn’t tell him what I was looking for. I asked for bonding rituals, love spells and the like. I even paid him for the work and drank the potions.”
“Seriously?” His silence told her that he had indeed slammed back experiments one through six. “What did you find?”
“A killer case of indigestion and really bad BO.” His gaze returned to hers. “And your dad had a heart attack.”
Her eyes widened. “He didn’t drink them, did he?”
“Only me. And we made sure nothing was poisonous.” He gestured to the bottle on the counter. “I’m not supposed to try that one until the next full moon.”
Because that made logical sense—not. Meanwhile he turned to look at her dad’s office. “There were more recipes that we hadn’t tried yet. I’ve already looked on his desktop. There isn’t anything there, so it must have been on his tablet or in his journals.”
The missing tablet and journals. This is why he’d been alarmed by the “wrong” scent in the office. This is why he thought someone had stolen the information. Because it might contain the key to him staying human.
“We need to tear this place apart,” she said. “We’ve got to find—”
He shook his head. “I already did that while you were away. They’re not here.”
Which led credence to the idea that an evil someone had stolen her father’s research. “That’s why they attacked,” she said softly, the pieces falling into place. Not to mention a killer case of the heebie-jeebies. “I’m the only one who can read his notes.”
“What?”
“Have you seen my dad’s handwriting? It’s appalling, and that’s when he’s not writing in shorthand.”
He touched her arm. “Are you saying that whatever was stolen—can’t be read?”
“Anything on the tablet is probably understandable. Anything in his journals would look like scribbles.” She flashed him a rueful smile. “What did you think I was doing those summers when you excluded me from the fun stuff? I was transcribing my father’s notes into English.”
“For the record, I wasn’t excluding you from fun stuff. I was keeping you away from shifter stuff.”
“What?”
“Look, I remember cutting you out. Parties you got uninvited to. Times things broke up just as you arrived.”
She stiffened her spine, remembering the pain of that.
She’d been a teen in a small town where she didn’t go to school.
She was a visitor for the summer without even her sister for company because Ellen had wanted science summer school way more than time with their father.
That left Julie in Gladwin feeling like she was being snubbed at every turn.
She lost track of all the times conversations just stopped when she showed up.
And that was nothing compared to the “get together and hang out” times when she wasn’t invited or worse, it somehow got canceled only to happen somewhere else.
She’d hated it and she’d hated them for being so snobbish.
It never occurred to her that it was because of this… this magic business.
But even so, the memory still stung.
“So that was you?”
He snorted. “Hell no. That was Carl or Tonya. Even back then, they were the leaders of our group. But, yeah, I helped enforce it. Julie, you aren’t a shifter. No one could have guessed that you would be here now.”
It made sense. It did, but logic didn’t hold sway over her feelings. “Do you know how outcast I felt?”
“Do you know how outcast we feel? You’ve got the whole wide world at your feet. Julie, you can go anywhere, be anything.”
“So can—”
“We can’t,” he interrupted. “It’s a…a salmon thing even though we’re grizzlies.
Just like a salmon returns home to spawn, we have to come back to Gladwin throughout our lives.
But even if that weren’t true, all shifters need a wild place to run.
We can’t live in big cities. It makes us insane.
” He touched her chin pulling her around to face him.
“Imagine being a teenager and knowing that you can’t leave small-town Michigan.
That all those big possibilities aren’t there for you.
You can’t be a pilot—what if you shift on a plane?
You can’t live where big business opportunities exist. You certainly can’t go into the military and risk exposing your secret that way.
All those little things that you take for granted are triply hard for us because we have to keep our wild nature under control.
We have to balance the animal with the human, and that doesn’t always work. ”
“All of life is a balancing act.”
“Yeah, we figure that out with maturity. We’re talking teenagers here.
” His fingers caressed her hair. “Yes, we were mean to you. I admit it. But that’s because we were so damned jealous of you, we couldn’t stand it.
” He took a breath. “Even me, and believe me, I wanted you from the first moment I saw the book you’d painted on your big toe with polish. ”
She blinked. She’d forgotten about that. Hell, without friends to hang around with, she’d had plenty of time to decorate her nails.
“You had big eyes and a sharp mind. You wanted to learn everything about the world then, including us—”
“I just wanted some friends.”
“And you were going to figure us out. You were going to hear about the magic. And so we excluded you.” He took a breath. “I made sure you weren’t around us as a group, but I still knew all about you. I still watched where you went and what you did.”
She bit her lip, thinking about the times he’d just shown up when she was sitting by a stream reading.
Or when she was out for a walk by herself.
He’d show up and be nice. More than nice, he’d been sexy and funny, and she’d thought maybe she was finally starting to fit in.
But then the next night, she’d hear about another party she hadn’t been invited to.
Another hangout at the stream that he’d never mentioned.
“You ran so hot and cold. I hated you even as…”
“Even as I wanted you with every breath in my body.”
She couldn’t believe it. He had yearned for her? He had wanted her? “I felt like you kept toying with me. Being wonderful just to throw me away.” Lord, even now she couldn’t keep the hurt from her voice.
He leaned in and their foreheads touched.
Their breath mingled while his other hand slipped to caress the length of her jaw.
“Push/pull,” he breathed. “Animal/man. Want/can’t have.
” He cupped her face and lifted her lips to his.
But he didn’t touch them. He didn’t take the kiss she so desperately wanted.
“That’s my life, Julie. And I’m losing the battle. ”
“No,” she whispered. “No, there has to be an answer.”
He shook his head. “I’ve tried.”
She could hear the defeat in his voice. The soul-deep weariness of the struggle.
It was the sound of a man giving up. Of one who was going to settle for what little he’d received and try to be content.
But Julie wasn’t wired that way. Maybe because she hadn’t fought this fight her whole life.
But she’d just learned that the world was a thousand times bigger than she’d believed a day ago.
God only knew what she’d discover tomorrow.
And she’d be damned if she let him give up like this. Not when she’d just entered the fight.
“No,” she said softly. And when he pulled back, she took hold of his shoulders and drew him forward.
“No,” she repeated, and then she took his mouth with hers.
Forget waiting for him to kiss her. Forget letting this shifter insanity decide how she was going to feel.
She’d let the magic exclude her as a teen because she hadn’t known better.
Well, now she knew. Now she was on board and making changes.
She slammed her mouth against his, and when he gasped in reaction, she thrust her tongue into his mouth. It didn’t take him long to react. She’d barely discovered this new bold side of herself when he wrapped his arms around her and drew her flush against him, arching her for his possession.
Thrust, parry, push, pull. Their tongues danced together, and when they finally pulled apart to breathe, her heart was hammering and her legs were liquid.
Well, she thought in a distant part of her mind, apparently she could still be attracted to a man who was part bear.
She’d wondered, though it had been a quiet question buried beneath the general WTF of discovering magic.
Now she knew that the attraction, at least, was just the same as before.
Stronger, even, because now the questions were answered, the inconsistencies made clear.
“Julie,” he said, her name a hoarse rasp.
She waited to hear if there was more. Did he have a question for her? Something he wanted to tell her? But the silence stretched on, and when she dared look at him, she saw the desperation in his eyes. The need and…
The defeat. He wanted her but knew that it was only temporary. It was the wish of a dying man. And it thoroughly pissed her off.
“No,” she said, her voice firming with sudden conviction. “No, no, no, no, no!”
He backed away, and it took her a moment to realize he thought she was denying him. So she gripped his arm and held him to her. He could break away at any moment, of course. She felt like she had two fingers on a tiny patch of fur on a bear. But she held on with everything she had.
“You are not giving up. You are not slinking off like some whipped dog to die.”
He straightened at that. “Do you know how insulting that is?”
“I don’t care,” she said. “Look, you want to find some magic potion to keep you human? Well, this is the age of the Internet.” She cracked her knuckles. “We’re going to find it.”
He sighed. “Julie, we’ve been looking—”
“Don’t care, Mark. I haven’t been looking. You need someone with experience in anthropology and folktales and I don’t know what. That’s my father.”
“We can’t bring him in.”
“Without him, you’ll just have to settle for me.
I’m his daughter, can read his nutso shorthand, and I’m motivated.
” She stepped forward, getting right up into his face.
Close enough to touch him. Close enough to grip his hard dick, if she wanted to.
And she really wanted to. But she held her hands firmly on her hips.
This wasn’t about sex, this was about fighting for his life.
And once he had a life—and a future—then they could see about the hot sex part.
And the-happily-ever-after part. But that couldn’t even be on the table until they solved this.
“Are you with me, Mark? Are you willing to keep searching?”
He took a deep breath, his expression haunted.
And for the first time, she saw the depths to which he’d sunk in despair.
What would it be like to search since you were sixteen for the miracle solution to your life?
To fight for answers, to hold on to hope, only to be disappointed time and time again?
And here she was, at the eleventh hour, asking him to believe again.
Asking him to give up the peace that came with acceptance and try again.
“Please, Mark. Can you please hold on to hope one last time?”
“There’s no reason to think you can succeed where everyone else has failed,” he said softly. “And lots of reasons to say you haven’t a prayer.”
She swallowed. That was true. After all, according to him, shifters had been searching for the solution to the feral problem for centuries. What could she add that no one else could?
“I—” she began, trying to find a reason he could believe in. Something other than, Because I want to believe I can.
“Okay,” he said.
She blinked. “What?”
He drew her hands up to his mouth, pressing kisses into her knuckles. “Julie, this morning was a miracle. I wanted to see you again to explain. And to have you not only listen but to…” His cheeks tinged red.
“To hump like bunnies?”
He grinned. “Yeah. Miracle.”
She felt her cheeks heat. “It was pretty awesome for me, too.”
“So you already came loaded with one miracle. What’s to say you can’t pull off another?”
Logic? Reason? But they were talking about magic, so she decided to toss those two scientific strategies out the window. “Exactly,” she said, pretending to a confidence she really didn’t feel. “We can figure this out. I’m sure of it.”
He took a deep breath. “Where do we start?”
Good question. It was too late to call her father and ask about whatever research he’d had on his tablet.
That meant going back over what ground her father already had established before they started looking deeper.
“Fire up that dinosaur of a desktop. I still have that creepy thumb drive of his notes.” She froze a moment, only now understanding the significance of a bear with a little bullet hole in its chest. “Oh my God—”
He held up his hand, stopping her explosion. “Graveyard humor. I thought it was funny.”
Well, she didn’t. But rather than argue, she pulled out her phone. “Actually, Dad often stays up late reading. Maybe he’s awake.”
She texted him, not wanting to disturb his sleep. But if he was awake, then maybe she could get a jump on things now. “U up, Dad? I’m with Mark. Got questions.”
Five seconds her phone rang.
“Dad?”
“What’s up, honey? I’m so bored I’m willing to eat hospital food. What do you want to know?”
With a grin, she gave Mark a thumbs-up. “Hold on while I grab something to write on. Mark has been talking to me about your research, and I’ve got some questions…”