Chapter Six #2
Becca shoved by me, bumping my shoulder and spinning me to the side as she passed.
I stared after her in disbelief and confusion.
I hadn’t made those scars on Caleb. The grizzly had.
No, Mr. Idiot Shifter Eli Emmerson had, for reasons I hadn’t a guess at.
I had only tried to help, and I had done the best I could.
I’d thought about it over and over and couldn’t imagine a way I could have done it differently—done it better.
I wished I had the balls to say those things out loud to her and defend myself.
Suddenly, I was angry at Caleb. Why had he been up on my land, anyway? He wouldn’t have been attacked if he would have been back at his big safe mansion with the rest of his snooty family. And he’d still be fucking human! And now I carried all this guilt, and apparently the blame, too.
His fault.
I glared at a familiar, dark-headed man who had come too close and pushed past the murmuring crowd. I peeled out of town as fast as my truck could go—which was actually really slow and anticlimactic.
When I was younger, I had this foster family I liked.
I had been passed around a lot and labeled a problem child because I didn’t talk very much and I looked funny.
Something about me didn’t sit well with people who didn’t understand what I’d been through.
This one family though, the Millers, had a biological son who was bad news.
He would destroy anything he could get his hands on, and he would always blame it on me because he knew I wouldn’t defend myself.
Life was pretty miserable until the Millers decided they didn’t believe him anymore, so they would ask me if he was telling the truth, and a funny thing happened.
For the first time in my life, someone believed me.
I never told them, but I had prayed every night that they would adopt me.
It was the only time I had ever wanted such a whimsical thing.
When a social worker came to take me away from the Millers, my heart had shattered into a million tiny pieces, like one of the fine china plates their son had thrown against the edge of a table in a tantrum.
It hadn’t mattered how honest I was, they still hadn’t wanted me. Hadn’t cared.
“Learn your lesson, Mira,” I growled at myself.
Sticks and stones would break my bones, but frivolous wishes would break my heart.
****
Caleb
I fell out of bed in the dark, drowning, suffocating, and burning from the inside out. Every inch of my skin felt washed in live embers. Short bursts of breath squeezed from my lungs as I kicked out of the covers that had ensnared my legs.
Something was happening. Something inside.
I tried to yell out in pain, but a snarling sound rippled from my throat as I stumbled for the bathroom.
The light was blinding, like my eyes were oversensitive.
My vision was humming with small pulses that made everything look crisp, then blurry again.
Gripping either side of the sink, I lifted my eyes to the mirror and shook my head in horror at what I saw there.
My eyes. I leaned closer and ran my trembling fingers across my cheek.
The color was supposed to be blue, but instead, they were gold on the outside, glowing like the freaking sun, and green on the inside.
I didn’t understand. Fighting for air, I searched the medicine cabinet for anything that would explain this away.
I had to be hallucinating as a side-effect from the pain meds the clinic had prescribed me.
Panicked, I yanked all of the bottles of Advil and vitamins out until they all clattered across the sink, then jerked the orange bottle of pain pills to my face. Holy shit. I could see the individual paper fibers the label had been made with. Focus.
Nausea, drowsiness, dizziness, fatigue, headache, skin rash, and not a damned word about hallucinations.
“Oww.” The word tapered into a gravelly voice that couldn’t belong to me. Pin pricks shot from my lips and cheeks, and when I looked into the mirror again, I had short, blunt whiskers and my face was beginning to morph into something I didn’t recognize.
I needed help. No! I couldn’t tell anyone about this. I ran for the front door, needing to do something, but at a loss on how to fix my broken self. I threw it open and let the wind caress my bare chest. I dragged lungful after lungful of fresh air into me and tried to think.
Who would believe me?
Who would believe I was this monster now?
Mira.
My eyes were drawn to the woods. I’d bought Eli’s place a while back and was on the property beside Fletcher land now.
If I could get to her, she could help me. She knew. She’d tried to warn me about what I would become, and I hadn’t believed her. She wasn’t crazy. She was the only person in this whole damned town who knew what was real.
I grunted as pain rippled up my spine and bent me forward. On all fours, I closed my eyes as the agony became blinding. I screamed as my skin felt like it exploded, casting me upward with the force of my transformation. I landed heavily on all fours, hard enough to rock the porch.
My paws were huge, and six-inch black claws made marks across the wood floor as I shifted my weight.
Thick, dark fur covered my arms and chest. When I turned to look at my reflection in the window, I wanted to run.
Staring back at me with gold-rimmed, bottomless eyes was a fully matured grizzly bear.
I was no longer me, but other. I was one of those bear men Mira had whispered about the day she’d saved me.
I sat heavily, completely out of control of my new body.
I wanted so badly to go back an hour ago when I’d been sleeping comfortably in my bed, thinking I was going to be okay.
I wasn’t going to be okay at all. This wasn’t just some weird hobby or embarrassing pastime.
This was something I would have to hide from everyone I knew and loved to protect them, and to protect me.
A low rumble rattled my throat and I tried to imagine what my family would say if they saw me like this.
I had to hide what I was now from everyone.
Everyone but Mira.
Heaving upward again, I stood and managed to spread all of my paws wide enough to stay upright. I swayed as I tried to realize my new balance.
My heart was pounding against my ribcage.
I could hear it. I could hear everything.
Leaves fluttering in the soft breeze all the way from the tree line.
Some small mammal scurried around the forest floor some distance off, and the soft call of bullfrogs sounded so loud it made the hairs of my ears tingle.
The tall grass, swaying in the wind, jerked my attention with every shift.
The old rocking chair behind me creaked, and I jumped away and growled.
I growled! Ears flat, canines bared, and I made the sound of an animal at the movement of a harmless chair.
I made a shitty monster.
Get it together, Caleb. Looking down at my giant paws, the size of dinner plates, I flexed them.
They made little scars on the wood beneath.
I wasn’t helpless. I wasn’t human. Now, I was all weapons.
Just like the grizzly—the bear man—who had tried to kill me.
Or perhaps he was only trying to change me. But why?
Lowering my lips to cover my teeth, I lifted my senses back to the woods that stood between me and Mira’s house.
Some sick part of me wanted her to see me like this, like some apology for scoffing at her when she’d tried to warn me about my fate.
I wanted her to know she’d been right, and that I was sorry—that I was wrong.
Maybe it was the panic and confusion talking, but suddenly, I wanted her to see me, and I wanted to see her more than anything.
With her face as my motivation, I took my first step in this new body, and then the second.
By the time I’d reached the trees, I was able to trot.
My breath sounded like panting that tapered into a soft growl as I gained confidence in my new form.
Cool air blasted in front of me with every breath.
Night birds called out from the canopy above, but quieted as I drew nearer, as if they could sense danger.
Was I the danger? I must’ve been because I could make out the sound of field mice, their little heartbeats hammering as they scurried to their homes when I passed.
I began to run, testing the power in my new legs, and on a whim, I leaped through the air and landed with my claws in an old cottonwood tree.
When I held, I widened my eyes at the claws dug deep into the bark and looked up into the branches.
Bunching my muscles, I heaved upward until I reached the lowest branch.
It wasn’t thick enough to hold my weight, so I slid down, clawing the tree as I went, leaving long gashes in the bark.
I looked at my claws, but they hadn’t dulled a bit.
A strange feeling spread through me. I’d loved climbing trees as a kid, but as I’d grown older, I’d fallen out of the habit.
I’d lost the joy in it. The freedom. As I looked up into the branches, a little wisp of that joy came back. Maybe this wasn’t all bad.
My ears twitched at a sound that echoed through the woods. It cracked again and picked up a steady rhythm. Curious, I trotted toward it.
I could smell her long before I could see her.
Mira was chopping wood in the clearing in front of her house.
Or trying to. Her arms were too thin, and she looked weak, but that didn’t stop her from putting block after block on an old stump and hefting an ax down onto it.
The blade was old and rust-eaten, and she could only manage to get it through the top few inches.
Then, she’d pick up the ax again, still attached to the wood, and crack it down against the stump.
It took her at least four swings to get one log split each time.