Chapter 4 #2
“Hi, sweetheart, how are you?” Inga asked, rubbing around its face while the griffins screamed in her ear and the parents made abortive attempts to dive-bomb the dog, pulling away at the last moment.
The dog wore no collar, but she could see by its behavior that it was well trained.
After a single joyous bound in which it attempted to jump on her, it stopped doing that and didn’t even try to lick her face, though it panted heavily.
It let her pet it for a few moments, then turned and bounded away, stopping now and then and looking back.
The “follow me” Lassie behavior could not have been more clear.
She hadn’t even realized dogs did that in real life.
Then again, she was carrying around a bunch of griffin nestlings while their parents followed her, so who was she to make judgments on animal behavior?
“I’m coming, fella. Is someone else here? Is your owner hurt? See, I’m right behind you.”
Inga slipped and slid over the wet rocks. The dog stayed just ahead of her, stopping to wait when she got one of her feet stuck between two rocks. She saw where it was going at last, when it stopped beside a great white-furred bulk lying on the rocks.
“Uh ...” Inga stopped, too. She was expecting a stranded fisherman, maybe a wrecked boat. She was not prepared for a dead polar bear.
Or—was it dead? The bear was lying flopped on its side.
Its head was away from her, and she couldn’t tell if its sides were rising and falling.
A few seagulls wheeled around it. Others perched on boulders to inspect it, but none were actually trying to scavenge it.
The trash griffins flew ahead for a similar inspection and seemed to come to an equally unsure conclusion. They perched to watch as well.
So it was a bear, unconscious or hurt. And the dog seemed more interested in bringing her to the bear than being rescued or fed. Even now, it was nuzzling the bear’s face, clearly having no fear whatsoever.
Coming as she did from a family of bear shifters, Inga decided the most obvious conclusion was probably the right one.
She hadn’t heard anything about other polar bear shifters on the island, where the relatively small population meant that most shifter families were at least vaguely aware of each other.
But that had to be what this was. Either that, or a polar bear and a dog had become buddies in a way that normally only happened in kids’ movies.
One thing this situation did not need was a bunch of screaming baby griffins, so Inga shouldered off her pack and set it on the rocks.
The parent griffins immediately descended on their offspring and began making very cute chirping and cooing sounds.
Inga left them like that and approached the bear.
Having grown up around bear shifters, she knew polar bears well. This one was a male, large even by generous polar bear standards. Inga was familiar with the heavy ropes of yellow-white fur, the black lips parted slightly to reveal a predator’s heavy fangs.
She had no way to tell by looking if the bear was a shifter or not.
If he wasn’t, she reasoned, she could shift herself, and this bear was clearly hurt or exhausted or both.
Inga wasn’t sure if she could take him in a fight, but she was pretty sure she could outrun or outswim him, wait until he left, and then come back to get her stuff.
With that in mind, she prodded at the bear’s face. The dog danced back a few steps, not in fear so much as to give her room, looking up at her with a canine’s instinctive confidence that a human could fix anything.
Inga was much less confident, but she gave the bear’s face another shove, which it completely failed to notice, then tugged on its ear.
“Hey,” she said. “Hey, uh, buddy. I don’t know if you can hear me, but if you can turn human, it’d help a lot.
The cavalry’s here, well, sort of, and I have a first-aid kit and food in my backpack.
But in case you haven’t noticed, I can’t carry a bear.
I’m not really set up to feed one, either. ”
The bear grunted, stirred a little, and its eyes cracked open.
Like most mammals, bears’ eyes—including shifter bears—were generally brown or slightly golden. These, however, were a startling, bright blue, the color of a husky dog’s, but threaded with vivid green. Inga had never seen anything like it in her life.
An instant later, the bear collapsed into a man, and Inga was staring into the same pair of eyes, but now a darker blue and fringed with dark human lashes.
The eyes widened a little, then immediately screwed shut, and he groaned.
Inga’s view was suddenly eclipsed by a mass of black dog fur as the Newfoundland dog stuck its nose in the strangers face. Inga grabbed two fistfuls of salt-matted ruff and shoved the dog back. “You can see your human in just a minute, fella. Let me take a look first.”
The man had his hand over his eyes. He was well built but lean to the point of being scrawny, as if he hadn’t been eating enough lately, and his body was laced with scars and abrasions, old and new.
Dark hair, overly long with the ragged look that suggested it had grown out of a short cut, flopped over the hand covering his face.
His knuckles were scraped. But none of it looked too bad; most of the recent damage was probably from having been flung up on the shore by the force of the storm, or whatever had happened to him.
Another thing Inga had plenty of practice at was dealing with unexpected naked men; it happened in her living room all the time.
Not usually ones she wasn’t related to, however.
She put a hesitant hand on his chilled fingers.
“Hey, how are you? Can you understand me?” For all she knew, he’d washed up from the other side of the ocean and didn’t speak English.
The man shuddered and coughed a little. In a hoarse, rasping voice that sounded vaguely American, he asked, “Do you have water?”
“Yes, of course.”
She found the griffins trying to dig their way into her pack, presumably for the sandwiches. She shooed them away, retrieved the water bottle and a sandwich, then got another one out for the dog. At this rate she was going through them fast. There had better be supplies at the cabin.
The man was sitting up when she returned. She laid the sandwich in front of the dog, who immediately snapped it up. The man looked around, squinting and blinking. “Oh—Rogue—is my dog all right?”
“He’s fine, I think.” She handed him the water bottle and sandwich. “Rogue is his name? Uh, is it a he?”
“I call him Rogue, and yes, I think so.” On that slightly cryptic note, he drank half the bottle of water and ate a huge bite of the sandwich. “Oh, God, that’s good,” he groaned. “You can’t imagine how tired I am of raw fish.”
“Have you been living out here?” Inga crouched on her heels, full of sympathy.
“Yeah, on a—” The man broke off sharply. “Island,” he muttered. “On an island. Where am I?”
“This is Newfoundland, so you’re still on an island, if you want to get technical about it. I don’t know what you were about to say, but if you’re worried about me finding out you’re a polar bear, I already know that. I’m a shifter too.”
He whipped around to give her an astonished look. Aside from the scrapes and obvious signs of ill treatment and rough living, he was very good looking, with sharply defined cheekbones and a strong chin under a grown-in scruff of beard.
“Shifter?” he said.
“Yes—what we are? You and me?” She didn’t understand why he looked so baffled. “I’m a bear, too.”
“You saw me,” he said slowly. “As a bear.”
He didn’t seem to be tracking very well yet, but that was unsurprising.
She could see by his cracked lips and sunken eyes that he was dehydrated, no surprise if he’d been in salt water for a while.
“Yes,” she said gently. “You were a bear when I found you. Your dog led me to you.” She reached over to rub at Rogue’s heavy black ruff.
“He’s a good dog. How long have you had him? ”
“I ... don’t know,” the man said.
He drank more of the water, then offered the last of it in his cupped hand to Rogue, who lapped eagerly before sniffing around for any remaining crumbs of sandwich.
“What’s your name?” Inga asked. She only belatedly realized she hadn’t shared hers, either; she was far too used to living in a small town where everyone knew everyone else. “Uh, I’m Inga Nilsson. Sorry, I forgot to mention that.”
There was a long pause before he said, with hesitation, “Luke.”
The poor man obviously wasn’t well, but who could blame him for being a little confused after the ordeal he had very clearly been through?
Inga decided not to interrogate him any more for now.
“Most of my clothes won’t fit you, but you can wear my slicker if you’d like, to keep the wind off.
It’s actually one of my brothers’ anyway.
” She offered it, and as he put it on, Inga looked up at the sky deepening into a slow purple dusk.
“Do you think you can walk? My family has a fishing cabin near here, and I hope we can get to it before dark.”
She reached out an arm to help Luke to his feet. He swayed, holding onto her for a moment. Inga was acutely aware of the masculine firmness of his body pressing against her, and she had to remind herself that it wasn’t his fault she’d had a very long man-free dry spell.
As she steadied him, she thought she glimpsed something move out of the corner of her eye. But when she looked around, nothing was there except the rocks and the waves.
When she continued to look around, Luke asked blearily, “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” The last thing she needed was to start jumping at shadows.
And speaking of shadows, the blue shadows of dusk were quickly beginning to eclipse details on the beach. The sky was still light overhead, but it wouldn’t stay that way.
Her bear was reacting oddly, too—not jumpy exactly, but off balance.
What’s wrong? she queried that deep, instinctual part of her.
Her bear didn’t know. It thought there was something about this guy that intrigued it, but it couldn’t seem to tell her what that thing was.
You’re a lot of help, Inga told it.
She passingly wondered if it was possible he might be her mate, but dismissed the thought immediately. From what both of her brothers had said, you just knew. The certainty was part of it. This was more like mild confusion.
But there was definitely something about him that drew her. The mystery of him, if nothing else. Someone didn’t just end up on a deserted stretch of Atlantic coast for no reason.