Chapter 6 Inga
INGA
In full dark, Inga found her way to the spring using the stark, sharp-edged clarity of shifter night vision, disregarding one of the trash griffins (the raccoon one) that followed her.
It was a relief to make her escape, for a short time, from Luke’s all too compelling male presence and the equally compelling questions that he raised.
She had never met anyone quite like him.
He clearly was a shifter, yet didn’t really act like a shifter.
She had noticed him stumbling in the dark, but didn’t think too much of it—the path was rough, his feet were bare—until realizing that he appeared to lack the keen night vision she and her family had always possessed.
Could there be differences like that among shifters?
The only other shifters she had spent a lot of time around, or talked to about it much, were her brothers and other friends in Westerly Cove, primarily Wyona and Nita, the seal shifter sisters.
Now that she thought back on it, she hadn’t noticed Luke inhaling the night air as she did habitually, sifting through those scents which she was able to distinguish in human form.
It shouldn’t be surprising that there were some shifters who might be night-blind, or nose-blind.
Perhaps some of them were less completely adapted to their shift form.
Could he be an urban shifter, perhaps? Inga had heard there were differences between them and the rural shifters who were able to live more closely with their animal side.
A familiar hint of woodsmoke reached her. She turned to look at the light streaming from the cabin’s single glazed window. At least he didn’t seem to be put off by the crude accommodations. Whatever else Luke might be, he was stoic and brave and evidently not one to simply lie down and give up.
And she was wildly curious how he came to be on a deserted stretch of rocky beach with a dog.
The spring was just as she remembered it, clear and clean, framed in a rocky casing that she remembered helping build with her brothers back when all three of them were young enough that this kind of work was play rather than feeling like yet another chore.
Even though she suspected, in hindsight, that their dad had set them working on it to give them something to do and stop the complaints about being bored.
The old tin camp cup still hung on its hook above the spring. Inga dipped a cupful and drank deeply of the icy cold water, then filled her bucket.
The raccoon griffin at her feet got tired of watching her and apparently decided she wasn’t going to drop any candy bars or fast food wrappers. It clattered its beak and waddled back toward the old seagull nest into which she had deposited the griffin family to settle in for the night.
“I guess I’m going to have to name you all if you stay, aren’t I?
” Inga said aloud. She had no idea how to tell the sex of the adult griffins, or even if they were a mated pair at all; for all she knew, scavenger griffins raised their young in groups and these were two unrelated members of the flock who had been swept up in her boat trip.
She suspected from their behavior that they were the parents, however.
She looked down at the cove, glossy in the starlight.
Memories of those trips surged in her with painful-sweet nostalgia.
Their dad’s fishing boat, the Codfather, would be moored down there.
He usually slept on board, sometimes with one of the youngest children, while the others slept in the cabin that was also where the group prepared meals and hung out to play cards or read when it was too inclement to be outside.
In her earliest memories, there were faint hints of the warm, elusive figure known as Mom.
The fishing shack was still informally known among the Nilsson kids as “Mom’s cabin,” and her dad called it Anna’s Place.
Her grandparents on Mom’s side had built it, and her parents used to come out together all the time when they were first married.
She knew from her dad that Mom had loved it out here.
But an icy road and a crash while driving to St. John’s had claimed her mom on a winter day long ago.
It was an old grief, worn soft and smooth by time.
She missed her mom, but she had never really known her.
As long as Inga could remember, except for a few scattered recollections from her earliest childhood, it had been just her brothers and her dad on those long-ago summers in the cove.
They had all reveled in the freedom of being somewhere remote enough to shift with impunity.
Even in Westerly Cove, they had to be careful of tourists and neighbors who weren’t in on the shifter secret.
At the cabin, they never had to worry about it.
She remembered scampering after big brother Tor on her stubby legs as a tiny, toddling cub.
When they were all a bit older, with the leggy energy of teenage polar bears, they would swim and wrestle in the cove, hunting for fish and cheerfully dunking each other.
Right now, though, far from experiencing the easy peace she normally felt in this place, she had the strangest feeling she was being watched.
Unable to explain the crawling sensation on the back of her neck, Inga looked first to the griffins, but they had settled down in their nest. The door of the cabin hadn’t opened, so it wasn’t Luke or the dog.
She had learned not to discount that kind of feeling, which was frequently the instinctive surroundings awareness of her inner bear. As she slowly scanned around her, Inga looked up.
There was a polar bear looking down at her from the top of the hill.
She only glimpsed it for a moment, and when she sucked in her breath, it vanished so suddenly that it seemed to simply ghost away into thin air—though she knew it must have merely disappeared below the edge of the hill.
Staying out here in the dark no longer seemed like such a good idea. She carried her bucket of water to the cabin, rapped briskly on the door to give warning in case Luke was changing clothes, and slipped inside.
Luke was unfolding bedding from one of the totes. “Is something wrong?” he asked.
Inga hadn’t realized that her alarm was visible, but the dog was looking at her, too. “There are bears around,” she said, setting down the bucket.
“Aren’t you a bear?” Luke asked, and then hastily amended, “We. We’re bears.”
“Yes, but wild bears can still be dangerous to us.”
She had seen no signs of anything trying to break into the cabin, but now they had food smells and other temptations inside.
Inga lowered the heavy bar across the door, designed to keep out exactly this sort of hazard.
She had a moment’s concern for the griffins outside, but they were wild creatures with wings, after all.
“The griffins will be an early warning system if we do get a bear sniffing around. If we hear anything out there, one of us can shift and give a few good growls to drive it off.”
“Griffins? Is that what those are?”
Inga had forgotten she’d promised to fill him in later.
“Uh, yeah. Except there are different kinds of griffins. My sister-in-law—” She stopped abruptly; it was so easy to talk to him that she was halfway to forgetting that Lucy’s shift form was very much a secret.
“—can tell you more about it, but anyway, yeah, we call them trash griffins, though I guess it’s a bit rude.
They’re basically the griffin equivalent of seagulls. ”
Luke stared at her. “I never heard of anything like that.”
“Apparently it’s a thing! I’ve only ever seen them in the town I’m from.”
“Where’s that again?”
“Westerly Cove. It’s an outport down the coast a ways.”
“Outport?”
“You really aren’t from around here, huh?
Little fishing towns. I grew up in one.” Inga caught herself on the verge of breaking her earlier promise to herself not to press Luke about his past. Firmly she turned her attention to other matters, like food.
“There are more sandwiches in my pack, which we should probably eat before they spoil, since we can’t refrigerate them.
Let me see if I can find something to go with them. I bet you’re hungry.”
“Starving,” Luke said with gusto.
As a shifter, he would be; his body was no doubt currently pouring resources into healing from his ordeal.
The dog thumped its tail, reminding Inga that there was another mouth to feed as well.
She looked over the canned goods on the shelves.
They seemed dry and undamaged and mostly within their expiration dates.
Inga selected two large cans of stew and opened them into a tin saucepan.
While that heated on top of the stove, she sniffed an open but tightly lidded can of coffee, shrugged, and filled an old-school coffeepot with water and a few scoops of medium roast. “I hope you don’t mind cowboy coffee.
Dad always used to insist that if you don’t have grounds in your campout coffee, you might as well get a suite at the Hilton. ”
Luke laughed softly. “I used to be in the Army. I’ll take coffee in any condition that has caffeine.”
“Really? My brother was in the Army for a stint.” Then she remembered some of the things that had happened to her brother toward the end of that time. As she placed the coffeepot on the stovetop, she wondered if Luke had gone through something similar.
Her brother Eren and some of his teammates had volunteered for a special project that turned out to involve having their shift animals experimented on. Maybe that explained why Luke seemed to have a peculiar relationship with his own bear.
“Can I do anything to help with dinner?” Luke asked. He sounded a bit plaintive; it must be tough to sit there smelling food without any other distractions.