BAD BOY ROMANCE: DIESEL: Contemporary Bad Boy Biker MC Romance (Box Set) (New Adult Sports Romance Short Stories Boxset) (119 page)

She wanted to do it for them, anyway. For Bruce and for Saxon and for the Family. For herself.

And Bruce couldn’t tell her no. There was a whole pack of shifters up in the mountains. One of them was bound to help her if she explained. Maybe Rosa.

But then she wouldn’t be a bear. She would be a wolf. She still wouldn’t fit in with her family, after it all. The only other bear in the pack that could do it was Lori. And Lori was hostile and shut off from her. Lori wanted nothing to do with her because she was a human.

No, that wasn’t going to work. But Jenna just needed a bit of time. And she had time. She’d been doing the human routine among the shifters for years, she could keep up the act another month or so. Until the next full moon.

That was when she wanted it all to be sorted.

One month. Enough to make plans.

Chapter 3

Bruce was furious. Instead of getting into bed and catching up on sleep when Saxon went to bed, Bruce left the cabin again. The full moon always took a lot out of shifters, and Bruce could feel the toll it had taken on his body, despite the hunting to make up for the loss of energy.

It always cost him a lot more not to lose all control. But he was too angry to sleep. Angry and scared. In fact, he had to admit that he was terrified. And as the man of the house and second in line to the alpha, he couldn’t afford to be this scared.

Jenna wanted to be a shifter. A
shifter
. She didn’t realize what a precious gift it was for her to still be human. She held onto something the Bruce had wished he could have for years, and she wanted to just throw it away. Why would she want to throw away her humanity, her compassion and her control of herself, to become a monster?

Bruce hadn’t always been a shifter. There had been a time when he’d known what it was to have more. To have just himself to worry about, and nothing else. Nothing extra. If he’d known he would lose it he wouldn’t have taken it for granted. He would have relished in his humanity, in his sense of right and wrong. Because when he’d lost it, it was gone forever.

Parents were the worst. They were always out to ruin Bruce’s fun, to tell him that he couldn’t do grown up things until he really was one. But Bruce could be an adult. He was mature. What did his parents know about drinking and drugs, anyway? It’s not like they ever went out or did anything fun.

The best nights were the ones where he snuck out and got to spend time with the brothers. The three boys were much older than Bruce. Nineteen, twenty and twenty-three. And he’d just turned sixteen. But that was alright because they liked it when he tagged along. He didn’t know why, but he wasn’t going to argue with it.

“We’re going out to the lake tomorrow night,” Thomas had told him. Thomas was the youngest, and he looked out for Bruce. “You’re coming, right?”

“Sure,” Bruce said. He knew he was going to have a problem with his parents. They wouldn’t let him out with a bunch of kids they said were trouble. But there was a danger about the brothers that drew Bruce. Something dark and ominous that was exactly what his parents had warned him against, so it was exactly what he wanted.

Whatever, he could sneak out. He’d done it a hundred times already.

“We’ll meet you just after dark at the vacant lot. Don’t be late, we’re not waiting,” Daryl said. He was the eldest and he was scary. It was like he was the leader, something about him that was more than just his age. Bruce nodded. He wouldn’t be late.

It had taken him an hour to get his parents to let him go to his room. Bruce had ended up breaking his mom’s vase just so that she would send him away. The moment he closed his door he climbed out the window and walked down the street. He had a backpack with him with a fresh change of clothes instead they stayed the night, and a bottle of alcohol that he’d jacked from his dad’s liquor cabinet. They were going to have a hell of a time at the lake.

“You’re late,” Daryl said when Bruce got there.

“I had to get out,” Bruce said and shrugged. Ryan was the middle brother. He stood in the shadow of a clump of trees, dragging on a cigarette. The orange glow of the cherry lit up his face and his eyes were so big and so black they almost didn’t seem human. Of the three of them, he was the scariest. Bruce tried to ignore Ryan.

“Let’s go,” Daryl said and they headed out. The moon was full, a large silver orb hanging in the sky. The night felt different like it was breathing around Bruce, and the wind ruffled his hair.

They got in a car and started driving. First on concrete roads, but, later on, dirt roads, and finally just on a dust trail between the trees. Bruce was starting to get nervous. He didn’t know what he’d expected, but it wasn’t this.

“Do you guys have a place out here?”  he asked, forcing the fear out of voice. Ryan looked over his shoulder at Bruce from the passenger seat and smiled. His teeth looked sharper than usual, almost pointed. Or was Bruce imagining it?

“No, we don’t,” Ryan said. His voice was creepy, and the car filled with a feeling Bruce didn’t want to fight anymore.

“Maybe this isn’t a good idea,” he said.

“Too late now, Brucie boy,” Thomas said next to him. He smiled, but it didn’t seem too friendly, either.

“Just let me out here, I’ll find my own way home,” Bruce said. He was starting to get really scared. Thomas shook his head.

“You don’t want to be a human alone in these woods, my friend. Trust me.”

A human? The night was getting weird. It had a different quality like it was alive in its own right. Bruce could almost feel the darkness outside pressing against the closed car windows.

The car came to a stop and Bruce was the first one out. The moment he was in the tall grass he wished he’d stayed in the car. But the car lock clicked shut and the brothers started walking toward the water. Bruce stayed behind. He didn’t want to be with them. He was starting to wish he’d listened to his parents.

“Come on,” Daryl called over his shoulder. Bruce started shaking his head no, but then he became aware of something in the bushes close by. Something that was
not
a person. Something that wasn’t even an animal. Something like a monster.

He ran after the brothers, propelled forward by a fear that crawled onto his skin from all sides now.

When they reached the water Daryl turned and looked at him. His eyes were different now. Scarier. And then something happened to him. His body started changing, contorting, twisting. Fur crept over his body and he grew in size until he was four times as big as he was, and not human anymore.

Daryl was a bear.

“Shit,” Bruce said. He looked for the other two brothers, but there were two more bears where they’d stood. Bruce shook his head, started backing up. They bear that was Daryl made a growling noise, and it was enough to push Bruce over the edge. He turned and ran.

At the edge of the forest where the car was parked men appeared from the trees, men with long curved blades and a menacing way about them. But they were human.

“Help!”  Bruce shouted. “Help me!”

He heard a growl behind him and one of the bears tackled him down. Bruce hit the ground hard. The bear was on top of him, but one of the men came running with his blade and sliced it through the air. It sunk deep into the bear’s flesh and the animal reared up. Two more men attacked it, and this time, a blade hit home.

The bear slumped forward, onto Bruce.

He squirmed under the dead weight of the animal, trying to get out. The bear was dead. All Bruce could think was that this bear was one of his friends. One of his friends had just been killed.

He fought until he was tired, and then he just waited. The sound of fighting was in the air for a long time, and then finally it stopped.

The men had finished off the other bears, Bruce knew it. He just knew it. His friends were dead, and somehow this was his fault. If he hadn’t run, if he hadn’t shouted…

Two men pulled the bear off Bruce and helped him up.

“Are you okay?” the one man asked. He was tall and muscular and his blade hung at his side, dripping with blood. But he looked concerned. Bruce shook his head yes and then no, not sure what he was anymore. His back hurt and he was scared. He just wanted to go home.

“ Come on, son,” another man said. “Let’s get you home.” He put his hand on Bruce’s back and Bruce winced. The man turned Bruce so that his back was to the moon, using the light.

“Skin’s broken,” he said, speaking to the others. “He’s infected.”

Infected? What?

“We can’t let him go now,” another said. “We’re going to have to finish him off.”

They were talking about Bruce like he wasn’t there. And he’d just seen them kill without blinking. He knew they could do it again. He didn’t give them a chance. He turned and ran.

They were after him, he could feel their feet on the ground, vibrating through him. He ran harder and faster than he had before, fear propelling him forward, and somewhere he lost them.

It was some miracle that he’d escaped, but he’d gotten away.

He sank onto the forest floor, curled into a ball, and started shivering. They’d said he was infected. Infected with what?

It took Bruce a month to realize what he’d been infected with. Life went back to normal, except he stopped sneaking out. He stopped looking for trouble. He started listening to his parents and what they had to say about life. He couldn’t afford something like that night to happen again.

He’d narrowly escaped with his life. He was going to savor his second chance.

But then the moon had been full again, and he’d realized he hadn’t had a second chance after all. The skin had been broken, the Assassins had said. He’d been infected. Infected with the disease, the curse, that made him turn into a bear at night, especially at full moon, and even though he could learn how to control it, he would never be rid of it again.

He would never be human again.

Bruce was alone for two years. He learned out to control his beast. He learned how to hunt and how to kick start the shift both ways. His parents knew something was wrong, but he couldn’t tell them. What was he going to say? That he was a monster?

An old shifter found him after that and took him under his wing. He left home, ran away from his parents who wouldn’t understand. He lived life in a big city where he could stay anonymous and spent time with his mentor.

Until the assassins had killed him too. They’d swept the city, found so many of them, killed most of them. Bruce had run back to his parents. If only he could see them one last time, let his mom hold him.

Assassins had cornered him and he’d had to fight his way out. It had been messy and bloody and he’d almost not made it. When he’d finally gotten out, an Assassin had called after him.

“We’ll find you. Anyone who knows who you are can help. We’ll find you.”

That meant Bruce’s parents. Bruce had learned enough, seen enough, to know that the Assassins would hurt his parents. He wasn’t going to put them in danger. So instead, he fled. He ran to the mountains, looking for a new place to live, new shifters to be a part of until he found the Syracuse Mountains. He’d left his life behind, left his parents behind, without ever saying goodbye.

Bruce wasn’t going to let Jenna go through the same thing. He could protect her. He could keep her safe, and as long as she was in the village and under the pack’s protection, she was going to be safe.

She had to hold onto what was human. She couldn’t be so eager to throw that all away. He wished he could explain it to her. But he didn’t want to go into details about his past. He didn’t want her to suggest he go find his parents.

And he didn’t want Jenna to leave the person she was behind.

It was bad enough that Saxon was a bear now. He hadn’t seen that coming. It shouldn’t have happened with Jenna as a human. But it had. Somehow the magic had been stronger, there had been too much shifter in him, and it had caused Saxon to be one too.

Bruce already blamed himself for Saxon’s change, for the fact that he would never be human. That he would never understand an innocent world. And that he, as little as he was, as nonthreatening, could still be killed just for what he was. It was bad enough.

Bruce walked through the trees, following a path he didn’t often walk. It took him up the Mountain, above the plateau and then down the side Lori favored. He’d wandered around for almost an hour when he ran into her.

Lori wasn’t in bear form. She was butch, with wide shoulders and a muscular build, not feminine at all. Her hair was short and she glared at Bruce.

He lifted his hands.

“Didn’t mean to disturb,” he said. “I was just taking a walk.”

Lori nodded with a grunt.

“Human life getting to you?” she asked. She didn’t sound friendly, but Bruce sat down on a log and shrugged.

“Lack of it,” he answered.

“The kid,” she said. Bruce looked up at her.

“I thought Dwayne was supposed to be the one that read minds.”

Lori shrugged. “You’re too predictable,” she said. It was an insult, but Bruce let it slide. If he got upset about everything Lori said they would always be fighting.

“I don’t know how to deal with it,” Bruce admitted. “He’s just five.”

“So? You were five too.”

“I wasn’t a five-year-old shifter,” Bruce said.

“Oh, you were changed,” Lori said as if it explained a lot.

“Weren’t you?”

Lori shook her head. “Born in these mountains. Parents didn’t make it through, obviously. But that was long ago.”

Bruce didn’t know what to say. Lori was hard to talk to. She was so strong and able to look after herself it was difficult to imagine her as a child. It was difficult to imagine her as anything other than a bear.

“Jenna wants to be one,” Bruce said.

“A bear?”

Bruce nodded. He hadn’t asked her what shifter she wanted to be, but he could assume. She wouldn’t want to be different than him and Saxon. That was the point.