Bearing It All (Alpha Werebear Shifter Paranormal Romance) (20 page)

I caught myself in mid-shrug. “I, uh... well I guess I felt kinda stupid about the whole thing. I mean, it
is
stupid, right?”

“Bears mate for life,” she said.

At first that didn’t make much sense, but then a couple seconds later, it dawned on me that she was actually being supportive in a Henry kind of way. I guess she could tell I was a little confused.

“They’re also impulsive,” she added. “I’m not saying this all wrong. What I’m getting at is that, yeah, I think you’re nuts for falling in love with a pit fighting bear you met twice and you don’t really know. On the other hand, look at me. Here I am doling out advice like I’m Gandalf and I’ve had two boyfriends ever. So, I’m not sure I’m really the one to be doling out advice here.”

“What about Darren?” I asked her. Darren was the guy she’d been with not too long ago. Real cute guy – kind of a lanky, skinny werewolf. “I thought you two were...”

The look of absolute horror on my friend’s face got me to stop short.

“Breaking news, breaking news.” Behind her, Whit Whitman appeared on the television and started talking. “Another kidnapping has just been reported. This time, a young girl – we don’t have – we promised police not to reveal her name, or her, uh, species – was nabbed on the way to Jamesburg High.”

“Do you believe this?” I heard myself asking. “It’s like... I don’t know, this is just crazy. Since when does this place have
crime
?”

Henry shrugged. “Kinda funny, isn’t it? That fighting crew comes to town, and there are kidnappings. Then they leave, and they stop. Now they’re back again in Clinton or wherever they have a match, and... guess what starts again?”

We both just stared at each other for a second, neither one of us sure what to say next. Millicent solved the problem by bursting through the door.

“My daughter!” she screeched. “It was her! She’s been taken!”

Right then, at the worst possible moment, my phone rang. The dulcet tones of some club song about drinking filled the wickedly thick air. That time, I looked at the screen before I answered.

“Ash.”
The screen said. I changed his name in my phone right after he told me his real one. It was like some kind of bond between us that I felt like was really important even though it probably wasn’t anything at all.

Millie looked like she was going to panic, and Henry was already by her side.

“Hey,” I said, “answering the phone and not waiting for Ash’s smooth voice to lull me. “Millie – my boss – her kid, she’s been...”

He finished for me. “Kidnapped,” he said. “I know. I need you to meet me between Jamesburg and Clinton. Can you?”

I looked over at Millie, who was understandably weeping, but Henry seemed to have it under control. “I... why?” I asked. “I thought you were going to come see me after your fight.”

“About that,” Ash said. There it was, there was his smooth, soft, leathery voice that did really funny things to the center of me. “I kinda quit. Kind of. I know it’s crazy, and I know it’s really sudden, but I need your help. I can’t say anything else in case someone hears me.”

“But, Ash,” I said. “She’s – my boss – she’s really upset. I don’t know if I should.”

“Tell her that you know where her daughter is,” he said.

“I, wait, you what? You’re kidding me. Right? Please tell me you’re kidding.”

Ash cleared his throat. “Actually don’t tell her anything.” he said. “I know where they are, but I need your help. I can’t do this on my own. Just meet me, okay? It’ll all be okay. But, yeah, I need your help.”

“I... have no idea why I’m doing this,” I said. “For some reason – maybe because I’m stupid – I trust you that I’m not walking into a trap.”

“I’m sorry I’m asking you to do this,” he said. “But thank you. Thirty minutes, okay? There’s a... a shed thing.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “Macdonald’s old chicken coop. We used to go out there and drink when we were too young to drink. I’ll see you there.”

The line went dead before I finished.

Oh my God what in the hell am I getting myself mixed up in?

I couldn’t tell Henry. I just couldn’t. She’d worry herself half to death if she knew where I was going. As I headed for the door, she looked up at me, but was too immersed in caring for Millie to really notice I was leaving.

I felt terrible. Like really, legit terrible. But at the same time, if I really was going to go help this werebear save a town full of kids, wouldn’t I be even worse if I
didn’t
go? I thought about my friend, and about those four other women – no, they weren’t women – they were girls. There were four high school students. The other of them was a girl I babysat when she was little. She was just in her first year of college, and unless she was a
lot
different from me, I’m not entirely sure she was a woman either.

I
certainly wasn’t in any mental shape to be called a woman the first year of college.

The twenty six miles between my parking space and Macdonald’s chicken coop disappeared without my really noticing them. I was just in a daze.

When I saw Ash with his huge brown eyes and his massive shoulders and shirt-stretching chest step out from behind the building, my heart melted. And then I saw the look on his face – a look of something between panic, rage, and heartbreak – and I ran to him, threw my arms around his neck and buried my face in his chest.

“Come on,” he said. “There’s something we have to do. And fast. Someone we have to follow. Hop on.”

“Follow?” I asked.

He didn’t answer, just revved the engine of his huge bike, and peeled off toward Clinton.

I squeezed him tight, clinging to my bear. There wasn’t an inch of space between us. Turning my head to the side I flattened my cheek against the cool leather of his jacket and wished we could just... be normal. The thrumming motorcycle between my legs hypnotized me momentarily.

“What are we going to do?” I asked as he pulled off the road. In the near-distance was the Civic Center where I assumed the fight was going to take place, but also, a small caravan of flat-bed trucks that were pointed toward Jamesburg. “Wait a second... that’s not...”

Ash tightened his mouth into a hard line. He wheeled his bike back behind a free-standing billboard far enough off the road that no one would notice, and then we hunkered down. “First we wait,” he said. “Then we follow.”

“But,
who
are we following?” I prodded him further. “All you’ve told me is—”

A soft touch of his hand on my back silenced me. “They’re moving,” he whispered. “Get down.”

The trucks – three old, mid-1950s style Chevrolet flatbeds – rolled toward us. I saw there were three of them lined up single file. They were a little like army-style carrier trucks with the canvas flaps to hide whatever they were carrying. I looked over at Ash, whose face was hard. His left eye twitched a little, making the tattoo on his face dance as he winced.

Without my asking anything, he just started to talk.

“Witch,” he said. “Weird woman. Really tall, wears this black... uh, habit-type thing.”

I searched my brain. Jamesburg has a coven of witches like all good towns do, but they mostly kept to themselves. But then, something stuck out.

Black habit.

There was one of them – the crankiest, most irritable, and oldest – named Leota Barlowe. My parents always told me to stay away from the parts of the woods where she, Crazy Mary, and Jenga the Witch Doctor lived in these ramshackle houses, but I never knew why.

The story went that she’d come to Jamesburg not long after the town was founded, escaping some kind of witch hunting extravaganza up north.

“Leota,” I said. “But...”

Ash shook his huge, shaggy head. “I don’t know. But I found some papers in Marlin’s office – that’s my boss, the crocodile – and also about eighty grand tucked in envelopes. There are eight girls, so...”

“EIGHT?” I asked, way louder than I mean to be. “The news only said something about
one
more.”

“From Jamesburg,” he said with a nod. “He got a couple of others on the road. I can’t be sure though, he’s got his nasty lackeys for that kind of work. And like I said, I kinda... tendered my resignation.”

“Wait, so you’ve just been following them? I thought... oh God,” I trailed off for a second. “I thought you were going to come through and have a couple fights and then we were going to go have a nice date and I was going to try and convince myself not to tell you I’d fallen in—”

I clapped my mouth shut and covered it with my mouth.
Not now, not right now. I can’t do this to him or to me right now. It isn’t fair and I’m crazy... like a fox.
My eyes darted back and forth.

He looked at me for a second, cocking that grin that makes me go all wiggly inside. But Ash didn’t say anything, he just nodded.

“When did you leave?” I asked, completely dumbfounded by everything going on.

The trucks were getting closer, but moving so slowly they were still a mile or so down the road. They’d just barely got to the Civic Center parking lot’s entrance. I guess a bunch of bound and gagged girls weren’t much anything to get in a hurry over, especially if you were a God-knows-how-old witch.

“A little town outside Raleigh, in North Carolina,” he said. “There were two days between that one and us coming back through here. I told him I’d meet up with him in Clinton, but that I needed some time to myself.”

“I thought he was some kind of tyrant. He just lets you leave whenever you want?”

Ash shook his head and stared deep into me with those dark, walnut eyes. “He knows me,” he said. “More accurately, he’s scared of me. I get – I mean, I’m not unique in this, it’s kind of a bear thing – I get into, uh moods. You know? Always being around the crowds, the audiences can make me kind of crazy.”

“I know what you mean,” I said under my breath. There had been so many times in my life I wished I could just crawl into the little lair I made for myself on my bed and never get out. I suspected it wasn’t quite the same though. “Do you like... snap?”

One of his eyes twitched and Ash chewed on his bottom lip. “I won’t say I haven’t. But I also won’t say anything else. Not yet anyway. I can’t have you thinking I’m some kind of unhinged psychopath.”

The grin that crept across Ash’s face was part mischief, part cocky and all knee-trembling. I don’t know what it is about him, but every time I see that look I just can’t help myself. Even sitting here waiting in the bushes to follow a caravan of kidnapped girls, I couldn’t help but think about... well, about him.

I hated that I thought it, but there it was.

They were getting close. The world started to get that weird, under-your-feet rumble that happens when you’re in a parking garage with a low ceiling and someone drives right above your head. It was partially that the trucks were huge, I’m sure, but there was just as much of my own anxiety and guilt that I was feeling.

Sitting next to Ash, with his arm around my shoulders, and his muscled sides touching me with every single breath he took, it was hard – like really, really hard – not to think about all kinds of things I shouldn’t have been thinking about.

They rolled down the street, and I was almost sure I heard a scream from the back of one of them. My ears are sharper than a normal person’s, and the little squeak of pain almost brought tears to my eyes.

“We gotta help them,” I whispered. “We really, really have to help them.”

“We will,” Ash growled. His voice was low and dangerous and full of barely-contained fury. “I’ve sat by the side of the road and watched Marlin hurt people for too long. Way, way too long. I’m not going to let it keep happening. Not this time.”

On down the road the trucks went, pointing east toward Jamesburg. Ash’s mouth was moving as each one passed.

“A handful of guards,” he said. “But there’s two really big guys – I think he hired them recently. I’ve only seen them from the back, but there’s something about them I remember.”

“Fighters?” I asked.

He nodded. “Some are, yeah. They don’t know what they’re doing. These two new ones though, aren’t fighters. Marlin has... ways... to keep people from figuring out their own reality. I’m gonna end all that though. He isn’t gonna hurt anyone else. I’ll make sure of it.”

“You don’t mean you’re gonna kill him, do you?” I asked, my hand trembling on Ash’s muscled forearm.

He looked in my direction and gave me one of those panty-melting smiles. I’m almost sure he made his eyes twinkle like that on purpose. “I’ll try not to make too big of a mess,” he said. “But I can’t promise anything.”

For a second, neither of us said anything. The grass was a little hard on my allergies, but with a regiment of slow exhaling, I kept my sneezes in.

“Oh shit,” Ash said, in a slow, excited voice. “Look at that wobbly-headed jerk-off driving the second truck.”

I recognized the face, but couldn’t remember the name. It was the jowly were-croc that spent so much time jawing at Leon when we saw the fights that first night.

My thoughts went back there for just a second. Back to how Ash – Crag as I knew him then – walked out in the middle of the cage, muscles all flexing, and how I fell for him right that second.

“Marlin,” he growled, reminding me of the guy’s name. Ash’s voice sounded like he was rolling the name around his tongue, savoring a bitter taste. “I’ve been waiting for this for so... so long.”

––––––––

I
couldn’t believe how hard I was shaking.

Ash pulled me to my feet as soon as the truck caravan was fully past us, far enough away that we could trail them but they couldn’t see back.

“Listen to me,” he said. “I hate that I’m doing this to you, but I know we can save them. Normally I’d just tip off the cops – hyenas – but I don’t know where they’re going, and I don’t want to give Marlin and Leota a chance to pull anything.”

I nodded, unable to speak from a mixture of being dumbfounded by fear and speechless with desire. Even in this ridiculous situation, in the grass beside a barn where we’d just snooped on a gang of kidnappers, I couldn’t get my mind off how badly I wanted to feel Ash against me again – against me, kissing me... inside me.