Blake, Her Bad Bear: A Paranormal Bad Boy Romance (17 page)

Two shifters came in. More of Connor’s, Blake could tell. The second man had kicked him hard in the back, and both had crude weapons: a piece of rebar wrapped with duct tape and a baseball bat. Blake reached for the shotgun on his back, but they advanced quickly, and it was all he could do to meet them both head on. Blake used the shotgun to block the first one into the room and felt the shock of the baseball bat through his hands.

“Bastard!” one of them grunted, forcing Blake back against the wall. Blake saw the wall coming up fast behind him and dropped down onto his back. It surprised the shifter who fell forward on top of him. Using his feet, Blake heaved upward and kicked him over his head. The shifter somersaulted through the air and landed hard against the wood, causing the whole foundation of the shack to shake.

The second shifter brought down his piece of rebar toward Blake’s head and barely missed. Blake swung out with the shotgun like a club, taking out his knees, and rolled to his side again. The first man had regained his position and was trying to pick up the baseball bat again.

“Stop!” Blake said and cocked the shotgun, aiming it toward the ceiling. He pulled the trigger, intending to scare them into submission. The gun made a perilous
click.
Blake squeezed it again, still nothing. Another
click.
“Ah, goddamn it,” he said.

Blocking the first attack had warped the muzzle, preventing the shells from getting to the barrel. The gun was useless now, just a piece of metal. The first shifter grinned and advanced again, trying to stab with the blunt end of the bat. Blake ducked again and swiveled, spinning and bringing the butt of the shotgun around in a wide arc that hit him in the jaw. The shifter grunted as he hit the floor, blood fountaining from his mouth where a sharp tooth was dislodged and plinked onto the floor.

“You’re in shit now, Blake!” his compatriot replied and lunged forward with the rebar.

This time there was no way to completely avoid it. The blow hit him by surprise and pushed him back toward the opening in the doorway. As he was being thrust back out, an idea popped into Blake’s head and he lowered his guard. Just as he reached the door frame, he spun the shotgun laterally so that both the end of the barrel and the end of the butt jammed against the sides.

The impact almost caused him to let go of the gun, but he used his own momentum to “swing” back into the shack. His feet slammed into the shifter’s ankles, causing him to fall forward. The shifter didn’t see it coming and let out a surprised exclamation as he landed on the pinned shotgun, clotheslining himself. Gasping, he rolled to one side, and Blake grunted and kicked the rebar away. The second shifter was still unconscious.

“I’ve been in shit my whole life,” Blake said, making his way to the end of the room and reclaiming the small firearm. At least this one still worked. He pulled back on the muzzle and rolled the second shifter over with his foot, who was still coughing and trying to regain his breath. “Now, I think I need some answers.”

“Fuck you,” the shifter spat, holding his chest. “You can’t do anything to me.”

“Sure about that?” Blake asked, leveling the gun at him.

“You-you wouldn’t kill me,” he retorted, but there was doubt in his face.

If Connor has truly gotten through to some of his comrades, than there’s no telling what sort of lies he’s told them about me—I hate to validate rumors, but it might be to my benefit this time,
Blake thought and closed one eye.

“Sure about that?” he repeated carefully.

The shifter hesitated. “What he said about you was true, you’re mad.”

“Just mad enough,” Blake said. “Now, where did he go? If you lie to me, I’ll know you’re lying, I’m taking out your knee cap. You’ve got two of those, so that’s two chances to tell me the truth. Lie to me a third time and I’ll consider it more efficient to go looking for him on my own. So, let’s expedite that process. Where… is… Connor?”

The threat was so casually given, so coldly issued, that the shifter opened his mouth almost too quickly to give in. “I, I don’t know, not really—he just told us to stay here, in case you came. He knew you’d come here, for some reason. That’s all I know!”

“Bullshit,” Blake bluffed, and brought the gun down square against the shifter’s knee and pulled back on the hammer.

“No! Please!” the shifter groaned. “I’m telling the truth! I don’t know, neither of us did—he took off into the woods, north. He had a woman with him, I don’t know what he wanted to do. He just told us to stay here, that’s it!”

Blake eyed him squarely, and only after a long pause did he pull the gun away. “Describe the woman,” he said.

“She-she was young, thin. Looked hard, I don’t know! Black hair, glasses, I think she was a human though—it was weird for me and Jake there, we didn’t understand why Connor was interested in a human,” the shifter said, leaning his head back on the floor. “She had her hands tied. That’s all I know, Blake, please! Don’t kill me!”

The Beta stood up and looked out the door to the north.
So he’s gone on foot,
he thought. That was a sign of desperation. Blake looked back at the shifter and stubbornly offered him his hand, pulling him to his feet. The shifter gave a respectful nod as he turned back toward his companion.

“He left a few hours ago, has a good head start. If you want us to—”

Blake’s hand came down swiftly on the man’s unprotected neck and he never saw it coming. The shifter made a grunting sound as he crumpled forward like dirty laundry. The Beta flexed the pain out of his hand. “Nothing personal, my friend,” he said, “but until I clear my name, I have a few more crimes to commit, and I can’t afford to have you following me. Sleep well, and I don’t envy the headache you’ll have when you awake.”

It sickened him that he had fought so many of his brothers and sisters lately. This was precisely what he had hoped to avoid, what Damian had always feared.
I let you down, old friend,
he thought grimly. It had been Blake’s responsibility to hold the tribe together, but instead he had wavered—if he had been as merciless, as pitiless as Connor, than perhaps none of this would have happened. But he had tried to abide by diplomacy.

Was I so foolish?
he wondered.

He checked the clip on Gavin’s sidearm. Full magazine. Next he picked up the baseball bat and unlatched the sling on the broken shotgun, fastening it around both ends of the tempered wood instead. Outside, the day was on its way out, coming slowly to an end. Twilight would soon be lighting up the eastern mountain range, that lovely pinkish alpen glow as it crossed against the blushed face of glaciers in the higher peaks. Night would dampen the scent of Connor and Lily, so he started off at a slow jog—a few hours and they could have gone kilometers already.

But she’s alive. Lily was alive, at least the last time the shifters had seen her. That confirmed it—she had put Connor in a bad position, between being unable to let her live but also incapable of killing her outright. The word
hostage
came to mind, and felt raw against the back of Blake’s throat. His legs carried him over the fields and toward the end of the valley where the thicket of conifers grew thick again and closeted a special darkness under their canopy.
He’s expecting me
, Blake realized. He’d even gone so far as to leave the last few loyalists to stop him.

“If you’ve hurt her, Connor,” he panted, wanting the words to live outside his own head, “I’ll break my vow one more time, even if it kills me.”

The Alpha had trespassed every tenet of the Ursa Majors. He had killed, had committed conspiracy, brought the tribe to the edge of war, and betrayed everything they stood for. But that wasn’t what Blake held him accountable for. No, it was something far more personal.

He had threatened the woman he loved.

The woman I love,
he repeated. If it was a fact he’d been avoiding for fear of what it would mean for him, both as a man and as a leader, it no longer mattered. Every time he blinked, the cold air rushing up against his face as his legs pushed him harder and faster, following the faint scent and tracks of his mark, he pictured Lily. Her small, beautiful face smiling out at him. He pictured himself beside her, both of them at the edge of a lonely lake.

His hand against her belly where a new life was blossoming.

I’m coming Lily,
he thought.
I’m coming.

CHAPTER NINE

It was cold by time they finally stopped, and by then, Lily had all but lost track of where they were. All she knew was that she was exhausted. They had been walking for what seemed like hours, and without food or drink. Thankfully, Connor had let her stoop and quench her thirst at a small creek, but her throat was burning again and she felt the dry air sting her nose. Her wrists were bound with a piece of rough rope, and during the long march from the old shack it had gradually wound its way into the skin until it bled. Her hands didn’t even feel like her own anymore—they were just figments of pain, an agony that burned like a match head behind her eyes every time she closed them.

She had pleaded with her captor to let her go, and when that had failed at least to unbind her, but he was resolute. She had been terrified at first, back in town. She now saw why the other Ursas had fallen so easily into his sway, and why only Blake seemed able to stand up to him. There was a callousness in his eyes, a weariness watched with a calculating mind that was menacing. She rubbed the bump on the side of her head where he’d smacked her. Everything else had been blurry, until she woke up back at the shack.
He must have knocked me out back at the house, then somehow carried me on his bike out here
, she realized.

“We’ll stop here,” Connor said abruptly, indicating the small, flat space surrounded by pines. It wasn’t huge, but it was protected on one flank by a huge boulder. They had been steadily climbing until it became almost cliff-like, and through a hole in the trees she gasped when she saw how far they’d actually come.

The valley yawning before her was totally foreign to her.
Did we really come all that way?
she wondered. She couldn’t even make out where the shack was supposed to be. For all she knew, they’d circuited around to another valley altogether. She fell to her knees gratefully and gasped for breath, trying to slow her heart-rate. The smell of dust and pine sap was heavy, fragrant.

Opposite the valley were more trees and the dark sloping upward face of another cliff. Even from here, she could see the tops of granite spires to their right. The air had gone colder and she shivered as the sweat dried on her breast and forehead, and flinched when Connor came over to her again. He had a knife in his belt and he held it out at her. She flinched again, her eyes wide with terror.

“Bind,” he said, single word. She took his meaning and carefully placed her wrists on either side of the offered blade. With a single sweep of his wrist Connor sliced the rope off, and it fell softly onto the forest floor, covered with pine needles.

Lily rubbed her wrists. They’d gone red and purple with bruises and abrasions, and as blood flowed back into them it was almost unbearable. She resisted crying out as she held them in her lap and tried not to make a sound. Connor put the knife back in his sheath at his belt and sat down on a small boulder several meters away, setting his rifle down against a nearby tree.

When she’d first been captured, she had thought about resisting—being with Blake had taught her to think quickly in such situations, but also to act. Even when an opportunity wasn’t obvious, that didn’t mean it didn’t exist. She’d been looking for that opportunity ever since they’d started out. Down the valley she made out the orientation. The sun was quickly declining, slipping down between another range of hills. The sky became a beautiful ribbon of alternating dark and light colors, and she could almost enjoy it if it weren’t for the mad shifter in her company.

She looked back at him, trying to take stock of her situation.

Since leaving the shack, when he’d told her to walk, and prodded her with the barrel of the high caliber hunting rifle, she had dared to look back at him only a few times. Each time she did, he was either sternly staring straight ahead, watching his prisoner, or casting a suspicious eye over his shoulder, like he expected to be followed at any instant. A few times, she’d tried to slow him down, stall for time, pretend an injury, but he’d seen through it and threatened to kill her right there and then.

Reluctantly, she had continued on.
I’m still alive
, she mused,
which means he still needs me—or thinks he does, anyway—best to let him keep believing that.
But what was he so afraid of? Yes, she had accused him outright of killing his father, the previous Alpha—she couldn’t have predicted he’d have acted this way. Was he so afraid of what she had to say, her a mere human, that he had gone this far? She thought of the two other shifters he’d called to the shack, how scattered he had seemed as he waited with her at gunpoint for them to arrive. Even when he gave them orders to stay there, to stop anyone who came, especially Blake, the looks in the eyes of those Connor thought were closest to him were wary.
The other Ursas are beginning to doubt
, she grinned.

That didn’t make her position any more viable. Connor was normally cool and collected, but he had just run. She had to assume that Gavin and Sarah had rescued Blake—which meant that they had the evidence against Connor with them, and were probably trying to appeal to the gangs. No wonder Connor was spooked. Everything and everyone was turning against him.

On his rock perch, he suddenly seemed to remember the human and glared at her. He reached in his pocket and took out a flap of matches and tossed it onto the needles in front of her. “You’re a human, you’re weak—I suggest you make a fire, if you don’t want to freeze to death,” he muttered.

Lily took the matches and gave him a mischievous look. “I’ll need to go look for firewood. You aren’t worried that I’ll run away?” she taunted.

Connor shrugged and picked up the rifle and patted it fondly like an old friend or a familiar pet. “It’s almost night. We’re at about three thousand meters already. Even if you managed to make it back down to the valley floor, and I don’t think you have the energy in you, you’d still freeze to death. It’s up to you, bitch. Make a fire, or don’t. It doesn’t matter to me.”

“That’s not true,” she said, glaring at him through her glasses. She took them off and saw that one of the lenses had been scratched. The frame on one side was also bent.
Damn
. “You’ve kept me alive and prodded me all goddamn day, so obviously I mean something to you. Otherwise…”

Lily let the thought peter out, but regretted it suddenly. She didn’t want to provoke him, especially if he was undecided at the moment. “I’m counting on you not being a complete idiot,” he murmured. “If you try to take off and think you’re brave enough, keep in mind—I’m a bear, and I can smell you for miles. You’re right, I need you alive… for now. But you can still be alive with a bullet through your leg. Keep that in mind.”

She gulped and clutched the matches closely as she got to her feet shakily. It was all bravado—Connor was right, she didn’t have the energy to try to escape. It was all she could do to scavenge the surrounding area in the growing darkness for some dry kindling. She stacked it in her arms and carried it back to the clearing. Connor was still there, hunched over with his rifle. He was like a statue, or one of the trees, completely motionless. But as she got closer and began to stack the kindling into a pyramid with palsied fingers, she saw that he was actually staring into the distance. The first stars were turning on above the blue horizon, and she caught the glare of his eyes like a cat’s.

He really is afraid Blake will follow
, she thought, lighting a match until it started to glow.
Which makes me a hostage.
The fire began to eat at the wood and soon an orange blaze was being nurtured by her feeding it sticks. She scooted up against the giant boulder and put her back to it with the fire in front and began to warm her hands. She was so tired, she could barely keep her eyes open, and not having eaten had taken its toll.
How can Connor still be so wary?
she wondered, daring to close her eyes for a moment.

He was a shifter. Of course. It was so easy to forget that these humans had other forms. She had seen just how mighty they could be, how terrifying. Then, her eyes flashed open and she realized that the fire, even though it was small, was serving as a beacon. In the pitch black, it could probably be seen for miles off as a dull orange flicker. When she looked toward the rock again she saw that Connor was gone. Terrified for a moment she scanned the clearing, but there was no sign of him, or of his rifle.

She rubbed her chin.

He wanted me to set a fire
, she thought. If someone was looking for her, or tracking Connor, then the fire was the perfect way to lure them. She stood up and was about to kick it out when she stopped. Connor had let her act as one of his weapons—but it was still a double-edged blade. Sure, the flames would lure and attract Blake. But Blake was smart; it was a gamble whether or not he’d fall for such an obvious trap.

The lynchpin came down to one thing.
Me
, she realized.

Carefully, she took her foot away and started at the flames crackling again, and grinned. No doubt somewhere close Connor was waiting with his rifle, scanning the surrounding area and hoping for an easy shot.
It’s up to me—do I destroy the beacon and with it any hope of Blake finding me, or do I count on Blake seeing through Connor’s trap?

Lily sat back down and hugged her knees as she stared into the flames. She closed her eyes again, the veil of fatigue rushing over her.
I’ll lay my bets on Blake every time,
she thought before falling into a light and restless sleep.

***

Several miles off, Lily’s suspicions were correct. Blake had been running for hours, and though he’d fallen into a steady jog and covered significant territory, it had also run him ragged. All the same, he felt a renewed energy in his muscles. All the exercise had increased his blood flow, and with it, his healing factors. He could literally feel joints and muscles knitting under his flesh, and the added endorphin boost left him giddy as he sprinted over grass and leapt straight across creeks. Evening had dipped fast, but slowly his bear vision had come alive, and he sniffed deeply, relying on his other senses to follow the trail.

It was quite easy. Even if Connor was an expert woodsman and knew how to cover his tracks, he couldn’t worry about making ground and eliminating the tracks of his prisoner. Here and there, Blake could easily pick up a deep footprint or a broken branch, and there was the constant smell of Lily, as if she’d made an effort to brush against the bushes and trees in order to leave her scent behind.
Smart girl,
he thought. It had become so obvious that he came to expect certain footsteps in certain places. Truly, Connor must have been desperate and his mind elsewhere to have missed such obvious hints that she had left behind.

It wasn’t until he’d made it through a small quagmire in the middle of the woods where the earth was sodden and grasses and sedges had overpowered all other plant life that he looked up against the black silhouette of the mountain range and saw it. It was well into the night now, with its many blues and blacks in spectrum across the sky, but there—like something burrowing out of the dark—was a red mark. He quickly recognized it as belonging to a campfire, halfway up the mountain side in a patch of trees.

It had to be Connor and Lily.

“What are you planning?” he whispered out loud, eyeing the distant glow of embers with suspicion. Surely, Connor wouldn’t have let her build such an obvious landmark for him to follow and bear down on? Unless, of course, that was the point.

Clever
, he smacked his fist into his other open palm. A trap, yes, but it was a carefully plotted one. It wasn’t meant to appear as anything
other
than a trap—both he and Connor knew it was a trap. That, in fact, wasn’t the trap at all. The trap was whether or not Connor’s bargaining chip, Lily, was valuable enough to Blake. “A devil’s wager,” Blake growled. He ran to the other end of the quagmire and looked up again.

Somewhere, Connor was waiting for him. Probably with a weapon. Knowing his enemy, it wouldn’t be something clumsy like a shotgun. Probably the Alpha had made off with a rifle of some sort, something that could pick off enemies at a distance. That made things more difficult. On the other hand, it also limited his scope of vision to his weapon’s sights, while Blake had the freedom to move and attack from several different angles.

“Okay, then.”

At the edge of the forest, he unloaded two shells from the shotgun, and in the moonlight that began to glance over the mountain, he used his pocket knife to unscrew it and scraped the potassium nitrate into two leaves. Next he ripped both sleeves off his shirt.
Sorry Jimmy
, he said, vowing to buy the kid a new shirt.

It took him another quarter of an hour to set up two identical apparatuses. Using only the finest kindling and dead lichen, he built two fire starters. The little stacks of wood and dead plants would ignite immediately if introduced to flame. Next he made crude pouches out of the shirt sleeves and filled them with fine, sandy dirt embedded against the moraine of the hillside. The device was ingeniously simple. The bags were anchored with his shoelaces to counterweight stones above the salvaged gunpowder. If he pricked the bag with his knife it would slowly sink, and make the rocks sink. Then, using an old style sapling trap he had long ago used to snag rabbits, he fixed it under the rocks. Once the rocks set off the trap, it would spring down on the gunpowder, igniting both fire starters.