Luke (Bear Shifter) (New World Shifters) (6 page)

That night was a strange one. Carla and I worked our asses off as usual, but neither she nor I had to dodge grabbing hands or pretend to like the winks and muttered comments as we served our customers. The Wolf pack was there in full force, though now there were only eight of them including Bruno.

And they seem
worried
. Obviously Everly was gone, but some of their other regulars were also missing. What's more, they weren’t talking about it. This was a group of guys I'd seen verbally accost a guy all night for showing up late, and now three or four of their stalwarts were completely absent and it wasn't commented on at all.

Something was going on. The look in Bruno’s eyes told me that a storm was coming. He wasn’t scared, but I could tell that things had gone to a whole new level. His roving eyes scanned the crowd all night, and by the look on his face he was cataloguing every comment he overheard, the body language of every person that came and bought the Wolf pack a drink or shook their hands or lied through their teeth when they said they were sorry about what had happened to Everly.

A worried Bruno was even more frightening than a confident one. I knew that he was capable of anything, and if he was going to be dangerous, it was to those that crossed them.

Did that include me? Had I been disloyal by finding Everly’s body? Had he seen me, because if he did, I was probably already as good as dead…

The night wore on, and as hard as I worked and as well as I was tipped, I couldn't wait for the night to be over. The Wolf pack left together, something I'd never seen them do. The fact that they were seeking strength in numbers told me all I needed to know.

Whatever had happened to Everly, they weren’t going to let it happen to them.

What could make a man that could turn into a Wolf
this
scared? I didn't know, but something in my gut told me it probably wasn't just a man that could turn into a Bear. That sort of thing must be relatively common, in their world.

Once the Wolf pack left, everyone else did too. I don’t know if they went home out of relief or respect, but at least we were able to shut up early. Carla and I decided that we were going home too. Forget about cleaning up, and forget about doing the books. This was a night like no other, and if the Wolf pack was gone, we figured that it was as close to a national holiday as we were going to get.

I said my goodbyes to her. “And thanks again, for earlier,” I whispered, still cautious even though we were alone. Who knew how well those things could hear?

“Don't mention it,” she said, “and don't breathe another word of it, either. Like you said, you went to the outfitter for a gun and couldn't buy one. End of story. Just make sure you let Old Man Cole know his part in your story before Bruno does, or things will start to unravel real fast.”

“I will,” I assured her. “You okay getting home?”

She smiled. “I'll be fine. You know how I am. I’ll have to count up all the glasses and inventory the napkins before my OCD lets me sleep a wink. You be safe. Hey, isn't tonight the night you were going to call your boy? Better hurry up and do that. It’s late in the rest of the world.”

I gasped. She was right. I’d been working so hard and been so worried about what happened earlier today that I’d totally forgotten. Every Friday night I got to call Jake, and now that I was leaving work at a decent time our conversation might get to last a little bit longer.

He was still just little, and my grandparents were dead set that he needed to have a consistent bedtime. I understood, but that meant that most weeks I only got a bleary little “Hello?” and an “I love you, mommy” before he was trotted off to bed. I was looking forward to hearing his sweet voice, and even though she’d only just reminded me that was going to happen, the very prospect was already filling my soul with joy.

I left the bar and hurried home. The sky was dark, and the stars were obscured by clouds. I stared at my feet and walked as quickly as I could, trying hard not to slip on the patches of black ice and being
very
careful, almost too careful, not to glance to my right past the outfitters.

If I see tracks there tonight,
I told myself,
I won’t follow them
. No matter what happened, I was determined to sit out that sort of intrigue. I'd almost drowned in it this morning, and this afternoon it almost claimed me again, when Bruno had asked about Bears and Wolves. Somehow, mostly due to my mysterious rescuer, a lot of luck and Carla's quick thinking I seemed to be in the clear, and I wasn't going to risk putting myself back in jeopardy.

I had my son to think about. I needed to get Jake back, and if something happened to me he'd be all alone in the world. My grandparents wouldn’t live forever, and I couldn't bear the thought of my boy growing up alone. He was such a sweetheart. He’d never done anything to harm anyone, and I owed it to him to get my shit together and provide a life for him that would be better than the one my parents had provided for me.

I got home, threw my bag on the bed and snatched up the phone.

The line was dead silent. I leaned over and hung the phone up and then picked it up again. Still nothing. There was no dial tone, no busy signal. I pressed it to my face and the cold, hard plastic just threw back the sound of my own blood rushing through my ears like the fake ocean call of a seashell.

My heart broke. It was hard enough to be up here and away from Jake. To have the promise of his voice taken away like that… It was simply too much. After everything that happened the past couple of days, after everything I'd seen and everything I’d been through…

The emptiness that I was always fighting rushed up at me out of nowhere and I set the receiver down gently once more and collapsed on the bed. The musty pillowcase had cigarette burns all over it, but I pushed my face to it anyway and cried my eyes out just the same.

It wasn't fair. It wasn't fucking fair! Yes, I'd made my mistakes, but I'd owned up to them as best I could. I wasn't about to let them put me in jail over them, but I paid back the people I’d hurt. I wasn't a bad person, and I didn't deserve to be stuck in this shitty hotel room without the voice of my Jake in my ear.

I knew I could reschedule. I knew that I was calling earlier than I usually did and that whatever was wrong with the phone line may well be fixed in time for me to make the call anyway. I even knew I was overreacting, but the knowledge did nothing to quell the sobs that rattled through my body and shook me to my core.

I needed to hear him, and it felt like a rug had been yanked out from underneath my feet now that I couldn't.

What was I supposed to do with myself now?

Nothing
, came my own answer to myself.
You lay here and you sleep. And then you wake up and take a shower. You kill time until you open up Bruno’s tomorrow, and then you work your ass off. And then you do that again. And again. You keep right on doing that, and you don’t fucking complain until you’ve saved up enough to get Jake back
.

When I’d done the math on how long it would take to get back to my son and civilization, I'd been hopeful. A year. A year wasn't so long. It was far less time than I would've gotten if I'd been arrested, and so I felt grateful for the chance.

I was naïve. I saw that now…

Everything up here in Barrow was so damn expensive, and even though I ate as cheaply as I could, food and the motel room I was in right now took its toll on my savings. I was still adding to my account, but
much
slower than I thought I would in the first place. My estimation of a year had turned out to be wildly optimistic, and now that I had my wits about me I had to own up to the fact that it would be far closer to three before I could pay my grandparents back and collect my sweet son.

Three years. By the time I got to hold him again, he’d have spent almost a third of his life without a mother.

And it was the years of his life that he’d remember, too. When he got bullied at school or hurt himself and looked for his mommy or wanted something that only I could provide, a hug or kiss or a trip to Toys "R" Us I wouldn’t be there for him.

I'd already missed so much, and when I was finally reunited with him there was always the danger that he wouldn't even remember who I was.

Or worse, that he did. What if he only thought of me as the person that had abandoned him three years before…?

I couldn’t take it. I knew I'd made my bed and I had to sleep in it, but at times like these I wondered if any of it was worth it. I told myself over and over that I could go through anything if it meant that I get back to my son, but was that true? If I was the type of mother that could abandon him for so long in the first place, did I even deserve to have him?

As I lay there heartbroken, I finally gave my mind a chance to think over what happened today. There was no doubt about it. I'd watched that cute guy I’d been crushing on become a Bear. I hadn't seen Bruno change, but I was sure that he had too. I'd heard the Wolf howls from across town, and I'd sensed the way that everybody in town had locked their doors and barred their windows and stayed inside.

They all knew. Whether they wanted to admit it or not, they had more than an inkling that something was going on. But there was nothing they could do, and so they simply did what everyone did up here. They put their head down and ignored it.

It made a grim sort of sense. I mean, what could
anyone
do against that sort of power? If Werewolves and whatever the Bear guy was were real, then what hope did any of us have?

At least the guy from the bar had been on my side. He didn't have to help me, but he did anyway. Yes, it was a little creepy that he knew so much about me already, but if he wanted to hurt me he'd had ample opportunity. He could have not lifted a finger and simply let Bruno find me, but he hadn't. He pulled me to safety, and when we’d been about to be discovered he risked his own neck and led my boss away.

Was the Bear okay? I didn't think the Wolves had caught him. If they had, I was sure there would've been a far more celebratory atmosphere at Bruno's tonight. No, he'd gotten away. They didn't know where, and that was part of the reason they were so upset. That, and now they knew that they were being hunted.

Don't get involved
, I told myself, even as I stood up off of the bed and wiped my eyes clean of tear streaked mascara.
Leave well enough alone. Let sleeping dogs lie
.

I didn’t listen. The dogs running around up here were turning out to be Werewolves, and they certainly weren't asleep. They were dragging this town down into the dirt, making everyone afraid of them, doing whatever they wanted. The Bear was willing to stand up to them, and he'd been hiding in plain sight until I had made him ruin that.

Something inside of me told me that he
wasn't
safe. He might've gone away, but at what cost?

I didn't know, but I was determined to find out.

Once I'd shrugged my shoulders into my biggest, thickest jacket and pulled on a hat and gloves, I left the motel room. The cloud cover had lowered and it was even darker outside than before. I looked left and right, wary of the junkies I shared the motel with, but everything seemed shut up tight for the night.

They felt it too, I could tell. Bruno and the Wolf pack were uneasy, which meant all the lowlifes that had something to do with them were on their best behavior

I crossed the icy street as carefully as I could and headed toward the outfitter, intent on walking past Cole's place and up into the woods. That way I could follow the trail that I’d seen last night and the escape route I'd taken earlier today. It was still early by the standards of my nightlife, closing in on eight o’clock, but everything should've been closed.

It was rare for a shop on the street to be open past five. There were no customers then, and it wasn't worth having an unlocked door in case a drunk walked in and started messing up the place. That was why I was so surprised to find that Cole's lights were still on. As I got closer I could see that the little white sign in his window was flipped to ‘Open’.

On a whim, I tried the door. It was unlocked, and even though I hadn't put very much pressure on it the door swung open enough for the little silver bell above my head to jingle merrily. I figured I
had
to go inside now, even if it was just to tell the old guy who ran the place that it had been me at the door.

Everyone knew that Old Man Cole lived in a room at the back of his shop. If I’d just woken him up, it’d be rude to not at least pretend to be a customer for a few minutes. I wasn't some kid anymore, and pranks like dingdong ditch were well in my past. Besides, now was as good a time as any to ask if he’d cover for me when Bruno came sniffing around with questions about today.

The walls and shelves were stocked with everything you would ever need to survive up here. Rifles, ammo, tents and rations, snowshoes and skis. There was a whole section at the back of the shop devoted to chainsaws and other types of machinery. I didn’t know how to use any of it, but it was vital equipment in the far reaches of the North.

“What can I do for you?” Cole asked from the back room, emerging blinking into the light. He shaded his eyes and peered at me for a moment, before giving me a gap toothed smile. “Oh, it's you Zoe. Welcome. Never seen you in here before.”

Cole was
ancient
. Most people put his age at somewhere between 80 and 90, but right now he looked to be at least twice that. What hair he had was tufted and wild, and one of his eyes was glossed over with thick cataracts. His other didn't look like it work much better, but at least it was clear. His face was a mass of wrinkles and scars, and the people in town were always saying that Cole had a story for each of them.

Everyone assumed they were bullshit, but who were they to argue with a man this old who had seen so much?

The best part about him was that he didn't like the Wolf pack. He wasn't loud about that fact, but I knew it just the same. I'd seen the way the fire touched his one good eye when they walked into Bruno’s. Occasionally Cole would come in for a rum or a brandy, and as soon as the Wolf pack entered he'd set the rest of his drink down, pay his tab, and leave.

And there was no love lost between them, because I'd seen Bruno staring holes in his back more than once. I don't know what sort of history had passed between those two, but there was clearly a story there to rival any of Cole's scars.

“Sorry,” I told him, “I'm really not in the market for anything. I saw your lights on, and I didn't know if everything was okay or not so I thought I’d check.”

“Everything is not okay,” Cole said, though he smiled. “Everything is never okay.”

“Are you hurt?” I asked, hearing the concern in my own voice. Cole and Carla were the only two people who’d been kind to me in Barrow, and I wore my heart on my sleeve when it came to them. “Is someone bothering you?”

Cole grinned at me and shook his head no. “I'm fine. But you’re a fool if you think that’s what’s important, right now. You need to go get that boy of yours, and that's for sure.”

I recoiled it as if he'd taken a swing at me. How the hell did everyone know about Jake, all of a sudden? I didn’t want to believe that Carla had told everyone my backstory, but I didn’t know what else to think…

Other than telling her, I'd been careful to leave my family out of this, and now everybody was blurting my secrets as if they were public knowledge.” Excuse me?” I asked, feeling the anger rise in my throat. I was ready to spit venom, and poor old Cole didn't have the benefit of being able to swap into a Bear and runaway.

I was about to give him both barrels, when he looked at me strangely. “That boy of yours,” he repeated. “The good one that sits in the corner at the bar. He needs your help. Can’t you tell?”

I blinked. So he hadn't meant Jake after all. “What are you talking about?”

“The store is still open because I have things here you need,” Cole told me. “I've got some stuff for you, and it should be enough. A little thing like you can't carry much anyway, but I tried to be mindful of that. I'm sorry I can’t help you, but these old bones wouldn’t make it through that forest again.”

“Stuff?” I asked, feeling as if my brain were broken. “Through the forest?”

“Yes,” he nodded enthusiastically. “It takes something out of you, or didn’t you notice?” He looked at me, and when I didn't answer he just shrugged. “Anyway, I've got some rope for you over there on the counter. A firestarter too, though you’d better hope that you don't need it on a night like tonight. There’s a climbing ax, but that's just in case. That's worst-case scenario, you understand?”

I didn’t. “Cole, I don't understand any of this. I know the words you're using, but I don't know what you mean. One of us is crazy and, statistically, it's probably going to be you.”

He chuckled. “Yes, well, just you think about what you saw this afternoon before you go and call people crazy, don't you think? You try telling
that
to a shrink, and see what they prescribe for you. You won’t last five minutes before they cart you off to the loony bin, that's what I'm thinking.”

I bit my lip so hard that I tasted blood. Was he talking about the Bear and the Wolf? He had to be, and a knowing look in his one good eye reassured me that he knew far more than he was saying. “Where am I supposed to go?” I asked eventually, unwilling to argue with him. If he was going to point me in the right direction, who was I to get in his way?

“You're supposed to head out; the way you went last night. Find where you left him and follow the tracks. They might've set a guard, but maybe they haven't. Were they all at the bar tonight?”

“No,” I said sadly. “Three of them were missing.”

“Right,” he said, “well I guess you best hope that your boy got them because otherwise they’ll be blocking your way. Just in case though, you better take this.” Cole turned and carefully selected a handgun from the wall behind him before bringing over to me. “Have you shot one of these before?”

“No.”

“Well,” he said, really not that hard. “It's the first point-and-click interface, I guess you could say. Point it at the thing that you want dead, and pull the trigger. This one’s a .357 Magnum, but all that should mean to you is that it's going to kick like a fucking mule. Be ready for it, or it'll either jump out of your hand or swing up and bash you in the face, unless you’ve got a good grip.”

“Cole-”

“I’ve got some ammo for you too. Can't forget that,” he said to himself, going back behind the counter. I saw him brush aside boxes and boxes of ammunition, digging towards the bottom of a massive stack until he found one that was underneath them. “Here you go. Have to keep it under all this gunpowder so that the bastards won’t smell it, you understand.”

“Of course I don’t understand Cole. And you can keep the bullets. I’m not going to shoot anyone.”

He sighed. “Sure, sure, that's what we all tell ourselves. That's what I told myself when I was storming that beach over there in France. I wasn't going to shoot
anybody
. I was just going to run to the nearest safe place, get as close to the machine guns as I could until they couldn’t aim down on me. But things change when you go to war, and that might be where you’re going now Zoe. Things change, and they either change you or
you
change
them
.”

I let him take the gun back from me and watched as he loaded it. Six bullets, which left another 18 in the box. They looked brighter than I expected them to, and I had plenty of time to count them as his shaky, withered fingers struggled to push one bullet after another into the cylinders before he pressed the gun back together with click.

“Did you see how I did that?” he asked. “There’s a little lever here. Flick it, and you can get the gun open. You have to shake out the metal that's left behind after you shoot. There are words for all this stuff, but you'll just forget it so what's the point? Shake out the old metal and press in the new bullets. Fold it back together and get back to shooting. You listening?”

“Yes, “I told him, “I’m listening.”

“Good. Now grab the rope, and shove those firestarters in your pocket. The pickax folds up. And it's a climbing ax remember, so make sure it's locked into position before you try and use it.”

“And I'm going through the forest,” I repeated, before he made me. “Following the old tracks and trying to find him.”

“That's right,” he told me. “You’re learning.”

“Cole?”

“Yeah?”

“Why am I doing this, again?”

Cole looked up at me and his old voice shook with emotion. “You're doing it, Zoe, because nobody else in this town can or will. It's up to you. And I know you won't let him down.”