Shifters of Grrr 1 (105 page)

Out in the kitchen, the phone continued to bleat. Emotional exhaustion made her sluggish, and a rare headache threatened. Reaching up to her shoulder she pinched the wound Ranger had made sending the ache deep into her muscles. She’d continue to aggravate it every day, keep it raw, if it meant holding onto a connection with her mate.
 

Even though he wasn’t her mate.

Even though he couldn’t keep his promise.

Fuck it.
She wasn’t worthy of a man like him.

She retrieved her phone. One hundred and eighty-two messages!

He must have some sort of automated messaging system, because nobody could keep that shit up. If it continued, she’d have to ditch the phone before it burst into flames. The thing was already running a fever.

Her thumb hovered over the screen; it was so tempting just to read one…but,
shit.
She threw the phone across the room accompanied by a hefty curse.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

~RANGER~

Ranger leaned his head back against the headrest of the SUV driven by Taras, the Bear Force operative who had met his plane. They were in Wiehai, in east China’s Shandong province, heading to the unlicensed bear bile farm Romer had apparently located. The removal of the bears was already underway, and Ranger was anxious to see if Romer was among the caged bears.

The past two days had taken Ranger from purgatory, to heaven, and then straight to hell. Although it pained him—although he had done it persistently over the past months and swore he’d never do it again—he pushed all thoughts of Ada from his mind.

It was time to focus completely on the job he had to do; he would deal with his regret over Ada when his work was done. And he would fight for her once he returned home.

The parking area of the farm was floodlit, making the assembly of transport crates, trucks, and people in overalls appear like the set of a science fiction movie. Taras led him into the enormous building, and even though he’d seen it before, the sight brought Ranger to a standstill.

He took a moment to assess the operation; rescuers calmly working among the crush cages where bears were compressed into spaces so tight they couldn’t move. All the time he breathed carefully, sympathetic to the fury of his bear who wanted to push through and tear the bars from the cages.
 

He closed his eyes and concentrated, seeking a sense of, or communication from Romer, but he was unable to discern a thing. There was too much anguish and emotional chaos in the building messing with his senses. He’d have to make a visual sweep, and that would be painful.

Ranger moved around the cages, nodding to the rescuers who each shared the same grim expression. A look that spoke of blocking the horror of what they were dealing with, and getting on with the job. No time now for shedding tears as a sense of urgency overtook the team of people whose first priority was to get the bears out of there.

This was one of the worst setups he’d seen, though he imagined many of the veterinarians and volunteers regularly saw just as bad, and worse.

As he walked around, checking each cage for the presence of his shifted brother, he witnessed the appalling condition of the bears. On the whole, they were underweight, missing fur, stinking of the infections that ate through the holes where filthy catheters drained the bile from their gall bladders.

Some were missing paws and limbs that suggested, as Romer had feared, that many of these bears had been illegally trapped in the wild and brought to the farm rather than being bred on site.

After checking the last cage and still finding no sign of Romer, Ranger sank back against a wall. He scrubbed at his face with his hands, fighting the fatigue brought on by forty-hours of non-stop travelling and little sleep coupled with the horror of what he now witnessed.

Taras joined him against the far wall. “Don’t despair, my friend; Romer may already be at the Sanctuary. Come and help load the transport crates onto the trucks. It will make you feel better, seeing the bears taken away from here rather than remembering them in this vile place.”

The drive from the farm to the Sanctuary took more than six hours to complete. Ranger was hopeful Romer had been taken in the first convoy, but concerned nonetheless that if he hadn’t, then he was still missing. Or worse.

He was a brown bear, quite different to the moon bears that generally populated the bile farms. Staff reported that a brown bear, which they thought may have been a hybrid, was discovered in an extremely distressed physical and emotional condition.

Larger than the moon bears, this bear had been kept in a bigger cage, however, to make the bear easier to handle, he’d been fitted with an illegal ‘metal jacket’. It was a device that fitted around his abdomen with a hole for the catheter inserted in his gall bladder. Limb movement was restricted by straps, and spikes at the neck prevented head movement that would endanger anyone attempting to milk the bile.

That bear was possibly Romer.

At the Sanctuary, staff rotated and cooperated like cogs in a well-oiled machine. Ranger knew the volunteers and veterinarians were under enormous pressure with so many sick bears on their hands and would be as exhausted as he was, but it was possible his brother was in the recovery area, and he had to get to him.

“Taras, find out for me when we can see the big brown bear who came with the first transport.” His friend was well-known at the Sanctuary, and knew exactly how to get information and access to quarantine areas without troubling staff who were frantically trying to assess and treat the new arrivals.

“Keep making tea, and I’ll get some information for you.”

Their muscle was no longer required, so Taras and Ranger had spent the past hour in the cafeteria making large pots of tea and helping the two staff prepare food. Ranger was refreshing the teapots with boiling water when Taras returned.

“The brown bear is in recovery. His catheter has been removed, and his wounds repaired and minor stuff patched up. He has an infection and a lot of damage caused by repeated attempts to escape his cage, but he should be okay. You can come and see him.”

The bear in the recovery enclosure curled on a nest of straw sleeping off the anaesthetic was Romer. Ranger heaved a sigh of relief, pleased that he would be able to give his parents some good news.

The superficial wounds would heal in time, as too would the operation to remove his mutilated gall bladder. A scan suggested his liver appeared to be in good condition, and it was hoped any damage would repair without any lasting effects.

Ranger sat in the straw with him taking one of his large paws into his hand. The claws were all but shredded by his attempts to free himself from the cage.

“It is Romer, yeah?” Taras asked.

Ranger nodded. “I’m certain.” He studied the paw in his hand then looked back to Taras. “How the hell are we going to get him out of here? When he comes out of the anaesthetic, he’ll shift. How are we going to explain the disappearance of a fucking great brown bear?”

“You know what they say: Never apologise, never explain.”

“Not much of a plan. Does anyone here know about shifters?”

“The director, Andrei. Apart from him, I’m not sure. There don’t appear to be any shifters working here from what I can sense.”

“Right. For now, I’m going to stay with Romer until he regains consciousness. When that happens, I’d like to shift to be able to communicate with him properly. But an extra bear will be as obvious as a missing bear, so that’s probably not a good idea. If he’s not too fuzzy, I should be able to get through to him in human form.

“Can you track down Andrei and warn him they’ve brought in a shifter? Explain that Bear Force want him back and see if he can help us.”

“Sure, boss, anything else?”

“Yeah, this straw’s okay to rest on, but unless I turn-bear I’m going to freeze in here tonight. Can you grab my sleeping bag and pack from the SUV?”

“I’ll drop it by after I’ve seen Andrei.”

Ranger watched his friend leave. Once he had his phone, he’d be able to contact his parents and tell them the good news. More than anything he wanted to share the news with Ada, too. To hear her voice right now would be a salve for his soul.

He fell asleep waiting for Taras. He returned with the news that Andrei would come up with a reason for Romer’s disappearance once he was well enough to travel. Ranger knew that wouldn’t be long at all. Shifters were quick to heal, but Romer approached fitness and healing as if he was training for an Olympic sport. It was something to do with his need to always look sharp.

Alone, Ranger sorted out his sleeping gear and settled in to call his parents. When that call was done, he sent Ada a text. Sure, she didn’t want him to get in touch with her, but that wasn’t something he’d agreed to. What was more, whether she wanted to or not, she would be concerned for his safety. At least he could allay those fears.

When she replied his heart raced with joy, and when she joined in for a cheeky textathon he couldn’t suppress the glimmer of hope that he’d be able to fix their relationship.

Then the battery on his phone died, and he only just managed to curb the drive to hurl it at the thick concrete wall. At least he’d had the chance to tell her how much he missed her. With the image of Ada stretched across her bed that he’d planted in his head, he unfurled his sleeping bag.

Romer continued to snore, and Ranger settled into his bag for some sleep.

It was still dark when he awoke to the gentle voice of somebody else in the enclosure with them. A veterinary nurse was checking up on Romer, and it wasn’t until Ranger managed to pull himself fully awake that he understood they had a new problem on their hands. He kept himself in the dark corner, hoping the nurse’s focus on Romer would mean she wouldn’t notice him there.

CHAPTER TWENTY

~ADA~

When Ada finally checked her phone the day after her unbelievably short reunion, there had been one hundred and eighty-two text messages from Ranger. The few she checked had the same message, and she guessed there was no variation in the others.

You’re my soul mate, Ada. My life and love are yours forever.
 

She knew the significance of the number; it wasn’t as if she hadn’t counted, too. One hundred and eighty-two days they’d been apart, and since he’d text-bombed her phone, he’d continued to send the same single message every morning. It was crazy and cute and guaranteed to keep him in the forefront of her mind.

Well, that and the one hundred and eighty-three hand-made chocolates that had arrived the previous morning.

Today it had been one hundred and eighty-four white lilies she struggled to deal with when Nicki returned from work.
 

“So, you’ve ditched the journalist career to become a florist?”

Ada glanced around the room. It certainly smelled great, but the sheer mass of flowers was overwhelming—just like Ranger. “The place looks like a funeral parlour. The guy’s insane.”

Nicki sneezed.

“Oh great, you’re allergic to lilies, huh?”

Nicki sneezed again. “I love them, but they get right up my nose.”

“Why don’t we do a random act of kindness with them? We’ll put them in buckets around town with ‘help yourself’ notes attached. People love flowers.”

Nicki blew her nose in response.
 

“I need to nip this in the bud. I’ll take them out to the garage, and then I’ll send Ranger a text and ask him to stop the madness. What will he come up with for tomorrow? Lawn art?”

“Gummy bears,” Nicki suggested.

“Not funny.”

“Imagine; he could have them made up in his own likeness.”

Ada snorted. “Knowing Ranger, he’d go straight to the Clone-Your-Willy website—”

“Oh, a gummy Willy. Gobble, gobble, gobble.”

Ada threw the nearest cushion at her. She picked out a couple of lily stems and put them in a vase in her bedroom, because, hell, she liked flowers, too. It didn’t mean anything more than that. She and Nicki would also enjoy the chocolates after dinner. They’d go well with a movie and a bottle of wine.

She removed the flowers to the garage and found an antihistamine for Nicki, whose sneezing had reached epic proportions. With a glass of wine, Ada went to her bedroom and settled against the bed pillows to compose a text message for Ranger.

About to start typing, her phone alerted her to an incoming message from him,
which was odd, because he’d already sent his daily message
.
She swiped the phone screen.

—
Found Romer. Working out a way to liberate him from a Bear Sanctuary in China. Situation complicated, but we’re all well. No danger at any time. Are you smiling? I miss you, did you know that?

Ada read the message three times, and yes, she was smiling. Of course, she’d worried about him, but she hadn’t realised how welcome his message would be. More than anything she wanted to phone him to hear his voice so that she would know for sure that they were all okay.

No. Hearing his voice would probably break down all of her resistance. Instead, she quickly typed a message back to him.

— Relieved Romer found. Thrilled you’re safe. Had no idea you’d missed me…you should have said something.