by Kate Rudolph
She met Derek outside and watched as his eyes quickly flicked from her head to her toes and back up. All of the sudden it didn’t seem quite so cold out, and she could feel heat rising in her cheeks.
That lust she’d felt from him had been directed at her. And it was almost hard to believe. Men rarely looked at her twice. And those that did came in two flavors: men who wanted her because she was Asian - those she dismissed out of hand. And then there were the perfectly nice ones, though they were few and far between. Even farther between because she could never stop herself from peeking. And before she knew it, she knew whatever deep, dark secret they kept hidden. Sometimes it was things she could have learned to put up with if she’d already been in love, other times it was things that would have sent her screaming no matter what.
But since she always learned that shit on the first or second date, she didn’t get the chance to appreciate a good smolder with no strings attached and no psychoanalysis.
Derek could smolder.
But when she went back outside, he smiled politely and waited for her to lead him to the decrepit farmhouse. He had her so distracted that she nearly forgot the voice that she had heard when he came by.
As she pointed out places that were particularly worrying on the outside of the house, she thought about it. A few stray thoughts were normally nothing to worry about, but there had been a nefarious quality to these. Nothing in the thoughts themselves. She’d only caught a few fleeting words, something about not being at the house.
Completely mundane. But the thoughts were like glass shards rubbing gently against her skin. Apply the tiniest bit of pressure and blood would spill.
Sandra had been operating on autopilot and tripped on a fallen piece of wood. Derek acted with nearly inhuman speed and spun her toward him, picking her up off of her feet and twirling her before she could even register that she was falling.
“You with me?” he asked, his eyes bright.
Sandra’s hand pressed against his chest, separated from his hard muscles by only the thin fabric of his shirt. His hands were on her sweater and she was still unable to read his thoughts. Though she sensed a slight note of worry, probably thinking that she could have injured herself. Sandra didn’t break easily.
“My hero.” She tried to make it sound like a joke, but it came out breathier than intended. This was not the moment for her sarcasm to flee, because right now she realized exactly how big, how strong Derek was. She’d never met a man who made her feel so small in this delightfully protective way. She didn’t know how to handle it.
“See? I told you I could be useful.” He grinned as he spoke, but he didn’t let up. The moment lengthened between them and Sandra could feel her heart pounding, her blood rushing just a bit too fast. Oh, no.
Danger, danger, Will Robinson!
She was with him now. For a minute there, Derek had sensed that Sandra was miles away. But that space between them had disappeared, quite literally. And he couldn’t make himself let go. Maybe if she hadn’t been so soft, maybe if she hadn’t smelled as good. For one crazy moment, Derek wanted to lean in and kiss her, press his lips against hers and see if she tasted as good as he knew she would.
Instead of acting on desire, he forced himself to let go and stepped back once she was on her feet.
“I don’t know if I’m okay with using you as transportation,” Sandra shot back. She was steady now, and took off in front of him, leading him into the house through a side door that wasn’t completely attached to its hinges.
“I’m fuel efficient,” Derek reasoned.
She turned around and let her eyes pan from his head to his toes. “I don’t know, you’ve got the looks of a growing boy.”
“What?” Derek hadn’t been a boy in more than half a century. But upon reaching adulthood, shapeshifters stopped aging. Though Derek looked like he was in this thirties, he was actually in his seventies.
“I’m questioning your fuel efficiency.” She leaned back against the kitchen counter, but quickly shifted forward when it slid backwards, not attached to the cabinets below. “Add that to the list of things to fix.”
Derek jotted a note down in his small notepad. Though he had over a hundred blank pages, he doubted that there would be enough lines to fill out every problem that would need to be repaired. He wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out to be more cost effective just to knock the place down and start from scratch.
“What brought you to Montana?” Derek asked as he made more notes about the old wood paneling on the walls and the sad state of the floorboards.
“What makes you think I’m new to the state?” A gust of wind blew in through the cracked windows and she shivered.
Derek raised an eyebrow. “We’re made of sterner stuff here,” he tried to sound serious, “No one is allowed to shiver until the temperature drops below freezing.”
“That is a dumb rule and I refuse to follow it.”
Derek laughed. She opened the door to one of the rooms of the kitchen, but didn’t go through. The door blocked some of the wind coming in through the windows and she kept it open by propping a single brick in front of it.
“I won’t tell the sheriff,” Derek promised. He already liked what they had going. He wasn’t typically tongue-tied, but he normally needed time to think things through. Right now the words were coming naturally. He couldn’t remember the last time he had flirted with a woman without an exhaustive list of questions prepared.
The list he had now wasn’t exhaustive. If he’d written it out, it wouldn’t have even taken an entire page of his notebook. And other than speaking to himself on the drive over, he hadn’t even needed to practice what he would say.
“As for why I’m here,” Sandra offered, “My contract was up and it was time for something new.”
“Contract?”
“I did some support work for a government contractor.” She crossed her arms even though she’d taken care of the cold, and when she smiled, it didn’t reach her eyes. “It wasn’t very interesting. Mostly secretarial stuff. But it paid well.”
She was lying, though she was very good at it. Nothing in her tone gave her away, and she didn’t have most of the normal tells. When people lied, their eyes dilated, their heartbeats increased, some people sweated. And while Sandra’s heartbeat did pick up a little, nothing else gave her away. But that wasn’t what tipped Derek off. It was her scent.
Lies smelled.
He didn’t know if all shapeshifters could pick that up, or if it was just a quirk to werebears, but every time someone lied to him, he could detect a faint shift in their scents which turned them sour. It only lasted a moment, but in three-quarters of a century, he’d had plenty of time to learn how to pick it up.
But he didn’t call Sandra out. After all, there were hundreds of reasons to lie about a former job, especially to a near stranger. Maybe she’d been fired. Maybe she’d been a spy.
“Which kind of contract?” he asked. “Bullets flying? Or sitting in an office in Des Moines?”
Sandra laughed. “Secretaries shouldn’t have bullets flying their way.” But she didn’t answer his question. “So if you sold your business, what do you do now?”
He couldn’t tell if she was asking about him because she was interested, or because she didn’t want him asking any more questions about what she’d done. But he wouldn’t press. Not yet. “After my friend’s company took off, he insisted on putting me on his board of directors.”
“Surely the company actually does something?” Now she was interested. “Or does your money just make you money?”
Was he blushing? Fuck. He could feel the heat in his cheeks. But she’d caught onto him in one. “Base is one of those tech genius guys.”
“Base?”
“I’m bad at nicknames,” and he was still blushing like a fucking teenager. As nonchalantly as he could, Derek crouched down to examine the wood siding. It gave him a moment to breathe before looking back up at her. “But Base’s company integrate
s with all the social media places.”
“Is this one of those things that let’s Facebook know what I had for breakfast?” Her eyes narrowed and she sounded displeased.
Derek shot back up. He shook his head frantically, “Just the opposite. We protect consumer data. Or Base and his engineers do. I go to a meeting four times a year and vote the way he tells me to when anything comes up.”
“Huh.”
So what if he wasn’t a self-made billionaire. And he didn’t feel any pressing urge to become a titan of industry. It didn’t embarrass him. “I prefer living out here, and what I’m doing now allows me to do tha...” he trailed off when he caught another scent. This one had nothing to do with Sandra lying.
“Are you okay?” She took a step closer to him and reached out a hand as if to comfort him.
But Derek was already moving back towards the staircase beside the living room. “Did you say that no one’s been in the house since you moved in? Other than you?”
Sandra shrugged, “I think so, why.”
“And when did you move in?”
“A week ago. What’s the matter?” She walked up beside him and rested a hand on his bare arm. “You’re starting to freak me out.”
It smelled wrong, but he couldn’t tell her that. She wouldn’t understand. Derek grasped for the words to explain that hers wasn’t the only fresh scent inside the house. “You’re sure there’s not like a boyfriend or someone who walked through with you already?”
She lifted her hand away from him and took a step back, crossing her arms. “Real smooth there.”
“What?” Derek scrunched up his face, he just wanted to make sure that she wasn’t... oh. “That’s not what I meant,” he insisted. And when she grinned, he knew she believed him. “It’s just that some of the things in the house have been disturbed recently. The... uh... dust is all unsettled.” He hoped she didn’t notice the slip. “How are the locks on your small house thing?”
“It’s a legitimate house,” she insisted. “And that’s a freaky question. Is there a reason I should worry?”
Derek reached into his back pocket and pulled out a card. “I don’t think so, but if you get freaked, give me a call. I’m good at scaring away intruders.”
“So’s my Glock.” But she took the card and Derek filed away that bit of information. She might look soft and sweet, but there was a core of danger and mystery to her.
“I like a woman who can look out for herself.” But he’d be paying close attention. He didn’t recognize the scent, but there was something off about it. Something that made the hairs on the back of his neck rise and poked at the bear snoozing within him.
Sandra was in danger, and he needed to find out why.
CHAPTER SIX
Derek was sitting in his living room some time later reading a report for his upcoming board meeting when he heard the terrifying shriek of his garage door being forced open. This sound might have startled a lesser man, but Derek had heard it before.
He closed the folder and calmly placed it in the drawer in the coffee table before heading to the garage. By the time he got there, a massive polar bear had already forced the door halfway up. Derek punched the button and heard the motor kick into gear, pulling the door up the rest of the way. He’d long ago learned to leave the garage unlocked lest it be destroyed by roaming werebears.
The polar dropped down to all fours and waited a few seconds for the door to open enough for him to crawl under. Once he did, he sprawled out on the couch without acknowledging Derek. Derek closed the garage again and left the polar alone. Morse would talk when he was ready. In the meantime, Derek returned to his office and went back to studying his documents.
He made a note next to a phrase he didn’t understand. Sometimes Base’s reports were more technobabble than English, but Derek was determined to learn. Despite what he had told Sandra, he liked to know how he was voting. He was no man’s puppet. Even if he went Base’s way 90% of the time.
A while later he heard banging again and the door from the cave opened and shut. A few minutes after that, the television in his entertainment room turned on.
Morse was human once more—it was beyond difficult to work a remote with a bear’s claws. Especially polar bear claws.
Derek put up his work once more and went to meet his friend. Bears were different than other shapeshifters. They didn’t bother with pack hierarchy and territory. If there was one rule among the ursine family, it was simple: don’t be a dick. Anyone who broke that rule was dealt with.
While a wolf or a leopard would throw a fit at a non-pack member for entering his house without an invitation, Derek simply grabbed two beers from the fridge and joined Morse on the couch. Friendship was better than pack structure anyway. He knew he’d never need to fight his friends to the death just to see who was the bigger badass.
Why would anyone want to do that?
“I caught a weird scent on my run,” Morse said. He was a tall man and sprawled out on the sofa. He’d borrowed sweats and a t-shirt from Derek’s closet. Normally, Morse wore his tightly-curled black hair back, but with nothing to tie it back with, he was left with gravity-defying curls that shot out from his head in a halo of black. When he was bored, he smoothed his hair back or played with the curls, pulling them taut and letting them spring back to their natural form.
His words spoke to another way that bears were different. If a wolf said such a thing, it could be seen as a challenge. They seemed to reject neighborly assistance.
“What kind of scent?” He remembered the one he’d caught in Sandra’s house, but he didn’t know if he’d call it weird. Unfamiliar, definitely.
Morse shrugged. “It wasn’t rotten, not quite. But I didn’t want to go investigate. Made me want to puke.”
That wasn’t what Derek had picked up at Sandra’s house and he felt no need to bring her up. He wanted to keep her to himself, at least until he knew what could blossom between them. Sure, he was getting ahead of himself. But in his own mind, he was allowed to do that. She couldn’t see him stumbling around, grasping for words in his own head.
“So who’s the new girl?”
“W-what?” Thoughts of keeping Sandra a secret dissolved with Morse’s question.
“I was in town. They said some new girl moved in. Always nice to have new blood. I mean, Tracy is nice, but we’re not exactly going steady.” Morse and Tracy Jellen, a local human woman, had been hooking up for a handful of years. They each had the bad habit of falling in love with other people and getting into very public, very loud fights.
“Didn’t Tracy get engaged?” In a small town, it was impossible not to know the relationship details of just about everyone.
“That’s only the third one since she turned twenty-five.”
Derek didn’t understand their relationship. He couldn’t do something so prolonged and so casual. When he was with a woman, he was with her. There was no other that he wanted, and it took a great betrayal to break his faith.
Over his seventy-four years he’d only had a few relationships, but now he was looking for something that would last. Someone with whom he could completely be himself. Fur and all.
Would that relationship be with Sandra? Even Derek knew it was far too soon to tell. It was one thing to experience lust at first sight, but he’d cross a line if he started imagining kid’s names. That was what she was supposed to do anyway. And he wasn’t talking about Sandra, so he needed to stop thinking about her.
Back to Tracy. “Just let her go, dude.” Advice that he’d given to Morse more than once. “If you keep this up, it’s got Shakespearean tragedy written all over it.”
Morse laughed before taking a swig of his beer. “You haven’t seen a tragedy, young man.” If Morse was given a chance to remind Derek that he was two - and a half! - years older than him, Morse took it. “This is a... dalliance.”
“Dalliance? Did you waltz with her improperly or something?” If Morse had been born into a different life, he’d h
ave been a dandy.
“Shut up, man.”
Derek let it drop. All things came back around, and if he kept it up, Morse would bug him. And he just wasn’t ready to talk about Sandra. He wanted to know that she wanted him before he said anything.
Clutter in her tiny house seemed to grow at a much faster rate than the clutter in a normal sized dwelling. Sandra would change her outfit once and all of the sudden, the floor was covered with a pile of different tops. She could cover the entire floor with clothes in less than a day, and so she needed to practice constant vigilance to keep out the encroaching mess.
Later in the day she planned to start clearing out some of the mess in the main house. She was going to the hardware store with Derek later and she wanted to have a plan for the inside of the house before she let him build up an impossible idea. He’d somehow wormed his way into her life without her realizing it. Though she supposed it was good to have at least one neighbor she could call on if things went wrong.
Like if some weirdo was lurking in her woods.
When Derek had dropped by two days ago, she’d been certain that she’d heard someone’s thoughts in the forest. Just as she’d been sure before that she’d heard something. But Derek’s mind had remained opaque, leading her to question her abilities, her instincts.
In her doubt, Sandra had turned to the most dubious of resources: Google. It wasn’t that the internet was unreliable. If she were looking for the date of the Battle of Gettysburg or for information about the secretary of the treasury, she had no doubt that the internet would be the tool for the job.
But when it came to information about the paranormal, frankly put, the internet sucked. Normal people didn’t know about psychics. The closest most people came to mind-readers or telekinetics were shows on the History Channel or one of those ghost hunting programs. Back in her days at the Sector, there’d been a private forum for all of the members to trade information and stories, but when she’d quit, she’d lost access. Their training had made it clear that they weren’t to discuss their powers through email or Facebook. The Sector operated in secrecy, and they weren’t supposed to post any information that could easily be obtained by any government or private entity.