by Amy Star
“Have you told anyone else about that whole ‘he turned into a bear’ thing I brought up?” Casey asked, once again pacing back and forth across her sitting room. One day, she was going to wear a rut into the floor.
Annie snorted, a gust of static rushing to Casey’s ear. “No. Thought about it. It’d be a hell of a story.”
“You can’t,” Casey informed her flatly.
“Aww, afraid of a little embarrassment?” Annie cooed. “Where’s your adventurous spirit, huh?”
“My adventurous spirit shriveled up and died,” Casey returned in a bland deadpan, “when Jason told everyone at work and garnered me a new stalker for his efforts.”
There was silence on the other end of the line for a moment, until finally Annie said, “Please tell me you’re shitting me.”
“I shit you not,” Casey replied. “I have a new, very wealthy stalker because Jason decided the story was just too funny for him to keep his mouth shut. So, if you tell anyone, I’m going to never speak to you again.”
Annie cleared her throat. “Got it. Strange story is never to see the light of day. Has the stalker done anything horrible?”
“You mean other than following me around the property?” Casey asked flatly. “I mean, that’s not exactly great.” She didn’t give Annie a chance to reply. “But no. She hasn’t done anything, like… blatant.”
There was some quiet grumbling on the other end of the phone, as if Annie had pulled the phone away from her mouth to avoid being heard. When she cleared her throat again, it was with the receiver back in front of her mouth. “You won’t get any trouble from me,” she assured Casey. “I won’t mention it. You just stay safe, alright?”
“As best as I can,” Casey sighed. There was a pause, and finally, “And just so you know, he’s great in bed.”
She hung up midway through Annie’s answering screech.
*
Being job-free wasn’t so bad, really. Casey wasn’t sure why she had avoided it for so long. Every day of the week was one where she was allowed to sleep in. True enough, entertaining herself was a bit of an endeavor, but she was pretty sure she could learn to have hobbies. Other than skating, she started with some of the most obvious things: exploring the property.
There was just so much space and so many things living on the estate. One of her walks brought her within spitting distance of a herd of deer. They watched her placidly for a few moments before they moseyed on their way, passing close enough to her that she could have reached out and touched one if she felt so inclined. Evidently, living in relative isolation on Atticus’s property hadn’t bestowed upon them anything resembling a fear of humans.
The first time she found a camera, though, she was… less than impressed. It was tucked into a tree, hidden in a hole in the trunk and aimed at the house. Casey never would have spotted it except that a woodpecker had taken a rather intense disliking towards it and tried to dislodge it. Carefully, Casey shimmied up the trunk to pull the camera out of the hole. She carried it back to the house to leave it for Atticus to see if he could get anything useful out of it.
She spent the rest of the afternoon searching the area as carefully as she could to find anything else that might have been left behind. Her efforts turned up two other cameras in strategically hidden locations.
*
Occasionally, she could forget about everything that was going on and just enjoy the fact that the property consisted of acres upon acres of largely untouched forest. Aside from the land that had been cleared to put up the house and the gardens around it, basically none of the land even looked as if it had been within leagues of human beings. Casey was pretty sure just breathing the air had added a few decades to her lifespan.
And then, something else would happen to remind her that not everything was pristine forest and that a great deal of the rest of the world was still shit.
There were footsteps every so often, dogging Casey from a distance. Every time she tried to find a culprit, she came up empty handed. Either she was going crazy, or the hunter was very good at camouflage and Casey simply didn’t have enough experience in the woods to pick out a hidden figure.
She was fairly sure she wasn’t going crazy, though, because she learned to realize when she should start listening if she wanted to hear whoever was following her.
Everything around her would get so much quieter, as if the birds and the bugs and the frogs and everything else had decided to vacate the area. As if the natural inhabitants of the woods could tell that of the two human presences, only one of them actually meant no harm to anything.
She could have just stayed inside, she supposed. But for one thing, she would legitimately go crazy from boredom and cabin fever. For another thing, she wasn’t going to let Miss Carmichael win. Casey had never been particularly confrontational, that was true, but the idea of letting a stranger chase her into the house like a skittish puppy made something in her soul rebel. She wasn’t going to stop doing what she was doing when she wasn’t the one doing anything wrong.
*
Some things in life were just infuriating. She could have sworn she left her helmet sitting on the porch, along with her rollerblades and the rest of her gear. And yet, there she was on the porch, looking high and low, and it was nowhere in sight.
After nearly a half an hour of searching for the wayward helmet, she stalked her way down to the garage to see if she could find a bike helmet in there that might fit her.
She nearly tripped over her own helmet, just sitting very innocently off to the side of the driveway. She picked it up and stared at it, blinking slowly. And as her anger slowly mounted, she very nearly pitched the poor helmet across the yard.
It was like they had a poltergeist, determined to shuffle things around and drive everyone insane.
She didn’t throw her helmet, though. She tucked it under her arm and trudged back to the porch. Anger be damned, she was not going to let some bitch with a vendetta scare her out of keeping herself in shape. Little Miss Mighty Hunter could just watch Casey skate and try in vain to find a way in which it offered any proof at all as to were-animal activity.
*
Casey straightened up from the toilet and scrubbed the back of one hand across her mouth. She reached her other hand out to flush the toilet. The bathroom still smelled faintly of stomach acid and vomit, though, so after washing her hands and rinsing her mouth out at the sink, she pulled a can of air freshener out from under the sink and sprayed it all throughout the bathroom.
The stress of the entire situation was getting to her, leading to nearly daily incidences of puking her guts up in the toilet. She hadn’t mentioned it to Atticus. He already seemed harried about everything else.
*
Casey had informed Atticus of the cameras and of some of the stuff outside being moved, but she hadn’t planned on demanding any sort of information from him. Presumably, he would tell her if she needed to know anything or if there was actually something she could do.
And then, she made her way back to her suite to get showered and dressed one morning and found her bedroom window open and everything on her bedside table shuffled around. She bit back the urge to shriek in outrage, instead slamming the window shut and going on a careful search to make sure that nothing had been taken. She found that the drawers of her coffee table in the sitting room and the knick-knacks on the bookshelves had been rifled through and moved around.
It was a step too far. Casey could be patient, but there was only so much she was willing to put up with. She used her shower to calm down and dressed in a flash before storming back to Atticus’s suite and stalking inside.
He was just finished getting dressed when she entered his bedroom like rolling thunder, and he honestly looked slightly alarmed at the look on her face.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
“She was in. My. Room,” Casey enunciated carefully. “My window was open, and all of my shit was shuffled around. I don’t care if there’s nothing I c
an do right now. You’re at least going to update me on the situation and explain to me why she’s so caught up on me when I’m not even a were-animal.”
Atticus sighed out a slow breath and agreed far more easily than Casey had expected. “Alright.” He motioned her back out to the sitting room and followed her out. Once they were both sitting on one of the couches, he explained, “We haven’t found any traces of her in her day-to-day life. Apparently, she’s on vacation in Puerto Rico, but we haven’t been able to find any records to support that. She’s just gone off the radar, I guess, so no one disturbs her while she scopes us out. As for why she’s focused on you…” Atticus trailed off, his expression distant for a moment before he shook his head and dragged his focus back to the moment.
“There are two likely reasons,” he explained. “Hunters tend to think that were-animals are unlikely to associate with non-were-animals. That’s complete bullshit, but it’s what they think. So, she could be looking for evidence that you are actually a were-animal, or if there’s some hidden method to turning a human into a were-animal. Or, if she’s planning something, she could be looking to use you in her plan somehow. Since going after the small human woman would be safer than going after the large man who can turn into an even larger bear, and it would give me incentive to cooperate with her.”
Casey groaned and let her head fall back against the back of the couch. “So, either I’m a science experiment or I’m bait,” she summarized. “Just fucking lovely.” She kicked her feet against the ground. “So, what happens now?”
“Branson’s going to see if his pack can help patrol the property at night,” Atticus replied. “Lydia might be able to scrounge up a flock. All we can really do right now is try to get more eyes on the situation.”
Casey nodded slowly. It wasn’t an ideal answer or even a particularly good one, but if it was all they had for now, then she wasn’t going to complain about it.
Slowly, she levered herself to her feet and stretched, arms reaching over her head. “I’m going to go punch something that won’t break,” she offered.
Atticus offered a crooked smile and gestured her towards the door with a flourish. “You have fun with that. If something does break, you can probably get away with it if you hide it under the rug fast enough.”
She offered him a thumbs-up as she left.
She had to make a detour to the bathroom to empty her stomach on the way.
C HAPTER TEN
“Alright, so, let me get this straight,” Annie mused slowly, as Casey paced back and forth across her usual stretch of floor in her sitting room. Annie sounded thoughtful as she spoke. “You keep puking, and you’re convinced it’s related to stress,” she repeated. “And it’s happening basically every single day. We’re on the same page so far?”
“Yeah,” Casey returned slowly. Frankly, she wasn’t sure why it apparently took quite so much brainpower to understand, but she wasn’t going to say that. She had some semblance of self-preservation instincts still.
“Despite the fact that part of the deal for you moving in and marrying Atticus is that you make a very good go at getting pregnant,” Annie carried on in the same slow, rational tone.
Silent, Casey blinked at the wall.
“Has it just not occurred to you that it might be morning sickness?” Annie wondered, sounding as if she was stuck somewhere between amusement and bewilderment.
Casey continued to blink at the wall, until finally she managed a small, “That had slipped my mind, yeah.”
“You think a pregnancy test might be a good idea?” Annie wondered dryly. “Just, you know… in case you’re wrong about the whole ‘stress puking every single day’ thing.”
“I’ll take that under advisement,” Casey returned faintly. “I’m going to call you back later, alright?”
“Talk to you then,” Annie returned, her voice laced with fond exasperation. “Let me know what the results are.” And before Casey could hang up, Annie just managed to shout in a rush, “And remember, you still owe me details about getting busy together, you promised!”
Casey rolled her eyes as she hung up and tossed her phone aside.
She joined her phone on the couch a moment later, staring up at the ceiling silently.
*
Lydia escorted her to the store the next day, and though she seemed slightly suspicious, she didn’t actually ask any questions about what Casey was buying. She did try to sneak a peek in the bag a few times, but she gave up good-naturedly when Casey simply stuffed the shopping bag in her purse.
Though she was pretty sure that was why she got dragged to five other stores before they returned to Atticus’s house.
*
Casey waited until that night to open up the cardboard box and dump the pregnancy test into her hand. She did her business quickly in the bathroom and set the pregnancy test on the counter to wait, pointedly looking anywhere but at the innocuous little thing as she brushed her teeth, washed her face, and put on her pajamas.
It took only a few minutes, but it seemed to take an eternity before the test showed a result.
Casey picked it up and stared down at it, blinking slowly at the positive result. Oh, sure, she knew store-bought pregnancy tests weren’t exactly foolproof. It was possible it could be a false positive. But combined with everything else she knew about the situation, she was willing to take the result at face value.
She was pregnant. She was going to have a baby. She was going to be a mom. She knew that had been the idea from the beginning, but it hit her all at once just then.
She had never put much thought into being a mother before. Bringing kids into her life when she could barely afford to put food in her cupboards hadn’t appealed to her. But just then, as she realized that everything she had originally worried about with regards to having kids wasn’t a problem—that her child would grow up loved and cared for and with everything they could ever need or want—that tears began to silently slip down her cheeks.
She was going to have a baby, and her child would be able to have the perfect childhood that she hadn’t been able to have.
She was laughing—gleefully, slightly manically—before she even knew it.
C HAPTER ELEVEN
Casey practically sprinted to Atticus’s suite, only to remember once she got there that he wasn’t back from work yet. Groaning, she threw herself down on the couch in his sitting room and decided she was just going to wait right there for him to get back. It wouldn’t be too long after that, anyway.
Time seemed to pass at a crawl as Casey watched shadows shift across the ceiling, waiting with something that didn’t resemble patience in the slightest. She shifted and squirmed and fidgeted until eventually she got back to her feet to start pacing across the room.
When at last she heard Atticus’s footsteps approaching the suite, she snapped to attention, facing the door with her hands clasped together in front of her.
Atticus paused as he entered, head cocked to one side in bemusement as he looked at her. “Is everything alright?” he wondered, and Casey could only imagine what the look on her face was like just then.
“Perfect!” she replied quickly—probably a bit too quickly—and she bounced on the balls of her feet. Her mouth worked soundlessly for a moment as she tried to think of the best way to get the words out.
“…Are you sure?” Atticus asked, his expression screwing up in slightly concerned bewilderment.
“I’m pregnant,” Casey replied, spitting the words out, because by that point, she was pretty sure she wasn’t going to think of any sort of more poetic way to phrase it.
Atticus blinked at her. Casey stayed quiet, giving him a moment to let that revelation sink in. “You’re sure?” he asked after a moment, his words slow and careful.
“Positive,” Casey returned. “I’m pregnant,” she repeated.
Slowly, Atticus grinned. He closed the distance between them quickly, and Casey squeaked as he practically scooped her off of her feet to kiss her,
crushing their lips together. They met clumsily, teeth clicking together and noses bumping, but they found their balance soon enough, tipping their heads to find a better angle.
The kiss was slow, but there was nothing leisurely about it. It had a certain intensity to it, as if Atticus was trying to breathe her in, in her entirety.
They parted slowly, still close enough together that the tips of their noses touched, and for a moment, all they could do was stare at each other. After a few seconds, Casey cracked a smile. “So, I guess this is good news.”
“Very good news,” Atticus confirmed as he set her back down on her feet, though he stole another kiss just for good measure before he did so.
Casey straightened up, opening her mouth to say something as she did, though she closed her mouth with a click as she noticed Atticus’s expression shift, concern sliding onto his face.