Bearly Christmas

by Becca Fanning

  For her part, Dani's mother was probably still passed out. Her way of dealing with Collection Day was to drink herself into a stupor the night before. By the time her hangover had gone away so had the day.

  Collection Day. By the end of the day the Wild West Show would be over. Sticky children and their sunburned parents would return home. There would have been displays of roping and branding cattle, simulated branding of course, which made her wonder if the cows thought the humans crazy. There would have been gunfights with blanks and celebrities locked up in the hoosegow for some charity or another.

  And the mini-rodeo, which was mostly for fun, would have finished up. The events always drew big names in rodeo, superstars of bronc riding and bull riding. They came because their name lent cachet to events and raised more money.

  Among them, far too often, came the Tyrell Clan, a family of shifter bears, a rodeo family of brothers and cousins. On those occasions there were always a number of shifters in the audience, filling the arena. There was always angry mutterings on those occasions. Old timers and haters said the shifters spooked the horses. Mostly they just hated anyone different.

  There was always controversy surrounding the rodeo clan, just because they were shifters. The Rodeo Authority in every venue was contacted with demands that the bears not be allowed to ride. So far the rulings had come down in the favor of the Tyrells, despite their known status as shifters.

  Despite some other things, too, like a propensity for drinking and gambling (Eddie Tyrell, and that was mostly under control) and practical jokes when they did get ousted from an event (they'd set pigs loose in an arena in Texas, to the amusement of a few and the fury of many).

  The tide was turning, though. Anti-shifter sentiment was growing and the number of disappearances of shifters in their community had grown high enough that news of it was hitting the so called "normal" community.

  And she, Dani Sjoberg, knew why at least some of those disappearances were happening.

  She was, directly, the cause of more of them than she wanted to consider and today, if her father had his way, she'd be the cause of another.

  Not again. Not this time. This time I'll have proof. Because law enforcement wasn't going to do anything until she had proof, especially given her father had money and status and ran his own Wild West shows as well as participating in others. He was a rider, roper, racer – a cowboy. A rich cowboy who brought his money into rural communities that needed it.

  Law enforcement wasn't going to so much as lift a finger without proof.

  I was there. I saw it. It was because of me. That wasn't proof enough. Or maybe it would be. If only the people the crimes were committed against weren't shifters.

  Law enforcement didn't like shifters. They didn't trust them. They didn't consider them part of the community they were hired to protect and serve. Most of them tacitly agreed with the disappearances without even knowing the full extent of what was happening.

  Those were the clean cops. The dirty ones were actively involved.

  That thought made her shiver despite the warm morning air in Holbrook, Arizona. There was no way to know going in which kind of law enforcement she'd be dealing with. If Dani got her proof and went to the cops and they turned out to be in league with the anti shifter groups, she herself might vanish.

  It was a chance she was ready and willing to take.

  By the time she was out of her shower and her long honey brown hair styled, her oatmeal was prepared and saved under a silver cover on a silver tray. That always struck Dani as silly: something as homey as oatmeal with some berries sitting on silver with fancy trimmings.

  She ate mechanically while she made herself up as carefully as she ever had the other three times her father insisted she help. She'd been barrel riding and roping for a couple years now but for the last few years she hadn't performed.

  Just knowing she had to be part of her father's nefarious schemes took all the fun out of it. And even if mostly she just wanted to help, to counter her father's deeds, in part she wanted her life back. Working against her father and his anti shifter friends meant she might get to feel life was good again. She might get to compete.

  She might get a chance to talk to Holden Tyrell.

  Yeah, she shook her head at herself in the mirror. That was going too far. Hope was one thing.

  Wild fantasies quite another.

  Holden Tyrell was the stuff of wild fantasies.

  But first there was Collection Day to live through, and it was here. For all that she'd known it was coming, she still had no plan. Pretend to participate, do her best to warn off whoever he targeted, free them if that didn't work, and try to get something as proof the police would accept, whether that was a recording of her father and his goons talking as they loaded up the body or photos.

  Police, or FBI if she could get to them and if it seemed the local police were in Walter Sjoberg's pocket. This was the first time Collection Day was happening in her hometown. Dani didn't know what to expect.

  That's why she'd made a plan.

  It wasn't much of a plan.

  Walter called for her a little after eight. There was a car waiting out front. For any kind of publicity, Walter used a beat up Ford pickup truck. It was like the ultimate in downplaying for PR. Look at us! We're good Americans buying American and using it till it disintegrates. The fact that he had several hundred million in the bank should have put paid to that but it worked. Everyone who interviewed him talked about how down to Earth he was. Everyone who interviewed Dani talked about how wonderful it must be to have such a simple man for a father.

  Right. Never mind the limos and the Lincoln Town Cars Walter took when he went to his meetings. It was like watching someone depart in style for a KKK rally. Only they didn't wear sheets and the symbol for these meetings was an red international NO sign, the circle and slash. In the center of the circle was a bear.

  "What's taking you so long?" Walter never jittered or fidgeted. He just got nastier.

  "Coming, Daddy. Is Mom awake? I'll go tell her – "

  "Just get in the car, young lady."

  The drive to the Wild West Show was silent. Her father worked through all the things that could go wrong with his plan. More than one plan had failed, once for Walter and more than once for some of his associates. But the masks the men wore and the tranquilizer darts they used to subdue their targets meant no one remembered who had attacked them.

  Walter Sjoberg was in no way responsible for all of the shifter disappearances. That had been going on for well over a year as known shifters vanished and their families searched for them and the shifter community grew more and more afraid.

  But while he might not be responsible for all of them, Dani's father had a record of generally bagging two out of every three shifter captures he attempted. Those numbers weren't going unnoticed. He was moving up in the shadow organization.

  Dani had been along for the last year. As bait. Tall, beautiful, with a great figure, long thick hair and big dark eyes, she attracted more than a little attention when she strode out across an arena or rode by on horseback.

  The first time her father used her it was in Utah, outside one of Ray Chaudett's rodeos. That was with an unmarried shifter from outside the Tyrell clan. Big and beautiful and buff, he'd been kind of dumb as a box of hair, but just because a guy was a shifter didn't mean he was smart, or even had animal wiles.

  She came onto him in a bar, lured him out back with a promise on her lips and the panel truck outside the back door. The fact that he'd actually pawed at her should have made her feel a little better, but hell, what guy wouldn't if you offered yourself up on a platter?

  The second time her father made her help out was the only one of Walter's that got away. Apparently some married guys could be faithful and when a beautiful woman gave them a come hither look they returned a thanks, but no thanks, darlin', look. Walter's goons had tried to take the bronc rider by force and most of them had sustained worse injuries than th
e shifter. They were arrested and hauled away for medical attention before jail and they must not have talked, because nothing ever came back on Walter.

  After that he switched to new tactics. Shifters were lured with promises of promotional contracts. When the executive they were supposed to meet at some out-of-the-way place after hours, didn't show, the irritated cowboy left and ran across a beautiful young woman – Dani, sometimes – being menaced by a handful of guys in a traditional dark alley or something similar.

  Rising to the occasion and rushing to the rescue, the outnumbered shifters changed into animal form, in the Tyrell clan cases, into roaring, angry bears – only to be instantly hit with tranqs. Down went the bear, and everyone got paid and slapped high fives and someone drove the bear away.

  Dani went off to therapy where she couldn't talk about what was really bothering her and her therapist couldn't figure out why she didn't move out since clearly there was some family dynamic that was pretty damned bad. Her mother, meanwhile, went instantly to mojito or wine therapy, imbibing comfort until she passed out.

  And Dani's father went off for a day or two to do whatever it was he did with his captives.

  Today was Collection Day and some poor bear was supposed to fall.

  Not this time. Not again.

  Dani was halfway to the door before the reason she didn't just up and leave came flying from some other part of the house and wrapped her arms tight around Dani's waist.

  "Where are you going? Are you going to the Wild West Show? Can I come? Can I come? Can I come? Why can't I come?"

  The handy thing about Lisa was she didn't wait for Dani to respond, just answered her own question and went on to the next one, which inevitably turned into a whine and then they were finished. Remarkably easy to deal with such a seven-year-old.

  Dani had been born one year after her mother had become a 19-year-old bride with a 40-year-old husband. Seventeen years later Lisa was born to Dani's 36-year-old mother and her 57-year-old father.

  Which meant Dani's mother gave up. When Dani was 17 the plan had been to hang on until she was 18 and get out. Dani and her mother Christy. They'd take off. Dani would be of legal age and her father couldn't drag her back, and as for his money – well, maybe they'd take some of it.

  Because it was the money that had kept them trapped. Initially Christy had been in love with Walter. Then she'd been afraid of Walter. Then she'd been his prisoner. And all along there'd been Dani, the child Christy loved and cared for when she was little, and the unbreakable mother-daughter bond as Dani got older.

  Dani got older, and her father became more malignant. His power grew, his wealth grew and his unshakable conviction that the world was his to manipulate grew. By the time Dani was 17 her father had enough police and judges in his pocket to make leaving a dangerous proposition. If nothing else, she needed to be 18 and appear to be leaving without her mother's influence or her father's money.

  But when Dani was 18, Lisa was one.

  Loving Lisa almost made being prisoner of her father's estate worth it.

  Only she had to get Lisa out. Because Lisa was next in line and there probably wasn't much more than five years before her father would start putting Lisa into the scenarios that trapped the shifters. Dani would be 29. He'd want a younger, more vulnerable looking victim.

  Dani dropped down into a crouch and hugged her little sister until Lisa wriggled. "Can't breathe!"

  "So? You love me more than air!" She reached out and started tickling the little girl, who squealed and ducked aside.

  Impossible to believe Lisa was seven. It was a reminder that time moved fast. Five or six more years to get away from a madman and his hater agenda. It should have seemed like all the time in the world.

  From outside, her father shouted, his voice dropping into rage. She saw Lisa flinch at the sound and knew even if her sister didn't have any idea about the shifter agenda or what her father was doing, she was already being affected. Dani and her mother didn't have any more years.

  They had do something now.

  Once they were in the town car Walter settled beside her going through his texts. Dani put her earbuds in but left her music off. The earbuds were window dressing, buying herself time to try and think of a way free. She was determined that today's abduction was going to fail. That she'd have the proof she needed to take to the authorities. This time she was going to the FBI. She was so close to having proof the shifters were being taken out of state.

  Get the proof and free the shifter. If she had to, she'd leave whoever Walter targeted behind. Just long enough to bring down her father and that part of the organization.

  If she got the proof and freed this shifter, bonus.

  If she failed? If she failed, Teresa had promised to take Lisa and run. It wasn't a great solution, but at least Lisa would be out.

  If she failed, though, her mother would be in danger. Dani hadn't told her about the plan. Christy was too unstable anymore and usually too drunk.

  Christy would be in danger. And so would Dani.

  She glanced at her father as he went through his texts, those missives sent to and from his hired thugs and the other anti shifter league men. If she could get his damned phone away from him, she could go with that to the cops. Provided the cops were clean. Bad cops would just say she'd done it herself, all those texts, because who the hell would be so arrogant as to put all his plans in text?

  Her father. That's who.

  Dani looked out the window and watched the Arizona landscape slide by as the town car drew her closer to whatever the day held in store.

  * * *

  Chapter Two

  Holden Tyrell let himself out of the arena facility, slamming the double steel fire doors behind him. Early Monday morning, summer in Arizona. The sun was already high, the heat was already desert hot. Sometimes he had daydreams about running away from the rodeos and the Wild West shows and going somewhere like Hawaii. Hanging out all day in the jungle shade and dipping into the ocean whenever he got overheated, that sounded like heaven.

  Then he'd saddle up a horse, ride out across a sandy, cactus-studded desert or a high desert with sage leading to cottonwoods along water and pines in the mountains and he'd give up the idea.

  Rodeo was in his blood. So was the desert. So was the shifter gene.

  So was a headache. It pounded in his veins, every heartbeat driving a spear of pain from his shoulders through his skull. So didn't need that right now. This was the last show in the area before the Chaudett Wild West Shows and the Chaudett Rodeos moved back East for a while.

  His brothers and cousins were looking forward to a break in the constant vigilance. Even Jacob could relax, and he'd been on edge ever since teaming up with Gemma the journalist, the two of them scoping out what they could find about the disappearances and Gemma releasing the information to the media. Holden hadn't been quite ready for that move. No one had asked.

  He'd thought they might, because Holden had been looking into the disappearances of shifters throughout the rodeos and just out of the shifter population for longer than anyone else. More than a year since he'd asked Eddie to hold down the fort while he checked into things. Nothing had come of his ramblings and searchings.

  Gemma's articles, though, had turned attention onto the crimes being committed against shifters. Exposing the disappearance of a faction of society that made people nervous might not get them tons of support. But exposing hate crimes – that got everyone's attention.

  And recently Gemma had uncovered a link between abandoned rural properties and disappearances from rodeos and shows that happened less than five miles away. Not just the Chaudett events but all rodeos and Wild West shows across the country.