Handcuffed to the Bear: BBW Paranormal Bear Shifter Romance (Shifter Agents Book 1)

by Lauren Esker

  "All the more reason to move as fast as we can," Avery said. "I need to talk to Stiers."

  He found her in the conference room. "Chief," he said without bothering with niceties. "I think we need to bring in one of the Fallons. Any Fallon we can get a warrant for."

  "According to Mister Helpful back there, at least one of the sisters is still in Seattle," Eva put in.

  Stiers looked between the two of them. "If we do that, this op is well and truly blown."

  "It's blown already," Avery said.

  "If they're holding Ross somewhere, we may be tipping them off that we're onto them. You know what that means as well as I do."

  "I know. It's a risk. I understand that. I think we have to take the gamble."

  Stiers stared at him for a long time with her unblinking owl's glare. Then she shook her head. "You're his handler. You know him better than I do. And your instincts have always been good. If you think it's worth hauling in one of the Fallons, we'll do it."

  "I do," Avery said, and prayed silently that he hadn't just signed Jack's death warrant.

  Chapter Nine

  When Jack's eyes closed, Casey's panic spiked. He looked like he'd passed out, and maybe he was dying, and what was she supposed to do then?

  "Jack!" she said, shaking him.

  "Ngghhh. Fuck." His eyes flickered open, dark brown with glistening reflections of the sky. "You're the one who said I oughta lie down."

  "Sorry. I couldn't tell if you were, um—" Dying sounded a little too desperate. "... all right," she tried.

  "I will be. Gimme a minute." He closed his eyes again, and without opening them, he said, "My body's healing. It just ... takes a lot out of a person. I'll be okay."

  Casey had a terrible feeling that Jack was not okay and not likely to be okay anytime soon. His whole left arm was a red, wet mess. There wasn't just nice clean blood like on TV, but different colors of red and dull, bloody white something, like exposed gristle or tissue. A long flap of skin hung down.

  Her first-aid experience consisted solely of television and books. She was capable of putting on band-aids when she cut herself in the kitchen, and that was about it. She'd always meant to take a CPR course but never seemed to get around to it. And now here she was, in the middle of the woods with the biggest, most badass guy she'd ever met, who had just turned white and keeled over while bleeding all over the place.

  Shifters healed faster than normal humans, but could even a shifter heal something like that?

  Staring at his arm, she didn't even understand most of what she was looking at. The only thing she knew for sure was that blood didn't seem to be spurting out. She'd read enough and seen enough TV to know that spurting blood was bad. Like, fatal kinds of bad. Instead it was leaking slowly, soaking from his arm directly into the forest floor.

  Beyond that, she had a vague idea that applying pressure would be helpful, but she had no idea what to apply pressure with, or what part of the arm to apply it to. Was this the sort of situation where a tourniquet would come in handy? Yeah, she thought, good luck finding something to make it out of.

  "Casey," Jack said through gritted teeth.

  "Yes," she said. "Yes, I'm here." On the bright side, she didn't feel in any danger of throwing up or passing out. The gory mess of his arm was actually kind of fascinating, in its own way. And it took her mind off how much her foot was hurting.

  "I need to elevate my arm. Do you see anything to prop it up with?"

  "Um, not really. But hang on a minute."

  The ground here consisted of a mix of half-rotted leaves and pine needles. It seemed like the worst possible thing to be getting all over any part of the human body that looked like his arm did. However, it was soft and she was able to scrape it quickly into a pile underneath his arm. She was also able to do it without touching his arm much, which seemed like a good idea. His jaw was clenched, his face white.

  "Jack, you're bleeding a lot. Do you need a tourniquet?"

  "No." His eyes cracked open. "That's only for the worst kinds of bleeding, when it's a case of losing the limb to save a person's life. I don't think I'm that far gone yet."

  "What can I do, then?"

  "Pressure." He sounded tired. His eyes closed.

  She was afraid to touch that mess for fear of making it worse, but she got the loose flap of skin back into place, and tried pressing on it. Jack gasped in pain.

  "Sorry!"

  "No, no. You're doing right." At least he was focusing on her now, looking a trifle more alert. "We should try to find sphagnum moss. It's mildly antiseptic and was used for dressing wounds before the modern era."

  "Where should I look for some?"

  "We," Jack said. He closed his eyes again, screwed his face up, and then made an effort and sat up. Bits of dirt and leaf litter stuck to his arm. She'd known that was a bad idea.

  "You're supposed to stay lying down!"

  "Can't," he said. "Need something to make a dressing out of, and you can't go anywhere without me, remember?"

  "Oh, shit." Fuck the stupid handcuffs.

  "And besides, we gotta get moving again. We might as well be sending up a big red flag to the rest of the pride saying Here we are, come get us."

  "Right." For a moment, Jack turning white and keeling over had washed everything else out of her brain, including their desperate peril.

  Now, as she helped him up, the hunted-animal feeling came rushing back. Every rustle in the forest, every snapped twig, made her jump. The hairs were standing up at the back of her neck.

  "Which way should we go?" Casey asked. She found that she could loop his right arm over her shoulders, with the cuffed hand across her chest. It was awkward because he was so much taller than her, but it would help steady him.

  "Don't know. Damn, I hate this. Water didn't work; they found us anyway. They'll find us even faster now ..." He stared off into the distance, his eyes not quite focused.

  "Jack! Don't pass out on me."

  "I won't. I'm thinking." He turned his gaze on her, the brown eyes sharp again. "You said you saw caves?"

  "I said maybe I saw caves. I'm not sure if that's what it was. Rocky ridge type of things, with shadowy parts."

  "We have to go somewhere. Keep going in circles in the forest, they'll get us for sure. Going back in the water might delay them somewhat, but the only place it'll take us is to the beach, and they can pick us off at their leisure there. We can't outrun them. But, with hands, we can climb better than they can."

  "They can shift and climb too," she pointed out.

  "Yeah, but that'll help level the playing field. They're a lot more vulnerable in their two-legged shape." He sounded stronger now, more sure of himself. Jack was obviously the sort of person who worked a lot better when he had a goal.

  Her grandmother had been that way, too. Casey sometimes thought the reason why Gran had died shortly after Casey turned eighteen was because all that time, Gran had been holding out against the heart trouble and the diabetes because she was needed. Then Casey left and Gran's powerful spirit stopped holding her body together.

  Casey blinked hard. Don't go down that road. Not now.

  "Which way?" she asked.

  "Not sure. We gotta get out of the trees, somewhere we can get our bearings."

  "And find that kind of moss you said." The blood on his arm was partly clotted, making it look even worse than it had before, but at least it wasn't bleeding as much. Maybe it would stop on its own.

  But his arm across her shoulders felt cold to the touch. She didn't want to bet on it.

  "Sphagnum. Yeah. Or any kind of clean-looking moss would probably do."

  "Tell me what I'm looking for."

  "Feathery moss. Bright green. Tell you if I see any."

  They started moving again. Every step hurt, and she couldn't shake the fear that she was doing irreparable damage to her feet. Even if you have to walk with a cane for the rest of your life, it's worth it, she scolded herself. The important thing is not to di
e.

  They hadn't gone far, just enough to leave the clearing behind, when another lion's roar echoed through the woods. Casey could tell this one was a lot more distant, somewhere on the far side of the island, but it still raised all the hairs on her arms. Jack's arm tightened briefly against her shoulders, not in comfort so much as a sudden convulsive reaction to the sound.

  The echoes were just dying away when another roar came from somewhere else. This one was a little closer. And then another. The echoes rolled around and around, until Casey thought her heart would tear its way out of her chest.

  As the forest died back to silence, Jack murmured, "Three of them. Assuming one of those wasn't Derek, then we have Roger and two of the other brothers or sisters to deal with."

  "I thought it was only female lions that hunt," Casey said. "Why are the guys after us?"

  Jack shrugged, and then winced. "That's kind of a myth. Male lions are just as capable of hunting as the females. In wild prides they don't, usually. But the males still rule the roost and take the—well, like they say, the lion's share of the kill."

  "It's so stupid. Even I'm doing it now. We're not animals; we don't have to behave like—"

  She stumbled when a dry branch snapped under her foot, almost taking them down. Jack winced, and both of them looked anxiously at the woods, which continued to fail to materialize a lion.

  "What about lynx shifters?" Jack asked, his voice cracking a little in the middle.

  "What about us?"

  "Are you guys mostly solitary, or what?"

  Obvious segue is obvious, she thought. But at least he was trying to give them both something to focus on other than their imminent death.

  "Well, for starters, we're not all lynxes," Casey said. "Cat shifters in the same family can be any type of cat. Lions are really the only exception I've heard of. They're like wolves, where the whole family will all be the same kind of shifter. With most cats, we don't really know until our shifting starts, which is usually around the time we're six or eight—somewhere around grade school age, 'til shortly before puberty."

  "What are the rest of your family?"

  "My Gran was a margay cat. Mom was a jaguar, and Dad was a swimming cat of some kind. Are bears like that, or are they all, uh—whatever kind of bear you are?"

  "Grizzly," Jack said. "And no, it's not quite the same. We don't always even know if we're going to be bears at all. My mom came from a bear family, but she never got it. So we weren't sure about me. And it tends to happen later with us than with a lot of shifters. It came out when I was in my teens."

  "That must have been weird."

  "It was just part of life, really. I knew it would probably happen. How was it for you?"

  "Weird," she admitted with a laugh. "I didn't have any brothers or sisters, and my mom didn't talk about that kind of thing much. I guess she would've been the kind of mom who never really talked to you about the birds and the bees, either, or about, you know—girl stuff, periods and whatever, but instead left you to muddle through on your own."

  "When did they die?" Jack asked, his voice gentle.

  "I hardly remember my father. Mom died when I was ten, and I went to live with my grandmother." Suddenly the safe topic didn't seem quite so safe. She changed subject quickly. "Do you see the right kind of moss around here anywhere?"

  The ground had gotten squishy under her sore feet. They were coming into a boggy area.

  "That," Jack said, orienting on some bright-green moss around a clump of scraggly little trees.

  It just looked like moss to Casey, but she dutifully tore off a big handful. It clung together more than she was expecting, and peeled off in a large sheet, mossy green on one side and dirt-brown underneath.

  "How are we going to fasten this on?"

  Jack smiled lopsidedly. "What, you don't have a piece of rope in your pocket?"

  "Nope, left it in my other pants. I don't suppose you know any nifty Boy Scout tricks for making string?"

  "Lots," Jack said, "but these woods are sadly lacking in most of the useful things I know about." He snapped the fingers of his handcuffed hand, making her jump. "Roots. That might do it. Spruce roots, especially. And these are mostly spruce trees here. They like wet places."

  Feeling ludicrous, she pulled more moss, and she and Jack both scrabbled for handfuls of roots under the trees, all the while watching the woods.

  "Shouldn't we wash your arm, and stuff?"

  "We're bandaging it with moss. I think at this point I'm gonna cut my losses and say there's not much point. When we get back to civilization, I can get a nice ol' IV drip of antibiotics, but right now I'll settle for not bleeding to death or leaving a blood trail that'll point the way for every predator in the area. My shifter healing can take care of the rest, for now."

  She turned the moss green side in, and Jack held it in place with his cuffed hand while she used her uncuffed one to wind roots around his arm.

  "When," she said. "Not if. You have a lot of confidence in those friends of yours."

  "They're good people," Jack said. "My partner, Avery, is the kind of guy you can rely on."

  "You think he'll find us?"

  "I think he'll bust his ass trying."

  Which wasn't quite the reassurance she'd been hoping for. But at least he didn't lie to her.

  ***

  They broke out of the trees at last onto a rocky outcropping overlooking a valley—not the beaver one, but a different one. Casey hadn't realized they were still so high; they'd come down a lot while walking in the stream, but now they seemed to be back up in the hills again. She also hadn't realized the island was quite so big.

  Dark clouds with puffy white tops towered against the sky. Jack had been right: what she had mistaken for land was an oncoming storm. The first clouds had already begun to trail overhead, intermittently blocking the sun.

  And nothing looked familiar in the slightest.

  "I hate to say this, but I think we're lost," she said.

  "Can't get lost when you don't know where you're going."

  "That doesn't even make sense."

  Jack gave a short, pained laugh, and sat down without speaking. Casey recognized that he was going to, and managed to sit with him rather than being dragged down.

  We do make a pretty good team.

  Their sloppy moss-and-root bandaging job had been working out even worse than Casey had been afraid of. The moss simply wouldn't stay on, and the most they'd been able to do was pack it onto the worst places and then have Jack keep it on by holding his arm clamped to his side. She could tell it hurt him a lot, but the only way he'd expressed it was by getting quieter.

  At least it wasn't bleeding anymore. This was the first time she'd had an opportunity to see fast shifter healing in action, aside from her own childhood bruises and minor scrapes while she was growing up. Already the terrible ragged edges of his wound had begun to knit at the edges. It was so fascinating she had to try not to stare at it.

  The gash in her leg had sealed up again, too, though it still throbbed and itched. Her feet had mostly stopped hurting, and tingled faintly as she sat still. Her thighs and the backs of her knees were a mass of cramps and aches.

  Also, she was thirsty again. Very thirsty. And hungry.

  Because this whole situation hadn't been miserable enough before ...

  Their previous overlook had faced the ocean. This one looked down into a valley with a narrow, twisting stream at the bottom and steep hills on the other side. The ocean was hazily visible in the distance, shadowed by the thickening wall of ominous dark clouds.

  As Casey looked out at the oncoming storm, a purple tongue of lightning stabbed the sea, making her jump. She waited for the thunder, but none came. Maybe it was still too far away to hear it.

  Turning the other way, she saw nothing but hills. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say mountains; they weren't as big and impressive as the Rockies, or even the Cascades, but they went higher and higher until their windswept upper
slopes were bare of trees.

  Surely there must be something on an island this size other than wilderness.

  "Gonna need you to tell me what you see," Jack said suddenly.

  "Crap. Sorry. I forgot."

  She described the view to him, ending with, "I can't tell if these are the same hills I was looking at before, or different ones."

  "Probably part of the same," Jack said. "The way I figure it, there's a bunch of little water-carved valleys running up into the main mountain range, radiating out like spokes. We were going roughly west and downhill in the creek. Then we came up over another ridge, and now we're facing north, and the hills are to our right instead of behind us."

  "Wow," she said, impressed. "You can navigate better than I can even without being able to see."

  "Bears have a good sense of direction," Jack said. He gave her a shadow of a smile. "We're long-distance ramblers."

  "Speaking of our animal side ..." She made sure their cuffed hands were resting on the ground so she didn't pull him off balance, and then shifted. It was more of an effort than usual; she was tired.

  The world's map of smells sprang into sudden sharp clarity for her lynx senses. She spent a moment sniffing the air and listening with her pricked, tufted ears. The smell of blood was almost overwhelming in this form—she had to concentrate hard to scent anything else through it.

  "Anything?" Jack asked when she shifted back.

  "No, they aren't close yet." She squinted at the mountains again, her gaze lingering on dark patches under the ridgeline. "I still think there are caves up there. It's hard to tell, though." She tried to think strategically. "If we go up there, we won't have as many trees to hide behind."

  "Trees aren't our friends right now," Jack said. "The forest is more of an asset to the lions than to us."

  "More climbing, then?"

  "More climbing," he sighed.

  He didn't seem to need her support anymore, but he didn't take the lead, either. They went side by side, with their hands linked because it was simply easier that way.