Shifter Country Bears: The Complete Collection

by Roxie Noir

  “You got it.”

  Dave left, and Craig gave Jasper a look.

  “So I like fancy beer,” Jasper said, summing up a conversation they’d had a thousand times.

  “She was feral,” Craig said, getting them back on track.

  “Right,” said Jasper, as Dave slid him the beer. “Really feral. Ten years feral.”

  “That is a long time,” said Craig. “Surprised she came out of it.”

  “She might have had to,” said Jasper, spinning the beer glass slowly between his fingers.

  Craig frowned.

  “There’s a rumor that she killed the two wolves.”

  Craig’s eyebrows shot up.

  “Shit,” he said.

  Shit is right, thought Jasper.

  He’d known about the dead wolves, of course. It made the front page of almost every paper in Cascadia when it happened, but in the total absence of evidence — and the complete unwillingness of the wolf pack to cooperate with the investigation — nothing had really happened.

  The humans had decided that a real bear killed the wolves. Shifters tended to think that those two wolves had deserved it. That didn’t mean that they’d forgotten, though.

  “No one’s proven it, obviously,” Jasper went on.

  He didn’t say, no one really has to. The pieces all fit into place perfectly if Olivia had done it while feral. It sounded to him like all of Granite Valley had already decided that the girl did it.

  “Well, fuck ‘em,” said Craig. “We can deal with all that later. Where is she?”

  Jasper exhaled loudly.

  “That’s kind of the other thing,” he said. “I think she works at the library, but she sort of... ran away from me.”

  Craig gave his mate a long look that that hovered somewhere between disbelief and irritation.

  “What did you do?” he asked.

  “I gave her book back,” Jasper said. “Well, I tried.”

  “What do you mean, ran away from you?” Craig asked, his eyes narrowing.

  “Literally,” said Jasper. He took a long drink of his beer, the bitter liquid warming his throat. “I mean, the old ladies said something, I turned to answer them, and when I turned back, she was running.”

  “Next time we’ll try a football play,” Craig said, his eyes crinkling at the corners with a smile. “You say something polite, she runs, and then I pop out of the bushes and tackle her. Done.”

  Jasper laughed.

  “You’re a caveman,” he said.

  “You love it.”

  Craig and Jasper kissed, Craig’s beard tickling Jasper’s clean-shaven face. When they pulled apart, Jasper could see the muscles in Craig’s forearms bunching and jumping as he messed with his beer glass.

  “It’s driving me nuts to not get out there and track her down,” Craig admitted. “I just want to go house to house and rip the doors off the frames until we find her and...”

  His voice trailed off and he looked around the small bar, noticing Dave’s gaze.

  “I won’t really do it,” he said, raising his glass.

  Dave gave him a thumbs up.

  Jasper pulled the worn, ratty copy of A Wrinkle in Time from his inside jacket pocket and looked at it, rubbing his fingers gently over the cover.

  Craig took it from him, his thick fingers carefully turning the soft, time-worn pages.

  “Don’t you have a copy of this?” he asked.

  “It’s at my parents’ house.”

  Craig studied the back, taking a sip of his beer as he read.

  “I think I read this when I was a kid,” he said. “Good book.”

  Jasper nodded.

  “Let’s return it,” he said. “You working tomorrow?”

  “Not anymore.”

  “Me either.”

  3

  Olivia

  Olivia drove around for hours, slowly losing herself on the twisting mountain roads of Granite County. Without realizing it, she drove to her other favorite place: a picnic area up high in the mountains, a quick walk from the road.

  The air was getting chilly, and up here all the smells of autumn were even more intense, but she walked in her practical shoes and her librarian-esque cardigan to a picnic table and laid down on it, looking at the sky between the massive evergreen trees.

  She closed her eyes as she felt the cool breeze across her face.

  I’m glad I’m human, she thought. I’ve got a house to go to with a fireplace and peanut butter sandwiches. No sleeping all day and then digging up grubs.

  Olivia took a few more deep breaths, then let herself think about the guy from earlier. Jasper, he’d said his name was. Even thinking about him made her stomach feel like it was turning in on itself. When she’d run, she’d reverted to pure instinct.

  For the past ten years, anything that made her feel that much had been danger, but now, alone in the mountains, she was completely positive that Jasper was anything but.

  Your therapist said you might be ready to form some new bonds, she thought.

  She thought of Jasper again, of running her nails down his bare back as he grunted into her neck, both of them sweaty.

  Alone in the forest, she blushed.

  I don’t think she meant that kind of bond, she reminded herself. I think she meant, like, new friends.

  Not that it mattered. The two older women he’d been with — probably his mom, she guessed, and an aunt or something? — had definitely known who she was, and she was certain that by now, Jasper was up-to-date on all things Olivia Lessing and wouldn’t want to have anything to do with her.

  After all, most of the people in Granite Valley didn’t. She wasn’t sure that she could blame them, especially since there were days that she barely wanted to have anything to do with herself. What kind of person couldn’t even remember if they’d killed two people?

  Some sort of maniac.

  Olivia stared into the sky for a while, repeating marshmallows, indoor plumbing to herself, and after a while, she pulled out her phone to check the time.

  Even though she didn’t have signal, she somehow had a voicemail from her mom. Olivia wasn’t surprised; in fact, it almost made sense that her mother could get a message through without a signal, just on pure force of will.

  I ought to drive down the mountain so I can check it, she thought to herself. She took another few deep breaths, hopped off the table, and went back to her car.

  She checked the voicemail as soon as she got off the mountain.

  “Hi, sweetie, it’s your mother! I’m just calling to remind you about the baby shower this afternoon, over at your cousin Ash and Hunter’s house. I thought you could wear that cute blue dress that we got a week or two ago when the Macy’s in Redding had that big sale, remember? Anyway, it’s at six and I promised everyone I’d bring my famous meatballs, so don’t be late, okay, honey? Also let me know how everything went at the library today, I’m so proud of you for taking the initiative and getting that job. Call me back! See you soon! Love you!”

  Olivia smiled. When she was a teenager, a voicemail like that would have made her furious — Mom, jeez, I can dress myself! — but as a formerly feral twenty-seven, she appreciated it more than anything. Yeah, her mom was kind of overbearing sometimes, but it was still a minor miracle that Olivia remembered that humans wore clothing some days.

  She’d completely forgotten about the baby shower, though. Or she’d forgotten that it was today, in only a couple of hours, and heavy dread started dragging on her heart.

  It wasn’t that she didn’t like babies, or her cousins and their mate. She just knew that there would be tons of people at the shower, plenty she didn’t know, and that lots of them would already have opinions about her.

  Olivia sighed and drove home, and tiny part of her brain thinking, I never had to go to a baby shower as a bear.

  Flush toilets, she reminded herself. Chocolate chip cookies. Beds.

  A few hours later, she stood off to the side at Ash, Hunter, and Cor
a’s house. The event seemed more like a cocktail party than a baby shower. At least there were no awkward games and no diaper cake, she thought.

  She’d spent the intervening hours Googling baby shower, and everything she’d found had made her a little nervous.

  “So, how’s the library?” asked Quinn, her other cousins’ mate.

  “I like it,” Olivia said, truthfully. “There’s a lot of repetition, and it’s mostly pretty soothing. It’s really satisfying to just put things where they belong all day.”

  Quinn nodded, then took another sip of her cocktail. The amethyst on her ring finger sparkled in the light, and Olivia watched it.

  I missed so much, she thought with a pang. They all found mates, even my brother.

  Kade was there somewhere, probably being grumpy in a corner. He wasn’t a people person, but he’d come out for his cousins, who were more like brothers.

  “Do you get to read a lot?” Quinn asked.

  “Only if I sneak off to do it,” Olivia said. “Which I do. Sometimes.”

  Quinn smiled. She didn’t quite look relaxed, but she looked like she was getting there. Olivia had never directly asked her about her life story, but she knew that she’d grown up in an anti-shifter group.

  “How’s the dating website?” Olivia asked.

  Quinn laughed.

  “It’s going really well, actually,” Quinn said. She did web design. “We just expanded again. An office is going up out in Cumberland in the next few months, and they’re going to start running in-person dating events on the east coast.”

  “That’s great,” Olivia said.

  “If you ever want a subscription, I can hook you up for free,” Quinn said with a wink. “I mean, no rush, none at all, just offering. If you ever want.”

  She looked out over the crowd again, and Olivia thought she saw the other girl shrink back against the wall, just a little.

  “God knows I’m the last person who’d pressure you,” Quinn muttered.

  As if on cue, a woman with gray hair and a champagne flute in her hand came up to Quinn and put her hand on the girl’s arm.

  “I heard your good news!” she exclaimed, then, without asking, lifted Quinn’s ring hand into the air. “Oh, goodness, it’s beautiful!”

  “Thank you,” Quinn said.

  “Are we going to be throwing you a party like this any time soon?” the woman asked with a huge wink.

  Quinn threw Olivia a look, and Olivia had to fight down a smile.

  “We’re taking life one step at a time,” Quinn said very politely, and Olivia moved away. She felt a little bad that she was leaving Quinn alone with the vultures, but Quinn seemed to be able to handle herself.

  Instead, Olivia walked back toward the snack table for some more of those goat-cheese-and-smoked salmon pastries. In the past few months, Cora — the pregnant one — had suddenly discovered a near-insane love of baking, and had baked up an absolute storm for this party.

  Olivia didn’t mind. She also didn’t mind sitting around in Cora, Ash, and Hunter’s kitchen taste-testing the stuff.

  A few people stared as she walked past, and she ignored them as well as she could.

  It wasn’t enough.

  “That’s her,” whispered one woman. Olivia didn’t turn and look.

  “The one that killed those wolves?” a man’s voice said.

  “Yeah,” the woman said. “Can you believe they’d invite her to a baby shower, of all things?”

  “She should be locked away somewhere,” the man’s voice said.

  Walk on past, Olivia told herself, feeling the steel in her spine. Just walk on past.

  “Animal,” the woman said.

  Olivia whirled and closed the distance between them in moments, reveling in the sudden fear on the woman’s face.

  “I can hear you,” she said, her voice half a snarl.

  The man stepped partly in front of the woman, and Olivia’s could feel him practically bristle, his bear waking up.

  “I wouldn’t let you within a mile of my family,” he said, his voice barely civil.

  “I’ve heard that feral bears eat their own young,” the woman said nastily.

  Olivia felt like she’d been slapped in the face.

  “I would never hurt anyone,” she said. She was half-angry and half devastated.

  “We all know what you did,” the woman said.

  Olivia’s throat started to close, and she could feel unwanted tears right behind her eyes.

  She could feel her bear inside her, snorting and growling, asking to be let out.

  Don’t prove them right, she thought. Don’t you dare.

  For the second time that day, she ran.

  She ran past the snack table, knocking off a few cookies, and before she knew it she was running up the stairs and into Hunter and Ash’s bedroom, throwing open the door to their bathroom.

  Olivia collapsed in their bathtub, sobs racking her body.

  She felt like she could barely breathe as she curled into a ball in the tub, holding her head between her legs.

  What if he’s right? She thought. What if I did kill them, and I should be in some mental facility instead of here, ruining Cora’s shower like a lunatic?

  Another sob ran through her, and she just let it go, the sound bouncing off the tiles.

  I can’t be here, she thought desperately. I can’t be here. I can’t be with regular people, I’m not fit for socializing.

  I deserve to be in some burrow, eating grubs and getting cold.

  There was a soft knock on the door, and she looked up.

  Charlie, her brother’s female mate, stood in the doorway.

  “Olivia?” she asked.

  “Hi,” said Olivia. She had no idea what else to say.

  Without speaking, Charlie crossed the room and stepped into the tub behind Olivia, then sat down, wrapping her arms around the other girl and holding her close.

  Olivia lost it, sobbing.

  “She’s right, I’m an animal,” she said, pressing her forehead into Charlie’s upper arm. “I can’t even be at a baby shower without wanting to rip someone to shreds, and I can barely talk to other humans...”

  She trailed off and sniffled.

  “You’re not an animal,” Charlie said, her voice low and soothing. “Do you remember when I found you in that cage?”

  Olivia hiccupped.

  “Sort of,” she said. Most of her memories from her time as a bear were strong but hazy.

  “You could have murdered me right there,” Charlie went on. “But instead you took me back to Daniel and Kade. It took you all night.”

  Olivia barely remembered it, and only in snatches: the cage, for sure, along with the one member of the wolf pack who’d been kind to her. Then she was running through the forest, something on her back, until she got to the cabin, tired and sore.

  “I barely remember that,” Olivia whispered.

  “It’s okay,” Charlie whispered against Olivia’s hair.

  “I shouldn’t be here, at a baby shower,” Olivia said. “It’s just... all these people celebrating something I’m never going to have, you know?”

  “Why would you say that?” Charlie asked, stroking Olivia’s hair.

  Another light knock on the doorframe, and Daniel, her brother’s other mate, walked in.

  “Hey,” he said, taking in the scene. He crossed to the tub and sat next to it, taking one of Olivia’s hands in his. “What happened?”

  “I’m not fit for human company,” Olivia gasped.

  “Some bitch said something mean to her,” Charlie said.

  “I’m an animal who kills people. I can’t have relationships with humans, no matter how many marshmallows they have,” Olivia went on, practically burrowing into her sadness.

  Daniel squeezed Olivia’s hand. “You are not,” he said, gently but firmly. “You are a good person who had a rough time, but you are our sister in law and we love you.”

  Technically, Kade and Daniel and Charl
ie weren’t married, but close enough.

  Downstairs, Olivia heard someone yelling.

  Please, let that not be about me, she thought, but she didn’t have high hopes.

  Two more faces appeared at the door: Olivia’s cousin Hunter, and her cousin-in-law Quinn. They also came and knelt by the bathtub.

  Olivia was starting to feel kind of silly.

  “We don’t have to move the whole party in here,” she muttered. “Just because I’m crying in a bathtub.”

  Daniel’s face broke into a smile. “There you are,” he said.

  Olivia sighed. Charlie was still hugging her from behind.

  “I promise not to shift and rip anyone apart,” Olivia promised.

  “We weren’t worried,” said Charlie.

  More of her relatives’ faces appeared in the doorway: Kade and Hudson and Julius.

  “You’re doing fine,” said Quinn, sitting on the floor behind Daniel and peeking over his shoulder. “Hell, if I could shift, I’d have torn that nosy lady a new one.”

  This time, Olivia actually laughed.

  Then she heard two people coming up the stairs.

  “You can’t carry me because I can still use my own two feet, okay? Now back off,” came a woman’s voice from that direction.

  Seconds later, an eight-months-pregnant Cora appeared in the doorway. She was slightly out of breath, but smiling.

  “Hey Olivia,” Cora said, one hand on her belly, her voice a little too chipper. “I kicked that bitch and her asshole husband out!”

  Cora grinned.

  Remind me to never fuck with a pregnant lady, Olivia thought.

  Behind Cora, Ash appeared, looking more than a little hesitant to approach his pregnant mate.

  “Thanks,” said Olivia, curled up in Cora’s bathtub and surrounded by people.

  “And I’ll boot anyone else who tries to pull that shit with me,” Cora said as she half-walked, half-waddled over to Olivia.

  Olivia took a deep breath, looking up at Cora.

  “I don’t think I can bend down,” Cora said. “I mean, hell, I haven’t seen my feet in a month. They’re still down there, right?”

  Olivia braced herself against the sides of the tub and stood.

  “I won’t eat your baby,” she said, rubbing tears out of her eyes.