by Leela Ash
“Well…” Estelle was caught off-guard by his reaction. He himself wasn’t a little man. In fact, he had managed to make her feel just like she had always been afraid she would never feel with a man; small, delicate, and beautiful. He was powerful, a force to truly be reckoned with. and she had to force herself not to let her mind wander too much back to the night they had shared together. It had been magical, sure, but it was something that could never happen again under any circumstances. He was her boss. He was a shifter. But worse than any of that, he was an ass!
“So, you’re basically just telling me that they make you feel like shit about yourself. But you feel like you’re supposed to be going out of your way for them when they tell you to?”
“It’s complicated,” Estelle said, sighing miserably and putting her head in her hands. “If he’s dying, he’s still my father…I don’t want to just abandon them even though they like to use me as a scapegoat.”
“I don’t want you to go. You’re needed here.”
Blaine’s gaze was steel, and even if he was just saying it to protect her, a deep defiant anger surged through Estelle’s body and prompted her to rise.
“I don’t really care what you want,” she said, horrified by herself as the words began to spill from her lips. She had spent too much time in her life taking crap from other people though, and now that she was an adult, she defended herself automatically. “I’m going to tend to my father.”
“You’ll lose the internship. You won’t graduate.”
The calm and reasonable tone of his voice made Estelle hesitate as she considered the source of her anger. She was defending her right to go see the people who had stopped at nothing to make her life a living hell. Maybe she just wanted to go back to show her father just how useless his insults had been. She had still managed to make something of herself. She was still confident and fabulous in her own right, and soon she would succeed in her chosen field. But not if she gave up her internship to go see him about it.
“Look,” Estelle said, taking a deep breath and steadying the angry wavering of her voice. “I don’t want to fight with you about this. I have the right to see my family. If I’m not back in a few days, then feel free to fire me. Tell everyone in the state that I’m a worthless employee for all I care. But I need to do this.”
For some reason, the conversation was starting to make her feel as if she and Blaine were an old married couple. She was fighting for something more than just the right to see her father. She was fighting for her independence.
“All right,” Blaine said, sighing heavily. “I’ll give you two days.”
“Two?!” Estelle exclaimed. “Come on, Blaine. That’s – “
“That’s more than fair,” Blaine interrupted, standing up to stare Estelle in the eye. “You don’t need to stay stuck in that shit for any longer than you have to be. You say what you must say and then get back home. You have a lot to lose.”
Estelle gaped at Blaine, unsure of how to respond.
“All right.”
“I wasn’t kidding. We need all the help we can get right now. Things are getting pretty extreme. I’m counting on you.”
Estelle pursed her lips, not sure what to say in response, and nodded simply. She couldn’t let him get to her. She had won. She had gotten the results she had gone in to get. It would be better for everybody if she didn’t let it make her unsure of herself. She would do what she had to do, even if that meant going back to face her own personal hell.
11.
“What the hell has been your problem the past few days, man?” Jack growled as Blaine pushed past him and into his office. “You haven’t acted this badly since -”
“Don’t you dare even say it,” Blaine growled, throwing open his filing cabinet and digging through it to find the folder that contained a copy of his grandfather’s will and the outline of the estate he had been promised.
“Well you know it’s true. What’s going on with you?”
Blaine glared at Jack, a man about a decade older than he was, who had been there and seen him through some of the most difficult transitions of his life. He was really the only man Blaine had ever trusted outside his own family, and if Jack was telling him he was being an asshole, he knew he was just saying that for Blaine’s own good. It wouldn’t help anybody if he was going to let his feelings get out of control.
“You have any fuckin’ idea how obnoxious it is to be debating these boundaries with the dragon shifters? They don’t have any respect for my authority. And those lawyers move slower than burned molasses.”
“That’s bureaucracy for you, man. You run a business. You know all about that.”
“Doesn’t make it any less infuriating,” Blaine grumbled, slamming the file open onto his desk and pulling the papers out. “I have half a mind to shove this damn will right in Geron’s face.”
“You don’t want to deal with the results of putting Geron in any tighter of a position.”
“You think his position is tight?!” Blaine exclaimed. “If we don’t find these portals by the next equinox, it may be too late.”
“We don’t know exactly how the magic works, Blaine. You can’t let yourself get discouraged. There will always be another chance.”
“We don’t belong here!” Blaine growled, surprised by the force of his own fury. “There’s no reason for us to stay and lose men over a pissing contest over a fuckin’ mountain when there’s an entire continent where people like us don’t have to live in hiding. What about that don’t you understand? We need to find the portals. Nobody knows what will happen if we don’t make it in time. I don’t want to be responsible for ruining our chances to get the bear shifters on Earth back home.”
“We don’t know anything about ‘home,’” Jack spat. “We don’t know if it’s better or worse there. What if we came to Earth for a reason? Huh? What then? What if we find the portals and they take us somewhere we don’t know how to survive? What happens then?”
“It’s worth the risk,” Blaine growled, his voice deepening as the bear inside of him came closer to losing control. “I’m not going to deal with you telling me that you don’t know what’s going to happen. None of us know. Part of that uncertainty is what makes this timing so crucial. We’ve been looking for years, but the ancients created the calendar the way they did for a reason. We have to respect that time is limited and that means that we could be running out of it.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Jack mumbled, turning away from Blaine. “You need to chill out a little bit though. You’re not going to get anything done by operating with just plain fury in your heart.”
“Nothing’s going to stop me from getting to those portals, Jack. Not a damn thing. You understand me?”
Jack just shook his head and stormed out through the office door.
But Blaine couldn’t let it bother him. Truth was that he already had his fill of shit on his plate. Ever since Estelle had left to go visit her family, he had been on edge in a way he never had been before. Knowing just what that poor kid might be going through had left him surly and short-tempered. It didn’t help matters at all that things between the dragon shifters had started to get a lot more malicious. Calculated attacks on several of the mines had occurred; leaving several of the men injured in landslides and freak storms. He was reaching the end of his patience.
Blaine sighed heavily and stared at the papers scattered on his desk. They wouldn’t make a difference to the dragon shifters. Not at all. The only thing they would respect were human laws. Paperwork. And none of those things were coming through for him yet.
He shoved the papers back into his folder and took off out of the office. Maybe things wouldn’t feel so hard if he wasn’t so damned worried about Estelle. She had been terrified on her way down the mountain. The car had passed by the office just as he was stepping up to the door and he had smelled the fear. Whether it was there due to the winding mountain roads or because of dealing with her family, Blaine couldn’t be sure. But what he
did know was that fear was the last thing he wanted to sense upon parting with her.
But he couldn’t care about that. Not now, with everything falling apart around him. The dragon shifters were making it obvious that until they had proof from the courts, the mountain was up for dispute and they were going to do whatever it took to gain access. The Equinox was also important to them, presumably. The shifter cultures had a lot of shared wisdom amongst them, particularly to those we were attuned with the ancient magics.
“Never let them take you by surprise,” Blaine’s grandfather had told him. “Everybody is looking for something, and it seems like all the answers lie in this old mountain. That’s why it’s been in our family for so long. We must guard it with our lives. The secrets buried here could be the difference between life and death. We must protect our people.”
They were words that Blaine had always sworn to live by, and he didn’t have any intention of letting his family down.
He left the office in a hurry, deciding that it would be more productive for him to be out on the field. The freak tornado that had torn through the mountain the day before had done a lot of damage to the mines on the base of the mountain, but the dragon shifters had known nothing about the massive quartz deposit that indicated something of immense power somewhere near the mountain.
“What do you think, boys?” Blaine asked, forcing himself to sound a lot less uptight than he was feeling at the time. “Any closer to the source of that gold?”
“Hell yeah,” a tall, lanky man with shortly cropped black hair said. His eyes flashed excitedly. “We’re definitely on to something.”
Blaine nodded. That was what he liked to hear. He continued up the mountain and paused, a reluctant smile spreading across his face. Despite all the bullshit, his men had been hard at work the past few days, and it was starting to pay off. Men were busy, shouting excitedly to one another as another batch of pay dirt was discovered.
“We’re close now, man,” Ken said, sauntering up to Blaine. Blaine eyed the man, unsure of whether to just walk away. Ken wasn’t his favorite person. Still though, his curiosity about the progress of the mine was winning out. Blaine decided to bite the bullet.
“How can you tell?” Blaine asked. Ken grinned and nodded his head toward a thin path that the men had made in the brush heading up the mountain.
“This ain’t the only deposit we’ve had luck with,” Ken said, his dark eyes sparkling. “Come on.”
Blaine couldn’t help but feel a nervous, excited tingling in his chest as he followed Ken up the pathway. When they reached the top of the steep hill, another group of men came up in the distance, the same excitement clear on their faces. There was major pay dirt here. The area was rich with gold. The original deposit was close. It was only a matter of time now.
“You see all this?” Ken laughed, slapping Blaine on the back. “It’s awesome!”
Blaine didn’t answer; he just walked up past Ken to survey the area. Ever since the last attack on the mountain, he’d told all his men to keep the location of the mines to themselves. He hadn’t even been anxious to know himself what they were up to; not since Estelle had left. He had been worrying incessantly about the damn kid. But there was nothing he could do about it. He had forbidden her from leaving, of course, but she wasn’t the kind of girl to take that kind of guff from anybody. It was important to her and he had to respect that, even if it meant she put herself in harm’s way. What kind of assholes would treat their child so badly? He had seen the wounded look in her eyes when she spoke about her family; feel the painful charge of hopelessness that consumed her. He had to be crazy to let that girl go back there. It just wasn’t right.
“Boss, come here!”
Blaine perked up at the sound of Matthew’s voice. Matt was his favorite worker, if he was going to be honest with himself. The man was young and strong and determined. And it helped that he was just as devoted to the ancient ways as his grandfather had been. They had worked together with an unspoken understanding for years, and now that he was old enough, Matt had been promoted to oversee all the mines, and knowing he was excited made the possibility of discovering the source of all that gold even more real to Blaine. Thank god something was going right, finally.
“Look at this, man. We’re rich!”
Blaine looked down at the bucket of silt, his eyes widening as Matthew shook it off and generous nuggets of gold came into view.
“That’s not all,” Blaine whispered. “Fuck the money. We’re going home sooner rather than later.”
Matthew nodded, a big, goofy smile spreading across his face, and Blaine slapped him on the back.
“Good work, son,” Blaine said. “We’re going to really get this on the road. Remember though, not a fuckin’ word about it. The last thing we need is Geron catching wind of any of this. He’ll do anything to sabotage our efforts these days. It’s best to stay quiet.”
“Oh, I know it,” Matt said, shaking his head grimly. “They know the portals opened by ancient bear magic won’t work for anyone else, right?”
“I don’t know what they think,” Blaine mumbled. “Except that they have a claim to those tunnels they started here. And we’ve been at peace for a while but all that’s changing. That son of a bitch almost killed us!”
“Us?” Matthew asked, tilting his head in confusion.
Blaine glowered, aware that if he kept talking, he might just reveal too much about what had happened between himself and Estelle. Estelle, who would make a much more suitable mate to a young man like Matthew than an aging, crotchety man like Blaine. Estelle, who had no idea just how gorgeous she was and was probably being put down right that moment by people who would never be able to appreciate her…
The thought made his blood boil, and he had to stop himself from snapping at Matthew when he laughed the question off and slapped Blaine’s shoulder.
“We’re doing all right for ourselves,” Matt said, changing the subject and heading toward the deep pit that they’d begun to dig. “We might just find those portals yet. The Equinox is on the horizon.”
“The Equinox ain’t for another month or so!”
“Not the human one, dammit Barney! Quit eavesdropping!”
“You guys are so weird,” Barney said with a deep chuckle.
“Watch what the hell you’re saying in front of me,” Blaine growled right into Barney’s face. Barney blanched and backed away, and Matthew’s easy smile faltered.
“He don’t mean anything by that, you know,” Matt said, guiding Blaine away from Barney, who shrunk away and headed off down the mountain to the other area of the mine. “He’s just a know it all.”
“Well he doesn’t know shit,” Blaine growled. “And if he says anything like that again, he’s fired. You hear that?”
Barney nodded vigorously as he disappeared down the hill, where he was soon busy stripping off the overburden. It was enough to satisfy Blaine for the time being, but the truth was that he was going to be miserable until the moment when he heard that Estelle was doing all right.
But until then, he was going to be just as surly as ever in the hopes that he would hear from her soon. A little bit of success in the mines wasn’t enough to lift his spirits. Not when he knew what kind of hell that sweet young woman was facing right that moment. He wouldn’t rest until she was right back where she belonged. And that was all there was to it.
12.
“The hell do you mean?” Estelle’s father grumbled, struggling to sit up in his hospital bed. “I’m fine. Get the hell out of here!”
Estelle felt as if she had been kicked in the stomach. She had spent all day on the bus out to visit her parents, knowing it was the most economical option for her to get out East. She still had to pay off her school and the student loans that had been piling up since she had moved out west to attend SU, and was risking her internship and graduation to see the father her mother had sworn was lying on his death bed. She had no idea what she was doing there.
“
Mom said you were in trouble, so I just wanted to come and see you,” Estelle said, trying to ignore the anger and pain rising in her chest.
“What the hell for? You left. As far as I’m concerned, your fat ass ain’t even my daughter anymore.”
She had expected a lot of backlash, but now, being right in the middle of it after such a long time of being alone and in a balanced and supportive place, she was feeling lower than she ever had before. How had she grown up listening to this kind of poison every single day of her life?
“Damn, dad,” Estelle’s brother Lance said, sniggering. “Harsh.”
“Shut it, boy. This girl thinks she can live without us, disown her family? Abandon us and leave us to fend for ourselves? Forgetting everything we ever done to make her happy and take care of her?”
“Make me happy?” Estelle sputtered, completely flabbergasted by the thought. “You always went out of your way to bring me down! Any chance you got you made me feel like hell about myself!”
“You’re full of shit,” her dad mumbled. “You’re just a selfish bitch and always have been. Stupid little twit. I done told you to get the hell out of my room! You ain’t no daughter of mine. My kids stick around. They know what it means to be a family and take care of each other.”
Estelle glanced over at her brother, whose chin was raised with an air of superiority that made her want to go over and punch him right in the mouth. But she was better than that. Though she wished to hell that she wasn’t.
“I don’t know why I bothered coming back here. You’re just a sad, pathetic little man who doesn’t feel good about himself unless he has someone to put down. You’re just a bully who gets his self-worth from bullying people you think are weak. What a joke.”
The aging man glared at her fiercely, his face growing red just like she knew it would. He had never taken defiance very well. She should have listened to Blaine. It had been a mistake to come here.
“I know you’re anxious to get rid of me, so I’ll make this fast,” Estelle said, sighing deeply. “My entire life you worked your hardest to make me feel like I wasn’t good enough. You did everything in your power to disempower me; to make me feel ugly and worthless. Because maybe you feel ugly and worthless yourself. But I’m going to tell you something. No matter what you feel about me, no matter what you say, I love the woman I’ve become, and I wouldn’t change anything about myself for the world, whether that’s good enough for you or not. Your words can’t touch me anymore. And they’ll touch me even less when you’re dead.”