by Amelia Jade
It started in her palms. They began to pulse rapidly, swelling in size as they did. A millisecond later huge talon-like claws shot from her fingers, almost like a comic book character she’d read about once, though hers were much shorter. Her center of gravity shifted swiftly and she fell forward, her arms now legs as their joints adjusted. Across her entire body she felt her skin thicken and then explode with thick, coarse hair blacker than the midnight sky.
As unsettling as that was, the feeling of millions of strands of fur erupting from her skin all at once was nothing compared to the final stage, where her face suddenly jutted forward, a huge, powerful set of jaws emerging from the relatively flat, smooth skin that had been there before. The final bulking and increase of mass were nothing compared to all that happened before. It seemed like an eternity to her, especially as she fought it along the way, but in reality it took less than a second for her change to be complete.
She was still fighting to control her suddenly powerful bear when it let out a warning growl.
“Victoria?” came a voice from the bushes moments before the figure it belonged to stepped into the clearing.
No!
She tried to stop her bear, to do anything to halt it, but nothing worked. She had spent so long training it to defend her, to be ready for an attack from anywhere. Now when she didn’t think she actually needed it her long-prepared defense was springing into action.
Thick, immensely powerful rear legs seemed to do nothing more than twitch, and suddenly she was halfway across the clearing, her jaws widening as they aimed for his waist.
“Victoria! Stop!” Evan’s voice was no longer the calm, even-spoken treble that she had known. This was a deeper tone, one that was infused with an almost physical force as he lashed out at her with his voice alone, using the command voice of a bear Alpha to try and halt her.
She felt her bear’s mind ricochet in surprise, and in that moment she rushed in to exert control once more.
Except it was too late. She was already airborne, aimed directly at Evan.
Victoria had met several Alphas before. She had known they were bigger and stronger than most other bear shifters, but never before had she actually tangled with one. Not in a way that had showed her how truly awesome their power was.
Evan was standing there in her path. Her bear was flying at him. He would take the full force of it, she knew. It was simply unavoidable. It wouldn’t be enough of a blow to kill him; shifters were far too resilient for that. But it would hurt him, possibly badly. The sheer amount of mass hurtling at him would see to that. It was simple physics after she left the ground.
Except the impact never happened.
At some point during her leap, Evan simply moved. One moment he was in front of her, the next he was to her right. She landed in an uncoordinated heap, and just as she tried to get up, a shadow descended over her.
She yelped aloud as he drove a fist hard into her side, and then demonstrated to her just how badly she was outmatched when he picked her up and threw her against a nearby tree. The trunk shuddered and cracked under the blow, though the mighty oak wasn’t felled.
With it stunned by the sudden series of blows and the sheer, visceral power of Evan, she finally managed to shut her bear away, locking it back into her mind, while at the same time shifting back into her human form.
“Can you control it?” Evan said, standing nearby. She hauled herself into a sitting position, noting his wide-legged stance and piercing stare.
He was ready to shift at a moment’s notice if she could no longer control her bear.
“I’m good now, yeah,” she said, wincing in pain as she took in a deep breath. Something in the blow must have bruised, or perhaps broken, one of her ribs. The pain was excruciating, but she decided to bear it in silence as penance for being so careless. She forgot sometimes that her bear wasn’t another human, but a feral animal that just so happened to have a partnership with her. That didn’t mean it wouldn’t try to escape from time to time though, and she would need to be more careful.
“Good,” Evan said, relaxing his stance as he crossed the distance to her.
“Now why don’t you tell me what’s going on?”
She shook her head, not ready to talk about it just yet.
Evan looked at her for a moment, then abruptly dropped into a sitting position opposite her. His eyes focused on something only he could see, and for a moment there was silence between them. Then he spoke.
“You know, I knew a girl once. I cared for her. A lot. I thought she was the one. For a long, long time I maintained that thought. It nearly destroyed me.”
“What happened to her?” Victoria heard herself ask, though she wasn’t sure where the story was going. Was this his way of telling her that he wasn’t actually interested in her? That he still loved someone else?
“I got her killed,” he said bluntly.
Victoria sat up straighter at that, her eyes nervously darting around the clearing. What the fuck was he talking about? She pushed herself back, trying to edge around the tree.
Evan spread his arms calmly. “Relax,” he told her, but she didn’t listen. “I didn’t kill her, but my inaction, but own stupidity did.”
She frowned, still not understanding where he was going.
He let out a big, deflated sigh. “Let me tell you the truth about why I was in that jail.”
Intrigued, but still cautious about relaxing around him, she nodded for him to continue.
“I was the Alpha of a crew. The Opals.” His voice began to take on a storyteller’s tone, but there was none of the happiness and joy normally evident. It was simply a grim recollection of the past. “We weren’t the best crew in town, but we weren’t the worst. Not at the beginning.”
“What happened?”
“My ego. Our ego. I think it was me, but others have told me I was prodded by my crew. Anyway,” he said with a shake of his head, getting back on topic. “I was approached by someone who promised me a drug that would give me a high like I’d never known before.” He shrugged. “Life here was pretty dull and I was bored, so I decided what the hell, I’d give it a try.”
Regret tinged his tone as he continued, the feeling mirrored on his face.
“Well, next thing you know, my entire crew is doing it, and so is another crew, and a third is actually starting to deal it on behalf of those who made it. We were doing it all the time, but we still managed to perform our job, so nobody cared. Until the night it all changed.”
Victoria didn’t move, frozen to the spot as Evan revealed to her more about himself, his true nature, and the things he had done in his past.
“We were at a bar. The Twin Peaks, to be exact. It was the normal stomping ground for my crew. That night we had everyone out, including the girl I was confident was my mate.”
“What was her name?” Victoria whispered, not sure she actually wanted to know the answer to her own question.
“Emily,” he replied without hesitating. “She was lovely, and we had a lot of fun together. We were celebrating, having had an unusually successful day in the mines. I wanted to get high, and she urged me not to. But I was the big, bad Alpha boy. I could do whatever I wanted and get away with it, right?”
Evan shook his head, and she felt for him, but she still didn’t reach out for him.
“She got mad and we fought a little, but I was fucked up and didn’t know any better at the time, so I mostly just brushed it off. Everything would have been fine, except that another crew showed up at the bar and they were also on the drug. One of them took a liking to Emily and wouldn’t take no for an answer.”
His head dropped and his shoulders sagged as he recalled the next part. “I saw him put his arm on her shoulder, and I saw red. I went after him. And in the fight that followed, Emily was killed.”
He hunched over, and she could tell by the way his shoulders bobbed up and down that he was shedding some tears over her memory. Then his head snapped up, eyes ablaze.
&
nbsp; “If only they had had the good graces to stay away and not come to our bar! Everything would be okay.”
Victoria’s eyebrows rose.
“Do you even hear yourself?” she asked, feeling sad for him, but realizing even more that Evan needed something else other than her pity and support.
He needed a wakeup call.
Chapter Six
Evan
“Do you even hear yourself?”
His lip pulled back in a snarl at the challenge in her voice, as if she could not believe what she was hearing. How dare she not understand what he was trying to say, what he was trying to get across? How could she do that? He was trying to show her that he had learned, and that he was a changed man.
“Of course I hear myself. I’m trying to tell you about the worst day of my life, how I’ve learned from it, and how I’m striving to be a better person so that it never happens again. What the fuck is wrong with that?” he snarled at her.
“Well for starters,” Victoria said, getting to her feet. “You could accept the fact that it was your fault, and not somebody else. You wanted to get high. You disagreed with her. You took the drug, and then you couldn’t control yourself when someone else put a hand on her. You didn’t give her a chance to handle it; you just leapt at him, and in the process you got her killed. If you can’t accept that it was your fault, that you fucked up, then you’ll never be changed. You’ll never be a man I could fall in love with.”
Tears sprung to her eyes, mixed with a look of shock at her own words.
“Dammit,” she swore. “This is why I don’t get close to people, and why I don’t let them get close to me.”
Evan was torn in multiple directions. On one hand, he was mad at her accusation. On another, he wanted to go to her, to hold her, to wipe away her tears and tell her it was okay.
But most of all, he was broken. He realized she was right. One hundred percent right. It wasn’t the other Alpha’s fault. Evan had started the fight.
“Holy shit,” he whispered, looking up at her, knowing his face was filled with horror. “How could I have been so blind?”
She looked at him, her eyes still glistening with liquid, though no more tears tracked down her cheeks. Even as he watched, her expression altered subtly, turning into a look of rigid stone as she locked her feelings up, pushing them away. Her eyes of hazel cleared even as they hardened in his direction.
“There is a good man in you, Evan. But he’s buried beneath a lot of issues.”
He nodded slowly, still trying to come to terms with the fact that it was all his fault.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, his apology directed as much at Victoria as it was at the memory of Emily, two women in his life that he had wronged.
He wanted to argue the issue, to protest his innocence, that it was all the fault of another. For so long that had been the mantra of Evan Mosier: he had been victimized by others. Despite what others may have said to him, not once had he considered himself to be at fault. It should have been entrenched in him that he wasn’t at fault. Every fiber of his being should be screaming out to contradict what Victoria was saying.
And yet, not a single ounce of him actually felt that way. Was that indicative of the importance of Victoria to his life? He shook his head vigorously, trying to clear it of thoughts as he worked at sorting out the shattered pieces of a life he had thought was finally being put back together.
“What is it?” she asked tentatively. She must have recognized that there was a lot going on in his head.
Still, he could tell by how unsure her voice was that she wasn’t certain about wanting to speak to him right then. Not that he could blame her; she had already fled an intimate moment with them. There was more going on in her head than she was letting on as well.
“Fuck, we’re all kinds of messed up, aren’t we?” he said with a weak laugh.
She smiled. “No argument.”
“What do we do now?” he asked.
“I think we both have a lot of thinking to do.”
“Yeah. And amends to make, I think.”
“You’re taking this rather well,” she observed. “You didn’t even try to argue with me.”
He gave her a sad smile. “I think, deep down, that part of me knew that you were right. I didn’t know it, and it took you calling me out for me to realize that it had been there all along. I did fuck up. I’m to blame for her death, and the others as well.” He paused to clear his throat. “It’s not easy for me to admit that, and it’s going to take a lot of time, and a lot of apologies to her before I can forgive myself. A lot of apologies,” he said a second time, thinking once more of the bright life that had been snuffed out by his actions.
“Hopefully she can forgive me.” He looked up, meeting her eyes squarely without flinching. “Hopefully you can as well.”
Victoria glanced away. “I don’t know Evan,” she said in a whisper. “I just don’t know. This is all happening so fast. I can’t keep up with it. Now the revelation of your past. I know there’s a flame between us—I’m not blind. But I don’t know if I can give it any fuel from my end.” Her head dropped. “I just don’t know.”
“I understand,” he said after a moment, lacing his fingers behind his neck as he looked up at the sky, hoping for some sort of guidance.
“I think I need to be alone for a bit,” she said at last.
His heart plummeted, taking his hopes and dreams with it. There was no anger in her voice; even the earlier sadness seemed to be gone. In its place was a thoughtful pragmatism. She wasn’t telling to leave her alone, but that she needed to be alone with her thoughts for the moment. Strangely enough, Evan realized he felt the same way.
“Me, uh, me too,” he said awkwardly. “I think I have somewhere I need to be.”
Victoria smiled at him, the expression mixed with sadness and understanding. “I know. I’ll be at the apartments later, I think.”
He didn’t like the last few words, but he couldn’t fight her. Wouldn’t fight her. Victoria was an adult, capable of making her own decisions. If she used logic and rationale and came to the decision that she couldn’t be with him, he would have no choice but to let her go. He hoped it wouldn’t come to that, and that they could work it out.
Evan swore with a silent, savage growl that if any outside forces tried to interfere he would tear them to shreds before they bothered her.
With one last, lingering look, she turned and disappeared into the bush.
The sun was below the mountains by then and darkness was quickly settling in for the night. That didn’t matter to Evan though; he could find his way to his destination blindfolded and with only one leg. He’d certainly spent enough time there, sneaking off at every opportunity.
“Hi,” he said at last, sitting down, his back leaning against solid stone. “It’s been a long time. Too long. I wish I could have made it here before, but I wasn’t free to.” He proceeded to retell the story of what had happened.
“I’ve thought about you though,” he said. It was true. In his cell, every waking day and sleepless night, she had been in his thoughts. Memories of their time together, her big, easy smile and effortless laugh. The way she shrieked when he tried to tickle her armpits. The way she felt up against him, and the passion that they had shared in their most private moments.
“I’m so sorry,” he said at last, after a long moment of silence. “It was my fault. I did it.” Hot tears stung his cheeks as they trickled down, his emotions overwhelming him in the shadow of Emily’s grave.
“I screwed up so bad, Em. So bad. What the hell is wrong with me?” he asked, looking up at the sky, seeking an answer, a sign. Anything. “How do I make this right?” he asked plaintively. “How…”
His voice trailed off as he closed his eyes, leaning back against her tombstone. He didn’t need to read the lettering on it to know what it said.
Emily Jane Singer
Beloved Friend, Sister, Daughter
Every Journey Starts w
ith a First Step
The last line had been her favorite saying. She even had a tattoo of it on her arm.
“Em,” he whispered at last. “I’m on a new journey now, but this first step, it’s the hardest of all. I—” his voice failed him.
He inhaled deeply, before slowly exhaling, trying to release some of the stress.
“I met someone,” he said at last, admitting it out loud. “I like her. A lot.”
Evan shook his head. “I’ll always love you. I hope you know that.”
Overhead a star shot across the night sky, lighting a trail that started at the mountains and ended in the Valley, pointing back toward Origin.
He stared at the sky for a long time after that, wondering if that had been a sign.
“Thank you,” he said at last. “I can’t undo what I’ve done, but I promise you, I will make the best effort I can to do right by the rest of my life.”
His phone buzzed. It was Victoria.
“Yes, and I promise to do right by her as well,” he said with a smile at the not-so-subtle sign. Whether it was just a quirk of the fates or not, the timing was impeccable.
“Thank you Em. I love you.”
He got up, turning to face the grave marker at last. Bending over, he placed both hands on it before pressing his lips softly to the top. “I’ll always remember you.”
Evan stood up, took a deep breath, and nodded to himself. Then his phone buzzed again, this time with a message from Garrett.
Ferro’s. Now.
Something was up. He knew it right away. As he walked back to his truck, he checked the message from Victoria. It was just her letting him know she was back at the apartments. He sighed with relief, and let her know he would be there as soon as he could.
The cemetery was outside of town, and it would take him a good twenty minutes just to get to Ferro’s. The engine roared to life and he took one last look in the mirror as the graveyard disappeared in the dark behind him.
Time for the first step.
***
The red neon sign shone brightly in the dark and the bright white light spilling through the windows told him the place was open for business.