by Tasha Black
If only he could…
Calling on every cell of his body, Derek searched.
I’m sorry. Please come back.
The bear slammed into him instantaneously. It hadn’t really left him. For the first time in his life, he reveled in his animal nature, giving up his control to it gratefully.
The flashlight clattered to the ground and the world went gray.
The scents of rain and sycamore and pancakes and woman rushed into him, coloring the cottage like a rainbow.
Hovering over his mate was the absence of everything. It was unnatural and repulsive. He roared and contracted his muscles, ready to leap on it.
Then his mate looked into his eyes.
No, please. The stones, make a circle, the man Derek asked from within.
He was furious at the thought, but he understood now. The humans had their own strange troubles and they had called on him. He must help his mate her way.
Bellowing with rage, he began knocking over and batting the huge buckets and pans of stones. When he reached the tree trunk, the human inside his head held its breath.
He nudged his snout under the trunk.
It was good and heavy.
He wedged a shoulder beneath and grunted with the strain of it.
At last the tree shifted and the cottage gave a horrible groan.
Quickly, he reached out a paw and spilled stones across the threshold.
Then he moved along the outside wall, dashing stones out as he went.
When he reached the fireplace he cowered for a moment.
Fire was bad. Humans liked it because they didn’t have fur. But the bear knew better. Fire brought pain and death. He must not go near.
His mate was weakening. The no-thing was all around her, waiting for her to fail. The scent of fear was wrapped around her, filling him with horror.
Please, for our mate, the man said inside his head.
He put aside his knowledge of the animal world, and lumbered carefully past the woman to spill stones across the threshold of the fireplace.
His task completed, he turned, hoping to see the happiness of his mate.
Instead, she looked worse than ever. The thing was seething around her, quivering with a horrid sort of glee.
Enough. He had done as they asked. He would do things his way now.
The bear rose up on his rear paws, threw back his head and roared so loudly the floor shook.
The shadow of nothing stopped its hideous pulsing and turned to him.
“Get out, Derek!” Hedda cried.
But he was glad that the thing was coming for him. This was the role of a protector, to accept death or worse on behalf of his mate.
The cloud began to surround him, wisps of smoke toying with his muzzle.
Instead of fighting it, he opened his mouth wide, welcoming in the darkness, sucking it into himself, where it wouldn’t be able to harm his mate anymore.
An icy numbness flooded through him, as blackness forced its way in from the edges of his vision. His mate shouted something he couldn’t understand, but she seemed small now, and far away.
The darkness overtook him. The bear felt his body sway as the man Derek inside his head went silent.
Something struck him, hard as a rock, cold as a stream, big as a tree.
The floor came up to meet him.
The memory of being a very small bear, cuddled in warm arms, a kind voice singing a strange song, flitted through his head.
And then there was only darkness.
34
“No, Derek, no,” Hedda screamed, but it was no use. The shadow demon disappeared into the bear.
She gathered herself.
The bear turned to her, no sign of Derek in its dead black eyes.
This would be the end. The demon would use the bear to kill her, unless she destroyed it first. And now that Derek had been brave and foolish enough to trap the thing in a physical form, it was vulnerable to her magic.
She had one good blast left in her. Enough to take care of the demon, but that meant killing the bear in the process.
Killing her love.
She fought back the ocean of despair that threatened to crush her beneath its weight.
Any pain that belonged to her alone was meaningless.
She couldn’t let the demon leave.
If it defeated her here, its next move would be to free the moroi. That would not happen. Not on her watch. She’d blast the whole mountain to ash before she let that happen.
She summoned a crackling ball of pure energy between her hands and drew it back to throw, looking for some sign of Derek inside the creature. She longed for a way to thank him for his sacrifice, to tell him he would never be forgotten, not as long as there was a Lane woman alive to tell his tale.
But there was only the beast before her.
And it was constricting its massive frame to leap at her.
Forcing her consciousness inward, she exhaled and released the last of her magic.
The ball of energy hit the bear squarely, stopping it in its tracks.
But instead of absorbing into its target, the shimmering blue globe quavered for a moment, and then suddenly branched into a thousand tiny rivulets, coursing along the creature’s fur.
She had never seen anything like it before.
Except once.
Her heart dropped into her stomach as she remembered.
Back in the woods, when he had been out of control in bear form, she had hit him with an Obtundo spell. And it had rolled right off him.
So the demon was in the safest place in the world, inside a creature that was resistant to her magic.
The lines of energy wrapped around the bear, connecting on the far side like a web.
Hedda waited for it to slide uselessly off, squandering her last hope of vanquishing the demon.
Instead, the bear cried out in horrible anguish.
The net of blue droplets was lifting from him.
And like a magnet, the net of her magic drew the shadowy form of the demon out of the bear.
Swaths of dark shadow tore straight through his muscle and bone, and out of his skin, as he moaned in helpless agony.
And as the shadow demon slowly emerged, the blue light above it shone brighter for a moment, and then shredded the darkness into a thousand tiny fragments.
The fragments scurried away along the floorboards at a frantic pace, scattering themselves wide.
Hedda threw herself to her knees, knowing they were too fast for her to catch, but unable to stop herself from trying.
If a single strand managed to escape, then she had lost. It would regain its strength faster than she could, and that would be the end.
But to her astonishment, as each scrap of darkness reached the boundary made by the circle of protective stones, it recoiled in agony and dissolved into nothing.
One by one, the pieces of the demon disappeared.
And then there was nothing left.
She’d done it.
She had killed a shadow demon.
Her mind was racing ahead, picturing her sisters’ pride and elation.
Then there was a resounding crash as the huge body of the bear fell, rattling the floorboards.
Derek.
She lifted herself from the floor to run to him. His furry form lay still and lifeless.
All magic came with a price.
This would be her price, her burden to carry.
She gazed down at him, waiting for him to melt back to his human form, now that his life was over.
Impossibly, the glossy brown form on the floor began to move.
Was it conceivable that he had resisted her strongest magic? That he had survived being a living filter for evil?
As if in answer, the bear rose to his feet, staggering, and shook himself.
He had survived.
Suddenly, everything clicked into place for Hedda. The magic inside Derek was stronger than she could have imagined. He was the reason the shadow
demon had come all along. It had been attracted to the magic pouring off of Derek as his 300th moon released him from its hold.
It was probably the reason the plane had crashed in the first place. The demon was trying to take out Derek to get at the magic inside him. Landing here was an accident. It hadn’t sensed the moroi until she had brought it too close.
She’d done her job after all.
A huge swell of relief flooded into her, but Hedda was afraid to feel hope. She couldn’t have it all, she knew that. That wasn’t the way this worked.
The bear swayed on his back paws. He was not unscathed.
He was clearly wounded and disoriented.
“Derek?” she allowed herself to whisper.
The beast turned to her, but there was no sign of Derek. Just a bear the size of a horse, confused and angry, looking to put an end to whatever had done this to it.
Hedda didn’t have a drop of magic left to fight off the bear.
For the first time, she was truly afraid.
She closed her eyes and made a wish for her sisters to know she had gone down fighting, and for Derek to one day find his way back to the surface of the bear.
Enraged, the giant creature approached Hedda, growling and baring his army of white teeth.
She might be able to run, she could find a way out a window and into the woods.
No. This is my mate, I will not cower, I must help him come back to himself, the voice her head cried.
She was shocked to the core to recognize at last that it was true. The connection she had felt was the bond of a mate.
But in her heart she was hopeless.
Derek was lost to her.
And without any magic, even the bear wouldn’t recognize her.
She was only herself. Nothing about her was accentuated, she had no halo of beauty, no glow of innocence.
Herself would have to be enough.
“Derek,” she said as calmly as she could. “I know you don’t recognize me, but it’s Hedda, your friend.”
The bear shook its head as if to clear it of her words.
“I love you. You’re a good man and I know you will not hurt me,” she told him firmly.
He paused and cocked his head, but then he snarled.
“You’re frightened, you’re not used to being your bear self, and a lot has happened. Come close,” she said, sitting down on the floor and opening her arms. “I’ll hold you. I’ll sing for you.”
She had spent her life afraid.
She was afraid of being herself without the magic, afraid of being herself with the magic, afraid of the risk of making herself vulnerable in either case.
It had been her excuse. It had been her insulation against the world and her place in it. Against love.
But tonight, Hedda would rather die than close her heart.
She opened her mouth and began to sing, she had no idea what she would sing, but the words began to flow.
The bear lowered his head.
He lowered himself onto his belly and crawled toward her, his eyes losing some of their fierceness.
Hedda closed her eyes as he closed the last few inches. When she felt the heavy head in her lap, she threaded her fingers through the glossy brown fur and crooned the last words of the song.
She hummed along afterward. The warm head in her lap made her so sleepy. She began to drift off.
It was only when the weight in her lap lightened and the fur turned to hair, that she opened her eyes and looked down into Derek’s bright blue eyes.
“God, you’re beautiful,” he said.
“You don’t mind the way I look?” she murmured.
“I know things have been a little crazy,” he said. “We both could probably use a little freshening up. But I’d wager you look a hell of a lot better than I do right now.”
Impossible.
She opened her hand and tried to summon even a small trace of magic, but failed to produce so much as a spark.
“My magic is completely depleted,” she said in wonder.
“We’ll warm you up,” he said, obviously missing the point. “Don’t worry.”
“Do I look different to you?” she asked him frankly.
His eyebrows furrowed as he studied her.
“Different from what?” he replied. “Aside from a few bumps and bruises, and significantly less clothing, you look pretty much like you did when I first saw you. Why?”
“No reason,” she told him with a happy smile.
She thought again about how her combat magic had almost no effect on Derek. Could it be that he had never felt the pull of her magically enhanced charisma? That he had seen her for what she was from the very beginning?
How was that even possible?
She shook her head in disbelief, her smile widening uncontrollably.
There would be time enough for explanations. Time enough for everything. But the explanation didn’t matter to her now, not really.
All that mattered was that here was a man who saw her as she was. And liked what he saw.
And he happened to be a man she cared about very much.
“I think we have a lot to talk about,” he said. “But it’ll keep. I’m going to change back to warm you. And so I don’t try anything.” he added with a wink.
She nodded.
He leaned forward to brush her lips with his. His blue eyes said more than his words. They were filled with love.
Then he lay her down, facing the fire.
A moment later, she was enveloped in soft, warm fur.
She drifted off to sleep feeling cherished, and dreaming of a farmhouse where little shifters rolled around on a rag rug in front of the fire.
35
The next afternoon, Hedda leaned back against Derek’s big body and let the scenery go by.
It had been so long since she had seen anything but her mountains. But the mountains would keep. And her sisters were already on their way to take over the rest of her watch.
Derek tenderly twirled a lock of her dark hair around his finger as he talked quietly on the phone to a person named Kurt. Hedda gazed out at the greenery turning to little white houses, to brightly colored businesses, back to houses, back to trees and on and on.
As they drove out of the mountains, the sky had seemed so big and the world so flat. But it was bright and had its own beauty, especially now with the sun turning the whole horizon pink as it sank.
“Nearly there, sir,” a voice said from the front seat.
“Excellent,” Derek replied.
Sir.
The whole business confounded her.
Hedda had spent her life poor and proud. The monthly deposit in her bank account from Craftsy for polished stones had been a fortune to her and she’d gloried in her good luck.
If she’d only known how lucky she was that she hadn’t sold them all.
When Derek held her hands and told her it was time to know the truth, she figured he was married or about to report for a space mission or who knew what.
When the news was that he owned a company she had at first been relieved.
So he had money, great. It was nice that he didn’t have to worry about where the rent was coming from. Although she knew a lot of businesses were struggling nowadays.
It wasn’t until he’d offered her the choice of a ride home by helicopter or car that she began to grasp what he meant.
And when this elegant town car with a chauffeur and a picnic lunch prepared with love from the chef of a five star restaurant in Philadelphia had arrived, she had been surprised, to say the least.
He’d quickly swiped the newspapers on the seat into his briefcase, but not before she saw his picture on the top one, with a headline stating that his plane had been lost.
It was then that she realized that what Derek had wasn’t just money.
It was wealth.
Life-changing, soul-selling, deal-with-the-devil-ing, terrifying wealth of unseemly proportions.
In other words, the opposi
te of the Lane lifestyle, where money was rarely talked about and used begrudgingly as a tool to get the supplies for living quietly.
She tried not to over think it. Derek was still the man who was lost in the woods, who had saved her life twice with selfless bravery, once as a man and once as a bear.
But now that he was dressed and at peace on the creamy leather seats of the town car, it was hard to reconcile.
So Hedda leaned against him, soaking in his familiar warmth and gentle touch, but not looking at him.
Instead, she looked out the window at his world, wondering at the possibilities.
36
Derek finished his phone call. Thank god for Kurt, who knew how to run that place inside and out, and who was a true friend - more valuable than gold.
Hedda rested in Derek’s arms as they turned down Yale Avenue into Tarker’s Hollow. The trees formed a canopy overhead, a verdant dome over the cedar shake houses and stone edifices of the college.
“Oh,” she said, sitting up a little.
“This is Tarker’s Hollow,” Derek told her.
He was proud of the little town where he had spent so much time as a child, riding his bike over for ice cream every week, attending the Fourth of July parade with the family every year, the many trips to visit the college gardens, and of course the time they’d spent selling produce at the weekly Farmer’s Market during the warmer seasons.
He watched as she took in the tiny downtown with its Tudor storefronts.
They turned down Harvard and pulled into the deep driveway of a large stucco colonial. The Rhododendron Grove bed and breakfast was famous for rarely having a room available.
They waited outside while his driver, Whitman, ran in and grabbed the key to the honeymoon cottage. The man was much more than just a driver. Derek always depended on Whitman to make his stays pleasant and seamless whenever he visited the east coast. He’d come to count on him so much, in fact, that the rest of the time, he paid Whitman to stay on retainer, so that he wouldn’t be driving for anyone else if Derek decided to pay a last minute visit home.