by Amelia Jade
That was a big if though, she realized, looking around the lobby. The front doors opened into the room, leading straight up to an oval desk in the center. Staircases curved up on either side of the desk, leading to the upper floor. Straight behind the desk was an elevator for those who couldn’t navigate stairs.
There was a hallway to the left and right of the desk, leading to the rooms, while in the back left was the staircase that led down to what she assumed was the basement. To the back right was a smaller hallway that had a sign above it labeled Conference Rooms. She wondered if they used those as offices.
“So Captain Korver,” she said, addressing him by rank once more to impress upon him the fact that she’d listened. “What can you tell me about yourself?”
The question seemed to catch him unprepared, which was the point. By changing the topic abruptly, she hoped he would assume she was willing to drop the subject and give him his space. That was exactly the opposite of what she was thinking of doing, but telling him that wouldn’t help her case in the slightest. Stephanie needed him to trust her if she was to get this done.
She needed that story.
“About me? Why the hell do you want to know about me?” he asked gruffly, starting to walk away.
Stephanie fell in step, following him as he headed back toward the conference rooms.
“Because you’re an officer. You’re in charge of everyone here. Showing the non-military side of you would be good. It would suggest to others that you’re a real person. That you have hopes and dreams and actually exist outside of being an authority figure over these people here. Something that people can relate to.”
Another shifter snickered as he headed by, having overheard.
Gabriel just glared, but he didn’t say anything. Stephanie glanced at the other shifter, noting that he had the same amount of rank symbols on his sleeves as Gabriel did. Another captain? She made a mental note to ask about him later.
“Humans can’t relate,” Gabriel said, rolling his eyes in disbelief.
“What?” she asked, startled by the bluntness of his response. “What do you mean?”
He started walking again, but this time toward the exit.
“Are you hungry?” he asked.
“Hungry? What does that have to do with anything?”
Gabriel pointed up at the giant analog clock on the wall. “It’s lunchtime. I’m hungry. There’s a great sandwich place just down the street if you want to come.”
She looked around, realizing it was a ploy to get her out of the motel. But at the same time, lunch with Gabriel promised to be an interesting event, one where perhaps he would reveal some of what she wanted to know in response to her leaving the motel.
“Fine, lunch,” she said. “But it’s a working lunch, nothing else.”
“It’s not a date, got it,” he rumbled with amusement.
A date? Why the hell would you think it’s a date? I never…we never. I…
With just one word, Gabriel had scrambled her brains. She blinked and shook her head, realizing he’d kept walking. She chased after him, still trying to figure out why he’d said the words he had, and on top of that, why she was having such a strong reaction to them.
It wasn’t as if she liked the guy.
Was it?
She shook that thought off. Clearly she was reading too much into going for food. Gabriel didn’t know the first thing about her. He wouldn’t have asked her on a date.
Would he?
Stephanie tried to focus her head on what was going on, to maintain her line of thought. She needed to ask Gabriel some questions, find out about who he was, where he came from, and just why he thought humans wouldn’t understand him or his men. That was a fairly powerful statement. What could be so different about them that she or others wouldn’t be able to relate to?
***
The walk was, as promised, short and sweet. Gabriel didn’t say much, and Stephanie was too preoccupied with trying to sort out her thoughts about him to ask any questions. But once they sat down with their meals in hand, that changed.
“Tell me,” she said around a bite of her delicious honey-mustard ham and cheese sandwich. “Why do you think we can’t relate to you?”
Gabriel tore off a hunk of his steak and cheese sub, swallowing it quickly.
“Consider this,” he said, leaning back and looking at her with that same quiet intensity he had the first night they met.
His green eyes flickered with sadness and pain as he formed his words, and she listened closely, not wanting to be rude in any way. Whatever he was about to say, it was clearly personal in nature, and likely something that she’d never heard about shifters before.
“Humans go through puberty in their early to mid-teens. Same as we do,” he explained.
Stephanie wondered what that had to do with anything, but it was obvious that Gabriel was putting in a lot of effort to paint her a picture of his world, so she sat back and simply listened, instead of asking questions along the way like she might normally.
“But that’s about where the similarities end. Was puberty the easiest time for you?” he asked with a gentle smile.
“Hell no,” she snorted. “I was a raging ball of hormones that hated everything and everyone, without so much as a warning. I was made fun of incessantly, and all the boys wanted was for me to take my top off by the time I was fourteen,” she said, glancing down at her large chest, which had begun to show early in her teenage years.
Gabriel tilted his head in understanding, and to his credit, his eyes didn’t stray below her chin. That’s not to say they didn’t wander at all, but he caught himself before he could blatantly stare at her chest. It wasn’t perfect, but she had to give credit where credit was due.
“Exactly,” he said with a polite laugh. “No difference. I started puberty around fourteen, give or take. For the first year, I was like every other person on this planet. I was growing, I was filled with hormones, the whole thing. But twenty-seven days after my sixteenth birthday, that all changed. You see, that’s when my bear manifested.”
She frowned in confusion. “Manifested?” she asked, breaking her own rule not to ask questions, though she was fairly certain he intended for her to do so right there.
Gabriel nodded. “Exactly. Unlike many of your legends about us, we don’t just have the ability to morph our shape.”
“You…don’t?”
“No. We actually draw upon the other entity that lives within us. Our animal. In my case, a bear.”
“You have a bear living within you?” she asked skeptically.
“Think of it perhaps like a soul,” he said with a grimace. “Based on varying definitions of a soul, that might not be accurate, but it should suffice. A soul that we’re aware of, that can, in very blunt and crude terms, communicate to us.”
Her eyebrows began to ache as they reached for the top of her head. “So you…you live with a bear inside of you, all the time?”
“Yes,” he admitted.
“That must be…tough.”
He shrugged. “Not so much now, though there are moments that are more difficult than others. But the human mind, it’s a complex, powerful thing. Far more so than that of any animal, except perhaps a dragon. So what we do is, we learn to harness our bear, to create a place for it in our mind. A place where we can control if it comes or goes.”
“That sounds an awful lot like a prison,” she remarked.
He smiled. “It does, doesn’t it? But if we didn’t take control, exert our superiority over it, then it would be in charge.”
“And we don’t want that,” she said softly, imagining a feral shifter running amok around Cloud Lake.
“Exactly. So, picture yourself at sixteen, and now add having to deal with that to your list of things. Of having to not only learn to adapt to your new and changing human body, but also your animal’s. After fifteen years of walking upright, do you think it’s easy to learn to master walking on four legs?”
; She sat back into her seat, her sandwich all but forgotten in front of her as she tried to picture what life as a young shifter must be like. Tried and failed. There was just simply no way she could understand.
No way she could relate.
“I see what you meant earlier,” she told him. “How could we relate to something like that?”
“You can’t,” he said simply.
“No, we can’t.”
“Then of course, there’s the fact that my homeland of Cadia is made up of several different types of shifters. Many of whom do not get along well with each other.”
Stephanie waved him off. “That one’s no different than us. We have our own class and race issues.”
He bobbed his head from side to side, in a so-so manner. “True, but generally the downtrodden ones are minorities, very low in numbers. In Cadia, that’s not the case. And it’s not that one race views the other as inferior. It’s that the two races hate each other. It’s more like two of your countries being at each other’s throats. But it never stops. Ever. Even as you grow older, there’s still tensions and fights that break out.” He gave her a knowing look. “Did it never occur to you why it’s only bears occupying Cloud Lake? Why no wolves or other races?”
He was right. It hadn’t occurred to her. She just thought that it was because the bears were the most powerful. But from what he was saying, that might not be true. It might be a simpler answer, that if other types came, they would fight each other instead of protecting the humans.
“Your culture, your world,” she said slowly. “It’s so much more complex than I ever imagined.”
He smiled sadly. “And that’s just the tip of it. There’s more, but not all of it is for me to share with humans. Suffice it to say, I sincerely doubt humans could relate to us.”
Chapter Eight
Gabriel
“How are we supposed to relate if most of us don’t know what you’ve just told me? What do you mean there’s more?”
“I’m not sure I should say exactly, but think of the way the animal kingdom treats death.”
He watched understanding flicker through her eyes at his words.
Interesting.
“I’d heard that killing wasn’t a very serious thing to you,” she said quietly, having sensed where he was going.
“It’s a serious thing. But we also are much more comfortable with it. We don’t condemn those who have killed, like you do. To us, it’s a much more…normal, I guess, part of life.”
She looked at him. “Killing is normal?” Her face reflected the horror of that idea back at him, in a manner of someone who could never fully understand.
Gabriel smiled wryly. “See. I told you. It’s too different for you to relate to. You have to grow up within it to truly understand. And a human wouldn’t last very long among us, not without protection and the right set of circumstances.”
“Do any?”
“Do any what?” he asked, not following.
“Do any humans live among you?” she asked, her voice more curious than the professional tone of her reporter voice.
“Occasionally,” he said. “From time to time humans end up mated to a shifter, and they come to live with us. But it’s fairly rare, and non-shifter children even rarer. But it certainly has happened before.”
He steadfastly avoided telling her about the recent trend of his Green Bearets finding their mates among the population of Cloud Lake, and of Turning them, making them bear shifters as well. She did not need to know about that. Humans could be a rational species, but they could also be very, very irrational. Best to keep that one under wraps.
“Interesting. That’s something I’d never heard about,” she said, taking a sudden deep breath in.
They both took a break there, eating some more of their food before resuming the half-conversation half-interview that was going on. He wasn’t sure why he had agreed to talk to her, to answer some of her questions, but so far he wasn’t regretting the decision, so he would keep going.
The time they spent eating gave him a chance to evaluate her a bit more. He considered her, and her job. Although he didn’t really watch much in the way of television, Gabriel wasn’t blind, nor ignorant. He knew that she didn’t fit the normal mold for a reporter. She was short, rather thick, wore her obviously dyed hair a non-standard color and length. She had glasses, not much in the way of makeup.
Nothing about her screamed reporter. Yet she claimed she was the best her boss had? He idly wondered about the truth behind that statement. Either her boss had no help, or she was lying to him to make herself seem more important. Why would she do that though?
Because she wants to impress you.
The thought startled him, but he considered it thoroughly. Why would she want to impress him? Was it a short person thing? Or maybe a human thing, wanting to ensure the big bad bear knew she wasn’t some useless thing to ignore.
Or maybe she likes you.
The thought hit him like a lightning bolt and he had to swallow heavily to avoid choking on a bite of his sandwich. Stephanie didn’t like him. That just wasn’t a thing. She was perhaps acting like it, in hopes he might accidentally spill some juicy bits she could use for her story. Yes, that was definitely it. She didn’t stare at him with those eyes of the deepest blue of the ocean because she cared for him.
Did she?
He clamped down on the thoughts leaking out from the deranged corners of his brain, and focused instead on the here and now. After careful consideration, he decided not to ask her why she’d become a reporter. He didn’t want to hurt her, or bring up any of her walls. They were being open and candid right then, and he wanted to keep it that way.
“I think the answer to your question of how humans are supposed to relate if you don’t know anything, is an interesting one. I can’t answer from your perspective, but from ours, it’s really quite simple.”
“It is?” Stephanie asked cautiously.
“Yes. The reason is, we just don’t care what you think.”
“Oh.”
He smiled to let her know he wasn’t trying to be rude. “We’ve always stuck to ourselves, and it has generally worked out well for us. Why would we have any interest in changing that?”
“Anything that becomes happy with where it is stagnates and then eventually dies,” she replied. “Including a culture. Besides, can you say it’s really worked out?” she asked, a pointed reference to the ongoing troubles with Fenris.
“Perhaps. But we have hardly stagnated and stayed where we were, now have we? Why, two hundred years ago, before the formation of our territories, we were constantly at each other’s throats. Roving bands of shifters, living a nomadic lifestyle as they traveled around the edges of civilization. We fought. We fought so much. Almost always amongst ourselves of course, unless provoked.”
Stephanie opened her mouth, but he held up a finger to indicate he wasn’t done.
“And in response to your other point, look at it this way. We had two hundred years of peace before the current calamity. Two hundred years of unprecedented growth of our species as a whole, where we weren’t killing each other off and keeping our numbers low. No, we’ve grown more than I think anyone believed we might ever do. Yes, things with Fenris haven’t worked out. But it is nothing compared to all that has been achieved in the past two centuries.”
He sat back, shutting his mouth as he started to get worked up about how well things had been going for his kind lately, not wanting to sound like he was bragging. After all, compared to the advances of the human race and their technology, all he had to be proud of was not fighting and lots of fucking, if one boiled it down to the essentials.
Nothing like putting a man on the moon, curing diseases, and things like computers.
“You speak of peace,” she said. “But then earlier you said how death is normal. Aren’t the two mutually exclusive?”
“Is there a difference between the men you sentence to death in your prisons, and the ones who
die wearing the uniform of your military?” he asked calmly.
“Of course!” she said quickly.
Too quickly.
“Oh. I see,” she said.
“Exactly. We don’t kill indiscriminately. But we put up with much less, and we have a more rigid code of honor, among other things. Misbehaving parts of the whole are excised out, and dealt with. Therefore we function better as a whole. It’s brutal, but that is our way of life. Don’t forget, Stephanie Holmes, we aren’t fully human. We are half animal too.”
“I’m not sure I could ever forget that now,” she said softly, not shying away from his eye contact.
“Relax,” he said with a smile. “We’re not bloodthirsty killers.”
“No? What about the blood I saw on your shirt last night?”
He shrugged. “We are at war, Miss Holmes.” His tone was firm, letting her know to stop bringing that up.
She cocked her head slightly sideways as if she knew that his answer wasn’t the complete truth. That the blood had come from elsewhere as well. From his actions, when he couldn’t contain his desire to kill.
“It’s okay to talk about it,” she said softly, and her hand slid halfway across the table toward him. “To share weaknesses, unhappy thoughts…a desire to kill. If you don’t tell people, then it can bottle up. Explode.” She gave him a sad look. “Bad things can happen. That’s just part of being human, and as much as you’re part animal, you’re part human too.”
She looked at him, waiting for him to respond.
Chapter Nine
Stephanie
“Thank you for accompanying me to lunch, Miss Holmes,” Gabriel said stiffly, his voice taut with anger. Rising to his feet, he gave her a jerky nod and pulled some cash from his pocket and tossed enough on the table to cover their meals. Then, without another word to her, he stormed out of the building.