by Vivian Arend
Words with her big knife. Still, she couldn’t shake the instinctive urge to trust him.
Twenty minutes later they had broken free of the water and he led her up a heavily overgrown goat path toward the top of the ridge. She no longer had the energy to do anything but put one foot in front of another.
That pizza Chase had promised her was getting farther and farther away.
When she finally hit the top of the rise, she found the wolf had curled up in the lee of a tree on the side of the ridge that faced the cabin. They were high enough to have a good view of the surrounding area, but unless someone knew exactly where to look, she and the wolf would be nearly invisible.
She slipped off her backpack and joined him, wiggling until she’d found a comfortable spot against the dirt of the hillside. “Well, you’re obviously not trying to take me away somewhere to hurt me. Thank you.”
He circled a couple times before lying down nearly in her lap. He rested his chin on her knee and stared up at her with something close to puppy love in his eyes.
“Where were you when I was a little kid? I could have totally used a wolf to accept me back then.”
He opened his mouth and grinned before yawning and getting cozy.
Shelley tucked her shirt around her and relaxed. So. Hiding in plain sight. She supposed from here she’d be able to see if there was a huge panic over her departure. If needed, she could stand up and shout, even take off her top and flap it to get attention until everyone down at the cabin knew where she was.
It salved her guilty conscience. Maybe crawling out that window hadn’t been logical, but shifters were more about instinct than logic.
The heat of the sun washed over her and lulled her off into nearly sleeping.
Something crashed and Shelley jerked upright. There was a second staccato bang. Branches to her left smashed together in the gust of wind that played over the hillside. A quick glance at her watch showed she’d only slept a few minutes. The wolf was on his feet, growling as he stared down the hill toward the cabin. Shelley yawned and blinked the sleep from her eyes, attempting to focus.
But when she did, the view wasn’t at all what she expected. On the lawn outside Chase’s cabin, men and animals milled everywhere, all facing toward a line of rapidly approaching bears.
Chapter Twenty
From a distance there was barely any sound to accompany the fighting. It was as if she was witnessing everything on a teeny tiny screen, a newscast on her cell-phone. Only when a body was left behind on the lawn could she make out additional details. A bear went down, curled into a ball and was abandoned as his core group surged forward.
A wolf flew through the air, caught in the backswing of a massive paw.
Her young kidnapper wolf slipped under her hand and nudged her.
“I’m not leaving,” Shelley insisted. “I’m safe enough watching from here. I have to see what’s happening. Why are they doing this, I wonder?”
She double-checked her blade was in place. Just in case she needed it, although, please, no. She would fight if she had to, but a battlefield of shifters seemed a terrible place for a human woman. It had been bad enough killing the puma, even in self-defense.
Down to one side the bears were forcing their way forward. Chase’s huge cougar body was easy enough for her to spot, or maybe it was because she was sure that had to be him. The biggest body headed into the worst of the trouble, slamming himself against a group of shifters and knocking them over like bowling pins.
A small bear rolled to his feet, and this one, instead of returning to the fight, hightailed it back toward the northern bush.
Shelley frowned in confusion. Now that she’d noticed one, there were clearly more of these runaways. One or two at a time, bears broke away and disappeared until there was only a small contingent still fighting.
She’d had enough. From what she could see, the good guys outnumbered the baddies two to one.
“Come on, wolf boy, escort me down.”
He stepped in front of her, blocking her path.
Instinctively she growled at him, and he snapped back in obedience faster than she expected.
Hmm, that little sensation of power was a sweet thing for a lowest of the low to experience. “You are totally going to give me an ego if you keep doing that. I mean it. I think we need to head back. Sniff for me. Make sure there are no bears coming at us from the side, okay?”
The wolf waited for her to grab her pack then led her on a direct route down the hillside toward the cabin. They popped in and out of the trees, allowing her to check again and again how things were proceeding on the lawn.
If things turned ugly she wasn’t sure if she’d run forward faster. It was damn tempting. She was concerned about Chase. She’d taken off because her wolf had insisted on it, but the entire time she’d wondered and worried what his reaction had been to her disappearance.
She was caught in the middle, and it was time to throw caution away and make sure he was okay.
Wolf boy stopped at the base of the hill and led her off the main trail. Shelley sighed as the branches closed in around them, scratching and tugging at her long sleeves. “I hope you know what you’re doing,” she complained.
He obviously did. Not even five minutes later they broke out at the edge of the lake, not far from where she’d walked with Frank. Which was only…two nights ago? Shelley shook her head in wonder.
There were a lot of shifters between her and the cabin, and she hesitated. Being brave was one thing. Being stupid was another. She watched and analyzed until she was confident what she saw were mainly Chase’s men.
Now her role as a vet could be used. Unfortunately.
The wolf gave a low bark before slinking into the clearing. Shelley followed cautiously, but firm in her steps. Someone waved from the right, and she headed his direction.
Mark glared down, the hand slapped over his forehead partially covering a bloody gash. “Where the hell did you go?”
“Never mind that now. Where’s Chase?”
Mark stared at her.
Shit. “Mark, you hear me? Where’s Chase? I saw the fight from the hill. Where is he? And who the heck are those guys?”
She pointed toward the dozen bears all sitting on the lawn, surrounded by shifters. That’s when she noticed one of the men stood over them with a rifle at the ready.
“We’ll figure out who they are. Chase is in the cabin. Frank carried him in.”
Carried? “He’s hurt?”
“He was already hurt, lady.”
She pushed past him and headed at a dead run for the front door. Her wolf guide sped past her, darting into the house long before she could reach it. All along the route the shifters in her path separated and stood aside, clearing space for her.
Chase. Dammit, she’d left and he’d gotten himself hurt again. She was going to kick his ass.
She was nearly through the front doors when her wolf boy blocked her again. Words exploded from her. “Move it, or I’ll turn you into a eunuch.”
He tilted his head to the side, the most puzzled expression on his wolfish face.
Delton’s slow drawl carried over her shoulder. “Jones, the lady means she’ll cut off your balls. It’s okay, let her in.”
So that was the boy’s name. She gave Jones a dirty look as she pushed past him, frantically searching the cabin for a sign of Chase.
Frank hadn’t carried him to the bedroom, and she understood why as soon as she got close enough. “Oh, Chase. What have you gone and done this time?”
The cougar on the floor of the kitchen was bleeding profusely from deep cuts. Bite marks and torn skin made a mess of his beautiful body. He opened his mouth to snarl softly.
She understood enough cat body language to answer that one.
“No, I won’t go away. Now let me check you.”
The bear tried to get in her way again. “You don’t want to—”
It was certain stupidity, but she did it anyway. She slammed a
hand against the man’s huge chest and shoved him. “Shut up, Frank. I know what I want and don’t want.”
Of course, for all her shoving, he didn’t move an inch, but at least he didn’t try to block her when she slipped around to Chase’s side.
She kept her touch light as she examined as much of his body as she could reach with him in an awkward position against the wall. He snorted and sniffed when she hit delicate sections, but there didn’t seem to be enough damage for him to be lying there as if he were more seriously injured.
He had to be exhausted, but even that didn’t explain his immobility.
She patted his flank gently. “Come on. It’ll be easier to stitch you up if you shift to your human form.”
Chase closed his eyes and ignored her.
Ignored her, or was going into shock? Damn. She scrambled to get in position to check his vitals, but Frank held her back with his big pawlike hand.
“Shelley?”
She looked up to find the bear shifter staring at her sadly.
He shook his head. “He’s not going to change.”
Frank pointed, and she moved in closer, following his lead. Chase had been hiding his back against the wall. He’d moved just enough she could finally see.
There was a hole where there shouldn’t be one. Not only was he injured, either a bite or a huge claw wound, but the area around it had changed back to human, twisting his cat body to the side with the mismatch in size between his forms.
The puma in the bush, with its twisted mutated corpse, instantly flashed to mind, and she shuddered.
Panic hovered, but she fought off the fear. That horrifying conclusion wasn’t inevitable. There had to be a way to stop it from happening, stop the disease from continuing. The shifter in front of her was impressively strong.
The fact he had captured her heart in their short time together only made it that much more important.
“Chase? Can you shift? Come on. Shift and give me a chance to fix you up. There’s not that much damage, and I’ve got the samples. There’s a chopper coming, and you can fly out with me and we’ll find a way.”
Chase opened his eyes and stared unblinking for a moment then rolled, blocking the wound completely from her sight. Ignoring her request, all but ignoring her. His eyes were glassy, and he had to be in pain, but right then she wanted him to keep on fighting. To not give in.
And the thought of him dying before they’d figured what the future could hold? Sucked so hard she couldn’t stand it.
She scrambled for the words to encourage him. To poke him into doing everything he could.
“No. Damn it, Chase, do not give up. You have a whole field of men you need to take care of, and you are not allowed to just close your eyes and die. Do you hear me?”
She was dragged to her feet as she continued to rail at Chase.
Frank turned her toward him and held her tight, stopping her from facing Chase. Stopping her from seeing his still body. “Let him decide. It’s only right.”
She didn’t care if it was the right thing because she wanted the selfish thing. “I don’t want him to die.”
The big bear patted her back kindly, but he wasn’t Chase.
Shelley knew what she had to do. If Chase was going to die, she wasn’t going to let him die alone. She squeezed Frank fiercely then slipped from his grasp to curl up at Chase’s side on the hard wood planks of the kitchen floor.
“Looks as if you’re stuck with me for a bit, Long John Silver. So why don’t you make yourself comfortable, and I’ll be here if you need anything, okay?” Shelley cupped his furry face and stroked his muzzle. She wrapped an arm around him carefully, hugging as much of his cougar body as she could.
He might have been rejected at times during his life, but damn if she’d let him feel anything but acceptance as he died.
There were layers to the pain, and layers to the confusion. Not like a multi-tiered cake where everything was visible all at once, but like in the winter, when pulling back the thin sheet of ice covering the pond would reveal what lingered beneath.
Chase hurt. That was his single, clear focal point at first. Then she came into the room, and at least that gave him something nicer to concentrate on than hurting. The cat and the human fought for a moment over which one of them would actually get to see her, but that was one of the layer things that seemed to be broken.
He really wanted to talk to her, which meant shifting to human. But the cat liked it when she got all riled up and started yelling. Her anger was kind of cute and invigorating, and if it didn’t feel as if there were a three-foot dagger stuck in his side, Chase would have gotten up and kissed her, in either of his forms.
But that dagger was there, and it seemed to have him rather effectively pinned to the floor. He tried twisting, but that only made the pain increase, and now his heart felt strange as well.
She was a pretty woman. Beautiful, really, not just the outside bit. The wolf inside that refused to come out appealed to him, as did her human body. Yet those were surface things, they weren’t who she really was. They weren’t her strength of will or her caring heart.
Even his cat thought she was all right.
When Frank hugged her, the cat almost snarled his disapproval. Almost, until the stab of agony through his torso effectively stopped any complaining.
Chase closed his eyes. Dying was a lot more work than he thought it would be.
A rush of her scent washed over him, a hot body snuggled up tight, and he managed to crack open his eyes to enjoy the sensation of her hand on his face. He really wanted to kiss her goodbye, and since kissing was a human gig, he gathered his energy to attempt the shift.
And the strangest thing happened.
His wolf, who had been gone on some kind of weird sabbatical for the last three weeks, showed up. It hurt like the blazes for a moment, as if the creature were digging its way out of his skin instead of shifting. The skin-crawling sensation increased until finally his wolf was right there, ready to go. When the actual moment of the change came, it was the easiest shift he’d done in ages and glory hallelujah…
It felt good.
Body altering, limbs reforming, his vision changing from feline to lupine. Size adjustment, fur, teeth, muscles.
Chase didn’t usually shift from one animal to the other, normally utilizing his human in-between, so it was an unusual sensation in the first place, but the overall mind-numbing difference to the entire process hit with incredible relief.
When he shifted, he left behind the pain.
He rose to his feet and shook out his fur, and was immediately trapped as a pair of arms wrapped around his neck so tight he could barely breathe.
“Chase, oh Lord, you’re alive.”
“Well, damn.” Frank peered down at him. The big bear tilted his head to the side. “How the hell you do that?”
Shelley ran her fingers through his fur, laughing as she examined him. “Chase, I don’t believe it. You have barely any damage to your wolf.”
That was good. Very good. Except for the ringing in his ears that made his vision blur. His hind legs slipped out from under him, and he sat heavily on the floor.
“Chase?”
Shelley tried to catch him, but even his wolf was too heavy for her, and when his front legs gave out he landed in a heap on the ground.
“Chase. Stop. What’s wrong? Damn, don’t you go and do something stupid like die.”
He chuckled, the sound escaping in a series of tiny barks. He’d get right on that. The not-dying part.
Shelley was far too fascinating to leave right now.
She shouted at him again, but the ringing had gotten worse, and if he didn’t want to throw up or do something equally undignified, he had to lie still for a moment.
Wolves didn’t like doing undignified things.
As he lay there, working on not dying, he suddenly remembered a vital fact.
She’d run away from him. Asking her the details was impossible in his wolf, so he
made the effort to attempt another shift, not really expecting that it would work. Because everything else was broken.
Imagine his shock when his attempt succeeded.
Once again human, he groaned in pain. Damn, the hurting part wasn’t supposed to return as well. What a weird day.
Shelley was at his side and examining him in seconds. “How did you…? Chase, you’re so much better than you were only minutes ago. How did you do that?”
“I have no idea.” The words rasped over a dry and scratchy throat. “I’ve just been lying here, innocently taking a nap, woman.”
She tugged on his shoulder. “You were napping. Good timing. Way to scare me to death.”
Chase struggled upright, sitting on the cold floor. “Way to scare me. Where the hell did you go, and where is Jones? I want to rip his ears off.”
Shelley ran her fingers over his back, skimming the place where the original injury had been. He glanced over his shoulder to see the claw marks were still there, plus a new slash, ugly and wet and deep, but the pain was a lot more manageable.
“Poor Jones,” she said. “I just threatened to rip off his balls.”
“That’s a good idea as well. Now where were you?”
She flushed. “He took me up the hill and we watched the fight. You were crazy.”
“I thought you were gone.”
“So that made you act crazy?”
Damn. He wasn’t about to confess that the idea of her leaving had made him reckless.
She coughed lightly then the fussing began in earnest. She wiped him down. Stitched and closed his wounds.
“You should be checking the others,” Chase complained.
Frank grunted. “We got a few wolves fixing them up. You’re the only one stupid enough to get himself hurt this bad.”
“That’s what I said,” Shelley muttered.
“I heard that.” He’d closed his eyes because while the pain was much more manageable, it was still difficult to stay vertical as she wrapped a bandage around his chest.
“Good, means you’re only stupid, not gone deaf. What were you thinking wading into a huge group of bears like that?”