Briar on Bruins' Peak (Bruins' Peak Bears Book 7)

by Erin D. Andrews

  “Would be the luckiest man alive–”

  “Don’t you scoff. You know what you’re saying?”

  He quickly shut his mouth and focused on his pulley he was concocting. We had to lift Susy off the floor directly and then carry her down the mountain somehow. I wanted to ask how we would take her to the compound, but I pressed my lips together. What if the answer was that we couldn’t? Maybe it was just too risky. No one wanted to leave her behind, but no one knew of an alternative.

  All the other parts of Susy’s rescue were going well; the pulley was finished, and she was positioned in the bed of it, ready for her ride up. The girls and I had joined Carson up at the top of the stairs to get her off the floor, and Harper stayed on the lower level in case anything went wrong.

  “All right,” Harper said to Susy, “this pill is a very strong painkiller. I want you to take one now. You’re about to go on a very painful adventure.” Susy swallowed the little gel capsule, Harper gave a thumb’s up, and we counted together.

  “One…two…three…LIFT!”

  Slowly, in fits and starts, a shifter and three humans lifted a broken girl off the floor. Soon, we had her up and laid out on the vines of the main hallway. We lowered more sheets for Harper to climb up to the stairs, and then she joined us.

  “Okay,” she said, “let’s head for the garage. We’ve got a group, so we’ll need something big.”

  I had no idea what she meant, but the humans around me all brightened up.

  “You can drive?” Meagan was beaming. “I thought you were taken everywhere.”

  “I did,” Harper said with a big, smug smile. “That’s why I had to sneak out and teach myself. Follow me.”

  We made our way to the other side of the palace–much more slowly now that we had to carry Susy–and found the garage more or less unharmed as it was more sheltered than the rest of the palace. We walked in, and a few auto-lights turned on, revealing a huge collection of cars.

  I gasped loudly at the sight of all those unused, enormous vehicles just sitting in an empty room. I’d genuinely had no idea that the president was in possession of every car on Earth. Some were extremely old; others looked terrifying and powerful. Some were even extremely tiny, just big enough for one person.

  Harper walked up to a big, tough-looking car on giant wheels and patted the side. “This will get us down the mountain, no problem.” She pressed her thumb to the door, and it popped open. She pushed a button inside, and the whole car opened up.

  “Come on.” She smiled at all of us and down at Susy. “Let’s go see our friends at the compound.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Learning to Read

  Harper did not exaggerate about the car’s power. It crashed through all the overgrowth that nature threw at it and never even flinched. We flew over giant roots and fallen logs, which got big cries of pain from Susy, but overall, it was fine. At the Open Zone, we had to swing around the little settlement that had sprung up. The people there were more than a little surprised to see a massive vehicle speed by. We all waved to show that we were friendly, but I couldn’t be sure if they saw us.

  The compound was next. I was thrilled when I saw it; the fence had been dismantled by Mother Nature herself. The tree branches, vines, and flowers that had torn it to shreds looked emboldened by their move. Maybe the electricity that had flowed through the fence was inside these brave plants now. I hoped so; I didn’t want anyone to ever cut them down.

  We arrived and pulled up outside the boundary.

  “Everyone wait here,” I announced. “They know me. I’ll go first and explain what’s going on. I don’t want any riots.”

  They nodded and wished me luck. I slid out my door and found I already had a crowd of shifters standing around to see the car and who might come out.

  “Hey!” A little voice called out from the back of the crowd, and I heard anxious footsteps running toward me. “Emily! Emily! It’s me, Nate!” Nate’s feet pounded the soft, green earth, and I held my arms out for him to jump into me. He never slowed down; his little legs just pumped him straight at me, and he leapt through the last of the space between us and right into my sternum.

  “Uuf! Whoa, Nate! You got so big!”

  “Only when I’m a human,” he assured me. “I’m the same size when I’m a bat.” I gave him a serious nod, and then we both started laughing. I gave him a big hug, and just holding him close made me so happy I thought I would burst.

  “Where’s your brother?”

  Nate shrugged. “With my mom, I guess.”

  “Hey,” I whispered to him, “go find your brother. Later, we’ll all play a game together, okay?”

  “Nah,” he said, wiggling down to the ground, “we wanna read.” And then he ran off. I looked up again to see Tina standing and watching me.

  “Hey.”

  “Hi.”

  She gestured at the car with her chin. “You rob somebody?”

  I shook my head ‘no.’ “Not technically, no.”

  One of the shifters looking at the car tilted his head a little and then raised his eyebrows in shock. “Did you kidnap Bachmann? Is he in the car?”

  That got everyone excited and nervous, but I assured them it was nothing like that. “Listen, listen, I do have some friends in the car. Some humans.” This made everyone go stiff. The compound was shifter territory. We’d never welcomed humans there before. “I know, it’s a little weird. But please, one of the females has a broken leg and needs our help. Can anyone do a purring for her?”

  A few of the older females stepped up and nodded. I led them around to the back of the car, and they gently carried Susy out. I gave her a smile as they trudged past me with Susy suspended on a bed sheet between them.

  “You’re going to feel better very soon,” I assured her.

  As they went off, the rest of the crew tentatively got out of the car as well. I nodded at them. “These are members of a new alliance that was formed by shifters and humans. They want to come and live with us. I think we should let them in.”

  “Why would they wanna come here?” Black Feather shouted out. “How do we know they don’t want to kill us?”

  Meagan stepped forward to answer that. “The group we came from, the Alliance, they want to kill Harper. I think she should live. That she deserves to live, no matter what. The Alliance started as a peaceful organization, but now....”

  Harper crossed her arms and clenched her jaw. “They tried to get a lion to eat me.”

  Black Feather looked impressed by that. “Not a shifter lion.”

  “Yes. A shifter lion. Someone I trusted.”

  The crowd mumbled to themselves, but I could already see their minds were made up. Tina stepped forward and shook Tiffany’s hand. “Hi. I’m Tina. I’m a wolf.”

  “Hey. Tiffany.” They chatted a moment, and then Tina went over to Carson and Meagan, winning over the whole group. The others followed suit, and I stepped back to get out of the pathway of welcome.

  As I stood off to the side, I felt a tap on the shoulder. When I turned to look, I saw Grey standing there.

  “Hi.”

  “Hey. You all right?”

  He shook his head. “I know the Alliance. And I know Alex. He’s very charming, very convincing. If they want to kill Harper, we can’t have her here. It’s too dangerous.”

  I reared back. “So, what? You want to just hand her over?”

  He didn’t answer, and I nearly slapped him across the face. “Grey, she’s part shifter. We have to protect her. And besides,” I hissed, grabbing his arm, “she’s an asset. She can drive. She can read. She knows a lot of history. We could really learn a lot from her!”

  Grey looked at her and then at me. “She’s part shifter? And she can read text?”

  I nodded, which made him sigh loudly. “All right. We’ll protect her.”

  Together, we stood for a moment and took in the well-fed, comfortable community standing in a haze of green. I could already see some small tre
es pushing their way up from the ground, some different plants winding their way around the space in every direction. It was a whole new place, one I felt very happy to be in.

  “What’s going to happen to all of us?” I wondered out loud.

  “I don’t know,” Grey admitted. “No one’s in charge. The land is changing. The city is becoming the forest. I suppose anything is possible.”

  I watched as Meredith walked up with Ted and the boys to join the crowd. They saw me and waved as they made their way over. The sight of them made my heart jump a mile out of my chest.

  “I suppose it is,” I agreed as I reached out for my adopted family, all of them ready to welcome me back. “Anything at all.”

  Book 4: Shifter’s Rose

  Chapter One

  A New Home

  Harper Bachmann stepped out of her treehouse early as she always did. She adored this new house. It was elevated off the ground to keep her safe from predatory, pure animals that hunted at night, kept her close to the broad, green leaves at the top of the tree, and kept her in the path of cool breezes all day long. The floor went around the trunk of a tall, strong tree in a kind of octagonal shape, though a rough one. The walls didn’t come quite up to the roof, but that was how the birds could flit in and out, which she adored. This morning was no different. She could see little red and black birds tilting their heads at her, wondering if she would appreciate a visit.

  It was hard to believe that only a couple of years ago she had been part of a plan to capture a shifter and submit it to testing. She and her father had hatched the plan. Originally, he was supposed to befriend a shifter, earn his or her trust, and then kidnap that shifter to a house out in the middle of nowhere. It had worked, but too well. They ended up with an extra female shifter, a female boar named Emily. She had burst in just as the kidnapping was getting underway and threw everything out of whack. Desperate, her father and his henchmen decided to take both.

  When Harper had seen the two young, female shifters, she’d balked. For some reason, she had expected her father to go for a fellow man. It had never crossed her mind that he would use the wounded president routine to seduce a beautiful cobra like Blue. But seduce her, he did. Blue always insisted she’d never actually given the former leader her heart, but rather taken pity on him. However, the truth had been hard to get a grip on those days.

  Anyhow, the whole plan backfired. Harper had found herself surrounded by shifters out for her father’s blood. To her surprise, no one really saw her as a threat. Probably because they’d taken the time to actually get to know her during their captivity and she had done the same. So, when the big escape happened and they found the city very different than how they had left it, everyone had just found their own way. She’d been sure that the three of them would be close friends for eons, but instead, they were neighbors with a strange, shared memory that none of them ever discussed.

  The tree across from Harper’s was Emily’s home. Emily, the young woman who had saved her life, who had been held captive by Harper’s father only to set herself and others free, had chosen solitude for the present time. Harper gave her a silent hand raise, their own silent greeting. Emily returned it and then turned away to make her tea. Harper watched her silent neighbor for a while, hoping she was well.

  Emily had been taken in a few years ago by a family of bats that adopted her as a daughter and sister. She loved them dearly and wanted nothing more than a family, but as her bat brothers grew older and her bat parents became more and more reclusive, she found herself alone again. Poor Emily was the only remaining member of her family, and it showed. Her eyes held a loneliness that Harper had not come across in other shifters’ eyes.

  The other shifters were all thriving in their new environment. What had once been a crumbling, crowded city had been reclaimed by a fresh wave of aggressive green. Trees sprang up through old cement floors, cracking them with hardly a second thought. Tough vines burst through thick window panes, wrapped around table legs, and tripped anyone foolish enough to try and salvage the furniture. They’d all had to leave their structures as they became overgrown death traps. The trees, however, proved to be more than they could have asked for in those early days.

  After decades of food shortages, there was suddenly more than enough for everyone to eat. Money lost its value as new fruits, vegetables, and fat, purple bugs became readily available in any nearby tree. All a human or a shifter had to do was reach up and grab their next meal. Hardly anyone cooked anymore – no one wanted to start a fire, lest they burn down their own home. Harper had never imagined she would one day pluck a slow, overweight bug out of the air and pop it into her mouth, but the juicy, filling little things were just too good to pass up. Now she happily ate bugs.

  A sound under her took her attention away from her neighbor and the birds and down to the ground. Some group was tearing across the heavily covered forest floor, yelling and crying out to one another. She wondered if they were the last of the Alliance and shivered a bit at the thought, despite the heat that was already building all around her.

  The Alliance. They simply refused to go away. They had started as a peaceful, inclusive group, but it had slowly become a separatist group of people that only made the occasional appearance. They had a way of interacting and communicating that no one else was able to follow. They had odd objectives and weird ways of bonding.

  “We are the Alliance!” they would scream at each other, running and slamming chests together like warriors on the battlefield. Several of them had approached her about joining them in order to encourage others to give their lifestyle a try. After all, she was the descendant of the last president. If they wanted to make a real power play, she’d be their main target. That was why she spent so much time with Grey.

  Oh, Grey. Just his name made her heart swell in her chest and beat a little faster. They had been playmates as kids and had shared one secret kiss as teenagers, but now something as powerful as the trees and the sunlight were growing between them, something Harper couldn’t even name. Was this love? She suspected it was, though she had never thought of herself as someone capable of falling in love before. Did love make people tremble at the sight of the right pair of eyes? Was love both wonderful and terrifying? Was it the thing that made his voice so beautiful, his shoulders so broad, and his hair almost too lovely to touch? If it was, it was a force she wanted to be ready to grapple with and hoped that one day she would be able to do so.

  A knock at the base of her tree shook her out of her lovely thoughts of Grey and suddenly, the real man was there.

  Grey had grown into a muscled, confident, and handsome young man. The Shifter Revolution had liberated him from a life of service, and being out from under the mantle of power had helped him immensely. His father had been a presidential messenger for his entire life, and Grey had started down the same path. Once that path was gone, however, he was free to make himself into the man he actually wanted to be: a leader, a poet.

  Like so many shifters, Grey had thrown himself into reading. After a small device was discovered in an abandoned mansion that could scan and read any text, the shifters got together and created a reading school. They found all kinds of books and studied the markings that represented different words as they listened to the automated voice read them one by one. Harper had helped a little, but they barely needed her. She’d had no idea that enthusiasm and a thirst for words could be such a great teacher.

  She waved down to the shifter who held her heart in his hands and then lowered the lift. The lift was essentially a swing on a pulley, except that the rider stood instead of sitting, and it went up and down, not back and forth. Grey, himself, had built hers and then went on to make one for most of the families in the grove. His design caught on quickly, and now he was looking into connecting trees through some kind of hanging bridge. He wanted everyone to have a means of getting help, having company, and keeping up with all the news.

  “Hi.” His face appeared up over the edge of her
porch, and the sight of his lips moving turned Harper’s knees to water. “How did you sleep?”

  She smiled instead of answering as he swung his strong, bare legs over the railing and landed on his feet. He took a step closer to her.

  “Not talking to me today?”

  “I’m just looking at you.”

  “Why?” he asked, reaching for her waist as she walked backward away from him. He pursued. “Do I look funny today?”

  She nodded. “Very.”

  “That’s such a coincidence! I was just about to tell you how weird you look.”

  “You’re horrible.”

  “You’re worse.”

  Harper had nowhere left to go. Her backward walk had guided her into a corner that held her in one spot. Grey walked up to her, putting his hands on either side, and closed his eyes, tilting his forehead toward hers. “I never met a weirdo like you.”

  She touched the side of his face. Oh, his jaw. It was sculpted perfection. “Yeah, well…” she whispered, sure that she had some ending to that thought, but she couldn’t seem to find it. His lips were so close. It had been years since their last kiss. Now she could have another one. Maybe she could just kiss him forever. She closed her eyes and gently moved toward him.

  “Grey!”

  The cry startled them both, making them butt heads. Hurt and annoyed, Grey scowled over at Black Feather, who was yelling from a few trees away. “What?”

  “Jeez. Just saying hi, man. Oh, and we need you over here. Minor emergency.”

  Grey sighed and pulled Harper a little closer so that his breath fell onto her cheek. His skin was so accustomed to sunshine it felt as if it had trapped some inside. She closed her eyes and enjoyed the moment, knowing he would take off as quickly as he had arrived.

  “I better go check it out.”

  “Grey, I’m telling you, he’s freaked out by the two of us being together. He always does this.”

  Grey squeezed Harper just a little tighter, then stepped back but kept ahold of her arms. “I’ll talk to him. See what’s up. Can I come back for breakfast?”