Tanner bent his head down, not waiting for a response. His lips sought hers, and the answering kiss was sweet and salty all at the same time. Heather wound her hands into his hair, flooded with lust and a warm, tranquil contentment. She was home.
Epilogue
Chloe admired the gentle waves that the hairdresser was creating in Heather’s shiny chestnut hair. Her make-up had already been done, and she was chatting animatedly with the woman, occasionally glancing over at Chloe, a light, content smile resting on her lips.
Chloe looked down at her own dress, she was flower girl, maid of honor and chief bridesmaid, all in one. It was easily the happiest Chloe could ever remember being, including the day that Heather had returned. That night, she’d tucked Chloe into bed, the engagement ring glinting on her finger, and Chloe had known then that everything was going to be okay.
She made her way over to the window, watching as the band set up in the back yard. The ranch and its substantial grounds had been completely transformed, wisteria weaving its way around every bench, table and through the small pine pagoda where the ceremony would take place. Bouquets of Peonies, Calla Lily, Sweet Pea and Hydrangeas covered the table tops, and toppled out of the seat backs. Fairy lights, Chloe’s idea, were tacked everywhere, so come evening the place would look like something out of a magical kingdom, with Heather as it’s beautiful queen.
She searched for her father. He was talking to his brother, Uncle Wyatt, and looked incredibly handsome in his three-piece suit. She felt a rush of pride as she watched him. Not long after he and Heather had gotten engaged, they had told Chloe about his bear. She smiled to herself; she knew she’d seen a grizzly on the outskirts of the surrounding forest. She’d been sworn to secrecy, but that didn’t matter – she thought it was awesome, and it was enough just for her family to know. She was sad she’d never be a bear, but then, neither would Heather, so that was okay.
The guests were milling about, admiring the flowers, and she spied Wesley over by the stage, helping set up the sound system for Wyatt’s band to play later. Kellie Lane was hovering by, but Wesley was completely ignoring her. Chloe hoped he noticed her tonight; her dress was a lapis blue to match the flowers she’d be carrying, both she and Heather had roughly designed it together, before sending it off to New York to be made.
“Are you ready?” Heather had risen from the chair, her hair finished and tumbling down her shoulders perfectly. Chloe nodded, and took her arm. Together they made their way down the stairs.
Josiah was waiting for them in the kitchen; he was going to be giving Heather away today.
“Everyone’s ready for you. Chloe, you go in front.” He commanded. Josiah took Heather’s elbow and she smiled at him, nervously.
“Don’t be nervous. It’s going to be perfect.” He reassured her.
Chloe took one look at the pair behind her and made her way to the door. She signaled to Wyatt, and his band began the opening chords of the wedding march. Everyone turned to look. Practically the entire town of Jackson Hole had wanted to be here today, and it made Chloe extra proud at how her parents were so loved by everyone. Heather had opened a small patisserie on the town’s main road, the locals raved about it and already tourists were venturing from nearby cities to taste Heather’s divine creations.
She could see her best friend, Lucille, in one of the back rows. Lucille was practically green with envy as she surveyed her friend’s dress. That just made Chloe all the happier, and her smile just that bit wider as she made her way down the makeshift isle, walking on a soft bed of rose petals.
She looked up to see her father’s smiling face, grinning at her. Chloe watched as the grin faded, and was replaced with a look she couldn’t quite ascertain as he gazed past her at his soon-to-be wife. Chloe quickly checked over her shoulder to see if Heather was okay, but whatever was in Tanner’s look made Heather blush bright red and smile, averting her gaze to the floor. Chloe shrugged and continued her slow march to the front.
Chloe stood to the side of the ceremony, gently wiping away tears that she repeatedly wished wouldn’t fall; but it couldn’t be helped. Watching her mother and father together, she gave a small smile of triumph. Her plan had worked, against all the odds. Chloe closed her eyes and sent up a small prayer of thanks to the God of bear shifters, amazing moms who could love, cook, and hug properly, and the families that got their happily ever afters.
THE END
THE HUNTER
By Cara McAndrews
STORY DESCRIPTON
For seventy years the road through the mountains from the town of Bruton to the neighboring town of Pentworth has been untraversable.
Old Rick Backus perched out front of the pub every night entertaining the children with stories from long ago while their fathers sat inside getting a quick drink.
“Avoid the mountains, children,” Rick warned. “Avoid them as if they were a gateway to hell! Don’t bet one another, bully one another, or dare one another into goin’. The wolves are still there. They haven’ gone anywhere. The howls you hear at night, snug in your beds, are just as dangerous as they were seventy years ago. They’re hungry for blood, an’ always will be.”
******************************
In the little town of Bruton, Amber had been the town’s ‘ugly girl’ and Dunstan, its lost boy, of course they found each other and formed an unbreakable bond.
As years went by, Dunstan remained an outsider. He was easily the tallest, most muscular person in Bruton. The men both feared and respected him. He had all of the girls’ rapt attention whenever he walked down the streets. He was many of their first crushes, although, just like the boys, they were too afraid to speak to him.
Amber strove to keep it that way. If anyone was going to be his girl, it was going to be her. Like Dunstan, she, too, blossomed. She wasn’t the town’s ugly girl, Fatty Amby, any longer. With a beautiful face and a curvy, voluptuous body, the boys could hardly contain themselves around her. This past week they had been asking her out to the coming Spring Festival left and right, but the one boy she wanted to go with, the one boy whom she had been friends with all her life, was nowhere to be found. Did he just not like the Spring Festival?
The incident last winter had changed Dunstan. The night he staggered back into town beaten and bloodied, he said a man attacked him in the woods. A crazy man that demanded all of his possessions. Was that the truth? Perhaps there was more to the story than what he told them?
CHAPTER 1
Life was strange.
There was no getting around it.
Brandon Fay last week died of some sort of poison to his blood. Scratched himself on a hanging nail running through the mayor’s yard playing tag and seek. Now he was dead. Amber didn’t know such a thing was possible, but there you have it.
He had been so vibrant and virile. Now he was gone.
But take Stephen McKim’s grandmother, Old Abbie. Ninety something years old, but still walking down the cobbled streets telling the menfolk how to properly patch their straw roofs and the womenfolk how to get their hens laying again in the cold winter months.
Amber’s mother said there were some people the gods wanted, and some people they didn’t and that was why Old Abbie was still walking around.
Amber thought this an unnecessary attack on Abbie who had never caused anyone harm. Her mother just didn’t like that she always knew a better way of doing something. And that, even at her inconceivable old age, she had a sharper mind than all the townsfolk put together.
So some people died young, and some people died old? That was that?
But that wasn’t the extent of the weirdness in the world. Oh no, there was a whole lot more strangeness in the world than that.
Take for instance boys. Amber grew up thinking they liked small blond girls. After all, every one of the fairy tales Rick Backus told just outside her father’s pub beneath the flickering torchlight always dealt with a young prince finding and rescuing a petite girl with blond hair and taking
her for his wife.
Amber didn’t have blonde hair, and she sure wasn’t petite, but that didn’t seem to bother any of the boys.
Large and curvy, with mousy brown hair, Amber practically had to fight them off with a stick. This past week they had been asking her out to the coming Spring Festival left and right.
The one boy she wanted to go with, the one boy whom she had been friends with all her life, was nowhere to be found. They had an unspoken relationship, or so she thought. Assumed. Maybe she just assumed he would want to be the one to escort her this year. When he was in town, she didn’t see him talking to any of the other girls. Did he just not like the Spring Festival?
It was tradition for the boy to ask the girl, and then the boy needed to sign his name and attach his date’s hairpin on a rope threaded through the board outside of Town Hall. Of course Dunstan knew that, he wasn’t a nitwit.
Perhaps his distance had something to do with what happened to him. He got wounded in the woods this last winter while hunting and since that time he had been acting strange. Disappearing for days, sometimes even weeks at a time.
“Where’s that Conner boy?” Dylan Hobbs, the town blacksmith asked her as she came out Mr. Hayden’s bakery.
Amber shrugged. She didn’t know.
“I might have to drop him. Other boys more dedicated to learn have been asking. You see him let him know. It would be a shame. He showed a lot of potential.”
There were a lot of things Dunstan Conner was good at, which was part of the problem— he got bored quickly. But he would have to deal with that himself soon enough.
The other thing that struck Amber as odd were the amount of wolves they could hear coming out of Bowland woods these days. They had gone from hearing one, maybe two howls every fortnight, to hearing them every night. A whole chorus of them.
The mayor was offering three gold pieces for every hide brought back to him, which got the local boys all riled up. Three gold pieces could feed a family for a month, buy a new horse from Ian Chapman, or sail to the capital and spend a week there eating and drinking to merriment and beyond.
Stranger still was that no man had returned with any wolf hides yet.
The young boy who lived two houses down, Colin, had tried to pass off the hide of a large male fox as a wolf. The mayor simply laughed and sent him on, but Amber heard his father, Mr. Dennel, give him quite the beating that night. It was pitiful, too. The young boy was only trying to make his family happy. But Mr. Dennel couldn’t have his son growing up a liar and seeming a crook to the town. Theirs was a small community. Somewhere else and the incident would be forgotten after a few days, but here, in Bruton, the story would follow him around until he did something honestly noteworthy or something even more stupid.
“Amber, would you like to go to the Spring Festival with me?” Martin Grey asked her as she neared her family’s quaint, stone house off the main road. Startled, she shook her head inwardly at the onslaught. It was cold and she was ready to warm herself by the fire. She was always accosted by someone these days. Especially since Dunstan was gone so much and her hairpin wasn’t on the signup board.
“I’m sorry, but Dunstan and I—”
“If Dunstan wanted to go with ya, don’t you think he would have asked you by now? Don’t you think he’d be here to sign that you’re going together?”
Amber ignored him and asked, “Have you seen him?”
Martin shook his head. “Jessica says she saw him trekking up the road into the Bowland Mountains a few days ago. Right stupid if you ask me. Spring Festival may be coming in a week, but those clouds that have been gathering are snow clouds.”
Amber looked up. She wasn’t the greatest at reading the weather. Not as good as Martin anyway, whom the mayor even relied on.
“Is it going to be bad?” Amber asked, frowning.
“Nah, the worst of the winter is behind us. Probably just a few inches. Are you sure you won’t reconsider going with me? If you and Dunstan are an item, I’ll back off, but I think the woods have gotten to him. He’s gotten wild, going back and forth into those hills.”
“We’re not official,” Amber said. “But I think we soon will be.”
“Well, if you were my girl, we would have been official as soon as I came of age. Dunstan’s been of age for several months now. I don’t know what he’s waiting for. Not all of us are going to live as long as Old Abbie.”
Amber looked to the ground and silently agreed with him. She had thought the same thing.
Often.
Amber thanked him for his interest and went inside. She always tried to be polite to the boys when they fought their nerves to talk to her, but Martin stormed off angrily, cursing under his breath.
Inside, the fire needed some fresh logs. Only glowing embers remained after her morning errands. Her parents must already be at the pub getting ready for the night, else it would be tended to. But winter was their busiest season and they had to prepare for the evening early in the day. It was the town hangout these days.
Amber should go and help them get ready, but doing so meant she would be there for the rest of the day. She needed a little alone time now and then, and thankfully her parents understood that.
They recently hired Julia Mathers to help out in the kitchen, which was a relief. It meant she didn’t have to work in the sweltering heat anymore and drink a gallon of water every night just so she didn’t pass. The con was that she now helped get the men their beer.
They were fine at the beginning of the night. Pleasant even. But after an hour or two of drinking they began to pinch her when her parents weren’t looking and tried to look down her shirt when she bent over. Her father had punched and thrown out many men, but he couldn’t kick them out forever. The town wasn’t that big, and they rarely tried to do so again after they’d been caught. And they never even tried at all when Dunstan was there.
But that was rare these days.
She placed a few well cut oaks onto the coals, and blew on the embers. Tiny, crackling flames lit up and started licking the bark. She stuffed some more kindling in between the logs, and soon the fire was roaring again.
Tap, tap, tap.
A light rapping. Not Dunstan, who enjoyed banging on the door as loud as he could to wake her up in the mornings.
She looked out the window. It was Jessica, Martin Grey’s sister.
She opened up the door and said, “Yes, I told him no. I’m sorry.”
“Told who no?” Jessica asked, shivering.
Amber stepped aside and invited her in. “Your brother. He asked me to the festival just a few moments ago.”
“Oh,” Jessica said. “I don’t care about that. He needs to move on. There are more girls in this town than you.”
Amber smiled and sat down before the fire. She offered Jessica a piece of bread with some cheddar cheese, which Jessica quickly began eating without saying thank you.
Amber said, “So what’s—”
“I saw Dunstan this morning,” Jessica said, mouth full. Proper etiquette gone between them.
Amber’s eyes lit up. “Where? Why didn’t he come to see me?”
“Not in town. I was letting the chickens out, and I saw him, for a brief moment, running.”
“Running? What was he running from?”
“No idea,” Jessica said. “He was as naked as the day he was born, too. He seemed like he was chasing something. I’ve never seen anyone move so fast.”
Jessica’s family’s land was not technically in the town of Bruton. They owned a farm just past Erith Stream that marked the end of the town. Facing west, their land reached into the mountains where the men folk went to hunt.
“Was he chasing something? Hunting?” Amber asked. “He really likes to hunt these days.”
“Maybe,” Jessica said. “But you know how cold it is? I’m wearing all of my winter accoutrements, plus my mother’s cloak. How does a man survive in this cold without any clothes?”
“Maybe that’s why
he was running? To keep warm?”
“He should have been running to town then. We would have laughed at whatever reason he gave us, but we would have gladly clothed him.”
Amber agreed.
“So he was running into the woods?” Amber asked.
“Yep,” Jessica said, mouth still full of food. “He was fast, too.”
The idea of Dunstan running naked caused Amber’s heart to flutter. She had seen naked men before, but she had only ever seen Dunstan with his shirt off. He was quite the sight. He put every other man in town to shame.
But she was more worried about him than anything. The incident last winter had changed him. He was always a little wild, but never reckless. Being naked outside on a morning like this was pure recklessness.
The night he staggered back into town, he said a man attacked him in the woods. A crazy man that demanded all of his possessions. Was that the truth? Perhaps there was more to the story than what he told them.
Rick Backus who always drank and sat outside no matter the temperature, was the first to see him. He drunkenly shouted for help, thinking a demon from one of his stories was staggering towards him. Everyone but Amber went outside— she had been dealing with Rick’s drunken rants all her life. But her father went outside, too. He must have heard something in Rick’s voice he didn’t often hear.
When her father screamed for someone to fetch Mrs. Sadler, the town healer, Amber went outside.
Of course she gasped when she saw that it was Dunstan. He was collapsed on the ground, and his entire right side, from the shoulder down, was soaked in blood.
She didn’t wait for Mrs. Sadler, despite everyone’s protests. She knelt down and peeled his shirt away. He had deep, brutal gashes along his upper right arm. Pointy shaped. Almost triangular.
He was bleeding a lot, but that didn’t explain the amount of blood underneath his armpit. She began to inspect his side when Mrs. Sadler came running to them along with a couple of strong men. They carried him instantly back to her house where she had a room for dealing with traumatic injuries.
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