by Josie Walker
“Just tell me where you are and I’ll come stay with you,” Grace suggested.
“I’m too far away. I’m in Alabama.”
“Where in Alabama?” her roommate asked.
“It doesn’t matter,” Michelle said, forcibly switching the subject. “Listen, I have to go. Please just promise me you’ll lie low and play it safe.”
Michelle hung up the phone and lay down on her side. The king sized mattress seemed too big for one person and her thoughts immediately shifted to Parker. “There’s no going back,” she whispered to her broken heart. The worst part was that she had no one to blame for her current predicament but herself. “I’m so pathetic,” she cried brokenly into the pillow. “Why did I have to ruin everything? I had a man who loved me... a good man… and I broke up with him in a letter.” Sleep was a long time coming. Before long her nose was puffy and her throat was raw from crying. She was so miserable that she hardly even noticed the poison ivy anymore.
***
Grace’s hands were shaking as she set down the phone. She turned to face the men in the corner, her voice quavering in fear.
“You heard her. She wouldn’t tell me where she was. So can you guys please just let me go now?” She flinched when one of the men moved like he was going to strike her and then the tiger laughed at her pathetic cringing.
“Call the number back,” ordered the group’s leader. One of the other men grabbed Grace’s phone and punched the little green dial icon. The phone began to ring instantly.
“Murphy’s Travel Lodge,” answered the bored male on the other end. “The perfect place to spend the night at the end of a long day on the road. Would you like to make a reservation?”
“Why yes I would. What’s your address there?”
“No…” Grace mouthed silently as she watched the man write down the exact address of the motel her friend was currently staying in. She had assumed at first that Michelle must be dead. But over a week had passed and the tiger shifters still hadn’t let her go or put her out of her misery. She’d begun to believe that somehow her roommate had managed to escape the city with her life intact. So why did she have to go and ruin everything by calling now?
As for herself she’d already made peace with the fact that they were going to kill her. She wasn’t even all that upset about it, because her life had never exactly been a bed of roses in the first place. But she just couldn’t stomach the thought of anything bad happening to Michelle. Her friend didn’t deserve to die. Michelle was the only person who had ever stuck by her, even though she was always screwing everything up. Her foster sister was the only family she had.
***
Michelle’s first thought when she heard the knocking was that Parker had somehow tracked her down and that he was willing to forgive her… and then reality set in. She was pretty sure that the only reason he would bother hunting her down would be to get his stuff back. She’d ruined any chance of a future relationship when she’d left him and she’d never forgive herself for ruining something so incredible.
She pressed her eye to the peep hole and was surprised to see a very bedraggled and strung out looking Grace on the other end. Her friend’s hands were shaking, her eyes were bloodshot, and it was obvious that she was experiencing some massive withdrawal symptoms. Michelle hurriedly undid the bolt and chain. It wasn’t until she’d already thrown the door wide open that she saw the man with the gun trained on Grace’s head and his two cronies waiting in the shadows.
“Well if it isn’t the bitch that got away,” snarled a man she recognized instantly.
He’d been there the night she’d first seen the tigers. He’d held up her dry cleaning claims receipt to the window as she’d fled on the bus. The man with the gun pushed Grace roughly into the room ahead of him and ordered Michelle to sit down.
“You have caused us a great deal of headache,” he hissed and for a moment she feared he’d shift into a tiger right then and there. But apparently the cat wanted to toy with its mouse a little longer before he killed it. “I just can’t wait to hear all about where you’ve been and who all you’ve been shooting off your big fat mouth to. Looks like whoever it was had money, because I saw your apartment and it certainly didn’t have nice things like this in it,” he accused fingering a pair of designer heels that Mia had bought her. “Tell me his name and I’ll kill you fast.”
“NOT GONNA HAPPEN!” she spat out loudly, making sure to enunciate every syllable. She didn’t care what they did to her, she was never going to tell them where the bear’s den was. She owed Parker at least that much for all the kindness he’d shown her.
One of the men had snuck up behind her without her noticing him. She didn’t even sense his presence until his hands were already wrapped around her throat, squeezing all the air out of her lungs with his iron grip.
She could hear Grace screaming in the background. She saw one of the men kick her roommate savagely to the ground, but it was as though she was experiencing everything from outside of her own body. As she began to lose consciousness she couldn’t help but wonder how she had made such a monumental mess out of her own life. Perhaps her death would bring with it a happy release; at least that’s how they always pictured it in the movies.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“I need a favor,” Parker said into his phone.
“You do realize it’s after midnight and your aunt is ready to kill you for disrupting her rem cycle,” his uncle Keen stated bluntly.
“She left me,” Parker said, his voice strained. “I need you to help me find her. Please,” he asked plaintively.
“Stay on the line. I’m heading down to my office to see if I can still hack my way around the Internet like I used to. If you tell your young impressionable cousins I did this I will deny everything.”
“She has his wallet if that helps,” Henry interjected loudly in the background.
“Oh, that definitely helps,” Keen said wryly.
It only took Keen Abrams twenty minutes to track her down because she’d used one of Parker’s credit cards. “It wouldn’t have taken much longer to track the truck,” his uncle bragged. “It’s funny how close she is to your territory,” he commented. “Does she know where you live?”
“It never came up in conversation,” Parker said tersely, forcing himself not to yell at the man who’d just bent over backwards to help him.
“Of course she could have just read his license… the one in his stolen WALLET,” Henry muttered.
“Thanks for everything. I owe you,” Parker said, ignoring Henry’s comment.
“Just promise me that you’ll take your second with you in case you run into anything unexpected. Oh, and your aunt is requesting that you mate the girl ASAP so that your mom will stop complaining to her about how she doesn’t have any grand-cubs yet.”
“That’s the plan,” Parker laughed before ending the call. He turned to face Henry and said, “Listen, you don’t have to come.”
“Good luck getting there without me,” Henry replied bluntly as he waved his car keys in Parker’s face. “Last I heard you don’t have any wheels.”
“Fine, but I’m driving,” he growled, reaching for the keys.
“Like hell you are. I just had the thing detailed. I will never understand how a man can get this worked up over a woman. It hardly seems worth it,” muttered the confirmed bachelor. When his Itan snarled at him and stomped outside irritably he added, “But I’m sure she’s lovely.”
To make a difficult situation even more aggravating, Parker had no idea where Henry had parked and he was forced to wait for his second to lead the way. Even with Henry ignoring every speed ordinance in the state he still had Parker growling at him to go faster. Soon enough they passed the “Thanks for Visiting Georgia” sign, and then they were on to the welcome to Alabama billboard.
“Don’t you dare ruin my upholstery,” Henry ord
ered when he noticed that Parker’s skin had begun to sprout fur. “We’re almost there. Just hold your SHIFT together for BEAR’S sake!”
But Parker couldn’t calm down. Hours of driving had done nothing but fuel his anxiety. He knew something was wrong even before they pulled into the parking lot. He sensed his mate was in danger even before he heard the screaming. He hurled open the door before the vehicle had even rolled to a complete stop. As if the tell tale sounds of domestic violence hadn’t been enough of a giveaway, his truck was parked in the space directly outside of the room. They were in the right spot alright.
Henry tried to pull back on his arm and to get him to “hold on a second,” but this was not a moment where cooler heads prevailed. His bear started running, picking up momentum as he went and then he slammed hard against the window, throwing up his paws in front of him to protect his face. Shattered glass flew everywhere as he spilled into the room and rolled to a stop by the bed. The man with his hands wrapped around Michelle’s neck sniffed appreciatively when he busted in.
“Took you long enough, lover BEAR. We were beginning to think you didn’t care. Boys, take out the trash.”
The two men shifted into their tiger forms and all too quickly he realized his mistake. The smaller tigers danced around him, darting in again and again to slice him with their razor sharp claws. Parker roared and attempted to strike, but he was seriously outnumbered and his bulky bear couldn’t function well in this cramped indoor space. The smaller more agile cats moved about with relative ease.
Parker attempted a partial shift, keeping his claws and muzzle intact as he moved to transform the rest of his body back into it’s smaller human form. He roared and made a lunge for the door when he saw the first man dragging Michelle’s unconscious body towards the door. There was a woman crouched in the corner who was covered in a rainbow tapestry of bruises, all in various stages of healing. Henry came crashing through the window just as the man darted past with Michelle.
His inner bear panicked when he heard the sound of tires squealing out of the parking lot and all too soon the smell of burning rubber followed, assaulting his nose with it’s acrid stench.
Henry launched himself at one of the tigers and was dealt a vicious cut across one arm. Grace ran screaming through the open doorway the first moment she saw an opportunity. She didn’t slow down until she was a good ways down the highway. All she knew was that in a fight between bears and tigers she didn’t want to stick around long enough to find out who won. She was certain to lose anyway you looked at it.
Now that Henry was there to help him, Parker was finally able to shift his focus from defensive measures to prepping his own offense. He knew the tiger was faster, and certainly more agile. The tiger lunged at him again, swiping wildly with his bared claws. Parker roared in outrage as the claws tore into his back, but instead of retreating he seized the tiger by the neck, and calling forth his bear once again he brought his paws together with all the available force in his massively powerful body. He crushed the tiger’s skull bones together and then jerked violently upwards, not letting go until he heard the eerie pop of the tiger’s vertebrae detaching from the spinal column. He dropped the lifeless body to the ground and shook off the tiger’s claws where they were still digging into his back.
“Go get your mate,” Henry ordered through a muzzle of wickedly elongated teeth. “I got this one.” He tossed Parker his keys and went back to taunting the other shifter.
“Eeny Meeny Miney Moe,” Henry chanted as he backed the shifter into a corner. “Catch a tiger by the TOE!” The last thing Parker heard before he pulled out of the lot was the tiger snarling in agony as Henry brought his bear paw down hard and shattered every bone in the tiger’s smaller foot.
He rolled down the windows and chuffed loudly as he pulled deep draughts of air into his lungs and tried to scent the air. He smelled the strong odor of gasoline which didn’t make any sense because they were nowhere near a filling station. The smell was so strong that it overrode any other smells that might have led him towards Michelle.
Focusing on his sight instead of his smell, he followed the trail of burned rubber and ignored the violent shaking of the vehicle beneath him as he pushed the car faster than it had ever been intended to be driven. He could buy Henry a new vehicle, but there would be no replacing Michelle.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
He found them five miles down the highway and he couldn’t help but laugh at his second’s ingenuity. Suddenly the smell of gasoline made sense, and he understood what had taken Henry so long to join the fight. Henry had been busy siphoning gas out of everyone’s vehicles but his own. He owed his friend big time, but thanking him would have to wait until later. First he had a tiger to kill.
Parker pulled over to the side of the road, parking behind the tiger’s vehicle. He shifted back into his full bear form. His animal was hands down the superior tracker. He heard them almost as soon as he caught their scent in the woods.
“I said move, bitch!” the tiger snarled, dealing Michelle a savage blow that sent her head reeling back and brought instant tears to her eyes.
Parker took a running leap and roared so loudly that the sound went ricocheting for miles across the empty forest. He knocked the tiger to the ground and they went rolling tooth and claw down the hill.
Michelle’s first instinct upon finding herself suddenly free was to run, but she’d hadn’t made it more than five steps before she stopped dead in her tracks. She’d stared down death tonight head on and in doing so she’d reached some important milestones.
She’d come to realize that she loved Parker Holmes. She loved him like she’d never loved another living being in her whole life. She’d also realized that she was never going to leave him again, even if it meant she was going to get mauled by a tiger before the night was through.
She began to search the forest floor for anything she might be able to use as a weapon, wishing that like her future in-laws she had the ability to shift into a powerful animal. It hardly seemed fair that she had to settle for a big ass stick when everyone else had razor sharp claws. It wasn’t that she was stupid; the way she saw it she had a zero percent chance of making it out of these woods alive. But what she’d come to realize since she’d run away was that some things were simply worth fighting for, even dying for. True love was just one of those things.
It had hit her in a powerful “Eureka” moment as the tiger had attempted to choke the life out of her. She’d realized that she’d spent her whole life chasing after something that didn’t really exist. Security. It didn’t matter how much money she had in the bank, or how much education she managed to cobble together. She’d discovered tonight that all it takes is one instant to lose EVERYTHING you care about.
So, she was gonna go into the lion’s den… errr tiger’s den anyway. She was going to come out with the man of her dreams or she wasn’t coming out at all. The tiger and the bear were locked together in a vicious hold of snapping teeth and slashing claws. She stepped carefully, afraid to so much as rustle a leaf as she made her way towards them.
She brought the tree limb down hard on the back of the tiger’s head and it let out a loud “Oomph!” Parker seized his opportunity and brought his deadly sharp teeth down hard, jaws grinding together and he dug into the unprotected flesh of the tiger’s neck. The bear whipped his head back for good measure, separating a goodly portion of the shifter’s esophagus from his body. He spat the tiger’s flesh from his mouth and kicked its now lifeless body to the bottom of the gorge so that nature could dispose of the body for him.
Michelle was crying hysterically as she wrapped her arms around him. He slowly began to relax his body, beginning the process of shifting back into his human shape so that he could speak.
“Does this mean that I win the next date?” he joked weakly.
“Oh you... you big dumb model,” she laughed, crying happily onto his chest. “
You’ve won the whole competition… that is if you still want me. I’m sorry I stole your truck... and I used your credit card,” she admitted sheepishly.
“Well I wouldn’t let you sleep on that park bench, so the way I figure it we’re even,” he teased.
“Is it all the blood you’ve lost, or are your jokes always this bad?”
“I’m afraid if I answer that question truthfully that you’ll never mate me,” he admitted weakly.
“If you feel like you can walk I’ll happily go back and mate you right now.”
“Did I hear you right? Or have I died and gone to heaven?”
“You’re not dead, but I think we should get you to a hospital,” Michelle said tugging on his arm.
“No hospital. Just help me to the truck. I promise I’ll be fine. We shifters heal fast.”
***
“You broke my heart when you left,” Parker said softly after he’d been driving for awhile.
“I was afraid that you’d break mine, so I ran. I’m not proud of what I did.” There was a long pause before she spoke again. “How did you even find me?” she asked, but what she really wanted to understand was why he’d even bothered.
“My Uncle Keen’s a whiz with computers,” he answered and then his tone turned serious. “In the forest, I… I thought you were running away again. What made you change your mind and come back? You know that tiger could have killed us both.
“I realized that I wasn’t going to let anyone, not even my own stupid trust issues, stand between me and the man I love.” His eyes lit up when she said the L word and she snapped at him, “Don’t let it go to your head or anything. I still think you’re rude… and an idiot.”
He just kept grinning widely as she spoke, treating every added insult as though it was a love word.
“Where are you going? You passed the exit back to Georgia.”
“I’m taking you home,” Parker replied mysteriously.