The Bearfield Baby Heist

by Jacqueline Sweet

  “No, I can’t fix it. The whole electrical is shot back here. No turn signals. No brake lights. It’s an open invitation for a cop to pull us over.” Vera punched the inside of the car repeatedly.

  “Well, we can’t drive without taillights. It’s not safe,” Peter said matter-of-factly. “We can’t risk an accident. Precious cargo.”

  When he glanced back to find Mina, she was gone.

  Past the eucalyptus grove Mina ran, trying to keep the trees between her and the car. Her breath came in great puffs as the big baby bump pressed against her diaphragm. It was past midday, but the sun was hot and the air was dry. Knee-high weeds whipped at her legs and the light dazzled her. A dizzy feeling swirled in her head. Something about those weeds, she knew, had messed with her. Matt could have saved her if he’d been there. He would have summoned his bear and knocked the kidnappers down with one paw, then carried her home on his back.

  He was coming. She didn’t know how she knew, but she could sense it. Her mate was coming. But she couldn’t wait around for him.

  If her sister-in-law, Allison, had been there she would have known in an instant what the weeds were. The woman was a flipping genius that way. But unless you could cook with it or stick it in a centerpiece, Mina didn’t care about plants.

  The fence grew closer, but too slowly. There was a tiredness in her bones that felt unnatural. Whatever they’d done to knock her out, it hadn’t passed. Cars whizzed by on the highway. Golden hills stretched on all sides, dotted by clumps of trees and idle gatherings of cows. Voices shouted from behind her, but Mina resisted looking. She needed to focus.

  She huffed and puffed across the field, a dust cloud rising behind her. Burrs and bits of weeds clung to her pajamas. The fence was near, higher than she thought, but it looked flimsy. It was not quite as tall as her. She hooked an arm over the top bar, gripped the chainlink with her toes and heaved herself up.

  And then Pete was there, his arms seizing her from behind like he was going to give her the Heimlich maneuver. “Don’t make things any worse,” he whined. “Just come with us and you’ll be fine.” He planted his feet and pulled, his fists pressing hard against her chest.

  Mina held on tightly to the fence. Did any drivers see her? Would any of them glance off to the side of the road, see through the overgrown grass and understand what was going on? Even if they did and called the cops, how long until they responded? Twenty minutes? An hour? This was open country lands. There was a lot of space between everything. Help would not arrive soon, so she needed to hold out.

  “What the hell do you want?” Mina hissed.

  Pete tugged hard and her feet flew away from the fence. His grip slipped and he stumbled away from her, his hands scrabbling for purchase until he ended up holding her ankles, yanking her almost perpendicular from the fence.

  “We just want what’s best for your baby! I promise! No one will get harmed.”

  “I am being harmed right now, you ass!”

  “Do you know how special your baby is?” Peter’s voice changed. He was angry now, not whining. “Your little bear is going to do great things and we can’t risk her growing up surrounded by so many bad influences.”

  A wave of angry heat rolled down Mina’s spine. They wanted to steal her baby.

  Her baby.

  Just then the little cub woke up and stirred within her. Strength filled Mina and pushed away the last of whatever they’d doped her with. She pulled one foot free of Peter’s grip and then kicked back like a mule, catching him right in the face and sending the scarecrow of a man tumbling backwards across the grass.

  “Oh my god!” he screamed. “You broke my face! I can’t go to work like this!” He stood up on shaky legs and his nose was all lopsided and gushing blood.

  A growl rolled from her lips. She should have run, but the anger was overpowering and she wanted to hit him again. How dare he endanger her and her cub? How dare he threaten to steal her baby?

  Mina lashed out and decked him hard in the face again, sending him sprawling in the dirt.

  Vera was running across the field now, beelining right for Mina.

  Mina grinned and braced herself. She was going to clean the woman’s clock with one punch. The strength pulsed within her, fizzing in her blood. Her senses awoke and stretched out, taking in the sharp smell of Peter’s blood and lingering scents of medical cleansers on him. She smelled the dry earth of the field and the hundreds of tiny animals hiding within it. The highway held the poisonous scent of car exhaust and farther off came the rich, complex scent of the grazing cattle.

  She didn’t smell Vera though. She could see her and hear her, but her scent was a void. Absolutely undetectable.

  Vera slowed as she approached. The woman scowled at Mina and didn’t even spare a glance for her partner, who was whimpering and holding his face.

  “Come quietly and you won’t get hurt,” Vera said. In her hand was a leather bag, about the size of a coffee mug.

  “You won’t take my baby,” Mina growled. She took a step nearer the kidnapper, but Vera backpedaled, staying well out of striking distance.

  “It’s not your baby,” she sneered. “It’s a bear and it belongs with its own kind, not raised in that decadent powderkeg you call home.”

  The baby thieves thought she wasn’t good enough to be her daughter’s mother? That Matt would be a bad influence? Bearfield was the most welcoming place on the planet, and these lunatics thought it was a bad place to raise a kid? The idea was preposterous. Vera may as well have said that kids shouldn’t eat fruits and vegetables because ladybugs walk on them.

  “Bearfield is my home. It will be my child’s home,” Mina said. “And anyway, it’s a very nice place to raise kids.”

  Vera face twisted in condescension. “You don’t even know. Your mate and his brothers live divorced from the old ways, the good ways. You live amongst humans and call it progress, not realizing how weak it makes you. Your baby needs to grow up among its own kind, in a good place with good people who know their place.”

  “How do you think you can even get away with it? Don’t you know that Matt and Michael and Marcus would hunt you to the freaking moon if you stole our daughter?”

  Vera laughed a venomous laugh. “He won’t even know she was taken and you won’t remember a thing.”

  Mina leapt at the kidnapper, fingers splayed like she wanted to claw the woman in half, but Vera reached into her leather bag and tossed a handful of sparkling dust in Mina’s face, and before she even hit the ground Mina was asleep.

  Chapter 4

  “I’d call this a sign of struggle, wouldn’t you?” Joannie’s voice was flippant. Matt knew she was trying to keep it professional, to avoid panic. But he really felt like panicking.

  He and Joannie had driven to his home to find the front door open. The glass was smashed out, but there wasn’t any blood that they could see.

  “Can you scent her?” the midwife asked.

  Matt shook his head. “I can’t scent anything. My bear is gone. I’m mortal. At least for now.” He knelt down at the threshold. A blue powder coated the doorframe and floor. It reminded Matt of the sand art they sold to tourists in town. There was a lot of it. The spray of the sand reached into the house at least ten feet.

  It was a violation, seeing his home this way. Mina should have been safe. He should have been protecting her. She was his mate. She was carrying their child. He should never have let her out of his sight.

  “It’s not uncommon,” Joannie said. “The shifter child needs special protection against forces unseen. Your bear is with her now, keeping her protected. It is the way.” She had a portentous way of speaking, like she was always on the verge of uttering a prophecy, that grated on Matt.

  “What is this stuff? This blue dust? I’ve never seen anything like it.” Could he see the outline of Mina in the dust? The wind had blown and shifted the powder, but he could almost make it out.

  Joannie knelt down next to Matt, her elderly knees creak
ing audibly. She ran one finger through the dust, smearing it on her fingertip before bringing it to her nose to smell. “It has no scent,” she said. And then her eyes shut and she fell forward, fast asleep.

  Matt stepped away from the fallen midwife. His feet crunched on some dried weeds underfoot. They were tied in a bundle with twine. The weeds were almost black. They had large pods and tiny thorns and he was sure he’d never seen them before.

  He couldn’t do this alone. He needed to find Mina, but had no idea where to start. So he did what he always did when he was in over his head—he called his brothers. And then he took Joannie by the ankles and tugged her out of the sleeping powder. Her face was smudged with it and she snored loudly. Matt picked her up and laid her out gently in her own backseat.

  If a whiff of that sleeping dust made Joannie pass out instantly, what would a whole sack of it do to a person? There was enough of the powder spread around his doorway and front hall to knock out a thousand midwives. Would Mina be okay?

  Michael was the first to arrive. Matt hadn’t told him on the phone what the problem was—all he had said was to bring Allison and to come in a hurry. His Jeep roared down the driveway, flinging mud everywhere.

  “What the hell happened?” Michael jumped out of the car and ran to the front door. His mate Allison followed right after. She was still wearing her chef’s outfit. Michael must have picked her up from work. “Where’s Mina?”

  “Stop!” yelled Allison, just as Michael was about to step in the blue powder.

  “You know what this is?” Matt asked, nodding at the mess.

  “Yeah, it’s Lethe’s Bramble. Stuff is super nasty. Basically impossible to find,” Mina said. “It’s like a magic weed? I’ve seen pictures of it before. And they have a preserved sample of the flower in a lucite block down at the museum. It costs a fortune.”

  “Whoever did this has money to burn,” Matt said. The thought was poisonous. “I’ve been sitting here thinking about why someone would take Mina. It could have been her ex’s people, that was my first thought. But it’s been a long time and they haven’t shown any interest so far in coming after us. I was hoping it was for ransom, y’know?”

  “Some jackass snatches up your wife for a quick payday?” Michael said. “How messed up is that for a best case scenario?” Michael was Matt’s younger brother. He was the town’s wrecker driver and auto mechanic. It used to be that he was the kind of guy who always seemed like he was about to just walk away from a conversation to go play video games or get a drink or goof off somewhere. Until he’d met Allison. She was civilizing him. Matt’s screw-up brother was turning into a man right before his very eyes.

  “If it isn’t for a ransom, then why?” Allison asked.

  “The baby. They want my baby.”

  If his bear had been with him, Matt would have roared to the heavens. He would have shaken the earth with his fury. But mortals couldn’t do that.

  “Mikey, I need you to find her scent. Find the scent of the kidnappers. Find something.”

  “What? Why can’t you?”

  “My bear is, well, gone. It’s with Mina right now.”

  Allison looked back and forth between the brothers. “How is that even possible?”

  “Magic?” Michael said with a shrug.

  “Just shift, please. We don’t have time to waste,” Matt said. Michael nodded and began taking off his clothes. Matt turned to Allison, “Do you know what these are?” He nudged the bundle of dried weeds he’d stepped on. “Are these the Lethe’s Bramble?”

  Allison was a botanist, and a damn good one. Before coming to Bearfield she’d been a field researcher, the kind of scientist who crept through a rainforest on her belly, looking for new plants. After inheriting a home, meeting her mate, and building a life in Bearfield, she’d been studying up on the brand new vista of mystical plants with a voracious appetite.

  She examined the tied bundle of weeds without touching it. “It’s a related plant. Part of the family that they call Magebane. They only work on supernatural creatures or witches, basically. This powdered bramble here would knock you on your ass, but since I’m just a normal girl it wouldn’t do jack to me. These weeds are kind of the same deal. Oh what’s the name,” she said. “It’s on the tip of my tongue.”

  Behind her, Michael shifted. In the blink of an eye Matt’s brother was gone, replaced by a bear with honey-gold fur.

  “Don’t go near the house,” Matt warned. “If you pass out like that we’ll need a forklift to move you. Or Marcus, who regrets that he can’t be here but he’s tied up in some negotiation in town.”

  Michael shuffled off down the driveway, sniffing and snuffling for a scent.

  “Got it!,” Allison yelled. She was paging through a leather bound journal filled with cramped, precise handwriting. “It’s called Siegfried’s Veil by the Germans. In England it was known as Arthur’s Mantle. But I’ve always liked the Greek name for it,” Allison said. “Hades’ Crown.”

  “All of those names sound horrible,” Matt sighed. “What’s it do?”

  “Whoever holds this is invisible to supernatural senses. They say that hunters used to weave crowns of it, so that their prey couldn’t sense them.” Allison’s voice was excited. She was clearly enjoying seeing a live specimen of something she’d only read about in books. “Watch this.”

  Allison picked up the dried bundle of herbs and called out to Michael. The bear was halfway down the drive, trying to find scents. At the sound of her voice, he glanced back and startled. The big shifter spun and raced down the drive, his big bear feet throwing up even more mud than his Jeep had.

  When Michael neared, he shifted back into his human form. His face a mask of panic. “Where’s Allison!” he yelled and then, upon seeing her, did a double take.

  “See?” Allison said. “Invisible to shifters.”

  Matt took the bundle from Allison’s hand.

  “So the kidnappers approached the house with the Hades’ Crown.” Matt walked forward, talking himself through their actions. “Mina wouldn’t have sensed anything unusual, and my bear would have been blindsided. She opened the door, expecting the doula, and instead it’s the kidnappers. They throw the sleeping dust in her face and drag her out. She didn’t have a chance.”

  Behind him, Michael was asking Allison where she’d vanished to. “I’ll explain it later, honey,” she said.

  “How do we find her?” Matt asked. “These people are professionals. They’re well funded. They masked her scent. They masked their own scents. What do we do?”

  “If this was a cop show, we’d find security footage somewhere that would show us their car,” Michael said.

  “I called Pete already. He’s trying that, but we don’t really have the hardware. There’s only a few cameras in all of downtown.”

  Allison turned the bundle of Hades’ Crown over and over in her hands. She bit her lip and frowned.

  “What is it?” Matt asked. “You have that look you get when you’re about to say something irritatingly smart.”

  She untied the twine and held it up. It was the sort of brown waxed twine florists used. “Michael, can you get a scent off this?” She handed her mate the twine and stepped far away, outside the influence of the sense-evading weeds.

  Michael held the twine in his hands and sniffed hard. “Oh yeah, totally. This reeks. It has a sort of chemically smell. Like really strong soap. Hospital soap and something else.” He closed his eyes to focus. “It’s Peter Parsnip. That EMT guy. I’d swear it. No one has the same smell of medicine and anxiety as that dude.”

  “Parsnip?” Matt said. “Parsnip? Why the hell would Parsnip do this? I defended him in court last year. Guy’s kind of a weiner, but he didn’t seem like a kidnapper.”

  “Money makes people do stupid things,”Allison said, but Matt already had his phone out.

  Five quick calls later, and they finally had a lead. “Parsnip called in sick this morning. And the ambulance is still in the garage. It looks lik
e he got a rental. And Sheriff Pete is putting out an Amber alert about Mina with a description of the rental. The license plate cameras on the highway caught it going north, about an hour ago.”

  “We can’t just wait though,” Michael said. He was still naked. He had a habit of forgetting to put clothes back on after shifting that had led to him being banned from several restaurants in town.

  “We’re not going to wait,” Matt said. “We can’t afford to. If Parsnip and whoever he’s working with had the knowledge to prepare all this, then the cops won’t be a match for them.” He retrieved the gently snoring midwife from the back of her car and moved her to Michael’s Jeep. “Get in. I’m driving.”

  “I love you like a brother,” Michael said.

  “I am your brother,” said Matt.

  “But no one but me and sometimes Allison drives my Jeep.”

  “I need you to get in the back and shift, so you can try and catch their scent while we drive.”

  “That’s crazy,” Allison said. “We can’t drive down the highway with a bear hanging out of the back of the Jeep.”

  “I love this plan,” Michael said. He jumped into the rear of the Jeep and shifted. His big bear butt overflowed the sides and the Jeep wobbled slightly, as if it might tip over.

  Matt and Allison clambered into the front and they drove off with Michael hanging out of the back, sniffing the wind for any scent of hope.

  Chapter 5

  If it was a dream, it was one that felt real.

  Mina was stretched out on a camping mattress, one of the thick foam ones covered in gentle swells like waves frozen in time. She was in the eucalyptus clearing still, but her kidnappers’ car was nowhere to be seen. The tall trees with their medicinal scent surrounded her in a ring. She lay at the very center of it. A circle of sky was visible where the trees didn’t quite manage to touch and through it she could see stars.