Shared by the Bear Clan: Box Set (Paranormal Alpha Werebear Romance)

by Lynn Red

  In my search, I flattened my silk-covered hand against the wall. The beeping subsided and for a horrible moment, I thought nothing was going to happen. Instead, a series of tones that may as well have been a live performance of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony for the way it made me feel, chimed out.

  “Scanner?” Grave asked, still apparently confused about whole concept. “How did rubbing that shit on the wall make it open?”

  I laid my hand on his naked chest, momentarily letting the warmth snake its way up my arm and warm my palm. “You know,” I said, “for someone as big, as strong, and as apparently intelligent as you are, it’s kind of amazing that you don’t go into the human world for a while and, I don’t know, just go look around a Sharper Image store.”

  “I’ve seen television!” Wild piped up as the panel began sliding to the side. “They’re the ones that make the tower that sucks smoke into itself.”

  I just shook my head. It sounds ridiculous, but those tiny little breaks in the tension, in the violence and the terror, really make the difference. And the panel was sliding to the side like two old slugs fucking on top of a glacier, so it’s not like we had anything better to do for those two seconds. I had no idea what to expect when the door opened up, but I think that in the back of my mind, we’d just find ourselves in the middle of another corridor.

  Or stepping into an ambush. At that point, walking through that hole in the wall could have led into the mouth of hell itself and I wouldn’t have been surprised.

  For the second time in about as many minutes, I was absolutely, definitely surprised. Behind the 1980s Starship Enterprise-style sliding door was my pale-skinned ex-boyfriend in a state of panic.

  “That’s not what I expected,” I deadpanned as his scrambling became approximately a thousand times more desperate. “I mean… I’m happy but—”

  “Get him!” Grave cried out. “Get the liar! I’ll rip his throat out and eat him from the neck down!”

  He tried to lunge, but before he could make up the distance, Todd turned and sprayed some kind of mist in Grave’s direction. It looked like the cloud came out of an atomizer, or one of those little perfume spraying decanters they use at expensive department stores. The big, gray bear let out a howl of pain and pitched backwards to get out of the cloud. When he rolled over and took his hands away from his eyes, his palms were covered in blood.

  “Quicksilver glass,” Todd said with a smirk. “I guess you haven’t figured out all my secrets yet, have you?”

  As Grave howled, I dropped the samite-like cloth on his face. He clutched it to his eyes, yelling out in pain, but refusing to take it away. “I’m fine!” he shouted. “Get him! Don’t let him get away!”

  Craze and Wild circled the massive stone tablet behind which Todd was fooling with something that looked like a safe. “It doesn’t matter what you do,” he said with a rattling, half-crazed sounding laugh, “doesn’t matter! Everything’s already finished. The cubs are dead,” he laughed again, “dead, dead, dead!”

  He reminded me of my drunken uncle Phil the way he was howling away. “I don’t even have to push another button! I already did it! They’re dead, you morons, they’re already dead! Look!”

  Reaching into the safe, he pulled out a remote control and pressed a button. There was a decided click as the monitor above our heads, in the corner of the room, up against the ceiling, switched on. A scene played out in front of our eyes of bombs going off, and then gas covering the ground. All of the caves, and all of the huts, seemed empty. No one was stirring, not even a cub.

  “There’s no one there,” Craze said a second later. “You realize that, right?”

  Todd turned to him with a look of furious indignation on his face. “I blew them all to hell,” he said, “that’s why there’s no one there!”

  Two of my mates were still flanking him. They drew slightly closer. “Right,” Wild said. “Sure, you really got us. We’re all dead.”

  “I’ve got another one in the bag,” Todd started chortling. I’ve never used that word before in my life, but that’s what he was doing. A mixture of laughter and snorting. Just listening sickened me. “All I have to do is push this button, and your precious cave, where you took my girlfriend, where you tried to make the pact come true, goes up in flames.”

  Craze and Wild exchanged a glance, but Grave was still wincing in pain from whatever had been shot in his face.

  “That’s what you think,” Craze said. “We got all of them away. As soon as I knew Grave took Ade up here, I knew you’d try something like this. You didn’t kill any of them. Not a single cub. How does that feel? How does it feel to know that you didn’t do a damn thing. You tried to kill us, you tried to kill her, and here you are, looking like an asshole and caught between two of us? Your wolves are dead, whatever that girl was that you sent at us has gone and run away. It’s the end of the line, Todd.”

  “End of the line?” he repeated, only in the form of a question. “Do you really think I believe you? Do you really think I believe that the four of you oafish idiots managed to kill my Angelica?”

  Again, he broke into insane laughter. “Angelica?” I asked. “Is that her name? That thing that called you father? No, she ran away. No one killed her. She’s a coward, Todd, just like you.”

  At that, his laughter turned into something akin to the sound of running your teeth along the serrations on a butter knife. It sent wiggling discomfort all the way from my spine to my fingertips. He bent over forward, almost collapsing on his desk, but just bracing himself against it with his palms. He threw his head back, laughing like a goddamn demon.

  That is, until I threw the cloth right in front of his face.

  In a terrible instant, his laughter choked out into a series of gasps, then sickening swallows. His gulps were desperate, hungry and awful. I looked away for just long enough to glance between my mates, but when I heard a sickening thud I shot my eyes back to Todd.

  He lifted his head, grinning horribly as blood ran down his forehead, and framing his face like the outline of a mask. It dripped along his chin and when he opened his eyes they were wild, bloodshot and got my stomach churning all over again.

  And then he did it again.

  And again.

  He cackled, almost screeching with laughter, as he slammed his head into the slab again and again.

  Wild and Craze both looked my way both with what the hell do we do now looks on their faces. Grave hobbled forward, still holding his side, but moving with a great deal more purpose than he had been recently. After the sixth time Todd cracked his skull against the table with the four of us watching, Grave grabbed him roughly by the hair on the sides of his head.

  “Coward,” he said flatly, stonily, into Todd’s face.

  The man looked like he was wearing a golden, Greek death mask. Where he’d beaten his skull on the rock, instead of his pale skin, something shimmered. The blood had hardened into a color reminiscent of the mystery fabric.

  “So that’s why it opened the door,” I said, wonder filling my voice. “You might be a coward, and you might be an asshole, but you are a genius. Of some sort or another, I guess. Not the impressive kind, either, but there you go. Not everyone can be a good guy.”

  “Good guy?” Grave roared with laughter that sounded just about as insane as Todd’s. “I know that’s some kind of joke, but look at this fool! He thought he could trick me, he thought—”

  “I did trick you,” Todd said in a low, dangerous hiss. “Or did you somehow forget already that you were the one in the box? You were the one who betrayed your mate… you forgot, didn’t you? It’s been, what, seventeen minutes since you woke up?”

  I thought he was going to start up with that damn laughter again, but instead he threw his head back, hissed again, and roared. His skin started to flap loosely around his mouth as though he’d grown fifty years older in a few seconds. With his hands up to his eyes, he seemed to scratch at himself, clawing his face with such fury that it unsettled me so de
eply that I couldn’t watch.

  Something about his feral clawing and scratching reminded me of just how different the world was. Coming back in a flood, thoughts of my old life, our old life, knocked me almost flat. It wasn’t pain—it wasn’t any kind of feeling at all—that struck me in his ferocity. It was revulsion. And in a way, I guess, pity.

  “How did this happen to you?” I took a step forward and put my hand gently on his forearm. “You loved me once,” I whispered. “No matter what you say now, I know you did. Not even someone as evil as you could act that well. I remember the way you kissed me, the way you touched me. I remember the way you ran your tongue along my throat before we…”

  I curled my fingers against his frigid skin. He looked up in my eyes for a moment, just a brief moment, and I thought for that brief flash of time, that he did feel something.

  “Yes,” he growled low and dangerously. “Yes, yes, yes… no! You’re trying to fool me! You’re trying to distract me! You can’t, I won’t let you, I won’t fall for your… for your tricks, your…”

  “Back up,” Wild said softly so that I barely heard. “Ade, back up, now.”

  I froze in place for long enough to see Todd yank his hand away from the desk, and draw it back. Faster than I could possibly react, and faster than Wild and Craze could lunge, he brought his twisted, claw-like hand across me in a whipping motion. I reeled back as pain exploded from my left cheek and sparks of fire and agony flitted in front of my face.

  Watching his face for just a moment longer, I saw what I thought was regret in his cold, pale, blue eyes. Whatever it was though, it was gone in a flash. Whatever he had ever been, whoever he had been, was consumed completely by the beast inside of him.

  Throwing his head back on his growing shoulders, my ex-boyfriend, the man I thought I knew so well… hell, the man I thought was a man, unleashed a roar so loud and so awful that it felt like the sound itself was pounding into my ribs. A jolt shot through me, from the back of my head all the way down to my toes.

  I heard a war-cry from the left, and in the next breath, I saw a half-shifted Craze launch himself at Todd. He managed to get a claw shot in before Todd had time to react, and raked a brutal railroad track down Todd’s increasingly ghostly skin.

  “Who do you think you are?” Todd hissed in a way that must’ve hurt his throat from how it hitched and clicked. He let out something that sounded like a mixture of a laugh, a cough, and a wheeze. “You have no right to do this! You’re just half-savage bears! I’m something different,” he hunched over as the last throes of his transformation wracked his body. Silvery hair shot out of his arms, his chest and his neck, and when he wrenched his head backward and opened his mouth, his jaws stretched and distorted, and his teeth grew into long, yellowed daggers.

  “This is our home,” Grave said. He hunched his shoulders, cracking his neck and then clenched his fists. “And she’s our mate. You are the one with no right.”

  The next explosion was no bomb; it was no flash of light or blast from a gun’s muzzle. It was a thousand times more terrifying and more immediate. I stared in awe as the three of my mates all dove at Todd. Grave slashed at his face and Wild snapped his jaws wildly in the direction of Todd’s side.

  Somehow, he moved like molten mercury. With a motion that seemed more at home on a ballroom floor than a bloody brawl in the middle of a stone-clad base, Todd swept to the left, raked his claws along Wild’s chest, and then ducked backward so that Grave and Craze smashed into each other. He grabbed both of their heads, cracked them together, and then leapt up onto the desk.

  Crouching deeply, saliva ran in tendrils from his open mouth. He was still wheezing, still coughing, but when he turned his pale blue eyes on me, I couldn’t move.

  My muscles just froze in place. The tendons in my arms and legs tightened so quickly that a jolt of electric pain snaked down my wrists. My fingers clamped down hard on the shaft of my axe-spear so hard that the skin squeaked against the smooth wood.

  “Mates!” he spat. “No right… no right!”

  I watched as his muscles flexed and he crouched lower, his pale fur glistening in the static glow of the monitor above him. He opened his mouth again, but instead of more broken words, he just snarled.

  And then he jumped.

  Claws wrapped around my wrists, the nails digging into the flesh on the back of my hands. I screamed, but from pain. Every shred of rage I’d felt in the last month; every bit of confusion, of anger, of sadness and betrayal all came bubbling out of me in one huge, roaring sound. They weren’t even words that were bursting out of my mouth like water through a cracked, helplessly overpowered levy.

  All I remember saying was that I repeated “no, no, no” about a million times a second, and I used my newly learned head butting skills to plant one right in the middle of Todd’s face-snout-thing. Unfortunately, wolves don’t get as much pain from a head butt as people do, probably due to a lack of a breakable nose. He winced slightly, just enough for me to twist away.

  His nails dug in deeper as he tried to hold on tight, but gritting my teeth and pushing away from him, the pain wasn’t even in the top ten of things on my mind just then. I tried to twist my hands enough to get the blade of my spear around to his skin, but he was so strong that even opening my hands wasn’t an option. He drew right up into my face, breathing his sour, fetid breath down my neck. “You,” he breathed, “have nothing… to do… with… this.”

  “You brought me into this,” I answered, doing my best to keep from flinching as his breath seeped into my pores. “You dragged me in with your lies and your bullshit. And now, as we’re sitting here, four against one, you’re wondering why you ever took me so lightly, aren’t you?”

  He released my wrist and whipped a hand around. I heard the thump before I felt it, but as soon as I did, pain erupted from every nerve in my face. For a second, it was like the whole world stood still. Grave and Craze and Wild had all regained their feet, and were all on top of us before he could strike again.

  Laughing, Todd whirled around again. He batted Craze’s claw swipe away with a smirk, and gave him a shot across the face in return. Blood welled up from the wound, but Craze didn’t back off. Wild jumped in right afterward, getting a handful of fur, or hair, or whatever it was. Wrenching Todd’s head back—and let me say how strange it is to call this demonic, pale, ghastly beast Todd—and slammed his forearm down across his throat.

  “You think that hurts?” the wolf monster screeched. “This hurts!”

  Shooting himself up from where he was laid out across the desk, Todd threw himself violently right into Wild’s face. He got his teeth around my mate’s throat and for a second I thought he was going to crunch down and end it all.

  “Wait!” I cried out, desperate to do anything to forestall the horror. “Todd! You want me? That’s what this is really all about, isn’t it?”

  Slowly, he took his teeth from Wild’s neck. I caught him with another of his brief looks of confusion. Even if I wasn’t right, I got him thinking. He turned his head and cocked it to the side in the same undeniably canine expression his daughter gave me.

  I lifted my hands, and made a big show of dropping my weapon to the floor. “Look,” I said, “if this is really what you want, then—”

  “Ade, no!” Craze shouted. “You can’t… without you, we’ll—”

  “You want me dead, right?” I asked Todd giving a sidelong glance to Craze, telling him that I knew what I was doing, even if I wasn’t myself entirely sure. “You don’t care, really, whether they live or die as long as you get the forest to make your drugs or your slaves, or whatever your big, crazy plan is, right?”

  Grave snarled under his breath and made a move toward Todd, but I laid a hand on his shoulder and felt him immediately relax under the warmth of my palm. “It’s fine,” I whispered. “There’s more to being a mate than mating, right?”

  He snorted in irritation, but the way his eyes softened I knew I’d hit on something. “If you can
have whatever you want,” I said, turning back to Todd slowly and measuredly, “what would it be? Whatever you want. You can have me, you can have the bears dead, and you can have the woods for whatever bizarre thing you want to do. All you have to do is say it.”

  He let out a clicking, humming sort of sound.

  “Adriana,” Wild said softly. “What are you—?”

  I shushed him with a sideways glance. Then I shook my head so slightly it would’ve been imperceptible to anyone else. “Anything you want,” I said again, sidling closer to Todd, who had by then turned his entire attention toward me. The three bears pulled back. I don’t know if they could read my body language, but it certainly seemed like they did.

  I should have believed in you sooner, I heard Grave say in my mind. I doubted you, but I never should have. You’re braver than all of us, probably.

  I took another step toward Todd and slowly moved my hand from Grave’s shoulder to Todd’s. “Anything you want. Whatever you could possibly dream, what would it be?”

  He was shaking his head over and over. “I want,” he started to talk, but his lips wobbled as though he was having trouble either formulating what he wanted to say, or considering whether or not to say it. Todd clenched his lupine fist. His nails scraped audibly against the table, making my ears recoil in revulsion. I squeezed my other fist closed and bit down on my bottom lip to keep from letting myself pull back.

  Whatever he was going to do, I had to be ready for it. Whatever he was going to say, I had already made my mind up how I was going to react.

  I just had to be brave enough to do it.

  I had to be as brave as Grave thought I was.

  “If you could have anything you want, what would it be?” I asked softly.

  “Hunh?” Todd grunted.

  “I said anything you want. Just… what would it be?”

  I guess Grave decided he just couldn’t take anymore. “Not this way!” he shouted, diving for Todd’s throat. With a motion so easy that it was almost unbelievable, Todd just moved his head to one side, reached up and snatched Grave’s enormous paw out of the air. He turned it upside down, jumped up in the air and slammed him down, back first, on the table. With another movement, he was on the table too, crouched over Grave’s half-shifted form, staring down at him.