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

by Lynn Red

  Our hearts thudded as one. Our souls looped around each other and sailed into the sky. I felt him fill me over and over again, his heat dripping down the inside of my thighs. It felt like a welcome eternity before I was standing again, and even then it took a pretty decided effort to keep my knees from buckling.

  “Home,” I said again. My bears had nestled down into the makeshift bed of fur blankets, and I slipped in between them. “We’re home.”

  “We’re home,” Wild said before he kissed me, “and we’re safe.”

  An arm slipped under my head like a pillow. Craze turned me toward him, and stared into my eyes. “We’re all safe,” he said. “You, us, the cubs… I never thought we’d see the end of that war. I never thought we’d see the day when I could sleep without worrying about someone taking everything I love.”

  I put my forehead against his and sat there for a moment, just smelling the air, just breathing in the ecstasy.

  “Tomorrow our new life starts,” Grave said softly. He was propped up on his elbows with his head relaxed backwards and his eyes closed tight. “We have a lot of work to do, rebuilding the camp, and rounding up all the cubs. But tonight is ours.”

  “No,” I said, “forever is ours. Tonight is just the first night of forever.”

  For a while, no one said anything. No one needed to.

  Everything we needed, we had. Everything that mattered was right there.

  And there I was, right in the middle of it all.

  There I was. At home.

  At last.

  Epilogue – United

  “More wood?” Gray, one of the thirty-eight cubs scampering around our new digs, was fully in the throes of adolescent angst. And he really, really didn’t want to get any more wood.

  “Little more,” I said, grunting as I squatted down and hefted a bundle of logs. These were going on the fire. “If we don’t get these cabins finished before tonight we’re all going to be sleeping in a storm. And if there’s one thing I know about bears… okay I know a lot about bears. But if there’s one thing I know for sure it’s that when you guys get wet?”

  “Yeah?” Gray was trying really hard not to laugh.

  “You stink!”

  He cracked. First he laughed and then he threw back his head, and just about roared. Even after three months of living with them, and two months of being their mated den mother, I still got startled when such a little thing made such a big noise. I dropped my bundle of sticks, leaned over and put my hands on my knees to catch my breath. Up here, where we decided to settle on the fringe of a small, very old mountain chain, the air was thinner than my blood could handle. It was a long trek – a really, really long one – that took about two months all told.

  Now we had a place. It was far from what all of us knew, and really goddamn cold if I’m being honest, but it was a place just for us. No remnants of Todd’s wolf clan, no worries of Angelica, wherever she was, coming back to haunt us. At least not right then, and really what more can you ask? After what we’d been through, just surviving was enough.

  A cold whoosh of wind swept through and went straight up my pant leg. I grunted as I bent to pick up a bundle of sticks, encouraged only by the thought of a huge roaring fire to banish all the cold, but it would be hours still before we had enough to last the night, and a bit longer past that before our first shelters were made.

  “Let me get those,” another cub, Steel, said as he approached. “You should rest, you know.”

  Oh right, and then there’s that.

  The mating ritual worked, so to speak. Maybe it wasn’t just the exertion and the altitude getting me out of breath. My belly wasn’t sticking out that far, but having had plenty of friends get pregnant in the last few months of my “civilian life” I knew that I was a whole lot more engorged than they were at the two month mark.

  “Yeah,” I said with a laugh. “I guess you’re right.” I patted the cub on the shoulder which actually means that I reached up as far as my arm would go, and then patted him. Steel was the biggest, the oldest of the cubs, and he had the same serious demeanor as Grave.

  I sat, heavily, on a stump and let out a long-held breath. I smoothed down the oversized tee-shirt I was wearing. That’s one thing I never had gotten quite used to—being naked all the time. Luckily, a new part of bear life that developed a few years before I’d shown up was that they were beginning to interact with humans, and going into the human world. That, of course, meant non-optional clothing. It also helped that about three hours by walking, there was a Wal-Mart that we tended to visit extremely late at night.

  For whatever reason, the cashiers and the other customers didn’t much notice the half-wild look on the faces of my mates or the cubs when they were in the middle of humans. And let me tell you, a bear clan waltzing into a department store at four in the morning all decked out in heavy metal tees, Zubazz pants and ill-fitting jeans is a sight for sore eyes. And before you judge, half the bears can’t wear anything but Zubazz pants since their legs are approximately the size of tree trunks, and those are the ones who don’t even exercise.

  All that aside, life was good. Very good. There hadn’t been any smoke, no fires, and no wolves.

  Actually that’s not entirely true. The wolves had been around, but somehow, they’d become less feral as time went on. They still had terrible manners, but their new leader, none other than Todd’s daughter, had apparently decided that it was time to bury the hatchet. I’m not entirely sure I believe all that, but she hadn’t launched any assaults, so I guess we may as well take it as safe.

  A few short breaths later, I felt a hand warm my back. I habitually wore very flimsy spaghetti strap tank tops, especially since the weather had begun to warm. Anything more quickly turned into a filmy, sweaty mess. And a side benefit of the tiny shirts was that whenever one of my mates touched me, which was all the damn time, I felt the warmth of their palm radiate through me without any fabric to get in the way.

  His scent hit my nose next. “Hey Craze,” I said, placing my hand over top of his and smiling as I watched the cubs bang around with the wood. He curled his fingers against my skin, sending a warm trill down my back.

  “You okay?” he asked in a soft, almost caressing whisper. “I mean, with all the, uh…”

  “Being pregnant?” I asked, laughing. “Of all the things you bears don’t like talking about, I can’t figure out why you get so shy about babies.”

  “It’s not that,” he said with a crooked grin that I saw when I turned my head. “It’s just, well, we’re so helpless to do anything. I hate seeing you in pain.”

  “You’re the sweetest thing ever,” I said. “But just you being here makes it better. And I’m not gonna lie and say I don’t hurt like hell most of the time, but then again, I’m a five-and-a-half-foot human carrying a magical werebear baby. Werebaby?” I started chuckling. “And I think it might be driving me crazy on top of everything else.”

  He sat behind me, straddling me close against his body. I felt him stir and couldn’t help but giggle. “Already?” I asked. “It hasn’t been three hours since the last time you jumped my bones.”

  “Can’t help it,” he cupped my belly with the tips of his fingers, tracing gentle lines around my navel. “Something about the way your scent changes, or at least that’s what Wild said. I think he might be full of shit, but you never know.”

  I laid my head back against his chest. He lowered his chin, softly resting it on my forehead. “But whatever it is, you don’t seem to mind.”

  I couldn’t disagree there. I smiled to myself more than to him, but I let out a soft cooing sound that perfectly suited the way he was making me feel just then. “I’m worried though. I mean, with how rough you guys get sometimes, won’t it jostle the poor thing?”

  He let out a booming blast of laughter. “Why do you think we’re all so tough? We have to deal with this for the twelve months we’re in the womb.”

  My heart sunk to my toes. “Wait,” I said slowly, drawi
ng the word out into about fourteen syllables, “a year of this? How the hell am I going to survive? I’ll get torn in half!”

  Another hand met my skin. “I think you’ll find my friend here is both an asshole, and completely wrong.”

  “How do you do that? You weigh like three-fifty and you’re almost seven feet tall,” I said with a smile on my lips as I recognized Wild’s voice. “You shouldn’t be able to sneak around like the goddamn Batman.”

  He chuckled softly. “Just something we learn. Anyway, clan meeting is about to happen. Grave’s got some kind of announcement and I’m not sure what it is. I’d rather do just about anything than listen to him yammer about duties and survival and all that, but well—”

  “I don’t yammer,” Grave boomed.

  “Stop sneaking up on me!”

  All three of them laughed for a moment. “He doesn’t know what yammer means,” Wild offered. “If he did, he’d probably be even more offended.”

  I turned to Grave, who had an abnormally relaxed look on his normal stone-serious face. “Probably,” he intoned. “Good thing I don’t.”

  For a second, no one spoke. And then, because I’m me, I couldn’t take the silence. Bears have this thing where they can sit quietly forever and ever and never feel uncomfortable at all. Me? Not so much. When things get quiet for too long, Ade gets nervous and when Ade gets nervous, she gets irritable. And let’s be serious – I was already carrying a gigantic baby bear in my stomach who had just developed the magical ability to kick me right in the liver.

  So what I’m saying is that irritable was a state of almost constant being for me.

  “What’s the meeting about?” I asked as I turned to Grave. “Anything important?”

  “Everything I say is important,” he said flatly. “That was a joke.”

  “No it wasn’t,” Wild said with a snicker. “Of everyone on this planet, I imagine you are the one who really does believe everything he says is incredibly important.”

  “There’s no trouble, is there?” I asked, suddenly growing wary in the way only a mama bear can get. “Because if there is, we can’t have that. Can’t have that at all.” I felt a little whacked out for the way I was rambling, but if nothing else, I wasn’t going to bring a baby into the world without making damn sure it was safe.

  “What are you gonna do about it if there is trouble, Preggo?”

  I snarled at Wild. Of all the dumb human slang to pick up, I don’t know why he’d picked that one word. Then again, I taught it to him, so I’m not sure why I made that decision. Either way, he grinned. “Calm down, calm down,” he said as he raised his hands defensively. “If it was trouble we’d know already.”

  “Not trouble,” Grave said slowly, “at least not that I know of. Apparently the settlement near here is very, er, welcoming.” The way he said the last word made it sound like it was six syllables long. “They sent this, whatever it is. It arrived by way of a very large bear, uh, thing, on a three-wheeled pedal-cart.”

  “A tricycle?” I asked with a confused grin. “That’s one hell of a fruit basket.” He held the absolutely massive collection of cantaloupes on sticks, strawberries carved to look like flowers, and some kind of finger-sized bananas arranged into a crown around the whole mess. “Someone brought this thing here on a tricycle? I’ve got to see the sort of thing that could tote this around on a trike.”

  Grave let go of the basket’s handle, and try as I might, I couldn’t keep it from falling. The handle was about as thick as my forearm, and when it hit the ground, the rumbling sound it made got me thinking that it was either completely full of iron shot or lead. I couldn’t imagine the sort of beast that could ride anything at all that involved the use of handlebars and still carry the thing.

  “No you don’t,” Grave said, shaking his head. I wasn’t sure if it was another of his illfated attempts at a joke, or what, but from the vague paleness on his face, I thought maybe he’d caught the flu.

  “You’re acting very strange,” I said. “Is something going on we need to know about?”

  He swallowed, hard. “I’m not sure how to say this, exactly,” he began before trailing off for a moment.

  “But?” I nudged him with my elbow. “But what?”

  “Well, it’s just that I’ve never seen anything quite like the thing—man—thing, I’m not sure what it was, to be honest with you, but I’ve never seen anything like it at all. It’s like it was some kind of mutant, or… no, it couldn’t have been that.”

  At this point, I started getting a little concerned that instead of just being a little out of it after all that travelling and all the work he’d put in since before dawn that day, that the biggest of my mates was going bonkers. I studied him for a long moment, waiting to see if I could notice any other cracks in his sanity beginning to appear, but nothing came of it. “Is… he still around?” I finally asked. “Assuming ‘he’ is the right way to refer to your boogie man?”

  Grave just stood there shaking his head. Absently I reached down and snatched one of the impaled melons, then handed it his way. Without ever taking his eyes off the place on the horizon where his stare was fixed, he took a big bite. “Good,” he said. “If nothing else, I guess the—what’d you call it? A fruit basket? If nothing else, the fruit basket’s good.”

  He took another bite, a very large one, from the end of the cantaloupe and chewed. Juice ran down his chin and disappeared into the hair on his chest. “Good fruits. Real good. Is he here? Is who here?” He managed another bite before the last one had been swallowed, and very quickly, he was turning into what I imagine a post-lobotomy Jack Nicholson would’ve acted like.

  From the distance came a rolling, thunder-like sound. Grave, Wild and Craze all froze stock-still. “Not again,” Craze said.

  “How could they have followed us here?” Wild asked. “Angelica ran like hell from our last little encounter, and the wolves were all starting to get their brains around being normal again. And… wait, what the hell is that smell?”

  “It’s kinda like flowers,” I said, “but not, uh, ones that are very good. Or fresh. It smells like flowers that have been on the floor of the locker room in one of those meat head gyms for a long time. And maybe grew mushrooms on them. And then got boiled in… God,” I sniffed again, “it’s almost like lavender, I think.” I paused for a moment as the tendril of scent tickled my nose again. “No, it isn’t lavender, but it’s kinda similar.”

  The rumbling drew closer still. It reminded me of the foreshadowing in a movie, right before a heard of rogue elephants or something stampedes through a hapless town. The closer the sound got, the more distinct the smell.

  “It’s lilac,” I whispered.

  “HELLO!” a voice boomed. Loud and clear and exuberant, but also with a twinge of semi-drunken slurring, the sound came like the exclamation point at the end of an overly long sentence where nothing of consequence happens, but the author is clearly in love with their own words. “FRIEND HELLO!”

  “What on earth is that?” I asked whoever was listening. “It can’t be… whoever brought the basket?”

  A figure that seemed about four sizes too big to be real appeared about a hundred yards from where we were standing. Either my nose had gotten a whole hell of a lot better since leaving the city, or this thing really reeked like lilacs.

  Grave shook his head again. “I think it… he… whatever, said its name was—”

  “ATLAS HELLO!”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Atlas.”

  “Grave?” I grabbed his arm as the mountainous, half-green, lilac-smelling monstrosity bounded toward us. “Grave! Wild! Craze! He’s coming! What the hell is he doing?”

  Before any of us could react, the thing—which was about the size of Wild and Craze put together, and a foot and a half or two taller than either of them—grabbed me and lifted me up in the air. I took a deep breath and closed my eyes, expecting to either be ripped in half or eaten or I don’t even know.

  Of course, when I took
said breath, my entire body seemed to fill up with lilac-scented air. If that’s not something you’ve ever experienced then it’s hard to describe exactly how it feels. It’s sort of like chewing Juicy Fruit and sticking your nose in a jelly jar. Except Lilac. Just let that sink in for a second.

  I let one of my eyes open about a quarter of the way when nothing happened.

  As soon as I realized what was happening, both eyes shot open and I let out a very, very brief scream before the ginormous bear-thing silenced me with a bear hug, and then a big, sloppy kiss right on the side of my face.

  If the smell was terrifying, the kiss was… this is going to sound really, really weird, but it was at the same time, horrific and endearing?

  “What the hell is this?” I spluttered. “Who is… what’s… I can’t… ah!”

  He kissed me again and again, mercilessly assaulting me with what I can only imagine was more love than most humans were ever built to withstand.

  “HELLO!” he repeated, when he was finally finished, and set me down on the ground, feet first.

  “Atlas! Where are you? Oh no, no, no, I’m gonna get in so much trouble if you—”

  An old man wearing a wide-open Hawaiian shirt featuring hula girls and 1957 Chevrolet silhouettes, came running up. His beard flew behind him like a cape. It was filled with chicken feet, little metal things that looked like thimbles, and a bunch of quarters—like the coins—with holes drilled in them all braided in the enormous gray mass, and when he skidded to a halt, I noticed he was carrying a cane which he only started to lean on when he saw me looking at the unused walking stick.

  “He didn’t do anything awful, did he?” the old man asked. “Atlas! How many times do I have to tell you? Don’t assault new people with kisses!”

  “What is he?” I asked. Grave, Wild, Craze and the cubs were all helplessly staring at the enormous thing. “Wait, is he sewn together?”

  From down the road that moments before brought us this wonderfully bizarre love bear, a cloud of dust appeared, rolling toward us. The rumble of an incredibly loud engine hit my ears a split-second later, and just after that, the gangly old man became nearly distraught. He wrung his hands, got handfuls of beard, and started shaking them and twisting it up like a big, hairy handcuff. “I had one job, one damn job and—wait, why are you hugging him?”