by Vaughn, V.
“Sheriff Monroe is a servant of this town, and my taxes pay his salary. We’ll print a special edition today and get this out as soon as we can. I’m not going to let one of the national papers pick this one up before us.”
My dad lived in constant fear of being scooped. It should have been amusing, but in this instance, it wasn’t. I felt sick.
“You listening to me, Maren?”
I realized that I hadn’t heard his last several sentences. “I’m looking for my car keys,” I said to avoid his question.
There was a heavy sigh on the other end of the phone. “I thought you were over all that. It’s been ten years.”
I was glad that my dad wasn’t there to see the heat that I felt rising in my cheeks. “I don’t know what you are talking about.”
“If the Greyelf Grizzly clan has to make a succession call, then there is a chance that he’ll come back. We both know that, so you better get ready for it.”
“He who?” I made my voice as neutral as possible, as if I had no idea whatsoever what he was talking about.
“Don’t do that. I may be old, but I’m not blind, deaf, or dumb. I know that boy broke your heart, but I would hope that you’d have outgrown your schoolgirl crush and moved on by now. Especially knowing his background.”
This was definitely a train of conversation that I had no intention of following. It was far better to let sleeping dogs lie. “I couldn’t care less about Lukas Kasper, Dad. You’re right. It has been ten years, and I’d practically forgotten he even existed.”
“The Grizzlies keep a lot of that succession business inside the Clan, but I know that Lukas hasn’t resigned his claim,” Dad said. “It’s been a bit of a bone of contention between Markus and the sheriff for years. He told me once when he’d had a few too many shots a couple of years back.” Magda Pern wasn’t the only one who got around in the gossip circles.
“I gotta go,” I said. “I want to beat the ambulance there if I can.”
“Call me as soon as you know anything,” Dad said. “I want as much information as we can get ready to go for an afternoon edition.”
I hung up the phone and stared at it for a minute. Lukas Kasper. A ghost from my past—one I hadn’t thought I’d ever have to confront again, because he left Greyelf ten years ago. There was no indication in all that time that he planned on ever coming back. He had hated it here. If there was anything that was ingrained in my memories of Lukas more than anything else, it was his extreme dislike for anything and everything about our picturesque small town.
I had already hit the remote start on my car while I was getting dressed, so by the time I settled myself behind the wheel, my butt already felt the warmth of the seat heater. That one thing was an absolute necessity for braving the arctic Minnesota winters. You never stayed outside any longer than you had to, and when you did, you had to make those excursions out into the chilled air as comfortable as possible.
Turning the ignition, I looked into the rearview mirror. The street behind me was empty. As I swung my truck around, I hit the brakes. A large black bear stood directly in the middle of the road, staring at me. It swung its massive head toward me in a display of annoyance and then lumbered to the other side of the street before continuing down the slight slope to disappear into the tree line. My heart skipped another beat. I counted to ten, but the bear didn’t reappear. I took a deep breath and gently put my foot down on the gas once again.
Twenty-five minutes later, I slid the truck into a parking spot outside the emergency room at Fulton County Hospital. It was the only hospital within a hundred miles of Greyelf, and I knew that this was where the ambulance would bring Markus.
Markus was sixteen years older than his younger brother, Lukas. I remember always being intimidated by him whenever he was home. Even then, he had the polish of a young politician, and he took his role as facilitator of the shifter-human treaties very seriously. When everything went down with the negotiation of the peace treaty between the shifter clans, Markus had seemed to be the only one qualified to step in and lead. He was the calming voice of logic and reason. He brought structure to the chaos. And in the eighteen years since then, he had led the Grizzly Clan to prosperous and peaceful times while also being a national figure of hope for shifters everywhere.
No one understood how Markus and Lukas could possibly be related. They couldn’t be more opposite. Lukas was rash, loud, and quick to anger. I think that Markus had spent more than half his time cleaning up after messes of Lukas’s making. For all the admiration the town showered on Markus, they heaped equal amounts of impatience and annoyance on his younger brother.
As I stared at the entrance to the emergency room, I wondered again if even this tragedy would be enough to bring Lukas back to Greyelf. His decision to leave had been a complete surprise to me. It had come on the heels of a particularly bitter argument with Markus. I often wondered if Markus felt any remorse for the fact that he drove his brother away.
“Even my own brother wants to get rid of me.” The hurt in Lukas’s voice had been enough to shatter my eighteen-year-old soul. I had offered him the only comfort that I knew how to give at the time to make him feel like he belonged here in Greyelf, and then he was gone.
“Bastard,” I said to the empty air around me. I wiped away the tear that had traveled down my cheek. I grabbed my bag and swung the door open. I was here for the job. Markus Kasper had been a pillar of Greyelf’s community, and people needed to know the truth about what happened to him. That was how I played my part. The rest of the drama was irrelevant. And if Lukas Kasper was stupid enough to show his face again, I would spit in it.
I quickly made my way toward the entrance and let those beautiful green eyes slide from my mind.
Chapter 2
I shouldn’t have been surprised to find that I wasn’t the first one to arrive at the hospital. Magda no doubt put out the call on the Greyelf grapevine, and the community had responded in force. I saw Reverend Jones in the corner, talking in hushed tones with Bea Kramer. Bea ran the general store on Main Street. She was also the reason that Markus and Lukas Kasper were in Greyelf to begin with. After their parents died, Bea was their only blood relative. She suggested that Markus bring Lukas somewhere quiet and more stable. I personally thought that Markus had likely just been relieved to have another set of hands to help with the impulsive behavior of his hell-raising little brother. Even then, Lukas had been a handful.
I saw Bea look up as I walked through the doors. I gave her a small nod, and her face scrunched up, and a round of fresh tears began to mark her cheeks. I quickly made my way over to the other side of the room and tried to think of a reason for me to be there other than the obvious one. She lived just a few doors down from my father, but relations had been strained between our families since before Lukas hightailed it out of Greyelf. My father blamed Lukas for my broken heart, although I had tried to hide it from him. That was after berating Bea on more than one occasion for letting Lukas run loose all over town.
The rest of the crowd included several members of the Grizzly Clan that I knew only by sight. I didn’t run in shifter circles, and although things were friendly enough between the humans and the shifters in Greyelf, we all tended to stick with our own kind for the most part. The one time that I hadn’t observed that rule, I had been bitten in the ass.
I was an interloper and an outsider here. I knew it, and they knew it. But I was Earl Lene’s daughter, and it made perfect sense to me why the wily old man sent me to the hospital. If he had shown up, he would have been kicked back out on his ass. The shifters were just barely tolerant of my dad and the stories that he published about their ways. If they suspected the truth, I doubt any of them would ever speak to him again. My dad had been meticulously collecting research and information about each of the individual shifter clans for years. His planned legacy, before he died, was to publish the formative reference guide to the shifter lifestyle.
I had lived in town since I was ten. Most peop
le had watched me grow up here, and so there was an inherent trust that came from being one of “them.” I was always respectful of my sources and fair in my stories. On those that were more controversial, I was fine letting my dad take the byline. I had gone into journalism because that was what he wanted, and, at the time, I was pretty listless. I didn’t have a plan. I didn’t have a clue. After high school graduation, I had been left with little more than a shattered heart and barely the will to get out of bed in the morning. Sending me off to college for four years was probably one of the best things that my dad had ever done for me, but I didn’t think that writing for the town paper was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.
I set my bag in a chair but didn’t pull anything out. Not yet. I smoothed my palms down the front of my jeans and wished that I’d thought to put on a little bit of makeup before I ran out the door. “Little Maren Lene with her mop of unruly red curls.” I swear I had that comment tattooed somewhere on my ass from as many times as had I heard it.
I turned around and then purposely made my way to Bea Kramer’s side. She was taking a few deep gulps of air, and the minister held her hand. I saw his inquisitive look as I approached.
“I’m so sorry, Ms. Kramer,” I said in a hushed tone. “I heard about what happened to Markus.”
I saw her eyes blink before they focused on me. “Maren? What are you doing here?”
“I heard about the accident on the police scanner,” I said, avoiding the direct line of questioning. “Do they know what happened yet?”
“Bear trap,” she choked. “Why he was up there at all, though, I have no idea.”
“Shulman’s Trail is the border for the Loper Clan, right?” I hated myself for inserting myself into this woman’s life like this, but there was no way that Dad was going to let me off the hook without something. I just needed a few breadcrumbs, and then I could slink out of there like the buzzard I was. “Maybe he was supposed to meet someone up there?”
“He wouldn’t have been meeting any Lopers,” Bea said, shaking her head. “Everything is kept under wraps until the Summit.”
My ears perked up. “It could have been a secret meeting, then. It just doesn’t make any sense why he was up there otherwise.”
“Why are you here, Maren?” The minister returned the focus to the original question. “I didn’t realize that you were a friend of the family.” His flat tone told me that he knew exactly why I was there and that it wasn’t to act as a supportive pillar of the community. I was ferreting out information for a story. I still cursed Lukas for talking me into toilet papering the rectory that summer when we were fourteen. The minister hadn’t looked on me kindly ever since.
“I’ve known the Kaspers since we moved to Greyelf,” I said defensively. “I practically lived in the general store’s back lot when I was little. I always admired Markus, and I’m incredibly sorry to hear about this tragedy.” I felt myself growing more indignant by the second, because all of it was true. Never mind if it wasn’t the real reason I was there. It sounded good.
“I thought that all ended when Lukas moved away.” One of the other men in the room stepped forward. I swung around to him and realized that he looked familiar. Joe? Mike? Ben? I couldn’t remember his name to save my life, which was yet another reason that I sometimes questioned my career choice these days.
If there was one thing that I knew, it was when to beat a retreat before things got ugly. I was supposed to tell the story, not be the story. “I’m sorry again for your loss,” I said to Bea, ducking my head. Then I stepped away. The group closed in around Bea as if to protect her from me, and I heard the murmuring.
“You’d think they’d give people space to breathe.”
“Fucking jackals.”
Yep, that was me and my life. I scooped up my purse. Then I wandered over to the other side of the reception desk. There was a coffee machine there in the corner, and I figured I’d grab one for the road. I tried to avoid caffeine pretty much all the time, given my natural insomniac tendencies, but the long drive back to Greyelf at this hour seemed to call for it. My dad was going to be pissed that I didn’t have a direct quote from Bea, but at least I had the nugget that something might be amiss with all of this.
It had been bothering me since the moment I heard that it was Markus up on Shulman’s Trail. Even though the county had finally gotten around to putting asphalt down last summer, I would always remember it as little more than a muddy path that stretched across the National Park Reserve that served as the northern border for Greyelf proper. That was part of the reason that we saw so many shifters in these parts. We lived on the edge of the largest growth of natural woods in the state. It rivaled most national parks in the country, outside of Yosemite, and so it had naturally become a focus for shifters over the years.
I wasn’t surprised to hear Bea say that Markus wouldn’t have been meeting with Lopers unless he had to. There had been a lot of tension between the two clans ever since the original peace treaty eighteen years ago. There were many who believed that Markus should step down and give someone else a try at organizing and keeping the peace between the clans. Personally, I thought Markus had been doing a fantastic job and never understood why the Lopers wanted to upset the apple cart.
I had a bad feeling about Markus’s accident, but it was also the feeling that told me that this was exactly the kind of thing that made for a good story. I cursed the fact that Earl’s blood ran through my veins. I shouldn’t be thinking like that. I was a human being with compassion and empathy. So why was I scooting a few inches closer to the reception desk when I heard the words “shifter accident” drift from the two women ensconced in a whispered conversation behind the desk?
I carefully took a small notepad out of my pocket and started flipping through it as I waited for the old coffee machine to dispense my drink. The whirling and churning noises inside it made it sound as if the thing were on its last legs. I knew that Bea and the rest of the clan members gathered on the other side of the desk wouldn’t be able to see that I was still there. I’d give it just a few more minutes to see if I heard anything else of interest. There wasn’t really any harm in that, right?
“I heard that he was out there for three hours before a car went by and saw him on the side of the road,” one of the women whispered. “He had dragged the trap with him because he couldn’t get out of it. If he hadn’t had the fur to protect him from hypothermia, he would have died practically right away.”
“I heard there was something weird about his fur on the back of his neck,” the other woman whispered just as earnestly. I started to scribble frantically in my notebook. “The driver told me. They brought him in the back, you know. They didn’t want to draw any attention to it because he was still half shifted.” The woman made it sound as if Markus was some kind of mutant.
I felt torn again. I shouldn’t be listening to this. I shouldn’t even be there. I should be at home, curled up in my bed, trying to sleep, just like every other night of the week. I needed to tell Dad that I didn’t want to take over the paper when he retired in a few years. But what else was I going to do in Greyelf? Wait tables at Croseley’s Diner? Help pick bolts and screws at Lehman’s Hardware? The employment options were slim pickings around town. I felt miserable as the desk phone rang, and the conversation stopped as one of the women answered it.
Flipping my notebook closed, I figured I had enough to see what corroborated whatever Dad was gleaning from Sheriff Monroe. As my feet turned toward the sliding glass doors, I saw him. I whirled back around, sloshing coffee all over the front of my sweater. I hissed at the pain but quickly moved deeper into the room.
Please tell me he didn’t see me. Please tell me he didn’t see me. The words played desperately in my head.
“Maren?”
I wanted to disappear off the face of the earth. It was a voice that haunted my dreams often, even now. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. Then I turned and met the jade-green eyes that I remembered
all too well.
“Lukas,” I said stiffly. I could see the worry lines on his face. It was a face that had grown even more handsome in the last ten years. His skin was tanned, and I couldn’t help but notice his broad shoulders that appeared to be stretching the limits of the simple green button-down shirt he wore. His dark blue jeans hugged his trim waist, but what was most impressive was his height. Both Lukas and Markus had always been tall, but as I looked up at him, I realized that he had to have grown at least another three or four inches since I last saw him. Didn’t he have even enough grace to have gotten uglier with age instead of better looking? Then I remembered with a start why he’d be there, and, of course, I felt my stomach churn once again.
“I’m so sorry to hear about what happened,” I said lamely.
His jaw tightened. “What did happen?”
Why was he asking me? I wasn’t friend or family, which the group on the other side of the reception desk had not-so-gently pointed out to me.
“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “It happened up on Shulman’s Trail.”
“Isn’t that Loper territory?”
I wondered how much Lukas had kept abreast of the goings-on in Greyelf. “It’s a boundary line now,” I said. “Has been for about five years.”
Lukas ran a hand through his thick black hair. “I don’t even know how to process all of this.”
He seemed different to me. Older and more mature for sure, but it was unsettling how quickly we seemed to be falling back into our old pattern. Lukas would run into some situation that he couldn’t deal with, and he’d show up on my doorstep, expecting me to help him navigate through it. And I had done that for years. Always the friend. Always the one he complained to when he got in trouble. Always the one he ranted and raved to when some girl broke his heart because she didn’t want to be associated with a shifter. Lukas always chased the human girls for some reason. All of the human girls except the one who wanted him back.