by T. J. Klune
For my little brother, Marcus:
I’d be nothing without you.
S’up, girl?
And to all of you who love these guys
almost as much as I do.
This one is for you.
First, for Bear and the Kid: I sought my soul, but my soul I could not see. I sought my God, but my God eluded me. I sought my brother, and I found all three.
—Author Unknown
Second, for Bear and Otter: Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.
—Emily Brontë
Third, for their family and for families everywhere: Families are like fudge—mostly sweet with a few nuts.
—Author Unknown
Prologue
Or, Where Bear Reveals The Truth
I’VE lied to you from the beginning, and for that, I’m sorry.
My name is Bear McKenna, and I’m in a shitload of trouble.
“It didn’t have to come to this,” Otter growls, the barrel of the gun he’s pointing at me like a gaping black tunnel. “You should have just left it alone, Bear!”
I glare at him, this man who I thought loved me, but who, in the end, betrayed me like no other had done before. I take another step back, and my right foot slips off the edge of the rooftop we stand on, the street below at least eight hundred feet down. Blood trickles down from the cut on my face where he’d caught me off guard, right after I’d discovered who he really was. How did I not know? That this man, my man, was not who he seemed?
“How long?” I snarl at him. “How long have you been working for the FBI hunting my kind? Was any of this real? Did you ever care about me at all?”
This causes pain to cloud his hard face, and his eyes grow dark. The gun pointed at my head begins to shake. There’s doubt in him, and my breath catches in my throat. Maybe… just maybe….
“I was recruited right out of high school,” he says as he begins to pace, the gun still pointed at me. “I was told that there were things in this world, things that defied belief, and that they were dangerous, and we had to stop them. They said I had an extraordinary aptitude for everything I did, and I was a perfect candidate for a new division of the FBI. I was trained to find these things… and to stop them.”
“What things?” I snap at him, needing him to say it, needing to be sure.
He stops, and I hear him take a ragged breath before he whispers: “Were-Bears.”
Shit. So he does know.
I didn’t get my nickname as I’d told you before. I got it because of what I was, what I could become. I discovered at a very early age that I was a shifter, a being capable of turning from human form into that of an animal. You’ve probably heard all the shifter lore before, but I’m here to tell you it’s all bullshit. There’s no such thing as Werewolves, or Were-Panthers, or Were-Giraffes. Only Were-Bears actually exist, and we are slowly dying out, our kind hunted almost to the point of extinction. The Council of the Bears had called an emergency session to try and curb the tide against us, but I was unable to get there in time, seeing as how my supposed boyfriend had suddenly become the hunter and trapped me here on this rooftop.
Thunder explodes overhead. Lightning flashes.
“I trusted you!” I shout at him as rain begins to fall from the darkened sky. “You are my—” But I stop myself before I make the biggest mistake of all. He can’t know what he is to me, not if he’s to stay safe.
But this is Otter, and I should know better. “I am your what?” he asks me, taking another step closer.
It seems despite my resolve, I can deny him nothing. “You are my mate,” I say miserably. “A Were-Bear is destined to be with only one person, one person who understands him completely, whose biological makeup completes the bear. It’s next to impossible to actually find one’s mate, but I found you. Somehow the Bear God saw fit to give me you. It was always you.”
“I knew it,” he breathes. “I knew there was something….”
I shake my head, trying to clear out the hope starting to crowd in my mind. “It doesn’t matter,” I whisper. “You’re a part of the FBI’s secret side agency: People for the Execution of Terrestrial Abnormalities. I knew it the moment I saw your PETA badge!”
“Bear, you don’t understand!” Otter says as he lowers his gun and rushes to me. My Were-Bear instincts threaten to take over, wanting to maul him and shred the skin from his bones, and then hibernate for three to six months in a cave on a nest of grass and leaves while my stored body fat keeps me alive through the winter. But I look up into the gold-green, the eyes of my mate, and the rain falls down around us, and I can’t maul him any more than I can turn him away. “You don’t understand!” he says again. “I’m not what you think I am, either!”
“You’re not?” I whisper as he kisses my forehead gently.
“No,” he says, taking a step back. “I only agreed to go into PETA because I knew I could keep tabs on what they were doing from the inside. You see, I know what you are. I’ve known for a long time. Because… because I’ve been keeping a secret too.”
“What?” I ask, chills racing down my spine. “What is it?”
“I’m a Were too,” he says, setting his gun down onto the ground. “Bear, there aren’t just Were-Bears in the world. Werewolves are bullshit, but there are others. I….”
“Tell me!”
He closes his eyes and raises his face toward the sky. “I… am a Were-Otter.” Then, as if my night couldn’t get any stranger, Otter’s skin suddenly begins to shift and tremble, fine brown hairs sprouting from his arms as he shrinks. Muscles and bone snap and creak as they shorten, and within seconds, Otter the man is gone, and from a pile of clothes crawls out a fat brown otter. He waddles over to me and sits up on his haunches, his nose twitching as I fall to my knees.
“Otter?” I whisper. “You’re… an otter?”
Yes, I hear him say in my head, his voice a caress. I’ve always been a Were-Otter.
“Why didn’t you just tell me?” I ask, my voice hoarse. “Don’t you know how alone I was? Even with you there, I felt so alone because I couldn’t tell you my greatest secret!”
Otter looks at me sadly, his whiskers drooping. I just wanted to keep you safe. If they had found out about you, you would have been taken from me. And I’m not just talking about PETA.
“Who?” I ask, not wanting to know the answer. A loud crack of thunder rolls out of the sky.
His nose twitches in my direction, and for a moment, I wonder if he is trying to smell me. I think that’s very weird. The Clan of Otters, he says. There was a prophecy foretold generations ago that there would be a union between a Were-Bear and a Were-Otter, and it would unite the two groups. But Otters are fiercely territorial and have since been trying to negate the prophecy so we don’t have to share our underwater dens. Bear… there’s something you should know: you are my mate too. And the prophecy… is about us.
“No,” I whisper. “It can’t be.”
Otter falls back to his feet and waddles back to his clothes. It is true, he thinks back at me. And I have the proof right here. Bear, what I am about to show you has never been seen outside of the Clan of Otters. I risked my life to get this, in case a moment like this arose, where I needed to make you believe. But first, shifting always drains me, and I need to eat to regain my strength. Otter pulls a clam out of his coat pocket and rolls over onto his back, placing the shellfish on his stomach.
“What the hell are you doing?” I growl.
I am an otter. We eat clams off our bellies. It’s how it’s always been.
“We don’t have time for this!”
All done. Here… take a look at this and—
&n
bsp; But that’s all he’s able to get out. The rooftop door suddenly opens, and men in full Kevlar race out onto the building, automatic rifles pointed at each of us. Otter shifts back into his human form, standing naked between me and the gunmen. “Whatever happens,” he says quietly to me, “I need you to trust me. Can you do that, Bear?”
Can I? This man is everything to me, but everything I knew about him was a lie. But even I, the Crown Royal Prince of the Were-Bears, cannot deny my mate. “I trust you,” I whisper. I feel him shiver against me, my words causing gooseflesh to ripple across his skin.
Then the leader of PETA walks out onto the rooftop.
I should have known. I’d heard stories about how sadistic the guy in charge was, and I should have put two and two together. I haven’t seen him since a year or so ago, when he discovered my identity and we last battled, but he hasn’t changed at all, not really. That grin is still the same.
“Finally,” Tyson McKenna says, twirling his handlebar mustache. “I have you both right where I want you.” He cackles maniacally.
“Nice eyepatch, Kid,” I snap at him. “It’s certainly an improvement.”
The Kid reaches up and rubs the patch covering the right socket where his eye used to be, a remnant from our last fight. I’d ripped the eye from its socket while in my bear form, and his screams had been long and loud. “You’ll pay for your transgressions, Bear,” the Kid shouts, “and pay dearly you shall! You have nowhere to run. My men have this place surrounded! You are now my prisoners, and you’ll come back with me to the underground PETA lair, where I’ll perform dastardly experimentations and will finally glean the secrets of the Were-Bear and Were-Otter! The world will forever remember what PETA and I have done this night! The world will be mine!”
“I’ll never let you have him!” Otter hisses. “Bear is mine!”
The Kid cackles again. “Oh yes, I’d forgotten you were mates. Such a trivial thing, love is. It can bring even the greatest man to his knees.” He looks darkly amused as he glances between us. “Have you told him yet, Otter? Have you told Bear your final secret?”
“Kid,” Otter warns, “you leave that out of this!”
“Bear, you should know this before you are separated from your mate, never to see each other again.”
“Kid!” Otter shouts. “Don’t do this!”
“When a Were-Bear and Were-Otter are destined to be mates, such as is written in the Prophecy of Otter-Se-Ra, the otter is biologically endowed with the capability… to become pregnant.”
Lightning flashes overhead.
“You’re pregnant?” I whisper to Otter.
He nods sadly. “With a litter of Otter-Bears.” He presses my hand against his distended stomach. “There are sixteen of them,” he sighs. “And you’re the father.”
“I just thought you were getting fat,” I say, feeling a kick against my palm, the little life inside my mate.
“Fat with my love for you,” he whispers as he gazes into my eyes.
“I can’t let any harm come to you and my babies,” I tell him. And with that, I pull him off the edge of the building.
As we fall through the night air, the rain slashing against our faces, the Kid screaming from somewhere up above, I shift into the Great Grizzly that is my Were-Bear form. My arms and legs explode in muscle and hair, the claws stretching into wicked three-inch black hooks. My face elongates and my snout picks up a billion different scents in the air. But then my royal heritage reveals itself as wings unfurl from my sides, catching the wind and lifting us up.
“You can fly?” Otter shouts over the rushing cacophony around us.
Yes, I think at him. And I can breathe fire. I open my jaws, and a great flaming gout shoots out of my mouth, causing the rain around us to hiss as it evaporates.
“I can’t wait to have our babies,” he says to me, stroking my ears.
Me either, I think at him. Otter, I lo—
“THIS is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” the Kid says, scowling at me and interrupting my epic story. He sits up in his bed, the covers falling down at his sides. “Bears don’t have wings!”
“Fat with my love for you?” Otter says incredulously from his spot next to me on the Kid’s bed. “You made me pregnant and said I was fat with my love for you?”
“What the hell are you guys talking about?” I ask, feeling insulted. “That was getting really good!”
“If by good you mean not good, then, yes, it was getting very good,” the Kid retorts.
“You made me a pregnant shifting otter!” Otter yelps.
“Whatever,” I say as I roll my eyes. “Mrs. Paquinn told me that shifter stories are more popular than any other subgenre and that I should try to cash in on them.”
“I think if you’re going all the way down to subgenres to start with, then you have a problem already,” the Kid says. “Besides, aren’t those stories all pretty much the same? Be careful, Bear. You wouldn’t want anyone accusing you of copying someone else. Trust me: there’s a few people on the Internet who have way too much time on their hands.”
He’s got a point there.
His eyes flash. “And I won’t have you besmirching the good name of PETA! Although,” he concedes, “my evil mustache was a big selling point. And I liked the eyepatch. Can I get an eyepatch?”
“Do you want me to be pregnant?” Otter asks me. “Is that all I am to you? A baby factory?”
I ignore him and look at the Kid. “Well, if you hadn’t so rudely interrupted what is obviously a masterpiece in the making, you’d have found out that you also had a robot arm and dark secrets of your own. But since you stopped me, you’ll never, ever know what those secrets are. It’s time to go to sleep.”
The Kid rolls his eyes. “What secrets? Like I would have had an evil twin brother or something? Lame.”
“No,” I say, even though that was totally it. Dammit. I thought it sounded cool. “Bedtime.”
“Well, I did like how I was in charge of PETA, even if you made it evil.” He yawns and falls back onto his pillow. “Can you leave the light on low? I’m still not used to the new house.” I nod and flip the lamp to its lowest setting and kiss him gently on the forehead. The Kid is out even before I shut the door behind us.
As soon as we’re in our bedroom, Otter spins me around and shoves me face-first up against the wall, holding my hands above my head, pressing his body up against mine and grinding wonderfully into my hip. “I’ll show you pregnant,” he growls near my ear as he licks the nape of my neck.
“That sounds so wrong when you say it like that,” I manage to whimper before his other hand is down the back of my jeans and doing neat things to my ass.
Huh. If this is the reaction I get to one of my stories made up on the fly, maybe I should be a writer after all. Or something. I can’t quite seem to focus right now, and what was I saying? What were we talking about?
Shit.
Here we go again.
1.
Where Bear Goes to War
WE WERE at war, he and I.
I’d inadvertently fired the opening salvo on the day forever known as the Big Move (It’s About Time). It was not intentional, but I’ve learned that maybe the first shots never really are. Of course it wasn’t intentional; who in their right mind would want to face the wrath of the smartest nine-year-old vegetarian ecoterrorist-in-training on the planet?
Not I. Much greater men than I have fallen to him.
It was one of the last boxes in the apartment, and there were only a few things left to pack. I’d gone into the bedroom to make sure we’d gotten everything, that nothing was left behind. It’d startled me, if only for a moment, to see how empty the room was: divots on the floors showing where bedposts had rested for years. Faint outlines of posters on the walls. A stain in the corner that I just knew wasn’t going to allow me to get the damn deposit back (and I really didn’t want to know what it was; it was a greenish-bluish thing that screamed “bad tenants.” I thought maybe I s
hould at least try to clean it, but it looked too gross, so I just left it alone). I was struck, oddly, by a sense of sadness at the empty space before me. I don’t adapt to change very well, even if it’s a good thing. So much had happened here, so much that had changed everything about our lives, that it seemed important that I stop and at least send up a grateful thank-you to who’d ever take it.
So I was distracted, okay? It wasn’t intentional. I swear.
I noticed something light blue near the closet. A shirt that somehow had gotten missed. I picked it up, rolling my eyes at the MEAT ISN’T NEAT slogan across the front. I don’t know how the hell he’d missed this; it was literally the most favorite thing he owned. Well, that and the random collection of other shirts he started ordering online with my credit card (once he’d learned that all it took was punching in the numbers into the website and he could order whatever he wanted—you’d have thought that Jesus had come back and told him that vegetarians are the next step in human evolution; he’d been that excited.) Every few days a new box would show up at our door, containing shirts with such winners as GIVE ME TOFU OR GIVE ME DEATH or one with Gandhi’s face and his quote underneath: “You can judge a society by the way it treats its animals.” That one had made me feel a little guilty. And way creeped out, because Gandhi’s eyes seemed to follow me everywhere, like he knew, just knew I was thinking about pulled pork.
But it was when that last one had come that I had to draw the line. Imagine, if you will, sitting down for breakfast one randomly bright and sunny morning, and your little brother walks into a room wearing a shirt that says WANT LONGER LASTING SEX? BECOME A VEGETARIAN! Seriously? Come on. Seriously!
I was in the middle of saying something to Otter when the little shit walked into the kitchen, pretending not to notice me noticing him. My spoon had dropped from my hand and clattered onto the table, and Otter had followed my line of sight as the blood drained from my face and my jaw dropped open. And did that big bastard help me? You bet your ass he didn’t. Otter started bellowing great gales of laughter and pounding the table with his gigantic paws, causing it to rattle and shake. I glared at him for a moment and then looked back and waited for He Who Was About To Have His Internet Privileges Seriously Revoked Forever to turn around.