Babysitter Bear

by Zoe Chant

  "You really shouldn't be here, you know," he said, gripping her hands. "It might not be safe."

  "She wouldn't stay at home," the dark-haired man said, looking briefly exasperated.

  Loretta stepped on his foot. "I'll be fine. It's not the first time I've dealt with a dangerous enemy, don't forget. Besides, I'll have an entire room full of big strong shifters to protect me. What could possibly go wrong?"

  "You're shifters?" Paula asked cautiously.

  "Oh, right," Ben said. "Yeah, this is my dad, Darius. He's a dragon. My stepmom Loretta is human."

  Paula came over to greet Loretta. The two of them clearly hit it off immediately.

  "Your sister and her mate are with us," Darius said. "In fact, there they are now."

  The door opened again. This time it was a dark-haired woman accompanied by a huge blond man. The woman's resemblance to Ben was clear, even before she ran to him and hugged him.

  "Melody," Ben sighed. "I'd feel better if you were out of this."

  "Too bad," Melody said cheerfully. "The kids are with Mom. She seems to be enjoying the opportunity to play Grandma Esme."

  "And what do you turn into?" Paula asked, not one to mince words.

  "Dragon," Melody said brightly, pointing to herself. She pointed to her blond mate. "That's Gunnar. He turns into a bear."

  Dan gave Gunnar a slight nod, and got an equally slight nod back.

  This was starting to feel more like a family reunion than a trap for a dangerous enemy.

  "They're coming!" Derek called from the door, and just like that, the mood in the room turned deadly serious.

  Dan looked at Paula. She nodded and took Loretta by the hand. The two human women stepped back to the kitchen doorway, where they could keep themselves behind the shifters.

  A moment later, the door opened, and the griffins walked in.

  There were three of them, all dressed in long dark coats as if they were trying to be deliberately inconspicuous and had somehow ended up looking like TV secret agents instead. One was Sunglasses, with his sunglasses firmly in place. The others were a woman and a man. Both were redheads and bore a visible resemblance to Terry.

  They all stopped at the sight of the group waiting for them.

  It was, Dan had to admit, both intimidating and strange. Darius looked like a bodybuilder turned Fortune 500 CEO. Melody had stepped up next to him, slim and pale and pretty, dwarfed by her massive mate. Ben was on Gunnar's other side, with Dan beside him. They formed a line, roughly ranged in front of Paula and Loretta. Terry was in the middle.

  Derek strolled over to close the door, and quietly flipped the lock.

  There was a tense, waiting silence.

  Then the red-haired man said calmly, "What kind of game are you playing, Tyr?"

  "Uncle Adan." Terry's voice was tight as wire. "I go by Terry here."

  "Is this some kind of attempt to intimidate us?" Sunglasses sneered.

  "Oh, knock it off, cuz," Terry said. "You're a dick and you always were a dick, even back when we were kids. Being an enforcer doesn't make you special."

  Adan sighed. "Just come with us, Tyr."

  Terry shook his head. He folded his arms and straightened his back, and Dan felt a reluctant respect for him. It had to be hard to stand up to your family like that. "I'm not going back with you."

  "You talk like you think have a choice about it," the woman said. "It's how things are done."

  "Not for me," Terry said. "Not anymore."

  Dan spoke up then. "You heard him give you his decision. Now it's time for you to leave this town and never come back."

  His voice carried through the room. Terry fell silent, and Dan realized that everyone was looking at him now—not just the griffins, but everyone on Dan's side of the room as well.

  He hadn't been prepared to speak for them.

  But he was Paula's mate. Defending her was his responsibility and his joy.

  "Look who's talking," Adan said calmly. "A one-armed man. Are we supposed to be afraid of you?"

  "I don't care if you're afraid," Dan said. "I just want you gone. Time to have a look at what you're up against." He turned, with a slight smile, to the other shifters. "Derek?"

  Derek Ruger growled low in his throat. He shed his shirt, and his bear erupted out of him, thudding down on massive grizzly paws.

  This triggered an eruption of shifting all around the room. Terry shifted first, going from human to griffin with a gliding economy of motion. Ben shifted into a panther, lean and black. Gunnar followed a moment later. His bear was a huge white polar bear.

  And then Darius shifted.

  Dan knew that dragon shifters existed, but he had never seen a full-grown one before. The only dragon he had met personally was cute little Skye.

  Darius was huge. His great coiling body expanded to fill most of the floor space of the diner. He was polished silver, like hammered steel, covered in overlapping plates of metallic silver armor. His neck arched over the assembled group, and his head dipped until the tip of his muzzle was almost touching the human-form griffins. He opened his mouth slightly, displaying a gleaming row of teeth.

  Melody shifted too. She was a much smaller dragon, about half Darius's size, and her metallic scales were a silver so pale that she was nearly white. If Darius was steel, Melody was platinum. Her silvery coils spilled over Darius's. There was barely room to stand.

  For the first time, the griffins looked intimidated. There was a bear at their backs and dragon coils all around them. The griffins not only didn't have room to fight, they didn't even have room to shift. He hadn't quite realized how much of the space the dragons were going to take up.

  "Now that we've got your attention ..." Darius said in a deep, rumbling voice that seemed to vibrate the tiles underfoot.

  Surrounded by huge predators, backed up in every sense of the word, Dan stepped forward. He didn't shift, but he let his inner animal rise inside him, showing in his eyes.

  "This is our town," he said. "You have your secret griffin islands. We have this town. It's off limits to you just as yours is almost certainly off limits to us. But this is ours. The people who live here are ours. If you stay on your island, we won't bother you, but if you come around looking for trouble, trouble is what you'll get."

  Darius growled. It vibrated the counters and rattled dishes in the kitchen. Then he very lightly set his enormous teeth on Adan's shoulder.

  Adan didn't twitch a hair. Sunglasses was frozen, and the woman seemed tensed on the edge of a shift.

  This was when it would go wrong if it was going to, Dan thought. He had dealt with enough tense situations, in the military and as a bouncer, to know that people nearly always backed down if you got in their face with sufficient authority and backed it up with a show of strength. But there were always those few who had to prove a point, or the ones who didn't realize they couldn't win even if the odds were stacked impossibly against them.

  The tension stretched. No one moved.

  Then Adan said tightly, "Shift, Tyr, and give me your arm."

  Terry ruffled his wings and, after a moment, he shifted back to human and stepped forward. He seemed to know what was happening, even if Dan didn't, because he pushed up his sleeve and wordlessly presented the arm with the tattoo.

  Dan became aware of Paula nudging up to his side, glancing all around nervously at the big predator shifters. To Dan, she murmured, "Do we stop this?"

  "I think he knows what he's doing," Dan murmured back.

  Adan's fingers blurred and shifted into claws. Dan had never seen a shifter do that before, not without shifting their entire bodies. He wondered if it was something only griffins could do, or if all shifters could learn to do it.

  Terry braced his wrist with his other hand.

  Dan could see where this was going, where it must be going, but it was still a shock when Adan's claws slashed through the tattoo, leaving a line of gleaming blood behind. Terry barely flinched, but as the blood welled up rapidly and drippe
d off his fingers, he pressed his hand over the injury and took a step back.

  "You are exiled from the covert," Adan said, his voice cool. "Stay here with your humans and outsiders. If you return, we will kill you."

  There was no expression on his face. Sunglasses looked smugly pleased, and the woman was visibly distressed, but neither of them said anything.

  "And you'll leave," Dan said. "You'll never return, and you won't bother anyone here."

  Adan gave his hand a brisk shake, restoring the normal human fingers. "First, it seems that we still have a slight problem. Tyr's tattoo prevents him from speaking of us, even in its current state."

  Terry looked up, grimacing, from his blood-slick fingers wrapped around his wrist.

  "But we have no such guarantee with the rest of you," Adan continued smoothly. "And you clearly know about us."

  "Oh, who are we going to tell?" Paula burst out. "You people are so worried about secrecy, but we don't know where you are, we don't know how to find you, and if we tell anyone in the human world about you, they'll just think we're crazy."

  "She's right," Terry said. "I can't reveal it—" He gestured with his bloody hand, and winced. "—and no one would ever believe it anyway. You're in no danger from anyone here."

  "The children—" Adan began.

  Dan tensed. He saw Terry go tense, too.

  "Are not," Terry said shortly. "They're human, and none of your concern."

  Dan kept his mouth shut.

  Adan regarded them for a long moment. Then he gave a brief nod.

  "I accept your terms," he said. "Keep our secret, and stay away from us, and we will do you the same courtesy."

  Derek moved aside so they could leave. The three griffins filed out without a backward glance.

  There was a brief silence in the diner. Then Paula flipped the lock on the door, and around the room, shifters began shifting back. The tense atmosphere changed to a low-key murmur of voices, saying things like, "Has anyone seen my shirt?" and "Oh, damn it, ripped up my jeans again."

  Paula leaned against Dan.

  "You didn't even shift," she murmured.

  He laughed quietly under his breath. "You mind?"

  "Hey, I'm never going to object to seeing you with your clothes off." She gave him a quick kiss. "You were amazing."

  Loretta came bustling in from the kitchen carrying a dish towel. "Here, honey," she said to Terry. He was still clutching his wrist; blood welled up between his fingers. "Let me."

  Terry allowed her to take his arm and bind the towel around it. He looked dazed, as if he was slightly in shock. "I can't believe that worked," he said faintly.

  "Are they really gone?" Melody asked. She was helping her mate Gunnar back into his shirt. As a mythic shifter, her clothes had gone with her.

  Dan took a peek between the blinds. The sun was dazzling outside on the remaining snowdrifts. The town went on about its business, completely oblivious to the shifter confrontation that had gone on inside the diner.

  "Looks like it," he said. "You think they'll keep their word?"

  "Honor is important to us," Terry said. He sagged against the counter, resting his hip against it while Loretta worked on his arm. "We're like dragons that way. We wouldn't break a contract."

  "What did they do to your tattoo?" Paula asked Terry. She hadn't moved from Dan's side; he tightened his good arm around her.

  "Mark of exile," Terry said. He flexed his hand with a wince. "Any griffin looking at this will know that I'm banned."

  "Did you know that was going to happen?" Dan asked.

  "I thought it might. I've heard of exiles, although it's not very common. Usually it's criminals, people who broke the covert's rules." He gave Loretta a grateful nod when she passed him another towel, this one dampened, to wipe the blood off his hands. "But it goes both ways. As an exile, they have no authority over me. They won't come looking for me, and you and the kids are safe," he said to Paula.

  Turning, he looked around the diner. "I don't know how to thank you. Any of you."

  By staying away from my mate was Dan's instinctive response—but Terry was still Austin and Lissy's father, and Dan knew it wasn't fair to take that away from them.

  Loretta laughed. "Now that all the action is over, I have to say that I didn't come all this way to leave without seeing my granddaughter. Where is she?"

  Ben grinned. "Skye is out at the farm with Gaby and Tessa and the rest of the kids. Actually, we should head back out there now."

  Paula's hand slipped down to squeeze Dan's. "Actually, I have a better idea," she said, pitching her voice to carry over the murmur of conversation among the others. "You're all invited to the diner to eat tonight. I haven't been open for dinner in a long time, and it's on the house. In fact, as far as I'm concerned you can all eat free forever."

  In the brief silence, Dan heard Darius murmur, as he leaned over to Loretta, "Now that's a woman who knows how to thank people."

  Loretta jammed an elbow into his ribs.

  "Well?" Paula asked, looking around. "What do you all say? Dinner here, tonight? Get all the kids and bring them. This is a family business."

  "And we'll get started cooking," Dan put in.

  Paula looked up at him. "You don't have to. I can call Mitch and see if he'd like to pick up a late shift."

  "I think it would be fun to do it together." He turned his hand around and laced his fingers through hers, palm to palm. "Teamwork."

  "Teamwork," she murmured, and leaned her head against his shoulder.

  Paula

  Paula woke lazily, wrapped up in Dan's warm body. She could get used to this whole sleeping-in thing, she thought.

  "Mmm, good morning, beautiful," Dan murmured. "Diner closed again today?"

  "I haven't had a vacation since I moved back home. I think I've earned one. Especially after feeding all those people last night. Thanks for helping with that, by the way."

  "Hmmm." He rolled over to prop himself up on his good elbow, looking down at her. "Any thoughts on how you might want to start your vacation?"

  "I have some ideas," she said, and pulled him down to her.

  A little later, lazy and sated, they took turns showering. He had an overnight bag this time, and Paula sat on the bed, combing her damp hair while she watched Dan putting his arm on.

  "Any plans for today?" Dan asked.

  "Not really. Well, it's a Saturday, so the kids are sleeping in. Then again, I guess we did too," she added, glancing out the window at the bright sunshine gleaming off the snow. "I'll need to get them up soon anyway. Terry's coming by to pick up them up in early afternoon."

  "You're okay with that?"

  "I want him to be part of their lives. He always was a pretty good dad until he disappeared."

  "You know, that reminds me," Dan said, looking over from adjusting the straps around his shoulders. "There are some things about their dad, and about me, that the kids should probably know."

  Paula paused with her hair parted at the side, comb in hand. "Tell them about the—the animal thing? Are you sure?"

  "I think we should," Dan said. He hesitated and seemed to be struggling with some kind of dilemma. Finally he said, "If their dad is a shifter, one or both of them might be, too."

  "But Terry said—"

  Paula's mouth fell open. A sudden realization hit her like a thunderbolt, and she gave Dan a careful look.

  "Is that what you and Austin talked about the other night? Is that his big secret?"

  His face was a perfect picture of dismay, so much that she had to laugh.

  "He swore me to secrecy," Dan said. "Please don't tell him I told you."

  "You didn't tell me. I figured it out." Her son, a shifter. An abrupt coil of anger tightened in her chest. "Did Terry lie about that too?"

  Dan shook his head. "I don't think he knows. I don't think anybody knows. Austin only found out recently. Anyway, wouldn't you rather have those griffin jerks think he's a normal human kid?"

  "Jeez, y
ou're right." She decided, even if it was a lie, that she was willing to forgive Terry for that one. "Is he a griffin? He'd have to be, wouldn't he? No, wait, don't tell me." She got up and went to give Dan a kiss. "You're right. We should have a family meeting about this, once the kids are up."

  Paula had always appreciated the privacy of having a large backyard with a high fence around it, especially living in a small town with nosy neighbors, but she had never appreciated it as much as she did now.

  Lissy and Austin were assembled in the snow, wrapped in coats, hands in pockets, looking chilly and baffled. They'd had a leisurely breakfast with pancakes whipped up by Dan, and then Paula herded everyone into the backyard for a family conference before Terry showed up.

  "Do we have to do this out here?" Lissy complained. "Why can't we talk about whatever it is in the living room?"

  "Because there's more room out here." Paula looked around to be sure that no nearby neighbors' windows were aimed at the backyard. There was the Jamesons' place, but their second-floor curtains were drawn and they never used that bedroom anyway.

  "What's all this about?" Austin asked. His gaze kept going to Dan.

  He did actually have some idea of what this family conference was all about, Paula thought, and her stomach flipped with a strange feeling, excited and guilty all at once. Her son really was a shifter.

  "If you want to tell us you're dating, we know," Lissy said. "Can I go in now?"

  "No, it's not that. Well, not just that." Paula turned to Dan. "Show them."

  Dan had left his arm inside. Now he turned away from them and stepped behind a bush.

  Paula and Dan had discussed how to do this. Dan had told her that shifter families were used to casual nudity around each other, like people in some cultures elsewhere on Earth. Paula had said that this may be true, but it definitely was not true in Autumn Grove. The bush worked as a reasonable privacy screen that allowed the kids to catch glimpses of what was happening without showing them a little too much.

  "Is he taking off his clothes back there?" Lissy shrieked. "Isn't he cold?"