Loved by The Alpha Bear (Primal Bear Protectors Book 1)

by K. T. Stryker

  “Hey, are you still with us?” Peter said waving a wet dish in front of her face.

  She snatched it out of his hand. “Yeah, I’m sorry but turkey always makes me sleepy,” Ashe replied.

  “That’s all?” Peter asked. He looked concerned.

  She could have told him about Penelope, but she didn’t. “Yeah, everything’s just fine.”

  CHAPTER 3

  The classroom was buzzing with the energy of students just back from winter break. Ashe was excited too for her last semester of classes, because it meant she was only a few months away from graduation and becoming fully independent. After school was finished she could go anywhere with Peter. They could travel the whole country if they wanted, and maybe even the world. She would no longer be tied down by her studies.

  Ashe glanced at the syllabus, idly massaging her sore earlobe. She had taken out the earrings Peter had given her as they were far too formal to wear to class and likely too expensive as well. Besides, she wanted to give her ear some time to heal after the damage Penelope had done. A semester ago she wouldn’t have believed that she would be taking another of Professor Sharp’s folklore classes, but here she was in the same lecture hall where her life had changed in so many ways. She was looking forward to seeing the professor again and catching up on how he had spent his winter vacation. Unfortunately, he was running late this morning and the students were getting restless. A crumpled-up syllabus flew past Ashe’s head towards the wastepaper basket, but missed and landed atop the podium. “Sorry,” a student in a letterman jacket shouted as he jogged down the row of seats to retrieve it.

  Ashe glanced at the clock. It wasn’t like Professor Sharp to run this late. His mannerisms were slow, but he was always on time. As she pondered what could have been keeping him, a woman from the administrative office came in and stood at the podium. She cleared her throat and everyone quieted.

  “I apologize for the late notice, but class is cancelled today. Professor Sharp has had some personal matters to attend to and will not be back on campus until further notice. We have called in a substitute for him from a nearby college, but he won’t be getting here until this evening. Classes will resume as usual on Wednesday. If you have any questions you can contact the dean’s office.”

  The woman left the podium and the students started exiting the lecture hall, talk already buzzing of what could have happened to the professor. Ashe just sat in her chair with a worried frown crinkling her brow, her eyes looking sightlessly down at her empty notebook page. She hoped Professor Sharp was okay. The woman had said personal matters, not illness or an accident; something must have happened to a family member. Ashe slowly gathered her things and dropped them into her backpack. There was no one else in the lecture hall by the time she left. The room was cold, empty, and Ashe wasn’t looking forward to returning on Wednesday.

  She left the building and the snowy white fog quickly consumed her. It was hard to see where she was going, though the distant light of the student center kept her on track. The wind bit through her heavy jacket as if she hadn’t been wearing it at all. It looked like a snow storm had blown in and it would only get worse.

  The news worried Peter. He had come across it by chance in the student center in a local newspaper left on a chair he was about to sit on. He picked up the newspaper and skimmed the headlines. On the bottom of the second page was a small article about a missing persons case outside the city. The county was the same as the one Landon’s hideout was in; Peter knew in a second that it wasn’t a coincidence. He got comfortable in his chair and took a closer look at the article.

  It had been a young couple out on a drive. Their car had been found crashed in the snow by the side of the road, but there was no sign of the bodies. Police were stumped, though there was a theory that the couple had faked the car crash and ran in order to escape a mountain of unpaid bills. Peter wasn’t so sure. His bet was that they were either dead, or soon would be once Landon and his clan got their fill.

  Peter had been doing some investigative work on his own lately with the help of another vampire whom Winnie had gotten him in contact with. The man was somewhat of a pro at rooting out the most dangerous of their kind and handling them with discretion. His name was Mark and he tended to drift to wherever his specialized skill set was needed. Peter hoped that, together, they would be able to bring down Landon’s clan.

  He snapped a picture of the article and sent it to Mark. Then he carefully tore out the newspaper article and put it in his wallet alongside another one he had found earlier that week about a senile old man who had gone missing while out for a walk. He folded the paper inside just as Ashe came walking up to him.

  “Anything interesting?” she asked nodding at the newspaper on the table as she sat down.

  “Not really,” Peter replied as he put his wallet away. “How was class?”

  Ashe sighed. Peter could tell something was wrong. “Professor Sharp’s out sick or something so class was cancelled. No one knows when he’ll be back.”

  Peter wondered if he should add Professor Sharp to his list.

  “We’ll get a sub on Wednesday.”

  “That’s all?”

  Ashe had been acting a little withdrawn lately. Peter wondered if she was still worrying about Landon. All Peter wanted to do was make her feel safe. He would have done anything.

  Peter’s phone buzzed and he picked it up. It was a message from Mark telling Peter to call. He ignored it, not wanting Ashe to know that he was going after Landon and worry.

  “Who is it?” Ashe asked.

  “Vanessa,” Peter lied. He felt bad lying to her but it was for her own good.

  “Are you ready to go?”

  Peter was about to ask her where before remembering that he was supposed to go to her house for dinner that night. Though Ashe’s mother was relatively easy to get along with, Peter was definitely looking forward to Ashe moving out and getting her own place, maybe a place for the two of them. “Yeah, let’s go,” he said, gathering up the newspaper with the missing article.

  Ashe stood while tucking her hair behind her ear. Peter noticed her earlobe was red. “Is your ear okay?” he asked. He wondered if the earrings he had given her had caused an allergic reaction. They were centuries old, after all, and who knew what kind of metal they were made of.

  “My earring caught on my sweater this morning so I thought I’d give them a rest,” she replied.

  Of course, Peter thought. He wondered if all this worrying after Ashe was healthy for him. Every scrape, frown, or slightly odd comment of hers made him panic that something was wrong. But if something was truly wrong, she would tell him. He would have to learn to trust her more.

  Before they left the student center Peter ducked into the bathroom. He went into a stall and called Mark.

  “What took you so long?” Mark asked.

  “It’s only been a few minutes since you sent your message,” Peter replied. “I was with someone.”

  Mark grumbled. He wasn’t the easiest person to get along with. “I did some research into the Alilovic family tree, among other things.”

  “And?”

  “You seem to have gotten yourself into a feud with one of the oldest clans in Europe.”

  Peter didn’t believe it for a second. He knew the names of all the great clans and Alilovic wasn’t one of them. “If you’re trying to get out of helping me, you’re going to have to try harder than that,” Peter said.

  “No, no. It would be an honor to end their bloodline. After all, their ancestor is one of the first of our kind to gain any sort of notoriety for killing humans. Have you ever heard of Jure Grando?”

  “In legend, yeah. He terrorized a town in Croatia in the seventeenth century. The townspeople finally ended it by chopping off his head.” Peter hoped Mark would get to the point soon. He couldn’t keep Ashe waiting outside forever.

  “Not just legend, but verifiable fact. Grando had a son who took the name Alilovic and fled the country. He
too had the curse, his father’s thirst for blood. He lay waste to towns in Italy and France before settling in Germany to hide from vampires like me who would have put an end to his butchering. His clan then went on to take part in the human atrocities of World War II and then, as far as I know, continued to operate in the dark places where the sentinels can’t find them. That’s why you’ve never heard of them before. They’re shadows among shadows.”

  Peter had no idea what he was getting himself into. He wondered if Landon’s family still maintained contact with their relatives in Europe.

  “How do you suggest we proceed?” Peter asked.

  Mark replied. “We have to cut off the arm before it can tell the brain what’s happening, if you know what I mean. We take out Landon’s branch of the clan in one clean sweep and make ourselves scarce before their friends in Europe can find out.”

  “Okay,” Peter agreed, though nothing about it felt okay. He was committing himself to a war.

  “You don’t have to do this,” Mark said, as if he could sense Peter’s hesitation. “There are plenty of us who are trained to handle this sort of thing.”

  Peter thought about Ashe and his promise to keep her safe. “No, I’ll help you. Tell me what you need me to do.”

  “Right now I need all the information I can get. Keep sending me articles and anything else you can dig up.”

  Peter promised to do so and hung up. His mind felt heavy with everything Mark had told him. Apparently Landon’s evil could be traced all the way back to his ancestors. Peter was glad that his own line had not cursed him to such a fate, but it was still no excuse for Landon’s behavior. Peter should have known from that first day when Landon had tried to crush him with the construction crane that the man was nothing but evil.

  Peter left the stall still thinking about Landon and how close he had been to losing Ashe once already. If he had known at the time what Landon was, he never would have agreed to let Ashe finish her semester here. He would have insisted they pack their bags and leave as soon as they had gotten home. But telling Ashe she couldn’t graduate now would crush her. Peter didn’t have it in him to do that to her. Now the only way forward was to fight.

  The lecture hall was only half-full; the students were clearly taking the professor’s absence as an excuse to skip class themselves. Ashe sat near the back, listening as the substitute, Professor Wheatley, talked about witch hunts dating all the way back to ancient Rome. He was a stern man with thick, dark eyebrows that cast his whole long face in their shadow. He stood in the light of the projector with his hands in his pockets, his back slightly hunched though he couldn't have been more than sixty.

  “Witch hunts actually declined in number in ancient Rome with the advent of Christianity and its acceptance as the official state religion,” he droned. “For many centuries, the Church had no hand in persecuting witches, but once they did, things became quite nasty.”

  He changed the slide to show a sixteenth-century depiction of a witch tied to a rack in the town square.

  “This is the kind of scene that most of you are probably used to seeing. If you notice, the building in the back there is a church and the priest is standing here off to the side. Whereas before the Church had claimed that even the belief in the existence of witchcraft was blasphemy, here they are now doing the very thing they condemned mere decades previous. If we look at this slide...”

  The slide changed again and the professor’s meandering sentences quickly lost Ashe’s attention. She picked up her pen and started drumming it against her notebook, thinking about where she would go for lunch. Peter wouldn’t be free until the evening, so she would have to wait until then to see him. As her mind continued to drift, she hit her notebook a little too hard and the cap of her pen went flying with a clatter into the aisle. She got up to retrieve it.

  Professor Wheatley turned towards the auditorium. “Miss Linfield, if you could please pay a little more attention to my lecture.”

  Ashe’s face felt hot but the lecture hall was thankfully too dark for it to show. She went back to her seat and crossed her arms in front of her chest, hoping the professor could sense the anger rolling off her in waves. She couldn’t wait for Professor Sharp to come back.

  It had been over a week and there was still no word from the professor. Ashe had tried emailing him, but no replies had come back yet. She still had some books she had borrowed over the break that she needed to return to him. She figured she could stop by his office after class and slide them into the mail slot by his door. If she didn’t return the books today, she would likely forget and they would be lost like so many others. Only last week she had found a weathered copy of Sense and Sensibility under her bed that she had lost some time back in high school.

  “...before largely dying out in the ninetieth century. This doesn’t mean that witch hunts are entirely nonexistent today, and these modern witch hunts will be the subject of Friday’s lecture, along with the belief systems that keep such practices alive.”

  The projector clicked off and the lights came on. Ashe rubbed her eyes and closed her notebook.

  “Now, don’t get up just yet,” the professor said to the few students who had already stood up from their seats. He took a stack of papers from the podium. “We still have ten minutes left; just enough time for a pop quiz. Let’s see how many of you were sleeping and how many of you actually managed to learn something today.”

  Ashe flipped her notebook open but today’s page was blank, as they had been all week. Instead of listening to the professor’s dry lectures she had been worrying about Professor Sharp and Penelope and what she was going to do after graduation. All she could remember was that today’s lecture had been on witch hunts and something about Romans and dying on racks.

  She took a quiz and handed the stack to the row behind her. Already she could tell the questions were impossible. She wondered if Professor Wheatley had actually said any of these things in his lecture or if he was playing a cruel game with the class, who clearly wanted their regular professor back. She glanced around at the other students who looked about as lost as she was.

  When time was up, all she had written was her name at the top. The rest of the answers were blank. As Professor Wheatley came by to pick up the quizzes from each row he looked down at hers and clicked his tongue. “I thought so,” he said and continued down the aisle.

  Ashe could faintly hear the cathedral bells ringing outside for noon and grabbed her bag before the professor could say anything more. She left the auditorium quickly and followed the familiar path through the hallway to Professor Sharp’s office to return his books. She hated Professor Wheatley and was dreading her first paper for the class. She already anticipated the terrible grade she would receive, along with the scathing remarks written in red in the margins. It was just like last semester, only the professor had this time written her off as a lost cause instead of a student whose attention was worth fighting for.

  The light was on in Professor Sharp’s office when she got there. Ashe shifted the books to one hand and knocked on the door. She tried not to get her hopes up as she waited for a response.

  “I don’t have office hours now,” Professor Sharp said through the door.

  Ashe allowed herself a small smile. “It’s me, Ashe,” she replied.

  There was a creak of a chair and the door opened. Professor Sharp looked tired and his pupils were badly dilated. They were having trouble adjusting to the brighter hallway light. He looked like he had aged ten years over the break.

  “I have some of your books,” she said uncertainly. “But if now’s not a good time I can come back later.”

  “No, it’s good to see you. Come on in,” he said gesturing her inside his office.

  Ashe took a seat in her usual armchair. She noticed that the professor’s desk was littered with books and papers, some of which looked like they had come from a museum and might crumple into dust at any minute.

  “How’s the new professor?” Professor
Sharp asked her, starting to stack the books into neat piles, which he then moved to the floor behind the desk. Ashe could see that many of the books had to do with alchemy and folk remedies, and wondered if the professor was planning on doing a lecture on the subject, though it wasn’t in the syllabus. She also wondered how long it had been since he had slept.

  “Professor Wheatley is absolutely terrible,” Ashe replied. “Are you coming back to teach soon?”

  Professor Sharp’s eyes lit up for a moment before the weak flame doused itself again. “No, I don’t know; I’m only here because my books are here. I don’t like being at home all alone. Professor Wheatley is a good colleague of mine. He takes a little warming up to, but you’ll learn a lot from him.”

  Ashe wasn’t so sure. It was hard to believe there was a professor out there that made Professor Sharp look like a lamb.

  “Is everything... okay?” Ashe asked. She didn’t feel comfortable asking him outright, but he looked too pitiful to pretend everything was normal. He was like the shell of his old self and Ashe couldn’t stand it. She missed the sharp, uncompromising teacher she had grown used to.

  Professor Sharp sighed, taking his glasses off and setting them on the desk. Without the frames, Ashe could see the dark, puffy circles under the man’s eyes. “My wife passed away,” he said.

  Ashe felt her heart breaking for the professor. She couldn’t imagine losing the person she loved like that, losing Peter. “I’m so sorry,” she said.

  The professor shook his head. “I already knew what was going to happen, but it didn’t make it any easier when it did. My wife had been sick and the doctor told us she didn’t have much time left. I promised her I would take her out to the countryside and spend her last days with her, just the two of us watching the snow falling and enjoying our time together. So that’s what we did. It was nice.”

  He paused, sniffling a little.

  “She always loved nature. The only reason she moved to the city was because of my work. Maybe if we’d stayed out of the city she wouldn’t have gotten sick. I know that cancer runs in her family, but maybe things would have been different.”