He started to chew, carefully testing the strength of the plastic. It wasn’t an incredibly powerful cage, but rather one built for the demure little house pets that the humans like to keep. It took some time to consider all parts of the cage in the dark, judging the strength of his bonds carefully, before deciding what route he was going to take to freedom. It wasn’t right for a shifter to trap another of his own kind like this and he only despised the young Walter even more because of these inconveniences that have been laid upon him.
He shook his head and continued to chew, slowly but surely working his way through the plastic and creating enough damage to the prison to let him work his way out. He chewed, the pressure from the plastic feeling pleasant on his constantly growing teeth. He chewed, pleased with the progress that he was making on the subject and confident that he would be free before his captors would have a chance to stop him. He knew that they would never find the boy, the child was too well hidden for a simple group to discover and he would be able to teach the child about the freedom that he was supposed to live with, about the way his world was supposed to work without it being polluted by human ideas.
He had been doing this for years and he could remember the face of every child he had freed from human captivity, he noticed the similarity to his own situation. The children had been unable to rescue themselves from the vile world of the humans, but he had been able to pull them out, rescuing them from the pain that they would be cursed with trying to living the normal world as a creature of the beast, with the soul of the beast constantly fighting to escape.
It didn’t take him nearly as much time as he thought that it would going to, not that he really had any way to judge how much time had passed. It didn’t matter anyway, he slipped out from under the blanket before anyone had come to check on him, to detect his escape attempt.
The timing of his escape couldn’t have been any more beautiful, Ursula was coming down the stairs and Fredrick didn’t change from his animal form. The woman was humming, trying to take her mind off of the damage that he had caused to her face. He slunk into the shadows and wondered why Walter wasn’t down there with her. He listened carefully, and quickly realized that there was no one else in the house.
He was certain that this could work out well for him. He shifted and came out of the shadows, surprising his quarry as he grabbed her and clamped his hand over her mouth before she had a chance to scream. “Shut up.” He growled and Ursula tried to bite his hand. “Stop fighting me.”
Ursula wasn’t going to give up that easily. She was ready to fight this man to the death, was willing to kill to get her son back, Fredrick realized that just as her stomping foot came crashing down on his arch. He didn’t show any pain however, he had been practiced at resisting the horrible effects of human attacks in the past.
He started to drag his prisoner, forcing her up the stairs and out of the cabin. He was pleased to see that they had stationed no guards outside of her home. He shook his head at this tribes stupidity and wouldn’t be surprised when they came begging to him for support and protection as soon as their secrets were released to the rest of the world. As soon as they became the leaders of humanity. He walked to the truck. Walter had left it behind, shifters didn’t take vehicles if they weren’t leaving tribal lands ,and quickly located a set of handcuffs that had been placed in the backseat for his own capture. “You must have been quite prepared for that.” Fredrick roughly forced his prisoner’s hands behind her back and cuffed them. Ursula yelped in pain, but refused to respond to the man’s taunting as he forced her to lay down on the floor board in front of the back seat. He squeezed her into place, lying face down, with her hands still tied behind her back. “It should be a little more difficult for you to pick yourself up out of there than it was for me to break out of your silly little cage.” Fredrick’s voice held a sneer, there was pure hatred in his voice. Ursula shuddered as she breathed in the nasty smelling carpet. She could tell that this truck had been owned by people in the country, she could smell mud and other foul smelling odors trapped in the fabric. “This is why humans haven’t found out about us. They’re stupid. You do stupid things like put a weasel in a plastic cage. Did you forget that I had teeth? Did you forget that I could chew my way out of it? Were you really that stupid?”
Ursula couldn’t do much but listen to Fredrick rant and rave as he yanked the car key out of her pocket and climbed into the driver’s seat. The man enjoyed his victory over his captor, he enjoyed having defeated the human, and having her as his prisoner, but he wasn’t foolish enough to get himself caught. He carefully navigated the roads back to his home, trying desperately not to draw attention to himself. He knew that he could have slinked back home as a weasel, but then he wouldn’t have this prisoner in his possession. He continued to tell her about the glorious future for the shifters, the one that would only exist once the humans had learned their place. “You don’t know this yet, but you are about to be the victim of a great war.” His voice was full of hysterical laughter. “We are going to not only be free to show our true forms, the powerful ones that nature has given us, we’re going to be respected and feared.” Ursula didn’t respond, she was trying to keep her breathing passages clear from the debris that littered the floor of the vehicle. He took her silence as an invitation to continue his grandiose rant. “I know that you don’t understand this now, but you will. You will learn to respect us. We hold the power of nature, the ability to stand above the men that have forgotten their natural selves.” He didn’t laugh, but it was easy to picture a maniacal laugh sliding out of his mouth after the explanation of his scheme. “It isn’t going to be easy, but we’ve been planning and preparing for years. We’re ready for anything.”
Fredrick slammed on the breaks, knowing that it would cause his prisoner’s unsecured body to shift uncomfortably and listened to the pained noises that came from the back seat. He felt glee when she moaned, but when he didn’t hear anything after that, he wondered if the woman had been knocked unconscious. It didn’t matter, and he continued to drive, crossing the wilderness back to his own tribal lands.
He pulled into his home, knowing that he would have to call someone to dispose of the stolen vehicle and yanked his prisoner from her position. Ursula’s hair was a mess and he could see the tears that were welling up in her eyes. “Please.” It was just one word and it had no effect on the man at all. “Please, give me my son back.” She was begging him.
Fredrick sneered at her as he forced her into the building, yanking hard on her arms and causing her to grunt in pain. “You can’t stop yourself from groveling, can you?” He clearly hated the fact that the human felt the need to grovel at his feet, but there was something else, it was hiding behind his smile, and it told her that seeing the woman begging him for her son gave him a vindication, it gave his mission purpose.
Ursula didn’t say anything immediately, she was fighting against the pain as she was forced into what was once a very lovely living room, but had been taken over by the invisible presence of many children. They weren’t in the room at the moment, but it was easy to see that there had been a lot of children in the room in the very recent past. Toy boxes littered the floor, and it had been picked up, but there were still a few cracker crumbs on the couch. Fredrick could feel Ursula shudder at the sight. “How many kids have you stolen?”
“I don’t think that matters to you. The only one that you care about is your son.”
“No.” Ursula stared at the weasel, locking his eyes onto hers. “That’s not true. All of these children deserve to be happy. They deserve to be with their parents that love them. They don’t deserve to be stolen from the beds and brought here.”
Fredrick laughed at the woman, knowing that she would never truly understand. “You don’t get it, they need to be with their own kind.”
“Are you saying that a human isn’t able to love these children enough?”
“No, they won’t love them enough. They won’t let them run wild and
free, they won’t let them release their beast. Humans are afraid of us, and they should be, we can kill them with a thought. Imagine an animal with the mind of a man, we can be that dangerous.”
Ursula grimaced. Fredrick could see the soreness in her eyes. The woman was exhausted, and obviously hadn’t slept much since he had taken his prize. She shook of the sudden hopelessness and her eyes grew steely once again. “Is it so horrible to think that these children might be happy and loved with their real parents? I mean, think about it. You could offer these parents the support that they need.” She tried to reason with him, but it didn’t seem to be working.
“These parents aren’t worthy of these children. We are the ones capable of teaching them to survive. We are the ones that can care for them.” He tried to make the human understand. “You will never be able to understand us, how we live and what we do. You don’t stand a chance to live like us, live among us and fit into our world. No matter how hard you might try, you’ll never be one of us. You just don’t stand a chance to ever understand us and these children deserve to be understand.”
“You can’t make that judgment about everyone, not every shifter, not every human, not every person in whatever other group you want to count off.” She was getting angry.
“Yes, I can, I live in this world and I see the intolerance and the pain that humans cause to our world. I see how they hurt the earth and damage the world that the live in.”
Ursula sighed. She was starting to understand the reasons that he was doing the things that he did, but it didn’t make it right to steal children from their loving families. “If these children are half human, does the fact that you are raising them to hate themselves make any difference to you?” She tried to make him understand. “You are raising them to hate, and that is more damage than a loving family could ever know.”
“They don’t know where they come from. They don’t know that they are half human. They live with us and belong with us, their own kind.”
“You would take them away from loving families, that’s kidnapping.”
“I have a good reason to.” Fredrick finally realized that the woman was baiting him. “I don’t have to fight with you over this. You do not belong in our world, but your son does. He will be cared for among his own kind.”
Ursula screamed at him. She wanted to strike the man, hurt him until he returned her son to her, but her hands were still cuffed and her arms were in an extraordinary amount of pain. “Give me my son back! He’s my son, he doesn’t belong to you.”
“That’s where you’re wrong. He’s your son, but he’s one of us, he belongs to us. We will be able to give him what he needs. There is no way that you could help him.” Fredrick insisted.
“What makes you say that? You don’t even know the kind of home and acceptance that I could have given him. There’s no way that you could make that judgment.” Ursula was insisting that the man rethink a religious belief and it wasn’t going well.
“No, humans aren’t capable of understanding us, what we are and what we’re capable of us. They just end up living in fear because they can’t ever realize the gift that they had been given.”
“Do you really think that you are that much more important than the rest of the world? Isn’t that the kind of arrogance that you accuse humans of having?” She was incredulous. “How could you say something like that and not realize the hypocrisy of it. How would you know how these parents would react?”
Fredrick’s face contorted with rage. “I know, I know, I’ve seen it. They used to do that!” He was insisting and it was easy to tell how personal the story was to the man. Suddenly Ursula found herself realizing that there was a very deep reason that he was doing what he was doing. She realized that he must have been the example that he was throwing out there. He must have been rejected by his family. She could picture the story in her mind and wanted to embrace the man before she stopped herself. No matter what the reasons he had in his past, it didn’t matter, he had her son; he had taken the boy away from loving parents. She kept that in mind and continued to press her point, but nothing she could say was going to change his mind.
*
Fredrick was mad. That much was desperately obvious as he gripped Ursula by her upper arm and forced her out of the living room. Ursula started to panic, there was so much that she wanted to say so that she could convince the man that what he was doing was wrong. She didn’t know how to say the words, but knew that they needed to be said. She had to teach him that what he was doing was wrong, but was so desperately trying to convince him that nothing seemed to be right, the words just wouldn’t come.
“Just stop. I’ll let you see him if you’ll stop.” He had dragged her into the back room and could hear children being brought into the house. She wondered how many there were, it certainly seemed like there were just too many to count.
“Thank you.” Ursula was actually grateful for the opportunity to see her child, the boy that had been missing for to0 many days.
“Let’s go.” Fredrick grabbed her hand roughly, knowing that the woman wouldn’t fight him for the opportunity to see the boy that she didn’t deserve to have, and led her into a small room right next to the room they were in. Ursula couldn’t get a good look at any of the other children, but the room she was led into looked comfortable with generic unisex decorations on the wall. The paint and decals were faded with age, but well cared for and safe. The room had been modeled after the classic nursery for someone who didn’t want to know the gender of the child that they were expecting. She supposed that it made sense. The child wasn’t in the room with her and she had heard Fredrick lock the door after she had been forced into the room. There were two windows in the room, but escape was the last thing on her mind. She would worry about that after her son was in her arms. She paced the room, noticing that the furniture was handmade, beautiful, and well used. She noticed how clean the room was, cared for and recently vacuumed.
It all made her feel a little better. It was obvious that the child who stayed in this room was not neglected physically, but it didn’t tell her much about the life that they were destined for in this world. She didn’t know if they would ever be truly loved in a place that hated a part of their heritage. It just felt too sterile, too formal, from the way the bed was made to the decorative toys scattered through the corners and on the shelves. It just looked a little too perfect for a room that a child was living in. She shuddered, suddenly feeling very cold and alone as she realized that she had been in this room examining things for a while with no word about when she would be allowed to see her son.
She fought to keep her ragged emotions under control and walked over to the dresser. She slipped the drawers open and noticed the catch on it. They were baby proofed, it told her something when she saw the brand new latches, the items were the kind that just about everyone had in their home. She unlatched the drawer and pulled it open to find baby clothes in a variety of sizes and colors. She could tell that multiple infants had been kept in this room. It made her wonder how many missing children around the world had been raised in rooms like these, how many happy families had been destroyed by the unknown addition of shifter blood into their lives.
She started to look through the other drawers. Everything was neatly folded and carefully washed to be reused. The styles obviously made the clothes look old, but like everything else in the room they were well cared for. When she opened the third drawer her heart sank. There, neatly folded on the very top of the stack, was the tiny little outfit that her son had been wearing the day he was taken. Her heart started to break as she picked up the tiny onesie and hugged it to her chest, trying to control her tears. It was a tangible part of her missing son, a piece that she could touch, something that told her that there was someone to wash his clothes and care for him. She couldn’t control herself and the tears started to rush down her face and great heaving sobs started to wreak havoc on her form. She was dying inside, and this wasn’t the respite that she originall
y thought that it was going to be.
It was in that moment that the door open and Fredrick entered the room. The vicious scowl on his face and the bundle in his arms made her heart jump. Her tears disappeared and she looked at him with a hopeful face as she rushed over to his side. “Is that my boy?” She asked, trying to look into the blankets.
“He’s sleeping right now.” He warned her.
“I won’t wake him up.” Ursula promised before she realized how inane this conversation was. There was no way that she should be talking like this to her son’s kidnapper. “I promise.” She was still desperate to have the time to count all of the little fingers and all of the little toes. She wanted to see if he was still in one piece and was well cared for.
“You better not, we don’t want to spend hours getting him back to sleep.” Fredrick warned her.
Ursula reached out to her son. “Let me see him.”
Fredrick reluctantly handed the child over. “We won’t give you long.” It was a dire promise. “And don’t even think about escaping, we’re watching all of the exits.”
“I know.” Ursula sighed, she wasn’t really paying attention, but rather she was gazing at her son’s sleeping face. The child looked so peaceful, like he didn’t have a care in the world, but as he started to gain his mother’s scent, even in his sleep he nuzzled his chest.
“Take some time to say goodbye. He’s going to a different tribe in the morning to be raised by a proper family.”
Simply Bears: A Ten Book Paranormal Bear Shifter Romance Collection Page 64