by Alice Bello
Still no sign of Maddox the werebear.
I slid out into traffic and immediately saw Carly’s Burgers.
My stomach roared this time.
Okay, a quick bite and I’d get my ass back on the road. If anything I’d sleep in my truck when I absolutely had to sleep.
Chapter 3
I parked, slid out of my Chevy and headed toward the restaurant. There were some umbrella-topped metal tables out front. I walked in the front door and the smell of delicious, greasy food greeted me. I walked up to the counter and a beautiful woman with blue eyes, blonde curls, and dangerous curves swept over to me. “What can I get for you?” Her smile was real too. And I could smell, over the succulent smell of the cooking food and fresh coffee, that she was human.
Her nametag read Lauren.
I looked up at the menu sign. It was a smorgasbord of yummy.
What had the guy at the gas station said?
Oh, yeah!
“I’ll have a Contender.”
“For here or to-go?”
I thought about the werebear…
“To-go.”
“Fries with that?” she asked.
“Yes, with cheddar and chili…”
“Gotcha”
“And…” Everything looked so good. “Five cheddar chili dogs, onion rings and a large cherry pop.”
Oops…
I forgot humans didn’t eat like that.
Shifters ate like, well, like pigs. I can scarf down an extra large pizza with everything on it and be hungry an hour later. Maybe sooner.
“I like a gal that knows how to eat,” Lauren said and gave me a wink. “It’ll be about five minutes. Take a seat and I’ll ring you up when it’s ready.”
I tried to relax. I sat, crossed my legs, got back up, walked around counting the tiles on the floor, straightened a display of take-out menus… but I couldn’t stop checking the front window for signs of Maddox the crazed werebear.
I started looking at some of the photos on the walls, each one in its own dark wood frame.
The third one I looked at made my jaw drop.
There was the old woman I’d given a lift into town—Nonna, the werebear and witch—and she was standing in front of Stone Herbs Shop, the sign barely in the photo with her short little self, a lovely smile on her face.
This was making less and less sense.
She was obviously the owner of the little herb shop. Why would her grandson react like that to her scent?
“Hey there, pretty lady,” I heard. I turned and saw a towering man in a sheriff’s uniform sidle up to the counter, lean over it and plant a sweet, unhurried kiss on Lauren’s lips.
I smiled.
He had short cropped brown hair and…
One sniff and my smile melted right off my face.
Bear.
This had to be a joke.
Three werebears in the same town?
This was crazy.
I watched as they kissed again, and she ran her hand down his handsome, angular face.
“I’m going to be late tonight, baby.”
She sighed. “Van…”
“Pack business. You know how Ty is when there are too many new shifters in his territory.”
Cripes…
I was in a town with a pack.
How screwed up could this day get?
Okay, I was just going to…
Just then the radio that hung on the police officer’s belt squawked. He winced and pulled it off his belt, then spoke into it.
It squawked again, kind of like the teacher's voice in The Peanuts cartoons.
“Gotcha,” he said into the radio and holstered it again.
“Sorry, baby. I have to go. Got a couple cows loitering out on route 6.”
Lauren had slid out from behind the counter while he was talking into his radio. She pressed herself against him, sliding her arms around his tight waist and popping up on her toes to snag a kiss from her lawman.
I leaned against the wall and tried to blend into the wood paneling.
When they finally came up for air, she gazed into the man’s eyes with utter adoration.
“Be careful. Those cows on route 6 can be dangerous.”
A slow smile spread across the lawman’s face. But his eyes were dark and intense.
Pure desire…
“I’ll do my best, ma’am.”
She popped up and kissed him one more chaste time.
“Then get going, Mr. Abrams.”
If I hadn’t already known he was a bear, I’d swear from the sexy grin that he was a werewolf.
She swatted his butt as he left, and smiled wickedly as she watched him leave.
I breathed easier when she turned and headed back behind the counter. That meant the werebear Sheriff was gone.
I was tempted to take off.
I really needed to leave.
If this was a pack town, then there were rules, and one of the most important rules was usually you had to get permission to stay even a day in a pack town.
“Your order’s up,” Lauren said from the cash register at the end of the counter.
I jumped, just a little. But she was too busy tossing plastic silverware and napkins into my big bag of grub to notice.
I walked over, forcing myself to keep calm. I paid her, gave her a nice tip, and said goodbye and thanks.
“You come back again.” She gave me a little wave as I left.
Okay. I looked all around and didn’t see the werebear or the Sheriff werebear.
I had a lot of food to eat, and I was sure that I’d make a complete mess of myself if I tried to eat and drive.
But I so wanted to get out of this town.
Argh!
I’m a shifter and can eat with the best of them.
I’d have this bag of food polished off in no time.
I sat at one of the metal tables with the umbrellas, popped the straw in my cherry pop and started emptying the to-go bag.
Ah… it tasted so good.
The Contender was a triple cheeseburger with bacon, lettuce, tomato, mayo, ketchup, mustard and a beguiling mixture of spices rubbed into the meat of the burger.
Yum…
I dispatched that in about two minutes, taking little sips of my drink.
Don’t look at me like that… I’m a shifter. We have really high metabolisms.
Next came the chili cheese fries and my five chili cheese dogs.
The onion rings I could snack on in the car as I drove. I liked them best without ketchup anyways.
I smelled her—chamomile and licorice—a moment before I looked up to see her.
“I didn’t think you’d scare so easily, little medicine woman.”
I glared at her, chewing on a mouthful of chili cheese fries.
She sat down opposite me, holding her little purse in her lap. The breeze didn’t even touch her tidy hairdo.
Neat trick…
She sighed. “I should have told you his bear was broken. I apologize.”
I swallowed the chili cheese fries and sat forward, glaring at her with all the menace I could muster.
“His bear is more than broken,” I pushed myself back in my chair. “Have you seen his eyes?”
She nodded sadly. “He hasn’t shifted since his parents were murdered.”
My stomach dropped.
Dear lord…
“Did…did he…”
Her gaze snapped on me with fury. “Of course he didn’t kill them.” Her voice was like a whip. Add dominant to her list of powers.
I looked away. I didn’t want to see the pain that was in her eyes.
I knew it too.
“My son and daughter-in-law were killed by a pack of loupes.”
No…
Loupes were shifters that had let the animal inside them take over. They were vile, often psychotic, and raped and murdered and ate anyone that got in their path.
“My Maddox hid his two younger brothers in the forest. But the loupes
found them.”
I felt my jaw shake just imagining it. How on earth had he survived?
“He was sixteen,” she continued. “And when they came after him and his brothers… well, he went berserker. Not much was left when I got there. He’d called me, barely able to speak, and I got there as soon as I could.
“I took them home with me and raised them. But Maddox didn’t want that from me. He got a part-time job while he finished high school, and then he just worked and worked. Finally, he left and just wandered. A lone bear like his father had been.”
That was so… awful.
“So he hasn’t shifted since?”
She shook her head. “No.”
He looked to be in his late twenties now, but he was a shifter. He could be as old as fifty and still look that young.
“How old is he?”
“Maddox is twenty-five now.”
Ye gods and little fishes!
He hadn’t shifted in nine years.
“So when that bear of his finally rips its way out, it’ll be like a volcano.” I pinched the bridge of my nose with my thumb and forefinger.
My god, he’d almost changed back at the herb shop.
“He could have torn me to shreds back there, and then gone on a killing spree before someone stopped him.”
She looked down at her hands and nodded. “I know. He’s a danger to himself and others.”
I laughed. “Aren’t you the queen of understatement. He’ll murder everything in his path, who cares that he’s a danger to himself.”
Her eyes looked up at me and the blue of the sky reflected from her irises.
“I care.”
Yeah, I knew that already.
“And by a danger to himself, I meant he’s going to ask the Alpha of the pack here to kill him.”
My stomach fell again.
He wanted the Alpha to kill him before he hurt someone.
I felt my heart pounding in my ribs.
For some unfathomable reason, the thought of him giving up and having someone put him down just hurt my heart.
No one should have to feel so desperate that they would rather choose death than to live.
Especially a shifter.
Shifters didn’t get sick, they grew older very slowly—but when their animals became broken, then they descended into insanity.
And his bear had been caged up inside him for nine years.
It was beyond crazed.
“You have to help him, little medicine woman,” she said.
Was she crazy too?
“As I said, I’m no medicine woman. I’m just a werepuma, a girl with a background in bar and grill management, and that’s it.”
She opened her mouth to say something, but then her eyes widened and she looked behind me, her eyes rising.
Damn…
“He’s standing right behind me, isn’t he?”
She nodded. “He looks calmer, though. That’s a plus.”
“I’m sorry I was so gruff with you earlier,” Maddox said.
He moved around the table until he was standing half way between me and his grandmother.
My mouth was suddenly so dry it hurt to swallow.
“It’s just, you…” he stopped talking and scented the air. “You still smell like my grandmother.”
I blinked at him.
How insane was he?
I looked pointedly at the old woman across the table from me. “There’s a reason for that.”
She sat there and sadly shook her head.
“What would that reason be?” Maddox’s voice had turned hard and brittle again.
Irritation spurred me to say something…
But as I took a deep breath to say it, my words turned to ashes on my tongue.
I looked at the old woman across from me.
She smelled stale.
Her grandson couldn’t see her.
He was so angry about being able to smell her, though.
And she kept calling me little medicine woman.
“Fuck…” I rumbled.
My grandmother would have slapped me in the back of the head for using such language.
But she wasn’t here.
She was dead.
She’d said her mantle of medicine woman for the tribe would be passed down.
And she had told me all my life how she saw the spirits of the dead, and that they sometimes talked to her.
I closed my eyes and bit my lip.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
The old woman sighed.
Maddox said, “Tell you what?”
I opened my eyes and saw he was leaned over, his hands on the tabletop. He was staring at me with utter hostility.
I didn’t blame him a bit.
“You wouldn’t have believed me if I had,” she said. “I had to wait for you to realize it on your own.”
I rubbed my hands over my face and tried to make sense of it all.
But first things first.
I had a huge, volatile werebear in front of me, and I needed to calm him down.
“I didn’t know your grandmother was dead.”
His brows knit together.
I continued.
“I guess I see dead people, ghosts.”
He stood upright and folded his muscular arms across his chest. “Yeah, right.”
“I know,” I said. “It’s kind of a surprise for me too. But I picked your Nonna up at the city limits sign and drove her to your shop.”
“I don’t know what kind of sick joke this is, or how you found something of my grandmother’s.” He took a step closer to me. “But you’re going to give it back to me right now, and then you’re going to get the hell out of town.”
He was looking dangerous again…
The woman called Nonna blew out a disgusted breath and said, “Fine, we'll play it your way.”
I frowned at her. “What?”
“Tell him he still needs to buy me a new pair of lace panties.”
What the…
“Are you serious?”
She just stared at me.
“Okay,” I looked up at him and said, “She says you still need to buy her a new pair of lace panties.”
His glare turned into a frown.
“And if he doesn’t want me to start telling you about what he used to use his socks for when he was seventeen, that he’d better start listening to you.”
“This is just…” I closed my eyes and inwardly had to chuckle. This was just ridiculous.
“She says that unless you want her to start talking about what…” I looked to her again.
She said, “What he used to use his socks for when he was seventeen.”
That’s a strange…
Then it dawned on me.
“Ewww…”
She leveled me with a withering glance. “Just say it.”
I tried to shake the image of what she’d just said out of my head.
But truthfully, the thought of him now, naked, with his…
No.
No, no, no!
I was a good girl.
Well, not that good a girl.
I’d tried everything in that song Follow Your Arrow when I was in college that month and a half. Kissed lots of boys, kissed a couple girls, and drank way too much.
I’d gotten it out of my system real fast.
I’d also figured out I didn’t know what the hell I wanted to be or do, so staying in college—especially at those prices—was ridiculous.
I was a skinflint even back then.
I sighed and said, “She says that unless you want her to start talking about what you used your socks for when you were seventeen—and I’ve already figured that one out, thank you—you’d better start listening to me.”
His eyebrows knitted together. “What?”
I gave him a wide-eyed glare. “Don’t make her explain it, or anything else like it. Please.”
I saw the gears start to whirl in his head as he mouthed the wo
rd “socks.”
And then his eyes got wide, and he blushed.
“So,” he said, his voice cracking around the edges, “What does… what does she want you to tell me?”
I turned and looked at the gray-haired woman across from me. “I’d like to know that too.”
She gave us both a disgusted sigh. “Finally! Tell him he’s going to have to release his bear. Broken or not, it has to be done.”
I nodded. “She says you need to release your bear. That broken or not, it has to be done.”
He shook his head. “I can’t do that, and if she’s really… shit!” He scrubbed the back of his neck with his big, rough looking hand. “If she’s really here, then she knows damn well why.”
He was so afraid of what his bear might do, he’d held him in until he was nothing but rage and fury.
I looked to the old woman. “I don’t think it would be safe to let his bear out. It could be a disaster.”
He looked at me, and then to where his grandmother sat. It probably looked like an empty chair to him.
“I’m going to have it taken care of,” he said, his voice flat and nearly inaudible.
I stood up and looked him straight in the eye. “That’s not the way either.”
He shrugged his massive shoulders. “You don’t know shit, lady.”
God, this was a ghoulish conversation.
“I know you’re going to ask the Alpha of this town’s pack to kill you, and I think that…”
His eyes bored into me with so much hate.
“What do you think?” he spat at me. “You think it’s easy to decide this? I’ve been trying to figure out how to get rid of it for years, thought if I just pushed it back, kept it locked up it would go away.”
A shifter’s animal is a living thing. It gives its strength to its host, and the host gives it life. There was no getting rid of it.
“I think you need to stop trying to get rid of your bear.”
He laughed at me. “Do you know what it will do if it ever gets free?”
The thought of that would probably give me nightmares for years to come. And the thought of him releasing that bear anywhere around me made me want to run.
Run for my life.
But…
But it broke my heart to think of this man giving up, letting that precious life of his go.
I looked at the old woman. “You said I could help him, with his broken bear. How?”
“That’s… complicated.”
I leaned across the table and looked into her eyes. “It really isn’t. You said I could help, so you must have some idea about me. A plan?”