Out in the open moonlight, the bear was enormous. She’d never seen one so big—was this Old Ironhide, or some monster grizzly out of folklore? He was the size of a Goddamn pickup truck. The narrow strip of soil between tree and lake couldn’t even contain him. He stood with his front paws dipped in water.
She hadn’t made very much progress. Elie was trying to step lightly and make as little noise as possible, but the bear was still, as if it were listening…
…and then he started twitching.
How else to describe it? Fur and bone started a mad dance under the moon, and Elie watched in horror and fascination. The bear’s skin seemed to be berserking, trying to leap off its bones in defiant rebellion. A terrible, guttural roar of unmistakable pain bellowed out of the bear’s jaws. It rippled through Elie’s flesh, and she knew the panic of a deer before the hunter.
Then, the bear started shrinking. It was like origami folding, smaller, smaller. Fur shed out like wisps of smoke, and white skin caught the moonlight.
The ground came up to meet her. Elie’s legs folded as if they had no bones. It wouldn’t be fair to suggest Elie Barner was the fainting type, but her head did spin in a whooshing whirl of moon and lake. Her skin felt cold, and the night wind seemed to rush through her clothes as if they weren’t there.
There was no longer a bear, or any trace of one. Elie blinked several times, trying to persuade her eyes to see clearly. Time seemed to be skipping like a scratched CD. The bare human form that lay where the bear had stood was moving in slow jumps—first sitting up, waist deep in the lake. Then struggling to his feet, water streaming down thick, muscular legs. He was standing in the shallows, now, looking this way, and Elie was beginning to accept that this was, in fact, a hallucination.
“Elie?”
She shook her head. If she accepted that the hallucination talked to her, she might be convinced it was real, and that was a dangerous road to tread.
But, it was walking closer, and worst of all, Elie thought she recognized the voice. “Elie?! Jesus! What—? How long have you been here?!”
Her mouth moved—Elie wasn’t really sure what she planned to say, since not even one comprehensible scrap of a response was forthcoming. She held up a hand in a vague gesture toward the lake, where the bear had withered into… Jake.
Naked as the day he was born, Jake splashed towards her to the shore. This was one shock after another. Under normal circumstances, Elie might have avoided looking blatantly at the prominent areas of Jake’s body that were normally hugged into old denim, but staring at his dangling junk seemed like the least abnormal part of the evening.
“Elie! God almighty—get up, you’re scaring the hell outta me.”
Scaring the hell out of him? Elie giggled as Jake helped her to her feet.
Jake seemed to realize suddenly that he was naked, and turned Elie back towards the picnic table. He helped her with an arm around her waist at first, and when her feet stumbled over the first patch of loose dirt and she almost toppled forward, he picked her up without ceremony and carried her.
“Stay here,” he muttered, and propped her on the picnic table. “Just breathe for a minute. I’ll be right back.”
Elie turned to watch him storm away, the moon casting white speckles across his shoulders, buttocks, and legs through the branches.
Alone again, she swayed a bit and waited for the feeling to come back to her hands and feet. They were tingling. She wondered idly if she was having a stroke, or a heart attack. Twenty-seven was too young for cardiac distress, wasn’t it?
Crunching gravel sounded in hurried steps behind her, and she looked back to see Jake returning, dressed now in jeans with his shirt and his boots in one hand. His face was difficult to read in the shadows, but he didn’t look happy. Muscles in his chest and arms were tense and veins stood out all the way up his neck.
“What are you doing here?” he asked in a hiss.
“Meeting… you.” Elie nudged the six-pack that was sitting beside her on the table. This seemed to be the first Jake had taken notice of it. His shoulders slumped at once, and he dug his fingers through his hair.
“Oh, man… Look, Elie, what did you see? What all did you see?”
Elie was coming back to her senses, and looked up at him warily. “Nothing. I didn’t see anything. Nothing at all.”
He leveled a glare at her. “Don’t tell me you didn’t see anything. What, did you faint because an owl spooked you?”
“I’m terribly afraid of them, you know.”
“Elie!” Jake threw down his boots and clothes and spun away in frustration. He made a sound, something between a shout and a… growl. He spun back towards her. She’d never seen him so upset, not since that day eons ago when a dumb high school girl had shot down a hopeful more-than-friend. “This isn’t a joke!”
“That’s disappointing. I’ve been hoping I might be on hidden camera.”
“Not funny,” Jake snapped. “God knows, if anyone caught this on camera… I’d be… I’d be in some… government lab, or somewhere like that.”
Elie swallowed past her dry throat and looked at him, really looked at him, the curve of his great shoulders, the fear and pain clearly on his face.
Invisible walls seemed to tilt inward like a funhouse, mirrored realities bouncing each other back. This was impossible. Elie sprung to her feet. Adrenaline pumped through her veins. The world jolted but didn’t spin, not quite—she still had to reach out and catch a hand on Jake’s arm. His skin was clammy, like the aftermath of a fever. The hairs on his arms were coarse over the hardness of the corded muscles beneath.
“Elie, don’t—”
“Just leave me be!” Elie shouted, snatching her arm away.
He raised both hands in a peaceful gesture. “I’m not going to hurt you, Elie.”
Elie stalked away. She took long strides, devouring the distance to her car. This was impossible. This was impossible.
Afraid to find Jake following, Elie didn’t look back until she was unlocking the driver-side door. The moon was higher now and she could see him still standing shirtless next to the picnic table. She stood there staring. It wasn’t too late. She could still close the car door, go back to him, try to figure out whether she or just the entire situation was completely crazy.
They could still sit together in the moonlight and drink and remember what it was to be blameless. Hopeful. Free.
But the next second, she opened the door and dove into the safety of that which was real and solid and safe.
Chapter Seven
Two days later, Elie was still hiding under a quilt in her old bedroom, snug and safe as a princess in a tower, but nervous as a hen in a fox den. Clouds had rolled in without rain, just hanging overhead like a shroud over the Rockies, holding in heat and bringing up the humidity. With it came a persistent chill. Alison and Brent Barner had chalked up Elie’s behavior to a bit of a cold and she didn’t correct them.
She’d lived in a hazy state of half-waking, half-sleeping since the night before last. It played over and over again, the events between hearing the bear through the forest on the dark lakeshore and getting back into her car. Fur and teeth vanishing into human form. Jake stumbling out of the lake towards her. Him naked in the moonlight; there was no reason to pretend she wasn’t partial to that one, but it couldn’t blot out the insanity of the entire affair.
People didn’t turn into bears. Bears didn’t turn into people.
There was a knock on the front door downstairs. Elie’s heart flip-flopped in her chest and she held very still, waiting.
Murmured voices. One of them, certainly her mother’s. The other… Elie already knew, but wanted to hope it wasn’t…
Should she have warned her parents? Elie hadn’t told them a thing, but what if…
There were steps tracking through the house, and Alison politely commenting on Elie’s feeling under the weather and how she hadn’t left her room all day, or all yesterday. They were at the stairs!
It would be stupid to hide under the bed, right? Elie briefly considered the closet, but the stairs were too short for that and before she could have dashed across the room, Elie’s door creaked opened and Alison poked her head in.
“Hey… how are you feeling? Better?”
Elie peered over the quilt and shook her head.
Alison nodded. “Well, you have a visitor here, so I’ll send him up with some soup.”
“No! Mom—!” But, Alison had already closed the door coyly. Elie grumbled and sat up. At least she was already clothed. Now she had to wait for the hum of the microwave to end in a piercing beep, knowing that when the sound wafted upstairs, someone else would soon be coming with it.
Dismally, Elie waited, head under the quilt. Maybe if he came up and she ignored him, he’d just go away.
She heard the door creak open.
Her room was carpeted, and she could barely hear his footsteps as he crossed the floor, but she knew he was there. In her mind’s eye, Elie could see him, standing over her bed, looking down at the quilt with those soft brown eyes. He’d be wearing jeans again, like he always did, and a button-down shirt, or maybe a t-shirt that squeezed his big arms and oak-tree chest.
He sneezed and something sniffing and cold poked rudely under her quilt.
“Goddammit, Jasper!” Elie pushed his nose away, giggling. The shepherd grew more interested as she began to move, and his whole face came to see her in her blanket sanctuary. “Your nose is freezing! Get out of here!” Elie sat up and threw the quilt back.
Jake was standing, leaning against the open doorway, a bowl of soup in one hand. Elie froze, even as Jasper clambered into bed with her and settled absurdly across her lap. At thirteen years old, he still thought he was puppy-sized.
“Glad to see you’re doing ok,” Jake offered, not moving from the doorway.
Elie nodded stiffly. “Yeah, I’m ok. Just a little cough and cold. Not a big deal.”
He was staring an awfully long time, and the intensity of his eyes on her was making Elie woozy. Maybe she really was sick.
“Did—did you need something?” she asked innocently.
Jake shut the door.
“You know why I’m here,” he said quietly. He set the soup down on her bedside table and stood by her, just as Elie had imagined him doing minutes ago. The trace of stubble on his jaw was darker than his hair, black rather than dark brown. “I need to know what you saw.”
Elie swallowed dryly. “Here,” she patted the bed beside her. “Sit…”
He didn’t seem to want to at first. His discomfort at Elie’s suggestion was practically visible in the air. But sit, he did.
“I saw…” Elie paused, reflecting. Her voice was so quiet a lurker under the bed wouldn’t have been able to hear it. Elie didn’t want to speak too loudly, in case Alison got it into her head to ‘accidentally’ overhear their conversation. Scalding hot men visiting their daughter in bed was too much for any mother to resist listening in on, if the opportunity came. She looked him in the eye. “Jake… I saw a bear. It changed into a human. That human was… you.”
Jake let out a long, slow breath, as if he’d been holding it.
“Have you told anyone else?” he asked in a calm so forced, his jaw twitched.
Elie shook her head. “No, and I’m not going to. You’re right. If anyone knew, you’d end up in a—a FBI quarantine cell or a laboratory or something. Either that, or I’d end up in a mental hospital. I don’t plan on telling anyone. Ever.”
And Elie meant it, with all her heart. She of all people knew what it was to want to keep your business to yourself.
Jake didn’t seem to have an answer. Maybe he hadn’t expected such easy compliance. He turned out to be wearing the t-shirt today, and Elie watched as his shoulders lowered, bit by bit, and his face relaxed.
“I’m glad to hear that,” he murmured finally.
Elie was feeling more and more acutely how little clothing she had on. She pulled the quilt around her waist a little tighter, but it didn’t help the lack of a bra, which was obvious through her old, ragged Five Finger Death Punch tee. Elie winced. Maybe she should buy a couple blouses, or at least shirts that didn’t have holes worn in them.
“So why did you show up as a bear if you didn’t want me to see?” Elie asked, adjusting her arms and trying to keep the shirt from clinging to the round swell of her breasts too tightly.
“What?”
“Well, you knew I was going to be there. Why the hell did you come as a bear if you didn’t want me to know?”
He frowned. “Why would I’ve known you were going to be there?”
“Because I left you a note,” Elie explained in disbelief. “I left it right on your front door.”
“I never use my front door, haven’t in years. My workshop is in the garage, so I always just go in through there.”
Elie rolled her eyes, more at herself than anything. Of course, he never used his front door. Of course, anything that could go wrong had gone wrong. Stupid Murphy’s Law.
But now, there was one more topic, one more elephant in the room, and Elie badly wanted to begin the subject, if only she could do it gently. Well, she’d try, anyway.
“Jake?” He looked up at her, and Elie wondered if she really wanted to ask this next question. She figured she’d better do it quickly before she changed her mind. “Can you tell me? I mean, what was that I saw? What happens to you?”
He looked at her thoughtfully. Elie thought this was better, at least, than him storming out at the audacity of her question.
“You know,” he said, “you’re the only person I ever talked to about it at all.”
Elie smiled a bit. “I might as well know the whole story.”
Jake reached over and patted Jasper’s head. The dog quivered a little and whined, but didn’t resist the attention.
“Jasper’s a real good dog,” Jake pointed out. “Most dogs—especially the little ones—don’t like me much now.”
Elie snorted. “Jasper’s a wuss. Someone could come in to rob the house and murder us all and he’d either hide under the table or wag his tail and beg for treats.”
Jake laughed. He had seemed to relax almost back to his normal self. “Well. I… actually I’d like to tell you, to tell someone what happened. Been carrying it too long, you know…
“It was the year I got to the city. I went because, well, I wanted to try something new. You’d run off to France, and I thought that was way too far for me, but just down the mountain wasn’t too much. I could still drive home when I wanted—just an hour or so away. Was tough in the winter, though.”
“Is that when you learned about craft beer?” Elie teased.
“Yep, that, and some other things,” Jake sighed. “I was working with a construction company building apartments, and I would go out with the guys. Especially a couple guys that just sort of… They were different, that’s all. I didn’t really understand it, but they would talk to me now and then, and they seemed like nice fellas.”
“Seemed?”
“Seemed,” Jake agreed. “Now, my Mom didn’t raise an idiot, I don’t sucker up to anybody just because they pat me on the back or buy me a beer. But I hung out with these two. They liked to hike and camp, see, and well that was just perfect for me.”
Jake twisted his mouth in reminiscence. Shook his head. “I figure when you saw me the other night, you probably felt just like I did the first time I saw them change. Except when they turned, they came after me. I thought they were going to tear me apart, but they just wanted to infect me. They made me like them, and those bastards didn’t even ask.”
His fists were clenched on his knees. Elie couldn’t blame him. “If it’d been me, I’d’ve torn their damn heads off,” Elie snapped indignantly. She forgot, for a moment, about being quiet. “They didn’t think that maybe they should ask you first?”
“If they told me beforehand, they said, they couldn’t have been sure I wouldn’t give them away,” Ja
ke explained in a low voice. “And I told them to do some things and go some places that I won’t repeat. Of course, I worked with them, but they never said a damned word to me after that. In fact, they steered clear of me altogether. I learned later that they hadn’t expected my bear to be so large, or so dominant. They were actually scared of me.
“I felt like I was going crazy, though, Elie. I don’t know how to explain it. You know those people who hear voices in their head? I felt like that. For weeks. Not like a voice, but like… like a… a feeling like something else was in my head following me. Stalking me. Every day I was terrified some men in black suits were gonna show up and ask me kindly to please come along with them, they have some questions, and so on.
“I know I was paranoid, and it affected my entire life. They started to notice it at the jobsite. Eventually, I turned in my two weeks. I was afraid I was gonna end up getting someone killed. My boss didn’t say anything—he was a great guy, Mack—but I knew he was relieved I quit. I’d been drinking a lot, since alcohol seemed to keep the urge to change at bay somewhat. I’d shown up to work drunk twice. He would’ve had to fire me soon, and he hated to put a guy out of work.
“I hadn’t changed, because I was doing everything I could to stop it. I thought if I got out of the city, I’d calm down and it might go away, but I’d seen the other two change and deep down I knew it was coming. I knew I needed to be away from people when it did.”
He fell silent. Jasper wriggled a bit and Elie scratched his big ears.
“So, you came home,” Elie murmured.
Jake nodded and Elie caught his eyes drop to the holes in her thin t-shirt. They stayed for a long moment before he was looking her in the eye again. “I’ve been here ever since.”
Elie nodded and found herself patting him on the leg, like a pal. She winced.
To her shock, Jake set a hand over hers. “I actually like it there, if it’s all the same.”
Heat flew up into Elie’s face and neck, but she didn’t remove her hand. Jake was grinning, just a little now, just enough to make her heart race. His thigh under her fingers tightened and flexed as he moved nearer, leaned closer.
Bears of Burden: THORN Page 22