by Ivy Sinclair
"What the hell do you want? Haven't you done enough damage today?"
"I'm calling to find out if you were able to get Reddon to talk yet." I didn't want to talk to Doc Walton any more than Doc Walton wanted to talk to me. But the man was my peacekeeper whether he wanted to be or not, so I needed to lean on him. "I'd like to talk to him in private before the start of the Summit. I need to make sure that he doesn't try to pull any shit with the other leaders."
"Well, I think that pooch has been screwed," Doc Walton said. "Reddon went back to his hotel and won’t answer his phone. From what I’ve heard, he's packing up. I don't think he has any intention of even going to the Summit this afternoon."
That was bad news. "You’ve got to get in there and convince him to stay. If he leaves, it’ll throw the whole Summit into chaos."
"You don't think I know that?" Doc Walton sounded more than annoyed with me, but I didn't give a shit.
"I think you do know, so it's time for you to step up and show what you can do. You're a council member for the Greyelf Grizzly clan, and I trust you to take care of these kinds of matters. Get Reddon to the Summit." Then I hung up.
After my brief conversation with Doc Walton, I knew that I couldn't stall in my other business any longer. I stepped back to the desk, and the nurse passed a small piece of paper to me. On it was written the number 203.
As I made my way to Sheriff Monroe's room, I knew my feet dragged a bit. Sheriff Munroe had been my brother's best friend in high school. Since they grew up together, Markus always trusted Sheriff Monroe in pretty much everything. When the shifters finally came out in full force, there were many times when Markus’s life was threatened. He put helped Sheriff Monroe get elected in Greyelf just so he could always ensure he was nearby. Sheriff Monroe had always been nothing but completely devoted to Markus.
I wasn't sure what I was thinking in my mind, but there was something wrong about the whole situation with my brother’s death. Markus wouldn't have gone out to Shulman’s Trail in the middle of the night by himself for no reason, especially right before the Summit when tensions were running high. There was extra security in and around Markus all the time in the days leading up to the Summit. Why he would he have snuck out by himself? It made no sense.
That was what I was there to find out. If anyone knew why Markus was up on old Shulman’s Trail by himself in the middle of the night it was Sheriff Monroe. Hell, Sheriff Monroe probably knew Markus's bathroom routines and what clothes he wore every day of the week. He knew everything about Markus, and yet the man remained aloof and elusive to me.
As I approached the room, I thought about what I had done to Sheriff Monroe the day before. He had been wrong to try to take my alpha claim away from me. But in those last few moments before Doc Walton broke up the fight, I knew that I was capable of killing him. I never killed anyone, despite what the town might think had happened in my past. But in that moment, my bear had taken over. It had wanted nothing but Sheriff Monroe's blood for being so arrogant and so self-righteous. He thought that he knew better than me about the future of the clan. He was wrong.
That was another part of the real rub about the whole thing. I couldn't help but think that Markus had told Sheriff Monroe that he intended for me to be his heir. After all, Markus had been setting me up since the day that he took over as alpha of the Greyelf Grizzly clan to take his place one day. Markus knew that he would never have children. I was to be Markus's legacy.
Maybe that was part of the reason I was out of sorts too. I hadn’t wanted that responsibility. Hell, it wasn't as if Markus ever asked me if I wanted to be the alpha. But that’s who I was now all of the same. I was twenty-eight years old, and I felt it was my God-given duty to be the alpha now that Markus was gone. Which is what made everything so much more confusing when it came to Maren.
As I approached Sheriff's Monroe's room, I saw a doctor walk out. He shoved his hands into his pockets and glanced furtively up and down the hall. When his eyes lit on me, he turned on his heel and walked quickly away. I wouldn't have noticed him except he looked vaguely familiar to me.
"Hey," I called down the hallway. The man moved faster now. He went through a pair of double doors and was gone. I stopped at the doorway to Sheriff Monroe's room. I had two options, I could go after the man, or I could go in and shake down Sheriff Monroe.
He knew more than he had been letting on. I didn’t care what Billy Miller said. There was something about Markus's death that someone was keeping under wraps.
I decided to let the man go. It was just a crazy, irrational thought to consider going after him to begin with. I turned into Sheriff Monroe's room and came to a halt. The room was eerily quiet. I had expected to see Sheriff Monroe sitting up ready to give me an ear full about what an awful person I was. Instead, the shades were closed, and he laid in the bed on his side facing the window. I looked at the equipment around his bed. None of it was on.
Shifters had extraordinary healing abilities. But at the end of the day, we were all still mortal. I had broken bones in Sheriff Monroe's body that would take a normal human’s body months to heal. In the shifter world though, the same injuries would take a week, maybe two at most. Given it had only been a little more than a day since our fight, I knew that Sheriff Monroe would still be fairly banged up. I stepped closer into the room toward the bed.
"Sheriff?" I said softly. If the man was asleep, I didn't want to wake him up. The old expression don't poke the bear hadn’t come about for no reason. There was no response.
I made my way around the bed. What I saw gave me pause. The Sheriff's eyes were closed as if he was in a peaceful slumber. But I realized too late that the eerie silence in the room meant something else as well. I should have been able to hear the Sheriff's breathing and heartbeat. My hearing was keener than most of my kind, and I should have heard his deep breaths in his slumber. I should have almost felt the pounding of the heart in his chest. Instead, everything was still.
"Nurse!" I yelled out into the hallway.
Thirty minutes later, I stood out in the hallway across from the Sheriff’s room. I was surrounded by people, and yet I felt entirely alone.
A doctor stepped into my view. He nodded at me briefly and consulted his chart. "Sheriff Monroe suffered extensive injuries from his accident," the doctor said. "There really wasn't anything that we could do for him outside of making him comfortable."
That was bullshit. There was no way that a man with Sheriff Monroe's healing powers could have sustained such damage that he would not have been able to recover. At least, that's what I had to tell himself. There was no way that what I had done had been enough to kill the man. As long as Sheriff Monroe was alive when he left the bear match, it shouldn't have been a problem.
I stared at his room. The doctor left after I murmured a low ‘thank you.’ I watched as the attendants carefully covered the sheriff's body. The doctor who had just spoken to me stood in the corner writing in Sheriff Monroe's chart. There was a sense of keen loss that I felt even across the hall.
Whether I liked him or not, Sheriff Monroe had been a person in the community that everyone looked up to and respected. They would blame me for that loss. Sheriff Monroe had made the community feel safe for eighteen years. There would be whispers. I knew that it looked bad. I would be held responsible for yet another thing going wrong in Greyelf.
It was in that thoughts that I realized something was amiss. I looked at the doctor standing there in the room and realized it wasn't the same doctor that I had seen leave the sheriff’s room earlier.
It all fell into place, and I felt anger begin to burn in my chest. The doctor had looked familiar to me because I had seen him before. Ten years ago at a drive-in hitting on Maren. The sheriff’s death was no accident. Behind it was the feeling of relief that I didn’t need to feel guilty for it.
I heard the footsteps, and then Doc Walton appeared at the end of the hallway. The older man's hair was disheveled, and he had a look on his face that I had
never seen before, uncertainty. Perhaps even, fear.
"What the hell happened?" Doc Walton asked me as he approached. "I talked to insert the sheriff just this morning. He was fine. The doctor said they were probably going to discharge him the day after tomorrow."
“They said the internal damage was too extensive," I said without any expression in my voice. "They said it was an injury they missed and that he's been bleeding internally ever since he was brought in. He slipped away in his sleep."
"So do you believe that?" Doc Walton asked
Tt was a surreal feeling for me. It was the first time I felt as if I was being asked a question by the council member not as a boy, but as an equal. Our relationship was shifting. I realized this was an opportunity for me to truly show that I was the alpha and not just in name only.
"I don't think that this is the right place to talk about that," I said. "There are too many ears here."
Doc Walton nodded. "We have time before the Summit starts. This is going to be a shit storm, and you know it. We’re going to be lucky if we keep the rest of the shifter leaders here after they find out about this. No one is going to want to work with you if they think you killed him."
"I know what it looks like," I said. "Do you think this is the first time I've had someone try to frame me for something I didn't do?" I let that question hang between us because I knew the answer. I had earned my reputation as the bad boy of Greyelf more than twice over, but I wasn't responsible for everything that happened around Greyelf when he lived there either. There have been more than a few mistakes and examples of public mischief that had happened that had my name attached to it that weren't actually things I had done. At the time, I shrugged it off. I didn't give two shits what people thought about me then, and so I didn’t care if people didn’t like me or were afraid of me.
Now is different. I needed to look different. I was different. I had my people to be concern about, and I felt anger that ball of anger inside growing larger. Someone was taking aim at the Greyelf grizzly clan through me. That meant that everyone around me was in danger whether I realized it or not
"Have you managed to get an appointment with Reddon?"
“He said he think about it. That's the best I could do."
I gave a low growl. “You’re going to have to try harder than that.”
CHAPTER FOUR – Maren
I sat across the living room from my father feeling awkward and like I was ten years old all over again. The pause between us stretched out too long. My dad wasn’t capable of a high level of emotional support on the best of days. There was really no preparing us for what this was. It was a heart-to-heart that have been a long time coming, and I didn't know where it was going to end. I don't think he did either.
"Can you at least tell me what happened to your face?" my dad finally asked. "I swear to God if that animal put his hands on you, I'm going to kill him."
I was a little bit surprised. My father was not one who tended toward violence.
"Lukas didn't have anything to do with this," I said. "Although the reason it happened started with him, I have to admit. There are people out there who want to mess with the Summit. Some of them knew that Lukas and I had a relationship."
I let the word relationship settle there for a few moments. My Dad had not wanted to acknowledge that Lukas and I had even been friends at any point. He was stubbornly against the idea that there would be anything that Lukas and I had in common. I don't know why it had been news to me when Lukas told me my father had been involved with Markus keeping him away from me. It seemed as if everyone thought they knew how to run my life better than me.
"Maybe you should start from the beginning," he said.
It was as good a point as any really. But I was going to go back even further than he realized. "Dad, I know you don't like Lukas."
My father interrupted me, "It's not that I don't like Lukas. It's that he isn't good enough for you, Maren. You’re smart, witty, and pretty as a picture, just like your mother. I didn't deserve her either. How I got so lucky I have no idea. But he's trouble. He always has been, and he always will be."
If I didn't say something to get him out of his ‘I hate Lukas’ rut, we were going to go around and around in the same circular argument that we'd been having about Lukas since I was a kid. “I know you don't like Lukas. Then again, I don't think that you would have liked any guy that I brought home."
“What about Billy Miller? I saw him standing outside looking pretty upset," my dad said. "He seemed like a good enough guy, even though he’s apparently a bear. I didn’t see that one coming, I’ll admit. I just want what's best for you, Maren. That's all I've ever wanted."
"I know, Dad. I know that's what you want, and I'm trying to tell you that I found that. You can argue with me until the cows come home, but what I want is what I've always tried to tell you. Lukas is the one for me. Even when he didn't know it. He knows that now."
"What do you mean he knows it now?" My dad asked.
I took a deep breath because I wasn't exactly sure how to announce my new status with Lukas. It would be the first time saying it out loud to someone other than Lukas or the council members. Plus, it was like I was married but I wasn't. At least not in the traditional sense that I was used to thinking about it. It all happened so fast my head was still kind of spinning about the whole thing. "Dad, I know you know that Lukas was supposed to take a mate. It was supposed to be announced at the Summit."
"I heard that he was engaged to a girl who belongs to the Loper clan. That news was announced via a press release shortly after the end of the opening remarks of the Summit."
Now it was my turn to look surprised. It seemed as if the council was hell-bent on making sure that Lukas and Vivian Reddon were together forever. But that wasn't how it was going to happen. As far as I was concerned, that ship had sailed when Lukas and I marked each other and had the best sex of my entire life.
"The press release was sent in error," I said. "Lukas asked me to be his mate several days ago."
"What exactly does that mean? Becoming someone's mate? Goddamnit Maren, I can't believe you're getting yourself mixed up with this boy again, especially a goddamn shifter!" my dad exclaimed.
I had expected anger. I had expected unkind words. I knew that my father wouldn’t understand. He might have a pretty open mind when it came to all things around the shifter community. He knew better than most humans out there how it all worked. But when it came to me and Lukas, I thought my father lost all common sense and proprietary.
"It's exactly what it sounds like. Lukas has declared that I am his mate." I thought about that word again, mate. Even though I understood innately that this was a term of endearment and possession in the shifter community, it was a word that was still unfamiliar for me to associate with myself.
There was another word the word that was common those of us humans that I wanted to add to that title. I wasn't even sure if that something that was done in shifter community circles. Was there such a thing as weddings? Did they do the big church with the white dress and circle of friends and family? I didn't know. I guess it was something I was going to have to ask Lukas about because I had dreamed of getting married to him since I was a teenager. And I still wanted all of that.
"Maren, are you sure that you know what you're doing? And I'm saying this not only as your father but also as someone who has seen what's going on right now around the shifters. This is a dangerous time to be anywhere near Lukas Kasper. Your life could be in danger." My father stood up and began to pace the room. "I knew over the last eighteen years of about fifty attempts on Markus's life." He looked at me then, and I saw him register my shocked expression. "Yes, not all of those made it into the paper. Hell, only about a tenth of those made it into the paper. Markus and the sheriff kept a pretty tight lid on all of that kind of talk. They were afraid that if it got out, there would be anarchy. All of this talk of peace, and it's just not happening, Maren. Tempers are too volatile. Beliefs are em
bedded too deep. People aren't ready to accept an integrated society, no matter what they say. We are too different from them."
His words created a bolt of fear inside of me, but I thought that he was wrong. It was a debate that he and I had also had for several years. "Dad, there are people who want to do bad things in the world no matter what. I know that, and you know that. There are people who are biased and bigoted and have opinions that are different from mine and yours. But if we stop fighting, if we stop trying to make progress, we’re not going to get anywhere. Are you about concerned about what it looks like for you if I’m with a shifter? Are you ashamed of me now?"
My father's face softened for the first time since he walked through the door. He pointed at my face. "What happened there, Maren? You said that Lukas didn't do it, so that can only mean that someone else did. The fact that you're sitting in the man's house right now with a guard outside tells me that he thinks you're in trouble too."
Naturally, my father was as perceptive as ever. It was time to tell him the other truths of the matter. "During the opening ceremony, I was kidnapped. They took me out to the old mining town. I don't think that they meant to hurt me, at least not initially. What they were trying to do was scare Lukas. They were definitely gunning for him and not for me. Lukas and Billy came after me, and they saved me. My face got in the way during the process. I’m okay, so you don’t need to worry about me. Lukas is taking good care of me." I let him absorb the story.
"I can't believe you'd ever think that I was ashamed of you," he said softly. "I am prouder of you than I could ever imagine. I may not say it much, but I think you are amazing. I don't know why the hell you been sitting in this podunk town writing for your old man when clearly you're far more talented than that."
"What? I thought that's what you wanted," I said.