by Ivy Sinclair
"I can't let you do this, Lukas," Billy said.
"Then just hand me the keys. Let's not make this about us," I said. Billy just stood there and did nothing. I knew then that he wouldn't stand against me. But he wasn't going to help me either. I had to respect the man's values. He was a man of the law, and I needed him. The people of Greyelf needed him because I intended to make sure that Billy was the next sheriff of Greyelf.
When my fist crossed his face, I don't think Billy knew what hit him. I heard Maren's gasp. I pulled the keys off of Billy's belt before he even hit the floor.
“Stay down,” I warned him.
"What are you doing?" Maren cried out.
"Making sure that nobody gets in my way," I said. The words were more a growl than anything, and I wasn’t sure she even understood me.
I unlocked the door to Joe’s cell. The man finally looked afraid. That was good. There was a part of me that liked it when people were afraid of me. I knew that Maren wanted to stop me, but she also knew that she couldn’t once I got started. We’ve been through this routine more than once when we were younger.
“You talk, or I’m to make you talk. It’s your choice,” I said calmly. “You can talk to me man-to-man, or I can talk to you bear-to-man. Personally, I’ve love it if you chose the latter option. My bear is itching to come out and say hello.” I let my threat linger in the air between us.
“You can’t do that. I’ve got rights. I’m not a freak like you.” The man’s prejudice was coming out. That was good too because that made me angry.
“We’ll see about that. Like I said, this can be easy, or this can be hard. What’s your choice?”
“Lukas,” Maren whispered behind me. “It doesn’t have to be like this.”
I didn’t agree with her. She and I had come a long way, but perhaps I hadn’t come as far as I had hoped. But that was a thought for another day. Not today.
I watched the man as he slowly inched even further backward on his bunk. He wasn’t showing any signs of cracking quite yet. I had heard a lot about these Rally Against Claws activists. They had a long history over the last eighteen years of creating quite a nuisance for various shifter clans. It wasn’t surprising to me that they had made their waves to Greyelf now. After all, we were on the cusp of the largest Summit in history. We had clans represented from all over the United States, and even a few who had traveled from other countries. Shifters were a reality, and it was time that the rest of the world accepted it. We weren’t going to sit in the shadows any longer. Second-class citizenship was really no citizenship at all. We needed integration.
That was the entire focus of Markus’s last three years. He had disappeared from the national spotlight, mostly to focus his energy on trying to figure out the best way to bring all of the clans together in one common cause. There was strength in numbers. On our own, we wouldn’t be able to make enough of a difference to be able to change the world for our people. But together, we could make the progress happen.
I understood why Markus had been targeted. It just blew my mind that after eighteen years and so many threats, this ragamuffin crew had somehow managed to do what no one else had been able to achieve. They brought the great Markus Kasper down.
As that thought sunk into my mind, I thought about the man in the cell next door. I also thought about the boy that Maren and I had met all those years ago at the drive-in. There was something about them that was different.
I slowly backed out of the cell and closed the door. I locked it again. I heard Maren’s sigh of relief, but her body went rigid as I made my way to the cell next door. Billy laid on the floor. He might have been unconscious, but I wasn’t going to check.
This time I simply strung my arms through the bars and rested my forehead against them. I looked at the man. He was big, yes, but he was also…pretty and almost feminine in his appearance. I had missed it the first time because I had been angry and focused on the wrong things. Markus always said that I was focused on the wrong things. It was part of my nature to act first and think later.
I unlocked the cell door. Then I closed it behind me. The man showed no fear. Unlike Joe, he seemed calm and almost content with his status.
“You’re not afraid of me,” I said the words not as a question but a statement of fact.
“I’m not ever going to be afraid of freaks like you.” Craig simply stared at me. I wasn’t sure if he was crazy or simply resigned his fate. “I’ve lived around your kind my whole life. There’s nothing you can do to me or say to me that I haven’t already seen or heard.”
There was a part of me that wondered what had happened to Craig in his past that made him so angry against shifters. These types always had a reason for being angry. Perhaps a shifter had hurt someone important in his life. It was interesting to me that hatred against shifters when it was nothing but normal human nature that was at the core of those types of incidents. It really didn’t matter if it was shifter or man; evil came in all forms. But to have created that kind of hatred inside someone against an entire species was the part that was really frightening.
I needed to take a different tack with Craig. I knew that. I had landed on an idea, and I just needed him to confirm it. “So you knew my brother.”
Craig looked surprised, which was the first real expression of emotion that I had seen on his face. It was the only answer I needed. But I left the question open because I wanted to hear him speak the answer out loud.
“What?”
“I can smell him on you,” I said. It was a bluff, but he didn’t need to know that. It was well-known that shifters had super sensitive noses, so for all he knew I could be telling the truth. I was rewarded when he sprung up and began to swat at himself and his clothes.
“I can tie you to his murder scene.” I was bluffing again. But once again he didn’t need to know that. “You’ve already got a long line of offenses in your past. I’m guessing that any judge would be more than happy to throw you in some cell for the rest of your life. And first-degree murder will make sure you don’t see the light of day for the rest of your life.”
Regardless of what I said, there wasn’t anything about him that made me think that he would be able to commit the kind of violence that was actually done against my brother. No, I didn’t think that Craig was the source of this at all. It had all sprung from the mind of one crazy man.
“Tell me where Joshua is,” I said as I advanced on him. I deliberately let my snout and fingernails grow longer as I approached him. Still, he didn’t look afraid. I wasn’t sure what to think about that. “Tell me where he is, or I will feed you to the wolves.” Now that was a threat that I probably could deliver on. Bears, wolves, lions, leopards, they were all there at the Summit. All I had to do was tell them that this man responsible for Markus’s murder, and they would take care of the rest. It was the way of the animal kingdom. We took care of our own.
“You’re too late,” Craig said. “No matter what you know, we’re already two steps ahead of you. You think you know the truth, but you don’t. Even those who are like you hate you.”
The venom in his voice would take most normal men aback. Instead, it just made me angrier. Now, we were just a foot apart. I grabbed him by the throat. My bear wanted to rip it out. Then I felt the calming presence of Maren behind me. She gently pushed me out of the way. She looked at Craig.
“If were too late, then it doesn’t matter if you tell us what you know,” she said. “I’m a reporter for the Greyelf Gazette. If you tell me what you did, I’ll make sure that you get credit for it. Not the one who organized it, but you.”
I didn’t think that Craig would really want to see his name printed as the culprit, but then I saw his eyes light up. Somehow, Maren had known that it wasn’t my threats that were going to make Craig talk. Whoever was the true mastermind behind the plan was probably keeping him in the dark.
You’ll put my name right up there? With his?”
“Oh, yes,” Maren said with a smile. “
In fact, I’ll put your name first if you want. Just tell us.”
The words tumbled out of Craig’s mouth. “They’re already there. They’re already at the Summit. We wired the place weeks ago. We did it soon as they told us where the location was.”
“That’s impossible,” I said. “We’ve had security around the location for weeks.”
That’s when a slow smile spread across the Craig’s face. I realized a glaring, yet obvious truth that made things start to fall into place. I stepped backward. Maren looked at me with a question on her face, but I just shook my head. “We need to go. We need to go now.”
CHAPTER EIGHT – Maren
Lukas wouldn’t tell me what was going on yet. We rode silently in the truck, and he seemed to be trying to make it go as fast as possible. I had no idea where the Summit was being held. It was a secret location, and the media was definitely not invited. I could tell that Lukas was worried.
“I wonder if we just delayed the inevitable by starting later. Actually, that might have saved everything,” he murmured. I wasn’t sure if he even realized that he had spoken out loud.
“What you think is going on?" I asked. Lukas’s mind was going a million miles a minute. I could tell because I’d seen that look before on his face many times. But I needed him to let me in. We were a team.
“I told you about Markus’s preferences," he said finally.
He didn’t say anything else, and I knew immediately what he was talking about. It hadn’t been widely known outside a select few, but Markus Kasper was gay. That was his deep dark secret. It was something that I hadn’t even realized until talking to Lukas after he returned to Greyelf.
“Yes, so Markus was gay. We knew that already. But nobody else did.”
“Oh yes, they did,” Lukas said. I could tell by the frown on his face that his thoughts were turning blacker by the minute. “Markus would tell me that he would meet people like him at clubs in the city when he would come to visit me. He didn’t have any companionship here in Greyelf for fear that someone would find out, and I knew that bothered him a lot. With the council pushing him to take a mate, he thought that he was going to have to give up his entire opportunity to be able to someone to love. He told me a couple of weeks before he died, that he had met someone. He wouldn’t tell me anything else about him. Just that he was really excited about the possibilities for the future."
“So you think that he was meeting someone up on Shulman’s Trail for a secret rendezvous?” I asked. That I wanted to slap myself on the forehead. Of course, that made perfect sense. A secret rendezvous in the middle of the nights and no one would be the wiser. “You think that RAC lured him out there to catch him in that bear trap?”
“I don’t know if we will really know exactly what happened out there. But I do know that Markus had a soft spot for muscular, pretty guys.”
“So Craig was the one who lured him out there?” I thought about the two men back at the jail. Craig was the obvious choice to match Lukas’s description, although I hadn’t thought about it more than a passing thought at the time.
“All I’m saying is Craig was definitely Markus’s type. But I don’t think that those two engineered this whole thing. They’re not that smart. But Joshua, that’s the one that I’m worried about.”
“You said to Craig that you’ve had had security surveying the location for the last couple of weeks. Surely if there was something there that would cause damage, it would’ve been found.”
Lukas frowned. “Think about it, Maren. This all ties together. The fact of the matter is Sheriff Monroe was the one who was in charge of security for the Summit. He expected to beat me yesterday. I know he did, so me kicking his ass was a surprise to everyone. If he wasn’t the alpha, then with what he knew, he was a liability. Believe me, I don’t like it anymore than you do.”
It was horrible to think about. “You can’t honestly think that the sheriff had anything to do with what happened to Markus, could you? They were best friends.”
“What I do know is that Markus told me that he and the sheriff had been having a lot of arguments lately. The sheriff was lobbying for less integration, not more. But Markus thought believed that integration is the only way to have peace for everyone in the future. So he was focused on uniting the clans. Sheriff Monroe wanted peace treaties with the other clans, but only when it came to standing apart from the humans.”
“My God,” I said. “I feel everything I’ve believed is wrong.” Lukas reached across the seat and took my hand. He squeezed it tight. “I’m sorry, Maren. I’ve been really distracted. I’ve forgotten about you.”
I felt my heart swell with love for him. Here he was trying to be the protector of his clan, and he was worried about me. It made me feel special, but also a little bit selfish at the same time. I didn’t want him to feel as if he had to choose between us. I had been waiting for eighteen years for this, so I could wait a little longer. I couldn’t let him be distracted. Still, I did want to put one thing out in the open. “There is something I want, but it doesn’t have to happen right now.”
“Anything. Name it."
I took a deep breath. “I want a real wedding," I said shyly. I felt silly for asking for it. But then again, it’s what all little girls want. I had dreamed of walking down the aisle and meeting Lukas Kasper at the altar for as long as I could remember. Things had moved so fast that I thought I might have missed my opportunity for that. “I mean I know we’re mate and all now, but there’s something about a wedding it’s really important to me."
“Maren, of course, we’re going to have an official wedding,” Lukas said. He squeezed my hand tighter. His eyes locked on mine. “We are mates in the clan, but we will be man and wife to the world. No matter what comes our way, you and I are in this together now. Forever."
His words made me melt. They were the words that I had been longing to hear for so long that there was a part of me that still felt like I was in a dream. But the edges of my dream were marred with things like murder, kidnapping, and violence. That’s what made me think that sometimes my dream might actually turn into a nightmare. I worried now that I was going to lose everything with Lukas that I had just found.
“Whatever happens now, I need you to be careful." I reached across the seat and brushed his hair out of his eyes. He was so handsome it made my heart hurt. He was mine. I needed to take care of him the way that he took care of me.
“I’m always careful,” Lukas said sarcastically.
“I mean it," I said. I have a feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach that I couldn’t quite shake. Everything was happening so fast.
“Don’t worry,” Lukas said. “I need you to trust me. I know what I’m doing.”
I thought about how many times Lukas had said those words to me over the years. Most of the time, it ended up with him either being thrown in the back of the sheriff’s squad car or bloody in bruised from his most recent fight. Lukas wasn’t known for his thoughtfulness. But as I looked into his eyes, I knew saw a maturity there that hadn’t existed before. I was banking on him being different now, and I had to give him a chance to prove it. So I nodded and squeezed his hand.
“Okay,” I said. “I’m trusting you on this. But if you go off and get yourself hurt, you’re going to have to go find yourself a new mate. I’m not going to put up with that kind of nonsense.”
Lukas chuckled, and I joined him in the laughter. It felt good to laugh.
I was curious about where we were going, even though I didn’t say so. The truck followed the road that bordered the western boundary line of grizzly land and then headed due north into the national state park. Those lands were wilderness.
There was nothing resembling civilization for miles, and the government had agreed that this was a place where shifters could roam free without threat of being hunted. Humans usually stayed away. This was a place where cell phones didn’t work. It was where nature had been returned to nature. Something about the place made a chill ran down my
spine. Of course, this would be where the shifters would choose to meet for their secret summit location.
There was a strict no-fly law over all park property. No one could come in or out except on a few remote, isolated roads that ran through the park, many of them only one-lane. It would be easy to get lost forever in a place like that.
We fell into a kind of comfortable silence. Lukas and I often did that from time to time. It was a comfort level that had been developed over the course of many years of friendship. Of course, now there was something more between us, and it made me feel warm inside. I didn’t have to wonder what he was thinking about. He was focused on the hunt for Joshua. I was just praying that events wouldn’t turn so that I’d lose him again.
We pulled into a dirt parking lot that seem to appear out of nowhere off the right hand side of the road. “So are you going to tell me where were going?”
“This is where the shifter leaders meet.” Lukas shrugged. “It’s isolated, remote, and away from prying eyes. It’s the perfect location.”
I understood what he meant when he said perfect. When he said away from prying eyes, he meant this was a place where shifters ruled the land and were able to be in their natural element, not ours. No matter what the shifters said, there was always a certain uneasiness between them and us. I didn’t like thinking that way. Especially now I was mated to one of them. But I knew that those kinds of prejudices ran deep on both sides. It would take a long time before everyone accepted everyone.
“Are you going to tell me what Markus was planning to propose at the summit?”
“He had a plan for bringing together all of the clans as one,” Lukas said. “He knew that he was going to face a lot of resistance. But as long as we’re all scattered individual clans, we’re not going to get anywhere. He was going to put forward the idea that we all form one giant clan. He said that was the first step in a true world of integration. We had to put aside our own prejudices before we could expect anyone outside to do so."