by Meg Ripley
“I see,” says Jeremy. “Is there anything else you’d like to add?”
“I would, and this is the worst offense of them all.” I motion to Trent, who’s standing to my left, “He found evidence that at least one of the four did, in fact, murder two bears from my clan, Matilda and Harold. Shawn, the Alpha of their crew, left his scent-marks all over their bodies, which Trent found a ways north of here tonight.”
The members of the conclave nod, looking grave.
“We’d like to extend our sincere condolences to each of you,” Nathan says, as the rest of the conclave bows their heads in agreement. “We need to speak to the accused now, and we must do it quickly. Where are they being detained?”
“They’re in a shed nearby, over on the edge of our territory,” I tell them, gesturing in the direction of the trail leading to where the delinquents are.
“Very well. We’ll head down to hear their pleas, and we should be back shortly to discuss the verdict,” Nathan says.
I nod. “We appreciate your help very much.”
As they leave, I look up at the sky, feeling the tingling through my body intensify. The moon will be out within a matter of minutes, and we will all need to transform into our other forms. I take a deep breath, holding the change at bay by force of will. I sniff the air—I can almost smell the magic that makes the change possible, dancing through the little secluded spot by the pond.
The members of my clan begin to prepare themselves for the change as soon as the moon rises. I hold off, not wanting to commit to the shift until I hear from the conclave, and I look around, taking deep breaths.
My focus shifts to Hannah for a moment as I await their return. I’m 35 years old; at this point in my life, I need to get serious about finding my mate; someone to settle down and have cubs with, I tell myself. But if Hannah finds out what I really am, there’s zero chance of having a future like that with her. Not to mention she isn’t even from around here; it’d be hard to convince her to move up to these parts and abandon everything she’s been doing with her life up until now.
I’m plucked from my thoughts as I my ears pick up on rustling within the tall grass nearby. The conclave is making their way back toward the pond, and their expressions are somber. Behind them, Shawn, Harris, Kevin and Jamie trudge along, bound in silver chains; we made sure to take that precaution once we’d managed to track them down for the second time, not wanting to risk having them escape again.
“We’ve come to a decision,” Vanessa says, looking first at me, then over to the rest of the clan. “This is neutral territory, and it’s indisputable that these four have violated the terms of being on this land, and what it means to all of us. But one of the tenets of our society is that even wrongdoers are allowed to attempt to defend themselves in combat.”
This isn’t the result I was hoping for, but I know I have to abide by it. “So, what has the conclave concluded?”
As I look at the five members, Jeremy is the one to speak up. “At moonrise, the four guilty members will shift, and they will be given a twenty-minute head start, at which point, they will be fair game. If they can escape the territory before the Alpha can reach them, they’ll earn their freedom. If they are able to successfully conquer the Alpha, they’ll receive their freedom as well. But, let it be known, any confrontation will be fought to the death. If they manage to earn their freedom and attempt to re-enter the territory at any given time, execution sentences will be carried out without hesitation.”
“To make our point clear, absolutely no one may intervene,” Vanessa adds. “It is between the Alpha, Knox Bernard, and these four.”
The verdict is better than what I had been dreading, but not by much. I’ll have to chase down four separate bears; if they have any sense at all, they’ll take off in different directions. I’ll have to take them all out separately if I want to make sure that they will never threaten me, my clan, or Hannah again.
“I accept,” I say, because frankly, I don’t have a choice.
“Take the chains off these four, and we will oversee the challenge,” Jeremy says.
Trent and Cassidy step forward and begin to remove the chains binding Harris, Shawn, Jamie, and Kevin.
I move closer to Shawn and a low growl escapes from my throat. “Why? Why did you do it?”
Shawn smirks, still bound by his chains. “Do what, pussy boy?”
I level my eyes with his. “You know damn well what I’m talking about, jerk-off!” My growl is now a deep roar at this point.
“Oh, those old geezers? Please, I was doing you a favor.” He spits in my face. “Survival of the fittest, motherfucker.”
I lunge for his throat, but Trent and Alex pull me back.
“You’ll have plenty of time to settle this in a few minutes,” Trent reminds me.
Shawn laughs maniacally, shaking so violently from his hysterics that his chains clatter through the night air. “We’ll see about that,” he snickers as Alex steps behind Shawn and frees him.
I breathe deeply, trying to calm myself as I start stripping out of my clothes. I feel the magic of the change intensifying in me, the animal instincts rising up to take control of my mind more completely than they do at any other time of the month. I give into it, closing my eyes, letting the transformation course through my whole body, from head to toe.
I feel my heart nearly push through my ribcage as I’m taken over by the seismic change. Tremors ripple through my limbs as my joints and bones begin to crack and morph violently. I feel my face elongate, stretching into a broad snout as I begin to taste iron-rich blood, my razor-sharp ursine teeth now emerging from my jaws. My eyes involuntarily roll to the back of my skull as equal doses of pain and ecstasy flow through my entire being. My skin tears and gives way to accommodate the lengthening of my bones, and tufts of thick, black fur force their way to the surface in its place. A moment later, I’ve made my full transformation.
When I open my eyes again I’m a black bear, surrounded by the other black bears of my clan, and the members of the conclave in their animal forms: a fox, a mountain lioness, two wolves, and a grizzly bear.
The grizzly, Jeremy, lets out a deep bellow, and I see Shawn and his accomplices lumber off into the woods next to the pond, dispersing to take advantage of their twenty-minute head start. Despite my animal form, there’s just enough of my human mind still persisting for me to hold back and keep myself from automatically chasing after the four.
I wait impatiently, counting the seconds in my mind. Before I can hunt or forage for the foods I love, before I can commune with the rest of my clan, I have to take care of this problem. At least it’ll all be over soon; one way or another, the four shitheads will be out of my life for good by the end of the night.
To pass the time, I sniff the night air, reading the scents painted through it. There’s a new hive of bees not far from the lake, and I look forward to raiding it sometime soon after dark when they’ll be less defensive. I also want to make sure to get the last berries of the season to share with Hannah.
It’s almost time, and I’m sniffing the air again to try and determine which path to take first when I catch her scent. It’s unmistakable: lavender honey with a deeper musk underneath; delicious, magnetic and so fresh that it has to mean that Hannah is close by, right now. It’s not an old scent from her possibly tromping through the area earlier in the day; I would have noticed it before.
Adrenaline shoots through me and the entire situation immediately becomes drastically more complicated. I have to wonder if she saw me—and the clan, and the conclave—change forms. These four reckless deviants pose a serious threat to Hannah if I can’t get to them in time. I lower my head and let out a bellow. My human mind wants to take over—this situation is too complicated—but my animal mind maintains control. The simplest thoughts I have dominate my brain: protect the female, and remove the threat.
I take off after one of the scent trails, keeping part of my mind on the fact that Hannah is in the woods,
too; I need to keep away from her, if I can. What is she even doing in this part of the woods at night? Not important. Get the assholes taken down first and worry about that later.
I follow Harris’ trail, keeping myself aware of the others; as I suspected, they seem to have all gone off in different directions. At least, if I can track them down and take out two of them, the other two will be barred from the park for the rest of their lives. That would be a start.
Just as I’m getting close to Harris, though, I catch Hannah’s scent again, and then, as I’m sniffing the air and the ground, I realize that Shawn’s scent has crossed into this area of the woods, too; he’s been through the trail in the last fifteen minutes, to judge by the freshness of the scent. I hear a scream, and my animal and human brains identify it immediately.
It’s Hannah.
I quickly abandon any thought of going after Harris. Instinct takes over. I have to protect Hannah, whatever she’s run afoul of; I can only suspect that it’s Shawn.
I sniff the air and I find the direction Hannah is headed in, and a moment later, I find her, just yards away from me. She screams again, and I’m running towards her before I realize what I’m doing.
13
Hannah
I don’t know what I was expecting to see when I hiked out to one of the suspicious sites I’d noticed while cross-referencing the maps, but it definitely wasn’t this.
A group of people—including my most recent sex partner, Knox—stripped naked, and then somehow, violating every natural law, disappeared into the bodies of a bunch of bears, along with a fox, two wolves, and of all things, a goddamn mountain lion.
Whatever other plans I had for the night evaporate from my head completely as I watch four of the bears shuffle off into the woods in a hurry. One of the others chases after him and I fumble with my phone, doing my best to capture this all on video while still trying to get over the initial shock of what I’d seen. I decide that it would be a moot point to try and check out whatever other sites I’d mapped out. Jessica was right after all; there’s some fucking freaky shit happening in these parts, and there’s no way I’m going to stay in the park with these roaming bands of human-animal creatures running around.
But then, as I attempt to find my way back toward my car, I lose the trail, and then get lost in the park altogether, with my phone now out of range of a cell tower.
It’s bad enough to be wandering through the woods, unable to find my way out as the temperature continues to drop, but when I hear a growl from a few yards away and the barely-there sound of leaves and sticks crunching, I somehow know—immediately—that I’m the target of the animal in question.
My heart pounds in my chest as I try to figure out what to do about the situation. I hear myself screaming, one high, loud yelp escaping my throat, but I almost don’t know how it could be me; I’m so removed from my own body.
I can’t stop moving, but I force myself to slow down to avoid tripping over something and leave myself sprawling in the scrub, a perfect little bundle of tasty human meat that’s just waiting to be devoured.
Is it one of the people that turned into an animal? Is it Knox? Something tells me that it’s definitely not Knox; he wouldn’t be chasing after me...frightening me...would he? How much humanity stays in the mind of the animal after he or she transforms?
I get a mental flashback of the sight of about thirty or more humans, standing stark naked near a lake in the woods, almost seeming to dissolve as more and more animalistic characteristics come over them. As for the wolves, I guess you’d have to call them werewolves, wouldn’t you? But what would you call a human that changes into a mountain lion, or a bear?
I try to shake off the panic and shock I’m feeling when I hear the telltale sounds of a heavy, large predator behind me. I scream again without even realizing it until my strained throat forces me to cough. It’s moving fast and I need to figure out what I’m going to do; I can’t just keep walking like an idiot. I reach into my bag; I have a hunting knife that Mary gave me when I told her I was going to be checking out a few different parts of the woods at night. She’d pointed out that while it’s technically a crime to kill animals in the park, I could maim one in self-defense and not get charged, and more to the point, it would be better to deal with criminal charges than to die a gruesome death.
I take the knife out and turn around to face the animal coming toward me. There’s enough moonlight for me to catch a few glimpses of the creature as it descends on me: it’s a huge bear with tattered, mangy fur. Okay, so that bear from the other day… My brain does rapid calculus as the bear barrels down on me and I realize that the massive, glorious-looking bear that I’d seen fighting with this other one—when I hadn’t been able to find Knox—had to have been Knox. That explains the bear fight from the other day, the missing jacket and, more importantly, how quickly Knox had gotten back to me. Everything fell into place.
But before I have time to make sense of that revelation, the bear is within fighting distance. I take the knife and hold it up threateningly. “I know you’re a human, or part human,” I say. I try to stand as strong as I can and attempt to make eye contact with the leering, growling beast. “If you come at me, I’m going to do my level best to kill you.” Surely, these shapeshifting, human-animal people aren’t protected by the park’s regulations. What happens to them when they die? Do they remain in their animal forms, or turn back to humans?
The bear hesitates for a moment, seems to size me up, and then lunges at me. I lash out with the knife, but before I can even get at the bear, I hear crashing and a roar nearby. I hear someone—or something—coming at us, and then the bear that was about to attack me is on his side, bowled over by another bear.
I stagger back, stunned at what I’m witnessing. The two bears go at it immediately, swiping at each other, snapping their teeth and growling, wrestling on the ground as each of them struggles to gain the upper hand.
It takes me a few moments to realize that the bear who’s come to my rescue is actually Knox; he must have recognized my scream and came running. I’m torn between relief and new fear, and once again, I have to wonder how much of humanity is in the bear that’s pounding on the one that would have attacked me in a few seconds? Is it the human inside that made Knox come to my rescue, or some animal instinct based on my scent and the sound of my voice?
I suddenly lose my bearings and fall to the ground, hard enough to make my teeth click and my jaw hurt from the impact, and I see the battle continue to rage on. It’s like a weirdly-tinted deja vu from the other day, and while part of me is aware of the possibility that I might still get attacked, my body’s frozen as my mind is working through the surrealness of the situation. Reality slaps me in the face as it fully occurs to me that yes, I truly did see Knox—a man I’d had sex with, and more than once—transform into a fucking bear. And now that bear is protecting me from another bear, who apparently wants to attack me, for reasons of its own.
All at once, I come back to myself as I hear a sickening crunch and a roar. I look around and spot the two furry forms on the ground, and for a second, I don’t know what happened. I’ve been in a state of complete shock, so enveloped in my own thoughts that I totally lost track of what was going on in front of me.
The larger of the two bears—Knox, in his other form—rises, and the other bear doesn’t move at all. I realize, with a sickening feeling in my stomach, that Knox killed the other bear. I should be grateful, and a part of me is, but I’m also horrified.
Knox-bear lumbers towards me slowly, snuffling and making low noises in his throat. I have no idea what to say. I have no idea what to even think. Is Knox even really in there? The bear stops short of me and lets out a groan, and I stagger back on my ass, scrambling on the ground with my hands, unable to even muster the mental capacity to stand up and run.
Before my eyes, Knox-bear seems to shrink, shift and move, and I realize that he’s transforming back into a human, albeit very slowly. It seems almost pa
inful; the sound of bones cracking and joints popping back into place send a chill down my spine.
Then, finally, Knox is standing in front of me, fully naked but fully human, streaked with blood but with only a handful of scratches over him.
“So,” he says, his voice low. He coughs. “I take it you saw something.”
“You’re...some kind of...bear...shapeshifter,” I say, shaking my head. “But that’s impossible.”
“It’s obviously possible,” Knox counters. “You just saw me shift with your own eyes.” He gives me a wry grin. “I’d hoped you didn’t see the first change, but when I heard you tell Shawn here…” he kicks at the bear, which seems to be melting into a human, which is somehow even more unnerving than Knox’s transformation, “that you knew he was human, I figured if I could get rid of him, that would be a good time to come clean.”
“Thanks, I guess,” I say, still numb and stunned from the whole ordeal.
“It’s a lot to take in.” Knox looks worried.
I smile weakly. “Yeah...it is,” I agree. “I just found out that not only are shapeshifters actually a thing, but that I’ve had sex with one more than once without even knowing.”
“Who knows, you might have slept with one before me,” Knox says. “We’re sworn to secrecy about it.”
I mentally scan through the last few guys I’ve dated. “Nope. I highly doubt it.”
“You’d never know…”
I furrow my brow at that. “So... this is why you wanted to wait a couple of days to see me again,” I say, remembering that tidbit. “This is why you were going to be busy.” I’d figured on any number of outlandish scenarios, but this is one I never could have foreseen. “So, what, is the park some kind of hunting ground for your group?”
“It’s not only for my group, but any shifter who wants to come here. As long as they’re willing to obey the rules.” Knox gestures absently to the dead bear-man, who now looks completely like a man, and a naked one at that. “He and three others broke the rules when they tried to attack you, and when they tried to fight me on the premises. This one here even killed a few of my friends.”