And Karl let him, opening his mouth and hopping backward with a few easy strides, not at all moving like a bear with jagged raw flesh at the shoulder and stripes of red along his back. The rogue shook his bloody, misshapen head, one eye unfocused, one side of his jaw slack, then with a twisted snarl, he charged.
They dropped, rolling and wrestling on the ground as I tried to stay clear, splintering the trunks of small trees and flattening saplings. Karl let the rogue bite and scratch him, holding himself back, all with that terrifying smile on his face. Then the giant prehistoric bear got serious.
The rogue’s attack quickly turned to defense, then to panicked attempts to get away, but Karl held him in place, tearing with claws and teeth, bleeding him a little bit at a time, until the bear’s struggles grew weak. Then he opened his mouth wide, and this time he sank his teeth deep into the rogue’s neck. Blood gushed and I heard the crunch of pulverized bone. The rogue went limp, eyes unfocused, twitching paws slowing then hanging still.
Not content to just leave the dead bear, Karl stood up on his hind legs and shook the rogue like a rag, blood painting the nearby tree trunks. Then he dropped to all fours and ran over to one of those trees, bashing the shifter’s body against the trunk. He was so powerful, and so deep in bloodlust that I should have been frightened, but instead I found the whole thing funny. So I laughed.
Yeah. Because I was in a lot of pain, and I’d just watched something out of Jurassic Park Caveman Edition toy with and take down a grizzly shifter with a disturbing amount of glee. None of this was amusing, but I was probably bordering on hysterics because laugh, I did.
Laughing as a wolf sounds kind of like a cross between a whine and a cough. Karl froze at the noise, his head swiveling. He loped over to me, letting go of the dead bear halfway. I dropped down, ready to roll over and play submissive, but the gold glint in his eyes receded and he sniffed me, licking my wounds with his nasty, bloody, gore-filled mouth.
Ewww. I didn’t know much about bear shifters, but this wasn’t cool. I tried to push him away with my front paws, letting out an involuntary whimper as the motion pulled on my injuries.
Karl’s snuffling grew frantic, and he made a noise that sounded an awful lot like Chewbacca. My remaining fear vanished. Silly guy. I was a shifter. I’d survived worse than this. Since I wasn’t doing a good job of communicating to him in my wolf form, I closed my eyes to concentrate and began the process of shifting back.
Chapter Three
It took longer than usual. It was more painful than usual. And when I was finally human again I realized that Karl was also human and was cradling me against his chest, my naked rear on his very naked lap.
My first thought was how the heck does he change forms so quickly? My second thought was this dude has a serious boner going on right now.
A boner. I had angry red gashes and a host of bruises around my ribs. They hurt. Even with Karl’s gentle touch, they hurt. And they were sticky with blood and bear saliva. And human saliva. “Karl, cut it out. Stop licking me.”
He paused, then nuzzled my ear. “Thought you liked me licking you, especially down—”
How could he be sexed up right now? I knew a lot of wolves who wanted to get it on after a fight, but this was a bit extreme. And was I just as twisted that his words were making me want to forget about my injuries, turn around, and straddle him?
“Yes, yes,” I interrupted hastily. The boner against my butt was becoming insistent and now I was remembering how very talented Karl was with that tongue of his. “I do like you licking, but not when you’re a bear, and not on my injuries. I’m a shifter. I’ll heal just fine without the help of saliva.”
“Wasn’t healing. Was tasting.” His breath was warm and soft against my skin. And thankfully it didn’t still smell like blood and gore. “That bear was sick. Still can’t get the taste out of my mouth. Wanted to make sure you didn’t get infected.”
Sick? Beyond the melted plastic/rotten banana smell that we’d smelled in the shifter’s blood before, I hadn’t considered him sick, just a rogue, a crazy bear. The rogue had tasted pretty horrible, but I’d never bitten a rogue before. And I’d never been a huge fan of blood in my mouth anyway. Medium rare. Not alive and kicking. Obviously Karl knew what rogue grizzly shifter blood was supposed to taste like. It made sense. They fought a whole lot more than we did, and their skirmishes were usually brutal. Grizzlies weren’t as social as most bears, and they tended to fight over food, territory, someone parking in their favorite spot. We fought too, but not quite to their level, and once our hierarchy was established, everything was good. But come to think of it, if I bit a werewolf who was infected, I’d probably be able to detect it. I hadn’t risen to second in the pack without my share of brawls.
“Real sick. It ain’t normal. Shifters don’t get sick.” Karl shook his head, his hair brushing along my shoulder with the motion.
Sick. It made me think. “Do you think this sickness, the weird smell of his blood, the fact it didn’t clot might be related to the shifter killings up in Kenai? Those hunters were using magically tainted bullets that forced a shift to beast and hindered the ability to heal the wound. If he was shot with one of those bullets and didn’t get it out right away, he might wind up susceptible to illness.”
Karl grunted. “Maybe. Didn’t taste right. You think someone shot this guy with tainted bullets, and he went crazy?”
I thought, the pain beginning to subside to manageable levels as my body healed the wounds. “Could be. The bear killed up in Kenai was a grizzly shifter, and the hunters with tainted bullets nearly killed two werewolves. Maybe if that scientist was using something a little different, a version 2.0, it made the bear go crazy along the way to killing him.”
The other alternative was that there was now some virus floating around that turned bear shifters into crazed killers. There wasn’t anything I could do to battle a virus. Although I wasn’t sure there was anything I could do to battle hunters with magical bullets. Or scientists with magical bullets. They still hadn’t caught the guys responsible up in Kenai, and the police, although helpful, had given up, calling it a fluke.
It wasn’t a fluke. A bear died. Two werewolves almost died. One of those hunters got away and I was pretty sure that behind the hunters was someone supplying them, organizing the trips and profiting from our deaths. But they’d seemed to vanish in the wind and we’d had no further incidents since this past spring.
“Do you think this guy going rogue is somehow connected to what happened in Kenai?” I asked.
“One way to find out.” Karl slid me off his lap and stood, walking over to the body he’d discarded and carefully searching through the bear’s thick fur. Throughout our entire sober conversation, he’d maintained that erection. He still had it. Crazy bear.
“Look at this, Brina.”
I stood and went to him, careful not to pull at the healing claw wounds along my waist. When I knelt down I saw a spot on the grizzly’s chest, a hairless patch with blackened crusty flesh and a raw wound. I was surprised Karl had found it among all the slashes and bites the rogue had suffered in their battle, but there it was—a gunshot wound. And not a new one either.
“He’s got two more—another one in his chest and one in his shoulder from where the hiker shot him,” I commented. “But this one looks to be a few days old and it didn’t heal right.”
Karl examined the other two wounds, digging in the rogue’s flesh to pull the bullets out and place them in my hand. They looked like normal .357 bullets to me. Then one of Karl’s nails elongated, sharpening into a short claw and he dug out the other, older bullet. As soon as he sliced the skin over the wound, a foul odor hit my nose.
Hot melted plastic and rotten bananas.
I held my breath, gagging and waited while Karl tore through putrid flesh to pull a smashed chunk of metal from the shifter. It was slimy, coated with a gray sticky rot. And the sight of it sent a wave of nausea through me.
I didn’t want to
touch it, but we needed to take it back with us, to compare it to the bullets that had been taken from Leon and Brent from the attack up in Kenai, to have someone who knew their way around a microscope test the coating on them.
We were naked. My bag was probably a half-mile away where Karl had, no doubt, dropped it when he’d shifted. Gritting my teeth, I held out my hand and took the other bullet, keeping it separated from the other two.
“That wound should have healed within a few hours, even with the bullet still lodged in his chest.” I stood, looking around the clearing and finding the two casings from the bullets the hiker had fired. Scooping them up, I kept them in the normal-bullet hand.
Karl nodded. “Looks about right timing-wise, if you discount the shifter healing. Maybe he was trying to warn them out of his territory, and the scientists got scared and shot him. Grizzlies are aggressive, more than most bear shifters. If they shot him, he might have attacked.”
“And if they shot him with some tainted bullets…” Brent said he’d had the urge to run, to get away when he’d been hit with one, but maybe bear shifters reacted differently than wolves. Maybe they got even more aggressive when the magic hit their blood.
Clearly there was something peculiar about this bullet for there to be an infected wound over twenty-four hours later, and the blackened flesh reminded me of what Brent had said about the smell of rot and necrotic tissue that came from the hunters’ bullets up in Kenai.
The whole thing made me sick. We’d had to kill a shifter who had possibly been a victim himself. And if there were hunters in south coastal Alaska in addition to in Kenai, where else could they be? Was anywhere safe for us?
We’d need to figure out exactly what had happened between this shifter and those five humans studying fungus. And for that we’d need to talk to human law enforcement.
“Let’s go find our clothes, get dressed and head back to the Jeep. We need to go back to Ketchikan and talk to the police. Then I need to get this bullet somewhere to be analyzed.”
Karl sighed, wiping his hands on the rogue’s fur as he stood. “Ain’t our problem anymore, Brina. We caught the rogue and killed him. The job is done.”
“No, the job isn’t done. There’s a group of hunters up north with tainted bullets who are killing shifters, and now I’ve got reason to suspect some of those tainted bullets can turn shifters into rogues.”
“No law against selling bullets,” Karl commented.
“There’s a law against shooting people, and in Alaska shifters count as people,” I argued.
“I doubt this rogue was human when he was shot. Maybe he was a grumpy bear who thought he’d frighten off some humans he considered trespassers and got more than he bargained for.”
I couldn’t believe I was hearing this. “Whose side are you on?”
“Mine. Don’t mess with humans. Don’t mess with other shifters. Mind your own business and keep to yourself and no one will bother you.”
We were standing here, naked, arguing. I was injured, holding a bullet that made my skin crawl, and Karl wanted me to mind my own business? This was my business.
“The hunters up in Kenai shot two werewolves while the shifters were in human form. Based on that, I believe they also shot the grizzly shifter they killed when he was in human form. That’s against the law. And it’s murder.”
Karl’s eyes gleamed gold, that darkness pushing to the forefront. “Then track them and kill them. No need to involve human police. No need to investigate anything. Just drop your nose to the ground, find the human responsible, and make him disappear.”
This Karl terrified me.
“That scent has long gone cold.”
His lip curled into a snarl. “Then wait. He’ll kill again, and you’ll have him.”
Oh, no big deal. We’ll just sit around and wait while the hunters kill someone else, or cause more shifters to go rogue. It was obvious I wasn’t going to change Karl’s mind on this. He was a lone bear, an isolationist, where I was a pack animal with a sense of societal responsibility. Yet another glaringly obvious example of how we were miles apart.
“Okay. It’s not your problem, then. I still need to let the police know that the rogue who killed five human scientists has been neutralized, so he and the others in Ketchikan can sleep at night.”
I wasn’t going to bury my head in the sand on this one. I’d find out where this bullet came from. Then we’d work with the police as we’d always done to handle the situation.
The gold dimmed in Karl’s eyes and once more they were clear hazel. “We’re going straight into Ketchikan? You’re gonna make me walk around the town and talk to humans, aren’t you?”
Oh the horror. Although I doubt he’d be much help in dealing with the police, plus there was the fact that he didn’t have a shirt with him. “No. I’ll drop you at your cabin and you can go back to chopping wood if you want. I’ll go to talk to the humans.”
He sniffed and stared into the forest, back along the path. “You’ll come back?”
“Come back after I meet with the police? Or some other time? I’ll see you at the barbeque, right?”
“After you’re done with the humans in Ketchikan. I want you to spend the night at my cabin. I want your scent there.”
If I spent the night at his cabin, my scent would be everywhere because we’d probably screw like rabbits all night long, in every square inch of the place. The guy scared me. His “not my problem” attitude pissed me off. But I wanted him so bad I could barely stand it. Besides, it would save the pack the price of a hotel room in Ketchikan. “Yes, I’ll come spend the night, but I might need to leave early. I’ll have to meet Dustin at the dock whenever he can bring in the plane for me.”
He nodded and started off down the path while I fell in beside him. “You’re just going to talk to the police and drop that bullet off somewhere, right? I’m not going home to chop wood while you’re going after killers with bullets that kill shifters and make them crazy. I need you to be safe. I don’t want you sticking your nose in something that gets you shot and killed.”
I rolled my eyes and picked his pants up off a sticker bush, tossing them to him. “I’m just talking to the police, but I won’t promise you anything else. I’m a wolf. I stick my nose in stuff. It’s what I do.”
He caught the jeans with one hand. “Then you need to let me know. This isn’t my problem, but if you’ve got your nose in it, then it turns into my problem.”
“So you’ll come riding to the rescue like a knight on a white horse?” Yet another difference between us. I was a dominant wolf—strong, capable, a leader. While I appreciated back-up, I didn’t need a rescuer.
He grunted. “I hate horses. And I’ll always fight by your side, wolf.”
Maybe I’d misunderstood him and that’s what he’d meant all along. Not a rescuer, but an extra sword in battle. That I could accept. “You’re handy to have around in a fight, Karl,” I told him, because he was, and along with my pack, I’d appreciate a grizzly shifter with a giant prehistoric cave bear form to walk by my side.
“You’re not so bad in a fight yourself, Brina.”
The trek back to where Karl had dropped the duffle bag took a whole lot longer than our mad dash in, and gave me time to think. Twenty seconds it had taken me to reach the rogue and the hiker, and I doubt Karl would have traveled much faster. I’d been fighting the bear for all of five or ten seconds before my back-up had appeared. That meant it had taken him a maximum of fifteen seconds to change form, quite possibly less. That was unheard of in any shifter accept for Nephilim.
And that bear…that monstrous, extinct bear form of his.
“What are you, Karl?” I asked, breaking the silence as we walked. “Nephilim? Are you a Nephilim?”
Nephilim were the only ones among us that could assume more than two forms—human and one animal. But Karl didn’t feel like a Nephilim, he felt like a grizzly shifter. Most of the time. Sometimes he felt…like I was looking into a fiery abyss.
<
br /> “I’m not a Nephilim, I’m a grizzly,” he countered. But even I could feel the edge of a lie in that.
“Karl, you changed form in seconds, and you weren’t a grizzly back there, you were a giant bear-thing from the paleontology books and archeological digs.”
“My mother was a grizzly,” he insisted.
“And your dad?” I prompted. “A time-traveling extinct cave bear thing? What?”
Even if one parent was a Nephilim, the offspring still only had the two forms. What the heck was he?
“I’m not talking about my dad. Or my mom.” There was this closed expression on his face. He was shutting down, but I wasn’t about to let this one go.
“What other form can you assume, Karl? Hawk? Cougar? Saber-toothed tiger?”
“Bears. Any kinds of bears and that’s it.”
I got the feeling there was more. I got the feeling that the more was something really horrific. I remembered the glowing eyes, the glee with which he’d toyed with the rogue, like a sadistic monster playing with his prey. I remembered the twisted grin on his face as the other shifter had bitten down on his shoulder.
He’d told me once he liked it when I bit him. I’d thought it was just rough sex, but now… There was a dark power to Karl that drew me in, made me feel off-kilter, vulnerable. I’d likened it to a mountain, to an amoral force of nature, but I’d now seen something else in him. Under that mountain was a volcano, ready to break through the earth’s crust at any moment and destroy everything in its path. And unlike the impersonal destruction of nature, I got the impression that Karl would enjoy every minute of it, that he’d have those glowing eyes and disturbing grin as the world burned around him.
“You’re afraid of me, Brina?” His voice held disappointment and sorrow. “Strong dominant wolf like you is afraid of me?”
Of course I was afraid. A grizzly shifter would have made me feel wary, well aware that if I needed to defend myself I’d need to be alert, smart, use every bit of cunning and strategy to get out alive, but Karl with those glowing eyes and sadistic grin had made me scared—fear like I’d never felt before.
My Paranormal Valentine: A Paranormal Romance Box Set Page 46