Chapter Eleven
BRUNO
There’s shock on her face. But not nearly as much as there should be, if she truly didn’t know about shifters. Is she just that startled that we figured it out? But how can she be? She must have smelled it on us as soon as we smelled it on her, mustn’t she?
I don’t speak. I let the silence work on her.
Finally, she turns her gaze to me. “You can do it, too?” she asks. “All three of you? You turn into...” She breaks off and looks away, and I understand why. It’s a strange thing to say to someone for the first time.
“We’re bears,” I say. “Like you.”
“But how did you know?” she asks. “How did you know I could do it?”
“Shifters carry a scent that identifies us to others of our kind,” I explain. “You’ll smell it on Clay if you take a whiff.”
She hesitates.
“It’s all right,” Clay says. “This is normal for shifters. Have a smell.”
Cautiously, as if approaching a flame, she leans in and inhales. “You smell like...huh. Like bark and wet leaves.”
“You’ve got a discerning sense of smell,” I say, smiling at her. “Most shifters can’t break it down that far.”
“How come you didn’t know how to scent a fellow shifter?” Clay asks. “You must have smelled it on your pack before.”
“I told you, I don’t come from a pack. I was just living with my family,” she says. “They’re not, you know. Like this.”
I feel the surprise register on my face. “Your family aren’t shifters? But it’s a hereditary trait.”
“I was adopted,” Lane says. “So, I guess my birth family probably were. But I was raised by —”
“You were raised by humans,” I say stunned. I’ve never heard of such a thing before. A shifter raised by humans. No wonder she didn’t know how to respond when we asked her if she was one of us. She’s never heard the term before. And she didn’t shift to escape her captors because she probably has no control over when and how she does it. She’s never had anyone to guide her. “That must have been terrifying,” I say quietly.
“I am human,” Lane says. She looks like she might cry. “I am.”
Damn. I’m moving too quickly for her. I’m scaring her. “You are,” I agree. “But you’re more than that too. You’re human and you’re bear. That’s what it means to be a shifter. And being raised by humans...they’d never have been able to understand anything about you, would they? Did they even know what you were?”
“I never told anyone,” Lane says. She’s looking at her feet, digging her toes into the carpet as if she might be able to make a hole and get away from this revelation. “My adoptive parents never liked me to begin with. If they realized I was some kind of mutant, they’d have thrown me out of their house. Maybe turned me over to a lab for dissection or something.”
Clay looks revolted. “That’s sick. I can see why you left.”
“We’re not meant to be alone with this,” I say. “Our kind isn’t meant to survive on our own. You should have been with a pack. You should have had brothers and sisters to help you, an alpha to guide you.”
“What’s an alpha?” she asks.
“The alpha is the one in charge of the pack,” I explain. “The leader. A good alpha guides his pack through life wisely and helps them succeed.” She doesn’t ask me what a bad alpha does, and I don’t volunteer the information. I can see she’s coping with enough right now.
“So that’s you, then,” she says. “You’re the alpha.”
Clay bursts out laughing.
Lane turns to look at him nervously. “Did I get it wrong? I’m sorry. I thought he seemed like a leader.”
“No, you were exactly right,” Clay assures her. “It’s just that Bruno only recently came into his role as alpha, and he’s still struggling to accept what the rest of us can see plainly.” He turns to me. “I told you it was obvious.”
“All right, all right,” I wave him off. “Lane, I mean to stick by what I said. You’re free to leave this morning, and we’ll help you get to wherever you want to go. But I want to suggest something else to you. And I’m hoping you’ll give it serious consideration.”
“All right,” she says tremulously.
The fear I felt last night at the thought of her leaving is trying to swell up in me again. I know it’s a product of my bear side, some instinct that wants to cling to this woman I find attractive. It’s not rational, and my human side is doing its best to shut the idea down. And yet I can’t fully shake my desire to keep her near me. Please, I think, please let her go for my idea. Please let her want to stay.
“You should always have been part of a pack,” I tell her. “Because you weren’t, you never had a chance to learn vital things about yourself and your nature as a shifter. So, I’m asking you to join our pack for as long as you’d like to stay. As an honorary member of the Hell’s Bears, new North Quebec Chapter, you’d be able to find out everything you need to know about life as a shifter. Then you’d be prepared to be on your own when you decide to go.”
Clay is looking at me shrewdly, and I know what he’s thinking. I didn’t ask him and Mike if they supported this decision. But I’m the alpha, apparently, and I’m feeling reckless. I want to make a choice for our pack without consulting the others. If they don’t like it, they can deal.
Lane bites her lip. “I can leave anytime I want?”
“Whenever you want,” I promise. “We’ll even give you a ride.”
“All right, then,” she says. “I suppose I could use the help. And I don’t have anywhere else to go.”
“Okay,” I agree, trying to keep my delight from showing on my face.
“Are we just going to stay here?” she asks, looking around the motel room. “I can’t help pay for this. I don’t have any money. I lost it all when...when they picked me up.”
“No, we’re not staying,” I assure her. “As a matter of fact, we should probably get moving. Clay, can you get Mike on his feet please? And the two of you should get packed up as well.”
“You got it, boss,” Clay smirks.
I feel a boil of anger, but I don’t respond. If I stop showing that this bothers me, maybe they’ll stop giving me a hard time about it.
Why does it bother me? I suppose it makes sense that someone would have to be alpha, much as I hate the idea. We ran away from Harlan’s involvement in the drug and prostitution trades, not from the whole alpha system. It’s just not a role I ever saw myself in.
“What should I be doing?” Lane asks, pulling her shirt back down over the bandages around her torso.
“You don’t need to do anything,” I say. “We’ll have to stop later today and pick up some things for you. And you should probably keep borrowing Clay’s coat for now.”
She shrugs into it. “Where are we going next?”
“Away from Montreal,” I say.
“Most directions are going to be away from Montreal from here,” she points out.
“We’re going into the mountains,” I say. “Deeper in. The three of us have built a shelter in the woods there. We only left and came to this hotel because we didn’t want you to wake up after what you went through in the middle of nowhere. But now we’re ready to head back. We don’t think the pack we left behind will come looking for us there. They’ll look in the city first, and then they’ll look for signs in the surrounding area. They’ll probably give up before they make it all the way up here. And then we can cross the border into Ontario and settle somewhere permanently.” It’s the first time I’ve fully articulated this plan, and I have no idea whether Clay and Mike are going to approve. It seems that in spite of my resistance to my new role as alpha, I’m taking naturally to the idea of making decisions for my pack.
I offer Lane my arm as she gets to her feet and, after a moment of hesitation, she accepts it. I can tell she’s still in some pain, that her ribs are still bothering her, and I know a day on the bike isn’t going
to help. We might not make it as far today as I’d hoped before needing to stop. But I’m already feeling strangely protective of her, as if she belongs to my pack just as much as Clay and Mike do. It can’t be true, of course. She doesn’t know anything about pack dynamics. She has no idea how to make herself belong to us.
“WE LEAVING ALREADY?” Mike asks, yawning. He is always slow to emerge from sleep, and I’m used to seeing him still drowsy at the breakfast table. “Sun’s not even up.”
“Harlan definitely knows we’ve left by now,” I point out. “We have to get moving if we want to stay ahead of him.”
“Who’s Harlan?” Lane asks.
“We don’t know for sure that he’s coming after us,” Clay points out. “He might let us go.”
“We stole his bike,” I say.
“Not to mention his whore,” Mike says.
I give him a look. “Don’t call her that. He kidnapped her. She was a victim.”
To his credit, he looks ashamed. “You’re right. I shouldn’t have said that. But my point stands, right? We took her from him, and he doesn’t know we brought her to that shelter. He might think she’s still with us and that he can get her back.”
“All the more reason to keep moving,” I say. “Clay, can you go check us out?”
“One of these times you’re going to slip up and phrase it as an order,” Clay says with a grin as he slips out the door.
“Excuse me,” Lane says. “Who is Harlan?”
I don’t want to tell her about Harlan. She’s so new to all of this. I want to let her discover all the good things about life as a shifter first, to show her the joy in it, before she’s forced to confront things like Harlan. But I don’t know how I can avoid it while we’re on the run from him. The topic is bound to keep coming up. “Harlan is the leader of the pack we left behind,” I tell her.
“The alpha,” she says, tasting the lingo.
“That’s right,” I say. “He was in charge.”
“And now you’re the alpha?”
“I’m the alpha of this group. I imagine Harlan is still the alpha of those we left behind back in Montreal. Their allegiance hasn’t wavered.”
“Is that why you left?” She looks confused. “Clay said you were struggling to accept it. But if you didn’t want to be alpha, why wouldn’t you just stay with your old group?”
“I didn’t know this would happen,” I say. “It shouldn’t have. Alpha status travels through bloodlines.”
“And your parents weren’t alphas?”
“Only males can be. My father wasn’t.”
“Only males? That’s sexist.”
“I can’t help it,” I say, stung. “It’s biological.”
But she’s smiling. “I’m only joking. So why did you leave, if it wasn’t out of a desire to become an alpha?”
I hesitate. I’m on the verge of not telling her. But she needs to know if she’s going to join us in running away from the old pack. “They were doing things I couldn’t condone,” I say. “They were taking part in prostitution and drug dealing. I’ve always been proud to be a Hell’s Bear. We’ve always stood for things I could support, like family and honor. But there was nothing honorable about this. So, the three of us decided to leave.”
Lane bites her lip. “Is that common?” she asks. “Do all shifters trade in things like that?”
“I don’t,” I tell her firmly. “I never will. No matter how far I have to run, I will never be a part of anything so horrible.”
Our eyes meet, and as they do, something I don’t recognize passes between us. A kind of understanding. Is this my animal side reaching for her again? Or is it something more?
Chapter Twelve
LANE
“Mike,” Bruno says, “You and I are going fishing today.”
“Cool.” Mike is already pulling on his hiking boots. This is a process I’m familiar with, after spending two weeks with the pack. Every day, two of them leave the shelter they built before I joined them and head down to the river, which is apparently packed with fish. Every day, they come back with strings full of fresh trout and salmon for dinner. We’ve all become skilled at preparing the fish —hacking off the head and tail, scraping away the scales, and separating the meat from the bone. Every day it’s fish for dinner, cooked over an open flame, occasionally with a can of vegetables from one of the duffel bags. I would have thought I’d be tired of fish by now, but strangely, it hasn’t lost its appeal.
Which is not to say I have no complaints about the shape of this new life. “I want to come fishing,” I say, scrambling up out of bed. “I haven’t left the shelter since we’ve gotten here.”
“Your ribs are still healing,” Bruno says.
“They’re fine.” It’s true. They don’t even hurt anymore. They haven’t for days. I know scientifically that this isn’t right, that broken ribs take more than two weeks to heal, but I feel completely back to normal now. I’m not even wearing the wrappings Clay gave me anymore.
Bruno just shakes his head. “I want you to stay back here with Clay,” he says. “Maybe you two can do the dishes from yesterday’s dinner so they’ll be ready to cook on when we get back? That would be a big help. And Lane, we’ll try to get some of those prawns you liked.”
I didn’t even like the prawns that much. I was just being polite, because Clay said they were hard to catch. But I can tell Bruno is making an effort, and I want to acknowledge that and show my gratitude. “All right,” I say, trying not to let my disappointment seep into my voice. “I’ll stay.”
Bruno smiles. “Maybe next week you’ll be ready to come out with us.”
I’m ready now. There’s nothing more frustrating than having someone act like he knows more than you do about what your body can handle. Okay, my ribs might still be recovering, but it’s not like they’re going out to run a marathon. They’re going fishing, for God’s sake. They’re going to sit by a river and dangle lines into the water. It’s no more strenuous than what I’ll be doing here in the shelter, and it’s probably a lot more fun.
I retreat to the back of the shelter, the deepest part that’s hardly ever touched by sunlight, and try not to pay attention to Clay saying goodbye to the others. He doesn’t mind being left behind. I know that’s partly due to the fact that he just went out yesterday and he’ll get to go again tomorrow —for him fishing is probably more of a chore than an exciting adventure —but it’s also partly just who Clay is. He never seems to mind anything very much. He takes everything in stride.
I’m expecting him to settle in beside the fire once the others leave. Clay is someone who can spend hours staring into the flames, occasionally feeding them with bark or bits of twig and never bothering to look up until he has a reason to. So, I’m surprised when he comes back to the shelter, crawls in, and takes a seat beside me. “It’s nothing personal, you know,” he says.
“What isn’t?”
“Bruno not bringing you along. It really is just out of concern for your well-being. It’s not that long ago that you were injured.”
“Maybe if he bothered to ask me, I could tell him I’m feeling better,” I snap. I’m surprised to hear myself speaking so openly. After two weeks, I’ve developed a certain level of comfort with my three campmates, but I’m still always on my guard. The three of them are a pack, a family. I’m an outsider, and I’m very aware of my status as such. If they decide they don’t like having me around, they won’t hesitate to send me away.
And while I’m no longer afraid they might use me for prostitution —the time I’ve spent with them has convinced me of the fundamental differences between them and the men who kidnapped me that horrible night —there is still a lot I don’t know about them. They’re wild. They’ve been living here in the woods for two weeks now as if that’s a perfectly normal thing to do. And I know that each of them has buried within him the same uncontrolled animal side that I have, the same...bear...that might come bursting forth at any moment, without warning. I don’t kn
ow what could provoke it, but I do know the best thing I can do is to try not to anger them as long as I’m with them.
Sometimes I think I’m crazy not to run while I still can.
Clay passes me some dried apricots from his bag and I take them grudgingly. “We know you’re feeling better,” he says. “Two weeks is pretty standard for a broken rib to heal.”
“No, it isn’t,” I counter. “My sister —my adoptive sister —broke a rib once when we were children and it took six weeks to heal.”
“But your sister isn’t a shifter,” Clay says. “Right?”
“Definitely not. Faye couldn’t have kept a secret like that.” She made us throw her a party when she got her first period, so she definitely would have said something if she’d found herself turning into a hairy beast.
“It would have been different for her, then,” Clay says. “Shifters heal more quickly than pure humans. Bruno knows that you’re mostly all right now, if not completely.”
“So then why?” I ask. “Why is he making me stay here every day? I could catch fish, probably. I could be taught. We wouldn’t starve.”
Clay leans back, wrapping an arm around my shoulders. I’m taken utterly by surprise, but it doesn’t occur to me to pull away. He’s warm. The air all around us is cold, but Clay is warm, and a deep and selfish part of me wants to just enjoy this. I can’t tell whether or not it’s the same part of me that wanted to escape my adoptive family and sneak out to bars, meet up with men in alleys and indulge in anonymous sex. There’s something similar about the feeling. It’s visceral. Physical. Animal. But at the same time, I can’t help noticing how reassuring it is that Clay is the one I’m here with. I can’t imagine feeling this comfortable with anyone else.
The Hidden Omega Page 7