by Holley Trent
They’d stopped for the night soon after, though they didn’t get very much sleep. Her mother had forgotten to get a padlock for the U-Haul trailer’s gate, and she was up and down all night looking out the motel window into the parking lot to make sure no one was eying their things.
That one little trailer had contained all the possessions they had to their names, and given that they were moving from a commune to something that might as well have been one, they didn’t need much.
“All we need is each other,” Ma had said.
That had been bullshit, of course, but at the time, Maria hadn’t known any better.
She’d learned that the only thing people could be counted on for was disappointing her. Other than death and taxes, that was the only certain thing in life.
“Stop now or do you want to wait?” Eric asked.
She met his gaze in the rearview mirror and shrugged.
“I’m not really hungry anymore. Do what you want.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Fuck.
In Eric’s experience, whenever Maria’s voice took on that dark tone, she was veering toward that angry disposition that seemed to occur more often lately—the one that usually had her calling him for a certain kind of company.
What is wrong with her?
He watched her in the rearview mirror until he absolutely had to keep his eyes on the road. Truck traffic was getting a little heavier.
In a quick decision he hoped he wouldn’t regret, he pulled the RV off the highway and steered them toward the busy truck stop.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“You need to eat something. You asked for it before, and you can’t just change your mind about being hungry now. You were hungry. That means your body still is even if your brain is telling you that you don’t need it.”
“You think you know my body better than I do?”
“I lodge and feed people for a living. I think I know a little something about when they should be given meals.” Even if those meals were overpriced rabbit food. Malnourished vegetarians drove him fucking insane, especially in recent months, but he suspected that had more to do with being a Bear shifter than general annoyance at Maria. His inner beast was confused at why anyone would eat tofu when there were beautifully marbled steaks to be bought.
He parked beside a gas pump figuring he might as well fill up while they were stopped.
Maria had her hand on the door latch, about to step down.
“Shoes, Maria.”
Grumbling, she retreated to her bag.
She usually wore skirts too long for anyone to be able to tell if she was wearing shoes, but on his watch, she was going to wear shoes at places like truck stops where there were glass shards and nails and fucking disgusting vehicle fluids all over the asphalt.
“You do realize nothing on the ground is going to hurt me, right?” she asked.
He leaned over the back of the driver’s seat and glowered at her as she fastened her sandals.
“My immune system can combat pretty much any minor infection that enters my skin or bloodstream through cuts and wounds.”
“But does that stop it from hurting?”
“What?”
“The pain, Maria. When you step on a rock or a tack, does it hurt any less with you knowing it’s not going to kill you?”
“I compartmentalize most pain.” She shrugged. “I’m used to it. I step carefully, and should I step on something I shouldn’t have, I’ve trained myself not to be bothered by the pain.”
He dragged his hand down the scruff on his chin and scoffed. “Unbelievable.”
“Anyone could do it.”
“Sure. Anyone could if they didn’t have to concern themselves with germs entering their bodies that are nothing to a Shrew but could kill them. You’ve got that mind-over-matter thing down to a science, don’t you?”
“I don’t understand why you’re taking that tone with me.”
“You don’t think it’s funny that you don’t feel pain?”
“Funny?” She furrowed her brow and canted her head. “No. Why would that be funny?”
“You don’t see a connection there at all?”
“I don’t know what you’re getting at.”
Of course not. He didn’t really want to spell it out for her, but he wanted her to know that he was on to her. He’d found a clue to unlock the mysterious Maria Weisz.
“You don’t feel pain to a normal degree,” he said. “And you don’t bother with sex unless it’s rough. Can you feel anything that’s just regular or is pain the threshold you have to meet to feel like yourself?”
She narrowed her eyes, grabbed her wallet from the table, and headed to the door. “Don’t you dare try to psychoanalyze me.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t dare. I’m sure many have tried and failed, and I don’t have the qualifications for it, anyway. I’m just an innkeeper.”
“I punched you the last time you said that.”
“You sure did, and you said that once I shifted into a Bear for the first time and was stronger, you’d punch me even harder.”
The tic in her cheek said don’t push me. It was rarely seen in the calm, cool, and collected hippie, but he was Eric, and he was uniquely qualified to make her good and angry. She let herself be angry around him.
“You never came back to give me the punch,” he said.
“Because I’d hoped you come to your senses about wanting more excitement in your life.” She swept her arm toward the back of the RV and ostensibly the world beyond it. “Is this what you wanted? Going out on perverse road trips to snatch kids away from sickos? Personally, that’s not the kind of adventure I seek to get my thrills from.”
Unchastened, he pushed away from the seat and opened the door for her. “All I ever said, Maria, was that I wanted to be more helpful to what the Shrews were doing in the place where I have to live and work. I never said I wanted to be one of those monsters you’re talking about.” He gestured to the door. “Go ahead. Make sure you get something with legitimate protein. Eat an egg if you have to.”
“You don’t get to police my diet.”
“Someone should police you. You’re are a fucking mess, do you know that?”
That punch that she’d been saving up for him hurtled toward his head with a speed that would have taken Eric off guard before he became a Bear. He might not have been the biggest Bear or the most powerful one, but his reflexes were good.
He leaned away from the punch and lifted her, holding her around the waist.
He set her down on the ground outside the RV and pointed to the convenience store. “Protein. If you come back with three bucks of lettuce and a candy bar, I swear, I will force-feed you. I bet Dana’s not gonna say shit if I do it, either.”
“I’ll remember this.”
“I expect you to. If you’re anything like Astrid, you’ll never get over it and you’ll never stop reminding me about it. I’m sure I’ll figure out some way to cope.”
“Ugh.” Maria’s upper lip curled, but she turned on her heels and stomped toward the store.
Eric forced a breath through his closed lips and let them sputter as he watched her walk away. He didn’t pull his gaze from her until she’d stepped into the store and disappeared around an aisle.
She probably didn’t need him watching her back, but there was a reason Dana never allowed Shrews to work without backup. The women were scrappy and fought dirty when they had to, but sometimes, they found themselves in fights they didn’t need to be in at all. It was that bleeding-heart, save-everyone trait they all shared. Not everyone needed saving.
And sometimes, it was the Shrews who needed saving more than anyone.
He grabbed the corporate credit card Dana had tossed at him from the glove compartment and got gas flowing into the RV. As the fuel pumped, he scrolled through messages on his phone, occasionally glancing up at the store.
Maria hadn’t yet been gone for five minutes, but he was so used to Astrid
’s in-and-out practicality that he had a skewed perspective of how long simple errands took other people to complete.
The gas pump stopped. Eric cringed at the obscene total on the display, and was glad he wasn’t the one paying it. He grabbed the receipt, then settled back into the driver’s seat to wait.
He didn’t know how long he waited. Being turned into a Bear was another thing that had fucked with his perceptions. Time passed strangely for him, and the cues he used to mark the time of day were different. Instead of looking at a clock and mentally cataloguing how much he needed to get done by a certain time, his cues were baser. “It’s getting dark, time to wind down,” or “I’m hungry. It must be lunchtime.”
He’d complained to Bryan about it after missing breakfast service at the lodge twice, and Bryan had said that Eric would get used to it and find his own ways to compensate for the warring timekeeping methods in his brain.
Eric drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, watched an eighteen-wheeler with a busted tire crawl into the lot, and then another truck parking at the diesel pumps.
“She’s been gone too long.”
He grabbed the keys and headed to the store. Maybe he was overreacting, but he would have rather been safe than sorry.
He found Maria standing in the entryway between the convenience store and the truck stop’s diner.
She clutched a couple of white paper parcels in one hand and gripped the tops of two large bottled waters in the other.
Her gaze was locked on the television screen hanging in the corner of the restaurant. It was showing nightly sports recaps, but like Astrid—Maria didn’t give a damn about spectator sports. Something else had triggered that catatonic stare.
And this is another reason she can’t work alone.
He put his body in front of hers and crossed his arms over his chest. He stood there until her faraway gaze focused on him.
She furrowed her brow, rolled her eyes, and walked away.
You’re fucking welcome.
Annoyed or not, he followed her to the counter to make sure she paid.
Sighing, she turned, then hissed at him. “You didn’t need to come in here.”
“You were taking too long.”
The guy in the line in front of her finished paying. Eric nodded his head toward the register to get her moving.
“Ugh.” She turned, completed her transaction, and hurried to the door with Eric close at her heels.
“Stop following me!” She stomped across the lot, the hem of her too-damn-long skirt catching under her feet as she moved.
“What’d you get?”
“What’s it to you?”
“Remember what I said about protein?”
“I heard you perfectly well. My hearing is probably better than yours.”
That might have been the case before he’d been infected and changed into a Bear, but he didn’t believe it was true anymore. He could hear a dog fart from fifty feet away.
She hurried up the RV steps and he closed them in, watching as she deposited her purchases on the tabletop and hurriedly kicked off her shoes as if they were burning her flesh.
He left the key in the ignition but moved to the table to see what she’d bought.
Vegetarian burritos. Cheese, beans, and way too damn much salt. They were the kind of stuff that contributed to peoples’ illusions of being healthy without actually having any true nutritional benefits.
“Do they meet your exacting specifications, Mr. Falk?” She tucked one into the microwave and input in the cook time on the panel.
He leaned his butt against the counter, crossed his arms over his chest again, and stared down at her.
Her dark gaze narrowed, and that cheek started twitching.
He kept on staring.
She clapped a hand over her eyes and growled out her frustration. “Goddamn it, move, would you?”
“Does my presence here really bother you that much?”
“Yes. Yes it does.”
“Why?”
“Who cares why?”
“I wouldn’t have asked if I didn’t want to know. If we have to work together, there are going to be a lot of times when I’ll have to get in your way.”
“I don’t like it.”
“Why?”
The microwave beeped, and he leaned just enough to the side for her to open the door without smacking him in the face with the handle.
She put the second burrito into the machine and headed to the table with the first one.
“I asked you why,” he said.
She didn’t look up from her task of peeling the packaging away from her dinner. “Shouldn’t you be driving?”
“We’ve got enough time for you to answer that question.”
And many other ones. They needed to get into Jersey early so they could familiarize themselves with the area around the school before going in for the kids, but getting there by the hour school started wasn’t strictly necessary.
“Are you just going to stand there staring until I answer?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I hope you like what you’re seeing. You’re going to be staring for a while.”
“Fine.”
The microwave beeped, but she ignored it. She tucked her hair behind her ears and ate that sorry excuse for sustenance while fiddling with her cell phone.
And he did stare. It wasn’t a huge imposition, and he rarely got the chance to indulge. She was always moving, and he’d been so busy trying to keep Astrid and the other Shrews from figuring out there was something going on between the two of them to spend too much time looking at her. If anyone could have made a connection, it would have been Astrid. All Eric had to do was look at Maria for too long or in the wrong way.
She was pretty. Sweet-looking, with that heart-shaped face, and round, dark eyes. She looked five years younger than her age, which was probably an asset in some work scenarios and a detriment in others.
Beneath those mousy clothes, she had a sick body, but nobody else would have been able to guess. She kept her sex appeal tamped down, calling it a distraction, whereas a couple of the other Shrews might have called it a weapon.
She doesn’t like that. Why doesn’t she like that?
“You don’t want people looking at you,” he said softly. “Or touching you.”
She looked up from the bean slop and canted her head. “What did I tell you about psychoanalyzing me?”
“Come off it, Maria. You’re so afraid that I’ll find out anything useful or interesting about you. Why?”
“Because it’s none of your business?”
“Whose business is it, then? Does Astrid know?”
Maria shrugged and resumed eating.
“What would it take to get you tell me something truly personal? Do you want me to spill a few of my secrets in exchange?”
“I don’t care about your secrets.”
He whistled low. “Man, that’s brutal. The granola flower child everyone calls to bare their souls to is secretly a tightlipped bitch.”
She crumbled the paper wrapper in a fist and locked that dark, forbidding stare on him.
“It’s okay to have layers, Granola. It’s okay for a personality to have facets, and you know what? It’s even okay if you want to show more than one of them to someone.”
“What is your problem, Eric?”
“You tell me. We can both pretend we’re qualified to make sense of each other, in spite of our low emotional IQs.”
“My emotional IQ is plenty high.” She carried the paper to the trash and approached the microwave.
This time, he didn’t move when she reached for the door.
The microwave beeped again, taunting.
“Please move,” she said.
He put himself a bit more in front of it. She could hit him in the head with the handle all she wanted to, but she wouldn’t have a burrito to show for it.
“You’re being a dick.”
“So are you, flower child.”
“What the fuck do you want from me?”
“I want you to give me some words. Some honest words.”
“I could think of a few.”
“No. You don’t get to decide the prompt. I asked you a specific question, and that’s what I want to know.”
“Why is this so important to you?”
“Who the hell knows why, but I care about you.”
She flinched and took a step back.
“That disgusts you?” He scoffed. “Wow, you’re even more twisted than I thought. Girl, what am I going to do with you?”
“You know what your assignment is. That’s the only thing you need to worry about doing with me right now, and when we’re done with that, you don’t have to worry about doing anything with me ever again.”
“Yeah? You think Dana’s gonna go out of her way not to pair you with me when necessary? The Shrews are already short-staffed. In case you’ve forgotten, there are only three of you working in the field right now.”
“I haven’t forgotten, and I’m happy to take up the slack from Sarah and Astrid. It’s for a good reason.”
“So, somewhere inside you, there is a little warmth in your heart.”
“Those women are like my sisters.”
“But do you care about anyone else? Do you let yourself care about anyone else?”
She shrugged. “It’s irrelevant. That has nothing to do with the mission we’re on, and you getting into my head isn’t going to improve our chances of success.”
“You’re saying you won’t allow me to get to know you for the sake of just getting to know you?”
“Why would you want to?”
She’s a sociopath. He scoffed and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Oh, my God.”
It was the only explanation he could think of. Perhaps her reign of terror was one with a limited reach, but her cold shoulder was affecting him in ways he couldn’t have imagined. That was why he had to stop fucking with her.
“I want my burrito,” she said. “Move, or I’ll hurt you to get it.”
He stuffed his hands into his jean pockets and shrugged. “Do what you gotta do, flower child.”
