Dare to Bear (Book 1 Trail Guardians Series)

by Julian, Christine

  The wolves’ eyes gleamed with hatred and a thirst for vengeance she didn’t understand.

  The remaining wolves lunged at Mason at the same time. She flinched, wanted to look away but couldn’t.

  One launched from behind, latching onto his neck. The other dove at him close to the groin.

  The one on his neck Mason dislodged with a mighty back-slam against a nearby tree. A grotesque crack made her stomach lurch. He’d snapped it’s spine in half. It didn’t rise again.

  But the one wolf left refused to give up on its target. Its teeth clamped tight on Mason’s inner thigh. Flesh ripped from bone. A powerful roar of pain and fury split the air. The wolf on the ground dug in its paws, firmly latched, yanking its head with enough force to topple the might predator.

  Three-inch bear claws flexed high overhead, before thumping down on the final wolf, tearing jagged wounds up its back. The wolf shrieked, howled, and released its toothy grasp. It stumbled into nearby brush and collapsed, the rhythm of its exposed lungs slowing to stillness.

  She choked down bile so she could talk to whoever answered the satellite phone in her shaking grasp. She’d hit a button without thinking. Only a crackling noise came through.

  “Help,” she wheezed. “Mason needs help. We’re near Haventown. Someone, please help us.”

  The annoying crackle persisted.

  Crap.

  She pressed another button, and this time the call went through.

  “Sheriff Alterra.”

  “P-please. Help us,” she forced out. “It’s Mason. He’s injured. Badly. You have to help him. Come quickly. Please!”

  Shuffling noises were followed by a muted bark of orders. Then the sheriff asked, “Where are you?”

  God, where are we? “An hour or two from your town, I think?”

  “You think?” came the man’s sharp response. “Which direction?”

  “Um.” Her chin wobbled. “We took the AT from Mason’s survivalist store toward your village.”

  “Got it. Keep the phone close so you can guide us in.” He paused. “Are you okay?”

  “Yes,” she managed without barfing all over the phone.

  A curt exhale. “How bad are his injuries?”

  Tears spilled down her cheeks. “Bad, I think.”

  “You think?”

  The infuriated man on the line made her feel useless, stupid. “I don’t know, okay?” she yelled at him. “I’m not a doctor. He was attacked by a pack of wolves. They looked feral.”

  “Shit. We’re on our way.”

  Click.

  The phone went silent.

  A different sort of silence clung to the woods, unnatural and despondent. As if nature herself were mourning.

  No birds chirped. No critters scampered. Nothing seemed to breathe or move except the wind, gently raising the lowering the boughs of branches like a sigh of relief the harrowing nightmare had ended.

  Mason.

  Through the pine needles, she caught a glimpse of the forest floor. The area resembled a war zone, marked by broken branches, deep claw grooves in the mud, and pools of blood soaking into the ground.

  She wilted. “Oh, Mason.”

  Right now it didn’t matter who or what he was. He’d helped her, protected her, defended her. And he might have paid for that unselfishness with his life.

  Numbness followed by terror choked her in waves of agonizing uncertainty.

  Despite her convulsively quaking limbs, she managed to climb down the tree. He was in human form now, and he looked far worse than he had fur-covered.

  The gash in his shoulder oozed dark red blood, exposing white bone amid the torn flesh. Ragged teeth marks and claw scratches ravaged his skin head to toe.

  He endured this to protect me.

  The extent of his sacrifice hit like a punch to her gut.

  As she ran to Mason’s bleeding body, she collapsed over him, covering his naked back. Her sobs drenched his prostrate form.

  She brushed blood-matted hair from his forehead and wept softly. Then loudly. Her heart cried out for him.

  Then she got mad. Steaming, raging, mad.

  “I hate you,” she seethed at the wolf carcasses strewn around them. “How dare you do this to him?”

  Filled with impotent rage, she threw a rock at the nearest wolf. She couldn’t imagine the pain Mason had experienced, was still experiencing.

  “How dare you? He saved my life. He rescued me.” Tears flowed like hot springs down her cheeks. “He loves me. And I love him. Do you know how precious that is? How rare?” She slapped the ground with her palms. “You had no right. No right!”

  Did animals feel anything like the pain people felt when their family fell sick or became injured…or lost their lives? After this trip, she believed so.

  But these filthy, savaging beasts hadn’t understood that. She impaled each one with a wrathful glare. They hadn’t been starving creatures attempting to find food in a desperate situation. No, they’d been out for blood. Killing for the sake of killing. Mangling with the intent of murder. She despised them to the depths of their cruel, rotting corpses.

  “Mason?” she whispered, hovering over him again.

  No response.

  She shook him, a gentle prompting. He didn’t flinch, didn’t move a muscle.

  Investigating the gash in his shoulder, she saw scored chunks of flesh barely clung to sinew. She swallowed a dry heave, before she raced around the perimeter, frantically looking for a patch of moss. During one of his mini-lectures while they’d hiked, pointing out medicinal herbs and plants and their healing properties, she thought he’d said moss could be useful as a bandage replacement.

  Twenty feet from him, she came across a soft green spread covering a large stone. She scooped it up in her hands and returned to Mason. Applying it gently but firmly, she wedged the earthen cover into his wound, green side down, hoping she’d heard him right and that it worked.

  The moss turned beet red, but the gushing stopped. Oh, thank God.

  Why hadn’t she paid better attention to Mason’s tutorials? Damn it. Some of that natural medicine could’ve helped save his life. Again, she hated feeling useless, when he’d done so much to help her on their journey.

  Tears blurred her vision. “Please, Mason. You have to be okay. I didn’t come all this way to find you, only to lose you.”

  She didn’t care what he was—human or bear, or both—he was hers. And she was his. The mystical details required some explaining, but that was the least of her worries. She grasped his hand and squeezed it tight.

  Minutes passed like hours. She cradled him. Talked to him. Tried to reassure him he’d survive…despite her own fears to the contrary.

  Though she did what she could to ease his pain and stop the blood flow, she feared she’d done too little, too late. If only her best friend, Ashley, had been here. With her nursing skills, she would’ve done so much more. The helplessness of their situation hounded her like the wolves had hounded him.

  Then she caught a strange flicker of light from the corner of her eye. It came from the wolves.

  They weren’t moving. They were disintegrating. Their bodies slowly degraded to ash before her eyes, one by one, starting with the first casualty.

  She sat up. “What the…?”

  The urge to protect him shot through her veins and she threw herself over Mason. She hoped the creatures’ souls burned in hell.

  Overhead, the whoop-whooshing sound of feathers snagged her attention.

  A large bird swooped over them and landed in a branch above. It wasn’t a hawk, she knew those identifying features well enough. A falcon, maybe?

  From one open claw, it dropped a hefty pack onto a bed of brown pine needles, at the base of the tree where she’d sought safety. Then it dove to the ground and hop-flapped behind the trunk. Seconds later, a man stepped into view.

  Her heart leaped into her throat. She inhaled several gasps, hindered by stuttering sobs. “Wh-who are you?”

&n
bsp; “Don’t be alarmed.” The wire-thin man held up his palms, a gesture that said take it easy. “Dr. Tyce sent me.”

  Through overwhelmed emotions and terrified brain-fog, she put a face to the name of the doctor. Her shoulders dropped from their tense poise. “Why would Dr. Tyce send you?” Then she asked a more obvious question. “Are you telling me birds turn into people, too?”

  A slight grin of acknowledgment tweaked the corner of his mouth beneath his hooked nose. He flicked locks of multi-colored brown hair from his eyes. “You’re not from around here, are you?”

  “That’s not the point. You’re a shapeshifter, too, aren’t you?”

  “I am.”

  “But, how do you know Dr. Tyce? And how did you get here so soon?”

  “You called Dr. Tyce’s satellite phone.”

  “I did?” She remembered fumbling with the thing, misdialing the first time. “No, I called Mason’s brother. To tell him Mason was hurt.”

  “You called Tyce first. They heard your distress and assumed the worst. The satellite phone system picked up your location. Ollun was at the shop talking to Dr. Tyce when it happened. Ollun dispatched an alert call—”

  “Who’s Ollun?”

  The man appeared as confused as she was, but waved away the association. “He’s a woodland friend of Mason’s. A protector of the Alterra clan. He sent out an alert call that traveled along the Bough Network—”

  “The what?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” he said with an exasperated sigh. He reached for the pack the bird—he—had dropped. “I was the closest in the network to your location, and I have the training to respond to the crisis.”

  Relief washed over the tension coiled inside her. “You’re here to help Mason. Thank God.”

  “Uh, not exactly.” He extracted medicinal vials from the pouch. “I came to collect evidence, before it disappears,” he said, pointing at the dead wolves.

  “Excuse me?” Outraged, she couldn’t believe his nerve. “Mason is in excruciating pain, clinging to life. You’re a doctor, and you refuse to help?”

  “I’m not a doctor. More like a medic.”

  “Then help him,” she hollered, fury igniting in her veins.

  The man’s expression looked unsure. “Let me see what I brought. But your request is secondary to my mission. I must extract the blood from these wolves, to ward off a much worse disaster in the future.”

  “This is the man I love.” Anger radiated from every pore. “You will help Mason.” She stood, glared at him, and pointed at her lover on the ground. “Right now. Or I’m going to smash those vials one by one until you do something.”

  The man paused in the middle of setting the glass vials on the cloth he’d placed over a log. At her vehemence, his eyebrows shot up on his forehead. “All right,” he relented.

  Rummaging in his bag, he finally withdrew an elaborately decorated bottle that looked like hand-blown blue glass. He stuck a needle into the narrow lip. The liquid he extracted held a similar aqua tint.

  “Let me have a look,” he said, squatting beside Mason. “Oh, hell.”

  “Shut up. Don’t be so pessimistic. Mason is a good, strong man. He’ll be okay. Just help him.”

  The bird/human eyed her with a flicker of annoyance. “Am I not?”

  “I’m not sure, you don’t seem to be in much of a hurry.”

  The man’s gray eyes narrowed. “I’m identifying the correct place to administer the serum, based on his injuries.”

  A sad, fatalistic look stole over his sharp features. He stuck the needle into the spinal cord at the base of Mason’s neck. When the liquid finally left the syringe, he plucked out the needle and went on about his business, extracting blood from the remaining undissolved wolves. Like he didn’t even care. She might come to hate birds, she thought in disgust.

  She grabbed the medic’s arm. “Is it normal that he’s barely breathing?”

  The man nodded. “I gave him a powerful analgesic, which slows his heart rate. To make him more comfortable.”

  Irritated, she said, “You sound like a hospice nurse, giving a dying patient peace.” She received that awful, pitying look again. “Well, I’m not giving up on him,” she said fiercely. “He’s going to make it.”

  “Maybe he will, maybe he won’t.”

  “What about his wounds?” she demanded.

  “Not my problem,” he replied, with a thoroughly detached bedside manner.

  “Excuse me?” Beside herself, she insisted, “You have the knowledge to help him. Why won’t you?”

  “He is not my purpose. I came with a specific job to do,” he said coolly. “Kindly let me do it.” His tone was anything but kind.

  To her surprise, within minutes Mason began to twitch and moan. Much better than his previous catatonic state. Then gurgling cries issued from his throat.

  “Dear God. What did you give him?” she screamed at the falcon.

  The thin man paused, while encasing the vials of wolf blood in his pouch, and glanced at her over his shoulder. “I made sure he stays alive for the next hour. What you and the others do with him, to bring him back to health, is of your choosing.”

  “I don’t understand,” she said on the verge of a melt-down.

  He sent her a reluctant glance. “His recovery is in your hands now.”

  With that, the man stepped behind the tree trunk again. He reappeared in falcon form, dug his talons into the pouch, and flew away.

  “In my hands? But I have no way to help him…”

  Another wave of uselessness descended on her. Damn it, she should’ve listened to Mason’s ramblings about nature’s pharmacy.

  Slowly, the administered serum seemed to spread through Mason’s body. The random shaking of his muscles went still. The twitching in his fingers and toes stopped. An exhale that sounded something like relief puffed through his cracked lips. His chest rose once every ten seconds as he breathed. She knew because she counted those precious breaths, every single one.

  “Mason,” she whispered, “help is on the way. Hang in there.” She swallowed hard. “Please hold on.”

  Keeping pressure on his shoulder wound, beneath the moss, she had to accept some things couldn’t be explained, but that there was an underlying purpose, a layer of inescapable fate to it all, beyond explanation. Like her love for the man lying weak and bleeding beside her.

  Every movement she caught from the corner of her eye made her tense, her fingers ready to claw someone’s eyes out. Her body overcome with protective instincts, she was prepared to defend Mason against any potential enemy.

  One by one, the wolves disintegrated to piles of ash and dust. No carcasses, no blood, no bones. They just melted into the earth and disappeared.

  For a brief moment, she recognized what the falcon man had been attempting to achieve, by extracting blood from the ravaging beasts for some ultimate reason unknown to her. Would that purpose help save Mason? God, she hoped so.

  The Ancestors.

  Though she wasn’t sure why that thought had crossed her mind, she’d heard Mason mention the Ancestors on more than one occasion.

  Did they have some special, supernatural power to help him?

  If she set aside her doubts and put her beliefs into something beyond her understanding, would it help him?

  “Ancestors, whoever you are,” she said aloud, as she cradled him. “Please help Mason live through this. Please.” Tears dripped down her cheeks. “If you do, I’ll never doubt you. I swear. If he believes in you, so do I. Please let him live. Help him, because I have nowhere left to turn.”

  Sobbing over him, she poured all the love she had in her soul onto this amazing man. She understood bargaining was a part of the grieving process. However, she had no intention of grieving over Mason. He was so strong, so resilient. He’d make it through, right? Please…

  The sound of footfalls thundered through the woods to her right. Four men crested the nearest hill. “Oh, thank God.” A choked-up sigh burst from
her lips. She waved her arms above her head frantically. “Over here,” she called to them.

  A man bearing Mason’s same broad shoulders and height stood on the horizon. Mason’s brother, Midas. The brother’s unwavering glare told her that he already knew their location.

  Reapplying her hands to cover the moss over Mason’s shoulder wound, she leaned down to kiss his forehead. “Your brother is here. You’ll be okay now.”

  A puff from his lips moved a few strands of his hair. That was a good sign, right?

  Four lumberjack-looking men rushed toward Mason’s prostrate body. They moved in so fast, she scuffed her knees scooting out of their way.

  They wasted no time checking his vitals, patching up his wounds with their medical supplies, then carefully turning him over onto his back. The injuries to his front were worse.

  She clapped her hand over her mouth. It didn’t muffle her scream. How had she not noticed the gaping wound on his inner thigh?

  One of the men, a little shorter than the others, who seemed the most medically adept, raked his hand through his black hair. He glanced at her. “You made the moss patch?” he asked.

  Nodding, she worried she’d done some kind of irreparable damage.

  He dipped his chin in approval. “Good thinking. That may have saved his life.”

  A ray of hope pierced the darkness of her worst fears.

  “The damn virus could take him out anyway,” the brother muttered through a tight jaw.

  With a flick of his knife blade, he sliced his own wrist. She cried out in alarm. What kind of bizarre shapeshifter ritual was this?

  Clenching his fist, Mason’s twin flexed his forearm. Rich red blood drizzled onto Mason’s lips, soaking between the dry, cracked seam.

  Instantly, Mason’s lips healed. The cuts on his face dissolved into smooth, flawless skin.

  “That should hold him for the moment,” the medic said, “until we can perform a blood transfusion.”

  “It better not be too late,” Midas growled.

  “I did everything I could to help,” she insisted, walking up to Mason’s surly, intimidating brother.

  The men hoisted Mason’s body onto a makeshift gurney one of the men had quickly constructed from four sturdy branches, having woven grapevines into a latticework to support the weight of Mason’s damaged body. Midas covered Mason’s nude private parts with the shirt off his back, tucking the sleeves up under his bruised hips.