Bryan stared at her for a long time. He seemed to be thinking. He also seemed to actually be taking her threat seriously. Elie’s confidence had almost become real.
But, then he chuckled.
Faster than Elie could have ever thought possible, he lashed out and caught the side of her head in a dizzying punch. She reeled. She’d squabbled with a couple drunk bar-flies once before, but she’d never been struck so hard in her life. It almost felt like she’d been knocked right off the ground.
Jasper barked, and it was the bravest sound Elie had ever heard him make. But it was followed by a harsh caw from Bryan, and Elie regained her vision in time to see him kick a boot into Jasper’s side. The dog scampered off, limping and whining, towards town.
“Did you just kick my dog?” she shrieked, half hysterical. She must have taken brain damage, Elie thought later, because without much of a good reason she flew at Bryan as if her five-foot-five, fight-virgin stature somehow could be overcome by mere vehemence. She must have surprised him, because her fist actually connected with his jaw, not once but twice, before he knocked her silly and Elie watched the world blink out.
It didn’t seem to her that she was gone for long. A world of trees and sunlight, forest floor and leafy ferns underfoot, kept appearing and disappearing. But it had been a cool, breezy afternoon—why was it already half-dark? She wasn’t walking. She could see someone’s legs and boots. They were carrying her. It was Bryan. Bryan was carrying her. Oh shit.
Elie’s limbs seemed very far away, as if she was trying to call them through a downed phone line. Her hands were hanging down Bryan’s back. She could see them, but the effort to make them move cost her snippets of consciousness. He didn’t even seem to notice her batting at his waist—in fact, he probably thought her arms were just swinging with the motion of his walking.
It was getting dark out. So, so dark. With the situation being what it was, that made Elie heart-stoppingly nervous.
Without warning, she was tossed off Bryan’s shoulder and onto mossy dirt. She blinked. They were within sight of the lake. A dock jutted outward against a liquid mirror, reflecting the sun as it began to set. Bryan appeared over her.
Elie remained very still. Full consciousness had almost returned, and she knew she was in trouble up to her ears. She’d thought Bryan handsome at first. He still was, if you were into psychopaths. He stared down at her, his face calm, but with a glimmer in his eye that spoke insanity a little too clearly.
She was so afraid to ask, but he seemed in no hurry to say anything, and Elie couldn’t handle the suspense. “What now?”
He laughed, as if she’d told a joke. “Well, I’ll tell you, honey.” He crouched down and folded his hands, like an adult explaining to a child why it wasn’t nice to tell lies. “Right over there is my parent’s boathouse. It’s not much of one, or else I’d take you in there, but they do have a nice little canoe in that shed, and when it gets dark, I’m going to chain some cinder blocks to your feet and take you out into the middle of the lake and throw you overboard.”
Elie stared. In a hysterical way, this made perfect sense. Hidden Lake was a valley lake. Its center was deep, much deeper than it appeared. She’d be fish food long before anyone found her body. What an irony. Her corpse was going to be hidden in Hidden Lake.
It would be slow, here. Slow, yes. Drowning was a rather slow death.
Terror clawed at her insides, but it would have to do more than that before she’d beg. She wasn’t even close to scared enough to beg. Not from this scum. She glared at him, with all the hateful intensity she was feeling.
She told him to go do a few things that were rather unlikely, and perhaps not anatomically possible. Bryan grinned wider, and Elie did not appreciate that. She curled her fist into the moist earth beneath her.
With an exhaled huff of desperate fear, Elie scattered a handful of dirt at Bryan’s face. He yowled and rocked back. It seemed she’d gotten his eyes. Scrambling, Elie gained her feet and tried to run for the lake. She’d be able to find her way back from there.
But Bryan leapt forward and hooked one hand around her ankle. Elie broke free, but tripped and fell headlong into the mulch, and before she could jump up and try again Bryan’s weight was on her back, one hand fisted in her hair. He whistled.
“Oh, don’t worry,” he assured her, straddling her buttocks. Elie could feel his erection pressing against her jeans, and struggled viciously to free herself, but he had her in a helpless position. “I wasn’t going to let your last few hours be boring. I have some fun planned before we go on out on the boat.”
He was still holding her face in the dirt with one hand. Bryan struggled to loosen his jeans with the other, apparently wary of letting Elie have too much freedom. Her brain was shooting in every direction, but so far Elie hadn’t come up with a plan. The best she could do was try to throw him off, but he was heavy and wasn’t unbalanced easily.
Exhausted, Elie fell still to catch her breath.
“There we go! Now, yours.”
His fingers dug into the waistband of her pants, and a terror colder and sharper and deeper than Elie had ever known twisted inside her. Tears welled up, out of anger, out of fear, out of despair, whatever the source, they blurred the darkening forest as her skin was exposed to the cool night air.
“Hey! HEY! What the fuck?!”
Elie sobbed. She’d never been so happy to hear Jake’s voice.
The weight on her back disappeared at once, and Elie rolled away, trembling like a leaf. She reached to pull her jeans back in place, and found it difficult with fingers that wouldn’t listen to her properly. She looked up at the rush of sprinting boots, still tugging her clothes back up.
Jasper and Jake had come barreling through the forest. The shepherd let out a mournful howl and came to her immediately, sniffing her frantically, whimpering.
“You’re—r-really a—a coward—Jasper,” she whispered, hugging him close as Jake caught up.
Elie had seen Jake angry, but this was frightening. His face seemed gouged by lines of rage and hate, pulsing a purplish red with quivering veins bursting from temple and neck. He fell on Bryan like an avenging angel, and Bryan never had a damn chance. Jake had him by the collar, punching solid blows like hammer strikes that sent resounding cracks through the stillness of the forest.
Elie was still huddled with Jasper, digging her fingers through the spiny fur of his neck and shoulders. She watched in growing dread as Bryan Mosley’s attempts to fight back weakened and eventually stopped. By the time she managed to get her legs under her, Jake held him, limp, by the shirt collar, and was still going, going, going, like he was hypnotized. Blood coated Jake’s fist, and splattered across the front of his t-shirt, also white. In the twilight, it looked powdery-blue, and Elie’s mental picture of Gwen Framer’s last moments jarred in her head like a struck bell.
“Jake!” she called. “Jake, stop! You’ll kill him!”
“I don’t give a damn,” he growled. Something else thundered in his voice, something deep and inhuman. His eyes flashed gold, amber, in the dusk.
“I don’t care about him, I care about you,” Elie came closer. She looked at Bryan, fairly sure he was alive, but it was hard to tell. Jake had paused, looking at her, his chest heaving. “If you beat him to death, it’ll be second-degree murder, no matter how you slice it. Yeah, he tried—he tried to rape me, and he’s a meth dealer, but you’ll still get stuck with a murder charge. I don’t want that for you. Not over this piece of garbage.”
She reached out a hand. “Come on. Let’s go. We’ll sic the cops on him when we get back to town.”
Jake looked at her hand, curiously, as if he wasn’t sure what it was. Then he blinked, shook his head. He dropped Bryan Mosley and put his hand in Elie’s. It was the hand that was slick with blood, but Elie clutched it tight.
“Let’s go,” she repeated.
Jake nodded. As if he was dizzy, he let her lead him towards the lake. She still had no idea wher
e exactly they were, so following the shore home was the best bet. They made it to the water line and turned right. Elie could just see the lights over their picnic table.
Jasper shuffled along behind them as they walked. A mostly-full moon stretched upward over the valley in the east. With each step, Jake seemed to return to himself a little more, and eventually he squeezed her hand and took a deep breath.
“Thank you for stopping me,” he said, still staring at the ground. “I… I woulda beat him to death. I’d still go back and beat him to death, if I thought I wouldn’t go to jail for it. Thank you for… I didn’t want to kill anyone else. It gets hard, though…The bear, I mean… I forget where I am, I forget… about laws and decency and being human.”
Elie looked up at him. “Jake, you’re the most decent man I’ve ever met.”
He glanced sidelong at her, decided she wasn’t making a joke, and smiled. “Well, you aren’t too bad, either.”
And then, the gunshot cracked open the night.
9
Elie spun. She could just see Bryan Mosley’s white t-shirt on the bank, fifty-yards back. He lowered his gun arm, and she could feel his smirk across the water.
Jake’s body bent outward, like a bow. His mouth opened, but no sound came out; he just stood there for a moment, gasping, before falling to his knees.
“Jake! Jake—no! Jake!” Elie fell to her knees with him. Jasper was howling and whining and prancing nervously. There was a dark flower of blood seeping across Jake’s mid-back, and they were still far from town. “Jake!”
He coughed. Coughed again. The third cough came out hoarse and snarling.
Elie froze. Before her eyes, it happened, in perfect reverse of what she’d seen on this very lakeshore two nights before. His eyes changed first, glowing amber in a face that was sprouting a muzzle. Elie backed away to give him space. His bear shape unfolded in a mass of twitching muscle, popping bones, and ripping skin. He screamed, and Elie couldn’t blame him. It looked painful as hell.
Jake’s scream echoed into a roar, a bellowing call into the evening sky as he grew ten more feet and a few hundred more pounds. His black fur bristled against the fading daylight, standing upright, sniffing the wind.
He looked down at Elie. Jasper had run off.
Breathless, she stared back.
With a growl, the bear dropped to its feet and turned around. It thundered around the lakeshore, and Elie knew exactly where Jake was headed. She struggled to her feet and followed after at a run, no longer certain what she planned to do when she got there. Stop him? Could she stop him? Should she stop him…?
Up ahead, Bryan Mosley’s shocked scream answered her questions, and Elie booked it the last twenty feet or so until she saw the great shoulders of the bear—Jake—hunched over a haunch of meat that had once been Bryan. His face was just barely recognizable. Part of his skull was crushed, as if he’d been slapped into a tree by a monstrous force.
He was dead as a dishrag. Mauled. The sight was something of a relief to Elie, knowing he was gone forever.
Her relief was cut short as Jake the Bear swerved his blood-soaked muzzled up to regard her thoughtfully.
“Nice, Jake…” she muttered. It really would be stupid irony if Jake killed her now, after saving her from a rapist psychopath. Life and its nuances, never predictable.
Thankfully, Jake didn’t seem hungry enough to eat her, even seemed to recognize her in this form. The bear rumbled over to her side, then lowered down to the ground in an unmistakable entreaty. Elie laughed humorlessly.
“You want me to ride you? For real?” she asked, not really expecting an answer.
Jake snuffled at her, encouraging.
What a strange day. Elie climbed onto the bear’s back. She’d never even ridden a horse, and had no idea how she was going to stay on. When Jake got to his feet, Elie dug her hands in his fur and clamped her legs around him desperately.
As a bear, Jake was very wide, and for the most part round, but his back was flat enough for Elie to stay astride him, except for once, when he had to stop suddenly and she slipped off. Darkness was quite full by the time they reached the Framer’s back yard. Jake stopped under the cover of the trees.
Politely, Elie stepped down. The change-back process looked painful enough without someone sitting on you. It was difficult to watch, even knowing what was coming. The sound of cracking bone and knitting muscle was almost sickening, and by the end of it, Jake was lying on the forest floor, panting.
“That looks painful,” Elie whispered.
Jake nodded. His body was very white, very pale, in the darkness. “It is.”
Elie knelt down next to him. She pulled off her sweater to drape it over his shoulders. Not that she wanted to cover any of him, but it just seemed the polite thing to do. He was a lot of man to look at. Even in the bare light glimmering from the Framer’s back porch, his biceps and shoulders bunched and his torso rippled. The most distracting thing by far was between his legs—he was huge and semi-erect already. Jake sat up and let her do as she liked, passively, watching her.
“Elie?”
“Hmm?”
“C’mere.”
Elie glanced down and back up before she could stop herself. More than semi-, now.
If she wanted to stop, there had been better times, but now, finally, Elie admitted to herself that she didn’t want to dodge this one. Much of her life was spent running away. Too much. She leaned forward into Jake’s kiss, hot and firm against her lips.
It had been an evening full of fear and adrenaline, one shot after another, and it was still pulsing through their veins, both of them. Elie ran her hands over his chest and back. There wasn’t even a scar of the bullet wound. It was gone as if it had never happened. Jake pulled her closer, almost roughly.
“Sorry,” he murmured. “I… All I can think of is tasting you, is that bad?” He chuckled, but his breath was coming short and his mouth had closed on her neck, her ear.
Elie’s heart squeezed. “Depends on where,” she whispered back.
Jake laughed and pulled her against his waist. He was kneeling, now, and had drug each of her legs to one side of his hips. His hard length was pressed against the groin of Elie’s jeans with impossible insistence.
“Anywhere you’ll let me,” he breathed. It had been meant as a joke, but a shiver ran through Elie. He ran his hands up her abdomen, bunching her shirt up around his fingers until her front was exposed. At the sight of her breasts, still cupped in her bra but large and round nonetheless, he growled appreciation. His thumbs kneaded her nipples through the bra and Elie gasped at the pleasure of it. Her own fingers were currently raking through his hair, holding on for support.
Jake’s stubbled chin grazed against her skin as he kissed a molten line from her collarbone downward along the lacey edge of the bra, between her breasts. Elie pulled off her shirt and shivered.
“It’s cold,” she said absently. Jake hugged her tighter, still tracing his lips across her chest.
“I’ll keep you warm,” he rumbled.
He slipped Elie’s sweater off his shoulders and settled it, one-handed, on the ground. His hands tracked back to the closure of her jeans. Elie could feel his hands shaking, but she doubted it was from nerves. The thought of his desire, that he wanted her so badly he was shaking with need, sent a fiery wave through her body, through her head.
Jake rolled her to the ground. He was over her, his torso seemed to cover the sky, to fill her entire field of vision, until it disappeared and Jake slipped downward to drag her jeans off her legs. Her tennis shoes popped off whether on purpose or accident. Elie couldn’t be bothered to worry about her socks, as Jake rolled her panties down her legs and off into the night, as well.
She twisted, trying to get her bra off—she wanted it gone, wanted Jake to be able to touch her everywhere, everywhere. Elie had to arch her back to reach the clasps, and Jake helped her, lifting her easily by the waist. He lowered his mouth to her belly button and started k
issing and tonguing up, his chin dragging along across her skin and setting it aflame.
With her bra discarded in the darkness, Elie moaned under Jake’s mouth, clutching at his shoulders. He’d been cool to the touch at first. He still was. This time of year, there wasn’t much to be done about that. But there was a heat that burned beneath his skin, just below the coolness. A thrumming source of it rested against Elie’s thigh, now, waiting for the time to be right.
Impatiently, Elie wanted that time to be now, and reached between Jake’s thighs, gripped his shaft, and squeezed lightly. She was rewarded with a sharp inhale from him, which turned into a deep groan as she dipped her hand down and back up slowly, slowly, as if to hint at what Elie wanted to do next.
But Jake would not take hints, and instead flicked his tongue across her nipple. Elie’s back arched again, and Jake teased, first one and then the other, starting a tremor in Elie’s core that grew and spun wildly, like a spinning top losing balance.
“Jake,” she breathed. “Jake, please…”
He moaned pleasantly. “Say it again. The sound of you saying those words—I didn’t think I could get any harder—but you always manage—to surprise me.” He tried to sound casual, but his breath was deep and panting. When Elie put her hands over his chest, she could feel the thunderous pound of his heart, beating away under her fingers.
“Please,” she smiled, hooking her arms around his shoulders. “Please—oh, Jake—” Her words were interrupted as he just brushed her with his tip, startling her heart into an alarming trip of hyper-speed beats.
In thrill and rapture, Elie cried out as Jake delved into her, filling her, overfilling her, pumping briefly to wet his shaft until each motion was smooth and without resistance. He covered her mouth with his, devouring her with his kiss. His skin was feverish now, burning with sweat in the cool of the night as the trees whispered overhead.
Bear Outlaw (She-Shifters of Hell's Corner Book 4) Page 43
