by Roxie Noir
“Rick, you know him,” Julius said, his voice echoing off the table. “You know he didn’t do anything.”
Rick sighed. Then he entered the room and closed the door, a slightly guilty look on his face.
“Listen, we can’t question the other two witnesses just yet, because they’re in no condition to talk,” Rick said.
Julius sat bolt upright.
“Is Quinn—”
“Heavily sedated and sleeping, yes,” Rick said. The corner of his mouth twitched into an almost-smile. “Hunter and Cora are at the hospital with her, and Ash has been getting updates.”
Julius slumped back in his chair.
“The guy she crashed into got airlifted to Redding,” Rick said. “No word on him yet.”
Julius felt bad about Vince for a split second. Getting pinned between a car and a brick building had to be incredibly painful, and most of his bones were probably broken or worse. He might not survive.
He’d tried to kill Julius, though, so he didn’t feel that bad. And even if he woke up, it wasn’t like he was going to admit to trying to murder the two of them.
“Just between the two of us, there are a couple other witnesses,” Rick said, leaning over the table and speaking quietly. “Gunshots have a way of getting people to peek out of their blinds. Nobody saw the whole thing, but plenty of people saw the second and third shots before Quinn got into that car.”
Cautiously, Julius let himself feel relieved. That meant that Hudson, at least, would be cleared fairly quickly.
They could still press charges against Quinn, but Julius had his doubts. It was a pretty clear self-defense case, and besides, he knew an excellent lawyer.
“What about the Taylors?” he asked.
Rick exhaled, his cheeks puffing out slightly.
“We can only hold them for another day or so without charging them with something,” he said. “Right now, we’ve got nothing besides the fact that Vince was in their organization, but they’re claiming he acted alone. So someone who knows something either needs to step forward or wake up.”
I guess I hope Vince survives, thought Julius.
“Thanks,” he told Rick, and the two of them walked into the police station’s lobby to wait for Hudson.
14
Quinn
When Quinn opened her eyes, she thought she was back in the clearing with Julius and Hudson, lying in the grass and staring into the bright sky. There was the gentle rush of the creek, the sound of the wind through the trees, the intermittent beeping of the...
Quinn blinked. Then she blinked again.
“There you are,” said a female voice she didn’t recognize.
Quinn tried to look at the voice, but there was something that kept her from moving her head.
Suddenly, things came back to her in flashes: getting in the SUV, screaming as she stomped the gas pedal, the terrified look on Vince’s face right before the crash.
She was somewhere with a lot of beeping and bright lights.
“What,” Quinn said. She meant to ask more questions than that — What’s going on, where am I? — but she couldn’t get her body to cooperate. Her mouth felt like it was stuffed with cotton, and her tongue was so slow to respond that she thought it might have come disconnected somehow.
Then there was a straw at her lips and a friendly but unfamiliar female face hovering over her.
“It’s water,” she said. “Drink, you must be thirsty.”
Quinn managed to close her lips around the straw and take a couple of sips, getting almost as much water down her front as into her mouth.
“You’re in the hospital,” the woman said.
Duh, thought Quinn.
“You’ve got some fractured ribs, a broken nose, two black eyes, and some pretty bad whiplash, but the doctors think you’re gonna be fine,” she went on. “I’m Cora, Ash’s mate, by the way.”
Quinn swallowed and tried to control her face. She just felt so out of it.
“Yeah, you’re supposed to put on your seatbelt before driving into brick walls,” said an unfamiliar male voice. Quinn patiently waited for him to enter her field of vision, and in a few moments, there he was, a guy with chin-length hair also leaning over her.
“I’m Hunter, Ash’s other mate,” he said. “Welcome back.”
Quinn tried to smile, but it didn’t quite work.
“Juliudson?” she managed to get out.
“Julius and Hudson are still at the police station,” the man said, exchanging a glance with Cora. “They’re fine.”
Someone’s hand reached out and stroked Quinn’s hair, gently.
“Everything’s going to be okay,” Cora said, her voice soft and soothing. “Get some more sleep. We’ll be here when you wake up again.”
“Thank you,” Quinn managed to whisper before slipping under.
She woke again hours later, a sharp pain in her side making her eyelids fly open. This time, sunlight streamed in the windows, and the room looked almost completely different than it had previously.
“Quinn!” said a male voice.
It was Julius’s voice.
In moments, Julius was on one side of her, Hudson on the other, both holding her hands. Someone held the water to her lips again and she sucked at the straw, getting most of it in her mouth this time.
Then she took a deep breath, looking from one of them to the other. Her ribs protested and she cringed.
“Hey,” she said.
Hudson grinned and Julius kissed her hair very, very carefully.
The next few days at the hospital blurred together in Quinn’s mind. Some police officers came in and questioned her. They seemed oddly concerned with how she’d gotten the keys, but she insisted again and again that she’d just grabbed them from Julius’s hand.
At some point later, she heard Ash and Julius in her room, quietly discussing how the police had found two bullets embedded in the outside of the SUV and one in the passenger seat.
“It’s pretty clear he was shooting at you,” Ash said. Quinn didn’t hear Julius’s response.
From the moment she could talk, Julius and Hudson wouldn’t hear of any plan that didn’t involve her recuperating at their house. Quinn protested weakly for about thirty seconds, and then caved. After all, her parents were being charged and held, mostly because she’d told the police what she’d overheard and they’d subpoenaed phone records, and she was in no shape to take care of herself. She had a neck brace, hard bandages around her ribs, and had to move like some kind of robot.
For some reason, she was surprised when Julius drove the Prius up to a beautiful Victorian house in the nicest neighborhood in Granite Valley. She didn’t know why, but she’d imagined something else for them — maybe a cabin way out in the woods.
“Wow,” she said.
“I know, right?” said Hudson, hopping out of the car and stretching a little. Then he opened the passenger side door and helped Quinn out very, very slowly.
“This is beautiful,” she said. “Did you guys do this?”
“Mostly me,” Hudson said, her hand on his arm, just in case. Julius unlocked the front door. “Turns out mechanical skills translate well to home repair. I’ve still got the garage out back for tinkering.”
“Watch the step,” Julius said as Quinn walked into their front room, both men watching her every move, just waiting to swoop in and help.
She wondered how she’d gotten so lucky.
The trial had been pushed back a week, due to circumstances, and it was a week of freshly squeezed orange juice, breakfast in bed, reality TV marathons and sitting in the garage, talking to Hudson as he fiddled with motorcycles. For the week, he’d asked his clients to bring their bikes to his garage instead of the shop so he could watch over Quinn.
There was no more sex, at least for Quinn, though she could heard Hudson and Julius sometimes in the master bedroom. She was the tiniest bit jealous, mostly that she couldn’t join in — even walking too fast still made her ribs scream
in pain.
By the day the trial rolled around again, Quinn insisted on coming out.
“You’re still not healed,” Julius said doubtfully.
Quinn gulped her orange juice, sitting at the kitchen counter.
“Come on,” she said. “I’ll just stand there. I won’t even carry a sign.”
The two men looked doubtful.
“Don’t make me call a taxi,” she said. “I’ll do it.”
“You really can be stubborn,” Hudson muttered. “Fine.”
She grinned.
Two hours later, she stood on the courthouse steps again, but on the other side, surrounded by shifter, humans, and their kids, all shouting and holding up pro-triad-marriage signs. She held onto Hudson’s arm as he waved a sign that said LET LOVE RING.
Quinn had been worried that the people over there might hate her. She wouldn’t have blamed them, honestly, but instead they treated her like any other person. It probably helped that she’d taken down ShifterSexManiacs.com, and now the page simply read, “We support triad marriage rights.”
Across the steps, there were considerably fewer people holding up anti-marriage signs, and they were less enthusiastic than before. Whereas her parents had thought that an assassination would galvanize people to their cause, it turned out that the opposite had happened — no one wanted to be on the murdering side.
As she watched, a triad — two men and a woman, plus their adorable kid — walked up the steps, grinning and waving at their supporters, totally ignoring the other side of the steps.
Then Julius walked up the steps, looking through the crowd for Quinn and Hudson.
Quinn’s stomach knotted, remembering what had happened last time.
What if there are other shooters, she thought. Maybe there was a backup plan.
He waved at the two of them, and they waved back. Then he walked up the steps and entered the courthouse, the heavy door swinging shut behind him.
Epilogue
Quinn
“Did I tell you I found a job?” Quinn asked. She leaned back in the leather recliner, putting her feet on the ottoman in front of her. Her ribs protested slightly, but nothing terrible.
After a month, she was finally almost better.
“Doing what?” asked George.
“Web stuff again,” Quinn said. “It’s actually kind of a funny story.”
He laughed. “Someone hired you even after your last job?”
“Someone bought that domain for a lot of money,” she said. “Remember when you left, you charged a couple nights at a hotel to mom and dad’s credit card?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, they reported that for fraud, and they got sent a new credit card, so I ended up renewing the domain on my own card,” Quinn said. “And I never got around to switching it.”
“So you were the proud owner of shifter sex maniacs dot com?” George asked.
“Yup,” she said. “And now the proud owner is Triangulate, Inc., and I am twenty thousand dollars richer.”
George whistled.
“What do they want it for?”
“It’s a triad dating website,” she said. “They think it’s hilarious.”
He laughed.
“They hired me, too,” she said.
“So you’re staying in Cascadia?”
“For now,” she said, carefully. She could hear Julius and Hudson talking in their bedroom, Julius sounding slightly irritated.
“With your... boyfriends?”
Quinn laughed. George, despite being totally open-minded, had never dated a shifter and wasn’t totally familiar with their terminology.
“Yep,” she said. “With my boyfriends.”
Even though she could have lived on her own easily by now, Quinn had just never left the Victorian house. Before long, she blended into their routines, which now included careful sex. After all, her ribs weren’t entirely healed yet.
She heard a distinct voice coming from the bedroom.
“Why don’t you ever keep your cufflinks where you can find them?” Julius was asking, annoyed.
“We’re going to a wedding,” she told George. “If Hudson ever gets ready.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be the slow one?” George asked, teasing.
“I thought so too,” she said.
Finally, the bedroom door opened, and her boyfriends emerged.
“We’re already late,” Julius growled.
Behind him, where Quinn could see and Julius couldn’t, Hudson rolled his eyes.
“Who’s getting married?” George asked on the phone.
Quinn moved her feet to the floor and stood carefully, making sure not to jostle her ribs.
“Julius’s cousin Ash and his mates,” she said.
“Tell them I said congrats,” said George. “Love you. Talk to you later.”
“You too,” said Quinn, as she hung up her phone.
“Ready?” she asked the men.
They both nodded, and she walked over to them, her movements still a little stiff.
“You look very handsome,” she said, and kissed them both.
Then they walked out the front door of their house, arm-in-arm-in-arm.
The End
A Bear’s Mercy
Book Three
1
Charlie
Charlie held the field glasses up to her eyes, almost afraid to breathe. She crouched between the roots of a massive evergreen tree, and she could feel the wetness of the moss below her knees already seeping into her pants.
It was going to be another long night on the cold, damp ground, but she hoped it would be the last one. Her pack was getting heavier by the minute, she was out of fresh socks, and washing her hair was a distant memory at best.
None of that mattered, though. After days of tracking, she’d finally found the grizzly, and he was in her sights.
As she watched, he put his huge muzzle to the ground and sniffed. Then he looked up, still smelling the wind. He was a stunning animal, his fur dark at the roots and fading to red-gold at the tips.
Standing there in the afternoon light, his nose up sniffing the wind, he almost looked like a painting of a grizzly bear instead of the real thing.
Then he snorted and shook his head, and Charlie smiled. There was something almost charming about bears, she thought, especially to people who spent a lot of time around them.
He’s not charming, she reminded herself. He killed two people.
Worse, he knows what he did.
It was hard to reconcile with the carefree, almost goofy animal in front of her, but there it was.
Charlie swallowed and got back to work, putting the glasses back to her eyes.
The bear was at least four and a half feet high at the shoulder, maybe closer to five. That was big, even for a grizzly. Charlie did some quick calculations in her head: he was at least eight hundred pounds.
Even bigger than the estimates they’d gotten back at the office.
Shit, she thought.
As quietly as she could, she took her pack off and opened it up, one eye always on the bear. She had a .45 holstered on her side, but it was only for absolute emergencies — besides, she wasn’t even certain that it would stop this grizzly. Slow him down, maybe.
Carefully, she took the vial of tranquilizer from the pouch where she’d stashed it. There was enough in there for two shots, but realistically, Charlie knew she was only going to get one.
Either she hit him and he went down, or she missed, and he charged.
Charlie also pulled a giant canister of bear spray from her pack. Between that and the .45, she thought she could probably get away.
She propped the syringe up next to the rifle, then re-loaded her pack, stashing it securely under the roots of the tree. If he did charge, she wasn’t going to want to take it with her. She wouldn’t want anything weighing her down, that was for damn sure.
The bear took a step forward, and Charlie’s stomach lurched. She held her breath.
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Please don’t leave, she thought. I’m so close to finished.
Then he stopped, standing perfectly still, his side facing her. It was almost as if he was presenting himself for her tranquilizer dart, providing the perfect target.
What if it’s a trap? Charlie thought for a split second. It was so easy to forget, watching this bear, that inside the animal there was still a human mind, or at least, what was left of one. No one knew for sure how much rational thought a feral shifter still had.
As he looked around she thought she could almost see a human intelligence in its eyes, like he was considering something.
Do it now, she thought.
Charlie loaded the rifle, gritting her teeth as the tranquilizer dart clicked into place.
Immediately, the bear’s head swung around, his body lowering, his ears perking up.
Of course he knows the sound of a rifle being loaded, she thought, her teeth still clenched.
Charlie brought the rifle sight to her eye, the bear’s huge, furry shoulder squarely in the crosshairs.
“Sorry, Kade,” she muttered, moving her finger to the trigger.
Then she heard a growl right behind her, a split second before she felt the teeth on her neck and the claws on her back.
The last thing Charlie saw was a blur of sharp teeth and gray fur.
2
Kade
Kade was so, so close. Standing in the clearing, he could tell that he was on the right track, and he was almost there. He just needed one more moment to follow the scent, and then he’d know.
The click of a rifle behind him ruined it.
His human instinct took over. He ducked and turned, trying to get his huge bear body lower to the ground, even as his ears pricked up, rotating toward the spot where the sound had come from.
