Murderers…Murderers… A haze seemed to descend upon me, clouding my thoughts of everything except for that one word. Fierce adrenaline coursed through my veins, charging me with the energy I thought I would never possess again since heading out into the forest. All my senses were sharpened to a keen edge, and I knew what I had to do. My mother was dead, I knew that for a fact now, and it was my fault. The only thing I could do was avenge her. Looking back it was an insane thing to do, but at that second I had no doubt that I would come out as the victor.
My pulse racing with equal measures of excitement and terror, I hurled myself at the bear and, dragging myself up its broad side with handfuls of dense fur until I was within fingers’ reach of the wolf. I made a grab at it, knowing that I had one chance and only one chance, and was rewarding with a good handful of dusty grey pelt. I felt the wolf release its mouthful in surprise, its snout turning to see what was pulling at it, and I was certain that those amber eyes widened in shock when it saw me clinging onto it before we both lost control and tumbled off the bear in a tangle of fur and teeth and fists.
I was hardly aware of the teeth snapping at me, or of the claws tearing at my clothes and hair and skin. I didn’t care that blood was trickling down my cheeks from where the wolf had slashed at me. I didn’t care that I couldn’t breathe from the wait of the vile creature. I gave it as good as I got, tearing at its fur with my hands and kicking the soft flesh of its underbelly whilst all the while sobbing and screaming my hatred for what its kind had done to my mother until my throat was in as much pain as the cut on my head. Somehow I managed to lock my hands around the wolf’s neck, my fingers digging through the mass of fur to where a could feel a pulse pumping the creature’s life-force around it’s ugly, evil body. And I squeezed. As hard as I could, I squeezed using every bit of strength I possessed. The wolf’s eyes bulged in its head, the claws in my side retracting just a fraction. I had never experienced such physical exhilaration. This was power in its purest form and in that second I was hooked.
The body on top of me was growing heavier the longer I kept my hands around the wolf’s throat, the fight leaving the creature as life drained away. But as it did so, so did the face above me change. The long face seemed to retract and the thick fur withdrew into smooth, clean skin. I felt the bulky form shift against me as it shrunk and diminished, growing lank and scrawny, and I was certain that I was hallucinating. Finally, the long fangs that had been protruding from the wolf’s slathering jaws shrunk back until they were no bigger than the teeth in my own mouth.
It was only the eyes that never changed – wild, yellow eyes whose promise of retribution mirrored my own. They captured my own gaze and held it fast even as they faded and grew dim. My heart gave a lurch which brought me sharply back to reality as I realised that I was looking into the face of a human woman. With a cry, I shoved her off me and scrambled back out of reach, shivering in shock. She rolled off, clutching her throat and coughing harshly. She was draped in furs and leathers that hung loosely from her scrawny body. Long, dank hair fell in curtains over her shoulders. Her amber hate-filled eyes never left mine.
“Two-legged little bitch,” she snarled, spitting blood at me. Her shoulder blades were stark and sharp as she fell forwards onto her hands and began to crawl towards me, bearing a teeth for all the world as if she was still a wolf. I tried to scramble to me feet but my legs were no better than water beneath me and I collapsed hard back down to the ground, every wound on my body suddenly all clamouring for attention.
The wolf-woman made to snatch at my ankle, but the bear – who I had all but forgotten in the fight – got to her before she could get to me. It didn’t take much, just a single swipe with outstretched claws to the back of her head. She twitched once and, without even a final cry, it was over.
I stared at the inert body, hardly daring to breathe. Her ‘pack’ had long since fled, although I had not noticed them go, and silence had fallen once more save for the heavy panting of the great creature standing no more than three feet from where I sat.
With a trembling hand I wiped from my cheek and raised my head to look at the bear – my saviour. Its fur was, from what I could see in the pale moonlight, was a deep brown and flecked with gold, its eyes a deep, bottomless black… I swallowed hard. I recognised those eyes.
Ignoring the shooting pains in my legs, I crawled towards the bear with one hand outstretched. The bear blinked but did not move, even when I reached out with shaking fingers – half expecting my hand to be bitten off.
“Thank you,” I whispered, gently stroking the soft muzzle. Through its panting lips, my eyes were drawn to its rows of razor-sharp teeth, bigger and even more powerful than those of the wolves. “Thank you for looking after me.” Then, after a moment’s hesitation in which I could hardly believe what I was thinking, “I know who you are.”
It was as if I had lifted a curse.
Chapter4
No sooner had the words left my lips than the creature began to transform as the wolf had done – shifting its form from beast to man. I could hear the grind of its bones and smell the change in its scent. It shrank and compressed down and down until the whole great bear was condensed into the shape of a human being. A bear-man.
I bit my lip to keep myself from screaming. Even though I had been expecting it, the pure abnormality of seeing a great grizzly bear slowly transforming into a human was terrifying. If this was real – and the ‘if’ was a big one – then who knows what else could be possible? It defied nature and revolted me so intensely that I found myself shrinking back and hiding my face, my own body physically incapable of accepting such bizarreness. In my head, I had already justified it and accepted it, but my stomach was heaving and my head was swimming with nausea. I had seen a thousand werewolf movies, I was a connoisseur of horror, and this transformation was no way as gory as, say, Company of Wolves. In the grand scheme of things, it was pretty tame actually. There was no reason to feel so utterly repelled. I told myself this sternly as I fought down the bile rising in my throat. Don’t be so fucking pathetic!
“No!” I flinched involuntarily as I felt a coarse hand on my cheek. I blushed furiously with shame and forced myself to let him gently turn my face towards his. His black eyes were filled with concern as they searched mine, a frown furrowing his brow as they passed over the wound on my forehead that was still oozing blood.
“Wait,” he ordered me.
I wrapped my arms around my shivering body and obeyed, huddling into myself as I watched him scramble around in the undergrowth nearby, searching frantically for something. Every bit of me was covered in goose-flesh; every hair down my arms and on the back of my neck was standing on end. I didn’t know if I was hot or cold, or if I should be scared or safe. I did know that I was so tired I could lie down on the cold, hard ground then and there and just sleep forever. I also knew if I did give in to sleep, it probably would be forever. The last remnants of energy was used keeping my eyelids open
My bear-man returned shortly and knelt by my side, one large hand gently supporting my back. With the other, he smeared a green paste over the gash of my head, pressing firmly to keep me from shying away as stinging heat scorched through my flesh. I cried out in protest, but my voice was weak, so weak it came out barely more than a sob.
“Ssh,” he growled, taking my hand in his and pushing up my sleeve to search my skin for further wounds. “It’ll help with the healing and stave off infection.”
I nodded numbly, chewing my lip hard as tears streamed freely down my cheeks, mingling with dirt to form a thick paste.
“Who are you?” I found myself asking. “What are you?”
“My name is David.” He worked deftly with the hands of an expert, and I couldn’t help but admire how gently he was able to use those enormous, paw-like hands. “I have been able to shift into a bear since I was nine-years old, and I have been living in this forest since I was fifteen. You do not need to be afraid,” he told me, looking at me with kind eyes.
“I know how much of a shock this is for you, but you do not need to fear me.”
I nodded silently, still struggling to process all this insane information through my aching head.
David worked systematically; every scratch, no matter how tiny, was tended to and smeared with a thick layer of the poultice; every inch of me was carefully inspected for broken skin.
“Did she bite you?” he asked finally, rolling my trouser leg back down. “Tell me quickly. Did she manage to bite you?”
“N-no,” I stammered, frightened by the urgency in his voice. “I don’t think-”
But ‘I don’t think’ was not good enough. Growling to himself, he shook his head, his long lank hair falling across his darkened face. “We will know soon enough either way.” He looked at me with eyes full of sorrow. “And god help you if you are wrong.”
“What will happen to me?” I whispered through trembling lips. My skin was prickling everywhere the poultice had touched and it was horrendously hard not to scream with frustration and claw at every itch. “If I have been bitten… what then?”
I saw his eyes flick briefly to the rag-covered corpse lying just a few feet away from us. I shuddered, my blood turning to ice at the thought of that being my destiny. He must have noticed my shudder as, in one swift moment, he pounced on the body and began stripping it of its covers. I bit back my revulsion, trying not to let my ingratitude show, as he draped a ragged leather cloak around my shoulders.
“If you have been bitten,” he said, pulling the material snug, “there is nothing that you can do but accept it. Do not think on it now, we have more important matters that need our urgent attention.”
I stared at him in disbelief and opened my mouth to argue that nothing was more urgent than the very real possibility that I had been turned into a supernatural beast and could very well transform at any moment. But he silenced me with a look before I could even begin.
“There is still hope for your mother,” he told me. “It is slim, but it is hope nonetheless. If you still want to find her, we must go now and you must do as I say. We have broken the cardinal laws of the forest, and her pack will be tracking us within the hour. We were lucky last time. There is nothing to say that we will be so lucky a second time, and you must save your strength for when we reach their lair. And, as you just witnessed,” He gave a wry smile through his thick beard, “they do not give up their prey easily.”
“And you would come with me?” I asked. “You would do that for me? Why?”
“I owe you my life,” he said simply. “She would have had me, had you not pulled her down. You came to me for help, and I should have come with you then. I owe you every help I am able to give.”
“But you saved my life…” I rubbed at my pounding head, trying to make it work. Nothing was making sense. “How can you owe me anything when I should be dead right now?”
“And what would have been the point in saving you only to throw you back to the wolves?”
I found that I couldn’t really argue with that. “Thank you,” I told him earnestly, wishing there was some more adequate way of expressing my gratitude.
David straightened up, coughing awkwardly. “Well,” he said, his voice deepening several octaves in evident embarrassment. “You must do exactly as I tell you, mind. You must learn to be a tracker, to be completely inconspicuous. And you must rely on nobody but yourself, even with me on your side.” He offered me a rough hand and, when I accepted it, he pulled me easily to my feet. “You are strong. You have something of the wild in you. No,” he added as my eyes widened in fear, “I’m not talking about werewolves or anything of that sort. It's something that was already there. Remember how you felt when you attacked that wolf-bitch. That’s your wild, and you must work hard to harness that. Do so, and there won’t be a single creature in this forest who will be able to prey upon you.”
*
“See there?” David pointed up through the canopy of trees to where, in the distance, I could just about make out the silhouette of a mountain in the moonlight. “That’s where we are going.”
I chewed my lip nervously. It would be hell trying to scale such a height. “How long will it take?”
David looked down, appraising my speed and strength. “Two days, perhaps. If we are able to go unnoticed. If not…” He raised his hands in a hopeless gesture. “If not, then no doubt it will not make any difference.”
We walked on in a glum silence. I couldn’t help but feel like a convict walking to my doom. David’s presence did comfort me a little, but it was as though he had already been given his sentence and had nothing left to lose at that point. It felt like he was accompanying me as something to distract himself from the inevitable, rather than out of any confidence that we would emerge from our quest victorious.
“What did you mean?” I asked, keeping my voice as low as I could – I had already been told off for not being careful enough to remain inconspicuous. “When you said that we had broken the cardinal law of the forest. What is that?”
“Every society has laws,” David told me, moving aside wiry branches to keep them from whipping in our faces. “The forest is no different. Every creature – bird, fish or beast – is bound by those laws. They are basic, but they are necessary to keep the natural order. The cardinal law of the forest is that no creature must take another’s life unnecessarily. You may kill for food, you may kill to protect yourself or your young. You may not involve yourself in a dispute that does not concern you. You may not attack for the purpose of taking another’s meal. Basically, the law is ‘live and let live’.”
“That makes sense…”
David gave a deep sigh and looked down at the leaves crunching beneath his bare feet. “Yes,” he said softly. “Yes it does. But that law dictated that I did not interfere, that I let the she-bitch take you for her own. Just as she took your mother.”
My heart gave a sickening lurch at the mention of my mother. The image of her trying to defend herself from the wolf’s attack flashed before my eyes. “I’m glad she’s dead,” I spat vehemently, my fists clenching unwittingly at my side. “I’m glad it was her. And I’m glad I had a part in it.” David gave a low chuckle and I glared up at him – he was a huge man, standing well over six feet high compared to my barely-five-foot frame. “What?”
He smiled down at me with an expression I could easily have mistaken for fondness. “You’re a surprising one, Wildgirl, that’s for sure.”
For the first time I was grateful for the darkness as it hid my blush. “My name’s Helen,” I muttered, although – to be honest – I quite liked that he had taken to calling me ‘Wildgirl’. It was better than ‘Nellie’, that was for sure!
“I think Wildgirl suits you better. What does ‘Helen’ mean, anyway?”
“Well, what kind of a name is David for a werebear?” I snapped back with a wry smile. “Seems pretty lame to me.”
But David’s expression turned serious once more. “It reminds me of who I am,” he told me. “It keeps me from forgetting what I am. It would be very easy – and very tempting – to just stay as a bear and never return to my human form. Eventually I would forget the human side of me completely. Many times I have considered it. Besides it would be a cliché if my name was Teddy wouldn't it?”
“Then why haven’t you stayed as a bear?” I asked, revelling in the novelty of being able to question a true-to-life shape-shifter. “If I could do it, I’d say to hell with being of human and just stay in my animal form. Being human sucks,” I finished bitterly, kicking at a stone and sending it flying into the distance. “And I think you’re mad to choose to be one.”
“You should never try to be anything other than what you are,” David replied, raising his head and bathing his face in moonlight. “It’s an impossible lesson to learn, I know that. It was the wolves who taught me it, you know…”
“What? Those wolves?”
David nodded almost wistfully as he remembered. “I told you that I first came to this fo
rest when I was fifteen. I had run away from a hospital that had been trying to fix me,” his dark face contorted in hatred, his jaw clenching at the memory. “I murdered my doctor – the same one that had been assigned me when I had been committed at six-years-old – and I managed to escape. As a bear. I tried to go home, back to my mother. I hadn’t realised that the humans I encountered would see me as a threat and would try to kill me. Someone tried to shoot me. I was scared. I killed the man, and I fled to the forest. I knew that I could never let myself be around people again. I was a danger to them, and they were a danger to me. I was young – very young – and the only time I had been in the forest was when I had come hunting with my father. That was when I was bitten. I had no idea what I was going to do – should I stay as a bear, should I be human… Back then, I had very little control over my transformations. It seemed to be governed by my emotions. If I was scared or angry or excited, I would find myself transformed into a bear, and when I calmed down I would become human again. After a few days of drifting aimlessly through the forest, Lupion found me. I was in a bad way – half starved and near freezing. I was in my human form, at that point to weak to be able to transform, but he knew what I was. He could smell it on me.”
Bear With Me (BBW Paranormal Shifter Romance) Page 3
