I glanced up at him, apprehensive of interrupting the fragile peace he seemed to have found. “What was he?” I asked, my voice barely more than a whisper. “How did he know?”
“He is a wolf-man,” said David, smiling at me. “He is the leader of the pack and the king of the forest. He took me into his folds and taught me the laws of the wildfolk, how to survive… he gave me the protection of the pack.” His smile faded suddenly with a spasm of pain, and his shoulders slumped. “And now…” David let out a long, deep snarl of frustration, his fingers clawing at his face.
I froze, startled and not a little scared by this sudden expression of anger.
“It’s all been thrown away!” David was growling into his hands. “Everything I’ve worked for… all the kindnesses I’ve been shown… Just gone.” The wide sweep of the arm sent a flock of birds squawking into the sky; their roost disturbed. “Live and let live…” He shot me a glare. “And all for you.” With a deep sigh, he shook his shaggy head and muttered, more to himself than to me, “But it is OK. I could not have let them hurt you. ”
I kept my mouth firmly shut, not wanting to concentrate his obvious rage on me. I wanted to apologise, but I couldn’t help but feel that that would only add fuel to the fire. Apologies were meaningless – what was done was done, and there were no amount of ‘sorry’s that could change anything. And anyway, I told myself, trailing after David as he continued onwards, I hadn’t asked him to kill that wolf-woman. He had interfered of his own free will. His regrets were nothing to do with me, and they were certainly nothing that I had any power to fix.
I followed a few paces behind, pulling my leather covers tightly around myself to stave off the steadily increasing cold. They had still been warm from the wolf-woman’s body when David had draped them around my shoulders, but whatever trick she had possessed to keep herself warm I did not know it. The leathers seemed to do nothing at all to maintain my body heat. But, I told myself through chattering teeth, it was better than nothing.
*
We walked in silence for hours. By the time we stopped, I was numb with cold and dead on my feet – the only thing that kept me awake was counting my own, dragging footsteps. At least I didn’t have to think about where we were going. All I had to do was follow David’s broad, sloping back three feet ahead of me. All I had to do was trust that he would take me to where I needed to be. And I found that I did. Trust him, I mean. I had no reason to, other than the rather significant fact that he had saved my life from a deadly werewolf. But I did trust this strange bear-man. Implicitly.
I felt safe, as long as I had a Bear with me.
Chapter5
I must have somehow managed to hypnotise myself into a stupor for I found that one minute I was walking, walking, walking, and the next I was in David’s arms with a spinning head and an aching stomach.
I smiled blearily up at him, searching for his eyes amidst the thick, dark hair covering his face. He held me like a small child, my head resting in the crook of his elbow. “Did you rescue me again, Bearman?” I mumbled up at him, my eyelids flickering as sleep tried to entice me back.
David didn’t reply. Instead, he lay me gently on the ground where he stood, shrugged off his own raggedy coat and laid it over me, tucking it securely around my shoulders.
Never in my life had I been so comfortable.
“Sleep, Wildgirl” I vaguely heard David say. “I’ll wake you at dawn.”
His words were like an incantation, whispering through my bones and forcing my muscles to relax despite themselves. I fell headlong into the welcoming, enveloping arms of dreamless sleep.
*
I was awoken by a thin needle of sunlight piercing through the canopy of leaves and tickling my cheek. I stretched out languidly like a cat, yawning and tasting the sweet, fresh morning air. High up in the branches around me, birds and small beasts called out their morning greetings to each other, delighting in the bright sunlight and blue skies which were sure to mean a beautiful day ahead.
A day far better than the one just gone.
Rubbing the sleep from my eyes with the palm of my hand, I struggled to sit and try to sensibly order of events from the day before. It was almost impossible to determine what was real as opposed to what was simply a product of my delirious, fear-addled mind. There were wolves, and a man called David, and a fight that had ended with a dead woman… I groaned and ground the palms of my hands harder into my eyeballs, trying to use the pain to focus myself.
It was nonsense – surely it was all nonsense! This wasn’t ‘Alice in Wonderland’, where nothing was as it seemed, this was real life. Of course, I blamed the shock of my mother wondering off and getting eaten by wolves on my addled state of mind, but that didn’t mean I had to carry that panic over to today. Today would be sensible and productive.
“You’re awake then.”
I lifted my face towards David’s voice, shielding my eyes from the blinding sunshine. I could just about make out a hazy silhouette in his vague direction. “Good morning,” I replied brightly. “I thought you were going to wake me at dawn?”
“It’s not long past.” He moved to sit beside me, his great form providing a decent amount of shade from the sun. “And you needed to be properly rested if we’re going to make good headway today.”
I manoeuvred my legs into a cross-legged position, shuffling round to face David properly. He was much more acceptable looking in the day light, I noticed approvingly. His thick beard and long hair was lighter than it had looked before – an attractive honey-brown with flecks of gold which caught and reflected the sunlight – and his eyes, far from being simply black, were the deepest chocolate colour I had ever seen. Even his raggedy clothes hung well on his thickset frame. I allowed my eyes to roam over him. Last night, he had seemed like a bear to me – a great, snarling, grizzly bear – and it was easy to see how I might have hallucinated such an image; he radiated a kind of raw power, a natural energy that made the air around quiver in anticipation. My tongue flicked out to wet my suddenly dry lips and my gaze dropped to the ground as David’s eyes narrowed – he had caught me staring,
“So, ah… about last night,” I began quickly. “What actually happened? I mean, that woman that I…you…we killed, she wasn’t really a wolf, was she? That was all in my imagination, right?”
David regarded me for a moment, then threw back his head and roared with laughter, slapping his knees in pure mirth. “Oh, Wildgirl,” he gasped, wiping the tears from his eyes. “If only I could tell you that it was all a dream. If only I could, I would. But no, I’m afraid it’s all real – every bit of it.”
“I see…” I stretched out the words for as long as I could, my brain whirring like an over-worked machine to re-file the fiction with the fact.
“Okay,” I said finally, and I meant it. It was okay. It was mad – completely and utterly insane – but the fact of the matter was that it was all real, I would have to deal with that, and that was okay by me. “Okay, so what’s the plan, then? I mean, I know we’re heading up there-” I pointed up towards to the tip of the mountain, “-but what’s the plan? Which way are we going, and what are we going to do when we get there?” I gave a dry, humourless laugh. “You said yourself that they don’t take kindly to others trying to steal their prey so… Are we going to fight them? How many are there? They’ll be hunting us down, won’t they? In revenge for killing that woman last night.”
“Yes,” David sighed, resting his forehead on his steepled fingers. “Yes, they will have already begun hunting us down. Hopefully the pups will not have twigged that you are the daughter of their recent prey, so they won’t be urgently tracking you down as a serious threat to them. Nevertheless, I think it best if we follow the river to the foot of the mountain – we can lose any scent they might be following in the water. From there, we must go carefully. I know their tracks and the paths they follow, and we must avoid them as much as possible. The going will be tough and slow,” he warned, watching me closely t
o see how this news would affect me. “That’s why we must cross as much distance as we can today. At nightfall we must find shelter. They hunt at night, and we can leave nothing to chance. I am hoping that we will have reached the mountain by this evening and will be able to find some sort of cave to hide in until tomorrow.”
I nodded slowly, mulling the plan over in my head. “Okay…” So, hopefully, that would mean that the whole sorry business would be over and done with within three days… which would mean that I could go back to my life – in a world where people do not turn into man-eating wolves and ten-foot high grizzly bears. Oh how sweet that world would taste when I was allowed to return to it! I rose with a bright grin. “We’d better get going then, hadn’t we?”
*
The weather was almost perfect – a bit of a chill in the air, but having slept in my new leather clothes, they were doing a much better job of keeping out the autumn frostiness – with bright blue skies which provided a beautiful backdrop to the mountain ahead of us. Despite the gravity of the situation, my heart felt light with hope and I walked with a spring in my step. Not even the throbbing of my head wound could sober me.
The longer I spent in David’s company, the more I enjoyed spending time with him. As, obviously, he had spent very little time with people, he was filled with anecdotes and stories that he had been storing up over his years in seclusion and, once I had shown just the smallest bit of interest, the metaphorical floodgates were open and the nattering poured forth.
He told me about life before ‘The Incident’, as he liked to call the circumstances of the attack that had rendered him a shape-shifter, about his own mother.
At first, he spoke of her with deep fondness, recalling his adoration for her and her tenderness towards him. But the fondness soon faded into a deep sadness which, in turn, gave way to the sharp anger similar to that which I had witnessed last night. I watched him carefully as I listened to him talk in the gruff way of his, and saw how raw and tightly wound his emotions were, leaping from one to another like a rabbit escaping a bullet. It was no wonder, I mused, that he had had such trouble in the beginning, if his emotions were what controlled his transformations.
And thank god they were under control now!
At first, David told me as we walked side by side along the river-bank, he had missed being around people terribly, and would probably have tried to make contact with his old friends and family, had it not been for Lupion.
“He kept me close,” said David, smiling fondly at the memory. “For maybe a year or so after running away from the hospital, I barely left his side. Always he was there, teaching me to hunt, to survive and teaching me the discipline needed to control my transformations at will. The pack became my family, and accepted me in the way that I knew my own family would never be able to do again.”
“What happened to make you live apart from them?” I asked, pushing my toes through the sand beneath my feet, my shoes dangling from their laces around my neck. “Did you fall out?”
“No, nothing like that. I could have stayed if I had wanted to, but Lupion had taught me to honour myself and, to do so, I could pretend to be anything other than I was. I was not a werewolf, I was not a true member of the pack. I would have been doing a great disservice to myself to stay and pretend otherwise. I knew I had to leave and find my own way.”
“Don’t you ever get lonely? Or are there other… people like you?”
David gave a thoughtful pause as he mulled over my questions, keeping me on tenterhooks. “I have never met anyone quite like me,” he responded carefully. “Certainly, I have never come across any human being who has the same ability to shift into a bear as I do. I killed the bear who bit me as soon as I had the opportunity to do so,” explained David in answer to my silent question. “Lupion helped me to track him down. It was almost my initiation into the wild.” He held out the frayed sleeve of his raggedy coat for my inspection and told me proudly that, “I’ve worn his pelt every day since.”
I nodded, trying to look as though I was impressed whilst at the same time wondering whose skins I was wearing myself.
“I did have one lady friend, once,” David continued on, the soft sand of the shore crunching beneath his toes. “She was the most beautiful creature I had ever met. Her fur was completely golden, and she had the softest muzzle and the brightest blue eyes…” His voice trailed away wistfully and his sighed with a small shake of the head.
“What happened?” I pushed, edging a little closer to his side. “Why did she leave?”
“She was killed.” David’s voice was blank, completely and carefully devoid of any emotion. “She was murdered by that she-bitch, the one that almost got you last night.” I could feel the low vibration of a growl deep in his throat. “That was the last time I went back to the pack and tried to involve myself in the affairs of werewolves. I appealed to Lupion – she had broken the law, she had shed blood without any reason other than her pure selfishness, her jealousy, and I demanded that she was punished for her crime. But Lupion loved her. Even in werewolves, love is one of the highest governing powers, and he was blind to her evil. I knew then what they had been trying to teach me for so long – it is better to be alone. It is safer not to let yourself care.”
“I stopped caring a long time ago too,” I found myself confiding in David. There was something about the light refracting off the water that hypnotised me and put me at ease. At that moment, I felt like I could bare my soul to my bear-man. “At school, I got a lot of bullying because of my size. It didn’t matter that I was smart, or that I was just built that way… the kids, they just wanted someone to pick on, and that person was me. Everyone did it – it was just how it was. And anyone who didn’t… well, then they’d get a taste of what it was like to be me. Then they joined in pretty willingly.” By my side, my fingers curled into my palms and clenched into fists at the memory of school. Even now, even just talking about it made my stomach squirm. “There was a boy in my class, a new boy. All the girls fancied him. He didn’t know anything about how things were there. He didn’t know that he wasn’t supposed to be nice to me. In our first class, the only spare seat was next me, so our teacher told him to sit there. He didn’t seem to care that everyone was laughing at him. He was sweet to me, despite the comments that were being made around us. We talked a lot, he walked with me to our next class and he sat next to me of his own freewill.” I smiled humourlessly. “It was social suicide. By the end of the week, he had still not learned his lesson. He defended me and kept by my side the whole time. The last straw was the fact that he asked me to the Winter Dance, when every other girl was clamouring for his attention. We never got to go, though. Just a few days before, a group of kids waited for him after school and beat him up so badly that he ended up in hospital over Christmas.” I swallowed hard and ducked my head, not wanting David to see the tears in my eyes. “I never saw him again. And I knew – I have always known – that it was all my fault. I should have told him not to hang round with me. I should’ve refused his company. It was my fault they did what they did to him, and I swore to myself that I would never let it happen again. Of course,” I added with a shrug, “I know that time of my life has long since passed. But habits are hard to break, even now. Even with a new start, I struggle with people.”
I tensed as a sturdy arm slipped around my shoulders and gave me a reassuring squeeze. “It looks like you and I are more similar than we are different, Wildgirl.”
I smiled up at him, my heart flickering as I recognised with warmth of affection in his dark eyes. “Yeah. Yeah I guess we are.”
Chapter6
The cave we found to rest in was warm and dry, and facing west so that the setting sun sent in its warm, orange glow that did more to warm our bones than any fire could have. We shared a rich meal of fish that David had caught from the lake and wild green that I had harvested myself from the edge of the forest which we ate raw in the comfort of our temporary home – the scent of smoke would, no doubt,
summon the wolves our way within minutes, and that was a risk neither of us were willing to take. Anyway, who didn’t love a nice bit of fresh sushi?
Once our stomachs were full to the point of bursting, David covered the ground in his own clothes for me to lie down upon. The sun had still not set, but he was adamant that I should sleep then. “We must be gone well before dawn,” he told me before slinking out of the cave and heading towards the water to swim.
I did my best to obey. I knew there was wisdom in his logic, but there was nothing I could do that would persuade sleep to come and take me. I felt gross in my clothes – I had been wearing them solidly since the morning that I had discovered my mother missing – and my head was full of thoughts.
I wished that I had met David under different circumstances, on our own terms. I wished that there was no time limit on the time we had together. And, more than anything, I wished that there was no lingering shadow over our heads which never let us forget that death was a far more likely end to our adventure than success was.
Shifting into a more comfortable position amongst the soft, warm leathers, I closed my eyes and forced my mind to rid itself of all thoughts of danger and fear and guilt – by no means an easy job when you’re me.
Instead, I allowed my mind to slide to my bear-man swimming in the lake outside. He had left me all of his clothes to sleep on, I realised, except for one small piece of material to preserve his modesty. I smiled at that thought – for some reason, the thought of such a secluded wild man being so concerned with propriety, and behaving so coy, amused me greatly. I wished that the circumstances of our relationship were different so that it might have the opportunity to develop further, so that we might be able to have the chance get past the point of careful shyness and into more familiar territory. Certainly, throughout the past day in his company, I had found myself startlingly attracted to him. But, then again, who wouldn’t be? He radiated an animalistic energy that was almost tangible; I could see the muscles in his broad shoulders through his clothes rolling with every movement he made; behind the thick, coarse hair and his ragged apparel, I could see that he was young and handsome, and terribly, terribly lonely. It was all that I could do to keep myself at a respectful distance and not overstep the clear boundaries of our tenuous relationship.
Bear With Me (BBW Paranormal Shifter Romance) Page 4
