Jennifer watched in shock as Damon grabbed at a gun, wrenching it from a would-be killer’s hands with a savage jerk and tossing it aside. Another member of the town darted in to attempt to stab him and Damon wheeled around, grabbing the man and throwing him to the side with preternatural strength. For a moment, as Damon threw aside the attackers who had surged forward, knocking the wind out of them and making the rest of the mob shift backward in instinctive fear, Jennifer felt a surge of hope; maybe, just maybe it would filter through the peoples’ minds that they were on a fool’s errand of the most ridiculous and criminal character.
As more attackers came forward, Jennifer’s eyes widened at the sight of a mist gathering around Damon. She watched—transfixed just as the rest of the crowd was—as the man transformed into a bear, his body shrinking down and then arching up out of the mist, the sound of hard chunks swirling in a thick liquid, a sound like rocks in a cement mixer filling the air as his limbs covered in fur, his face elongated, and he bared his teeth in snarl. In a matter of seconds, the man was utterly gone, replaced by the towering, enormous bear that Damon became in his other form; in the bright light of day, his form somehow seemed even more powerful than it had at night, his size concealed by shadow. Damon threw the new attackers aside seemingly without effort, and Jennifer almost let out a cheer—although deep down, she knew that after seeing a man transform into an animal, the mob would be gripped by a fear even deeper than they’d felt when he’d just been an unknown “creature,” whose abilities they had to have surely doubted.
For a split-second, it seemed as though Damon might be able to extricate himself from the situation—at least beat back the members of the mob long enough to get away, to hide deeper in the woods until they all straggled away. But as Jennifer’s heart pounded and she struggled distractedly to break Liam’s grip on her, out of the corner of her eye, she saw Robert. Her friend—the man she had thought, before meeting Damon, that she might have wanted to have a relationship with—grabbed something from Liam’s belt as he slipped past them, muttering something to Liam about taking care of the situation. He darted around the crowd, avoiding Damon’s line of sight and getting around the bear. Jennifer struggled with new vigor, realizing in an instant what Robert’s plan was.
Even having a prescient notion of what Robert planned to do, Jennifer was—for an instant—paralyzed by shock when she saw him creep up behind the bear; Damon was distracted by fending off his attackers, though fewer and fewer of them were interested in risking their limbs against an enormous bear. Robert came up behind Damon and lifted one hand up over his head. Jennifer bit hard into Liam’s fingers pressed against her mouth as she saw the knife—Liam’s knife—in Robert’s hand. He plunged it downward, slamming it into Damon’s back, and Liam snatched his hand away from Jennifer’s mouth as she tasted the sharp, coppery splash of his blood. She took advantage of Liam’s shock to squirm free of his hold, only then realizing what she had seen. Damon roared out, the trees seeming to shake from the volume of the noise. Robert sank back and danced to the side of Damon as the bear staggered, his animal eyes wild with pain and fear.
Jennifer screamed, lurching forward, rushing towards the bear on unsteady feet. Before her wide, panicked eyes, Damon staggered backwards, letting out rumbling ursine groans of pain as he moved closer and closer to the edge of the cliff. “No! Stop!” Jennifer called out, desperate, reaching a hand out as she ran on unsteady feet towards the bear. But she couldn’t stop the backpedalling stagger; in a matter of a few moments, Damon clambered backwards, tripping and falling over the edge and plunging down into the river below. Jennifer fell to her knees, scrambling to the blood-spattered cliff’s edge where Damon had tumbled. She saw him hit the water; at this stretch, the river had dwindled to little more than a brook, and she saw his fallen body sprawled out in the shallow water, a swirl of blood flowing out around him.
The members of the town cheered, crowding the ledge as they looked down to confirm the fate of the bear. Jennifer tried to stand up, but fell back onto her knees, screaming wordlessly, clawing at her face in grief. She turned and looked at Robert, whose face held a combination of pride, shock, and confusion. “You killed him!” Jennifer screamed, stumbling onto her feet and lurching towards the man she had considered a friend for her entire life. “You killed him and you knew he didn’t do anything to me!” Jennifer threw her fists blindly at Robert’s body, hammering them against his chest, splaying her fingers to scratch at his face in blind fury and grief. “You bastard! You no-good, ignorant coward! You killed him!”
Jennifer’s throat felt raw and after a moment, all of the rage left her as her own words filtered through her brain. Damon was dead. The man that had loved her body so thoroughly, the man who had fascinated her and who had rescued her from Liam’s bad intentions, was dead. She fell to the ground, sobs beginning to wrack her body, tears falling freely from her eyes as she realized what had truly happened. All around her, the members of the mob were rejoicing, calling Robert a hero. Jennifer looked up at Robert’s face and saw the pride wiped away, replaced by a kind of shame that mingled with the confusion and shock to make him look dumbly ugly. Jennifer couldn’t believe she had ever been attracted to him in her life; she thought now that she would savor her newfound hatred for him for the rest of her life.
Liam and his father were cheering the members of the town, crowing their success in ridding the area of a “vile, evil creature.” Jennifer was barely aware of what was going on around her, but slowly began to realize that the jubilant, triumphant tone was fading. “Where’d it go?” someone was saying. “It was just there! The stream can’t have pulled it away.” Jennifer staggered onto her knees and crawled to the ledge, peering down along with a few of the members of her town. Where Damon had lain, apparently defeated by the combination of Robert’s stab to the back and the fall—though the height wasn’t so great—there was nothing. No sign of any disturbance of any kind. Jennifer sighed and fell to her stomach, pressing her forehead against her arms. A flicker of hope began deep inside of her as she remembered Damon telling her about the supernatural healing abilities of his tribe. He had shown her how fast the cuts that Liam had dealt him had healed—they were practically nonexistent within a day or two. He might have survived the stabbing and the fall and crawled away to heal. Jennifer felt hands on her shoulders and screamed out instinctively, remembering Liam.
Instead, Robert turned her over onto her back gently, and Jennifer looked around wildly to see that the members of the town who had made up the mob were moving back into the forest proper, dwindling away, muttering amongst themselves. “Let me get you home,” Robert said. Jennifer scowled at him. Even if Damon wasn’t dead, she wasn’t ready to forgive him; not yet.
“Don’t even touch me. Don’t touch me ever again. You’re dead to me, you asshole.” Jennifer struggled free of Robert’s hands and pulled herself up onto her hands and knees, and then struggled to her feet, exhausted. She decided that as tired as she was, she was going to take the long way through the woods to get home. She didn’t want to see or talk to a single person from her town. Not for a while.
Chapter Seven
A few days after the altercation in the woods, Jennifer sat at home, refusing to see most of the members of the town who came to inquire after her. She couldn’t stand their curiosity or the guilt of those who had been part of the mob; she couldn’t think of anything but getting back to the woods, even though the idea frightened her. The day after the mob, Robert had visited her; he was one of the only people that Jennifer would agree to speak to, in spite of her harsh words to him the day before. When she had finally arrived home, she had taken a long bath and thought about everything that had happened. If she put aside what she knew about Damon, what she knew had happened in the time she had been missing from the town, she could almost understand the reaction that the members of the town had had; Liam was insisting that some strange creature, some beast, had killed her—and had injured him. Just how Liam had managed
to fake the injury, Jennifer neither knew nor cared. She knew for a fact that while Damon had scared the other man, he hadn’t actually hurt more than Liam’s pride.
Jennifer had stayed up all night, sitting on her bed and staring out at the town through the window. She had considered her town boring, and had hoped to one day move to a city where she could have a livelier life, and travel around the world documenting different cultures as an anthropologist. But as she stared into the darkness, almost not moving, she thought to herself that whether or not she achieved her goal of city life and ethnographic study, she would never feel at home in the town again. She had seen the ugly side of the myopic peoples’ personalities. She had seen how easy it had been for them to turn into savages, bent on killing what they didn’t understand.
They hadn’t even stopped—hadn’t even heard her—when she called out that their reason for hunting the werebear down was a lie. They had been ready to kill something, and whipped into such a frenzy that they hadn’t even cared what the reason was anymore. The fact that her own neighbors could end up in such a state that they were lost to all common sense, to all decency, was a chilling thing. Jennifer didn’t know if she could ever look at the people in the town she had belonged to for so long in the same light again. Even the people who hadn’t participated in the lynch mob had to have known that something was going on—and they had done nothing to stop it, nothing to talk sense to people who were going out to kill what they couldn’t understand.
When Robert came to the house early the next day, Jennifer had begrudgingly invited him in. She wished, fleetingly, that her parents hadn’t died when she was young; they could at least have run interference for her. She thought, irrelevantly, of what it would have been like to explain to them what had happened to her; she didn’t know whether she would have been able to tell them the truth of the situation or not. What if her father had been among the people who were participating in the mob? What if he had believed Liam’s lies and had gone into the woods to avenge her death? But somehow, Jennifer didn’t think that the man who had raised her to question things—who had left her with so much more to impart—would have been the type to attack a “creature” simply on the basis of a story. He would have noticed that she was in the mob’s midst. He would have seen her, heard her, and known what he was seeing and hearing. And maybe, she thought, he would have been able to interrupt the rush of people to put guns and knives to use. Her mother would have helped her, Jennifer thought. One or both of her parents would have understood—if not the specifics of her situation, then at least that there was more going on than she was comfortable talking about. At least, she thought, they had left her the house, with enough money in the estate to keep it going until she got established. But she had already started to think about selling it; about taking what little she really wanted from the place and giving the rest to charity or to auctions and getting rid of the final reminder of the ugliness she had seen in the town she had grown up in.
“I didn’t think you’d actually let me in. I wouldn’t blame you.” Jennifer sat down on her couch, not quite looking at Robert.
“I didn’t think I’d let you in, either,” she admitted. “I guess it was just… we’ve been friends for too long.” Jennifer sighed and scrubbed at her face with her hands. Her throat was still raw from screaming. When she had finally made it back to her house, she had fallen to her knees at the door and began sobbing. In spite of her hope that Damon was okay, the shocks of the day, seeing him stabbed, overwhelmed her. She had stayed on the floor for over an hour, shaking and crying, vowing that she would never forgive anyone involved in the whole horrible mess for as long as she lived. It had only been after that was out of her system that she had gone into her bathroom and laid in the tub for longer than she even kept track of; she couldn’t even remember eating, only that she had been in an acute misery that nothing could seem to dull.
“So then you’ll hear me out?” Robert’s voice was almost pathetically hopeful. Jennifer looked up in time to see him watching her, biting his bottom lip. She nodded, taking a deep breath. “Look, I know—I should have known better. I’d seen you. I knew you were okay. But when I saw that guy turn into—a bear? I just… I was so scared. And I had to do something.” Jennifer nodded dully. She had to admit to herself that the first time she had seen Damon transform, it had been a shock. But then, she thought with a flicker of resentment, her first instinct hadn’t been to sneak up behind him and stab him in the back. Her first instinct had been wonder and curiosity, followed by an interest in the werebear’s well-being.
“I get it,” she said, closing her eyes and rubbing at her temples. “It’s not the sort of thing you expect to see happen in real life. And you were probably swept up in the whole… the ugliness of it all.” Jennifer almost spat the words out, remembering the glee on people’s faces when they had thought that Damon had been killed. They had been so ugly in their joy, so utterly inhuman that Jennifer remembered the sight like a nightmare she couldn’t quite shake. She had seen some of the members of the town looking up at her house as they walked past, looking furtive and ashamed. They knew what they had done. Their shame didn’t even gratify her; she knew better than to think that they would ever really examine what had happened. They would forget about it—and the next time something like that happened, they would do the same thing over again.
“I guess I was. I thought I was doing the right thing, Jen.” Robert’s voice was beseeching, his dark eyes pleading with her even more than his words. “Do you believe me?” Jennifer shrugged. She felt numb, cold, almost but not quite aching with what she had been through.
“I know you pretty well, Rob,” she said, feeling the fatigue setting into her bones once more. “I don’t think we can ever be as close as we used to be, but I can forgive you. I know you wouldn’t do something like that unless… unless you thought it was absolutely and without question the right thing to do.” She swallowed the lump that formed in her throat, remembering Damon’s kind eyes, his gentle hands and the bone-deep pleasure he had given her. Robert didn’t have the information she’d had. He didn’t know how Damon really was. He had only seen a creature.
“I’m really sorry. I don’t know what happened to you while you were in the woods… but you obviously thought—you obviously know more about that thing, that—person—than I do.” Jennifer shook her head; she wasn’t going to tell even Robert about what she knew about Damon.
“I just know that he wasn’t harming anyone. There was no reason for anyone to want to kill him.” Robert nodded, accepting that Jennifer wasn’t going to tell him any more than that. “And I know that Liam is a putrid snake.” Robert smiled sheepishly.
“I know you’ve never liked him,” he said, hesitating a moment. “And it… that whole situation yesterday… it made it clear to me that Liam isn’t the kind of guy that I thought he was.” Robert sat down heavily in a chair, picking at the arm. “He obviously lied about seeing you killed. He must have known that you were okay… but he whipped everyone into a frenzy about it, had them all set to kill that guy.” Jennifer shrugged. There were things that she couldn’t tell Robert.
“He… tried to make a pass at me after you, Alex, and Lucy left,” she said. “He got scared off by… something. After we fought. He got pretty aggressive, and I don’t know what he would have done if he hadn’t been scared by whatever was moving in the woods.” Jennifer swallowed down the omissions in her story.
“He made a pass at you? He was aggressive?” Robert’s eyes widened.
“Yeah. He grabbed me and called me an idiot for not being attracted to him and… well, the rest is pretty much obvious.” Robert cringed.
“I can’t believe I ever liked that guy.” Jennifer laughed shortly.
“None of us could believe it either. No one but you could ever stand the twerp.” Robert smiled ruefully.
“Are we going to be okay, Jen?” Jennifer shrugged.
“I forgive you. Like I said, it’s not going to be the
same between us, but I don’t hate you.” Robert nodded, standing awkwardly.
“I hope you’ll eventually forget it ever happened.” Jennifer smiled sadly.
“That I can’t do,” she said, leading him to the door. Her skin crawled slightly as Robert hugged her. In spite of forgiving him, even knowing that he had thought he was doing the right thing, knowing that he had been scared by what he hadn’t understood, Jennifer didn’t think anything would ever break the chill that now existed between them. She would never have that special place in her heart for Robert’s smile anymore. “You’ll just have to take my forgiveness and give me a little space.”
So Much To Bear (A Werebear Erotic Romance) Page 7
