Bear Me Away (Alpha Werebear Paranormal Romance) (A Jamesburg Shifter Romance)

by Lynn Red

  “Shay it was deersh again. I dare you.”

  She picked up her steak and took a bite, digging her false fangs in deep, and ripping off a hunk. She chewed slowly, savoring the texture, the taste, the scent. Swallowing with an audible gulp, Petunia sighed out loud, then went back for another.

  By the time she looked up again, the steak was half gone, and she was covered in a mixture of seasoning, juice and a thin sheen of sweat. Couldn’t have had better timing, too. When she came up for air, Whit Whitman was on the tube, standing in the middle of the Jamesburg Cannery’s field. Below him was a dramatic headline about the destruction of a local business.

  “I am here, in the Jamesburg Cannery’s vegetable fields, to report upon a travesty. A tragedy, a terror,” he said, in his gravitas-laden voice. The wind whipped past him, but his silver hair did not budge. “Two days ago, Jamesburg Police fielded a call about this horrific mess, and today for the first time, I’m bringing you the story. Hundreds of employees are off work today – on completely legitimate no-pay time off – and several of them will be laid off for a month, perhaps more.”

  He took a step to the left, swept his off-camera arm, and then corrected the gesture with a wave of his other, on-camera, arm.

  “What you see here is the wasteland that used to be the town’s only vegetable canning facility. They grew, they canned, they sold, and they made the best damn... er... sorry, the best darned pickles this side of Sweden. But now? There is, as you can see, nothing left.”

  A smug grin crept across Petunia’s haunting visage. She peeled her lips back, baring those awful teeth. She wiped her arm across her mouth, taking it away with a long, red streak. “Finally,” she said. “Finally shomeone realizesh my entirely deliberate act of terror! No more wiggly cucumbers! And that guy is an ashhole if he thinksh that Cannery made good pickles!”

  She took another bite, then another, and patted her then-distended belly, leaning back in her chair.

  “This is, my friends, a call to action. A call to stop doing... something. The hyenas are stumped. The best detectives the town has, have decided these are nothing more than a series of incidents of hungry deer coming in and wrecking the fields. In fact, Lieutenant Jorgenson, the detective in charge, noted that the wild blueberry and blackberry count is way down this year, contributing to the problem.”

  Petunia’s eyes shot wide open, beady and red. She clenched her jaws until she tasted metal from the fixture, and then grabbed a tomato in her hand, squeezing until her fingernails dug into the skin and the seeds oozed out down her arm. “Deer?” she sneered at the television and let her dentures fall, slowly, from her mouth. “What deer can get into a locked field? What deer can eat four acres? That took planning! That took a two hundred dollar bush hog rental from the Home Depot in Clinton! I had to pay extra to get it all day so I could drive the whole way there and back!”

  She was so fuming mad that spittle collected in the corners of her mouth. “You mealy mouthed motherfu—”

  “And so, Jamesburg,” Whit Whitman continued, “I’m asking – nay begging – Whit Whitman is begging – that whoever is responsible for this, to please stop. We have plenty of food services available for hungry carnivores or herbivores or anything in between. You, whoever you are, do not have to do this. The suffering does not have to continue.”

  Petunia, incensed, clicked the teeth back into place.

  “My shuffering doesh,” Petunia snarled. “And sho doesh everyone elshe’s. Deer?”

  She was beside herself. She couldn’t believe it. “Thish ish the shtate of the popular media,” she said, shaking her head. “If I punched a hole in a gash shtation, they’d blame a rhino. If I poishioned a well, they’d blame nature. How doesh anyone,” she trailed off, and felt a drip run down her chin.

  With a pop, she pulled the teeth out of her mouth one more time and set them on the table then wiped her face.

  Whitman signed off, and the news gave way to The Bold and the Beautiful. She loved the show, but had lost interest lately, since she was so involved in planning her revenge for a life of being a wallflower.

  As the lilting title music began, and swelled dramatically, something stuck in Petunia’s fevered brain. Since she started eating all the meat, she’d gotten feverish, though she loved the stuff so much, she ignored the signs that perhaps rabbits weren’t meant to be carnivores. Wolves, lions and bears, sure... but rabbits? It made strange things happen in her brain.

  Her diet was her rebellion, her way of taking her life back from her oppressive, terrible, nasty mother, who had force-fed her all those carrots.

  “They’re trying to fool me,” she said. “It’s all a set up.”

  She began to pace and lecture her dolls. “The newsman keeps saying deer. The police keep ignoring me, even with doing an illegal U-turn directly in front of the police department and going in excess of eight miles an hour over the speed limit in residential areas. Even when I go too fast in a school zone, they turn the other way. It’s a setup. It has to be a setup.”

  Petunia crossed the room and took the head off of an 1886 Metzger baby doll with a bisque head. Inside, blinked a small microchip, which she fished out with a pair of tweezers. She squinted, at the tiny electronic doohickey, and then smiled as she nodded. ‘They’re onto me,” she whispered. “They know who I am, and they’re coming to get me. Someone, sometime, is coming to get me. They want to experiment on me, want to hide me and pretend I don’t exist.”

  Like a light dawning on her from the heavens, warming her heart and soul. “That’s it,” she said. “They’re... they’re denying I exist to make me do something else. To lure me out and catch me. They want me to do something really bad, past crop destruction and nasty messages in carrot jars. And then they’ll pounce.”

  She looked along her doll wall, and thought she saw one of them that had fallen slightly out of place. It had just slumped slightly to the side from the weight of the head, but in her fevered state, that wasn’t a possibility. The only thing it could be? Meddling from them.

  “They’re already watching me,” she observed to herself. “They already know. They’re already coming. Well, I’ll show them. They want something worse than wrecking fields? I’ll give it to them.

  “If they want to find me, I’ll let ‘em. But I’m gonna find them, too.”

  She grabbed her wineglass and smooshed her thumbprint onto the lip, on a smooth place. “I’ve seen TV, I know how this works.”

  Into her spare dentures went the microchip, and then a drop of epoxy and a tiny piece of gum that just about matched the pink part of the fixture.

  Petunia grabbed her phone, and fumble-fingered to her app menu, where she found the Lo-Jack app she paid so much for every month. “This is finally gonna do me some good,” she said.

  The beep told her it was working.

  The dot on the map told her she could follow whoever took her dentures.

  From down the road, her bunny ears picked up a rumbling sound. Way out in the country where she lived, there wasn’t ever any noise unless someone got lost, or a thunderstorm was about to roll in.

  As far as she knew, there weren’t any storms coming, and at this time of day it wasn’t very likely anyone was going for a joyride.

  To her meat-drunk brain, this was proof positive to Petunia that her wild fantasies, her crazy theories, were all absolutely true. She mashed the gum down onto the epoxy to make sure it looked as natural as possible, and arranged them so that the loaded denture was on top. If whoever showed up decided to be inconspicuous, and only take half of the thing, they’d take the right one.

  There was never a question in her mind that they would leave everything as is. Not for a moment. After all, she was important enough to have started a town-wide conspiracy between the police and the media, right? The game was on the rise, the stakes were through the roof.

  And she needed to get the hell out of there.

  She half-walked, half-hopped, to the front door, and took one last
look around to make sure everything was in order. It was perfect. The perfect setup to catch a setup. The perfect trap to nail a conspiracy. Smiling grimly, she turned and continued her halting skip-walk to her black Mini, climbed in and turned the key.

  The heavily tinted windows, done that way to keep her skin from burning, also protected her from outside eyes. She pulled out of her driveway, drove in a circle, and parked across the street, just on the other side of a ditch so she could watch, and make sure her phone could pick up the signal from her dentures.

  Not seconds later, a large, black SUV, standard hyena issue, drove by her house, pausing momentarily outside.

  She turned on the sound recording feature of her phone, and started jabbering.

  “This is Petunia Lewis, the date is, uh, June 28, and I’m sitting across the street from my house waiting for the conspirators to appear.”

  Petunia slumped down further into the driver’s seat, peering between the wheel and dash. “I’m hiding here, waiting for them to come to raid my house, and then I’m going to follow whoever it is, and get to the bottom of this. And I may or may not kidnap whoever it is, just to prove a point. Just to prove that no black helicopter can scare Petunia Lewis. No unmarked car can make her—”

  “Uh-huh,” she said, smiling grimly at her own cleverness. “That was the lookout car. Just like they always talk about. Men in Black, they always come in pairs. That first one was to make sure the coast was clear. The lookout car is pulling away, and now it’s... it’s gone.”

  She didn’t know exactly why she’d chosen to narrate her own life, but it seemed fitting, given the circumstances.

  The black car vanished over the hill that led back to town. In the distance, she heard another rumbling. “Here it comes,” she said to her phone. “Unless I’m wrong – and I’m not because I never am – the next one will be the undercovers.”

  This car was slower, it was less black and more stripped-paint-gray, and kind of bounced when it came down the way and pulled into her driveway. Two heads turned to each other, talking in the front of the massive, old-model Buick. One door opened, and a massive hulk of a man stepped out.

  From the driver’s window, a small woman leapt, like she was a Duke and this was Hazzard County.

  Petunia smiled so hard that it made her cheeks ache. “You made this too easy,” she hissed. “Have fun in there, idiots.”

  -11-

  “Breaking into a rabbit’s house with a bear ex-cop. That’s... yep.”

  -Elena

  “This isn’t exactly what I expected,” Elena said, creeping toward the white, dollhouse-esque structure ringed by what appeared a million tomato plants. The house looked like a latticed wedding cake, with layered shingles running down the sides, and lace-like framing around each window. By the front door stood a massive, obviously custom built freezer, and the door itself was locked tight when she tried the knob.

  “I didn’t expect you to dive out the car window like a fox version of Sonny Crockett,” West said, with a grin. “But what’s with the tomatoes?”

  “Habit,” she said back, very quietly. “And as far as the tomatoes, that’s kind of her thing. Apparently. Don’t ask me to try and make any sense of a crazy person’s crazy.”

  “Just weird, is all,” West grumbled.

  “Hush, we’re not sure she isn’t here.”

  “Ralph said she wasn’t, right? He’s very rarely wrong about this kind of thing.”

  Elena really wished West would stop talking in his normal, huge, delicious voice.

  “Very rarely means ‘sometimes’, so shut up! Check that freezer.”

  With all the stealth he could muster, which wasn’t very much, West tugged the massive door open. “Shit!” he hissed. “This is...”

  “Oh God, don’t tell me you found bodies,” Elena whispered, turning her attention away from the house’s window. “She’s got a bunch of dolls in there. Pretty much screams Jame Gumb.”

  “Gumby?” West asked, still looking into the freezer in horror.

  “Uh, Silence of the Lambs? You know, the best-selling novel turned massive, award winning movie? Hannibal Lecter?”

  “I don’t like scary stuff.”

  Shaking her head, Elena had to bite her lip to keep from laughing. “Bear, bear, easy to scare,” she said.

  “Fox, fox, put on socks?”

  She snickered, and crept up beside him. Ready for anything, she took a deep breath and looked inside. Her shoulders slumped, and she stood up straight. “Really?” she asked. “A bunch of vacuum packed meat from Sam’s? You got me all excited over... exactly what normal people keep in deep freezes?”

  West shrugged. “You asked if there were bodies,” he said. “Didn’t specify, you know.”

  “Bear, bear, I guess that’s fair.”

  “Fox, fox, uh... do you have any clocks?”

  Snorting ingloriously, Elena chewed her lip. “Okay, rhyme time aside—”

  “That was one too, shoe.”

  “Oh my God you’re a child!” she hissed, still trying to keep from laughing. “Anyway! Whether or not half a cow is a normal thing for a freezer, it’s absolutely not a normal thing for a rabbit.”

  “It is for a carnivorous rabbit,” West said.

  Elena arched her eyebrows. “Yeah, and when’s the last time you heard of one of those?”

  “Bear, bear, uh, that’s fair.”

  “I already used that one.” West reached out and pinched Elena gently on the shoulder.

  Elena stuck her tongue out and eased the lid of the freezer closed. The air pressure change sucked it tight, and she moved to the front door. “Want me to bash it in?” West asked.

  “Uh, how about no.” Elena pulled what appeared to be two chopsticks out of her hair, and unscrewed them to reveal a set of lock picks. Immediately, she went to work.

  “Shit, shit, lock picking kit.” West was smiling, big and broad, when Elena shot a glance in his direction.

  “Very good, baby child, very good. I’m glad you know how rhymes work.” She chuckled under her breath as she went back to slowly twisting her tools, getting a feel for the pins in the lock.

  “Elena,” West said. “Why are you bothering with the door handle lock? There’re three deadbolts.”

  “Yeah, that aren’t locked. Why would you bother with all this security and not use it? Now be quiet. One,” she said, sticking her tongue out and biting down in concentration. “Two.” She turned the pin tool just a hair. “Three!” The tumbler turned, the pins fell, and she pushed the door open.

  “You’re cute when you stick your tongue out.”

  “Thanks a bunch,” Elena said, quirking her mouth in half a smile. “I guess if anyone’s here we’d know it by now.”

  Stepping in, Elena swept her eyes around the darkened living area, and when her eyes adjusted to the low light, gasped. “Jesus!”

  “Huh?”

  “It’s like I’m sitting in the middle of a horror movie. They’re all staring at me.”

  “Oh wow,” West exhaled. “This is incredible.” He crossed the room and picked one of the dolls up off the shelf with extreme care. “Such craftsmanship.” He turned the doll over, and pulled a small flashlight out of his pocket, examining something.

  He nodded. “Look at this,” he said.

  Elena walked to his side. “What’s so important?”

  “This is a Bergmann doll, turn of the century.”

  “What’s so special about that? Fourteen years—”

  “The last century,” West whispered. “All bisque, incredibly hard to work with. This room must be worth a fortune.”

  “Star Wars toys and baby dolls? Really? This is the hand I’ve been dealt?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” West said. “But what this tells me isn’t just that she has good taste in antiques, it’s that she’s got money. Either money, or a massive antique doll inheritance. But judging from how many there are, I’m going with money.”

  The entire room was packed ful
l of the gawking, staring faces; shelf after shelf full of carefully arranged, incredibly unsettling, soulless eyes.

  “I wish she specialized in, I dunno, old board games or something.” Elena said, shivering. “This creeps me the hell out. Come on.”

  Room by room, the unlikely pair moved through the house. And, room after room, they found absolutely nothing. There were no signs of life, not even completely normal ones. The toilet paper in the house’s only bathroom was folded into the triangle shape that only happens at hotels without weekly rates. The sheets in the bedroom were crisply tucked, creases so sharp they’d cut.

  The only sign that anyone actually lived in this place was a single plate in the kitchen sink. She looked down at it briefly, but found it completely clean, like someone had carefully washed it, and then just left it sitting there instead of putting it away.

  “Here,” West said. He opened the huge china cabinet in the corner of the room, gingerly picking up a wine glass by the base of the stem. “Fingerprint on the side there.”

  Elena nodded, and dusted the glass, lifted the print and stored it before making sure to clean up after herself. “Good eyes,” she said as she replaced the glass.

  “Ugh, look at this,” she said, popping a latex glove into place and lifting the red-stained dentures that were arranged neatly on the table. “Why? Why would anyone actually choose to own this? Serious Francis Dolarhyde vibes coming my way.”

  “Francis—”

  “Don’t worry about it,” she said, smiling despite the treasure in her paws. “You don’t like scary stuff.”

  “Anyway,” he pursed his lips with a good dose of attitude, “must be hard for a rabbit to eat much of anything except vegetables,” West said. “Take a sample, might be useful.”

  Nodding, she swabbed one of the sharp, awful looking teeth, as well as the underside where it would sit against the gums. Especially since I have one that still needs to be analyzed, she thought. Shuddering, she placed the long cotton swab in a Ziploc, and scrawled ‘denture sample’ on the bag with her marker. “A girl’s gotta eat,” she said. “I guess.” Rethinking her evidence gathering, Elena took the actual fixture – the top one, since it had the gnarliest teeth – and dropped it in the bag.