He screamed in pain and staggered back against the door. I recoiled in terror at what I had done. I’ve never done anything violent to anyone and as I watched the severity of the gash I had just opened up across Josh’s face I felt sick to my stomach.
Was this going to be the end of it? Was he going to leave now? I didn’t want to hurt anyone but I didn’t have a choice. I had to defend myself. But would I have to do it again? Was he recovering?
I needed to get out of that office. I realized that I had to rush him while he was momentarily incapacitated.
I made a break for it colliding my whole body weight against his. It took him by surprise and he stumbled to the floor still clutching his bloody face. I jerked the door open and began to run down the hall to the elevator. I thought about taking the stairs but realized that if he gained enough strength to run he might be able to catch me there. My only hope was to get on the elevator and close the doors and ride to the first floor where I could alert the security guard.
I ran to the elevator pressing the button frantically. It was a few floors above me, but I knew that this was the best course of action. I stood there with my eyes frantically watching the numbers dropping as the elevator came down towards the fifth floor.
Eighteen… seventeen... Come on!
“Get back here!” The roar came from the end of the hallway where my office was. I turned to see Josh coming out of the room, staggering, his face bloody, twisted, and full of total rage.
But there was something else different about him that I could not understand. Josh was stalking towards me, but he wasn’t really Josh anymore. I shut and opened my eyes several times trying to erase what had to be a mistaken vision happening in front of me. This was not real.
I have always considered myself a person who lives by rationale and logic but what I saw occurring in front of me walking down that hall took rationale and logic completely out of the realm of real understanding.
Josh was… changing… His face was pulsating as his features began to shift and move. His bones were lengthening and growing taller, thicker, and his voice as he finished his sentence was growing darker, deeper, and animalistic.
This is not happening, this is not happening, this is not happening.
I repeated the words in my head over and over again but nothing was changing the vision that I was seeing in front of me. It was like some sort of a nightmare come to life and there was nowhere to run to escape it. I did not have time to wait for the elevator but my legs were too scared to run. I could not move. I was literally frozen with terror. I was going to die. This thing was going to kill me. It was going to leave my child parentless. It was going to rip me limb from limb…
Dammit, Jackie! Run!
I screamed in my head and my body just sat there curled up on the floor wishing that the elevator was there, so that the doors would pop open and I would just fall backward into the elevator. That was the only way. I could not move.
The beast was now only a few feet in front of me and I could now make out that it looked familiar. The size, the height, the fur pattern, the red eyes, the foaming jaws, the razor sharp long fangs, and the huge claws waiting to rip me to shreds—I was looking at a huge grizzly bear.
The bear was Josh. Josh was a bear. How? How was this possible? It had to be a dream. That was all there was to it. There was no way possible for this to be real. It was a horrible dream. I had to wake up. I had to wake up. Come on Jackie!
The bear stood in front of me for a few seconds roaring and growling as if it was trying to tell me that I brought this on myself and I deserved every single bit of it. Maybe I did. Maybe it was right. I closed my eyes and waited for the end.
The bear leaped at me. I saw the shadow creating a pit of dark above me in the already darkened hallway. It was about to land on me, its claw pulled back ready to swipe me down.
Something collided with it just then knocking it into the wall. I winced and cringed back against the wall as hard as I could as if there was a way to squeeze more inches out of the space behind me.
There were two of them. I was not seeing this. There was no way that I was not dreaming. Because if this wasn’t a dream then I had to deal with the fact that creatures like this existed. People who could shift into animals, the stuff of folklore—it was all real. It couldn’t be… no…
The other bear was a bit lighter in color and about the same size. It was attacking Josh with everything it had, biting, gnashing at his throat, slamming his head back against the wall. Josh roared in pain and fear. Fear. I could hear the fear in his cries and it sounded sweet. He was finally paying for what he was trying to do to me.
But suddenly he was on the offensive. He gained some momentum and threw the other bear into the other wall, tearing out a huge chunk of drywall and littering crumbs all over the floor.
The other bear was dazed and it was slow to move.
Josh came at me then with insane lightning speed. I found the will to move suddenly. Maybe it was the fact that I was no longer alone and there was some glimmer of hope that with the other bear's help I might make it through this. But I leaped out of the way just as his sharp claw swiped past me.
I felt a surge of pain as the very tip of his claw scraped against my arm. I landed hard on the ground. The pain was sharp, intense, searing up my arm from the bloody wound. He had barely touched me but it had left a sizable gash on me.
The sight of the blood (or possibly the smell) drove Josh wild as he leaped at me again. I scurried along the wall trying to get away as fast as I could, staggering to my shaky feet.
The other bear suddenly came to the rescue again, grabbing Josh by the back of the head and sinking huge fangs into his neck. Josh let out a horrific howl as he threw the other bear off.
Even in the dimly lit hall, I could see that Josh was hurt. The blood glistened in the glare. He checked his wound. Then he looked at me, hatred in his eyes and growled once again. Then he ran into the copy room. A second later I heard a huge shattering sound.
I knew what had happened even before I limped over to peek around the door into the room. I had to make sure he was no longer there.
The room was empty and the huge window was shattered. He had leaped out of a five story window.
I got to my feet and quickly ran to the busted window to look out. I expected to see Josh's body (or the bear's) lying there sprawled out on the concrete below. But I saw nothing. He was not there. He had jumped through a five story window and ran off into the night.
“He’s gone.” I spun around in shock.
Derek White was standing there. He was naked, his glistening form wet with sweat and some blood. A bruise was surrounding his right eye, turning the skin around it almost black but it seemed to be fading by the second.
It was him. He was the other bear. He had saved my life.
“What is going on here?” I asked before I collapsed to the floor in tears.
Derek grabbed me by the shoulders gently and looked deep into my eyes. His touch felt good. It was what I needed right then. There was something about his touch, his warmth, and the tone of his voice that brought me out of the beginning stages of a total meltdown.
“I know this won’t make any sense to you, but you have to listen to me,” he said.
He was right; it didn’t make any sense at first.
Chapter Three
One year later
FINAL NOTICE.
I groaned at the words in front of me. The electric was scheduled to be shut off in six days if I did not come up with nearly two months’ worth of payment. I threw the bill down on the coffee table and took a sip of my hot cup of store brand coffee, which I could hardly afford anymore.
What was I going to do? This was the third final notice I’d received that week. The gas bill and my rent final notices had already reared their ugly heads. And now I could add the power bill to that pile.
I leaned back in the chair and closed my eyes, rubbing them hard with both hands. I felt that i
f I rubbed them hard enough then maybe I would wake up from this nightmare I found myself in. The money was gone. It was all gone and I was practically broke.
Damn Josh Thorn. Damn him to hell.
I sat there thinking about that night of the attack and how everything had just fallen apart since then. It was not my fault, any of it, but somehow, I was being punished for everything. Life was not fair, but this was beyond acceptable. This was just… punishment.
The night that Josh attacked me was just the beginning of a downward spiral in my life. After the attack, Derek comforted me and explained to me all about the fact that shifters were real and they were all over the place. Most were solid, good people like him, but some were evil just like regular people, and those evil ones did horrible things and abused the power that was given to them.
Derek was born a shifter. Several members of his family were bear shifters as well, but he also explained that there were wolf shifters, bear shifters, and rarer still multi-shifters who were able to shift into any form they wanted, as long as it was a living creature of course.
If I hadn’t been in such a weakened state of mind and I hadn’t been through what I had just gone through, then I never would have believed what he was telling me. It was bizarre, absurd. How the hell could things like that exist in this world we lived in?
But I had no choice but to believe him. Especially when he explained the severity of my injury that Josh had inflicted on me. I had forgotten all about it as I was being caught up in the story and the aftermath of the terror I’d just been subjected to. But when he mentioned it I noticed that it was no longer hurting. I looked over at my bloody arm, expecting to see the skin horribly mangled.
My arm no longer had a gash on it. It was perfectly healed. There was nothing there except some blood on my shirt.
Derek explained to me that if you were ever bitten or scratched by a shifter then the curse would be transferred on to you as well. I was a bear shifter now. There was no cure unless I wanted to die.
Over the coming weeks, Derek took me under his wing and taught me how to manage the shift and how it would impact my life. Parts of it were fascinating and some parts were terrifying, but really it was just like anything else that one learned to live with.
The horror Josh Thorn had put on me was far worse than the curse of the shift. With the damage done to the office and the fact that Josh had jumped out the window and survived a fall like that, there was no way to even get anyone to believe me that he had attacked me. Even without telling them he was a bear, which no one ever would have believed, except maybe his uncle but he would never have entertained such a story to anyone.
Josh was going to get away with what he’d done. It was our word against his, and there was no way that anyone was going to believe either me or Derek.
Josh was not to be denied. He did not want to come after me any longer, knowing that I was now a bear shifter as well, he was going to go after easier prey. But he would attack me in the Josh Thorn way.
I will never know how he did it, but he set both me and Derek up for embezzlement. We could have both faced twenty years in jail as he was hoping for, but luckily Walter Pierce had a bigger heart and he let us both go instead. But our careers were ruined. Walter and his team of attorneys had our law licenses revoked. On top of that, Josh blackballed us all over town so that we could not even get entry level jobs in any law firm anywhere.
We were through. And we were both lucky that we weren’t facing time in prison, mostly because the money was located still in our off-shore accounts that neither of us had set up. The firm got all of the money back and the punishments were dished out to us.
I’d been desperately trying to land a teaching job at a university or college, but not even community colleges were interested in us. The partners had tried to keep the story quiet, but Josh leaked it to the press and bloggers and reporters had a field day trashing our names.
My career was over. It took me a long time to accept it, but that was the truth.
Now I was just desperately trying to find any decent paying job. I was focusing more on my counseling degree nowadays, but it was not working out very well. I was just coming up empty handed repeatedly.
And I was out of options and out of money. I didn’t know what I was going to do.
If it wasn’t for Derek I probably would have gone mad. Ah ,yes-- Derek. He had been such a great friend to me through all of this and we had leaned on each other a lot over the past year. He was just about the best person that I knew.
I had actually known Derek for a while before the night of the attack. We first met when we were law students and hit it off right away. I knew that Derek had always had a crush on me, but I was happy to keep it just friendly. I did not really see Derek that way, which surprised a lot of my girlfriends.
Derek was sexy. He was about six feet one inches tall, broad shouldered, brown hair with a reddish tinge to it and a laughter that made him sound older than he was somehow.
He was so sweet, and he was as loyal a guy as you would ever find. But he was missing something that I could not put my finger on. He was missing the extra factor that drew me to someone. The factor that Frank had. You have feelings for some people and others you just don’t feel that chemistry with.
Luckily, Derek seemed to get that and he had never really pushed for anything more to happen between us, but I occasionally saw him gushing over me or checking me out a little inappropriately. It was pretty sweet and flattering, so I pretended not to notice.
I turned to my family photo album in my phone and pulled up the latest picture I had of my mom. She died of cancer when I was twelve and my dad left my mom and me when I was five. I wondered sometimes where he might be and what he was doing.
My mom was never able to track him down. I guess if you want to disappear badly enough in this world then you can do it. He might have been dead for all I knew.
But I had no family left. I was about to get kicked out of my place. There would be nowhere to go for me and baby Devon. The tears began to pour down my cheeks as I looked at the last healthy picture I have of my mother.
She was always so strong. Even with everything she went through she never complained. She always said it was like waiting for the circumstances of life to change and that never worked. You had to work with what you had and make your moves based on that.
I had always worked that way too, but right then I was about as low as I had ever felt and I felt completely alone.
The door opened right then.
I quickly wiped the tears away from my eyes with my hand. I never let anyone see me cry ever. That was another thing I learned from my mom. She always said if you didn’t act upset about things then other people wouldn’t either. Or at least they would never know what you were up to.
A second later Derek came bouncing into the living room. He was wearing his hooded sweatshirt and looked a bit sweaty. I didn’t know why he always came to my place after he finished training clients and was still hot and sweaty. I was on the way to his place and all, but it was still kind of gross I thought.
Derek had recently started his own personal training business. He had always been a bit of a gym rat and he decided after every other door had been slammed in his face that he would try that. So far he was up to five clients and starting to see a bit of a profit.
I was impressed by his ambition. He was even toying with going back to school to study something else.
“Hey, what’s going on?” he asked as he plopped down on my couch.
“Oh, just looking at the beautiful world of late bills,” I said.
“Ouch, I’ve been to that world and it sucks.”
“Well, at least you have a job,” I reminded him.
“No, see I don’t have a job. I have an enterprise,” he said with a wide smile on his face.
I couldn’t help but laugh. The guy was such a character.
“Well, you have income at least. We can say that. But I’d hardly say you h
ave an enterprise. When you own your own chain of fitness centers then you can say you have an enterprise.”
“No, I’m saying it now,” he joked. “You gotta think big.”
“And by thinking big you mean delusional,” I said.
“One man’s delusion is another man’s reality,” he replied.
“Only if they are sharing the same delusion. Which is most people when you think about it,” I joked.
“So, I take it you have not heard back from any of the jobs you applied for?” He asked.
“Nope,” I said. “Most of them won’t even inform you that you are not going to be selected. It’s pretty pathetic, if you ask me.”
“Yea, they could at least take the time to pretend to have the common courtesy to tell you that you were not selected. It doesn’t take that long and it is the right thing to do. You took all that time to apply after all,” Derek said.
I couldn’t tell if he was being genuine or sarcastic. That was Derek’s thing; you could never tell if he was joking or just being a bit of a sarcastic jerk.
“You could always work with me,” Derek said. “I know I could get a lot more female clients if I had a woman as a partner. We could cover a lot more ground that way and make way more cash.”
“I don’t look like a fitness expert; I look like your clients.”
“What are you talking about? You look great.”
“Well, I know I look great, but most women are not as comfortable as me being a sexy BBW,” I joked. “Most of them want to get rid of curves for some stupid reason, not accentuate the ones they have like I do.”
“True,” Derek said. “There are a lot of women who want to be stick figures.”
I’d always been happy with being a curvier girl. I had everything that thin women had, but much more of it. And as far as I was concerned I was attractive. I’m not conceited, but I do think that I am attractive and the looks I usually receive from all types of men have confirmed this to me.
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