by Kyrii Rayne
BEAR LODGE SHIFTERS – Book 5
Bear Territory
Kyrii Rayne
Dreamstone Publishing © 2019
www.dreamstonepublishing.com
Copyright © 2019 Dreamstone Publishing and Kyrii Rayne
All rights reserved.
No parts of this work may be copied without the author’s permission.
ISBN: 978-1-925915-09-9
Disclaimer
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, organisations, events and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.
Table of Contents
Disclaimer
Table of Contents
Chapter 1 – The Funeral
Chapter 2 - Contested Will
Chapter 3 - Storm Warning
Chapter 4 - A Candle in the Dark
Chapter 5 - Knowing Your Enemy
Chapter 6 - Malik
Chapter 7 - Bearing Bad News
Chapter 8 - The Bear Lodge Irregulars
Chapter 9 - In Flames
Chapter 10 - Finest Hour
About the Author
Here is your preview of Hunting Party
Chapter 1 - Anna
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Chapter 1 – The Funeral
Anna Moretti sat on the edge of her bed in the suite she shared with her fiancé Jake, and felt the cold knots in her stomach draw tighter as she waited. It was half an hour before they had to leave, and even done up in a fancily somber new black dress, shoes and hose, she wished she could climb back under the pile of comforters again and just hide from this day.
She hated funerals. Especially when it was someone she knew, had cared for and admired. Helga Thorsdottr had been all those things, and now she was gone. And soon her body would be cremated on a pyre on the mountaintop, and that would be the last time anyone would see her.
Helga had been recovering from her latest surgery when it had happened, snug at home at the Lodge but still on bed rest. She had never discussed the specifics of her health issues with Anna, or Jake, or even their friend Darrin, who’d handled most of Helga's administrative duties when she had been too sick to work.
But she had been well over a century old when her nurse had come in two days ago at dawn to check on her.
She had been found as if sleeping, her expression at peace, an open copy of The Lord of the Rings held on her chest and her reading glasses slipped down to the end of her nose. Anna had seen her soon after, when she had rushed upstairs with the boys at the nurse's summons. She had stood in her nightie and bathrobe, slippers askew on her feet and one bare heel with wooden floor under it, clutching the cloth against her chest as she had stared down at the body of her friend.
Except for her pallor and the chill to her skin, Helga had looked like she might blink awake at any moment, and ask what everyone was doing in her bedroom. But no. The same superhuman vitality that had kept her healthy for over a century had ebbed away in the last decade, and finally death had claimed her.
Anna sat on the bed, carefully braiding up her wavy honey-colored hair. Her green eyes had been red-rimmed for days. There was no sleeping after this. No sleeping, no working on planning her and Jake's wedding, and thanks to her pregnancy nausea, no real eating either.
No pleasant distraction of any kind seemed to take her out of her mood for more than a few minutes. She sought out Jake's arms often, but it was all a matter of comforting each other. Desire banked down to a barely existent glow in the face of this. And far too often, she found herself weeping again. She wondered, as she stared out the floor-to-ceiling window that overlooked the deep gorge behind the Lodge, if she should even bother with makeup. She was guaranteed to cry off her mascara before the day was over.
Helga had been more than a friend. She had led the Bear shifters of the Lodge for decades alongside Jake's father, and then alongside Jake. She had been their arbiter, their spiritual leader, and sometimes, their general. Helga had saved their lives once. Helga had mentored Darrin, raised and trained him up until he had become her indispensable right hand. Helga had helped rehabilitate Gray, Jake's younger brother, from the effects of his torturous life at the hands of their father, who had lost his mind. Helga had advocated for peace, for tolerance of humanity, for alternatives to violence. There was a gigantic hole in Anna and Jake's life where she used to be, and in the lives of everyone who was a Lodge member.
Anna slowly went to the white-tiled ensuite bathroom, to check her hair in the mirror and paint on her face. Jake was down the hall, helping his brother Gray's fiancée Julia shoehorn the half-feral shifter into a suit. Anna didn't envy him that work; Gray had been raised as a bear, and had only achieved human form a few months ago. Getting him to wear shoes and a shirt on an average day was a bit of a chore. But a tie? She could only imagine. It was in fact a bit of a surprise that she didn't hear Gray's growls of frustration from down the hall. Maybe they had bribed him with food.
Gray had been hit hardest of all of them. He had still been under Helga's tutelage, learning the basics of how to act human. He was a fast learner, but after everything he had gone through he had still been very emotionally dependent on Helga when she had died. The morning her body had been discovered, Gray had run off into the woods in bear form and not come back until late that night. Only his own mate's distress at his absence had drawn him back. And even then, it had taken him hours more to shift back to man-form, and even longer to speak again.
Anna didn't know how he would react to the funeral itself. But she did know that his grief was the greatest now of all of them— except possibly for Darrin's, since he had worked with Helga for years.
She was halfway through lining her eyes when the suite door opened. She heard Jake's heavy tread and a sigh as he came in.
“Baby?” he called.
There was just a touch of apprehension to his voice. He always got more protective of her when there was trouble.
“Bathroom,” she replied, her voice tired. Her stomach rumbled uncomfortably as she worked, and once she was done with one eye she laid a hand briefly on its soft swell. Her pregnancy was coming along well, according to the obstetrician she had been seeing. But getting enough calories into herself around her nausea was even more of a problem when she was under this much stress. “Everything go okay?”
“Yeah. I told him he was dressing up to honor Helga, and he finally gave in to the tie. I swear he's gonna fuss with it through the whole funeral, though.” Gray was physically an adult, but he had grown to adulthood on a bear's schedule— over the course of only two years. In terms of socialization, he didn't have much advantage over the average two year old, and every once in a while he acted like a big kid.
She smiled sadly.
“That's okay. It's just for today. He'll manage.”
“Hope so. Otherwise it's just one more thing. We don't need it now.” Jake filled the doorway behind her. She turned to him, so sleek and handsome in his black suit, yet so subdued.
Normally he shone like the sun, a beacon of courage, integrity and lust for life. But now that sun lay behind clouds, his dark brown eyes dull and his wavy coffee-colored hair scraped back in an over-neat way that, paired with his massive, muscular form, made him look like a hitman. For once his chin was completely clean-shaven, though she knew that wouldn't last much past noon. Bear shifters healed quickly, and were generally hairy folk; for them, their five o'clock shadows always came hours early.
She finished doing her eyeliner and set the brush down, going to embrace him. Her arms almost fit around his chest, and he made a low
sound of contentment when she pressed her body against his. His arms settled around her gently. She tilted her head back and whispered into his neck.
“It'll be okay. It has to be.”
Reluctantly, she released him, and went back to her makeup.
“You know, it's not even the funeral that's bothering me right now,” he admitted, as he checked himself in the mirror over her shoulder. “It's what happens after. I know that there are half a dozen members who will start pushing to take Helga's place as leader before her pyre even burns out.”
“I know.” Her hand shook a little bit, and she had to wipe off her lip liner and start again. “I'm confident you and Darrin can handle this, but I don't look forward to your having to do it.”
The Lodge had been built decades ago, to provide a group of wealthy Bear shifters with a private place to live, hunt and enjoy themselves, without fear of being noticed by humans, or worse, shifter hunters.
It lay in the mountains outside Jackson, Wyoming, surrounded by hundreds of acres of their private lands. The only reliable ways in or out were days of often near-vertical climbing and hiking, off-road vehicles using one narrow, difficult approach, or the helicopter shuttle that ran from the Lodge's helipad to Jackson Airport a few times a day. It was a genuinely private, and generally safe place— and that had unfortunately provided fertile ground for a lot of complacency. And the complacency, fertile ground for serious problems.
First Jake's father, Anthony Matson, who had owned the land and the massive timber edifice itself, had lost his mind while Jake was away at graduate school. He had brainwashed and abused Gray for years, while keeping his existence secret and forcing him to spend his life in an underground cage. Then he and some of the more anti-human Bear shifters had organized a hunt of kidnapped humans on Lodge lands— a hunt which had included Anna herself as prey.
Anthony had died in the aftermath, and Helga had done her best to help them all recover. But when Jake had inherited the Lodge, many of the Bears had challenged him due to his youth and relatively new membership. He had handled running the property very competently since then, especially with Darrin's help, but only a few of the others had been won over to his side of things.
The rest of the Bears continued to question him at every turn. Some had left entirely.
A lot had happened since then. The Bears who had joined in on the human hunt had been exiled, and three of them had conspired to send information on the Lodge to various shifter hunter groups as revenge.
Anna, Jake and the others had already had to deal with one group of Hunters, before finding out about the three's involvement and going after them.
Now the three were dead. But word was still out about the Lodge to at least a few groups of shifter hunters, and all they could do was brace themselves and wait for the response. And hope that all the political bickering the Lodge was going through didn't make it impossible for them to respond to any threats in a real way.
Unfortunately, neither she nor Jake were optimistic about that one. Helga's death left a power vacuum. It meant that time they could have spent preparing would end up being spent on contests of power and politics, as Bear struggled against Bear for the high seat of Helga's office.
Anna finished putting on makeup and straightened, checking her look briefly. Then she turned back to Jake and hugged him.
“Guess we'd better get going.”
As the sun climbed in the sky, the pilgrimage of Bears made its way out of the Lodge and into the rolling mountains to the north, climbing a narrow, switchbacked path. Jake and his brother carried the closed bier, Helga's body wrapped in a mat of woven reeds and tied with thick ropes to the carrying poles. Darrin walked behind them, carrying a stack of Helga's favorite books, and a copy of her will.
The other Bears trailed after them, some lumbering along in shift form, others walking awkwardly up the path in their formal wear. As did she, following along after Darrin with her fingers knotted together in front of her. She was glad she had decided on flats.
She looked around at the other people in the procession as they made their way up to the flat stone outcrop, which had served as a funerary spot for Bears since the Lodge's inception. It had only been used a few times— most of them in the last few months, for the human hunt had cost three of the nine conspiring Bears their lives. Those times, even Jake's father had gotten only a perfunctory ceremony, bodies laid on the pyre with barely a few words.
Jake had still been in shock from his father's brutal betrayal in trying to kill first Anna and then all of them. When the time had come for him to speak, he had said simply, “I don't know this man who sent humans to be hunted. I don't know this man who brainwashed a child of his own blood into being his attack dog. He's not the man who fathered and raised me. He's not the man who mourned my mother. I think maybe my father died years ago, in his heart, and this man replaced him. If I had known sooner, I would have mourned him sooner, and not wasted any time on the man he became.”
And he had said nothing more, simply lighting the pyre with the long torch, and stepping back to watch it all burn.
But Helga was well-loved. And as they walked in somber silence, she looked forward and back, and saw tears on grizzled cheeks, and people speaking in low voices about Helga, about the tragedy of her loss, and about how they had no idea what to say when they got to her funeral. Me neither, guys. Me neither.
Jake labored in front of his brother, who practically blocked out the sight of him. Gray was beyond huge, his bulk almost close to a bear's even in his human form.
His long, shaggy dark brown hair was tipped with silver, like the guard hairs of the grizzly bear he could turn into. It aged him, despite his youthful face and powerful body. Right now it drooped around his face as he kept his head lowered, back hunched under the weight of his grief. He and Jake kept on without speaking.
Darrin, their close friend, a computer expert and probably the best person in the Lodge to take over Helga's duties, walked silently as well, nearby. He was a smaller man than most of the Bears, with coloring close enough to Jake's that he could have been a second brother. He looked even more somber than Jake, and Anna wished she could slip up beside him and give him a word of comfort.
He might not have accepted it, however. Right now he walked so stiffly that she wondered if he was holding in a breakdown. That was probably why his own mate hung back, walking behind Anna alongside Gray's tiny blonde mate Julia. Tall, mahogany-haired Carly usually doted on the slightly moody Darrin. At least, she had every time Anna had seen the two together in the month since they had met in Colorado. Once the funeral was done, the three of them would go straight to propping up their men. But right now they kept back, letting their men do their duty as they labored up the final slope to the pyre stone.
The pyre of whole logs had already been built at the end of the outcrop, a square edifice like half a tiny cabin, stuffed with fresh straw. Jake and Gray walked the bier over and laid it across the top, Helga's body settling into the straw with gentle crackles. The bundle that held her corpse looked so small.
She had never struck Anna as small in life. It was as if her soul had been so enormous that her flesh had shriveled like an empty sack the moment the one had fled the other.
Jake turned to the crowd.
“Ladies and gentlemen, if you could all find a seat, we should get started.”
His voice was dully businesslike, and the others obeyed with tired looks, settling onto the ranks of folding chairs that the staff had set out as well. Anna took a chair in front, saving a seat for Jake, and heard the chair next to her creak under a heavy weight as Gray sat down. Julia was on his other side. Both of them put a supportive hand on one of Gray's arms, and the big guy shivered, his dark eyes filled with sadness and confusion. Jake watched them settle, and then took a deep breath.
“We are gathered here today to mark the passing of our Lodge Mother, Helga Thorsdottr, co-founder of the Lodge and its heart and source of wisdom since its creatio
n. I know a lot of you have something to say. Please come up in the order in which you are seated. But meanwhile, I have something to say myself. It's a given that I'm going to miss Helga. She was our protector when my father went off the rails and tried to kill us. She was our advocate when we had none, our teacher when we needed one, and to many, she was as close as family.” Jake looked around at them, his eyes dark with sadness. “Ladies and gentlemen, Helga's loss is a great one. And though she knew she was ill, and tried to prepare us for the possibility of her passing soon, you know that none of us could ever truly be ready for this. How could we be? Helga, her kindness, her wisdom, her knowledge of the old ways, all of these things, the Lodge needs. We always needed her. And God knows, I need her now.”
Beside her Gray shuddered again, hands flexing, and Anna saw her vision blur with tears. Some of the others were nodding, and she heard quiet weeping from a few people.
Jake swallowed and pinched the bridge of his nose, a tremulous frown deepening on his face as he struggled against his emotions. He finally looked up, blinking rapidly but his expression determined.
“But Helga wouldn't want to see us paralyzed by losing her. She'd want us to move on. To get back to the work of settling our differences, protecting each other, and building the Lodge back up to something great. And as the Lodge's owner, that is exactly what I plan to do— in her memory.”
Quiet muttering. Jake took his seat beside Anna, and she squeezed his hand and petted his arm before getting up and walking to stand in front of the pyre herself.
“I only knew Helga for a little while,” Anna admitted quietly to the assembled crowd. “But when Anthony Matson and his followers tried to kill me in their human hunt, she was the one who gathered the Lodge and came to save us. To her, I wasn't just a 'mere human', and I sure wasn't her enemy. My life was just as valuable to her as anyone else's. I don't... you don't see someone who is willing to jump in for others that way very often. I wish I’d had a chance to know her longer. I wish that I could have had time to repay her, somehow, for everything she has done for me, and for Jake.”
