Shrew & Company Books 1-3

by Holley Trent

  And unlike Eddie G., John would be wide-awake. Tamara didn’t have the weapon of dreamland manipulation this time, only her words, and a womanizing Bear’s weakness for exotic blondes.

  Bryan realized he was growling when a deliveryman in the alleyway paused and pushed an eyebrow up.

  Bryan cleared his throat. “Sorry. Been fighting off a cold all week.”

  The man shrugged, shifted his box to his other arm, and kept walking. “It’s the change in the weather, I bet,” he called back.

  “All right, Tam. Come on, baby.”

  Bryan’s bear was growing restless. He was worried about his unclaimed mate, and if anything happened to her, Bryan knew his bear would never forgive him.

  While he was his bear, and his bear was him, sometimes a shifter’s creature had a voice that seemed separate from his main conscience, and when it isolated itself, it was loud. Bryan’s mother had always said this was an evolutionary adaptation, because sometimes the bear could see more clearly than the man.

  “Best you listen to the bear, Bryan,” Ma had always said.

  Well, Ma couldn’t have predicted his mate would be a fucking lazy bear whom he’d have to subtly insult and demean to get a rise out of. He thought he’d been close at Eddie G.’s—he’d felt her anger, and it had perturbed his bear, too, but she’d reined it back in. It was as if she was trying to prove some point by not losing her temper, and that meant he’d have to push harder.

  The metal outer door swung open, and Bryan took his fighting stance, praying she’d gotten the man downstairs without his usual entourage in attendance.

  Fuck. No such luck. Out the door with John and Tamara came John’s secretary, whose telltale scent marked her as a new Bear. He would have known that if he’d been at the last full moon roll call.

  “I think in front of that fountain would be a good place to post for a pic—”

  John’s growl rose up before his rheumy gray stare found Bryan in the shadows.

  Bryan crouched into his fighting stance again, baring his fangs at the superintendent while Tamara assessed the situation behind the secretary.

  Her gaze flitted to Bryan, and there was a warning there. Don’t get in my way.

  His shoulders pulled up in the slightest shrug just before he and John collided, muscle against muscle.

  John was the only Bear in the group who came close in size to Bryan, but Bryan had athletic shoes and comfortable clothes to his advantage.

  They wrestled more than they fought, each trying to pin the other, but mostly Bryan was just playing with him. Teasing him. He didn’t want to cause the man any real pain, because if he tried to force a shift, getting him out of the alley would generate the sort of public attention he didn’t need at the moment. They fell to the ground in a heavy thud with Bryan on the bottom, but he was as good defensively as he was at being the aggressor.

  John’s clumsy grabs and swipes were easy enough for Bryan to avoid, and the more John swung and missed, the more tired he would be when Bryan was able to yank him to his feet.

  The secretary stepped in, swinging her purse at Bryan’s head and missing. She couldn’t have known who he was. What he was. She didn’t know his scent, and he was out of the psychic loop. She probably thought he was some kind of mugger.

  “For fuck’s sake,” Tamara said, sighing.

  She grabbed the woman by the hair bun and yanked her back. She tossed her onto the alley’s damp asphalt and put her boot against the woman’s dainty neck. “I would suggest you not move,” Tamara said, and then Bryan had to shift his attention back to John, because he’d given up on punching, and poised himself to slam his knee against Bryan’s crotch.

  Bryan caught the wind-up to the strike, dug his feet against the asphalt, and forced himself several inches backward—ripping the fabric of his shirt and abrading his skin in the process.

  John’s wayward knee struck the ground, splitting his suit pants and, apparently, his skin. He grabbed it, hissing.

  Bryan scrambled to his feet, and wrapped his arms around John’s neck from the back.

  “You know what happens to mutineers?” John croaked. He struggled in Bryan’s grip, rocking side to side to loosen his hold, and when that didn’t work, he reached into his suit pocket.

  Suddenly, there was silver in Bryan’s face.

  Fuck.

  Bryan scrambled back, leaning away as John slashed the knife toward Bryan’s face and neck. “No, tell me what happens to mutineers,” Bryan said. He kept his stare locked on his opponent and tried not to give away the movement behind John.

  Tamara’s borrowed camera broke into shards as it made contact with the side of John’s head, and John stumbled, sagging to his knees for seconds, before he stood back up. Blood dripped down the side of his face onto his starched shirt collar, but still he fought.

  The secretary was up now, swinging at Tamara, who easily knocked her back with the occasional open-handed smack.

  The last thing that woman needed was for Tamara to make a fist, so Bryan hoped she’d back down for her own sake. Whether the secretary was a Bear or not, Bryan knew there were only so many of Tamara’s blows a person could handle. There were two Bears back at the bunker who could personally attest to that.

  With a roundhouse kick to the same landing zone as Tamara’s camera, Bryan dropped John to the ground.

  “School’s out, motherfucker.”

  Tamara was still handling the secretary with her usual careful efficiency, but they needed to end this before people came to investigate the noise. Besides, Bryan had a warning for Gene.

  Extending the claws of his right hand, he reached past Tamara and swiped the secretary’s arm.

  She looked down at the wounds, staring at the flowing blood as if her brain couldn’t make sense of what her nerves were telling her. Her wide-eyed stare shifted from her arm, to Tamara, and then finally to Bryan’s face.

  He retracted his claws as her bottom lip began quivering.

  “Who are you?” she whimpered, and her shaking right fingers probed the rips of her blouse.

  “My name is Bryan Ridge.”

  Tamara grabbed his arm, her eyes narrowed into warning slits. “Bryan—”

  He was shredding their plan all to hell, yet again, and she was calling him on it.

  Reluctantly, he nudged her away, and reached for the secretary. He picked her up by the underarms and brought her up to his eye level. “My name is Bryan Ridge, and the Bears are mine. You can leave the territory, or you can fall in line. You go tell Gene that.”

  He dropped her to her feet, and she ran, stumbling, through the alley, not once casting a look back at the fallen Bear who’d likely been the one to change her.

  Tamara’s expression shifted from speculative to an outright angry glare, and when she lowered her chin to her chest and pulled back her upper lip, he knew to dodge the blow that was coming.

  He could predict it now, because his bear knew Tamara. Any other time, he would have loved to play-wrestle with her.

  Her anger seemed to radiate off her in thick waves, choking him and exciting his masochist of a bear.

  Be calm. Be calm. Don’t want the Shrew parts blocking her bear.

  He leaned back to dodge a sweep of her foot toward his face, and before her flying foot returned to the ground, he pinned her against the brick wall, pressed her wrists together over her head, and ground his erection against her belly.

  Unavoidable consequence. His bear was excited, and now he was, too. He suspected his arousal would enrage her that much more.

  Good.

  “This isn’t how partners work,” she said, squirming against him.

  He intuited that she’d try that same knee trick that John had, so he put his feet on either side of hers and pressed them together, pinning her legs.

  “What do you need me for if you’re not going to follow the plan?” Her breathing accelerated, nostrils flared.

  Recognize my bear scent now, baby? I can smell yours now, too.
>
  He pressed his nose into the crook of her neck and inhaled deeply. There wasn’t a perfume anywhere that could match the effects her natural bouquet had on his body.

  Her bear was awake in there somewhere, and evidently she hadn’t told Tam “Hi!” yet.

  He wanted to take her home, strip her naked and roll around with her until he’d had his fill, but they were in a well-traversed alleyway with the unconscious superintendent sprawled out beside the trashcans. Slaking his lust could wait. Right now, he needed to connect the dots. Finish what he’d started days before when he ripped that glory hole in her jacket.

  Releasing her wrists, he turned her, quickly, and pressed her front against the wall while pulling back the neck of her trendy shirt.

  He sank his teeth into the fleshy part of her shoulder, rimming his tongue around the back of his bite, tickling her skin as she squirmed, cursed.

  “Get off of me!”

  She yelled something in what was probably Romanian, and could find no route for exit from his embrace—not without ripping her skin, and not even a Shrew would purposefully endure that.

  He withdrew his incisors and licked the punctures he’d made before letting her shirt fall back into its natural position.

  She spun, and lobbed a punch at him.

  He easily ducked it.

  She fell to her knees, pressing a hand to her shoulder.

  She rolled her shoulder, and her face pulled into a mask of pain. Her eyes glazed over.

  “What’d you do to me?”

  The thickness of her voice made some unseen vice clamp his heart tight. His arms ached to hold her. She fit there, in his arms, and he wanted her back there. But he couldn’t risk it.

  He needed that lazy bear to get on her feet and growl at him. She needed to come out of that goddamned mental cave and see the sun. At least long enough to meet her Shrew counterpart.

  Bryan bent down, pulled John up to his loafer-clad feet, and wrapped the unconscious man’s right arm around his neck. Without Tamara’s aid, the trek to the truck would be a wobbly one that might raise a few pedestrian, but he’d manage. Maybe they’d think the good superintendent were drunk. Stranger things had happened than school administrators getting sloshed during work hours.

  Tamara pressed her hands to the wall, struggling to stand with her eyelids jammed shut and legs shaking.

  Fuck.

  He couldn’t imagine what sort of physical duress she was in. He came into his bear gradually during puberty. Typical growing pains, and he’d always known he was Bear. Tamara was in for a huge shock, and for once, Bryan was afraid of something.

  Her rejection.

  What choice did he have, though? He had to leave her to stand on her own—to let her anger finish the work he’d started. So he turned his back to her, and dragged the last of Gene’s main lieutenants to the truck, even as his eyes welled and his bear bellowed inside.

  He wasn’t programmed to ignore people in pain, and certainly not the people he loved.

  What he’d done would leave a psychic scab for him, and maybe for Tam, too.

  He just hoped that one day she could forgive him for it.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Tamara sat very still at the desk, saying nothing while Astrid bandaged her shoulder.

  She watched Bryan in Dustin’s cell where they chatted quietly about some Bear-related paperwork Bryan had found in John’s car.

  Tam was a Shrew, and they tended to regenerate cells much more quickly than the average preternatural being, but this was a Were-bear bite, and one Bryan had apparently taken special care with. For some reason, the punctures didn’t want to close but at least the bleeding had stopped.

  During the drive back to the bunker, she thought she’d fallen into some sort of deep sleep, because she dreamed of bears. She’d seen Bryan’s bear, which she recognized, and a smaller one. The small new bear was blondish brown, female, and cranky, as if she’d been roused from a long hibernation and hadn’t been offered so much as a cup of coffee for the trouble. Bryan’s bear had circled at a polite distance, but his solicitousness had been apparent.

  It wasn’t until they’d parked the truck between Dustin and Astrid’s cars that she realized her brain wasn’t processing the Bear fight in the alley in interesting ways. She wasn’t dreaming, and she hadn’t fallen asleep. Some veil had lifted from her eyes because of what Bryan had done to her in that alley.

  Their dimensions were sort of overlaid, beast and man. She couldn’t see John, Dustin, Tony, or Paul’s beasts lumbering around in the mist, but she could see Bryan’s, and Bryan’s saw her. She didn’t try to understand it.

  Her head hurt.

  When they’d arrived at the bunker, Bryan had pulled up the parking brake and said, softly, “I’m sorry, baby. Your father told me I had to.”

  She hadn’t believed him that anyone would do something like that on purpose—that her father would stand back again and ask someone else to fix one of her messes. He’d known about Dana all along and encouraged her taking Tamara in, but now Bryan? The diplomat was used to outsourcing his chores, but she was his fucking daughter for crying out loud.

  But then it registered in her that she wasn’t cold. She was burning hot, and although her brain was tingling and muddled, her usual high energy level had returned.

  Why, though?

  “You gonna be all right?” Astrid’s lips were close enough that Tamara could feel the heat of her breath on her ear. She was whispering for Tamara’s benefit, but seeing as how they were in a room full of Bears, it was probably a pointless exercise.

  “I don’t know. I need to call my father.”

  “That seems like a good place to start.”

  When they broke apart, Tamara gave in to the psychic prickle on the side of her face, and looked up to see the unoccupied Bears watching her, enraptured from the cells. Eddie, Tony, Paul—they all stood at their cell doors, staring out as if she had a fresh fish for whoever could be still the longest.

  Weirdos.

  She pushed back the rolling chair, stood, and Astrid immediately filled the seat she vacated.

  Tamara already had her father’s number queued up in her phone by the time she ascended to the surface, and when the sunlight met her face, she pressed Call.

  Tată answered on the second ring.

  Tamara said nothing as she let down the tailgate of Bryan’s truck and pulled herself up to the ledge, pressing the phone between her right ear and shoulder. She let her legs dangle over the edge a few moments and listened to her father’s raspy breathing.

  He didn’t say anything. Didn’t force conversation.

  In Romanian, she asked, “Do you have something you want to tell me?”

  He sighed. “I suspect you’ve already caught the gist of it.”

  “No, I really haven’t. All I know is that you told a Bear to bite me, and that suddenly, I don’t feel like death warmed over. And suddenly, there’s a beast in my head.”

  “It’s because your Shrew got out of the way of your Bear.”

  “I hear your words, and they’re in a language I understand, however they make no sense.”

  “You’re a Shrew, and you’re telling me being Bear is supposed to make sense?”

  “What does this mean, being Bear?”

  “You have a bear. Obviously.”

  “Let’s explicate that one part at a time, shall we? Bear. That would mean you and Mama are Bear. Born, not made.”

  Two leaves from the nearby oak fell on a breeze in the time it took Tată to respond, “Yes. And your brothers.”

  “If that’s true, what will happen at the full moon?”

  “Nothing should change. It’ll be just like always. You’ll be sensitive to the Bears around you, know they’re in the middle of a change, but you won’t change. You’re just like your grandmother.”

  “All those years and you sent me to her during the full moon, and no one ever said anything. Not you, not Mama, or even those fool brothers of mine.”r />
  “We didn’t say anything because there was a chance the bear would always be latent. You would have been in the dark, and given how hard it is at times for us to be what we are, we thought perhaps secrecy would be better for you. I’m not just a Romanian diplomat, Tamara. My more important job has always been in the shifter world.”

  “It should have been my choice.” She tried to put a little bit of edge in her voice, but her heart wasn’t in it. Her bear was wearing her down. Bear wasn’t talking, not really, but more like exploring Tamara’s mental nooks and crannies. Assessing her Shrew quirks. Searching out weak spots and strengthening them. Poring over her emotional history and forgiving her for it.

  While the parts of Tamara’s id all swirled around in her brain and merged together, it seemed easier to just let it all unfurl as it would. She didn’t have the stamina for anger.

  “You’re right. It should have been your choice.”

  “That’s why you flew out here, isn’t it? Because you didn’t know what would happen with me around Bryan.”

  “Yes.”

  “And now what?”

  He grunted. “Up to you. You’re like Bryan. Born, and not made, so you can flit through crowds without rousing the attention of other creatures. No more than you already do, anyway.”

  “And if I’m able to have children, then what? What will they be?”

  “Hard to guess the genetics, although that would most certainly depend on whom you had those children with, yes?”

  Good point. Blowing out a sigh, she rubbed her eyes with her free hand.

  “That said, Tamara, Bear is dominant in our strain. They’d always carry the gene, even if it were latent.”

  “Are all Bear strains dominant over human?”

  “Yes.”

  “So it can’t really be bred out. You can only hope it lies latent.”