Simply Bears: A Ten Book Paranormal Bear Shifter Romance Collection

by Simply Shifters

  “Precisely. They have hunted us to the point of extinction already, and now they wish to finish what they have started. In your world, there are perhaps two dozen more at this moment. In a few other worlds there is that many again.”

  “Other worlds?” Nikki asked, her mind spinning.

  “That's not important at the moment. What you need to know is that killing us all off won't take as much time or effort as we might like.”

  “All right,” Nikki said and then realized how that sounded. “I mean, that's terrible, I admit, but what does that have to do with me?”

  She tried not to let it sound harsh and uncaring but really Nikki didn't understand how she had gotten caught up in the middle of this war. She wanted out. She wanted to get back to her own life, and she wanted to get there now.

  “That is the heart of the matter,” Oroth told her. “You have something the Shifts need. It is unique in all of the known universes. I myself have never seen it personally although I can feel it on you even from here. Maximillian could sense it when he first met you and I'm sure that's part of the reason for his strong attraction to you.”

  Nikki felt the electricity prickling on her hand intensify as Max stroked his finger along the tip of hers.

  “But what could I possibly have that they want?” she asked Oroth. “I'm just a girl from Manhattan. I'm nobody special.”

  “Yes, you are,” he argued with her. “You are more special than you know. You are the product of your lineage. A genetic combination that I would have never thought was possible.”

  She heard Arcan gasp next to her. Whatever Oroth was about to say, Arcan had already figured it out. Apparently, it didn't set very well with him.

  “You,” Oroth continued, “are a child of an Ursallin and a Shift.”

  Chapter 8

  “I don't care what she says,” Nikki nearly screamed in Max's face. “I know who my parents were and they weren't giant globs of black goo!”

  “Shifts,” Arcan corrected her. He was pulling at the collar of his shirt again, clearly uncomfortable in his clothes.

  Nikki glared at him. Ever since the Regulators had agreed to let them come back to her world, Arcan had been a real prick. Nothing had been good enough for him and he hadn't missed a single chance to correct her over everything. No matter how small.

  “Shifts,” she grated between clenched teeth. “Whatever.”

  “And to be correct, one of them was an Ursallin.”

  The bus they were riding on was crowded. That was the only reason why she didn't grab the nearest sharp object and jam it into his ear. “My mom was a school teacher from Boise, Idaho,” she informed him. “She retired when I was twelve to stay at home with us. Pops was a college professor. We didn't see much of him and then he died when I was sixteen. Do not,” she said with harsh emphasis, “try to tell me different.”

  Arcan regarded her stonily, then shrugged and turned away. Somehow, that aggravated her more than anything he could have said to her.

  They had stepped through from the world of Gallandrian into Manhattan in the middle of Chinatown. It was still an amazing thing to see Max morph his hand into a clawed bear's paw and actually tear at the air itself, tearing through the fabric of reality, creating a shining round doorway that allowed them to step between worlds like they were stepping from one subway platform to another. He'd smiled at her and winked when he caught her staring at his paw and she had quickly looked everywhere else but at him. Damn. She was going to have to do something about this insane attraction they had.

  Like, sex him until one of them screamed for mercy.

  That, or take a day's worth of cold showers.

  The Council had provided them with clothing. Jeans and t-shirts for the boys, a blue blouse and a matching skirt for her. Max's shirt said Aeropostal across the chest. Arcan's had the New York Yankees logo printed on the left sleeve. Nikki's pointed looks at each of the naked Council members had gone unnoticed by everyone but Max.

  “They had these brought here for us when they decided to release us back into your world,” he explained to her in a whisper as they dressed. The cut of his jeans fit just right, hugging the curve of his ass in ways that made her want to feel her hand all over it. “They weren't holding out on you. The leaf shirt was made especially for you by Regulator Shellen. She's one of the few members of the community who has the skill to make clothing.”

  “Hmph,” Nikki had said but she made sure to tell Shellen thank you before they left. At least she hadn't had to walk naked in the land of the werebears.

  Now, they rode the bus uptown, heading for a meeting with two other bear people. This trip wasn't just for fun and it wasn't to let Nikki get back into her old life. That life was gone. The last time she was here, in Manhattan, her apartment had been torn to pieces and she'd nearly been killed. Max had jumped out of a fourth story window to save her life. Not to mention that they had killed a security guard and a private investigator, both of whom had been employed by her law firm. Both men had been Shifts in disguise, of course, but that wasn't something you could explain to the police.

  No. She wasn't going to be able to show up at the office tomorrow and pretend she'd been in bed with the flu. Nothing would ever be the same again.

  Reminding herself that a Shift could look like anyone, be anyone, Nikki nervously looked around them at the other passengers on the bus. An old woman smiled at her before going back to cleaning her glasses. A little girl cried and ranted about how it wasn't fair that she couldn't have a puppy. A strikingly beautiful woman with long blonde hair near the front of the bus didn't pay them any mind at all.

  Any of them could be Shifts, waiting to strike. All of them could be Shifts, for that matter.

  Nikki felt the walls closing in on her. She couldn't get enough breath into her lungs and she felt her heart beginning to race and she had the greatest desire to jump up and stop the bus and run out the doors and just keep running until she couldn't run anymore and then find the biggest rock she could find to hide under for the rest of her life.

  Max's hand on hers made her jump. Not just for the instant sensation of electric pinpricks, but because she had been so deep into her little mini freak out that she had forgotten he was there.

  “It'll be all right,” he said to her. “Just breathe. I'm here for you. I won't let anything happen to you. Just like before.”

  “How do you do that?” she asked in a whisper.

  He arched an eyebrow. “Do what?”

  “Read my mind. I swear it's like you know exactly what I'm thinking half the time.”

  Scratching behind his ear in that way he had, he managed to look cute and confused both at once. “I don't know. Sometimes, I think I can. Other times, I think I'm just so in tune with you that I can read your face. Not your thoughts, exactly, but the way you frown, or the way your nostrils flare, or the way your right eyebrow will lift up....”

  “Wait,” she said to him, “I do not flare my nostrils.”

  “Uh, yes, you do.”

  “Nuh-uh. Don't go trying to sell me none of that.” It was then that she realized she could breathe again. She could think. Just being close to Max made everything feel like it really was going to be all right, Shifts or no Shifts. “I don't flare my nostrils. Do I?”

  “Will you two stop it?” Arcan grumped from the seat next to her. “You're going to make me sick.”

  “What is your problem?” she blurted out. A few of the people near them turned to look at her, and she froze, waiting for one of them to turn pitch black and stretch out towards them with mouths full of fangs. That didn't happen, and they turned away again, and Nikki figured for the moment at least she really was safe. Lowering her voice she said, “I've had about enough of you, Mister Can. Nobody asked you to be here with me.”

  “It's Arcan,” he rumbled. “And I wasn't asked to come along with you and Maximillian. I was told I had to be here by the Council. So here I am.”

  “To do what, exactly?” she asked.
“Insult me and tell us how hopeless everything is?”

  His grin was all flashing teeth. “Nah. That's just a bonus.”

  Nikki threw up her hands and let them fall into her lap. “What are we doing, anyway? Why are we going to meet these friends of yours?”

  “They've found out something about the Ursa Initiative,” Max explained, repeating what the Council members had told them. “It's important.”

  “Okay, look,” she said. I don't want your people to get hurt, Max, but what does this have to do with me? Can't you just, like, beam me up to Brooklyn or Paris or someplace where the Shifts won't come looking for me and let me live my life?”

  Arcan snorted. “Typical human. Only thinking of yourself.”

  “You know,” Nikki said, “I just might make a bearskin rug out of you.”

  She had meant it to be insulting. Instead, Arcan knit his brows lower like he was seeing her for the first time, and turned away with something resembling admiration in his eyes.

  Now what was that about?

  “We've been over this, Nikki.” Max shifted in his seat and pulled her hand onto his thigh. “You have an important role to play in all this. The Shifts want you, desperately, and I can't say for sure if it's to kill you or use you but I know there has never been a baby born to a Shift and an Ursallin. Ever. You saw how shocked the Council was. That just doesn't happen. You may not understand what you are yet, and we may not understand it either, but there is something very special about you. You're unique in the universe.”

  “Well, sorry to burst your bubble there, Mister Riddle Man, but I'm not all that unique after all. I have two brothers. Both of them are pains right in my ass but I promise you that they're both as human as I am. I'm telling you, my mom and my dad were not Shifts.”

  “Only one of them—” Arcan started.

  “Shut up,” she told him, jabbing a finger in his face. “Just, shut up.”

  Only, he didn't shut up. “These brothers of yours. They older than you?”

  “Not that it's any of your business, but yes they are.”

  He muttered something to himself and then nodded like she had just answered some important question. “I have a theory about how that happened, then. You are what the Council said you are, Nikki Bryant. You just won't accept it. I can feel it just as easily as Max over there can feel it. I'm betting the Shifts can sense it, too. That's why so many of them have been attracted to you. That's why you got hired at a law firm where so many Shifts are hiding in plain sight. They needed to keep you close until they figured you out. They probably didn't know what the attraction is, but that doesn't change the fact that they know you're just as special as the Council does.”

  She rolled her eyes and slumped down in the green vinyl bus seat. “Call me attractive again,” she said flatly. “It's so hot. Really.”

  There was that look on his face again. What was he thinking?

  “Let's talk about this when we get there,” Max said, a little too quickly for it to sound casual. “We're attracting attention we may not want.”

  Nikki looked up to find the old woman staring at them again. A homeless man with cut-off mittens on his hands and a beach towel wrapped around his head was watching them, too. Max was right, she knew. The less said about these crazy things that were happening in her life, the better. Besides, she wasn't going to convince Arcan of anything. He was already sure that her parents had been a half-bear and a pile of gelatinous oil.

  It wasn't true. Nikki had a lot of fond memories of her parents from her childhood. Her mom more so than her dad but still. She would have known if they weren't human. They had spent so much time together she would have just been able to tell.

  Wouldn't she?

  The rest of the bus ride happened in silence, and Nikki was alone with her thoughts.

  ***

  The closest bus terminal to where they were going was five blocks away. It made sense. There weren't many people who had reason to go to a bunch of empty warehouses on Fifty-Eighth Street. Certainly not enough to warrant a bus stop anywhere close. So they walked.

  Crowds of people became fewer and fewer until there was only the occasional drunk staggering past. It was strange, but it made Nikki smile to see it. Manhattan in all its quirks. Home sweet home.

  “What are you thinking?” Max asked.

  She didn't answer him at first. What she was thinking about was him. How many guys would bother to ask a girl what she was thinking, especially when the world was basically coming apart around them? He was a big, lumbering, muscle-bound lug, and to look at him you would never know that he had this deeply sensitive side to him. Nikki had seen it. It was one of the things that made her so attracted to him.

  That, and the way he looked in those jeans.

  “Nikki?”

  She realized that she hadn't answered him as they stopped at the corner of a building that was literally falling in on itself. One whole wall had started to crumble, cinder blocks broken and out of place, paint that was discolored from weather and water damage. “Sorry, Max. I guess I've just got too much on my mind.”

  He reached out to stroke her chin, leaving her skin warm behind the line of his touch. White skin against her black skin. Dark and light, with something very close to love in between.

  “I have to go check on our contacts,” he told her. “I want to make sure everything is all right before you come inside. Okay? It's that building right there.”

  He pointed to the next warehouse down the line, a square gray building with a curving roof and absolutely zero character. Anyone would have passed it right by without ever noticing. Nikki might have passed it herself any number of times. She didn't remember. That was probably the appeal of meeting here. No one would notice them coming, no one would notice them going. It was a perfect spot for a secret meeting between the brothers bear.

  Oh, she was so losing her mind.

  Max nodded, trusting that she understood why he had to leave her here on the curb alone with Arcan. “I'll be right back,” he told her. “If you don't see me poke my ugly head out of that door in five minutes, then you'll know something's gone wrong.”

  “And what do I do if something goes wrong?”

  “Run like Hell itself is chasing you,” Arcan said quietly and very seriously.

  “Right,” Max agreed. “Do that.” With a look, there was more conversation between him and Arcan, with that weird mental link the Ursallin could do. She had joked about Max being able to read her mind, but the Ursallin really could do something very close to that between themselves. It was weird to watch.

  Then Max was jogging across the short open space between buildings and up a set of metal stairs that brought him to a service entry door. Nikki watched as he knocked on it, waited before opening it and going inside.

  She felt so very alone when that door closed.

  Arcan was staring at her with an odd look. She'd seen little boys stare at little girls that way, like they were just realizing there was a difference that mattered and wanted to know why. It was a very measured expression, and she knew that there wasn't any part of her that Arcan hadn't just examined.

  She cleared her throat, trying not to feel intimidated by him. He was taller than her by at least a foot, and much stronger, but that wasn't where her uneasiness came from. It came from how he made her feel naked all over again. Little details about him came into focus for her, like how his chest rose and fall with each breath, or how his brown eyes were the color of dark chocolate. Little things that turned him from the unapproachable werebear she usually thought of him as, into a living breathing man.

  “Um,” she stammered. “You, uh, told Max that we should run like Hell if something goes wrong.”

  “Sure. What of it?”

  “Nothing, I guess. I just, well, didn't think you bear people would believe in Heaven or Hell.”

  He took a step closer. Then another. Was she imagining the heat of his body against hers? “Of course we believe in Heaven,” he said t
o her. “And Hell. Both are very real. You think God only exists for the humans?”

  His hand rose up, coming close to her, about to touch the slope of her neck and she swallowed and held her breath and her lips parted and...and...

  “Max just told me it's safe to go inside,” Arcan said, interrupting her growing sense of arousal. “At least he didn't shout out loud to me this time. Sometimes he actually remembers he's a shapeshifter and not a human. Come on. Let's go.”

  Nikki suddenly shivered as she realized how very close she had come to letting Arcan touch her. Like, really touch her. The same powerful attraction she felt for Max had taken over when Arcan had looked at her with those dark eyes. No, not the same attraction. It was different. The difference between night and day.

  Between Black and White.

  Without saying a word, not able to trust her voice, she stepped around and past him, making for the open door where Max stood. What was the deal with her? It was like her body wasn't hers to control when she was around Max or Arcan either. Like she had no control at all over her sexual desires. The things she had just imagined her and Arcan doing were deeply erotic and very specific and would have made a porn star blush.

  Get it together, girl, she told herself. Things are crazy enough as they are without you going all to pieces over two men.

  It must be because she had just spent days walking around a damned otherworld nudist colony, she told herself. She just wasn't sure she believed it.

  Max looked at her strangely as she stepped up next to him and went inside the warehouse. She was sure her thoughts would be written all over her face and that he would know in an instant how easily she had opened herself up to Arcan just now. If he suspected anything had just almost happened, he didn't say anything. She didn't either, happy to let sleeping dogs lie so that no one would get bit.

  There was a short hallway in front of her as soon as she went through the door to the building. It led to a small room with several doors leading off. Arcan had come in right behind her and Max and the three of them crowded into that room, under bare florescent bulbs that washed everything in a harsh light. Everything included two men sitting at a small folding table against the wall. They were big, like Max, and both of them had light brown skin that made it hard for Nikki to know if they were Black or Hispanic or maybe even Arabic. Both of them were shaved bald. Both of them wore blue janitor's uniforms with names stitched at the right pocket. Armando and John.