Simply Bears: A Ten Book Paranormal Bear Shifter Romance Collection

by Simply Shifters

  His oily flesh crawled up her, the obscene hand of a lover wrapping himself around her most intimate parts. She tried to kick, to roll away, but nothing worked. She could not move, and she was merciless under him in a way that she had never been helpless with any man.

  By the time he reached her inner thighs she was hyperventilating and in near hysterics. Please, God, she prayed. Please help me!

  The slippery, ticklish touch of him against her cleft woke her from her crippling fear. Her mind unlocked itself and her body seemed to relax, all at once, until she knew she was in control again, and she knew if she tapped into the part of her that wasn't human she could find a way to not only push this thing off but to kill it dead where it loomed.

  Loomed. Such a big word. To Nikki, it was completely inadequate.

  Like paste, his body squirmed into her, deep into her, filling her, pushing her wide. It was obscene and painful and impossible the way he molded to her.

  It was the most sexually intense feeling she had ever known.

  He throbbed, once, and she gasped and threw her head back. Everything she had been thinking slipped away and the power that had been welling up from within her burst in a little bubble that was there and gone again. He was going to take her this way. Her mind could not focus on what she needed to do to stop him. Every time he—unh—moved an inch deeper—arnh—or twisted like a corkscrew—ohohohoh—or did…this!

  Damn it all to Hell!

  Green ichor flooded across her in a rivulet of blood from the Primus Secor.

  It took Nikki a moment for her mind to process what had just happened. A bear had exploded out of Donovan's chest. No. Not out of it. Through it. With claws and teeth and sheer force of desperation, the Ursallin had saved her from being tortured. At the risk of his own life, the werebear had torn into and the Primus Secor, rending flesh and fiber and whatever else that monstrosity was made up of. Max. It had to be. She had his name on her lips, ready to call him, when she saw the color of his fur and sucked in her breath instead.

  Not a white bear. This was a black bear, fur and claws and muzzle. She recognized that face. Even as a bear, she knew that face.

  Arcan.

  Even as she became aware of who had come to rescue her, the part of Donovan's body that he had stuffed itself up into her came sliding out under the force of Arcan's attack. The sensation of it rippled through her. Orgasm. Right there, ready to come all over everything. She held it back by sheer force of will but it was a near thing. She would not let this monster take her. Not like this.

  Arcan landed next to her, panting heavily, his dark muzzle stained even darker with congealing blood and bodily tissue. He shook himself, all over, and then looked down at her where she lay spread out across Arcan's oily flesh. In the Ursallin's face, she could read his bear-speak

  He was telling her they were well and truly screwed, that they were both going to die, that the others were already dead and it would be their turn soon.

  Nikki gasped. All of that had happened in a split second, quicker than thought, the idea of what he was telling her coming through as loud and as clear as though he had been shouting it at her.

  She heard something else, too. Concern wasn't deep enough to describe it. Fear didn't express the depth of the emotion. Nikki knew what she was hearing, she just wasn't sure she could put a name to it without changing everything.

  Love.

  Arcan was telling her that he loved her. For all that she may have decided to go with someone else, to give herself to another Ursallin even though she knew that they mated for life, he still held onto his feelings for her. Love. He loved her, and he was telling her they were about to die, together.

  "No," she breathed. Just that single word. It was not a plea of desperation. It was a statement of fact.

  They would not die here today.

  No one else would die. Not at the hands of the Primus Secor. Not ever again.

  Donovan's angry cry reverberated through her body, raising goose pimples on her naked flesh everywhere. It was less a cry of pain and more that of an animal that had been denied its prey. The echoes of it drifted across the landscape, leading away and then bending back on themselves to slam into Nikki again, full of undiluted hate, anger, and rage.

  The monstrosity of the Primus Secor reared up, somehow calling in the darkness of everything around them, the entire shadowy planet, reality itself. The blackness of eternal night leeched out of the ground and the trees and the sky above and oozed in a congealed mass toward the thing that was the ancient enemy of everything. Donovan doubled in size, tripled, and swelled to proportions that were impossible and created shapes that defied her mind to comprehend. She had to look away before her mind collapsed in on itself trying to make sense of a thing that had never been seen in nature or history or the private nightmares of the insane.

  "This is what I have become!" Donovan roared at a volume that threatened to pop her eardrums. "I am everything! I am vengeance! I am exactly what the Ursallin tried to tear away from themselves by force. You cannot get rid of me! I am eternal! I am forever!"

  Nikki suddenly understood. It wasn't that the Ursallin and the Shifts were linked. If the Ursallin had been wiped off the faces of every world out there, it wouldn't have killed the Shifts by extension. Vice versa as well. If the Shifts were slaughtered all the way down to their Primus Secor, the Ursallin would still be here, unharmed, untouched. That wasn't what connected the two races.

  It was all so easy to see, now. That story about the first Ursallin losing his shadow when he learned to jump from world to world was only partially true. That first Ursallin had seen the evil and corruption in his world. He'd been struck by how bad things had become, how their evil natures had caused the worst horrors imaginable, and he'd tried to fix things by starting over in a new world.

  Starting over without his evil side. He'd found a way to take that nature out of himself, to rip it off his soul, and leave it behind. That evil nature had become a living thing. It had gained sentience somehow, awareness, life. That was the first Shift. That was the Primus Secor, a being made up of everything vile and evil. Only those things. There was nothing good in the Primus Secor. He'd been created evil and left to rot.

  Only, he hadn't rotted. He had continued, growing angrier as time passed, his evil heart becoming darker and darker until killing was all it knew. That was the Primus Secor.

  That was what stood in front of them now.

  Donovan lurched upward again, pulling the very ground out from underneath them until Nikki couldn't keep her feet anymore and she was falling in an uncontrolled hard tumble to her side, her hip and left hand getting thumped and scraped, along with her left breast.

  Ow.

  Arcan fell next to her, his heavy bulk pushing up against her back until he twisted away, using his claws to scrabble back to his feet and thrust his head upward and roar a challenge to the massing aberration overshadowing them.

  A thick appendage with multiple joints and smaller strands of waving protrusions slammed down over Arcan with a thu-whump that told Nikki the great black werebear had been broken.

  She was thrown aside again by the force of that blow and it took her a moment to right herself so that she knew which way was up. Everything was a hazy mix of light and dark now, as if Donovan was stripping away the colors of night that had shrouded the world of Jakal, and with the darkness gone, the light could finally shine through. The effect of it made her eyes water when she tried to focus on anything for very long.

  Including Donovan himself.

  "I will make you mine now," Donovan rumbled. "No more interruptions. There is no one else. There is only you, and me, and destiny. I will enter you and fill you in ways no man could ever imagine doing. Your power will be mine. We will find our way to Gallandrian, to the home of the Ursallin, and we will slaughter every last bastard child of them. You will be completely mine and we will make history."

  "You tried that already," she told him, panting and trembling an
d scared out of her wits. "It didn't do anything for me."

  With a laugh that made the world shake, Donovan mustered all of himself in a twisting, roiling mess of half-formed shapes and lines, and then he was coming at her.

  It was like watching a tidal wave coming to swamp a small island in the middle of the ocean. It was one continuous, massive wall of black filth that was drawing energy and substance from the planet itself, rising up and over her and ready to crash down upon her and sweep her away. She would drown in that. She would be completely subsumed in that and then there would be no Nikki Bryant any more forever. There would only be the Primus Secor and his insatiable lust for death and destruction and more death.

  He would use her to travel from world to world, making them all like this.

  She couldn't stop him. There was no way.

  Nikki lifted up her arm in a defensive gesture that would be just as effective as an ant trying to hold off a boot intent on crushing it to pulp. This was it. There was nothing left. No one left to save her. Only her and the worst horror anyone had ever known.

  This was it.

  She was staring at her own death.

  *

  The world around her slowed to a grinding crawl.

  The Primus Secor still moved toward her with the weight of an entire world. She could see him coming, still. She could see everything around her, every movement, only it was like watching a movie one frame at a time. There was an eternity of time between each individual second. She had time enough to see how Donovan was coming at her, to study every line of his grotesque, massive face hanging suspended in the middle of his amorphous body, the gnashing teeth and the multiple faceted and drooping eyes, the deep folds of skin and bulbous protrusions that flopped and sprouted at random. This thing was hideous, the exact personification of evil.

  And she knew how to avoid it.

  Nikki could see the arc of his attack, could see where he would land and how he meant to take her, could see it all in her mind's eye clear as day. Her reflexes had kicked in again, she realized. This was the part of her that was not human, that was something more than the simple Black woman from Manhattan. She embraced it now, instead of fighting against it or worrying about it.

  It showed her things. It showed her that if she bent at the waist like this and used that momentum to throw herself to the side and roll and then bounce back the other way she would end up exactly where Donovan didn't expect her to be and he could never touch her.

  Huh.

  All of this had come to her in the space of time it took her heart to beat once. She knew it, as surely as she knew her own name, and she knew it was the only way to save her life. Smiling, because now she understood what she was in this crazy new reality of shape-shifting bear-men and dark shadows of death and multiple worlds. She was the bridge. The bridge between Ursallin and Shifts, sure, but more than that. She was the bridge between everything.

  Everything.

  Bending at her waist she pushed off with her feet in the direction her reflexes told her to go, the exact motion she had seen in her mind, faster than Donovan's eyes could follow.

  She wasn't even off the ground before the dark mass of furry body slammed into her from the side.

  The wind was knocked out of her and she couldn't scream to tell him no, no, no, don't stop me I can beat him let me do it! Arcan was saving her. Misguided as it was, he had rose up from the death that Donovan had dealt him to save her life and now he was going to get them both killed.

  She gripped her fists into his fur and held on tightly as they landed against the rough, blurry ground, shapes around them that used to be rocks or trees now hovering indistinct between the dark that Donovan was siphoning away and the light trying to break through the thinning barrier of Jakal's existence.

  Then they were running, Arcan putting on all the speed that a werebear could manage, putting distance between them and the Primus Secor. She tugged at him, and wrapped her legs around him and finally forced his big hairy snout to look at her.

  "You have to let me—"

  Not Arcan.

  Max.

  She nearly sobbed in relief just to know he was still alive. When he had gone down she feared the worst and then to hear both Arcan and Donovan tell her that everyone else was dead, she had believed every word of it. But, here he was, back among the living and back with her and damn him but he had the worst timing. How could she be happy he was alive when he was going to screw things up and make it so Donovan killed them both anyway?

  The mass of Donovan's slickly dark body crashed down across the landscape where Nikki had been standing just a moment before, and he roared in disbelief that she had slipped away from him. She saw his face, his consciousness, turn toward them and she felt the heat of his stare. Possibilities flooded through her mind, things she could do to avoid him, ways to hurt him, all of them unfolding before her like a multi-page story book, like the way she could read the bear-speak that the Ursallin used.

  Any of it, all of it, would save her life, and all of it required her to be alone.

  With Max standing here with her, she was trapped. Limited. He could never understand that, even if she had the time to try and explain it. She would never ask him to understand it. He had come back for her. He wasn't dead. That was enough, for now. They would make it through this together and by the hand of God she would see Donovan dead!

  The heat of her own promise kind of scared her. When she looked up into Max's big black bear eyes, she saw that he had heard her every thought. She gasped, holding a hand up to her mouth. Of course. She could read their language. Now, she could speak it too. She was becoming whatever she had always been meant to become. The bridge. The creation of two species masquerading as human and meant to save the world.

  All of them.

  Maybe the moment was coming when she would have to stop masquerading as human, too.

  She knelt down next to him, rubbing her hand into his thick fur. "I have to do this, Max. You didn't want me here, and I understand why, but I am the only one who can end this. Don't try to stop me again. All right?"

  He communicated an entire dialogue with the arching of an eyebrow, the snarl of a lip. He argued against her, railed against the unfairness of life, and begged her for forgiveness for ever bringing her into this entire mess.

  Then he finally agreed.

  She kissed the side of his long, thin mouth, and he panted in delight. It was all the tenderness they had time for.

  The Primus Secor, one huge black cylinder of him, smacked Max away from her and he went tumbling away, his White fur unnaturally bright against the darkness around them.

  "Max!" she called out to him. He didn't get up. Instead he disappeared into the background of Jakal's night. "No!"

  No!

  That laughter of Donovan's came at her again, from all over, from everywhere, out of the very bones of the ground at her feet. "Told you," he rumbled. "You cannot win this. No one can stand before the power I now possess. Jakal has become me. I have become Jakal. You are defenseless."

  She sensed more than saw the way he hunched down over her, even though he really was all around her at the same time. Close, very close now, he formed a wall that encircled her. She was surrounded by his flesh, and that thought made her naked skin crawl. She went down on her knees, thinking about Max, mourning him all over again. All along her legs, little feelers of flesh tickled and groped her, Donovan's body feeling hers. She began to sink into him again, or he began to crawl over her, or something that amounted to the same thing, and she didn't care.

  How could she fight him? How could she hope to win? She could avoid him until one of them grew too tired to fight or she died of old age. She could land puny strike after puny strike against him and have it amount to nothing at all. She could never hope to do any kind of damage that would matter to a being that was consuming an entire planet. Never.

  His moist flesh crawled up the backs of her legs now, cupping her ass, squeezing her there, pinchin
g with a thousand little fingers.

  Her legs were pushed apart, and he felt into her crotch again, deeply, painfully.

  "You will be mine," Donovan promised.

  Nikki's thoughts were still lost. She could never hope to beat Donovan. How many Ursallin had died in just the last few days trying to make that happen? Ten? Twenty? And those were the ones she knew about. This was hopeless.

  Hopeless.

  Pressure built up inside of her as he lifted her up off her knees by pushing into her. She gasped, from pain, from the sexual explosion he sent coursing through her, from sheer despair. There was nothing…

  Nothing.

  He laughed again, and more of him climbed up her torso, her sides, up her ribs to coil around the mounds of her breasts.

  Nothing.

  From in front of her, the body of the Primus Secor parted. A figure was pushed through. Max. Gasping, choking for breath, struggling for his freedom, he was back in human form, and his pale White face was smeared with his own blood. One eye wouldn't open. He had been badly injured.

  All her fault, and there was nothing she could do about it.

  Nothing.

  "Nikki," Max gasped, blood dripping out of his mouth as he talked. "Run. Get away."

  She couldn't.

  She couldn't do anything.

  More of Donovan oozed up her, up her neck, to her chin, where he forced her head up to look at Max. The man she loved. Her lover, her friend.

  With a twist like rubber bands coiling tight, Donovan squeezed Max sharply. Nikki heard his spine pop, saw the pain etched in the lines on his face.

  Then Donovan crushed him harder.

  Nothing…

  Something. She had to do something.

  Max's life depended on it.

  Depended on her.

  She had to do something.

  Nothing.

  No. Something.