Arthur's Mate (Bears of Valor Lake Book 1)

by Lisa Daniels

  “I’d really rather you talked. But if you don’t, I’ll have no choice but to kill you as well. Who sent you? Dillon?”

  The bear shifter, eyes tearing up, clenched his jaw and didn’t respond.

  “Ah, well.” Arthur bent beside him, took one hand, and grabbed the baby finger. “One by one, shall we?”

  Snap. The man whimpered, dark eyes bulging. Foam bubbled at the corners of his lips as he attempted to hold in his pain.

  It took Arthur five more snaps, starting on the baby finger of the man’s right hand, before he howled out.

  “Stop! Please! Stop! Yes! Dillon sent me! Ah!”

  Not letting go of the hand, Arthur gave a wide, toothy grin at his opponent. Rage coursed through him, and he wanted nothing more than to kill this rotten bastard. Instead, he said in a tight, controlled voice, “Now, see? Wasn’t that easy? You could have avoided all these broken bones, if you’d just bothered to talk.” Arthur pinched the next finger up. “Now, as a show of goodwill, how about you tell me how exactly he recruited you, found out where we were, and sent you and your buddy to kill me?”

  His eyes flickered to the four undamaged fingers. With deep, ragged breaths, he made a wet, gulping sound, before saying, “I don’t know. I’m a bastard. Always on the fringe, ain’t I? Said he came to me, wanting to get to know his missing sons. Said for two hundred thousand, me and my buddy had to take care of a problem. He told me your regular spots, and we were waiting in the area for a few days.”

  Arthur wondered why the idiot hadn’t bothered to bring guns. The bastard answered his unspoken question, however.

  “We had to make it look like a natural bear attack. Gunshots too obvious, you know?”

  I highly doubt me and my sister ending up dead in any circumstance is considered not suspicious. And for Christ’s sake, we’re a community of bear fucking shifters. What a moron.

  “Was there any part of you that thought this might be a bad idea?”

  Scrunched eyebrows greeted the question. As if the shifter was struggling really, really hard in that tiny little brain of his for an answer.

  “I’m calling our family,” Yara said. A trembling Emma stood behind her, watching Arthur as he held the shifter’s finger in his fist. “We’ve got cleanup to do. And we don’t know how many more might be lurking in wait for us.” She wiped her mouth, perhaps feeling a speck of blood still on her chin. Emma’s eyes kept flickering, including back to the dead shifter, who lay in his human form. At death, even if they started in bear form, they’d melt back into human.

  “Dad’s gonna be so pissed at Dillon. This is a step too far. Assassinating family members?”

  “He’s part of a new clan, now. He can’t exactly worry about being excommunicated,” Yara said with a snort, pacing up and down in the darkness, kicking up ash with her feet as she attempted to reach their parents. A moment later, she muttered into the cellphone. Arthur, realizing he still held the bastard’s finger, released it, and sat next to the man’s head, watching him like a hawk.

  *****

  “So...” Emma said. Arthur observed her, tension as tight as a guitar string inside him. Once a human knew about the shifting, for better or for worse, they’d be strongly recommended to stay in Valor Lake.

  Or killed.

  She had her hot chocolate by now, though her blonde hair still looked mussed up, and her eyes were bloodshot. Her head also tilted to the side, as if nodding off to sleep. “Bear shifters.”

  Yara, fingers interlaced, pressed her lips together. In the safety of their parents’ lakeside mansion, they were sprawled out in the huge basement, a place Arthur’s father had worked hard at transforming into a man cave. Emma sat on the blue sofa bed, and a king-sized bed took up space in the far right corner. Lights dotted the walls in circles, giving a strobe-light feel to the spacious room. His sister leaned forward, the leather of the armchair creaking underneath. “That’s right.”

  “They exist.”

  “Obviously,” Yara said.

  “And you killed someone.”

  “They were trying to kill us first,” Yara pointed out.

  Emma did not appear particularly reassured by this. Arthur couldn’t exactly blame her. It wasn’t every day that a human stumbled across the existence of shape shifters. People like Arthur much preferred keeping to themselves, or living on private lands. Valor Lake certainly wasn’t the only reservation out there. But perhaps it was one of the biggest—counting the wilderness.

  “You’re all bear shifters.” Emma sipped her hot chocolate, hands a little wobbly. “I’m sitting here, in a mansion, drinking chocolate… and talking to bear shifters.”

  “That would be correct.”

  Emma stared at her feet for a moment. Her left yellow sock had a hole in it.

  “This wasn’t really the way we intended you to find out,” Arthur said, though in all honesty, he didn’t intend Emma to ever find out.

  “You can say that again,” Emma said, hands shaking more violently. A tiny wave of chocolate slopped over the rim, trickling onto her wrist. “I take it—there’s other shifters, too? Or… just bears or whatever?”

  “There’s others,” Yara confirmed. “Mostly due to Native American ancestry. Buffalos, coyotes, wolves, bears, eagles. We’re the best, obviously.”

  A laugh tore out of Emma, and she hastily put her drink down, before ruining her top. “I’m—I’m having issues processing this right now.” She waved her hands helplessly. “Like—three hours ago, I just found out about bear shifters. I’ve spent my entire life just assuming they’re in books and shitty TV shows.”

  “Some of those bear shifters in the shows are actual shifters,” Arthur replied with a grin, relieved that Emma seemed to be taking it better than expected. “Closely guarded secret. There’s not so many of us, mind you, but enough to leave a mark on the world.”

  Mark on the world. Small ones, to be sure, since no one wanted to be fully out there in the open. No one wanted their habitats destroyed by thousands of tourists, to have scientists experimenting. Those who risked themselves and went out there, posing for movies and paranormal shows—Arthur thought them stupid. All it took was one person to blab from the NDA—and that was it. Likely there were groups of humans who knew all about the shifters, but none of it reached real news sources, or if it did, it drowned out fast under layers of skepticism.

  “Is it normal for you people to… to kill?” Her voice shook. Something dark fluttered behind her eyes—a memory she wanted to wash away, perhaps. Or horror at what he did. To an outsider, he must have seemed brutal and cruel. A monster.

  He wanted to explain to her that he wasn’t, but he didn’t see how. “Sometimes,” he replied, sad. “We are more… territorial and aggressive than humans. And we have our own laws. It’s not often, at least. I heard it used to be more common in my grandma’s day. Easier to just kill the competition than attempt to get along with them, and it’s hard to stop a charging bear once they’ve got themselves going.” She leaned towards him, listening, and he felt obliged to continue. “I didn’t want you to see this side of us. I just… I thought it’d be nice to take you fishing. Not let you be alone or anything. But it didn’t turn out so well, did it?”

  “No,” Emma said, the corners of her mouth set in a neutral line. “That attempt didn’t work out.” Another moment of staring. “Am I safe?”

  Yara took it upon herself to answer that one. “I can’t answer that for you. You should be safe. Bears generally don’t bother killing humans. But if our uncle’s sending assassins to come and pop us off, it may mean anyone with us is in some kind of danger.”

  To Arthur’s surprise, Emma seemed to nod and accept this. “I’m okay now,” she said, under their anxious eyes. “I want to go home. I need to process this. Sleep. Go to work tomorrow...” Sounded more like to Arthur that she wanted to escape. He knew father wouldn’t approve. They wouldn’t want a human running around free. But he couldn’t refuse Emma this request.

 
“Okay. I’ll take you home.” He ignored Yara’s bulging indignation and searched for his jacket.

  Chapter Five – Emma

  Unbelievable, Emma thought. Even though she’d watched both Yara and Arthur transform in front of her eyes into big, fuzzy brown grizzlies, she still couldn’t comprehend the fact that shifters existed. Big, furry bear shifters. Only a couple of days had passed since the incident, but her mind struggled to process.

  Her boss sidled over from his table. “Emma,” he said, clearing his throat and twitching his white mustache, “Emma, dear, you’re looking quite distracted today.”

  Jumping out of her dazed state, she attempted a smile at Roger Miles, her boss of two months. “Yeah, sorry. Just some trouble at home, boss. I’ll get right back to work.” The first lie that sprung to her lips, and an easy one, because she did have trouble at home. Several months back. He certainly didn’t need to know that.

  He gave her a kindly smile, watching her move nervously in her swivel chair for a brief moment, before he went and turned on the office fan with a click. “Getting warm. This’ll help. Work hard, okay?”

  She bobbed her head and smiled back, before forcing herself back into the flow of work, dealing with a flood of emails and disgruntled customers until her eyes crossed. Her mind kept wandering, however, and several times, she Google searched about shifters to see if somehow it had made the news anywhere. All she got was links to fiction stories and shows. And a few smack articles about “real vampires” and people with lycanthrope symptom.

  Arthur and Yara Valor remained firmly off the map. Even the information about Valor Lake didn’t say much. Just what she’d seen. Cheap rental properties, talks about nature, fishing, bears, and it being a small town situated within the boundaries of a natural reservation. Certainly nothing about the fact that the rich founding families also happened to possess the interesting ability of shifting into bears.

  Then again, what exactly did she expect? She didn’t think they existed. Therefore, they did a damn good job of hiding themselves and making sure their secret remained as such. They took precautions. Owning their own lands, making them reservations, probably… she looked around on the internet, wondering if there were any other potential shifter hot spots.

  She thought she might have found a few. All seemed obscure and not really designated as tourist spots. All seemed to specify a protected species on their reserves, like wolves, bears, coyotes.

  Reminding herself to keep working, Emma refocused on the mission at hand. Easy to let attention stray, however. Easy to have her eyes drift to her emails, to look at funny pictures friends had sent her…

  Emma’s heart dropped into her stomach when she opened her email, and saw two messages that burned into her eyes, amongst the others she’d not yet deleted.

  Mom. Marcus.

  How did Mom have her new address? Emma hadn’t told her it. She looked back at her friends’ list, trying to figure out if she had a friend who might have blabbed. Maybe if Mom did that I just want to keep in contact with my daughter puppy eye, looking like a long-suffering mother, Susan or Charisma might have done it. They were suckers for puppy faces, and both thought she was being unnecessarily harsh to her own parents. Try living and working with them for a year, and then see how harsh I am. She sent a caps-lock message to both women. DID YOU GIVE MY ADDRESS TO MY MOTHER??!

  She knew who gave Marcus the address. Her mother, of course, who still thought Marcus to be a darling.

  Then she stared at her mother’s subject line, ‘I miss you’, and wondered, maybe, was she being too harsh? Maybe her mother genuinely thought she might be dead or something.

  Checking that her boss was currently distracted by something else, like today’s newspaper, his feet up on the desk, Emma clicked on her mother’s message.

  Hey baby girl,

  It’s been a while since we’ve heard from you, and I just want to know if you’re okay. Your father and I have been worried sick. We’ve had a lot of trouble with the IRS, and your father says that it’s your fault, but I know it’s not. All you need to do is explain yourself, and I’m sure everything will be okay. I am of course very sad you chose to leave us like this, and I don’t think we deserved that kind of leaving at all. We had to scramble to get someone new, but it looks like we’ll have to close the family business down. We gave it 8 years, but it looks like it can no longer be done.

  Please get back to me.

  Your loving mother.

  PS: You left your boyfriend as well? We thought you took Marcus with you. He’s been in such a state.

  Emma’s stomach clenched and unclenched, and she felt the familiar drip of poison entering her veins again. Her mother really, really liked to mix false concern with accusations. She was the kind of person who would say I’m not blaming you or anything when that was clearly her intention, or I’m not trying to offend you but… and then say the thing that offended the other person. Her mother likely shook with rage when typing that out, rather than felt concern. They’d probably be happy with an accidental death from her, so they could claim her insurance money.

  Also, Emma’s father did like blaming other people for his issues. Emma had left those stupid tax forms in plain sight. Her father would need to put them through a shredder to “lose” them. He obviously thought he could get away with tax evasion. She’d reminded him so many times not to do it, even explaining why, and he’d always have that dumb incomprehension, like he was annoyed at her for telling him he couldn’t break the law.

  As for Marcus’s letter… the subject line, ‘Please Talk’, made her block and delete the email without bothering to look at it. She hesitated, before blocking her mother as well.

  Did it make her a coward?

  Probably.

  She fidgeted with her blonde hair anxiously for the remainder of her shift, often changing her position and jiggling her legs to avoid the horrible stiffness creeping up.

  Another rainy afternoon. Emma splashed through puddles outside the building, got the bus to the edge of town, and waited once more to be taken to Valor Lake for a stupid amount of time. Trying not to think about those messages. Trying not to cry.

  She’d tried asking her boss if she could be let out earlier, but he wanted every single minute squeezed. Likely his two-week holiday clause meant, “You don’t actually have any holidays off, because I will make you feel bad about taking them.”

  Though he wasn’t a terrible boss, to be honest. He did put the fan on for her, after all.

  A figure slouched to the bus stop along with her, and the first drops of rain fell. Judging by the slightly stooped back, the bag-lady clothes, even though the woman’s face was hidden by one of those handkerchief scarf things, Emma knew her to be the same woman who spoke to her before. The one with the creepy-as-hell, red-rimmed eyes, and an abrasive way of talking. She clutched four shopping bags in her wrinkled fingers, not letting go of them.

  Emma tried hard not to look like she was available to talk.

  “Oh, you again, isn’t it?”

  Shit.

  “Hello,” Emma said, not wanting to engage in further conversation. Her emotions scattered all over the place. One wrong word right now might just tip her over the edge. “You okay?”

  “Would be, if I can get one of me grandsons to help carry all this,” the old woman complained. “Always seem to be fishing when I ask them, or busy with something.” Her face obtained more crags as she scowled.

  Fishing? Emma examined the woman, heart thumping unusually fast. She fixated on the woman’s drooping nose, not wanting to stare into those eyes as her stomach made little queasy flips at the missing eyelashes. No, it’s just a coincidence. I’m sure everyone likes to fish here.

  “What are… your grandsons’ names, actually?”

  “Always finding excuses not to help their grandma… why, I can still tan their hides if I want to! Huh, sorry dear?” She finally realized Emma had said something and nodded at her to speak.

  “Their
names? Maybe I’ve bumped into your grandson recently?”

  The older woman’s eyes turned bright and piercing. If Emma focused on the depths of those dark eyes instead…

  “You the one who went with my Arthur on that fishing trip?”

  For a moment, they both stared at each other, and Emma processed the information. Grandma Jackie.

  “Yes. That’s me. I went on Saturday, Sunday.”

  “Oh, dearie me. Then you know all about us. Arthur was telling me about that dreadful attack, oh yes. I’m sorry you had to witness that. We’re usually quite peaceful, keep ourselves to ourselves…” Her eyes were hard, suggesting something that Emma couldn’t quite pick up on. Anger? Scorn? Determination?

  “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “You gonna tell on us?”

  Before Emma had a chance to reply to that, Grandma Jackie continued, in a higher pitched tone, “Don’t be doing that, now. We like to keep our secret for a reason. Don’t want my family being carted off to a lab.” The wind howled through the narrow gap of two buildings, and the rain picked up in patter, as if to emphasize Grandma’s words.

  “I won’t! I hardly believe it myself!” Emma said, but Jackie shook her head stubbornly.

  “No, you must come over. Come to the Valor Lake side, be introduced to our family. Now you know about us, don’t think we’re going to let you be wandering around. You better come and see the family, understand what’s up. Eh?”

  “Um… okay?” The bus trundled into view, and they both scrambled into it, with Jackie instantly waving her pass, which had been clutched in one hand, ready to go. Emma should invest in a pass at some point, she did lose a fair amount of money to traveling…

  “You’re coming with me,” Jackie said, her voice hard. A trace of a growl contrasted wildly with her small, diminutive frame. “Introduce you to the family, let Arthur know you’re visiting…”