by Roxie Noir
Every so often, Delilah heard stories of bear shifter packs who weren’t so bloody and violent, where the pack was run more democratically and not just according to the whims of the man with the most brute force strength, but she’d never seen it in practice, not even in California.
Not that she’d known any shifters in California. It had been lonely, driving into Marin every weekend to shift, taking the long trip to the Sierras every month or so for a good, long weekend in her other form. She’d missed gallivanting around with other shifters, wrestling and fishing and doing all the bear stuff she loved. What she hadn’t missed were the brutal pack politics, the wild misogyny, or the long Alaska winters.
One of the officers on the scene came over to the two of them, Miles standing there in just his t-shirt, Delilah with her arms inside his jacket, wrapped tightly around her.
“Miles,” he said, nodding.
“Steve,” Miles said.
Officer Steve wrote something down on his notepad, then turned to Delilah.
“Name?” he asked.
The questioning didn’t take too long since it was so obvious what had happened: Larry had drunkenly run a red light and nearly killed someone. Ten other witnesses had seen the whole thing, and Larry was getting a breathalyzer test in the ambulance as they spoke.
When Officer Steve was finished, he put his notebook away on his belt and looked from Miles to Delilah, uncertainly.
“She’s cool,” Miles said.
“I know it’s a lot to ask,” Officer Steve said. “But the law really ought to take care of this one, Miles.”
“I know, Steve,” Miles said. He rested his thumbs in his belt loops and looked down at the pavement. Delilah felt her heart skip a single beat at something in his movement — it was just so familiar, and so.... sexy. “I’ll do what I can, but it’s no promise.”
“That’s all I want,” said the officer.
Then he nodded at Delilah and walked away to talk to some other witnesses.
Delilah looked down at her watch. “I should get going,” she said. “Jeez, it’s almost seven. I forgot how light it stays up here.” She started to shrug off the jacket, but Miles put a hand out.
“Keep it until you get home,” he said. “I saw you use yours on Susan.”
“Come on,” she said, holding it out.
Miles raised his hands in front of himself and began backing away, toward his old pickup truck. Delilah recognized that, too — he’d had it since high school.
“I’ll get it next time I see you,” he said, and then he got into the cab and was gone.
Delilah walked slowly back to her own car and buckled herself in, around Miles’s jacket. She turned the key and then cranked the heat, let the officers stop traffic briefly to let her out. All the way to the grocery store, she kept her mind carefully blank, except for one thought:
I guess I’ll be seeing Miles again.
Chapter Two
Delilah
The one thing that had changed in Fjords, it seemed, was the layout of Carr’s grocery store. At some point in the past seven or eight years, they’d repainted it, taken down the tired, chipping signs over the aisles and replaced everything. Even the lighting was better, the ugly fluorescents of her childhood gone and replaced with something just a tiny bit more pleasant. Alaska prices hadn’t gone down at all, though. It was still wildly expensive to ship groceries all the way up there.
She didn’t even need very much — peanut butter, bananas, yogurt, bread — but Delilah found herself wandering the grocery store for a little while, seeing what sorts of food had made it up to Fjords, Alaska. To her surprise, they had tofu now, but still no kombucha. The apples were tired and bruised, the avocados all bright green.
Something had made her leave Miles’s jacket in her car. She’d realized, back at the accident, that she still knew most of the people who lived in town, and she suspected she’d be recognized. Better if she wasn’t already wearing the jacket of the boy she’d dated in high school — that would be sure to get people talking.
All the same, in a strange way, the inside of the grocery store felt like proof that Fjords could change, when it wanted to, proof that it wasn’t just stuck in time even if it felt that way. Carr’s could get better lighting and a new layout and could stock tofu. Who was to say that she couldn’t move on from her shitty father, that the town couldn’t find new industries and thrive again? Who was to say that the violent, hyper-masculine pack was the way that things had to be?
Who was to say she, too, was stuck in the past, feeling a twinge of something for her high school sweetheart?
Of course you felt something, she reasoned with herself, walking down the beer and wine aisle. She grabbed an exorbitantly expensive six-pack of Sierra Nevada from the shelves and put it in her cart.
Miles was your first love, she told herself. You’ll always feel something about that. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a memory.
By the time she left the grocery store, paying far too much for two scant bags full of food, she had almost convinced herself that it was true.
Delilah had never intended to come back to Fjords.
It had been five years since she’d last spoken to her father, and even that hadn’t gone well. He’d been drunk and it had been late in Alaska and even later in California. She had woken up when the phone in her tiny apartment rang, and she stumbled out of bed, dropping the receiver once, her heart beating fast, because who called at two in the morning if it wasn’t an emergency?
“Lilah,” the voice on the other end had slurred.
“What’s wrong?” she said, panicking, but doing her best to keep her voice down and not wake her roommate.
“You don’t call me anymore,” her father said.
Delilah had gripped the phone until her hand hurt. After everything, he was upset that she didn’t call him?
“Someone had better be fucking dead for you to call me this late,” she hissed. “I’ve got an eight a.m. class tomorrow.”
“That’s your problem,” he went on, totally ignoring her. “All you think of is you. You don’t care about your people. Your family.”
Her roommate’s bedroom door opened and the other girl padded out, wearing a robe and pajamas, frowning at Delilah.
“What’s wrong?” she whispered. Clearly she also thought someone had died, or gotten into an accident. Something to warrant a phone call this late.
Delilah shook her had. “It’s nothing,” she murmured, one hand over the receiver.
“I heard that,” her father slurred. Her roommate nodded and went back to bed. “I ain’t nothing. We ain’t nothing. Someday you’ll realize that and stop thinking that you’re too good for us, Miss Med School.”
Then he hung up, leaving Delilah open-mouthed in fury, only twenty years old.
Years later, unlocking her father’s house with two bags of groceries, it still made her angry. Her going to California, getting an education and making something of herself hadn’t cost him a thing. She’d done it on her own, attending Berkeley on a combination of scholarships and student loans, working half-time to pay for her own food and lodging. She’d done the same through medical school, studying her brains out sleepless night after sleepless night.
He, on the other hand, had seen fit to drink himself out of a job and then out of his family by the time Delilah was three. Her mother had taken her and stayed in Fjords because the pack was there, and the pack was what had kept her father alive when he was found drunk on the side of the road or when his electricity got shut off, but she knew he was tolerated at best.
He’d never gotten properly inducted, and when she was a kid, Delilah had looked at other men’s bear tattoos, wishing her dad had one. Her mom had gone to Anchorage at the same time that she’d gone to college in California, and he was left alone in Fjords.
And now he was gone. He’d driven drunk and finally had the bad luck of careening head-on into a Mack truck. The truck driver hadn’t had a scratch, but w
hen Delilah spoke with the police about her father, they’d just assured her that he hadn’t suffered.
She wasn’t totally sure how she felt about that at first, but finally, after five days on the road between Berkeley, California and Fjords, Alaska, she’d decided that he’d suffered enough in life. His death didn’t need to be hard, too.
Delilah walked through the living room with the groceries, doing her best not to look at it. She hadn’t known that her father had been a budding hoarder. There was trash everywhere, things that he’d probably gotten for free from the side of the road, broken furniture, newspapers, pillows and cushions, McDonald’s wrappers. All she’d done so far was clear a path to the kitchen.
At least it didn’t look like he’d used that, she thought, setting the groceries down on the counter. It wasn’t exactly clean, but it wasn’t piled high with random shit the way most of the house was. As far as she could tell, he’d barely used it to do more than reheat pizzas in the oven and keep beers cold in the fridge. Now all the white-and-gold cans were pushed to the back, and she put the milk and yogurt away, then sat heavily at the kitchen table.
She was wearing Miles’s jacket again, and it crinkled when she sat. Slowly, she took it off and laid it over the back of a chair.
Miles had been the absolute worst part of leaving. Delilah didn’t think she’d ever forget his face when she’d told him that she was going to Berkeley instead of the University of Alaska campus in Anchorage, which was a little over an hour away.
He’d barely passed high school, getting C’s and D’s in every class that wasn’t shop class or auto repair, and when they graduated, he’d already had an apprenticeship set up with Dale’s Motors. Leaving Fjords had never really occurred to him — maybe he’d go to California or the Lower Forty-Eight someday, on a vacation or something, but why leave behind everything he’d ever known?
Why leave behind his people?
And then, today, he’d been there at the accident. He’d lifted a car off of a woman and then given Delilah his jacket, and she’d felt the same thrill at his touch that she’d felt when she was sixteen and feeling it for the first time.
Delilah rose and went back into the living room to start dealing with the physical mess, at least. The less time she stayed in Fjords, the better. Then she could go back to her real life, down south, where there were no shifter politics, no father’s affairs to deal with.
Most of all, down south, there was no high school sweetheart to tempt her.
Chapter Three
Miles
Miles jerked awake, and it took a couple of seconds for him to remember where he was: his little house right outside town, in the Alaska woods.
He’d dreamt of her, for the first time in years: they’d been sixteen again, in the dream, before Delilah decided she was going to California.
This time, in the dream, they’d been lying in the back of his pickup truck, limbs intertwined, in the big warm sleeping bag he kept in the cab just in case.
Above them, the northern lights had undulated across the sky, green and blue and pink, and they’d been warm and half-naked.
Everything had been perfect.
Miles shook his head and looked at his alarm clock. It was still three minutes before six, but the sun had been up for almost an hour already, and this time of year it hardly even got dark, even at midnight.
He knew that there were other places on the globe that had regular night and day, twelve hours of each, but that wasn’t his life experience, other than a few weeks in spring and fall. Not only was he an Alaska native, he was a bear, deep down inside. He knew he was built for long summer days feeding and wrestling and running through the woods, then long winter nights in front of the fire, burrowed down under blankets taking a good long sleep.
The alarm started shrieking and Miles hit it. It stopped, and in the renewed silence he could hear the creek behind his house gurgling, the birds outside singing. Squirrels chattering.
Why would anyone live anywhere else?
He hoisted himself out of the big pine bed that he’d made himself. It had only taken him three tries: two ugly, unstable bed frames, but then this beauty on the third attempt. It was far from perfect, but it was pretty nice. Much better than it had to be.
He stood and stretched, all six and a half feet of him, wearing only socks and boxers, and looked out his bedroom window. It was going to be a beautiful day, sunny and long, the spring finally in full effect. This time of year he always had the wild urge to rip off all of his clothes, run out the back door and shift. It was tempting to just spend all summer in bear form, sometimes, but he always ended up missing the finer points of being human. Eating cooked food, sleeping in a bed. Reading a book.
Not today, though. Today he was due at the shop at seven. Spring meant taking snow chains off, putting the cars up on lifts and telling everyone what damage the winter had wrought. As much as he liked his job, Miles didn’t like that part, of looking at someone’s car and telling them what it was going to cost. The people in Fjords who budgeted for it properly were few and far between. Around here it was far more common to live hand-to-mouth every month with barely enough left over for smokes or beer, and waiting until something simply rusted off of your car to get it fixed.
Just like Miles, everyone kept a pile of blankets or sleeping bags or something in their cars. They all knew the stories: someone gets stuck in their car, way out, late at night, and they freeze to death before help can get there.
He padded in his sock feet to the kitchen and flipped the switch on his coffee maker, hearing it creak as it started. He’d gotten it ready the night before, just like every night. As the coffee brewed, filling the kitchen with its aroma, he pulled the eggs and bacon out of the fridge, started warming up his cast iron skillet.
One more time, waiting for the pan to heat up, he thought about his dream. It had barely been a dream, of course: it was really a memory that had just come back to him, floating in that space. He couldn’t believe she was back in town, or that he’d seen her yesterday. It had been years since they last spoke — she had visited her mom in Anchorage for Christmas one year and had come down to Fjords to see some old friends, just for a day. He’d spotted her out on Main Street, getting coffee, and they’d chatted awkwardly for a few minutes: she was still in college, at Berkeley, and he had finished training and was an Assistant Mechanic at Dale’s.
That had been five years ago. Seeing her then had nearly wrecked him. It was dark nearly all the time anyway, and he had still been living with his parents, though most of their energy had been devoted to his brother, Nathan, who even at thirteen had been a handful. All he’d done for months was go to work, fix cars, come home, and sleep.
Time had passed. He’d been initiated, given his energy to something else. He’d gotten better.
A spatter of hot bacon landed on his bare belly and Miles brushed it away. He reached for the apron that hung by the stove, mostly for bacon splatters like this one.
He felt okay, he thought. He’d seen her and he’d even given her his jacket, but he was going to be okay this time.
A little surge of relief flowed through him.
I’m really over her, he thought.
Five minutes later, he walked through his little house into the living room, still just wearing an apron, boxers, and socks, so he could eat breakfast on the couch and watch the morning news while he woke up, but when he flipped on the lights, something moved on the couch.
Something person-shaped and under a blanket. Miles stopped short.
“That had better be Nathan,” he said out loud.
There was an incoherent muttering from the couch.
“Again?” said Miles. “You get kicked out?” He walked around the front of the couch and sat his plate of bacon and eggs on the coffee table, then took a long drink of his coffee. If he was going to deal with his brother, he was going to need to be as awake as possible.
“Iwastoooolate,” Nathan said.
“Spea
k up.”
“I was out too late,” Nathan said. He pushed the blanket down over his chest, rubbing at his eyes with one hand. “Mom and dad would have chewed me out, but you sleep through everything.”
When Miles had moved out of his parents’ house and into his own cabin a few years ago, he’d given his younger brother keys. Nathan had been having trouble with his parents, and Miles, seven years older, wanted him to be able to come over any time if he needed a place to go.
It was starting to get ridiculous, though.
“What time did you get in?”
“Five.”
“What were you doing?”
Nathan shrugged. Miles absolutely hated this part of their relationship — the part where he felt like Nathan’s parent, quizzing him about what he’d been up to.
“Just out with the guys,” Nathan answered. He finally looked up at Miles, standing over him. “The fuck are you wearing, man?”
Miles realized he still had the apron on. It was the most masculine apron he’d been able to find — solid blue and utterly without frills — but he was wearing it with nothing but boxers and socks, he realized. Annoyed, he tugged it off and tossed it over the back of the couch.
“I didn’t know you were here,” he said. “Scoot over.”
Sleepily, Nathan obeyed.
“I heard Delilah was back,” Nathan said. “She saved Susan’s ass, someone said.”
“Yup,” said Miles, his mouth full. He didn’t want to talk about his ex-girlfriend with his little brother.
“Good thing,” Nathan said. “She’s been gone for a long time.”
Miles frowned and paused in his chewing, looked at his brother. Then he swallowed, still hunched over his plate, elbows on knees.
