by Roxie Noir
“That’s yesterday’s,” she muttered, seeing the date across the top.
“Good morning, beautiful,” Jake said, tilting his head up. Ariana bent down and kissed him, morning breath and all.
“I take it from the office every night, so I’m a day behind,” he said. “But the Times-Dispatch won’t deliver out here.”
For another moment, Ariana stared at him, her brain not fully processing those words yet.
Then, she gave up and went into the kitchen. Her beautiful new french press stood, shiny and proud, on the counter. She boiled water and scooped grounds into it, then waited an excruciating five minutes.
Then, as she plunged, she thought, the paper won’t even deliver here?
What on earth have I gotten myself into?
She poured herself a big mug, pleased to find that the press had plenty of coffee left over.
“There’s more coffee,” she called toward the door leading into the living room, and she heard Jake stand and walk into where she was.
“You like it?” he asked, reaching to the tallest cabinet and getting down a teacup.
Ariana eyed the teacup. Jake really did have the strangest collection of housewares, she thought. This teacup in particular was green with pink roses on it, the edge of it delicately fluted in gold. Where the hell had he gotten it?
“It’s great,” she said, and watched him pour coffee into the tiny mug. It couldn’t be more than half the size of her own, and then he reached into the pantry for a bag of sugar.
Jake put three heaping teaspoons of it into his tiny cup of coffee.
“Ridiculous,” she said.
Jake looked up at her. “What?” he said.
She waved her hand indistinctly at the coffee. “You want some coffee with your sugar?”
“Are you going to make that joke every morning?”
Ariana stared at Jake over the lip of her coffee mug and took a long drink, then set it on the counter.
“Okay,” she said. “I need to be honest with you.”
“What?” Jake looked at her, a little alarmed.
“I’m not a morning person,” she said. “I know I seemed okay before, but I was faking it because I really like you and didn’t want you to know how terrible I am, but I’m really bad at mornings and it might be best for both of us if we didn’t interact a whole lot first thing. Why are you laughing?”
Jake chuckled, stirring his coffee-and-sugar mixture.
“What?” demanded Ariana, starting to get angry.
“You weren’t faking it very well,” he said.
Ariana narrowed her eyes.
“Don’t worry,” said Jake, still laughing. “You’re still my grumpy morning princess.”
Ariana opened her mouth, but before she could say anything, Jake was bending down, planting a kiss atop her head, and then walking back into the living room.
He was still humming.
* * *
After the previous day spent trapped in Jake’s cabin, Ariana decided to head to the library to get some work done. She didn’t think it would really be healthy for her to just stay alone all day in a cabin, not seeing or talking to anyone.
“Stay inside,” Jake said when he dropped her off. “Don’t go walking through the woods. Stick to the main street if you go somewhere, and remember—“
“I’m smaller than a grizzly, run in a zigzag, toward people or get into a car,” Ariana.
“Sorry,” Jake said.
She knew he was doing his best not to worry that Violet was still after the two of them after her mate had died. Ariana wasn’t too concerned for herself, to be honest. So far, all the grizzly attacks had been very late at night, and they seemed random at best — the bear was on some kind of spree.
Besides, they didn’t even know that the bear was Violet. It could be a real bear who’d just gotten the taste for human flesh, even though Jake had totally dismissed that idea when Ariana brought it up.
She made her way up the steps to the library, knowing that Jake would be watching until she got inside. Even though she knew he was just worried, Ariana really hoped that his over-the-top concern would die down once this whole “murderous grizzly on a rampage” thing quieted down. She wasn’t used to someone being so present in her life all the time, so in her business.
Right as she entered the building, a corkboard caught her eye, full of paper and posters and things to do in Evergreen.
If I’m going to live here, I should probably make some friends, she thought.
As she was scanning the board, a short, perky girl came up to her.
“Hi there,” she said.
“Hi,” said Ariana.
Is she about to hit on me? She wondered. For some reason, she pinged a lot of lesbians’ radar as one herself, even though she was straight.
“Do you play roller derby?” the other girl said.
Ariana looked over at her: she had short, dark brown hair and very big, wide hazel eyes. She couldn’t have been more than five-foot-three, making her considerably shorter than Ariana.
“I don’t,” said Ariana. “Why?”
“Oh, that’s a shame,” said the girl. She had a perky, bubbly voice that was just a little bit raspy. “We’re recruiting, and you just sort of... look like you play derby, is all. I bet you could really check a bitch on the rink, you know?”
Ariana was almost annoyed at this girl, who assumed that because she was chubby and athletic, she played derby, but she couldn’t quite be. She was just so enthusiastic, and seemed so genuine.
“I haven’t skated since I was a kid,” Ariana said. “I’d need some serious boot camp.”
“We offer that!” said the other girl. She also had a messenger bag, army green with a big red star on it, and she was digging through it, finally producing a pamphlet that was clearly a copy of a copy. She handed it to Ariana.
“We’re on kind of a shoestring budget,” the girl said, apologetically. “But, if you want to just come and check it out, we’ve got skates and pads and helmets you can borrow for a while.”
“There are enough people in Evergreen to play?” Ariana asked.
“Just barely,” the girl said. “To be honest, we mostly practice in the summer and then play through the winter, when all the ski instructors are in town. You haven’t lived here long, have you?”
“I moved in two days ago,” admitted Ariana.
“Welcome!” the girl squeaked. “I’m sorry, I’m Jenn.”
Ariana introduced herself.
“I’ll let you go,” Jenn said. “Come by the rink sometime!”
Ariana went and sat at her favorite table, considering the handout. There was a practice every Thursday night, and it was Wednesday. She should go — even if she did nothing but fall on her ass, she was going to need to know someone in town besides Jake.
She put the handout into her bag and took out her laptop.
Ten unread emails.
Shit, she thought. She didn’t get too many emails, so ten was a lot. Her boss, a weirdo who seemed to have a lot of money, wasn’t really the communicative type, and her only real coworker, Theresa, had been out on medical leave for a long time following a mountain lion attack.
The subject line for every one of them was Please read — from David Lycan.
David was her boss, and he really didn’t understand email. She’d given up explaining that he didn’t need to put any of that in the subject line long ago, but it was a lost cause.
Each email except the last one was a link, along with the words Please read, as though putting it once in the subject line weren’t enough.
They were all reports of chupacabra sightings, int he northern Mexico desert. Ariana squeezed her eyes shut and pinched the bridge of her nose. Why did this have to happen now? After a few sightings right before the whole thing with Brock and Violet, when she’d flown back to Boston only to have Jake follow her and convince her to come back to Evergreen, they had died down and David had decided she didn’t need to go
.
Now, it was looking otherwise. She had unpacking to do, dammit, and a luscious boyfriend in her bed every night. She deserved to take full advantage of their honeymoon period and get it on every day, instead of being long-distance from some horrible, cartel-filled desert.
One by one, she read them carefully, hoping there was some obvious flag. Maybe all the sightings were when the people had drunk too much, or they were high, or it was late at night and the person was a known sleepwalker, but there was nothing like that.
One was a ten-year-old kid who’d watched it take a sheep said it looked like a scaly dog with an alligator’s head; another woman who’d seen it through her window at night said it was half-dog and half lizard, with three-clawed toes on the front. There were five reports total, all slightly different, none instantly disprovable.
Well, she thought, I guess I’m going to Mexico.
Chapter Three
After he dropped Ariana off at the library, Jake drove the back roads aimlessly for a while. He phoned the office and told them that, officially, he was looking or any signs of a grizzly bear on a rampage, but he just needed to clear his head.
It was worse than he’d told Ariana. He didn’t think she deserved to deal with all of his bear drama, no matter what she’d signed up for — after all, she’d just moved across the country to a new town and moved in with him. These were huge life changes, made bigger by the fact that they’d barely known each other a month.
He loved her, of course. He loved her so much that when he just thought about her, he got a little giddy, thinking about the fact that he’d get to sleep next to her that night, wake up to her grumpy face every morning. But he wasn’t an idiot. He knew it took more than that to keep a relationship together, it took time and effort and communication and more than just watching her soft curves as she undressed...
Jake shook his head, bringing himself back to reality. He hadn’t shifted for four or five days now, and he was starting to feel the itch already, the feeling that he desperately, desperately needed to change, if only for a little while.
He knew that if he didn’t change voluntarily in the next few days, he wouldn’t get to decide when or where he changed. It would just happen wherever he was, whether he was driving or eating or even just watching TV in his house.
The involuntary changes were bad. They hurt because they were much, much faster than regular changes, and he couldn’t control when he changed out of them. Every teenage shifter experimented, of course, seeing how long they could go without shifting, what would happen when they did. Brock, the alpha of his former pack, had encouraged it, saying that every shifter needed to know their limits, how they reacted to a forced shift.
Jake knew that he reacted pretty poorly.
As a teenager, he’d never made it past seven days. He was sure he could make it longer now, as a grown man with more self-control, but when he had finally shifted as a teenager, he’d gone so crazy that he chased down and killed three deer, smearing himself with their blood and effluvia, barely eating them, before uprooting a small clearing’s worth of trees.
There hadn’t been any humans around, thank God, but Jake knew for a fact that he’d have killed them. When he had to change, he didn’t have any control over himself, and that frightened him more than having to fight ten alpha grizzlies.
Jake passed a brown sign on the side of the road and realized he wasn’t far from Rasar State Park, where the grizzly had killed a camper. He hadn’t realized that he’d driven that far west, but now that he was here, he figured he should at least check out the crime scene, go offer his Forest Ranger professional opinion.
He’d also sniff around some, literally. If Violet had been there, he’d know it.
“This is it,” said the campground host, a retired lady probably in her seventies. “God, how awful.”
The tent lay in tatters, still on the ground. The body had been taken away, of course, but the sleeping bag and sleeping pad were still someone in the mess that had been a tent. A camp stove still sat on the picnic table, next to a lantern.
Predictably, there was blood everywhere: the tent, the ground, even a little sprayed onto the trees.
“Did you hear anything?” he asked her.
The woman shook her head. “I’m too far away. Some of the other campers heard screaming and came, but they couldn’t do anything. The campers were long dead by the time the ambulance got here.”
Jake nodded.
“Did any of the witnesses describe the bear?” he asked.
The campground host shrugged. “It was dark, and they were all in shock for a little while,” she said. “A couple of them swore up and down that it was a grizzly, but we’ve got no idea if that’s accurate. It was late at night and dark, so no one really got a good look. My guess is, we’re dealing with a rabid black bear. I don’t know what else would make one attack people like this.”
“I see,” Jake said. Even from ten feet away, he could smell the campsite, and underneath the smell of blood and smoke was a distinct grizzly smell. He’d know it anywhere.
“Do you have a lot of problems with rabies?”
“No more than anywhere else,” the woman said. “Mostly squirrels and raccoons, but I know bears can get it.”
“Thanks for your time,” Jake said. “I’m going to look around the site a bit, if you don’t mind.”
“Go right ahead,” said the woman, and she walked back to her RV.
The campground was understandably clear — no one wanted to be where a bear had recently murdered someone. Jake stepped past the yellow police tape, lifting it high over his head, and walked gingerly to the destroyed tent. Even though it had been out to the elements, wind and the ever-present rain, it had obviously been slashed open by something with serious claws.
The campers hadn’t had a chance. They’d been surprised while asleep, and had barely gotten to scream before the bear ripped both of their throats out.
Jake crouched down and took a deep, deep breath, trying to smell Violet. He itched inside his skin, the urgency to shift mounting, but he forced himself to stay human. Even though he could smell much better if he were a bear, he couldn’t exactly risk it — not here. Even though the campground had emptied out, there was still the campground host and a few brave families around, mostly those with RVs instead of tents.
Besides, he couldn’t guarantee that he wouldn’t go nuts and kill someone. He was getting to that point, he could tell.
The ground and tent smelled like grizzly, that was for sure. Jake breathed deeper, fighting his urge to hold the torn sleeping bag up to his face, something he knew for a fact would look weird to everyone else.
It was a female bear. He was pretty sure about that, but he couldn’t quite get a bead on whether it was Violet or not. He battled down the urge to shift, one more time, looking around the campground. Maybe after this, he could drive somewhere remote and shift just for a while, destroy some trees or something, get it out of his system...
Ten feet into the forest behind the campsite, he noticed something: five parallel scratches in a tree trunk. He didn’t know if the police had seen it, but Jake would have recognized grizzlies’ markings anywhere.
Slowly, trying to look casual, he walked to the tree, then looked around to see if anyone was watching.
As nonchalantly as possible, Jake leaned forward and sniffed the claw marks in the tree.
It was her.
He thanked the campground host again and told her that he also couldn’t determine whether it was a rabid black bear or a grizzly, but that she should take every precaution she should. Either of those animals would be dangerous, he said.
Getting into his truck, he felt almost relieved. The worst case scenario he’d come up with hadn’t been Violet — it had been some other bear, some grizzly who might not even have been a shifter, wreaking havoc across the North Cascades. Violet at least he knew, even if he wasn’t sure what she wanted.
First things first, though, he needed t
o shift. Luckily, Jake knew of a dirt road off of Highway Twenty that led five miles up to a clearing where he could do whatever he wanted and not hurt anybody—
His phone rang. It was the office. For a moment he considered not answering, but that seemed like a bad idea, especially with Violet on the loose.
“Jake here,” he said, turning the key in his ignition.
“Someone just spotted the bear in Evergreen,” Harold, his boss, said on the other end of the line. “It’s definitely a female grizzly.”
Ariana, Jake thought. All thoughts of stopping somewhere to shift flew out of his head — he had to get back, now, make sure she was safe. Was she what Violet was after?
“I’ll be right back,” Jake said. “I was just checking out the scene at the campground.”
“Good idea,” said Harold. “See you in thirty.”
Chapter Four
Even though Ariana was sitting in the back of the library, when the pandemonium erupted in from outside, she could hear it all the way back where she was. It wasn’t even screaming, but instead a sudden rise in the overall volume of the place, people in the library suddenly talking in their outside voices, shouting at others to get inside. The library filled up fast, moms herding children inside, librarians rushing to the glass doors to see what was going on.
Ariana looked up and saw a mom with her kid standing next to her.
“What’s going on?” she said. “Was there an accident?”
“The bear’s outside,” the woman said.
Ariana left her laptop unguarded on the table and walked to the windows along the front of the library. She found a spot that was just kids and leaned over them, looking for the bear. The street was totally empty, but she didn’t see anything at first.
Then, a collective gasp. The kids in front of her pointed, and then Ariana saw the bear, a huge thing with the characteristic hump in its back, loping along the center of main street. It was a deep brown, nearly black. Someone near her muttered that it was an unusual color for a bear, and maybe that was somehow related to its behavioral issues.
