Bears of Burden: THORN

by Candace Ayers

  CHAPTER 4

  Alex slept for long enough that when she awoke it was dark outside. There was a light spilling into the room from behind where she lay, in the direction of the kitchen. Alex blinked and rubbed the sleep from her eyes. She sat up to look over the back of the sofa and spotted Shane finishing up the dishes from earlier and watching something on the small, wall-mounted TV at the end of the cabinet row. From the monotonous mumbling it sounded like the news. Quiet as a mouse, Alex roused herself from her makeshift bed and padded over to him, slipping her arms around his waist without a thought and pressing her cheek between his shoulders with a little nuzzle. He must have heard her because his only reaction was to crane his torso around so he could press a kiss to the top of her head that was so tiny Alex barely felt it.

  “Sleep well?” he asked, washing off the last dish and putting it in the rack next to the sink to dry.

  “Yeah,” Alex replied. “When did the power come back on?”

  “About twenty minutes ago. You were out for a while. Did I keep you up last night?” Shane asked, turning around to give her a teasing smile. His arms went easily around her waist.

  “No,” Alex said, ignoring her blush. “I was just tired, I guess. You make a very good pillow.”

  “Well, I'm glad to hear that.”

  Alex tilted her head back, staring up into Shane's handsome face, her gaze holding his briefly before dropping to his grinning mouth. He clasped his hands together at the small of her back, keeping her pressed tightly against his body. Alex's heart went up into her throat then almost deafened her with its beating. She was so close she could see the ring of black around Shane's irises, and streaks of bronze where the bright kitchen lights shown down on his hair.

  “I need to show you that proof you wanted,” Shane said before Alex could speak what was on her mind. “Are you sure about this?”

  “Are you in control?” Alex shot back.

  “Completely,” Shane said without hesitating. “Normally I go to the basement but for your sake I'll stay up here. It's not a pleasant thing to watch, so... just stay here, okay?” Alex nodded slowly. Shane slipped away from their embrace, leaving Alex alone with a jittery stomach and racing heart. The minutes ticked by slowly, but it couldn't have been more than five before she heard a creak from down the hall where Shane had walked and the shaggy wolf-dog from the previous night trotted over to her, wagging his tail and rubbing affectionately against her legs.

  “Shane?” Alex asked, silently cursing how her voice shook. The dog sat at her feet and nodded his head in an eerily human like manner before licking Alex's fingers and butting her hand. “So you were telling the truth. Holy shit.” Her last shred of doubt evaporated when she looked into the dog's eyes and saw they were the same crystal blue as the man that she had found in her bed. “Can you change back?” she asked. Dog-Shane licked her fingers and turned away. When he was out of sight Alex let out a shaky breath and leaned against the sink for support. She definitely wasn't hallucinating. But what did it matter if Shane turned into a dog, or a wolf, or whatever however often he did? It was the man in him that mattered and that was clearly the part of him that was in control. A man that Alex felt a deep connection to. She knew he was important to her. It was the same feeling she had when she and her best friend had first met, except her best friend hadn’t made her knees weak and given her butterflies in her stomach.

  Shane came out a moment later, looking slightly uncomfortable and moving gingerly, wearing only his jeans. He stood a couple feet away from Alex and couldn't quite meet her eyes. Alex held out her hand and waited until he looked up and approached her before she moved at all, stepping back into his arms.

  “Do you believe in love at first sight?” Alex asked. “Like, seeing someone and just... knowing. Knowing something. Maybe not right then that's it's love but, just having that feeling in your gut that you have to talk to them? You have to get to know them?”

  “Do you?” Shane asked.

  “I do now,” Alex replied, and leaned up on her toes. Shane met her halfway, cradling her face in his hands. Alex felt a spark across her lips, and the gentle brush of Shane's fingers on her cheeks. Even though he hadn't initiated the kiss, he waited until Alex pressed herself more firmly against his body before he relaxed and looped an arm around her waist, deepening the kiss with a simple brush of his tongue. He pulled away first, but not before Alex was breathless and very much wondering what would happen if they kept going.

  “So,” Shane said, “still sure about that coffee?”

  “More sure than I've ever been about anything in my life,” Alex replied and pulled him back into her embrace.

  THE END

  MY VALENTINE WOLF

  STORY DESCRIPTION

  When Kelsey Owens finds herself alone at a bar on Valentine’s Day – stood up by her blind date, she stomps out of the place in a huff. But outside in the darkened ally, she sees something she shouldn’t and lands herself in deep hot water.

  Lucky for her, a handsome, stoic stranger appoints himself as her guardian.

  But is she lucky?

  Is she safe in the hands of her self-appointed, oh-so-sexy protector?

  When he is forced to make a revelation while the two are on the run, she isn’t so sure.

  The thing is, she’s never been so unbelievably attracted to any man before… EVER.

  …And what is lycanthropy anyway?

  CHAPTER 1

  I sucked the last of my fruity, pink drink through the straw, making a hideous slurping noise that drew attention from several others at the bar. I gave the fake blond closest to me the stink eye, and reached into my purse for some money. Tossing the crumpled up bills onto the shiny bar top, I sighed. I knew that Mitch, or Mike, or whatever his name was, had stood me up, but I kept glancing at the door in vain, hoping that I wasn’t the pathetic loser who got stood up on Valentine’s Day. And yet, that’s exactly what I was as I left the bar.

  “You, Kelsey Owens, need to woman up. You don’t need a man to have fun on Valentine’s Day,” I whispered to myself, even though I knew it was a lie.

  The sharp cold of the February night in the Black Hills of South Dakota stole the breath from my lungs momentarily, at least until I got my scarf wound around my neck and mouth. I looked up and down the main street of Rapid City, trying to decide what my next move should be. There were plenty of places to go, and I wasn’t ready to go home just yet.

  I had only had one drink while I’d waited, but I suddenly felt woozy. Pausing beside the edge of the building, I pressed my hand against the cool brick as I waited for the feeling to pass. I leaned forward, concentrating only on the swirling of my stomach. Several people left the bar, and continued on down the street, couples arm in arm, delighting in the romantic ambiance of the day, or night, or whatever. I couldn’t clear my head long enough to think straight. What had been in that drink?

  There was a sharp curse followed by sounds of a scuffle in the alley next to the bar. The sound set my heart racing. I couldn’t have been thinking clearly because instead of getting as far away from the fight as I could, I straightened up, and wandered closer.

  Two large men, broad shouldered, barrel chested, and hairy with wild hair and full, bushy beards had cornered another man, smaller, but still with the same characteristics. I must have been drunker than I’d realized because it sounded to me like they were growling at the other man. The self-preservation part of my brain screamed at me to run, to get away from there as fast as I could, to forget that I had ever seen anything. But my feet stayed rooted to the ground, and I continued to stare at the fight in progress.

  One of the men advanced, flexing his hands as if he had claws attached to the ends of each finger instead of fingernails. He made a slashing motion in the air, and the other man howled in pain. I let out a shriek before clapping a hand over my mouth, as if I could hold the sound inside. The two men turned, momentarily distracted from the original object of their rage. When they turned their eye
s on me, I could see them flash yellow under the streetlight. I began to back away as they moved toward me. Surely I could make it back to the bar before they caught up with me.

  But for some reason I couldn’t move fast enough, I felt like I was slogging through wet cement. As I frantically scrambled to get out of the alley, to get onto the light of the main street, near buildings, near people, near safety, I could practically feel the heat of the first man’s breath on the back of my neck. Dog breath. The change in thinking jolted me out of slow motion movement, and I felt a burst of energy.

  Still, I knew that it wasn’t going to be enough. My heart sank, and horror spread through me as I realized that I was going to be beaten or worse. There was nothing I could do. Just when I thought that I was going to give up, strong arms grabbed me from the side, and rolled me out of the way. My right shoulder hit the pavement hard, but the rest of my body was cushioned against the body of the unknown man, my savior.

  “Stay here, and keep down,” the man said, in a low, gravelly voice. There was just a moment when their eyes met before he ran back into the fray, but I felt a jolt of electricity shoot through my veins. I could see something in the depths of his eyes that I recognized, something that was mirrored back at me from my own heart.

  I rolled over onto my stomach, my shoulder throbbing as I moved, but I lifted my head enough to see the man who had saved me charge the two men who had threatened to attack me. I could hardly believe my eyes as I watched him flip, twist, and kick the two men into submission. The two turned and ran up the block with their proverbial tails tucked between their legs.

  When he seemed satisfied that the men weren’t coming back, he walked back over to me. He reached down, and helped me to my feet. “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “I…I’m, um, my shoulder hurts,” I stammered.

  “We need to get out of here,” he said.

  I stared at him in disbelief. “I don’t know you,” I said even though there were so many other things that I wanted to say. I wanted to tell him that I would be fine, that I’d just go back to the bar, that I’d go home, but I had a feeling, deep in the pit of my stomach that answer wasn’t going to be good enough.

  “My name is Chase Volka. You saw something that you shouldn’t have seen, and there are plenty of people that will want to make sure that you don’t stay alive to tell anyone about it. Now, please, come with me. I can get you to safety, and then we can come up with a plan to keep you safe,” he said.

  From the look on the man’s handsome face, I decided to follow my instincts, and trust him. “I’m Kelsey. Okay, let’s go.”

  CHAPTER 2

  When I was settled in the front seat of a large, black SUV with tinted windows, I began to wonder if I had made the right decision. Chase had his eyes on the road, and one hand tapped the wheel while he rubbed his beard with the other hand. Even though I had just met him, I trusted him, whether or not that was a stupid idea. I felt like I had known him for years. That didn’t stop me from wondering where we were headed or what was going on.

  Chase steered the SUV south out of Rapid City, glancing in the rear view mirror every few seconds. Suddenly he hunched forward over the steering wheel, and made a sharp right down a side street that barely had any lights. Being thrust into sudden shadow made my stomach twist. I swallowed hard as I gave him a sideways glance. Most of his face was hidden in darkness as he killed the headlights and turned off the car. He kept his eyes trained on the mirror. I had to fight every urge within me not to turn around to look.

  Finally, I couldn’t take the tension any longer. “What’s going on?” I asked in a whisper.

  “Shhh,” Chase hissed.

  Fear lanced through my belly, and I hunched myself down in the seat as far as I could go, holding my breath until Chase leaned back in his seat. Slowly he restarted the car, did a U-turn, and pulled the car back out of the side street. Only once we were back on the busy main road did he flip on his lights.

  My stomach was still churning with anxiety as he headed out of town. Once we were on the curving roads, flying past tourist attractions closed for the season, did I dare to ask, “What is going on?”

  Chase ran a hand along his scruffy beard again, and sighed. “I had to make sure we weren’t being followed. Those two men that you encountered will want to find me…and you as well. You saw far more than you should have seen. That means you are in danger. Probably more danger than I’m in.”

  I shifted uneasily in the passenger seat. Every instinct inside of me told me that he was telling me the truth, and that made me more nervous than if I’d realized that he was lying to me. Looking at him sitting beside me now, I could see the weariness lining his face. There were so many questions running through my mind, I felt at a loss as to what to ask first.

  Thankfully, Chase seemed to relax the further out of Rapid City we drove. A few minutes later he veered off the main road onto an exit that as far as I knew led to an abandoned town. He killed the lights a moment later.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  Chase looked over at me, appraisingly. He seemed to be trying to decide whether or not he wanted to tell me something. Finally, he sighed. “The less you know about everything the better. They might go easier on you if they think you’re just a pawn. Besides, that way if they catch us and question you, then at least you won’t have to lie.”

  “Lie about what?” I asked, unable to keep the exasperation out of my voice. “I don’t care what kind of weird connection we seem to have or the fact that I’m indebted to you for saving me, I deserve to know what’s going on. Besides I really don’t have any idea what I saw back there in Rapid City. There were just two guys ready to attack some other guy, and you kicked their butts.”

  Chase eased the SUV off the road into a bank of deep shadows. Ahead I could see the lights from the only occupied building in the town, a saloon that drew on people’s need to get away from the darkness of winter. In the dim light that extended beyond the saloon’s boundaries, I could tell that Chase was watching the establishment.

  “Who are you looking for?” I asked.

  “How’d you…? Never mind. No one. It doesn’t matter. They aren’t here,” he said as he put the car back into gear. As he sped through the center of what used to be a tourist attraction ghost town, I thought I saw someone emerge from the shadows, and run toward the SUV.

  Chase must have seen it too because he said, “We’ve got to get you somewhere safe, preferably before the moon rises too high.”

  “Huh? What are you talking about?” I asked, confusion befuddling my brain. “What does the moon have to do with anything?”

  Chase sighed. He seemed to do that a lot, and I got the feeling that he was telling me far more than he wanted to. Maybe that was part of our connection. Maybe I had some kind of strange power over him that got him to spill his deepest, darkest secrets to me. I was so lost in my self-congratulatory thoughts that I didn’t realize how long Chase had been silent.

  Finally, he said, “I suppose you do need to know this part in case things start to get weird.” He paused. “I suffer from lycanthropy.”

  “Lycanthropy?” I repeated. “What do you mean?”

  Chase glanced at me out of the corner of his eye. “It means,” he said slowly, “that I am a werewolf.”

  CHAPTER 3

  I gaped at him, but Chase remained calm. He turned toward the town of Keystone, the road deserted save for us. I was still trying to process what he had just told me. I wanted to believe that he was just messing with me, but I could tell from the look on his face that he wasn’t. So I swallowed hard. I had to make a decision right now. I could either demand that he stop the car in Keystone, even on the off season one of the hotels would be open. I could rent a room for the night, get a cab back to Rapid City in the morning. Or I could choose to trust Chase, and go wherever he was taking me.

  I decided to trust him. I had the strangest sensation that my heart was beating in rhythm with Chase’s even
all the way across the car. It was almost as if…we were meant to be together. I shook my head, and squinted out the window at the darkened store fronts as we sped through the center of town. The off season was eerie in so many ways. Many businesses shuttered for the winter, and generally only locals frequented those places that were still open.

  My brain felt muddled, and I was beyond tired. Leaning back in my seat, I glanced over at Chase. He was glancing in the rearview mirror again. The way his eyes flicked from the mirror to the road ahead of us made my stomach knot.

  “You need to tell me what’s going on,” I said softly. “I will go wherever you need me to go. I trust you, but I need to know what it is that we’re running from.”

  Chase glanced in the rearview mirror again, and shook his head as he sighed. “Tonight is the full moon. When it reaches the fullest height in the night sky there are…things that a lycanthrope can do.”

  “Okay,” I said slowly. “So what does that have to do with those guys back in Rapid City?”

  The car curved through the mountains. Through the shadows and the dense stands of pine I could just make out the faces of Mount Rushmore. I waited for Chase to respond. A car came around a curve a little too fast, and Chase tensed, leaning forward over the steering wheel and staring at the car until it was out of sight. He stayed quiet for a while longer, and I knew that he was waiting to make sure we were still alone.

  “Those men were lycanthropes too,” Chase said. “Tonight every lycanthrope wants the same thing.”

  “And what’s that?”