Bruce shrugged. “You’re right, but the animal kingdom doesn’t rely on character traits to choose it’s leaders. It’s survival of the fittest and Tara is at the top of power hierarchy.”
“The animal kingdom works fine though,” Jenna pointed out, and she didn’t have to add the rest of what she wanted to say for Bruce to know what she was talking about.
“Yes, but the animal kingdom consists of groups of like creatures. Even the shapeshifter world should be like that, but we’re all misfits. We don’t work well together and that makes the pack volatile.”
They got to the cabin and Bruce put on the backpack with enough non-perishables to last Jenna a while. He picked up his own bag and hers and they left the cabin and headed up the mountain.
Bruce led her on a trail she didn’t know, past the boulders she’d climbed and around the corner to a new face of the mountain. The trees grew in a thick tangle and they had to stick to the narrow path or they wouldn’t have made it through at all. Even then, small twigs caught at Jenna’s clothes, stray branches tugged and pulled at her and it was as if the trees lifted their roots on purpose to trip her every couple of steps. It was like the forest didn’t want her.
“We usually avoid this part of the forest,” Bruce said after they’d walked a while in silence.
“Why?”
“It’s difficult to hunt between these trees – prey gets away too easily.”
“Which is why you’re bringing me here,” Jenna said. He was taking her somewhere it would be harder to hunt her. The idea made her feel uneasy.
“I thought that we had some sort of safety until full moon,” Jenna said.
“Never hurts to be careful,” Bruce said in a nonchalant way, but Jenna didn’t buy it. He was worried. And if he was worried, so was she.
They climbed further and further up. She stopped at two streams to drink water, and Jenna later learned that it had been the same stream. She felt lightheaded being so high up and the air was chilly where they were. It felt like they were climbing up all the way to winter.
“Tell me about the pack,” Jenna said after they walked another while in silence.
“Should we really talk about this?” Bruce asked.
“Why not? It wouldn’t hurt for me to know what’s going on, and the conversation will distract me from the fact that I’m exhausted.”
Bruce glanced at her, sliding his eyes down to her feet like they were the reason for her fatigue.
“We all belonged to packs once, real ones. I lived in a big city where there were several packs. The werewolves had packs with more than fifty wolves. The leopards had numbers too but not as many. The bears didn’t really move in packs as much as they met up once in a while to stay aware of each other.”
Jenna nodded. It made sense – bears were independent, almost lone animals.
“The Assassins found us, one of the pack had told a human about us, showed him the transition and everything. It didn’t take long after that.”
“The Assassins?” Jenna asked. Hearing Bruce speak like this was like watching a movie – Jenna could almost see him transport back into time and relive the old days. And she could feel his sorry, his loss, something she understood.
“Did the human rat you out?” Jenna asked.
Bruce shook his head. “He didn’t need to. The Assassins work with psychics, like Dwayne. He used to be one of them but the killing was more than he was willing to stomach.”
“Killing?” Jenna felt blood drain from her face. Bruce nodded slowly not making any eye contact. He pointed to the floor where roots were lifted high above the ground so Jenna wouldn’t trip.
“They kill all the shifters they can find. And they make a mission of finding them. They say we’re an abomination.”
“Why does everything always end in death? The Assassins kill the shifters, the shifters kill the humans—“
“They only kill the humans when they know so that the Assassins don’t find them,” Bruce interrupted her, defending his kind. But Jenna frowned.
“Doesn’t that make them exactly the same then? The only people that are dying without actually wanting to kill are the humans. That doesn’t sound fair.”
“Life hardly is,” Bruce said and his voice was hard. Jenna swallowed.
“So, Dwayne decided to join the shifters instead?” She asked, trying to change the topic to something lighter. “What will the Assassins do when they find him?”
Bruce shrugged. “He’s the only one that’s done it, as far as we know. So that’s something we’ll have to see. But we’d rather not rub shoulders with the Assassins.”
Jenna nodded. She understood in a way. It was all very basic – survive, make sure someone doesn’t know about you, repeat. What she didn’t understand was how the shifters seemed to make it all more complicated. Bruce had said that the animal kingdom’s power structure was simple – the strongest was at the top and that it had nothing to do with character traits. And still, they all had character traits because they were human, too. It seemed impossible not to get the two mixed up and influencing each other.
They finally broke free from the tangle of trees into a small clearing. There was a cave opening to the left and a small stream, likely the same one as before, that ran past to the right with a waterfall that gave everything a chattering quality. The trees walled them in from all sides at the edge of the clearing, like some sort of jail.
“A cave?” Jenna asked, looking at the dark opening. Bruce grinned.
“It’s not so bad. It’s been altered a bit. I’ll show you.”
They walked in. The cave was smooth rock at the opening, but deeper in logs were used to fill cracks and holes and there were openings almost like windows toward the back. It was rudimental, but Jenna had to admit that it was cozy, and not much more primitive than the cabins she’d grown up in. It just needed a lot of cleaning.
There was furniture, too. Rough chairs, a table – al looking handmade – and a screen to the side where the edge of a bed peeked out.
“What is this place?” Jenna asked, looking around.
“It was the place I was supposed to live in when I joined the pack after I first came to the Syracuse Mountains. I only stayed here for a couple of weeks, I couldn’t deal with being away from people after I’d lived in a city for so long.”
“So you came to live in Williamsburg,” Jenna said. “You’d been in the area much longer than we thought.”
Bruce nodded. Jenna walked over to a squat bookshelf with a couple of dusty books. She fingered the spines, recognizing one or two of them from her father’s bookshelves.
“The others stay up in the mountains too, don’t they?” she asked.
“On the other side, yes. I didn’t want to join them.”
Jenna understood that. Even though they were live beings, they weren’t people. Hell, they were about as close to animals as they could be and still retain human form. She understood why they weren’t great company.
Jenna took her suitcase to the bedroom and put it on the bed. She looked around, looking for closet space, but there was none. She put the suitcase in a corner on the floor. She could live out of a bag for a while. She wasn’t sure she wanted to move into this place anyway.
The sun started to set and the home in the cave grew darker and darker. Bruce came into the room with candles, setting them on the nightstand, the desk.
“Candles?” Jenna asked.
“No electricity up here,” Bruce said and grinned sheepishly. Jenna nodded. She felt like she was half in a daze. A week ago she was happily married, just moving into her new home, ready to start on the next leg of her life. She had friends that were like family, a good job and a man she loved that loved her back.
And now suddenly her life was reduced to a black cave in the middle of a tangle of trees with no one to talk to, shifters hunting her, and no electricity. The thought made her want to cry.
As if Bruce knew it he pulled her closer to him and wrapped his arms arou
nd her.
“We’ll figure this out, okay?” he said. “There’s two weeks and I’m sure we’ll find a way to sort this out before then. Just hang tight for me, okay?”
Jenna sighed with a shudder and then forced herself to nod.
Bruce kissed her on the forehead and then turned around, walking back out toward the entrance of the cave.
“Where are you going?” Jenna asked.
“It’s almost nightfall. I have to go out soon. The pack will want to meet, and then I have to hunt. I haven’t had a chance to last night, and if I don’t do it often enough I lose control.”
“You’re going to leave me alone?” Jenna asked and she was aware of the panic in her voice. Her voice sounded thin and high. Bruce’s face softened and he walked closer to her again.
“Nothing’s going to happen to you here. You’re going to be perfectly fine, and I’ll be back as soon as the sun comes up. And the upside is neither of us have to work tomorrow so we can spend the day together.” He smiled. “That’s something we haven’t really been able to do.”
Jenna nodded and he hugged her before he turned back to the entrance of the cave.
“Don’t worry,” he said one more time. “I love you.”
He walked outside where the night was starting to thicken, the blue of the sky getting darker and darker until it swallowed all the color round it. Jenna walked to the cave entrance and crossed her arms over her chest. The air up in the mountains was chilly. She looked into the trees all round, but Bruce was gone.
She wasn’t worried so much about the other animals coming to get her. After all, if she were dead she wouldn’t really know about it. What worried her was life, living up here all alone. What worried her was the fact that she kept thinking she had Bruce, just to lose him again. It had happened on their wedding night, and it had kept happening since.
She didn’t know how she was going to deal with that. Bruce was scared of losing her but that would only be one time. She had to lose him over and over again.
Chapter 3
The village drew Bruce like it never had before, now that he was forced to leave it. When he’d just come to the Syracuse Mountains, following a story that there were survivors out here that would take him in, he’d hoped to be isolated. He’d found the cave and made it his home after the Family had accepted him as one of their own. He’d been lower down in the hierarchy then, with Lori and the wolves above him.
He’d hated living in the cave. After a couple of weeks he’d been so sick of the emptiness, tired of living like an animal, that he’d decided to go down to the village. He’d just needed to see people.
And he’d fallen in love with Williamsburg and the people in it that seemed to care so much. He’d fought with the Family until they’d agreed to let him live among the humans, and he’d left the cave and gone down to the place where he felt at home.
That had been five years ago. Since then he’d been up to the cave only a handful of times to store things he didn’t use in the village, or to recover if something particularly bad had happened, like his fight with Stephen to rise in the pack that had taken him two days to heal from, and then his fight with Lori that had taken another week.
Other than that he’d hated the cave because of its seclusion. And now he was making Jenna stay there.
He told himself it was to keep her safe. If she didn’t stay away from people, any people, Tara was going to kill Jenna. Her word to leave Jenna alone until full moon was already very untrustworthy and Bruce didn’t know how long it would last.
He needed to hunt. Jenna would be safe in the cave. It was virtually impossible to get there, even the other shifters hadn’t tried it. He thought about the boulders and how he’d thought it was impossible for a human to get over them, and Jenna had made it, but he pushed the thought away the moment it took shape in his mind. She was going to be fine.
He was going to make sure that it was fine. He would know if she was in trouble. Even as he was walking he could feel the bond with her, tell what she was feeling, where she was, if she was okay.
He shifted into a bear when he was out of the thick and tangled trees and able to move around more easily. He tracked down a couple of nocturnal creatures and ate them, feeling the power of their blood surge through his veins. The power of the feed was different than his power to shift. It was controlling power that gave him the ability to keep the bear in check. To Bruce that power was a lot more valuable than being able to change into a bear in the first place, and have the sharpened senses and increased power.
Then again, without the bear in him, he wouldn’t have needed to ability to control it.
For the first time in the fifteen years Bruce had been a bear, able to shift form, he wondered what his life would have been like if he were just a human. Where he would be now, if he would be disappointed.
But he shook that off too, because thinking like that, trying to hold on to his humanity too much, that was just as dangerous as embracing the animal. Without balance it was easy to go crazy.
When Bruce had had enough the moon was still high in the sky. It was already fuller than the night before, still just a strip, but every night it crept closer to full moon. It was still just under two weeks, but Bruce felt like his time was running out. He had to make a plan to get Jenna safe from Tara, and to keep the Family and himself safe from the Assassins, all at the same time.
He hadn’t want to admit it to himself, but he didn’t know how that would be possible. If Tara had a heart maybe it would have been easier. There were stories of other shifters taking up with humans, and being able to ward off the Assassins despite it.
But Tara was cold-blooded and murderous. It wasn’t going to work.
He made his way slowly around the mountain, weaving in and out of trees and working his way up until he reached the plateau. The others were around, he could feel them. Usually he would have gone there straight away, but the fight to keep Jenna safe had taken too much out of him, and he wanted to be in control around Tara.
It was ironic, because Tara’s role as alpha was to help keep her pack in control, not that they had to be controlled around her. But Bruce didn’t like the idea of being at her mercy. She didn’t have anything like that.
Dwayne and Cleveland were in the circle of power with Tara, talking about something. The conversation fell quiet when Bruce approached, making him think they were talking about him, but he let it slide.
He walked to the alpha and joined the group. The power in the ground was subdued, but it was there – a fine prickle that ran up Bruce’s legs. It would get stronger the closer they got to full moon.
All shapeshifters had a circle of power, somewhere they could go and lose control, somewhere someone else could wield that power.
Bruce stood with the three members of the Family, and neither of them said anything. A moment later Lori walked out of the trees and her scent traveled to them on the wind. It was wild and reckless, and Bruce knew she’d been a bear until seconds ago, too. Stephen and Rosa glided out of the trees a moment later, like they’d been summoned and they were both still in wolf form. Stephen shifted as he walked and he made the transition, which was awkward in any case, seem almost elegant. Rosa was less in control and she stopped, letting the beast drain away while Bruce watched her.
When she was a human, too, she joined Stephen before they both took their places in the circle.
“I’m surprised you didn’t bring her with you,” Tara said to Bruce. It was a hostile way start to the meeting. If it was an indication of how things were going to go, Bruce didn’t really want to be there, but he wanted to be at every meeting from then on.
He wanted to know which shifters were missing so he would know if Jenna was in danger. He wanted to know what was said or ordered. He wanted to know how much they still regarded him as part of the Family.
“She’s not a shifter, I didn’t think it appropriate,” Bruce said. Tara snorted.
“Nice of you to take that into con
sideration,” she said in a sarcastic voice and Bruce suppressed a groan. “You didn’t seem to think that was a problem when you mated her and put her under your protection. You didn’t think that was a problem when she found out about you and endangered the pack.”
“I know you’re upset, and I said I was going to fix it,” Bruce said, trying to get Tara to stop. The atmosphere in the air was building into something ugly and he wanted to stop it from getting any worse.
There was a moment of silence.
“This is not just about the fact that you’ve put all our lives in danger by letting a human being in,” Tara said and her voice was lower, warmer, but Bruce also knew, more dangerous. “This is also about the pack loyalty. Since you’ve started with your escapades, thinking about only yourself and how you feel about those damn people of yours, things have gotten out of hand.”
She looked around the circle, making eye-contact with every one of them. “With all of you,” she added.
“It’s not like we don’t know who we want stand behind,” Lori spoke up. “You know we’re loyal to you.” She was looking at Tara with a face that didn’t back the words that came out of her mouth. “It’s just hard to stick to the rules and follow you blindly when the rules don’t apply all round.”
So that was what the problem was.
“I don’t have an issue with it,” Stephen said and Rosa nodded because she always seemed to agree with him. “This is just another phase. This happened twenty years ago, too. Every twenty years there’s a human that gets too close, and it’s this big problem, and then we kill them and its over.”
Stephen shrugged like it was no big deal. Bruce thought back to Jenna’s father that had been killed in the mountain by wild animals.
“You’ll agree with anything Tara says because you’re a suck up,” Lori snapped.
“Don’t you talk to him like that,” Rosa said, leaning forward so she looked like she was going to attack. With her almost-perpetually glowing eyes it would have looked threatening if she wasn’t so small in comparison to Lori’s size.
BAD BOY ROMANCE: DIESEL: Contemporary Bad Boy Biker MC Romance (Box Set) (New Adult Sports Romance Short Stories Boxset) Page 91
