Bear With Me (Alpha Werebear Shifter Paranormal Romance)

by Lynn Red

  Finally, when the recitation of every Emmy award that General Hospital won ended, he wistfully looked into the distance and talked about how fondly he remembered the show’s anniversary.

  My mouth was hanging open, and even though I tried to stop myself I was just staring at the stuff bouncing in his beard as he excitedly explained everything.

  “Right,” I finally said when I realized he was waiting for me to say something. “Yeah, great show. Really love it. But, listen, there’s—”

  “I never liked Passions,” he said. That hung in the air for a second. “Too much sex.”

  Slowly, I nodded, furrowing my brow and trying to figure out how I could possibly steer this off-course yacht back into the right headwind. Luckily, he did it for me.

  “Oh, listen to me. Just an old man babbling on about my stories like they were real people.”

  I opened my mouth to respond, but he cut me off. “I mean, they are real people, of course. Just not the stories. That’s the made up bit, y’see. The actors are...” He wrinkled up his forehead, as though he had somehow forgotten what he was saying part of the way through the saying.

  “Anyway,” I said. Jenga joined in, saying the ‘way’ part along with me.

  “What can I do ya for?” he asked.

  I had heard of people saying that before, but never actually heard it come out of anyone’s mouth. Somehow, it made perfect sense for it to come out of this guy, though.

  “Needing a leeching? Maybe some herbal remedies what aren’t going to do anything you expect? Oh!” he started getting very excited again, maybe even more excited than when he was talking about the soaps. “You want a light bulb treatment! I’ve seen that look in a whole lot of faces comin’ through this door.”

  He grabbed something that looked like a fishbowl and then fished a cigarette lighter out of a pouch he had hanging around his waist. “All’s I’m gonna do is strike this thing, and then pop the bowl on your back. It’s supposed to do something about energy balance, but if I’m bein’ honest I just really like the noise it makes when they come off.”

  Jenga stuck his finger in his mouth and popped it inside his cheek, I guess to show me what kind of sound it would make. As much as I wanted to experience either being bled, or having fishbowls stuck to me, I had more pressing concerns.

  “No,” I said. “Sorry, I’m not here for any kind of treatments.”

  Atlas started stroking my hair again, but I just let him. There’s something oddly amusing and also lovable about a giant zombie smiling happily and petting your hair that just warms the heart. I found myself reaching up and patting his huge, and surprisingly well-manicured hand.

  “He’s started using hand cream,” Jenga offered.

  I had to laugh. But then I remembered I was on a mission. “I’m sorry to be short,” I said.

  “You’re pretty tall,” he countered. “Though maybe that’s because I have bad posture.”

  I was momentarily stunned, but recovered quickly. “What I mean is I need your help, but not with any kind of leeching or any light bulb fishbowls. One of my friends lost part of the week, and we’re trying to figure out what’s going on.”

  “Alien abduction?” he asked.

  I shook my head.

  “Heavy drinking?”

  “She’s underage, and anyway, she’s a unicorn,” I said.

  He nodded solemnly. “Unicorns react to alcohol strangely. Important point. Well, what is it you reckon happened?”

  I explained the whole situation with Graves and the strange storm and everything else. He nodded and jotted some things on a notepad that he pulled out of his beard. But he seemed a little disinterested in the whole thing. That is, until I got to the part about me getting a weird sense of vertigo and forgetting who I was for a few moments.

  “Brain washin’,” he said simply. “Shouldn’t be a surprise. You said this was a professor-type, then?”

  I nodded.

  “Uh-huh,” he said. “Duggan know about him? The suspender-wearing hedgehog who teaches Greek History at nine in the morning every semester? Also he’s the dean of the college. If someone on his staff is brainwashing unicorns, he should probably know. That sorta thing can give a good school a bad reputation.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Did you just say ‘brain washing’? Like mind control?”

  “Yup.”

  I shook my head. “How is that possible? How could he brainwash an entire class and make my friend disappear?”

  Jenga started giggling, which made his beard jingle more than ever before. “Well look at it this way, little ‘un. Explain it some other way. You said there weren’t no aliens, and you said she’s a unicorn which means she weren’t drunk. Wasn’t smoking anything funny, was she?”

  “Winter?” I asked. “She’s a hell of a space case, but no, she wasn’t smoking anything.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Unicorns are all space cases. At least all the Ginger unicorns are. You know, that’s a funny name for someone who isn’t actually a ginger.”

  I took a deep breath and forced a smile. “I think maybe other people are in danger. I mean, Winter is safe now, presumably, but unless we figure out some way to stop him, there’s no telling what he’ll do.”

  “You’ve made a lot of decisions based on just a wee-little bit of evidence. How do you know anything happened? Anyway, this feller’s a professor, right? What sort?”

  “Art history,” I said.

  “Hum,” Jenga grunted. “That rules out him brain washing teenage girls as some sort of science experiment. What do you expect he was doin’ with her? Presuming she wasn’t...”

  “Oh,” I said. “No, she wasn’t physically hurt I don’t think. But she was shooting blue rainbows.”

  For a second, I thought the witch doctor was about to cry. “That’s... I’ll tell you, little girl, I’ve seen some terribly sad things in my day but I’m not sure I’ve heard anything the like of that. A unicorn with blue rainbows.”

  I nodded. “I couldn’t believe it when I saw it. She’s usually so, well, chipper isn’t the right word exactly, but certainly not sad enough to shoot blue rainbows.”

  “I’m even more sure now than I was before,” Jenga said. “But something’s not right. You’re talking about Graves, right? The new professor? He doesn’t have any sort of powers. That was part of Duggan hirin’ him. He brought it up at a town council meeting, if you’re wondering how I know all this. Ain’t any kind of clairvoyant hokum.”

  “Hokum is a funny word from someone who...” I trailed off.

  “The irony isn’t lost on me, little lady,” he said. “But the point is, there’s no reason to think – wait a minute.”

  “Yeah?”

  “This feller, Graves, you said he was pacing around giving a lesson and then suddenly you got tunnel vision and you fell into some kinda stupor?” He was shaking a finger, and then pulled something out of his breast pocket. “I want you to take this.”

  It was, I noticed, what appeared to be a chicken bone in a glass vial. I reached out and took it, squinting at the strange device. When I looked closer, I realized it was a carved figurine of some sort.

  “You just had this in your shirt?” I asked.

  “Yup,” he said, nodding. “Never know when you’ll need one.”

  “What is it?”

  “What is what?” he asked, cocking his head. “Oh! That’s a hokum finder.”

  I raised my eyebrows in surprise. “A... what?”

  “Hokum finder, bullshit radar, con sniffer. Whatever you want to call it, the point is that you can use that little doohickey to figure out when someone’s hiding something from you. And then if they are, which I suspect is the case with this feller, it’ll start to jiggle, all excited like.”

  “Oh...kay? And what’s that supposed to do?”

  “Simple!” he said. And that was all he said.

  Atlas groaned, and rubbed my hair, then smiled at me. I smiled back.

  “Okay,” I
said, trying to get some clarification. “I take this thing, and... detect bullshit with it?”

  “Yup! Oh, I suppose it’d help to tell you that you should take it to where you suspect said bullshit is being perpetrated. It’ll get to jigglin’ faster the closer you are to the source of the bullshit.”

  “Bull,” I paused, pre-emptively realizing what I was about to say. “Shit.”

  “Not a bit. If’n it’s like you say, he’s got some kind of power behind him, then this little device will point out the source of it. Assuming, of course, it works.”

  “I’ve never heard the term ‘bullshit’ more in a shorter period of time,” I said.

  “Bull shit,” Jenga responded, a grin spreading from ear to ear. “Anyway, take that thing, go to wherever it is you think he’s keeping his secret and it’ll ferret out whatever the problem is. Bring me the problem and I’ll fix it.”

  “Really?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “If I don’t know how, I’ll let Atlas eat it. That solves more problems than you can probably imagine.”

  “Well, thank you,” I said, backing toward the door.

  My new friend followed me all the way and then as I hopped back in my car, shaking my strange bone-in-a-vial, I looked back at him.

  The big zombie had just about the sweetest look on his face that I’d ever seen, and then when I waved back, he started grinning bigger, and laughing so loud I could hear him through a glass door, twenty feet of space, and over my engine.

  Jamesburg, I thought. Gotta love it.

  -18-

  Langston Graves

  The sleek, black, darkly-tinted SUV pulled up outside an unassuming duplex that stood across the street from a park.

  With the sun just set, Jamesburg was bathed in a slightly unnerving, purple-orange that only happens when winter is waning and spring is on the wind. Rain clouds puffed up along the horizon and when Langston Graves looked out the side window of his car, he felt almost like the electricity in the clouds was gathering in his veins as well as the sky.

  “Here is fine,” he said to a gray faced man who sat in front of him, driving the car. The gray faced man wore a charcoal suit, and had his hair slicked back. Dark, aviator sunglasses completed the look, and he wore them all the time, even when he was indoors, in the dark.

  Behind the sunglasses were yellowish-red irises, and behind those yellow-red irises was absolutely nothing.

  Graves reached up and patted his mechanical servant on the shoulder, smiling at his own achievement more than anything.

  What he lacked in magical ability, or in raw power, Graves more than made up for in genius. He spent his days tinkering, fiddling, and creating. This driver, who he called Jeffress, was his crowning achievement. He wasn’t a robot, and wasn’t exactly an android, but what he was was something perfectly in between.

  Jeffress took commands, he followed them, and he was able to drive. Oh, and he never interrupted Dr. Graves’s longwinded lectures on Mesopotamian occultism, which made him just about the best companion Graves could ever hope to have.

  Except the book.

  Where are you? Graves thought. He looked back over his shoulder, half expecting to see that damn book flapping behind him, pulling strings in his mind, making him do things he didn’t want to do.

  Well, he thought, it isn’t exactly like I don’t want to do them at all. It’s more like he makes me do things for a slightly different purpose. But knowing that, means that I can win. Knowing he’s trying to trick me at every turn means I can use that against him.

  “Thanks Jeffress,” Graves said, patting his metal driver on the shoulder. “You... wait here.”

  Jeffress stared straight ahead, and Graves smiled at him, very happy with his clever joke. He pulled out a large, tied-together packet of papers and shuffled through them. “Schwarz,” he said. “Mitzi Schwarz. Eight-six-two Roanoke. I think I’m going to enjoy this.”

  He also grabbed a doubled-over essay, which he had stuck in his jacket pocket. He was dressed in hound’s-tooth tweed, because that’s what people expect from a professor, and after all, the things that are expected almost never raise questions.

  Graves checked his watch, which had been stuck on seven-sixteen for the last three years. He couldn’t remember why, but that’s where it had always been. Then he looked at the watch on his other wrist and saw that it was just about time. From what he understood, his next mark was going to be home in about eight minutes.

  She was going to pull up from her job at Applebee’s and panic when she saw her young, dashing, Art History professor standing at her front door. Then when he said he had some concerns about her academic honesty – that maybe she’d cheated on this paper and he was bringing it to her attention outside of class as a favor to her – she’d flip the hell out.

  He smiled, content at having drained the unicorn, and being about to drain his second victim. They were still alive of course – he’d never kill anyone – but her spirit was his. He didn’t need much more, not at all, before he could finally do what he’d always wanted to do.

  Since he had begun his path through the occult arts, Langston Graves had one desire that evaded him always. He could consort with demons, he could bend time and meddle with the minds of those around him, but he’d never been able to transform.

  “To feel my legs stretch and grow, to feel the hair pour out of me. To feel that raw, incredible power,” he said to himself. “Soon. Very soon.”

  Goosebumps slid up his arms and down his back. He didn’t care what it took. He’d feel that ultimate power course through his veins if it was the last thing he did. And once he was able to transform, to realize his innermost power, he’d rip that book to shreds and send that damned djinn straight back to hell.

  Jeffress turned his head, and it squeaked a little. Behind the sunglasses, those yellow-red irises expanded, then grew smaller, focusing on the tweed-covered form six feet from the windshield.

  If he had a body, if he had lips, Eldred would be smiling.

  Instead he had to be content with feeling smug that he’d managed to escape the box. First, it was the box. Next, he’d have what he always wanted – the body of a shifter, the body of... a bear.

  As a small, off-white, late-90s Camry pulled into the parking lot, Graves made sure he had the right paper in his hand, and he straightened his lapels. Eldred, through the automaton, watched, never tired, never looking away.

  *

  Graves had to keep himself from smiling. Her power, no matter how bizarre, was so close he could almost taste it on the end of his tongue. When this shifter girl started shaking with fear, the electricity of her terror was sweet and salty and savory all at once.

  But he had to watch himself. He couldn’t give in and start up with the hand wringing and the lip licking. He couldn’t dive straight in. He’d managed to keep his desire dialed down enough to drain the happiness out of that unicorn, right? He could manage now, too.

  So many lessons he’d learned since the initial mistakes he made trying to drain that bear, back in Baghdad. At least he’d left his mark. A thin, crooked smile spread across Graves’s face as he remembered the way that huge soldier half-shifted and then writhed around, tugging at the silver cuffs so wildly that he’d almost killed himself on the table.

  That old familiar warmth crept through him, crackling from his scalp to his toes.

  “Sorry,” Mitzi said, breaking the professor’s intense, nostalgic explosion. “I don’t know why our papers ended up so similar, but I’ll make sure not to do it again.”

  She was, apparently, not quite as frightened as he was hoping. In fact, all of her terror had seemed to pass, if it was there at all in the first place. “Is there anything else I can do for you, Professor Graves?” she asked.

  Mitzi was tired, with two big circles under her light brown eyes. Maybe that was it, Graves thought. Maybe she was just too exhausted to realize how serious the situation was.

  “Young lady,” he began in his best authorita
rian tone, and making sure to use rounded “r” sounds like he’d heard on a radio program to sound upper class. “This is an awful situation. You could be expelled from the university. You could have your scholarship revoked!”

  Mitzi let out an impatient laugh. “Do you think I’d be covered in a mixture of spilled beer, chicken wing sauce, and reduced-calorie lasagna if I was on a scholarship?”

  Graves looked at her, confusion plan on his crooked grin. “But the academic honor board could have you removed from school,” he said.

  She drew her shoulders almost to her ears. “Look,” she said, “I know it’s bad, but I also know I didn’t go to the trouble of copying a five hundred word essay. It woulda taken longer to copy than it did to just churn out the essay.”

  “You can’t let this one get away,” a voice inside the professor’s head said to him. “There’s not much time before the equinox. If you don’t finish the ritual by then, it’ll be too late. You’ll be run out of town sure as anything when they find out everything about you is fake.”

  Graves shook his head. His hair was plastered down with such a heavy slather of product it didn’t move, but his pale cheeks wobbled slightly.

  ‘Professor Graves?” she asked.

  “Oh, sorry,” he said. “I was just thinking about how terrible it would be if such a bright, promising young lady had her entire future snapped away because of a simple, foolish mistake.”

  Mitzi closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose. “I don’t really know what to say,” she said. “I didn’t copy the essay. I’m sorry you think I did, but I’m not...”

  Graves lifted his eyebrows, using his pale blue eyes to peer deep into Mitzi’s mind. She paused her speech, and then tilted her head just slightly to the side. “I,” she started, then trailed off again.

  Squinting, the professor peered into the girl’s thoughts. Everything he saw was warm and happy. Just like the unicorn girl, this one’s memories were full of cheer – a baseball game with her father, she and her mother learning to use roller skate. Frivolous things, useless things, but things he could use.