“I love you too, Mom,” said Wesley, his weeping now starting to pass. “And I’ll see you soon. I love you. And Dad.”
“We love you, sweetheart. And we’re proud of our boy.”
“Thanks, Mom,” he sniffled.
“Goodbye, baby. We’ll check on you before it’s time to go.”
“Okay. Bye.”
Wesley ended the call and sat, slumped, on the edge of the bed. Everything that he and his mother had said was true. The most critical time in a werebear’s life would soon be upon Wesley. Perhaps it was for the best that he would never see Jennifer Casey again. Perhaps it was for the best that she would never know. For all he knew, this might be goodbye, not only to her but to his entire human life.
It was only the remotest possibility, but still…sometimes, in just a few rare cases, there was no coming back from what was soon about to happen.
As soon as he had faced this fact, the phone rang.
Wesley picked up the phone from his lap and looked at the caller ID.
JENNIFER CASEY, it said.
Wesley’s heart jumped like a trout leaping from a brook to escape the jaws of a bear. Oh my God—Jennifer! And after everything Mom and I just said! Jennifer…
As he had done so many times, he hovered his finger over her name on the phone. But this time, he pressed it.
“Jennifer? Jen…”
The sound of her voice spread fingers of long-missed warmth through his body. “Wesley…?”
“Yeah, Jen, it’s me. Jen, it’s so good to hear you! I’ve missed you so much. Jen, I want to talk to you. I want to try to explain everything to you. Everything, Jen. And…I still want you. I want you more than ever.” All the resolve that he had just made was gone. His feelings for her were stronger than he was, human or bear.
“We do need to talk, Wesley,” she said. “But…I’d rather we didn’t talk here, at my place. Just not here.”
With a gulp, Wesley asked, “My place, then?” He glanced around at his small and simply furnished studio apartment and the full but smaller bed on which he was sitting. It was the furthest cry from where he had made love to Jennifer so many times, but he did not care. He wanted to see her, speak to her, tell her everything. And he would make love to her anywhere she wanted. If she wanted.
“No,” said Jennifer. “Not your place either. Someplace neutral, not yours or mine. There’s a park near here. I think it’s about halfway between the gym and my place. You know it, right?”
“Yeah, I’ve been by there every time I came to see you. So, you want to meet there?”
“Yes, in the park. Near the pond. Can you make it sometime tomorrow?”
“I can make it any time you want, Jen.”
They firmed up their plans for the next afternoon and agreed on the time they would meet. At last, Wesley said, “Jennifer, I’m really glad you called. I want you to know first, there’s nothing to be scared of. What you saw, that was me, and I’d never, ever hurt you. Ever. I want you, Jennifer. That’ll never change. I want you.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow, Wesley,” she simply said. And with that, she ended the call.
In silence once more, Wesley put the phone down on the bed beside him and bowed his head. Calling out in his heart to the spirits of his man-bear ancestors, he sent out just one word: Please…
CHAPTER EIGHT
The park, as such places always are, was filled with natural beauty: trees and grass, shrubs and flowers, a shallow pond with a fountain in the center, fish swimming slowly in the water. And none of it, thought Jennifer, was anywhere near as beautiful as the young man waiting patiently for her on the park bench near the pond on that warm late afternoon. None of it could compare to the way his face lit up at the sight of her.
She managed a little smile as Wesley bounded to his feet to greet her. “Jennifer!” he called with all the passion and exuberance of his young years.
When she drew near him, he reached out to throw his arms around her. But she raised a hand to stop him and he flinched back, his smile fading, an edge of apprehension coming over his features. Jennifer wondered if there could be any more painful sight in the world than that of a sweet young man afraid of having his heart broken.
More calmly, he said, “Hi, Jennifer. I’m glad you asked me here.”
She motioned to the bench. “Let’s sit down, Wesley.”
They sat together.
“Jen,” he began, “I just want you to know how sorry I am. I wanted to tell you so many times, and I should have. And I wanted to show you, but…I was scared of how you’d react. I was scared of seeing you look like you looked that morning. And I was scared of seeing you want to run away and hide from me like you did. Jen, I wouldn’t scare you or hurt you on purpose if my life depended on it. I think I’d rather die than hurt you, even a little.”
Jennifer nodded, accepting. “No, Wesley, I know you’d never deliberately hurt me. The young man that I spent all those days and nights with, who made me so happy so many times…he’d never hurt me. I know that.”
“I’ve been out of my mind worrying about you, Jen,” he said. “And thinking I’d never see you again.” He looked at her with a sorrow that was unique to heartsick young lads, and crushed her own heart in doing so. “I cried, Jennifer,” he softly told her.
“I haven’t known whether to cry or scream or curl up into a ball or anything. I thought of calling someone…”
Now Wesley started at her, turning pale with an abrupt, rude shock of horror. “Oh no, Jen! You didn’t call anybody, did you? You didn’t tell…”
“No, no, Wesley, I didn’t tell anyone. I wouldn’t have known what to tell someone. I wouldn’t have known how to explain what I saw, what you…” her voice broke down at this point at the thought of actually putting the following words into the air for the first time. “What you are. I thought of telling someone what you are, but I didn’t know how to tell anyone about a thing like that. What would they have thought?”
Wesley exhaled, relieved. “Yeah. That’s always been the biggest thing we’ve got going for us, having to live with…you know…humans. Our advantage, living in the same world with you, is most of you not believing in us. It makes it easier—except for times like now.”
Jennifer’s last vestige of disbelief was at odds with this new side of reality she’d discovered. “I still can’t wrap my head around it, Wesley. How is it even possible? How can you even be…?”
“A werebear?” He studied her for her reaction to the word and saw her eyes blink at it and her skin redden. He could just imagine the flash of shock at hearing it, even now. “We’ve been around almost as long as there have been plain humans, I think. We’re about as old as mankind.”
“But you’re supposed to be mythical! You’re supposed to be stories. Legends, folklore. Things that people made up to…I don’t know, explain things they were afraid of.”
“Somebody, a long time ago, told me this old saying: ‘Every myth has a basis in fact.’ The things people make up, somewhere they come from something that was real. Most humans only know the myth. The real part got lost or forgotten a long time ago. I’m the real part, Jen, that’s all.”
“And you’ve always existed, right in plain sight, looking like ordinary humans?” Her disbelief was slowly turning to wonder. “Are there a lot of you?”
“There are a lot more of you than there are of us, believe me,” Wesley replied. “And there are different kinds of us.”
“Different kinds of werebears?”
“Different kinds of shape-changing people. You know about werewolves from the movies—The Wolf Man and movies like that. Werewolves are real, too, just not like in those movies. They’re like me, except they’re wolves. And there’s werepanthers and weretigers and werelions and weredolphins…”
Jennifer blinked again, this time in pure and utter amazement. “Weredolphins?”
“Yeah,” said Wesley. “And weredragons.”
Her jaw dropped open. That last one al
most left her speechless. “Dragons? Wesley, you don’t mean people who actually become…” She was suddenly aware that her voice was raising and that she was discussing something absolutely fantastic in a public place. She half-whispered, “…actually become dragons?”
Wesley nodded, totally deadpan. “Yeah. Dragons, too.”
“Have you met them?”
“I’ve never met ‘em. But I’ve met people who have, folks who know about ‘em.”
Jennifer shook her head and put a hand to her heart as if to stop it fluttering. “Oh, Wesley. This is all so much to hear. It’s like there’s a whole world that no one even knows about.”
“Some people know about it,” he said. “Sometimes it happens that we get close to a human and they find out. And that can put us in a lot of trouble if the human is too scared and starts making too much noise. But sometimes…sometimes, Jen, a human learns how to not be scared of us, how to accept us. I’ve heard of were-people who live their whole lives having a human for a lover. Or a husband or a wife. Even having families with humans.”
“Have you met any of them?”
“No, I never have. But I’ve heard stories. You see, Jen, sometimes, every so often…there’s something besides fear.” He glanced down at the bench to where his hand rested, so close to hers. He wanted with all his heart to reach over and touch her hand. To do more than touch. But he looked back up into her eyes, searching for any sign that she was ready, and he stayed his hand.
“How does this even happen?” she asked. “What makes someone a…?”
“A shapeshifter? It’s how we’re born, Jennifer. We’re born like this. It runs in families. Some of us, the smart ones, say it’s in the genes. There’s supposed to be certain genes that are switched off in most people. In us, those genes are switched on instead. Our DNA is turned on different than yours, and we don’t have just one body. We have two.”
Jennifer sighed, marveling. “So it’s a genetic mutation, then. It’s not magic, not something supernatural. It’s more like science fiction.”
“Yeah, kind of.” He was gladdened slightly to hear her now speaking so rationally about it, showing such comprehension now when she was so afraid before.
They sat that way talking together on the park bench for a while. They talked about the times that each of them had wanted to call the other but hesitated and not gone through with it. Wesley told her that he understood her need to put some space between herself and the very shocking events of that morning.
If he were in her place, he said, he probably would have wanted the same thing. Jennifer told him that she’d realized the irony of serving him trout and that she knew what he must have meant about the way he’d had trout back home. Wesley could not help but laugh at that. Seeing him laugh made her smile. It was one of so many things about her young model/fitness trainer that had made Jennifer smile.
At length, Wesley turned serious again and said, “Jen, now that we’ve got everything out in the open that I should have told you before it happened…there’s something else I need to tell you.”
Sensing a more sober turn in their conversation again, Jennifer wondered what this new thing might be. Was he about to tell her that vampires were real as well? Or was there something else…?
Wesley began, “See…there was a reason I turned like that, in your bed while we were asleep. Ninety-nine percent of the time, we can control when and where we change. Ninety-nine percent of the time, we have to want to go into the other body for it to happen. We have to will it to happen. There’s just one time when we’re not really in control. And…that time is getting close for me.”
Jennifer’s brow creased with concern and dismay. She did not like what she was hearing now at all. “You mean you’re losing control of your…changing?”
Wesley nodded, seriously. “You see, we have what you might call a kind of cycle. It’s a long cycle. It’s not a monthly thing like werewolves in the movies. But it’s at this time, maybe every four or five years of a shifter’s life, that we can’t stop ourselves from going into the other body. It just happens. And it’s a time we all have to go through. It doesn’t hit all of us at the same time, but we all get it, starting when we hit our teen years. We shift involuntarily, and we have to stay the other way for maybe a couple of days. We call it the Calling Time, because it’s like a time when our other self is calling to us and wants us to stay that way.”
She watched and listened, mystified at what he was telling her, as he went on. “My Calling Time is coming, Jennifer. And you and me, we started getting into bed together right when it was getting close. I knew it was getting close, and I thought I could handle it. I thought I could just go out of town for a couple of days and go through the time, and then come back to you and everything would be okay. But all the sex you and me had together…it hit up against my cycle and threw me off. And that one morning, it just happened. I can stop it and shift back for now, but I’m getting to the time when I’m gonna shift and have to stay that way ’til the Calling Time is over.”
Now Jennifer was aghast—quietly so, because they were still in public, but her dismay and bewilderment were greater now than they had been since she’d found him lying morphed beside her. Eyes wide and jaws slack, she tried to sort out what she was hearing. “You’re going to change…into your other shape…and not be able to come out of it?” She looked away from him for the first time since this discussion had started. Once again, the world seemed to be slipping out from under her feet.
“Not for maybe a day, or two days at the most. That’s how long the deepest part of the Calling Time lasts. Then, after that, I should be able to turn human again and just pick up my life where I left off.”
Jennifer whipped her head around to face him again, not liking the implication of this part. “You should be…?”
Carefully, desperate not to frighten her all over again, Wesley explained, “Yeah, I should be. Almost every time, the Calling Time comes and goes and we can just get on with our human lives again. But there’s a small chance, Jen—a really small chance—of it being permanent. I’ve been through it before and been all right. But in rare cases, someone goes into the other body when their time comes…and they don’t come back.”
Jennifer’s face fell. Her mind reeled, and the shock of the whole thing made her turn numb. She turned away and buried her face in her hands. “Oh my God,” she gasped. “Oh, Wesley…oh my God…”
Now he could not help but reach out for her. He moved closer to her on the bench and gently put one arm around her. “Jen, it’s rare. And like I said, I’ve been through it before and been okay. I just…have to go away for a while, soon. I have to go back to Osborn Wood, where there’s a community of Ursans, of bear people, who know what I’m going through. There’ll be others there having their Calling Time, too. And my parents will be there for me. I’ll go back to Osborn Wood, and I’ll shift and go out into the forest for a little while, no more than a couple of days. Then I’ll be back.”
She took her hands from her face and gazed over at him, seeking his sincerity. “You’re absolutely certain that you won’t become the bear again and go into the forest forever? Wesley, do you really know this?”
“I’ve been through it before, Jen, like I said. And I’m here now. I know I can make it back again. I can do it. Almost everybody does it, every time.”
Jennifer set her jaw, bravely. “Almost everybody.”
“I will, Jen,” he said, daring to give her shoulder a little squeeze. “There’s something in this life that I wanna be here for. And I’ll make it back.”
She sighed heavily. The handsomeness, the sweetness, and the goodness on the young man’s face eased her fears somewhat. She did not lose her fears entirely, but somehow they became a little more tolerable.
“Jennifer,” said Wesley, “I said last night I still want you. I said I want you more than ever. And I do. I want you so much, Jen. I want to go back to the penthouse and climb into bed with you, to be in and out o
f you and show you how you make me feel.” He dared to touch her knee with his other hand. “It doesn’t matter what I am or what I’m gonna go through or any of that, Jen. None of that touches how I feel when we’re in bed. Please, Jen—please, can’t we go back to your place right now? I’ve missed you, and I wanna do it so bad. Please?”
Hearing the plea of a young lad’s desire, Jennifer was as powerless against her own feelings as Wesley was against his Calling Time. And yet…
She had to ask: “You’re not going to go through any more spontaneous changes, are you? Because I can understand, in a way, the facts of all of this, but…”
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