And now Graham was sitting by the side of Caballo Lake, just a few hundred yards away from the cabin where Fergus had now taken over the entire comforter and was probably slobbering all over the deluxe pillows Graham had treated himself to after his last paycheck and a stop at the IKEA in Albuquerque.
But Graham didn’t particularly mind the slobbering. It was his sleeplessness that was getting to him, or, more accurately, the cause of it. He hadn’t always been like this, only sleeping a few hours a night and often wandering around like a zombie in search of brains.
According to his mom, he’d slept through the night at three weeks old and had continued to do so happily, until a few months before his eighth birthday. Until his older sister, Sarah, had been kidnapped by the infamous anti-werebear gang, Anti-Ursa. They’d taken Sarah, who was only fifteen at the time, while Graham and his mom were just down the road getting groceries. They’d only been gone twenty minutes, just to get milk and cheese for the pasta dish their mom wanted to make later that night, but that had been more than enough time for Anti-Ursa to break into the house and smuggle Sarah out of the safety of her light-blue room, where Graham and his mom had left her finishing her art homework.
Despite an extensive search by the local police force that had included everything from search helicopters to specialized divers to check the lake near their house, Sarah hadn’t turned up. Not until three years and a day later, when a hiker had seen a body floating in this river. Sarah’s body. And just like that, the same day, she was pronounced officially dead. The mystery was over. On her back, the words “Down with Shifters” were written out in the smooth stones that littered the riverbank, a tell that let the police know the murder could have only been carried out by Anti-Ursa, who used the phrase as their calling card for every atrocity they committed.
And this particular morning, such as it was, was the anniversary of Sarah’s death, or at least, the anniversary of the police finding her body and the medical examiner officially declaring her dead. Twenty years had passed, but not a day went by when Graham didn’t miss his older sister with every fiber of his being.
That event had changed the whole trajectory of his life. Before that, Graham had planned, in his little eight-year-old imagination, on being an astronaut. He’d read all the books on it, even made a special trip with his mom to visit NASA headquarters for his seventh birthday. But after Sarah died, Graham’s dreams suddenly became all about protecting his kind from similar atrocities. And the best way he knew how to do that was by patrolling the very lake his sister’s body had been dumped into, the lake where since her death, the notorious Anti-Ursa group had left four more of its victims. Sarah hadn’t been the first bear to be abducted and subsequently murdered by the group, but if Graham had anything to do with it, she would be one of the last.
It had taken him years of outdoor skills training, a bachelor’s degree in park administration, and two previous posts in other state parks to get him the job at Caballo Lake, but now that Graham had made the lake his home, it was where he would stay, until he had defeated every last member of that infernal gang and burned them and their legacy to the ground.
Graham had set up cameras all along the river to track any movement, and though he hadn’t found anything so far, he was confident that one day soon, he would catch those bastards in the act and finally, finally get his revenge.
Keeping his eye on the lake, Graham unconsciously rubbed at the small tattoo gracing his right collarbone. It was of the constellation, Ursa Major, the Great She-Bear. Graham’s mom had the same one on her wrist, and Sarah’s best friend Kaylee had gotten hers on her hip. It and the presence of Anti-Ursa on the Internet, at their annual marches, on their vitriolic Twitter account, were a constant reminder to all werebears of just how dangerous it was to be themselves.
Except out here. At the lake, at this time of the morning, it usually was easy for Graham to forget all that. At three in the morning, with the moon’s reflection lighting up the lake, and the trees swaying gently in the spring breeze, it was easy for Graham to forget that this had been the sight of so much atrocity. It was easy for him to just enjoy the scenery, to feel, for a few minutes, that he had a normal life. That he was just a park ranger, living out in nature with his dogs and his books and his comfy bed. No danger, no dead family members, no animal trapped inside him. Except…
Graham sat up straighter, his nose tilted toward the sky as he breathed in deeply, sucking the night air into his lungs. It couldn’t be. Could it?
Standing up, Graham looked all around him but saw nothing. His night vision was excellent, but no shadows were lurking in the trees, no large, furry shapes on the river... In the three years he’d worked as a ranger here, he’d caught a whiff of a brown bear only once, and he’d handled that situation quicker than lightning. But now, suddenly, it was all he could smell. That musky scent of sweat and sun-caked into fur, along with lake water and…coconuts? What the hell?
Graham knew that some of the Anti-Ursa group were actually bear shifters themselves, and as far as hate groups go—they often vehemently opposed the very things they were terrified to admit to being. Perhaps they were close by. Graham’s hackles rose just thinking about them being close, but then again, isn’t that what he wanted? To finally trap them?
Tiptoeing carefully over the dead leaves and broken branches lining the way back to the cabin, Graham quietly opened the door, and ignoring a snoring Fergus, got his supplies. A tranquilizer gun, a cloth bag, and rope. Everything he needed to subdue an Anti-Ursa member and carry them to the police station.
As he stepped back outside and shut the door behind him, Graham found the scent just as overpowering. He started following the scent, doing so almost unconsciously, the bear in him taking over even as he stayed in his human form, fleece jacket covering a University of Texas Longhorns t-shirt, and his strong, lean legs clad in a ratty pair of old sweatpants.
Graham’s sniffing had him following the paths that connected all the camping sites together, and as he continued along the crushed earth covered by forest detritus, he found himself nearly overwhelmed by the scent. With every step he took, the scent only grew stronger, both the bear and coconut elements. It was practically blinding him it was so strong, and Graham was so lost in the aroma that by the time he’d gotten to the campsite, he was barely relying on his vision at all, focusing all his attention on his nose. Which is how he didn’t realize he was slamming into a body until it was too late.
“Ow!” a deep female voice said from below him. Graham hadn’t been using a flashlight, had just been relying on his night vision, but now he fished out of his pocket the industrial-strength regulation flashlight that all rangers carry and shined it on the ground below him, his body rushing with adrenaline and tensed for battle.
He relaxed slightly when he realized that below him, whitewashed by the flashlight beam, sat a young woman, no older than 25, rubbing her knee with one hand, and with the other, she tried to shield herself from the glare of the beam. Anti-Ursa was 95% men—go figure, it was always the male of the species ruining things for everyone else—so Graham doubted this woman was part of the gang. She also wasn’t wearing the hood they donned when they were committing crimes.
Graham’s shoulders lowered, and his senses began to return to normal again, though the woman’s scent was still overwhelming him. She must be a werebear, he thought to himself. It was the only explanation.
“Could you put that down? You’re blinding me!” she whisper-shouted, and Graham was too shocked by the strength and rasp of her voice to do anything but obey. She sounded very, very angry. He lowered the light until it rested on the rock beside her.
“Thank you,” she said, looking at him indignantly as she kept rubbing at her knee. Graham could see a small tear in her fleece tights, a break in the skin that was bleeding slightly. Nothing more than a flesh wound, but it looked like she’d scratched it on the rock, and he could see bits of gravel stuck in the cut. He winced, knowing how much tha
t must hurt.
“Sorry about that. I didn’t see you. Are you okay?” Graham asked, kneeling down and trying to get a better look at the cut. He didn’t miss the way the woman sniffed him, her eyes momentarily widening in shock before she schooled her features back into an angry mask.
“No, I’m not okay! You shoved me to the ground, and I’ve skinned my knee!” she whispered, managed to imbue her words with vitriol despite the low volume. It worked. She was very, very intimidating, not something Graham was used to in a female.
“I have a first aid kit back at my hut if you need it. Disinfectant, Band-Aids, the whole shebang,” he said, immediately regretting the use of the word “shebang,” a word that no one remotely cool had ever uttered.
“What hut? Are you trying to lure me back to your lair to kill me? Because I’ll have you know, I might look small, but I’ve been attending Barry’s Bootcamp for three years now, and my thighs are so strong I could squeeze your head right off your shoulders,” the woman spat as she wobbled to a standing position and put her hands on her hips. She was short, the top of her head barely reaching Graham’s chest, with dark curly brown hair woven through with shocks of rose pink that somehow almost looked natural. Graham could tell that even though her body was in head to toe fleece, she was curvy and voluptuous in all the right places. Graham tried not to think about how nice it would feel to have her warm, curvy thighs wrapped around his neck, and how that position would facilitate other activities of a more sexual nature because the very idea made him want to growl territorially. She was exactly his type, down to the letter, but that was currently beside the point. He needed to stay on topic.
“I’m not trying to kill you. I’m a park ranger,” he said, realizing as he took another deep breath that the coconut scent he’d smelled earlier was coming from the woman’s beautiful hair, which shone almost black and purple in the moonlight shining above them.
“Oh really? Then show me your I.D.,” she said, as though that was a volley he couldn’t possibly catch. But Graham was always prepared. He might have been having a pre-dawn wander, but he took his badge with him wherever he went, even on hikes and runs when there was little to no chance he would run into a tourist or one of his superiors. He fished the badge out from the pocket of his sweatpants, cringing a little when his hand brushed against his budding erection and thrust the badge out to the woman, who took it with a smirk still on her face.
That smirk immediately faded when she realized that Graham was a legitimate employee of the U.S. National Park Services and had been since 2011.
Sighing, she handed the badge back and crossed her arms over her chest, which did delicious things to her cleavage that made Graham’s cock harden to a level of stiffness he wasn’t sure he’d ever be able to relieve using just his own hand.
“Okay. So, you’re a ranger. Explain to me why you’re out in the middle of the night. I bet that’s not a normal patrolling hour, is it?”
“No. It isn’t,” Graham said, mirroring her position with his arms crossed over his chest. He was mostly doing it because there was a chill in the air, but it also made him look authoritative, which he needed, because inside he was practically ready to fall to this woman’s feet and worship her like the ursine queen she was.
“But are you still willing and able to help a citizen in need?” she asked, her tone suddenly become a little less indignant and a bit more light and sultry. Graham didn’t mind the transition one bit. His cock didn’t either.
“Sure. Want me to go get that first aid kit?” he asked, tamping down the fantasy in his head of carrying her in his arms back to his hut, where they would bond over their shared ursine natures and then have magnificent sex on his rarely-used wooden desk.
The woman shook her head. “No. I want you to shift.”
Chapter 3
“Forgive me for asking such a ridiculous question, but how exactly would my shifting help you?” Graham asked. He glossed over the fact that she knew he was a bear; it went without saying that they could both detect their kind when they smelled it. She smelled like bear and coconuts, and he probably smelled like bear and Fergus. Out of the two of them, Graham figured her scent was probably the preferable one.
“Because I am on a camping trip with my best friend,” the woman said, jerking her thumb toward the tent behind her, “who is fast asleep right now, and we desperately, desperately need to leave. Like, so bad. I nearly shifted in front of her earlier when I smelled you, and I can’t afford for that to actually happen,” she said, her voice laced with anxiety.
“Okay…but how would my shifting help you out of the camping trip? Can’t you just tell her you need to leave? I’d be happy to help you two navigate in the dark, if need be,” Graham said, though he wished it could just be him and this woman in the dark, preferably the dark of his bedroom.
The woman shook her head. “She won’t let me leave for anything other than fatal emergencies. She’s convinced we need to stay here and ‘commune with nature,’ but I can’t do that. Not with her around. I’m too afraid I’ll hurt her. Please, you have to help me!” the woman said, her hands laced in front of her in supplication.
Graham was tempted to comply, so tempted, especially with the way she was looking at him like she was Guinevere to his knight-in-shining-armor Lancelot, but he shook his head. “I’m sorry, but no. I will happily help you out of here some other way, but it goes against my principles to do what you’re asking,” Graham said, trying to convey with his voice how serious he was. “The point of our kind is to learn to get along with humans, not scare the shit out of them. Besides, do you know how terrifying it is to have a bear sniffing around your tent? Trust me, I’ve heard the screams of campers when a raccoon stops by, and that’s just a tiny, tiny mammal. Bears, in case you hadn’t realized, are big,” Graham said, shaking his head when he remembered the screeches that had reverberated through the park after that pest snuck into that Girl Scout troop’s tent. What a nightmare that had been.
The woman’s shoulders slumped down. “I just don’t know what to do. I can’t be here, not if you’re in the same park. I haven’t been around my kind in so long that whenever I get the faintest hint of bear, every molecule in my body wants to shift.”
“What do you mean, you haven’t been around our kind in so long? You don’t have an adopted clan?” Graham asked, surprised. He thought every one of their kind had some sort of ad-hoc community by now. He’d met his in college, and he still counted Joel and his two roommates as his best friends. They were the only people who truly understood him, and he wouldn’t have been able to get through his degree, let alone years of ranger training and the isolation of his job, without their WhatsApp group and weekly Skype calls.
The woman shifted uncomfortably. “Mine is a slightly special situation,” she said, no longer looking Graham in the eyes.
“What do you mean, ‘special situation?’” he asked.
Huffing out a breath, the woman said in a quick stream of words that took Graham minutes to decipher, “I was the bear who shifted in the middle of that Whole Foods in New York City seven years ago, and every time I tried finding a clan after that, none of them would take me because they were too afraid of the attention I would draw. Eventually, I gave up and changed my name and moved out here, and I spend most of my time in my apartment. I don’t go outside much, I don’t tell anyone I’m a bear, and I’m basically living a double life.”
After Graham had processed what she said, it all made sense. She was Mary Barnes, the shifter literally every major newspaper, magazine, and website had written about when she spontaneously shifted in the middle of the nation’s most popular grocery store, knocking down an artful display of freshly baked cookies and cakes in the process. Her shift had sparked weeks of debate on TV about whether shifters of all kinds were too dangerous to integrate fully into society. Anti-shifter groups, including Anti-Ursa, had suggested the U.S. government fund concentration camps to rid the country of what they called “godless m
onsters.” It had been a difficult time for the country’s were-shifters, but, Graham imagined, none more so than Mary herself.
“So, you’re Mary?” he asked eventually.
The woman shook her head. “I legally changed my name to Molly O’Brien after all the news coverage had died down. At the time, it was my pen name, so it was easy to remember, and I didn’t feel weird being referred to as it.”
“Pen name? You’re a writer?” Graham asked. He tried to keep his tone purposefully light to communicate that he didn’t hate her, wasn’t mad at her, and in fact, thought she was extremely brave and that the way she had been treated was horrific. He doubted he got most of that across, but she seemed to relax slightly, so at least she didn’t think he hated her.
“Yup. I write romance. Have done since just after I graduated college. Didn’t know what to do with my English degree and I’d always loved romance, so I decided to try my hand at it. I was lucky—it’s much harder to get traditionally published now, but back then there weren’t many paranormal romance writers out there, so I kind of cornered the market a bit,” she said, sitting down on the road near Graham and looking at the cut on her knee.
Graham took a seat a foot away from her, wanting to give her some space, but he turned toward her and gestured at the wound. “Does that hurt? You sure you don’t need me to clean it for you?”
Molly shook her head. “No, it’s okay. You know shifters. We heal fast. By tomorrow it’ll be a scab.”
“Yeah. One of the benefits of being a werebear. Sometimes it feels like it’s the only one,” Graham said, laughing softly and picking at the peeling label on the pocket of his sweatpants.
The Baby Shift- New Mexico Page 2
