My decision made dinner a little difficult. Using my teeth and a strategically placed paw I managed to get the outer pocket of my duffle bag open and tear through a packet of beef jerky, eating the whole thing. There were another three bags in there along with a summer sausage, but I got the feeling that Karl was out getting his own food.
Less than an hour later I heard the crash of something large moving through the trees, and heard the low grumble of a big bear. I felt the fur rise in a line along my back and neck, my lip curling to reveal fangs, but then I lifted my nose to the air and realized the grizzly lumbering into the clearing was Karl.
Even recognizing his smell, I still braced myself, adrenaline flying through my veins. He was huge. Bigger than a polar bear huge. Karl’s grizzly form was at least ten feet long and six feet at the shoulder. Yeah. As a bear, he would be more than twice my height standing upright. He had to have weighed over a thousand pounds. Brown bears came in a variety of shades and markings, but Karl was distinct. He was blond, his gold fur deepening to brown on his lower legs and paws. And those paws were huge with claws as long as my human hand. He was enormous, powerful, his jaws big enough to crush my head. And in those jaws was a fish…a fish he deposited at my feet.
Uhhh, this was awkward. Was I supposed to eat this? I didn’t know much about grizzlies, but I tended to cook my food first. Maybe I could pretend it was sashimi—sashimi that had been carried around in a bear’s mouth for who-knows-how-long, and hadn’t been gutted, cleaned, or filleted. I was a dominant wolf, but I wasn’t a caveman…or cavewoman.
Karl made a huff noise and sat on his big furry rump, looking at me with brown bear-eyes that still had those familiar gold glints. I reached over and patted the empty beef jerky bag trying to communicate that I’d already eaten.
He still stared at me, waiting.
The things I do for sex. Closing my eyes, I took a tentative bite of the fish, trying not to gag. The skin was rough, the scales sharp, and the rubbery bones poked my gums as I chewed. The meat wasn’t horrible, though. It was fresh, tangy, but very, very fishy.
One bite was it. I stared down at the fish, but try as I may I couldn’t manage to choke down any more of this. I looked up to meet Karl’s intense gaze and flattened my ears, trying for a cute puppy expression. His furry eyebrows shot up.
Seriously? I hadn’t seen him eat any fish. For all I knew he was totally pranking me right now. Come next month’s barbeque there would be all sorts of stories about how he got Sabrina to eat a raw fish.
Yes, he was serious. One courtesy bite should have been enough, but evidently I was required by some bear etiquette to continue, so I ate another bite, gagging and choking as I forced it down. I couldn’t do this, I just couldn’t. Maybe I was a wimp, but the next bite was going to either get me into guts or head, and I just wasn’t going there.
Karl huffed then nudged me aside, nearly knocking me over. Then he snapped up the remains of the fish, crunched it with those massive jaws, and gulped it down.
I was so going to puke. Karl the human was smoking hot. Karl the grizzly was scary, and more animal in his bear form than I was in my wolf form. I dug into a second bag of jerky, just to get the taste of raw fish out of my mouth, and shared some with Karl. He was warm and I had every intention on snuggling up with him tonight. Better for the pair of us to have jerky breath than fish breath.
Then we curled up together underneath a tree, my muzzle against his shoulder, feeling the breath rise and fall in his chest, his scent filling my nose with clove, pine, and fur. There was something inside me that wouldn’t settle being near him like this, a deep rooted instinct that was reluctant to trust him. Because he was a grizzly shifter? Because he was so darned huge? Because he’d crunched up a raw fish whole? Or because those glittery gold flecks in his eyes let me see a glimpse of a Karl I didn’t understand—a shifter that seemed more beast than man. Outside of the incredible sex last summer, what did I really share in common with him?
Nothing, that’s what. Absolutely nothing. But that still didn’t tell me why his bear form made me wary, why the things I could overlook in Karl the human seemed right in front of my face when he was Karl the grizzly. Maybe I was imagining it all, blowing our difference out of proportion and giving him a darkness that in reality wasn’t there. Maybe it was a day of scenting a rogue in the woods that had me on edge. Wild man didn’t mean amoral psychopath serial killer. I’d had sex with this man—a whole lot of sex. Rough sex, but nothing shifters would find disturbing. If I trusted him enough to screw him all night long, then surely I trusted him enough to sleep next to him.
I pushed away the worry. I soothed the prickling along my back. I forced my eyes to close and my mind to drift into peaceful sleep. But as I floated into slumber, all I could see was gold flecks of light in hazel irises—gold flecks that hid something very dark.
Chapter Two
I awoke to find my muzzle resting on skin, long fingers curled tightly into the ruff around my neck. Flesh instead of fur, but Karl’s scent was still the same wild spice-and-pine as it had been when he was a bear. When had he changed? How had I slept so soundly that I hadn’t awoken to either a bear moving out from underneath me or shifting form?
“Ready for some breakfast?” His voice was deep and raspy, his fingers loosening to stroke along my fur.
Breakfast. I remembered the taste of the raw fish and shuddered.
He chuckled. “Such a princess. I can gather some berries, but I’m guessing you’d rather have that log of cooked meat in your duffle?”
The summer sausage. My mouth watered at the thought.
“Here. Since I’ve got hands at the moment and you don’t.” He took the meat from my bag and flicked open a knife, cutting hunks off and feeding them to me by hand. A girl could get used to this.
And I realized that in the light of day, with Karl in his human form, the unease I’d felt last night had receded. It hadn’t completely vanished. It was still lurking deep inside me, dancing at the edges of my awareness, but at least I didn’t feel the urge to bristle up my fur and snarl.
Karl handed me another piece and I took it gently, giving his fingers a quick appreciative lick. The taste of his skin sent a bolt of need through me and I closed my eyes, remembering last summer when I’d tasted every inch of him.
“You’re making me hard, Brina,” he complained. “I don’t mind taking you like this, but if you couldn’t manage to eat a raw fish, I doubt you’d be able to enjoy me fucking you in your wolf form.”
Yeah, that crossed uncomfortably into bestiality in my mind. That it wouldn’t bother him the way it bothered me was yet another reminder of how far apart we were.
I nudged his hand, and when he cut off another piece and handed it to me, I pushed it with my nose up toward his face.
“Thanks.” He alternated feeding me and himself, then wrapped the remaining half of the sausage log back up and returned it to the bag. I trotted off into the woods a ways to take care of business, then returned, stretching and eyeing him with a questioning head tilt.
“Let’s go.” His voice was tight, his mouth a grim line as he looked out into the woods. Neither one of us wanted to be doing this, but we couldn’t let a rogue run free. I dropped my nose to the ground and picked up the scent, leading the way. Within a few hours the smell of blood hit my nose and I broke into a fast jog, slowing as the scent grew overwhelmingly strong.
“Brina, slow down,” Karl hissed behind me. I dropped to a trot, not wanting to burst in upon a rogue grizzly feeding.
We didn’t find the rogue in the clearing up ahead with smashed brush and gouged trees, but we did find a dead bear—a wild grizzly bear, not a shifter.
I skidded to a stop, staring open-mouthed at the slaughter. Wild bears fought over territory, but seldom to the death, and never with this level of carnage. The non-shifter bear would have conceded the fight and run for it long before he’d lost his life. Which mean the shifter hadn’t allowed him to run. Instead of reacting
defensively, then letting the wild bear retreat, he’d held him there, forced him to fight to the death, then mauled him.
Eaten him.
Bile rose in my throat. I was an omnivore. I didn’t have anything against hunting. Actually I enjoyed a good hunt myself, and the entire pack benefited from the meat from our kills. This wasn’t a hunt; this was a murder. And to eat the bear raw, in the field… I suddenly had an image of that fish from last night, of Karl crunching the whole thing down. Maybe this was a bear shifter thing? Maybe I shouldn’t be such a bigot, quick to judge others by my ways. Maybe I shouldn’t be such a princess.
Karl walked past me, his hand brushing the fur along my back. “This bear didn’t have to die.” He carefully turned the body, examining the bite wounds, gouges from claws, and the chunks of missing flesh. “I’d hoped we were wrong, but this is truly a rogue we’re tracking.”
I nodded, sniffing the body to get a better lock on the rogue shifter’s scent. That’s when I noticed it. On the wild bear’s claws was blood, and that blood held a cloying scent that made my lip curl in revulsion. I’d never smelled anything like it—hot melted plastic and rotted bananas was the closest I could come to a comparison.
Karl did the same thing, frowning as he touched the blood on the claws and rubbed it between two fingers. “What the hell is that?”
I shrugged. Karl dropped my duffle onto a clean spot of ground and pulled out a plastic bag, carefully wiping the blood onto a napkin and sealing it up. Good idea. I had a pretty amazing scent memory, but it would be good to have a strong sample just in case this trail went cold and we needed to expand our search outward.
That done, Karl shouldered the bag and I once again put my nose to the ground, feeling bad about leaving the bear carcass behind, but knowing that the wildlife in the area would make short work of it and appreciate the easy dinner.
The shifter had picked up his pace after the kill, not bothering with stealth as he tore through brush and saplings off the existing animal track. It slowed me down to have to struggle through brambles and thick grasses, but I managed. Karl had a more difficult time on two legs, carrying the duffle, and he fell farther behind as I pressed on ahead. After the rogue’s meandering, practically staggering-around-the-landscape trail, this was straight, direct. Had killing the wild bear given him a return to some sanity? Was his den somewhere ahead and he just wanted to get home? I didn’t know why, but this rogue seemed to suddenly be moving with purpose and speed toward something.
The sun was dipping low on the horizon and my stomach was growling when I hit pay dirt. Fresh scent. The shifter was ahead, and by my nose he was only a half-mile away. I paused, waiting for Karl to catch up. He must have fallen farther behind than I’d realized because I could no longer hear him tearing through the woods like an elephant, cursing each time some bramble snagged the leg of his jeans. I held silent, waiting, because there was no way I was going to confront this crazy shifter on my own, especially after I’d seen what he’d done to that grizzly.
Then I heard a gunshot and a scream—a human scream. It was the type of scream that someone could have heard a half-mile away with or without shifter auditory senses. I yipped for Karl then ran, not caring about the noise I was making or that the airflow would bring my scent to the rogue. There was a human out here in the middle of nowhere, alone with a rogue shifter who had killed five humans and torn a wild grizzly to bits. If I didn’t get there in time, this person would wind up dead as well. Actually even if I did get there in time, they might not survive. Karl, hustle your furry ass up.
I raced into the clearing, taking the situation in with a glance and throwing myself between the human and the rogue. The human was holding a pistol. The shifter had a bloom of red on his chest. I sent up a quick prayer that the human wouldn’t shoot me, then squared off against the grizzly, and snarled.
He’d attack. And I’d lose without Karl to back me up. The only chance I had was to keep alive and keep this guy occupied until Karl had time to shift into his more lethal animal form. That could take twenty minutes. It’s not like I had a choice, though. I couldn’t stand by and watch this human get mauled while Karl changed form.
The shifter hesitated, recognition sweeping across his glazed eyes as he realized I wasn’t a wild wolf. It made me hesitate too. A true rogue would have just killed anything in its way, but it seemed like this guy was fighting against it.
There was another gunshot. I winced at the deafening sound so close, expecting the pain of a bullet tearing through me, but the hiker had shot the bear again, another splotch of red spreading on his shoulder. The bear roared and charged, leaving me no time to consider strategy or do more than give a quick howl to warn Karl.
Ducking low, I danced to the side, sinking my teeth into the bear’s lower leg then spinning out of reach. He whirled on me and swung with his right, claws barely missing my shoulder as I hopped back. Before he had time to swing with the other paw, I’d darted in for another solid bite, then danced away. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the human back out of the clearing and take off into a run. Good. It was never wise to show your back and run from a predator, but the rogue’s focus was on me, and I’d fight with more concentration if I knew the hiker was safely away.
The shifter gave up the free use of his front paws and dropped from his upright position. Not that I would have tried to go for his exposed belly and risk being wrapped tight into a crushing grasp, but he’d been less stable on two legs than four. Now he’d have less reach, but he’d have those jaws in position to bite down on my back and snap my spine, and he’d be faster and quicker to maneuver like this.
I hopped back, ducking and darting as I evaded his attack. Seeing an opening I dove in to bite his muzzle then jumped back. I moved a hair too slow and a giant paw slammed into my ribs. Claws dug deep furrows and the force of the blow lifted me clear off my feet and flung me ten feet away where I crashed into the trunk of a tree. Down I went and stayed, winded, feeling the wetness of blood seeping from the gashes in my side. Five seconds. That’s all it had taken for this rogue to take me out. Five seconds wasn’t long enough for Karl to change form and get here, or for the human to be a safe distance away. I’d failed.
And I couldn’t fail. Not when so much depended on me to keep going. Struggling upright, I ignored the pain and snarled. I was too hurt to do my dart-in-and-out routine. I was going to go for the jugular and hope I could pierce the bear’s throat before he crushed me. The grizzly charged and felt a stab of shame for not being able to hold my own against this rogue for less than a minute.
I leapt on him, my jaws wide as I sank them through a thick ruff of fur. Powerful arms wrapped around me, pressing my ribs. I heard a crack, then something hit the grizzly with the force of a wrecking ball spinning him away from me. I dropped to the ground, my mouth full of fur, and I shook my head, struggling to stand and attack once more.
A roar shook the trees. My eyes widened to see two bears rolling across the clearing. When the tangle of fur separated I saw Karl. Or not-Karl. If I hadn’t caught his familiar scent, I wouldn’t have even recognized him. He’d been an oversized grizzly yesterday when he’d come back with the fish, but this time he was something else.
Fighting the rogue was an animal of legend, an animal I’d only seen in books and plaster bone-casts in museums. The bear facing off against the rogue was some prehistoric monster. He was double the size of the massive grizzly he’d been yesterday, weighing close to two thousand pounds, and at the shoulder he was about seven and a half feet. On two legs, the guy had to be close to fifteen feet tall. He was monstrous. He was terrifying. The same fur darkened on his lower legs and paws, but those legs were thick as tree trunks. Claws ripped chunks from the earth as he dug in. The rogue stared at him, eyes glittering red, then he roared.
Karl opened his mouth wide and returned the threat. As he bellowed, lips curled back to reveal savagely huge fangs. With no more than that quick warning he was on the grizzly, tearing, biting, and sl
ashing.
As a smaller animal, my technique had been to bite-and-run. It was a pack method of bringing down larger animals and brutally effective in a group hunt. Solo, when the intent was to actually take down an animal, it wasn’t as effective. Given time and enough maneuverability, I could possibly have worn the grizzly down enough to get in a killing bite, but the odds were stacked against a lone wolf in this fight.
Karl had better odds—far better odds. In his huge form he had the advantage of greater mass compared to his opponent, his only disadvantages were lesser speed and, strangely enough, not as long of a reach.
They came together with a crash, grappling as necks twisted and teeth snapped. Both bears sank their claws deep into the other’s back, holding tight. The rogue bit down on Karl’s shoulder, blood staining the dark blond fur a bright red.
They spun, giving me a chance to see Karl’s face. There was a huge grin stretching his mouth—not a grimace of pain but a smile. His eyes had lost everything remotely bear-like, or even shifter-like, his irises an unworldly glowing gold.
He was enjoying himself. He was purposely holding back, letting the rogue bite deep into his shoulder because he liked it. We all got stoked from the adrenaline of the hunt, of a fight, but this was beyond that. Karl was lost in a strange kind of bloodlust where the joy of inflicting pain, of killing was all wrapped up with a very intense joy of his own pain.
I’d been crouched, watching and waiting for an opportunity to assist by hamstringing the rogue or attempting to distract him with small bites, but Karl’s expression froze me in place.
His mouth opened wide, coming down on the top of the rogue’s head, then he bit. I heard a crack of bone. The rogue yanked his claws from Karl, pulled his fangs from the other bear’s shoulder, and shoved, trying to push the bigger bear away.
My Paranormal Valentine: A Paranormal Romance Box Set Page 45
