Chapter Thirteen: Gunnar

 

 

Gunnar ran through the dark woods, his bear's legs pumping in time with the beating of his powerful heart, following the traces of Nils's scent.

He shouldn't have just run off without saying anything to Melody; he knew that. But every moment he waited was a moment when Nils was getting farther away. And, anyway, the only thing he'd get if he explained what he had in mind was endless arguments. Arguments from Melody's brother and friends, who didn't trust him; arguments from Melody, who would worry about him.

No, Nils was his problem to deal with. That had always been true, ever since they were young.

Last time, he'd given Nils the benefit of the doubt. And he'd gone to prison for it. This time, he had people to protect. Gunnar intended to put his own flesh and fur, claws and teeth, between Melody and Nils. If his brother threatened one hair on her head, one scale on her body—and a threat to her family might as well be a threat to Melody herself; he knew that by now—

Nils was going to regret the day he messed with the Keegan family.

Gunnar's bear didn't seem to care; his bear was simply thrilled to be out and running, relishing the smells and sounds of the dark forest. Even before prison, as an urban bear, he'd rarely gotten to enjoy this kind of freedom. He wished he could just enjoy it, without the human side of him being acutely distracted by the confrontation to come.

As he pursued the fresh, hot trail of Nils's familiar scent deeper into the woods, he began to cross other, older trails. Older by days, older by weeks—Nils must have been living back here since he'd escaped prison. Which, now that Gunnar thought about it, made all the sense in the world. They had been thinking in human terms, as if Nils were an ordinary escaped convict, making lists of his old contacts and known bolt holes and ways that he might try to get out of the country. Even Gunnar had been thinking that way.

But Nils didn't have to do any of that. All he had to do was shift into a bear, and he could live in the mountains indefinitely. A polar bear this far south was pretty conspicuous, but he had a human mind to drive his bear's habits. He could stay out of sight, feed himself by hunting, and live comfortably off the land as long as he wanted.

Gunnar suspected he might have thought of it earlier if he hadn't spent his entire life in the city. But Nils hadn't. Nils had been all over the world, working as a gun for hire on nearly every continent. He had plenty of experience at surviving in the wilderness, as a bear or a human.

And if you'd just taken off and decided to make your home in a different forest, you could have lived there for years, with no one guessing a thing, Gunnar thought angrily in his brother's direction.

But no, Nils had to come back seeking revenge on the people who'd put him in prison and their mates. And now, Gunnar and Nils were headed toward a clash that had probably been coming for a long time, maybe their entire lives.

As Gunnar ran, his childhood memories kept pace with him, surfacing in his mind in bright flashes. He remembered good times and bad ones. Memories of Nils mercilessly bullying him. Nils showing him how to hotwire his first car. Nils making sure there were groceries in the house, or the two of them playing together as small children ...

There had been a lot of childhood cruelty that Nils had made sure their mother never saw: stealing or breaking Gunnar's toys, pushing him down in the sandbox. But there had also been times when they played together happily, wrestling and laughing as little children do. And Gunnar truly believed that all the things Nils had taught him as a teenager—how to shoplift and steal cars, how to forge rent checks—had been well intentioned, if terribly misguided. Nils had believed that it was a harsh, cruel world out there, and everything he had taught Gunnar were survival skills for the world as Nils thought it was.

"You have to get them before they get you," he'd said.

And: "All we've got is each other, kid. We have to look out for each other."

Bears couldn't weep, but Gunnar felt the ghostly prickle of tears in his eyes anyway. He wanted that brother back, the brother he'd glimpsed in those rare soft moments in between all the harshness and cruelty and anger ... the brother who, he now suspected, had never really existed except in his own childhood idolization of his adored older sibling. Certainly, Nils had not been that person for many years.

All we've got is each other.

But that wasn't true anymore, was it? Into the home-movie reel of childhood memories, something new began to intrude: memories of Melody. The softness of her hair, the warmth of her laugh, the sparkle in her gray eyes. The subtle strength as her fingers curled around his. The way she defended him against her family, and listened when he talked.

They had both misjudged each other in the beginning. Like most people, she hadn't been able to see past his bruiser looks and jail tattoos—but he was no better; he'd failed to see the strength underlying her soft-looking surface. She wouldn't hurt and abandon him like Nils had. This was a mate who would stand by him no matter what the world threw at them.

Gunnar slowed. Nils's scent was very fresh now. The trail had led him away from the hilly farmland around Autumn Grove into the mountains. It was possible one of the other shifters at the farmhouse might follow their scent the same way Gunnar had followed Nils's, but if so, they had a head start; they'd have at least a few minutes before anyone bothered them.

From the rocks ahead of him came a low growl. The wind brought him Nils's scent, fresh and strong.

Gunnar bristled as his bear surged inside him, wanting to fight. Unlike Gunnar's human mind, his bear wasn't restrained by memories of their childhood. His bear knew that Nils was a threat, not a fellow cub anymore, but another big boar bear to fight.

Gunnar shifted so he could speak. "Come out where I can see you. I know you're there."

Even as a human, his slightly-sharper-than-usual senses could pick up Nils's scent. There was a faint sliver of moon in the clear sky, just enough to lace Nils's white fur with silver as the other polar bear strolled into view, his muscles rippling beneath his shaggy hide.

Gunnar had forgotten how enormous Nils was. Scars from other fights slashed through Nils's pale coat, trophies of old fights won—and, Gunnar guessed, one fight lost, against Derek Ruger.

That was what Nils could not forgive. He might not even mind the prison sentence so much as losing a fight to another bear. He'd never been able to back down or walk away.

Are you any better? Gunnar asked himself.

He shook off the doubts. Unlike Nils, he hadn't chosen this fight. He was here to defend, not to attack.

"I went to prison because of you," he said quietly.

Nils shifted abruptly into his human form, huge and muscular. His hair was longer now than he'd kept it when Gunnar had known him, a tangled blond mess full of leaves, and he had several weeks' scruff of a beard. "Am I supposed to apologize?" His voice was rough from disuse.

"It'd be a start, yes."

"A start on what? Renewing our brotherly bonds?" Nils sneered. "You made it clear how you feel about me when you took their side and threw in with that bunch of cowards and mixed shifters down the hill."

"They're not your enemies."

"Everyone is the enemy! Didn't I teach you anything? The only person you can trust in this world is yourself. Take them out before they take you out. That's how it works."

Gunnar shook his head slowly. "That's not how most people are. That's just how you are. It doesn't have to be that way."

"Yeah? Well, if you believe in our brotherly unity so much, then join me." Nils grinned fiercely, his teeth flashing white. "We'll attack them together. Between the two of them, I bet we can take that bear and panther, even their dragon watchdog."

Gunnar recoiled in horror. "I'd rather die!"

"Then you will," Nils growled, his words distorting as he shifted.

Gunnar shifted too. He met the other bear with a clash that shook the trees.

They hadn't ever fought, truly fought. They'd wrestled as kids, but in the half-serious, half-playful way that brothers always fought. As a younger man, Gunnar had brawled with other large-predator shifters like himself, out back of shifter bars, but those fights had been nothing more than drunk, rowdy young men bristling at each other. He'd gotten some bruises and a few scars, nothing more serious. He'd gotten into some fights in prison, but always as a human, and always with the threat of the guards not far away.

This was a no-holds-barred, knock-down, drag-out bear fight. They snarled and tore at each other, slapped at each other with their huge paws, tried to wrestle the other to the ground to sink fangs into his throat. In some distant part of his mind, Gunnar didn't know what he'd actually do if he did get Nils down onto the ground. He couldn't see himself killing his brother except perhaps accidentally, in self-defense.

But Nils was giving him no chance to withdraw, no quarter. They roared and tore at each other. Gunnar tasted blood in his mouth, and felt the dragging pain of injuries sapping at him. And yet, there was something freeing about it—when was the last time he'd really been able to let his bear go like this, with no chance of anyone smaller or weaker getting hurt? Their heavy fur was like armor; even their roaring, unleashed bears did relatively little damage to each other.

But he could feel himself starting to tire. Nils was slowing too—but not as quickly. This would be the make-or-break point in the fight, when they both started to make mistakes. This was when a single moment of inattention could be fatal, when the fight might yet drag on for hours or be over in seconds.

With his bear's tunnel vision focused entirely on the fight, Gunnar hardly registered his surroundings until something huge slammed into both of them, knocking them apart.

Gunnar tumbled into a clump of brush. Panting, confused, he rolled over and pushed himself up on his front legs. Nils—his fur matted with blood, one eye twisted shut—was also picking himself up, growling in fury.

Melody's dragon thumped to the ground, wings outspread and hissing angrily. "What are you doing to my mate?" she demanded. The gold chain on her neck glinted as she tossed her head.

Gunnar shifted so he could talk, wiping blood out of his eyes. Exhaustion and pain hit him hard enough to nearly knock him down again, no longer cushioned by his bear's raw strength and pain tolerance. "Melody, be careful! He's fast." Her dragon was large, compared to a bear, but he was still terrified for her. Could she take on a thousand-pound killing machine, finely honed by training and designed by nature for one purpose only? Melody had the advantage of size, and she had wings, but she was a bookworm who rarely shifted. Fighting was Nils's trade.

Nils seemed to be thinking the same thing. He growled and tensed in what Gunnar recognized as preparation for a charge.

"I'm not afraid of him," Melody declared. "And my father is on his way. If you think you can fight one dragon, bear, I'd like to see you take on two—ahh!"

As Gunnar had tried to warn her, Nils was fast. But Melody was fast, too. She flowed gracefully aside, using her wings for assistance, and Nils's attempt to snap her slender neck with his paw instead glanced off her scales. One of his claws hooked the chain. It snapped, but not before the locket was crushed against her neck.

Melody's graceful retreat turned into a lurching stumble. Gunnar smelled a sharp, bitter scent that hadn't been there a moment before. Melody was shaking her head as if she was trying to shake something off. Nils looked equally confused, looking down at his paw with the chain tangled in his claws. He shook it to free it of the glittering gold links.

"Melody?" Gunnar said, struggling to his feet. "What's wrong?"

There was really something the matter with her. He thought at first that Nils had hurt her after all, but there was no blood on her silver scales. However, her hindquarters folded and she abruptly sat down, her wings drooping. She raised one forepaw to touch her neck, and then shifted, the great silver dragon-shape collapsing into a small human woman with her fingertips tentatively brushing her throat.

"Melody?" Gunnar said again.

She turned to look at him, her eyes huge and frightened. "Gunnar ..." she said faintly, and then collapsed.

He lurched toward her, forgetting his own pain in his fear. He had no idea what had happened, but something clearly had. When he fell to his knees beside her and gathered her into his arms, she was limp and cold to the touch, her breathing fast and shallow.

"What did you do?" he shouted at Nils.

Nils lowered his head and growled. He was readying for another charge. This time Gunnar didn't know how he was going to defend her, defend them; he had to shift back, but that meant abandoning Melody, suffering from unknown injuries that had taken her down faster than anything he'd ever seen.

But he couldn't do anything less than go down fighting. He prepared for a shift. Maybe he could wait until the last minute, shift and come up from underneath when Nils charged, and get the drop on him that way—

He didn't even get the chance to try. A dark shadow floated over them, blocking the stars, and a huge dragon crashed to the ground between them, raising a cloud of dust. Gunnar had thought Melody was big, but this dragon dwarfed her. A head as big as a minivan lowered ominously toward Nils, lips drawing back from teeth like a mouthful of swords.

There was no doubt who this was. Darius, Melody had said her father's name was. Right now, Gunnar didn't care if Darius planned to kill him or save him. The important thing was that Melody was dying in his arms, her rapid breathing growing fainter.

"There's something wrong with her!" he cried frantically.

Darius turned his head and inhaled, then jerked back, his nostrils flaring. "Dragonsbane," he rumbled, and turned to look down at Nils, who had flattened his ears and bared his teeth in a snarl. "You. You dare attack my daughter, my blood."

And, without waiting for a reply, he pounced.

There wasn't even the slightest chance of Nils's survival, not with a dragon that big and that furious after him. Gunnar cried out helplessly, but there was nothing he could do. He couldn't leave Melody, and anyway, he could see that even two of them together wouldn't have been a match for Darius at the height of his fighting rage; all he could have done was die along with his brother. He couldn't tell if Nils himself realized how badly he was outmatched, even at the end. As far as he could tell, his brother kept fighting right up until the last, when Darius's jaws closed over his neck and ended it with a snap.

Darius flung the body aside and whirled around. As the dragon strode toward Gunnar, who still held Melody in his arms, he shifted in mid-stride: one minute it was the huge gunmetal dragon, the next a tall man with silver-streaked dark hair and sharp, clear eyes that reminded Gunnar of a hawk.

"Wipe that stuff off her," Darius ordered sharply. He tore off his jacket and flung it at Gunnar. "I can't touch her until you do."

Gunnar hadn't even noticed there was anything on her, but liquid glistened in the hollow of her pale throat. He scrubbed at it with Darius's jacket. She was so terribly limp and still, her breathing so shallow—"What's doing this to her? Can you help her?"

"If I can get her back to my estate in time." Darius crouched beside her. "It's concentrated essence of dragonsbane. Lethal to our kind. Where did it come from? Did you know of it?"

"I've never heard of it." Gunnar refused to recoil from the menace in Darius's tone. "Whatever it was, she had it inside a necklace." He pointed to the ribbon of moon-touched gold in the churned-up soil. "That."

Darius took a stick and used it to poke at the necklace, as if investigating a venomous snake. He gave Melody another look, and Gunnar glimpsed the veiled anguish on his face. "She was wearing this?"

"Ever since I met her. At least since the first time I saw her with her neck bare." Talking about it helped distracted him from Melody's terrible stillness in his arms. He scrubbed vigorously at her neck, wishing he had water. "I thought it was a keepsake."

"It was," Darius murmured, "but not hers." He turned abruptly. "That should be enough. At least, it must be, if I have any hope of saving her. Give her to me."

Gunnar's bear snarled defensively. Only we can protect our mate! Human reasoning overruled it; if Melody had any chance, it was with someone who knew what had happened to her and how to fix it. Gunnar carefully transferred her into her father's arms, and for a moment they looked into each other's eyes, steel gray meeting clouded blue. They might not have anything at all in common, but the one thing they did have was the one thing that mattered: they both loved this woman, in their own ways.

"Can you take me with her?" Gunnar asked.

Darius shook his head. "I can fly faster alone. Anyway, that panther son of mine is on your trail. I saw him from the air; he'll be here soon."

With that he shifted, so deftly that Melody's hair hardly stirred as the human arms holding her became a dragon's front legs. Gunnar stepped back as Darius launched himself skyward with a tremendous downbeat of his massive wings.

Gunnar stood watching the dragon dwindle in the night sky. It almost felt as if he could feel his connection to Melody, like a silver chain binding them, stretching as the distance between them grew, but never breaking. Not even death could do that.

Hold on, love. Hold on.

A crashing in the brush announced Ben's arrival. The panther trotted out of the woods and paused, taking in the scene—Nils's body, the torn-up brush and other evidence of the fight, Darius's discarded jacket—with his cool, luminous golden stare before shifting back to his two-legged form. "So," he said laconically. His sharp gaze took in Gunnar's battered condition. "You need a hospital?"

Gunnar shook his head. "I'll heal." Wordlessly, he held out his hands, wrists together.

"And what's that for?"

"Handcuffs."

Ben spread out his arms. He was as naked as Gunnar. "Does it look like I have handcuffs on me?"

Gunnar might have smiled if he hadn't been so worried. If he wanted to escape, he knew, this was his chance. Ben didn't have weapons or a phone, and both his shifted and human forms were smaller than Gunnar's.

But he didn't have the slightest desire to do that. Instead, he crouched beside the broken necklace and picked it up carefully. The bitter smell was stronger this close. Turning it to the minimal light of the sliver-thin moon, he examined the twisted catch of the locket, the smashed pieces of whatever had been inside.

"What's that?" Ben asked, bending over his shoulder. Then he jerked away, coughing.

Gunnar waved him back. "You're part dragon, right? Better not touch this. It's poison to you guys."

Ben bent over, hands on his knees, through a violent coughing fit. "I'll say," he managed at last, stepping back. "That's dragonsbane, isn't it? Wait—" He sucked in a sharp breath and suppressed another cough. "Melody and Dad."

"Melody got it on her," Gunnar said heavily. He stared at the locket, not at Ben. "Your dad took her somewhere. Said he might be able to help her. She was still breathing, last I saw." His voice trailed away.

"If you had anything to do with this ..." The panther's growl underlay Ben's words.

"Not me."

"Your brother?"

Gunnar shook his head. "She had it on her. Melody."

"Wait." Ben sounded thoroughly puzzled. Gunnar looked up. "My sister was carrying around dragonsbane? It's lethal! No dragon would want to come within a mile of that stuff. Why?"

Gunnar lifted his shoulders in a brief shrug. "I don't know. Guess you don't either."

"I have no idea." Ben pointed to the discarded jacket. "Wrap it in that and leave it here. Derek can dispose of it later. With Tessa carrying a part-dragon child, I don't even want to risk getting it on me, let alone anywhere near her."

Gunnar nodded and obeyed. Meanwhile, Ben went over to inspect Nils's body. "Dad, I'm guessing?" he asked, bending over to examine the wounds.

"Yeah. He was pretty upset about Melody."

"He's not the only one."

The growl was back. Gunnar chose not to point out that Ben's panther probably wouldn't have lasted more than a few minutes against Nils's bear. It didn't matter now.

Nothing mattered, without Melody.

He stayed on his knees, staring at the coat-wrapped bundle, until a hand settled on his shoulder. Startled, he looked up at Ben.

"C'mon. Let's go." Ben prodded at him. "Probably easier to head back if we shift. I don't look forward to a naked hike in the woods, do you?"

"And then what?" It was strangely difficult to care about anything, knowing that Melody hovered on death's doorstep and there wasn't anything he could do about it. His brother was dead; he still couldn't wrap around it, couldn't sort out any of the things he was feeling. "Am I under arrest?"

"Not right now." Ben's voice was gentle. "After we get back to the farmhouse and get cleaned up, I'll take you up to Darius's place. I expect Tessa's going to want to be with Melody, anyway. Derek can handle things here." He glanced at the heap of immobile white fur that had been Nils. "Any requests for what you want done with your brother's body?"

Gunnar shuddered and shook his head.

"Since he died as a bear," Ben said, "there's no way to prove to the authorities that he's actually dead. I guess he'll just remain at large indefinitely. As for the body ... there'll be time to figure that out." He held out a hand. "Let's go."

Gunnar let Ben help him to his feet. Ben shifted, and Gunnar followed suit a moment later, the slim black panther and the big white bear.

If Melody survived, Ben was going to be his brother-in-law. It looked like Ben was starting to come to terms with that.

And if Melody didn't survive ...

Well, in that case, he didn't really care what happened to him, after.