Cyrus Kincaid took a deep breath of fresh morning air, filling his lungs to capacity. He exhaled with a low growl and stretched his arms. Across the clearing, the mist clung to the trees where his log cabin rested below the peaks of Fate Mountain.

He scratched his bare bottom before lunging off the porch, shifting into his grizzly before his paws hit the ground. He ran, slicing through the forest with a primal intensity.

The line between grizzly and man had become thin in his years of solitude. He’d honed his shift into a fluid machine, his human and grizzly bodies primed for action at any given moment.

He came to a stop at the edge of the forest, where the mountain dropped away over a rocky ledge. He roared into the expanse, his echo reverberating back at him from three sides. He grinned, his grizzly teeth bared.

His human and animal minds were in such finely tuned accord that it was hard to tell where one started and where the other ended anymore. He’d come to know the animals of the forest. Black bears, mountain lions, and foxes had become his companions.

He shifted in the morning air, standing once again in his human form, tanned and toned from years of hard survival. Scars crossed his legs, back and arms, displaying the wounds of his past, some from the forest, some from the human war he’d fought.

Cyrus’s long beard and hair wafted in the chill breeze, the fall air blowing down the mountain. He inhaled a breath and took his fighting stance, focusing his attention at his core.

He’d been a master of martial arts since the war, and his time on the mountain had only honed his skill to furious intensity. In the mornings, he practiced the gentle art of tai chi. He moved in fluid motions, filling his body with vitality.

The view over the cliff and the mountains rolling out beyond filled his vision. He drank in the tranquility of this place, so far from the frantic pace of the human world. Only the wilderness could provide the constant edge of survival he craved.

He’d known for a long time that this was where he belonged, naked in the chill air of early autumn, running through his martial arts stances.

Cyrus closed his eyes, going deeper into the meditative movements. His shifter senses and animal instinct took him deep into the stillness of his mind. When he was deep in that place inside, he could feel the heartbeat of the forest.

Each squirrel in a tree, each rabbit in its den. He could sense the unfurling tendrils of ivy vines. He smelled the scent of the earth decomposing and the falling leaves of the deciduous trees.

He moved in a slow circle, his arms and legs in fluid, practiced motions. With a deep breath in and out, he cleared his vision, bringing up a three-dimensional grid of the world before him.

Cyrus tried to focus on details, but the grid dissipated. He growled and gritted his teeth, shifting out of his last tai chi position and into his grizzly form in a fraction of a second.

He rumbled through the forest, trying to bring the grid back up inside his animal mind. The grizzly’s instinct gave him an advantage over the man. He’d been working on transitioning his grizzly’s senses to his human mind for several years now. Each attempt brought him closer to control, but he still lacked the ability to focus on details.

Cyrus rumbled through the forest, tasting the scent of the trees and the ground, the smell of the small creatures around him and the growing warmth of dawn.

When he made it back to his cabin, he shifted in one fluid movement, jumping up onto the porch of his cabin. He walked inside. He threw a light leather duster around his shoulders, binding it at the waist. He poked the flames in his fireplace and threw a few more logs onto the fire.

Cyrus poured fresh water into his pot and waited for it to boil before he poured it over his tea. He’d been living alone on Fate Mountain for seven years now and he was surer each day that the choice to take to the mountain was the right one.

As he sipped his tea and ate his morning meal of rabbit and wild onions, he thought of the things he was missing in the world of men. Not much by his estimation, but there was still something that weighed heavily on his heart.

For all his self-assuredness, Cyrus felt lonely. It wasn’t a general kind of loneliness; the kind that made people go out to find friends to talk to. It was something else entirely. What he lacked was a mate. A special someone who he could connect to completely.

Cyrus was a man who respected nature and the natural order of things. He needed a mate to make him whole; without her, he wasn’t the man he was intended by nature to be.

Living up here on Fate Mountain alone, he didn’t have much of a chance to meet his fated mate. He’d signed up for that dating website that all the other shifters couldn’t stop talking about last year when he’d gone down the mountain to sell pelts, mushrooms, and carved antlers. His brother Jessie had helped him sign up for .

His mate had not been in the system at that time and all Cyrus could do was return to the mountain alone. As far as he knew, she still was nowhere to be found.

Some shifters never found their mates. But that didn’t keep the whole lot of shifters he knew from never giving up on the dream. Even Cyrus, a grumpy bear who liked nothing more than to be left alone, believed in the promise of happily ever after.

He couldn’t help it. He’d grown up on Fate Mountain with his shifter parents. They’d loved each other so much; his mother’s death had sent his stepdad into a tailspin. For all Hank Kincaid’s flaws, Cyrus couldn’t fault him for his devotion to his wife.

Cyrus shoved a bite of succulent rabbit meat into his mouth and chewed. Thinking of the past always put him in a dark mood. Living on the mountain had a way of keeping him focused on the here and now, which was all that mattered in Cyrus’s opinion.

The past and the future were all in the imagination. That’s what he’d learned from his years of solitude and silence on the mountain. However, that knowledge hadn’t made him want to go back to civilization any more.

When he was done with his meal, he cleaned up his plate and pulled on the rest of his clothing. Leather pants made from buckskin. A linen shift he’d made from raw fabric he’d bought in town. And his buckskin duster.

He hadn’t looked in a mirror in ages, but he knew that if anyone saw him, they’d see the image of a mountain man. Or a vagabond, depending on who it was. He’d let his hair and beard grow long and wild. He washed it with deer fat soap made with lye from the ashes. When he bothered to wash at all.

Several years ago, he’d hauled a large aluminum tub up the mountain for that purpose. It made a good tub for the few times a year when he took a warm bath.

He’d had a warm bath a few months ago and wasn’t due for another until winter. The rest of the time he jumped in a cold stream and rinsed the dirt and grime from his hair and skin. That was enough for him. His clean living took care of the rest.

There were definitely advantages to living in the woods, away from humans. One of them was only bathing when he felt like it. The other was not having to have stupid conversations.

In the last year, Cyrus could count on one hand how many times he’d spoken to another person. Most of those times had been when he went down the mountain to work with his brother Jessie.

Jessie sold Cyrus’s wares on the internet, which helped Cyrus buy the few supplies he needed to keep going on the mountain. New knives, needles, books, flint. Sometimes he bought things like rice or seeds to plant food he could grow in the short growing season at this elevation on Fate Mountain.

Cyrus’s garden was winding down now. He’d harvested his garlic and onions. There were a few squashes still holding on as the weather turned from summer to autumn.

He’d have to go down the mountain again soon for his winter supplies. Something he never looked forward to. As he washed his dishes and put them away, he thought of the dating site he’d signed up for last year. Maybe he’d finally find someone. That perfect someone.

He’d bring her back to the mountain, and they’d live together in his cabin, fulfilling his mission as a solitary bear who’d rejected society. A lot of women wouldn’t understand why he’d done it. But his fated mate would get it. He just knew she would.

After the war, Cyrus had been done with the world. He simply didn’t want to participate anymore. The war had taken something from him that he’d never be able to get back. He’d seen things he couldn’t unsee, and no matter what the human government said about the heroics of shifters, he knew it was all a lie.

The Great Shifter Council never should have outed his kind to humans. Knowing that superhuman creatures lived among them had only created a rift that never existed before. After that, humans rejected and harassed shifters for decades.

Then the Great War happened and the humans decided that shifters, with their superior strength, senses, and agility should be used to fight a war that wasn’t even their own.

He had gone to war. He’d fought alongside humans and shifters alike. The shifters had even played an important role in bringing the war to a diplomatic end. But that hadn’t kept the shifter world from being fractured forever.

Cyrus had seen the rift between shifters happening a long time ago. Right after the war, the men who’d fought had fallen into two camps: those who believed in the war, and those who resented it.

Cyrus was uncommon in that he fell right at the center. He could see both sides too clearly, it made it impossible for him to remain in the middle of that mess a moment longer.

As soon as he’d arrived home and found his stepfather spiraling downward into his gambling addiction, his brother Leland had left for the ranch for Texas. Buck had just kept going like nothing happened. And Jessie dealt with it all in his usual carefree fashion. Cyrus couldn’t stick around. He couldn’t save them. He could only save himself.

Now, his stepfather had died recently and Leland was the Alpha of the Kincaid clan. He’d assumed for a long time that it would come to that. Cyrus for one was happy he’d missed all the drama of Leland coming home and taking the title of Alpha from Buck.

His oldest brother had visited him looking for answers about their stepdad. Cyrus had done his best to help, but he didn’t have a lot to offer. From what Cyrus understood now, the ranch was in good shape due to Leland and his mate Sylvia’s hard work.

The brothers were all doing their part to keep the Timber Bear Ranch in the family and prospering on Fate Mountain. Jessie had informed him of the recent influx of hyenas in town. Cyrus wasn’t at all surprised.

The hyena packs had been the most vocal about their distrust of the humans after the war. Cyrus couldn’t blame them, but he didn’t trust a hyena as far as he could throw one. Even as a grizzly, that wasn’t all that far.