The days were becoming a little cooler by the time Rick and Laura were nearing the border to Canada. It had taken more than three weeks of hiking to get there, three weeks of twenty-five miles a day and sleeping on the progressively colder ground.

All in all it could have been worse, Laura supposed. They had a good tent that fit them both comfortably. It was advertised as a six person tent, but not when one of those people was Rick, the huge man easily taking up two thirds all to himself. She didn’t mind at all, however, since having his always warm body to snuggle against kept the nights chill away. She had barely needed blankets.

They had gone through all of this effort just so they could cross into Canada without announcing themselves at the border. Laura was a fugitive, wanted for the murder of her brother and what the media had described as his ‘friend’. The truth was far different, however. Her brother had been killed by a group of thugs whom he had gambling debts with. Laura had shot the second man to die in that apartment, but he was one of those responsible for her brother’s death and had been pointing a gun at Rick.

It had messed her up for a while, the knowledge that she had killed a man, but that had faded as the weeks passed. It was hard to feel guilty for shooting someone who would have gladly pulled the trigger on her had their positions been reversed. Beyond that though, being hunted, caught, tossed in the trunk of a car, and almost murdered in the forest had hardened her. The realities of her new life would not allow her to be a wilting lily.

What exactly she would be she was still figuring out. A fugitive, for starters, but hopefully a successful one. Just what her new life in Canada would look like, however, was still up in the air.

She had some idea of what kind of place they were headed towards, as Rick had been more willing to open up about his past when that past was now in front of them. His clan, as he called it, lived in a small community in northern Quebec, in Canada. Laura intended to take advantage of the opportunity to find out just what she was (literally) walking into.

They were hiking through a thinly forested area at the moment. Rick had proven to have an almost unerring sense of direction, having needed to use their map at most a few times over the past weeks.

“Don’t they speak French there, and have French accents?” she asked. Like most Americans, she didn’t know that much about their neighbor to the north.

“Yeah, I speak French a bit, but we moved there from Ontario when I was thirteen. English has always been my first language,” he said through a grin, clearly seeing where her mind was going.

“What?! How have you never mentioned that you speak French?”

“It never really mattered, and I think I’ve lost some of it over the last couple years,” came the reply. “The rest of my clan is the same way. Most of them can speak French passably well, but even in Quebec most people speak English so being fluent had never been the most important thing in the world.”

“Why did you guys move there?” Rick’s life prior to meeting her had always been something of a mystery, and the chance to dig inside that mystery excited her.

“We used to live across the way in Ontario, but we began having some trouble with the locals. It happens every now and then, so a lot of shifter groups like to be mobile. We can’t really live in a place where we’re in constant conflict, too much chance of our secret getting out.”

It had made a lot of sense to her. The leader of a group of shifters would have to work constantly to deal with friction between their clan and the humans around them. Just thinking about it made her realize how difficult a life it must be. It would be tough to have to keep a big part of yourself hidden from many of the people you came into contact with.

After a moment she realized that she now had a secret of her own. She would have to pretend to be Canadian once they crossed the border, and could never tell anyone her secret. Except maybe those in Rick’s clan, assuming they accepted her. He acted like it was a given, but she was still a little nervous about meeting them. It was hard enough to meet a lover’s family without all the extra drama around knowing a dangerous secret about them.

They walked in silence a bit longer before Laura felt ready to broach that subject. “Rick, will your people be okay with you bringing a human into the group?”

He chuckled, the deep sound filling the space between the trees around her. “It’ll be fine. A shifter’s mate is his mate, there’s no arguing about it.”

He sounded confident enough, but she noticed that he hadn’t answered her question straight on. She decided it was time to press a little bit. If she was going to be meeting his extended family soon, she needed to know what the full situation was. “So why did you leave?”

The silence lasted longer this time, but Laura was willing to give Rick a chance to figure out how to explain something that was obviously a sore spot for him.

After a while he stopped walking. “Let’s take a break here while I tell you about it.”

‘Here’ was a small clearing in the trees, a tiny bastion of warm sunlight in the shady forest. It seemed like a great spot to stop for a rest.

“My father was the alpha of our clan, but he died pretty soon after we moved to Quebec,” he began, eyes looking inwards. “He was shot by a hunter, we think. My mother died in childbirth.”

Laura wanted to run into his arms and offer what consolation she could, but she sensed that it would just interrupt a story that was already hard for him to tell, so she held herself back. He took a moment to compose himself then continued.

“My older brother, Tommy, always assumed that he would be the next leader. I kind of did too, Tommy was made for that kind of thing. But the clan was pretty split. About half wanted me to be the next alpha,” he said, his voice sounding disbelieving by the end.

Laura could understand exactly why people would want to pick him for that position, even if he couldn’t. Rick radiated this sense of stability, something that was probably a luxury for a shifter community. His first concern was generally the people around him before himself, and he had none of the arrogance and pride she had seen in Dillon, the leader of the Blackendale wolf pack. How Dillon had ended up in that position was still something neither of them understood.

Rick continued, shaking his head a little as if still trying to understand it himself. “Tommy was furious at me. I think he thought that I had been going around trying to convince people to nominate me! I didn’t even want the job. Things got pretty tense between us.”

His eyes swept around the clearing, but she could tell that he wasn’t seeing their surroundings. He was seeing his past. After another moment he continued. “There was real friction in the clan over this, and it was looking like things could only be decided by a fight.”

“A fight?” Laura asked, not fully understanding. “You didn’t want the job, why couldn’t you just not accept it?”

He smiled, really seeing her for the first time since they had stopped. “Shifters don’t get to say no to something like that. If the clan wants you, it’s you who becomes alpha. Doesn’t matter if you want it or not. In fact, some people think the best alphas are those who want anything but to lead.”

“Couldn’t you have just let Tommy win the fight?”

“If I did he would have killed me. Fights like this are to the death, Laura,” he replied, seeming almost embarrassed by it. “When two evenly matched bears fight the adrenaline gets kicked up so far that the human side of us is… pushed back or something. In a moment like that it’s just two animals fighting for dominance, so it gets vicious. I didn’t want to fight my brother, win or lose, so I just left.”

Now that his story was over she stepped in and pressed herself against him, hoping to remind him of just how much he was loved. His arms engulfed her, nestling her in a tender embrace that lasted minutes at least.

She looked up at him when she finally pulled back. “Is it safe for you to go back now?”

He nodded, seemingly more confident about that than he had been about anything else so far. “Yeah, now that Tommy’s had some time to become accepted as the alpha everything should be fine. I’m no threat to his leadership anymore.”

That was reassuring, but some part of Laura still felt nervous about all of this. She had been hoping this retreat to Canada would be an end to their troubles, but even Rick’s confidence couldn’t stop her from feeling at least a bit anxious about it all.

 

A few more days saw them to the border, though there was no clear demarcation in the dense forest they were walking through. Rick just pulled up next to a tree, tossing her their water bottle.

“I think we’re in Canada now,” he said as she drank sparingly. Conserving water had been an important lesson during their trip, as they could sometimes go for two or three days without coming across a river or brook to draw from. Rick could tell with a sniff whether or not water was clean enough to drink, which helped.

“How can you tell?” she asked, looking around. The forest here didn’t look much different than the area they had left weeks ago. She thought that maybe the ratio of different types of trees had changed a bit, but apart from that it could have been five miles from her Aunt Joyce’s cabin rather than five hundred.

“Just by how far we’ve walked,” he answered, taking the water bottle back after she finished. “Another day or two and we should be at the highway leading to Thunder Bay, and from there we can take a bus farther north.”

“Sounds like Canadians took all the good city names,” she grumbled. “Good thing they left us with Blackendale though.”

Rick chuckled. “I guess we did.”

They spent the rest of that day walking, then set their tent up on a bare patch of ground at the bottom of a hill. Dinner was a few granola bars and some dried meat, just like dinner had been the night before.

Rick shook his head when she suggested a fire. “Now that we’re across the border we should try to avoid forest rangers. We could probably talk our way past one without too much trouble, but it’s best we don’t take the chance.”

Laura understood. Rick was the only one with identification, a battered and almost expired dark blue Canadian passport. Laura’s IDs had all been destroyed before setting off. She couldn’t be Laura Hamilton anymore, so it would have brought nothing but danger to keep them.

The night passed uneventfully, though she did wake up to the sounds of rustling farther up the hill at one point. Rick said it was a moose, but it hadn’t seemed to notice them.

“We’re pretty lucky,” he whispered, mouth pressed against her ear. “This is mating season for the moose, and they can be pretty dangerous in season.”

The feel of Rick’s hot breath on her ear and neck sent shivers through Laura’s whole body. They had been…intimate… on many of the nights of their trek, though that had done nothing to diminish her desire for him. If anything it had increased it. That he was able to plan a hike of hundreds of miles and take them through it successfully spoke to a kind of competence she hadn’t had much experience with in her former life. She had known plenty of accomplished people, men and women skilled at navigating office politics and hard working enough to ascend to positions of authority, but this was something different. It was more primal, much closer to what humanity had traditionally experienced than what had come about in modernity. It was intoxicating.

Laura herself was an almost entirely different person since the trip had started. At least physically. She had always been fit, but it was one thing to be able to run three miles on a treadmill. Daily hikes of twenty miles or more with a large backpack weighing you down were something else entirely, she had discovered. The first week in particular had been brutal. Rick had done what he could to help her through it, carrying most of the heaviest supplies and stopping for breaks often, but that had only done so much.

It was nothing but dogged persistence that had gotten her through those first few days, a simple unwillingness to be less than she needed to be. As the weeks had worn on it had become easier, though each day could still be tough. She thought she had detected admiration in Rick’s gaze more than once, something that had sent ripples of warmth through her. She had found that respect meant a lot more when it was coming from someone like him.

Rick had spent most of the hike as a human, as he didn’t know the areas they were traveling through well enough to have a good sense of when there might be other people around. The last thing they wanted was a group of hikers to take a picture of a girl strolling along through the forest next to a great big grizzly bear wearing a backpack on his chest. Incognito was the rule now, and that would be anything but.

It was still strange, all the feelings coursing through her. Feeling giddy over a boy was something she hadn’t experienced since college, and it was something she had thought she’d grown out of. But here comes this big mountain of a man, and all of a sudden the same feelings were back. The butterflies in the stomach, the light-headedness. All of it.

She leaned her mouth to his ear, making sure not to rustle any of the bedding as she moved. “I love you,” she whispered, so faint that a normal person might not have heard it. Then she kissed him on the neck, just below the ear.

She felt him stir against her, though she could tell he was trying to be silent as well. If Rick said moose were dangerous, then they were. He wasn’t a man who considered many things dangerous.

“Love you too,” he whispered back, settling one arm around her as he got ready to sleep.

She smiled in the darkness, the simple happiness from that one statement more than enough to see her through another day of trekking. They were close now.