Ben fell onto his front paws as he scented the air, seeking something interesting to eat without having any particular goal in mind. A few feet away from him, he felt the mental presence of Dov, one of his oldest friends within the Nita clan. Someone in the woods. The thought came to him in something less than words but more than instinct, a suggestion—an impulse between animal thinking and human. Ben snuffled, shaking his head from side to side. Someone in the woods—unless it was a hunter—represented very little trouble to him in the form he had taken on; there weren’t many people either in the town of Green Tree or in general who would deliberately trouble a pair of fully-grown brown bears in their nocturnal search for food.
So what? He sent the thought in Dov’s direction, sniffing the air once more. He caught a fleeting scent—berries, sharp and sweetly pungent in the humid night air of the forest—and turned in that direction. He coughed, alerting his friend to the proximity of food as he approached the bushes, illuminated faintly by the waxing moon’s light.
Dov had been his friend for as long as Ben could remember; the two of them had undergone their first, ritual transformation together, they worked on the logging crew together, and even when the rest of the clan was busy with other things—spending time with family members, going out to take in the few diversions that the little logging town offered, or, as was the case with their Alpha, staying in for the night with a mate—he and Dov found their way into the woods together, exploring what the night held for inquisitive animals that had no need to fear predators.
Ben began to mine the bushes for ripe berries, his keen nose and keener instincts tugging him away from those still green. After a moment, Dov joined him, shifting down onto his rump to eat in comfort. They exchanged soft growling chuffs, enjoying the sweet-tart taste of the fruit as eagerly as any bear could. The only thing better would have been honey; but Ben had no interest in dealing with bees that night, and he knew Dov didn’t either. Unlike real bears, they had the advanced thinking skills and the money to buy honey if they wanted it; there was little sense in raiding a hive when there were jars and jars of honey at the local market.
I smell her. That woman—the new one. The fragmented thoughts, filtering through Ben’s mind from Dov’s, were accompanied by a faint image; a short, curvy woman, who had moved into town only a few weeks before, hired by the logging company to do administrative work. Ben had met her briefly; he had been careful not to get too close to the woman—her pheromones, feminine and possibly fertile, would have been nothing but an incitement to him, and he knew, as everyone in the Nita clan did, that the animal instincts had to be kept in check amongst the “normal” humans of the town. She had honey-colored hair kept tightly in a bun dead center at the back of her skull, and a slightly tightly wound air about her that put Ben on alert.
Of course, Ben thought as he meditatively munched on wild berries, sinking down onto his hindquarters in the filtered moonlight, there were plenty of members of the clan who were not quite so careful; they went out to the bars every night, picking up whatever girl would come home with them and showing up the next morning as likely as not with a hangover. He let out a snort of disgust. Since the few women who had been born into the clan were closely related to its other members, they had been married off—a decision by the Alpha, though not one that had met with universal approval. Ben himself could feel the low, pulsing animal lust inside of himself on a near-constant basis: the need to mate, to claim a female as his own. For werebears such as himself, mating was a permanent attachment. The less steady members of the clan, slightly younger—some of them just old enough to drink—were willing to slake that desire as best as they could with one-night stands, taking care of the physical problem.
But Ben held himself back, and Dov had taken the same cue; when they had first been inducted into the Nita clan formally, as teenaged werebears, they had agreed that they would follow their Alpha’s edicts as long as they weren’t harmful, and Ben had never gone back on his word in his entire life. He didn’t intend to start doing it just because he had the mating itch.
Next to him, Dov let out a soft trill. Coming our way. Ben sighed; they would have to decide whether it was worth it to risk the panic of a woman encountering two bears in the woods at night, or if it would be better to vacate the area, keep away from the stranger. The Nita clan had lived in the town of Green Tree for as long as it had existed; the original shape-shifters who had formed it had been loggers, just like the majority of the town’s men. Their existence was precarious, however. None of the normal humans in the tiny town knew the true nature of the members of the clan. There were occasional murmurs about some of the stranger behaviors of the “local bears,” but in spite of the occasional sighting of someone coming out of the woods, transformed back into a human, the members of the community seemed content to turn a blind eye; but if they were confronted with the true fact of the Nita clan, there would be consequences—deadly ones.
Move on? Ben rumbled, turning his head and scenting the air, trying to catch the trace his friend had noticed. In his human form, he had better-than-normal senses of smell and hearing; but in his animal form, Ben’s senses were even more acute. He caught the scent that Dov had found: richly female, with the sweet, slightly musk-laden undercurrent of fertility, it was enough to briefly make the promise of even the sweetest, ripest berries pale in comparison. How the woman had managed not to attract every human male in the town—along with the unattached Nita clan contingent—was beyond Ben’s ability to comprehend. A jolt of fiery need shot through him at her smell. Breathing deeply, trying to settle the hormones surging through his body, Ben picked up the answering scent of Dov’s pheromones; he was beginning to respond to the smell of female fertility as well.
Better leave, Dov’s hurried, not-quite-panicked thought reached him, and Ben let out a grumbling growl to confirm his agreement. They moved deeper into the woods together, and as they moved further away from the alluring, distracting smell, Ben felt his thoughts beginning to clear. If they could just keep downwind of the woman, he thought, they would be okay. He sniffed at the air, sorting through the scents that painted crystal-clear pictures on his ursine mind, identifying each one. There was carrion nearby, but he was unmoved by it; there was a tree somewhere close to them that had—to his keen nose—perhaps a few ripe fruits for the picking. He ambled off on all fours, meandering through the underbrush and putting the new woman out of his mind as completely as he could. She was not for him—even if she smelled appealingly like she should be. He would not fight Dov over the right to take her; he would rather lose the opportunity to mate completely than be in opposition to a man he considered his brother, his own flesh and blood. Ben barked a quick sound in Dov’s direction, heading towards the appealing smell of more food.