Cole stared out into the woods, his mind still racing after his encounter with Kassie. It was still difficult to process his encounter with her or, more accurately, the information that had been dropped on him after coming in contact with her again.

The concept that he was a father was completely foreign to him. He knew that he wasn’t really a father, of course. Kassie didn’t want him to be a father to her child, and he was in no position to try and push himself into the lives of her or her child. Perhaps in another life he would have enjoyed being able to be a father to a child, and it was true that he had felt a connection to the child in the one brief moment they had shared together.

But he also knew that he was a broken shell of a man. His time in Afghanistan had left him battered and bruised. He was more animal than he was human. The children in the villages would whisper about wahasha hilmand when a family would find it’s goat torn apart in the morning. Where does the man end and the animal begin? Wasn’t that the real problem?

Closing his eyes, Cole turned away from the woods. The fact that he wanted so desperately to run among the trees under the moonlight was just one of the things that disgusted him so much about himself. Yes—he was an animal. He had always been an animal, but now he was even more animal than he was human. He enjoyed the thrill of being in his bear form too much.

It terrified him to think about the fact that his daughter could be like him, but he knew he would be of no help to her even if she were like him. She would just have to come to it in her own time and on her own terms. And perhaps there was somebody out there who was better suited to teach her how to control that part of herself. It certainly wasn’t him.

“Damn it,” he said out loud, rubbing his hands together. It had been kind of Kassie to give him something to eat and some clothes to wear that night. He was definitely in need of a little kindness for a change. It had been a long time since he had even spoken to somebody for as long as he had spoken to Kassie that evening. It almost made him feel like a normal person.

But he wasn’t a normal person, was he? He never had been.

Those deployments around Helmand Province had made him sure of that, even if he hadn’t already been aware of it while he was growing up. He had enlisted the day after he met Kassie, and they had shipped him off almost immediately. And it hadn’t exactly taken long for them to figure out what he was.

There weren’t a lot of shifters in the military, but they knew about his kind. It was a surprise to Cole, even though it probably shouldn’t have been. He had learned quickly that the United States government knew a lot of things that the American public didn’t know. Among the things that they knew were that there were a lot of supernatural entities walking around, and most people would never sleep if they realized they actually existed and weren’t just fairy tales told to children.

Once they did find out about Cole, he had quickly become an asset rather than a burden. That had been another surprise. For so long, he had tried to hide what he was, but suddenly he had become a prize to the brass. Because after all, there was nothing more powerful—or better for busting into bunkers—than an eight-hundred-pound bear.

Sometimes when he tried to sleep at night, he could still smell the blood and gunpowder from the battlefield. He knew he still missed being able to shift at his leisure, to unleash his animal instincts whenever and wherever he felt like it. But that was the problem. He had let his animal instincts take over in Afghanistan.

Even his squadmates had been afraid of him in the end. He had never hurt someone who wasn’t trying to kill him, not once, but they had started to avoid him whenever he was around. They had started to think that he couldn’t control that part of himself. And weren’t they right? There were too many mornings when he had woken up only to find himself away from camp with blood on him from the animals he had killed in the night.

It had gotten to be too much when he had killed all of a Bedouin village’s livestock. The higher-ups had decided that he really couldn’t be controlled, that he was enjoying the thrill of the hunt too much and he was out of their control. So, they had done what they did with any Marine under those circumstances. They had cut him off, shipped him home, and forgotten about him.

Now he was just a veteran with nothing to his name—no home, no family, and no friends. Miss June, the woman who had taken him in when he was a teenager, had passed away, so there was really nothing left for him in Spartanburg, and he really didn’t know why he had come back to this place. Perhaps it really was just the fact that he didn’t know where else to go, or maybe it was his animal instinct that drove him to haunt the same old places he had roamed before.

Cole laughed at these thoughts as they wandered through his mind. He felt hollow inside… so hollow. Dropping down onto the steps of the hunting cabin, he let his head drop down and wondered just what it was that he planned to do.

It had been months since he had been back. In that time, he had been pretty much aimless. He didn’t know why he hadn’t even tried to figure out something—a job perhaps. Maybe it was just that he didn’t care what happened to him.

If only for Miss June’s sake, the one person who had cared about him in the past, he knew he should at least try to take care of himself. But the idea of putting himself out there in the world when he was so afraid of the beast that lay inside him… It was honestly terrifying. Cole felt like he could break at any moment. Or worse.

He continued to sit there, staring off into the distance for some time. And as he sat, he thought he began to see and sense something off in the distance. It didn’t register at first that the shapes were anything out of the ordinary. These were the woods, and wild animals were all too common here. But soon the wind picked up, and he could smell them. They were bears, and not just any bears. They carried an unmistakable scent that was not unlike his own. It was the same as when he had found his daughter earlier.

But that was impossible. He had never in all his life met another shifter. Cole sat up a little straighter, eyes widening in disbelief. He watched the shapes as they came moving through the tree line, two of them. They were definitely bears. He stood, wondering if he should shift too, but decided against it. Something about the idea of entering into his bestial form at this moment rubbed him the wrong way. He had resorted to that too often in the past.

The bears continued toward him as Cole watched, moving at a quick but steady pace, until they several yards away. Then they began to shift as well, rising up in the shadows until they took the form of men. They were both older, though they both looked strong and hale, capable of handling themselves in a fight if need be. These were not people he wanted to mess with.

“Hello,” said the older of the two, a man with stark white hair and pure blue eyes—eyes he noted that were not too unlike his own. The man continued to move forward until he was only a few paces away from Cole, finally stopping at the bottom of the steps that led up to the cabin. “So, we’ve finally found you. We’ve been looking for you for a long, long time.”

“I doubt that. I’m nobody,” said Cole.

“Oh, we are quite sure,” said the man, and a slow smile spread across his face.

The other man remained expressionless, watching the exchange go on from a distance as if prepared to protect the older man if necessary. But Cole didn’t want to fight. These were the first people like him he had ever met. Already his head was swimming with how surreal it felt.

“Well, you found me, but I don’t know who you think I am,” said Cole.

“You’re a god among ants, same as us. And a shifter of pure blood, which is more important,” said the older man. “Your mother and father were both part of our clan. They were criminals and deviants. They took you away from us. Now we’ve finally found you, and we are bringing you back home.”

“My mother and father?” He stared blankly at the two men. “I don’t know anything about my parents,” he said. And he didn’t know how these two strangers could know anything about them either. He’d been abandoned—completely abandoned—as a baby. But the old man continued to smile at him.

“Yes,” he said. “Your parents were part of our clan. Part of our blood. The same blood that runs in my veins runs in yours, Cole.” He took a step closer. “I know how hard this life must have been for you—never knowing anything about who you were, never having a place to fit in. But that can change. You have a place where you can belong. Your clan is ready to welcome you with open hearts and open arms.”

Cole continued to stare at the man, unable to believe what he was saying. What was this? It seemed like something out of a dream. He took a step back, feeling his senses kick into overdrive.

“I’ve done just fine on my own,” said Cole.

The old man laughed again. “Hogshit. You stink worse than a human. I’m not saying this to be cruel,” he added quickly. “It’s not in our kind’s nature to be alone. That’s why we’ve come for you. We’d have come sooner if we only knew where you were. But your parents hid you from us before they died. A tragedy.”

His words cut deep into Cole, penetrating into some part of him that wanted desperately to believe what he was saying. Was there really a place for him out there? Somewhere he could belong? Somewhere that Cole would be welcomed, where he could fit in? Relaxing just a little, he took a step forward where he could see the man’s face more clearly.

“Then… you would really have me?” he asked. “Just like that?”

The man nodded then seemed to hesitate. “Yes. Well, there are a few things. We need to keep the bloodline pure. So, we have a mate picked out for you if you do join us.”

A mate? Cole cocked his head to the side.

“And we know about your little mistake,” the man continued. “The half-blood. Just tell us where this little problem of yours is and we will take care of it. An unfortunate thing, really, but it needs to be done. Then you can start your new life. No loose ends. You understand.”

Cole understood instantly, and he knew what he had to do.

“Yes. I understand. And I’ll tell you everything. Come on inside,” he said, and he stepped to the edge of the threshold. The older man smiled, and the man who was with him silently came along as the three of them prepared to broker a deal for Cole’s return to the Iron Fur Clan.