“There now, small one. Wake up.” A voice called to me, as someone raised my head and touched my forehead with something warm. “You are not so injured that you need to be taken to an infirmary. You simply need to open your eyes. We’ll get you feeling much better.”

I forced my lids open. I didn’t know the voice that spoke, but I immediately recognized one of the three faces staring down at me. The giant from the kitchen and two more, whose high cheekbones had to signify they were the brothers he’d mentioned. Unless all bear shifters looked like that. Maybe they did. Brown hair. Brown eyes. High cheekbones. The one closest to me had a slightly more rounded face, and the third man, who stood next to the one I’d sort of met, had a cleft in his chin.

The closest of them, presumably the one who had been speaking to me, put a straw to my mouth, and I sipped. Water rushed down my throat quickly, and I nearly choked, which had him pulling the drink away from me.

“Slowly. You’re dehydrated, and you fainted. Exhaustion, maybe. I don’t like your head injury. Your physiology is the same as ours in this state. You’re just fragile. Don’t fret. We’ll see to it that you are okay from here on in.”

The third one spoke. “You’re sure, Cole? I won’t risk her. I mean, I don’t understand how this is happening, but it is, so I won’t allow anything to happen to her. She’s so small. So likely to break.”

“She is fragile, for sure. But maybe tougher than she looks at the same time,” the one who had been called Cole answered. “She did survive out there somehow on her own, and we’re nowhere near the wreckage.” He rose from the bed. “You need food and maybe something to make your head stop hurting since you can’t shift.”

Shift. The word made me want to pull the covers up over my head and hide. That wouldn’t do me any good, but it was everything I could do in the world not to simply give in and hide under the blankets. The first guy had told me I was safe and then used the word mate. I didn’t know what customs and rules were on this planet or with their species, but there were all kinds of ways to hurt someone.

I swallowed. My throat was still dry, but I forced myself to speak. “What are you going to do with me? Or to me?”

The three of them stared at each other for a long second before they all turned to look at me. First guy spoke. “I’ve told her that she would be safe here. That I was in charge of what would happen. She didn’t hit her head when she fell, but perhaps the crash? That bump and the cut? Do you suppose she has brain damage?”

“I don’t have brain damage.” I sat up straight in the bed, which was when it occurred to me that I was in bed. I guessed that answered my cave question. They slept in beds. Or at least they had one. I had to keep track of what I’d been saying. “It’s a reasonable question. I am here illegally, but not purposefully. I don’t wish to cause any harm. I’m sorry I stole your porridge. I. . .”

I took a deep breath. “You said I was safe, but then you used that word—mate—and I am not going to do that just because I took the porridge. I have gold in my bag. I’ll pay you.”

The third one held up his hand. He spoke to his brother. “We’re having a meaning of the word problem. That means something different to them, and she can’t understand scent as we do.”

First guy made a noise in his throat that sounded like a growl. “Okay. We’ll start over. I did bumble it. I was in the shower. The aroma hit me. It was all I could do to get down the stairs and not destroy things to do so. You had the same reaction. You might have made mistakes too if she had been conscious when you got here.”

Cole sighed. “Hold on, you two. Please. You’ll have to excuse my brothers. Oldest and youngest. They bicker while I make peace. We are the Durojo family. You are in our house. You met Finn first. He was here when you arrived.” First guy nodded to me. “He is the oldest of our family and the leader of this planet. I’m Cole. I have some medical skills. That is why I examined you. And my youngest brother, Rylan. He’s actually been looking for you for several days. You managed to elude him. You’ll have to tell him sometime how you did that. And he’ll have to tell us why he kept the fact that he scented what you would be to us to himself.”

“Hasn’t exactly been the time.” Rylan growled, his voice lowering. “It is illegal. I wasn’t going to discuss it with strangers. I was waiting until the three of us could be alone.”

I got up on my knees. I understood about half of what they were talking about, but I wasn’t worried about it. The fundamentals of things had not changed. I had to get out of here before whatever they smelled caused them to hurt me.

“I’m sorry I’m here. I’m sorry I came in here uninvited. I can go. You never have to see me again.”

Finn scrunched up his face. “We’re not angry. Relieved, in some ways. And confused. But not upset.” He patted the top of my leg. “I was going to feed you. I scent hunger from you, and if we are to proceed, in whatever way we can possibly do that, then I need to make sure you are cared for first.”

Rylan laughed. “You were going to cook? You don’t cook.”

“Maybe I was going to warm something. I would have gotten her fed.”

I shook my head. “I think we’re having a little bit of a translation problem.” They all turned to stare at me when I said that. Okay, that was good. They could take me seriously. I had a chip in my ear that let me hear in my own language. Although these shifters hated people from other planets, presumably they must have them, too, since they could hear me just fine. Otherwise, planet-to-planet, and sometimes within one planet itself, people would struggle to make themselves understood.

Still, things went askew. This had to be one of those times. I pointed to my ear. “I’m hearing things that don’t make sense, and that is fine. That happens. My name is Jessica White. I work for the Union as a courier. I bring things through space. Well, this was my first mission.” Rylan opened and closed his mouth. I didn’t know what he was going to say or why he decided not to speak. Or maybe that was some kind of tic thing he did. It didn’t matter right then.

I had their attention, so I continued. “I was flying through the assigned corridor of space, and the wolves shot some kind of planet to space missile and knocked me off the corridor and sent me crashing onto your planet. I don’t really remember anything from after the strike until I woke. I was pretty sure I was going to die. My family tends to be blown up in lots of different ways, but the end result is the same. We just do.”

Cole rubbed his chin and rocked back on his feet, but he didn’t interrupt. I really appreciated them not talking over me. Whatever the glitch was in our language chips, we could overcome it if we just all listened very carefully.

“I know that you guys, as a rule, don’t allow non shifters here. That is fine. I don’t want to be here. My people will come get me. I can either wait until they do somewhere else, or maybe you could contact them.” I might have been expendable, and I really hoped I wasn’t, but the gold would get them here fast. “You can all go back to your lives.”

Cole shook his head. “I am going to go do the cooking. You can explain this, Rylan. Finn needs to call off the searchers.”

I rubbed my eyes. Why weren’t they focusing on the fundamentals here?

Rylan sat down on the bed next to me, patting my leg under the blanket. “Are you in pain? Cole wanted to get you a pain block. I can do that.”

“I am in pain, but I’m less concerned about that than about the things I said not being answered. I am grateful you are trying to help me. Concerned, but grateful.” There. I’d been magnanimous, hadn’t I? I knew big words sometimes. I could read and did when I had any time.

“Listen, this must be confusing. It is for us too.” Rylan sighed. “You see, we were raised to believe humans smelled bad. That upon encountering a human, we would instantly want to kill it.”

It. I tried not to wince, but failed. His use of that term was exactly what I was afraid of. I was a cockroach to them. Every planet had them. The little bastards probably had their own interstellar travel arrangements.

He made a growling noise in the back of his throat and then abruptly stopped. “I didn’t mean to say what I said the way I said it. I’m not. . .good at this. Finn should be explaining. Okay, listen, we don’t hate the way you smell. If anything, we’re sort of addicted to it. You smell like our mate. I don’t know what you know about us since we know little about you, but we mate as clans. Brothers usually mate the same woman. There are always more males than females. Our kind evolved that way. Helps us protect you better too. You’re ours.”

My mouth fell open. “That’s not possible. I’m not a bear shifter.” Now at least I understood that word Finn had used. “Bear shifters must mate other bear shifters.”

“Yes. Usually. But we don’t often find ourselves with others outside of our population. You’ll adjust to the idea. You’ll like us. We are the strongest clan on the planet. Finn is in charge. It’s an honor to be our mate.”

I’d had enough. I couldn’t be reasonable. My head pounded. Fear made me stupid. I’d used up all my reserves to keep my freak out from coming.

“No.” Okay, I shouted. I did. I’ll admit it. “No. No. No.” I repeated myself over and over. I wasn’t going to stay here. I wasn’t going to adjust. This just wasn’t happening. I shoved at the big brick wall that was Rylan. He didn’t budge with my attempted assault. Instead, his eyes changed, like Finn’s had earlier.

One second, his dark brown depths were human, and the next, they weren’t. Finn’s had immediately changed back, but Rylan’s weren’t.

“You will hurt yourself.” His voice was low, much deeper than earlier. He rose to his feet. “I won’t let you do that.”

Finally, I grabbed the blanket, and I threw it over my head. I’d had a temper tantrum, and now I was hiding like a child under the blankets. Maybe they’d decide I wasn’t worth all this hassle and kick me out. That would work just fine by me.

The bed was too big. I wasn’t used to having so much space, and when I was really lost in the universe, I liked to feel squished. There was too much room around me for things to happen.

The bed dipped. Rylan must have sat back down. “You’re frightened.”

Did he expect me to answer? I had nothing to say about that. Zilch. Nada. Yes, I was terrified. “Imagine if you were unexpectedly on Earth or one of the human colonies somewhere and someone said you could never leave. That you belonged to them. What would you do? You wouldn’t be scared?”

He tugged on the blanket, but only so much as to get my attention, not to pull it off me. “Well, to start, I would probably have done less well than you did avoiding capture. How did you do that?”

I pushed the blanket aside. His eyes were still bear-like. Huge and brown, unhuman, not matching his very male and terran looking figure. “I don’t know. I don’t know how I didn’t die in the crash. I don’t know how I avoided being caught. All of it was accidental. I’m a good pilot. I’ve survived in the woods before, but that’s about it. I don’t know.”

“We’ll figure it out another time. Let’s just focus on the basics right now.”

I let him take my hand and lead me from the room. They were all very preoccupied with getting me fed, and I wasn’t going to object. Not if I had to run away, which I did, in order to not have to belong to them. What did that mean? What would their expectations of me be? Cleaning? Cooking? Sex? I had plans, and damn it, they didn’t include this level of crazy.

I sat down in a chair that was way too big for me, and a second later, Cole stood in front of me, placing a plate down. I stared at it for a second. “This looks a lot like a fish we have on Earth called salmon.”

“I imagine you have a lot of the same foods we do.” Cole sat down next to me. “Because we gave them to you when we deposited your ancestors on the terraformed planet many, many millenniums ago.”

I jolted at his words. “What?”

“Or so the legends go. My limited understanding of the non-shifting species is you think the same of us. What is it? We evolved here differently because of the moon?” He pointed at the salmon-like fish. “You’ll tell me how you like it or if you don’t?”

I took a bite. It was a warm, subtle experience, more like meat than fish. Yes, it was very close to our Earth salmon, yet it also had more of an aftertaste to it. I took another bite and then nodded. Belonging to them apparently meant being fed well. “Thank you.”

“You like it?” He pressed.

I nodded. “I do. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” He grinned. “I very rarely cook it. I can’t hear what you call it, by the way. I just hear what we call it when you speak. The chip.” He pointed to his ear. “We have gotten into a habit of eating in our bear form. Grabbing the fish and eating it right there. Bad manners, my mother would have said. We eat in our human skin, my mother used to say. But the three of us have been without female companionship since our mother passed, and I’m afraid we have forgotten how to be. Like, for example, how Rylan needs to sit his ass down.”

Cole’s speech made Rylan drop down into chair next to me. “Sorry.”

“Don’t mind him. He’s young.” Cole grinned at me. “He’s still learning.”

“I’m almost one hundred years old, asshole.”

Cole ignored him. “Ninety-eight. Those last two years make all the difference. It’s why he can’t shift his eyes back. The bear wants out, and he’s battling to keep it in.”

Rylan gripped the edge of the table. “I have it well in hand.”

“If you say so.”

My appetite fled, and I set down my fork. I’d never been able to eat through fear, unless it was chocolate. I could eat chocolate in any circumstance. Not that I’d had any since the Union banned it. No booze. No chocolate. No garlic. Nothing fried. All the things I liked in life.

Cole’s face fell. “You’re afraid.”

“She stopped being that way for maybe two seconds, and then you scared her again.”

I hated being talked about like I wasn’t in the room. “When you’re a bear, will you tear me to pieces? Will it hurt?” Why did I add that? Stupidest question ever. Of course it would hurt. “Are you fattening me up so that I taste better?”

No one spoke for a second. Oh wow, I’d really stepped in it. Why couldn’t I keep quiet until I had a chance to escape? Because I was dumb, dumb, dumb. That was why.

“Not one of us would ever hurt you in either form. You belong to us.” If it was possible, Rylan’s voice lowered further.

I pushed back from the table. “What does that mean? What will you expect me to do?” I must not have gotten over my hysterics from earlier because it reared back at me like it had just been waiting to smack me into this zone once again. “Clean? Cook? Things in the bedroom? You have to explain it.”

“It’s different with humans.” Finn leaned against the door to the kitchen. “She can’t smell us. They use the word differently, I think. It’s been a long time since I gave a human a thought other than to have them executed for being here when they shouldn’t.”

I backed up two more steps. They’d catch me if I ran. That didn’t mean I wasn’t going to try. Why couldn’t I have found a different house where the bears didn’t want to keep me?

Rylan rose slowly. “She is so afraid. It burns my senses.”

“Tell the bear to go away. The scent eases a little bit in human form.” Finn walked toward me slowly. “I don’t want you afraid, little human, so I will tell you all the things that might frighten you all at once. Then we will soothe you.”

Soothe me? He had to be kidding. “I don’t think there’s anything you can say that is going to make any of this better.”

“Maybe not.” Finn stalked forward. “But let’s get it all on the table. They aren’t hunting for you anywhere because I made a general announcement that you’d been found. It will be a little while until one group starts to wonder why they don’t have you and why another group does. By then, we’ll have to figure out how we’re going to handle this. We can’t go into hiding. You’re our mate. You belong to us.”

There were those words again. “What does that mean? I’m sure there must be a better candidate for a mate.”

Finn looked at Cole and then back at me. “The second I scented you, your aroma hitting me upstairs when you were down here, my bear knew you were ours. I knew my brothers would feel it too. That’s how it works. We will suit. So, no, there aren’t better candidates. Trust me. Mothers have been throwing their daughters in the path of our clan since Rylan hit adulthood, hoping her scent would awaken the mating. You did.”

If this wasn’t happening to me, I might find it interesting. “I don’t want it.”

Rylan made a noise, and Finn winced. I turned to see what was happening. Cole rose, a groan sounding from him. A second later, with no warning, Rylan’s body started to change.

“He can’t always control it yet. The ability to stave off the bear when the bear wants out comes in the second hundred years. Mine was actually on my birthday. About one hundred years ago.”

Two hundred years. Finn was two hundred years old? Or more? I retreated another step. Rylan’s body reshaped, fur pushing out where there hadn’t been, and with a snap, suddenly the largest grizzly bear I’d ever seen was in the room with us. Not that I had ever seen one outside of a zoo or in pictures. In any case, I knew that was a grizzly bear.

The high ceilings in this place made sense. They had to fit in it when they were a bear.

He dropped to four feet, walking toward me, and I officially slammed into the wall in my haste, pressing myself against it. My heart beat so loudly I could hear it in my ears. This was it. He was a bear now, and he was simply going to rush at me, swat me down, and eat me while I was still alive. That was what bears did. My uncle must have told me that. Or maybe not. It didn’t matter. At some point in my life, I had picked up that information.

Only, he stopped moving when he was right next to Finn. Cole walked up on his other side. “She can’t smell you, Rylan. She doesn’t know that you mean her no harm. There’s nothing you could do to him that would cause him to hurt you. You’re the only person in the universe that is true for. He’s deadly.” He stared at me for a second, consternation drawing his brows together. “That was supposed to make you feel better.”

I shook my head. “Nope.”

Rylan loped forward, stopping right in front of me. My body started to shake. I was way too close to a predator. If there was one thing I knew from simply surviving all these years, it was that some things out there killed you because that was what they did. Rylan the bear lowered his head, and I fully expected him to bite down. There was nothing I could do. This whole thing had been a game. And. . .he nuzzled against my shoulder.

I swallowed. Okay. That hadn’t been what I was expecting. He raised his head and then did it again. It was nice, but I didn’t trust it. Not yet. What did he want? “Can he understand me like this?”

“Sort of. Senses of what you’re saying,” Cole answered. “When Finn told him that you couldn’t scent him, he sort of got that. He knows that we’re talking now. Probably about him. Or at least, I would know that.”

I sighed. “Please back up. I don’t like this.” I was lying. I did sort of like the heat of him, the way his nose felt when he nuzzled against me. I liked that he was being gentle. But I didn’t want him this close. Not when I had to find my feet, figure things out. I couldn’t have a bear pressed up against me like this was normal. It wasn’t. They had to understand I wasn’t their mate.

I took a deep breath. He hadn’t moved. Finn said I was safe. I was going to try to believe him. “Back up, please.” I swatted him right on the nose.

Rylan made a grumbling noise and backed up before heading toward the back of the house. Cole ran ahead and opened the door, which the bear used to exit. I let out a breath I’d held.

Finn’s eyebrows were raised. “Good job. He understood that. So would I. Nothing says go away more than your mate swatting you on the nose.”

“I can’t be your mate. Work with me here. Shouldn’t this role be given to say a female bear shifter who could give you cubs? Isn’t that how it should work in nature? You guys don’t like strangers on your planet. You shouldn’t be mating one.”

Finn nodded. “Something is different, that is for sure. I’ve never been around a human before. All communication has been done over screens. You’re supposed to smell awful. You don’t. I think our parts are probably made to work just fine.” He winked at me. “And if we can’t have cubs—although I would probably say babies, maybe we’re lost in translation—then that’s just fine too. I don’t care. You’re ours.”

I walked toward him. “You can’t possibly meet a stranger and just suddenly think you’re going to keep her and make her yours forever. I might be the worst person in the universe for all you know. I have terrible luck, for one thing. Life tends to send me explosions. You don’t want to be anywhere near me.”

“Whatever it is”—Cole walked toward Finn. They stood shoulder-to-shoulder—“you’re ours. Even if we have to prove it to you.”

I put my shaking hands in my pockets. I needed a shower. I had to think. I had to breathe. I couldn’t do either of those things with them standing so close. Even Rylan, who was outside, was too close. I bent over, putting my hands on my knees. “Please.”

That was all I could manage to say. Finn walked over, placing his hand on my back. The bear was back in his eyes. Cole squatted down in front of me. Like his brother, he wasn’t using his human eyes. “Please what, mate?”

“I have to go.” Why didn’t they understand? “I don’t belong here. You’ll find a different mate.”

They would. Cole touched the side of my face. “Jessica, you’re safe. For now, hold on to that. Let’s figure things out in the morning. Or the next morning. Or the one after that. Start with safe. Tomorrow tends to take care of itself.”

He was wrong. The only tomorrows that took care of themselves were the ones I made sure were set up in advance. Otherwise, life was a giant mess all the time. It was clear they weren’t to be reasoned with on this matter. I’d simply have to bide my time.

“Okay.”