CHAPTER EIGHT

Marcella stepped softly onto the roadside shoulder and pushed the passenger door of the SUV shut. As she scanned up and down the deserted road, a chill shot down her spine. A perfect gathering spot for a clan of Bears was necessarily isolated from civilization. They may not have driven for many hours—barely even one—but they may as well have been on a distant planet. Even for an isolated location, the place seemed unusually gloomy.

Soren strode around to the back of the truck and popped the latch.

“What are you getting out of there?” She walked around, figuring she’d see for herself and spare him the response. Plus, she needed to be doing something besides standing around watching shadows move.

She caught him popping the lens cover off what looked like an expensive DSLR camera.

“Good to have some baseline information about a place on file, yes?” he asked.

“In case you have to come back someday?”

“Not only me. I don’t gather information only to keep it to myself, just like you won’t. Everything you learn, you’ll take back to the Shrews. What I learn, I feed to my father and perhaps to Peter. They add it to their general knowledge bases to draw on the next time they need to make educated guesses about similar problems.”

“So really, you’re doing two jobs at once.”

“Almost always.” He slammed the gate shut, and tipped his head toward the forest. “There’s a bit of a path there. I tried to avoid parking near probable Were-bear trails, so this may be a lesser used one made by wild bears.”

“How far into those shadows are we going?”

“Not far. After all, we have to talk to a particular barbecue cook right after the restaurant closes. Don’t want to risk her slipping away before we get back.”

She gestured toward the trail. “Lead on. This may be my assignment, but you’re the one with the experience.”

He chuckled and eased between the double trunks of a forked tree. “So, you’re letting me have my way?”

“Due to the absence of a better plan, I’m acquiescing that you may know some things I don’t.”

At the sharp poke of bark against her palm after having used the sturdy tree to catch her balance, she opted to put on her gloves.

Soren gave her a speculative look over his shoulder before settling his gaze back forward. He needed to look ahead to be able to scale the fallen tree blocking their way. “Generally when I wear gloves,” he said, “I’m trying not to leave evidence behind, or I’m trying not to get my hands bloody. Which is the case for you?”

“I suspect you don’t mean the second choice in the way I’m hoping, but I suppose, for the time being, that’s closest to the truth.”

He slung the camera’s strap over his shoulder and reached up to help her over the log.

She’d managed to climb onto the massive thing with only a little bit of embarrassment, but short of getting on all fours and backing down slowly or taking a leap and hoping she didn’t break off an ankle in the soggy tangle comprising the forest floor, she needed his help.

“I guess there’s no place for pride in the wilderness,” she muttered.

He got her to her feet with one arm, somehow managing to keep her upright in spite of the immediate misstep that had her right foot tangled beneath a rogue tree root.

She fell against his chest and swore under her breath at his sultry chuckle.

As she tried to untangle her feet, he didn’t let go. He let her flail like a clumsy, miserable wretch in his arms.

“Oh, let go of me, you buffoon.”

“I guess you didn’t spend much time in forests in Jamaica.”

“That would be a safe assumption.” Somehow, she managed to plant her foot onto ground that felt mostly stable and root-free, and she ducked under his arm.

He kept his hand held out, and one eyebrow hooked upward. “Sure you don’t want to hold on? I’m better acclimatized to the terrain. I have extraordinary vision and have better instincts for how to move.”

“No, thank you.” She turned on her phone’s flashlight and pointed the beam at the ground ahead. “Like hell if I’m going to get tripped up by another root. I’m the thing with the brain. The flora will not defeat me.”

“Okay, well, you also need to be mindful of burrow holes you could get a foot stuck in and, also, try not to disrupt any bee or wasp nests. They’re pretty active this time of year, and you can’t always tell they’re in the trees until after you bump them.”

His grin broadened.

So of course, she looked up into the branches.

She didn’t see any nests, but she pointed her flashlight toward the canopy, anyway. “I’m fairly sure you’re trying to gas me up.”

“Why would I do such a thing?” There were fangs in his grin and a hell of a lot more brown in his hazel eyes than there’d been before.

She poked his chest and then wagged her finger at him. “Don’t you dare shapeshift with me here. Dealing with you on two legs is bad enough. I don’t want to chase you around when you’re on four.”

“Don’t worry. I’m not going to do a full shift.”

His nostrils flared.

He pointed the camera toward the waning sun. “That way.” Without looking back, he got moving again.

She took one last glance into the greenery for things that might sting, one more at the ground for things that might trip or sprain, and then marched after him.

“Interesting,” he said after a couple of minutes tromping through soggy leaves.

“What?”

“The scent. Mostly dispersed since it’s been a couple of weeks since the last Bear gathering, probably, but the hormones read to me as almost entirely female.”

“And why would that be unusual?”

At the edge of what, judging by the clean-cut stumps encircling it, appeared to be an artificial clearing, he brought the camera to his eye and started taking pictures. “In wild bear populations, the females generally don’t overlap with their territories. Their areas are small enough that they shouldn’t have to. Being people as much as beasts, Were-bears, of course, are different.”

He walked around the edge of the clearing, and she followed.

He was still taking pictures of everything, likely trying to document the place from various angles.

“Still, Were-bears are similar enough to wild bears that there wouldn’t be so many females concentrated in a high ratio to male bears in a single place. They don’t want to be around each other. They want to be around their males.”

“Oh, that’s not cocky at all.”

He shrugged. “It’s simple biology.”

“So, what are you implying?”

Finally, he did step out into the clearing, scanning the sky overhead as he walked.

Marcella looked up, too. The moon wasn’t completely up yet. It was still fighting the sun for real estate, but she suspected that the Bears had an excellent of the celestial body from that location.

“Tell me your theory,” he said.

“Ugh, here we go again.”

“You don’t need to know much about Bears to offer a guess.”

“Well, the only guess I could make is that the group has few males. If these Bears are indeed all made-Bears, that creates yet another question.”

“What’s the question?”

“I’m feeling a hell of a lot like Watson to your Sherlock right now, but okay.” She shrugged. “I’ll play along. What I want to know is if the population is as unbalanced as you suspect, was the ratio intentional, or were males and females turned in equal numbers only for something to later happen to the males?”

“Same question I have, so let’s see if we can find the answer.”

“How?”

He grinned, showing off a face full of sharp teeth. “Ribs.”

___

“Are you going to let me do the talking, or am I taking the backseat in the investigation again?” Marcella cut Soren a withering look and slouched lower in the passenger seat.

He watched her fiddle with the seat warmer switch and noted how the hinges of her jaws convulsed. She was staring somewhere in the general vicinity of his nose. All things considered, his was a pretty good-looking nose for a Bear, thanks in large part to his mother’s more elegant genes. So many Bears were ugly motherfuckers. It wouldn’t have been an exaggeration to say his father had mated way up.

Still, he wanted Marcella to catch his eyes, not his nostrils. He tipped his chin down and raised an eyebrow.

She sighed. Her gaze twitched upward.

“I believe you have enough information to ask the questions you need. Or at least, the questions you need to start with.”

“So, you won’t interject?”

“No.”

“And you won’t loom annoyingly behind me like a probation officer trying to catch me slipping up.”

“I’m certainly going to loom, but I’ll do so subtly.”

“That’s a complete contradiction. Looming requires a certain obviousness, and even if the woman can’t read you as a Bear, she’s going to think you’re a threat from your size alone.”

“You keep underestimating my charm.”

“What difference does charm make if you’re not going to be speaking?”

“I never said I wouldn’t be speaking. I said I wouldn’t interject.”

She closed her eyes, pulled in a long inhalation, and then breathed out. “I swear, talking to you is like negotiating with a hungry raccoon. The raccoon is always going to do what it wants, and then the bozo will knock over your trashcan in spite of you.”

“I’m keeping you on your toes, da?”

At the movement of the restaurant’s side door, Soren gave Marcella’s arm a nudge. “Look.”

They were parked on the road shoulder, discreetly for a giant SUV. In that position, they might have been visiting the restaurant but were just as likely to be utilizing overflow parking for the church across the street. According to the sign, Bible study was in session, and the lot was full.

The cook stepped outside carrying a full black trash bag. She hauled the garbage to the dumpster set at the edge of the property. She lifted the heavy lid as though it were as light as a feather. Soren knew better from experience. He’d done plenty of dumpster diving in the course of doing his job.

After tossing the bag inside and letting the lid fall, she rubbed her hands on her apron and started back toward the door.

Marcella reached for the handle, but Soren grabbed her left sleeve.

“Wait,” he said.

Her lips parted, likely to speak some objection, but before she could get the words out, he said, “She’ll come back out. Wait.”

“How do you know?”

“Watching. I don’t have to observe one person for long to guess their habits. People, no matter where they are, are mostly the same. She tossed the bag because she’s about to clock out. She may be working closing shift, but she won’t stay as long as whoever owns or manages the place. She’ll go home as soon as the grease traps are empty, the griddles scraped down, and the floor is mopped.”

Marcella pulled her bottom lip between her teeth and, watching the restaurant door, worried the bit of flesh. If she kept doing that, the lip was going to be chapped, and that would make him sad. She had such lovely lips. That was why he found himself stroking along the place where enamel touched skin, trying to free the lip from the grip.

Her stare fell to his hand.

“Stop doing that,” he said.

She nudged him away, but released the lip. “Stop micromanaging me. You’re not only interfering in my case but now you’re telling me what to do with my body?”

“I’m only trying to stop you from ruining Mother Nature’s good work. You should be thanking me.”

“I—” Growling, she shook her head, and put her back to him.

“So simple. ‘Thank you, Soren.’ Try saying them. Three little words. So easy. You may even be relieved after speaking them.”

“How about these three words? Go fuck yourself.”

“Aw, pet.” He clucked his tongue and picked up one of the long dreadlocks hanging down her back. He’d never known anyone else who’d had them, and his curiosity was only going to get more intense the longer he was near her. Of course he was going to touch.

Having so much hair, she didn’t seem to notice. It had to be heavy, being so dense and practically mermaid length. Soren rubbed his thumb along the coil. It was like a rope made of dark cotton, firm, but soft against the pads of his fingers. He wondered what her hair would feel like without the dreadlocks right as he spotted a free wisp of hair at the nape of her neck.

“Apparently, you have no sense of self-preservation,” she warned.

He noted then that she was staring at him in the side-view mirror. “You’re not going to hurt me.” He let the hair fall back into place.

“You’re pushing your luck.”

“Perhaps, but why are you so bothered by my curiosity? I’ve been clear about what I want from you. I won’t harm you. I won’t make you uncomfortable. You can say what you like, but you can’t honestly say you’re uncomfortable. Your hormones would spike in a certain way, and I’m not smelling that surge right now.”

Her jaw hinges convulsed again.

He understood why she might have been annoyed. She probably thought there were no secrets she could keep from him, and as far as her body went, that was mostly true.

Her gaze flitted away from the mirror and back to the restaurant door. “There she is.” She reached for the door handle again.

“Not here.” Soren put his foot on the brake and pressed the ignition button.

“What?”

“Not here. Do you know why? Give me a guess.”

As she toyed with her seatbelt buckle, she furrowed her brow. “You want to know which car is hers.”

“And?”

“Where she lives. You want to follow her.”

“Yes. We don’t want to risk the woman getting suspicious and absconding before we’ve had a chance to get all the information we can. Observe, then approach.”

She let out some air. “How will I know, then, when to approach her?”

“When there’s nothing left to learn from observing, or when the situation begins to escalate too rapidly for you to control.”

“That makes sense,” she demurred.

“You truly have been working from instinct in all this time?”

She shrugged. “I did what made sense for me. I imagine your way may be deemed somewhat more…efficient, by the time all is said and done.”

“Your way isn’t wrong. I’m simply showing you how to look at an investigation as a long game rather than one play at a time.”

“That’ll take some adjustment.”

“I’m here to help you.”

She shot him a look.

“I am.”

“You’re looking at your long game, too. The personal one.”

He wasn’t going to deny that.

“Look,” she said, tipping her chin toward a late-eighties model station wagon backing out of a parking space by the trees. “There she is. I’ll write down the license plate number for Drea.”

“Make and model as well. We want to ensure the plates match the cars the system says they’re registered to. I believe that’s a Buick Roadmaster.”

“Yes, I’m familiar,” she said with a titter. “Surprisingly popular in my neighborhood when I was a little girl. I believe my father had one briefly.”

“Why briefly?”

“He’s never had a license to drive.” She muttered, “Not that laws could ever stop him from doing what he wanted.”

The cook pulled out onto the road. Soren held back, waiting until two cars had passed before he pulled out into traffic. He didn’t have to look to know that Marcella was glaring at him.

“Patience,” he said. “We won’t lose her. Even if she turns off, we’ll see her before she gets too far, assuming the road doesn’t have any obstructions.”

“And I imagine if we miss her today, we’ll catch up to her the next time she goes to work.”

“Exactly.” He shrugged. “Or we’ll encounter another Bear like her before then. We could probably brainstorm a pretty good list of places where local shifters may congregate, now that we know that most are women.”

“Bars would probably be out of the question.”

“Too much risk of conflict, so I’d agree.”

Watching the road, she grunted softly and drummed her fingertips atop her thighs.

His phone rang with a particular ringtone that made his stomach turn sideways as of late. “For fuck’s sake.”

Three shrill, bleating rings later, Marcella snatched the cell out of the cup holder. “I think that’s your mother.”

Most certainly is.

“Ignore her,” he murmured. “She’s calling because I didn’t respond to her email.” And he couldn’t talk, anyway. They were approaching an intersection, and their target appeared to be about to make a right turn. If one of the cars ahead of them didn’t turn right as well, Soren would have to drive suspiciously slowly to put some distance between him and the Bear.

Fortunately, the sedan right in front of him turned.

The phone rang again.

“What did she ask you to do in the email?” Marcella asked.

“The usual shit. Find some guy. Kill him.”

She dropped the phone into the cup holder as though it were a hot potato. “You’re joking!”

Grunting, Soren turned right and gradually accelerated to about five miles per hour under the speed limit. He almost wished he’d opted for a subtle vehicle—something that would blend in better in such a rural setting where most cars were at least five years old, and anything larger than a sedan was likely to be either a pickup truck or an eighteen-wheeler.

“Soren, tell me you’re joking,” she urged.

He shrugged. “Perhaps my mother didn’t explicitly say kill—”

“Not that she would ever use that word in an email. Paper trails are dangerous things, especially electronic ones.”

“True. I don’t see where I have much choice, though. My instructions were to neutralize a rogue contact, and there is a limited number of ways to do that.”

“Rogue in what way?”

“Accused a member of our clan of a crime, planted evidence to convince authorities his version of events was true, and then fled the country.”

“Why would he do such a thing?”

He cut her a look.

She put up her hands. “Yes, yes. Guess, right?”

“Yes. Guess.”

“Instinct says he was a double agent of some sort.”

“Right on the nose.”

“Truly?”

Again, he grunted.

The Roadmaster ahead was slowing at the entrance of a trailer park. Given the dark, Soren couldn’t tell how large the property was from that distance, but he did a quick estimate of porch lights putting them at around ten, so he rounded up to twenty dwellings, firming up his figure as he passed.

The other car had turned in as well.

“You’ll circle back around once they’ve both parked,” she said.

“Exactly. Perhaps take a look at the map and see where the terminus of this road is and whether there are any turnoffs ahead.”

Without argument, she pulled the map from the door pocket and shook it open. Using her phone light, she homed in on their location, turning the page so north pointed down—the exact way they were driving. The woman knew how to orient. He’d give her that.

“Next turnoff is up left about a quarter of a mile. That artery loops back around to the road we turned in from.”

“Any turn-ins to the trailer park from the backside?”

“Can’t tell. The map doesn’t give information at that level. If you keep going straight on this road, you’ll eventually see a fork with one way going toward the state road. About five miles through a wooded area. We’re not even close to there.”

“Understood.” Soren took a left when the sign approached and eased up on the gas. If push came to shove, they could drive the loop a few times until they were certain the Bear had gone from her car to her home, but that was as risky as parking too soon. Their vehicle was recognizable. No one would remember if they’d passed once, but if they did more than that, people would start getting suspicious.

Fortunately, the trailer park did have a turn-in on the back road.

“I guess it’s not used much,” Marcella murmured. “No pavement. No gravel.”

“So damn dark back here. If I were the residents, I’d prefer to use the other two as well.” He killed his headlights to avoid shining them in the windows of the rearmost trailers. Then he cut the steering wheel to the right and parked parallel to the closest residence.

He killed the engine.

Marcella put the map away and turned on her phone’s flashlight. “You stay here.”

“No, and you know better than to ask.” He depressed the seatbelt button and was out of the SUV before she could finish saying, “Had to try.”