CHAPTER NINE

Marcella knew a little something about lurking in potentially hostile neighborhoods after dark. Normally, she let her witchy instincts guide her on which turns to avoid, which alleyways to stay out of.

Never before had she been guided forward under compulsion of a Were-bear who insisted on keeping one giant hand pressed to the small of her back.

“For goodness’ sake,” she spat in a whisper as they passed a trailer that appeared to be unoccupied. “I don’t need you to clutch me.”

“You do. How else will you learn my cues? If I hear or smell things I don’t like, I can inform you without saying anything.”

“You need to give me a chance to investigate this on my own.”

“You are. I’m simply guarding you.”

“Bullshit.”

Shrugging, he kept her moving.

The complaining was getting to be more tedious than the actual man, and she wondered if she should bother saying anything at all. Any new tactic would probably work better where Soren was concerned.

She stopped at the intersection between four trailers, did a quick scan of the area, and moved a couple of feet rightward at Soren’s nudge. She didn’t see the man carrying the garbage bag until several seconds later.

He shuffled toward the dumpster in a stained white undershirt that didn’t quite cover his protruding belly along with baggy pajama pants and shower shoes. A plume of smoke fogged the air behind him as he trod.

Marcella pinched her nose and sighed. She’d never get used to smoke. Didn’t matter whether it was cigarette or weed smoke, the fumes wrecked her sinuses the same way.

She leaned against the trailer near the electric meter, waiting for the man to move along. He’d apparently found a compatriot by the dumpster, and they were chatting about some sporting event Marcella couldn’t make heads or tails of.

She was so busy trying to catch scraps of the conversation that she didn’t notice that Soren was petting her. His hand moved idly down the back of her hair again and again.

“Soren,” she hissed.

“Hmm?” He didn’t look at her. He was looking at his phone.

“You’re petting me. Stop.”

“Hmm?” He glanced down at her somewhat wide-eyed as though she were a fish a wild bear had forgotten he was about to eat.

“Get that look off your face. I’m not supper.”

“I don’t understand your continual aversion to admitting what you are. Embrace your situation. You’ll be happier when you do.” Tucking his phone back into his pocket, he straightened up and hooked her arm around his. “Come. Be casual.”

She went along, figuring complying was a better plan than waiting in the dark for a couple of jaw-flappers to go back into their trailers. The men sounded like they were just getting started.

“Over there.” She crooked her thumb discreetly toward the station wagon.

The vehicle was parked next to a trailer on the front row of the development. The plot was one of the few with maintained grass, permanent steps, and flower boxes in the window.

“Huh,” she murmured, picking up her walking tempo.

“What are you thinking?” the Bear whispered.

“I’m wondering what it means that she looks like she’s sticking around for a while.”

“Guess.”

“I’d rather just ask her.”

“Go for it.”

“As if you could stop me.” Marcella bounded up the steps, pulled open the storm door, and knocked on the wooden door beyond it before Soren could make a retort.

“Who’s there?”

Marcella didn’t care what the “right” answer was. Instinct told her to go with truth and save her cunning for later. “Marcella Bailey.”

Stillness inside.

Then footsteps.

One, two, three.

The door creaked open, and the cook put her face to the crack. “I’m sorry. Who? I thought you said Mark Bane. He’s late on rent.”

“I’m sorry to interrupt you. I’m here on behalf of a firm—”

Soren groaned from down at the base of the steps.

She ignored him. “And I believe there’s something special about who you are. If you don’t mind giving me five minutes, I’d like to find out what you know about someone we’re looking for.”

The woman blinked.

“It’s not you who we want to bother,” she said. “I’m trying to find a man who hurt my friends, and you may have encountered him.”

“And what the hell makes you think that?”

The question was a good one, and Marcella needed to come up with an equally good answer.

She pulled in a breath and grabbed the plackets of her jacket. She worked her thumbs over the zipper bumps and worried her lips as she pondered words. Words mattered, and she had a habit of always wanting to deploy the right ones on the first try. She got the feeling that her pause may have been construed as her gearing up to dissemble, and she never ignored her gut. She opened her mouth and prayed the right words would come out.

“To be perfectly honest,” she said, “we came to town looking specifically for Bears, and unless we pegged you wrong, you’re one.”

Soren murmured something that was definitely not English.

Marcella rolled her eyes.

After the sudden flooding of her cheeks with blood and a startled inward breath, the woman shook her head vigorously. “I’m sorry. Who are you again?”

“Marcella Bailey. Here.” She slid one of her business cards out of her inner pocket and placed it onto the woman’s outstretched hand. “I’m not here to make any trouble. We’re trying to clean some up, and hope you can give us some leads.”

“Trouble. I don’t know about that.” Hand shaking, she read the card. “Girl, what’s all this shit mean? Arcana and such.”

“Fancy word for mystical things. I can’t exactly say I’m a witch and that I work in an unregulated business. Someone would likely try to have me locked up.”

The Bear woman’s thick eyebrows flew up. “You’re a what?”

Marcella sighed. “Could we please have this conversation inside? I can’t promise my shadow back here won’t soil your carpet, but he’ll try to be on his best behavior.”

More foreign muttering erupted from the Romanian menace.

The woman looked from Marcella to Soren, then back to Marcella again. “You said five minutes?”

“That’s all. I don’t want to impose. All we need is some information to get started. We just got into the area today.”

“I don’t know if I have any information that you could use. Arcana? For crying out loud, I still don’t understand everything myself, but I’ve got five minutes.” She pulled the door open wider and stood back. “If you don’t mind, I want to move this along a bit. My daughter’s supposed to be home from work in fifteen minutes, and I swear, she’s nosy as sin. If y’all’re still here, she’ll be awake nagging me half the night and trying to get all up in my business.”

Marcella chuckled and stepped up into the trailer. “Children should only be concerned about childish things.”

“I know. That don’t seem to be the way it works no more, though.”

When the door had snapped shut behind Soren, the woman pulled out a chair from the kitchen table by the door and gestured to it.

Soren sat, cutting Marcella a side-eye as he did.

The woman perched on the arm of the sofa across the room.

Marcella took the other chair of the dinette table.

“How’d you know I was a Bear?” she asked in a whisper. “We don’t go ’round talkin’ ’bout that. That’s not somethin’ to tell folks.”

“We didn’t have to be told.” Marcella gestured to Soren. “He’s a Bear. He apparently possesses mysterious ways of identifying your kind.”

“Say what?” The lady shook her head and slid Marcella’s card onto the little table by the recliner. “A Bear how?”

“Born one,” he said.

“Born? What you mean?”

Soren’s lips parted, likely to make some crass statement about sperm meeting egg, but Marcella reached across the table and clapped her hand over his mouth.

He licked the back of her fingers, so she snatched her hand away.

Bastard.

Marcella wiped her hand on her pants and returned clasped it over Soren’s mouth again, just in case. “From what I know, there are far more born-Bears than there are made ones.”

“Huh? No way. Ain’t never heard of such a thing.”

Soren was working the tip of his tongue between her fingers in a most lascivious fashion, so Marcella pushed his face back, and then rubbed her palm on the leg of his jeans again.

Ass.

“Did you not know that the first made-Bears were infected by born-Bears?” Soren asked

Eying Soren with all the skepticism of a shopper peering at an expired pack of meat, the woman gave her head a slow shake. “They ain’t tell us nothin’ ’bout that.”

“Two questions. You said ‘us.’ Who is us? Also, who is ‘they’?”

She narrowed her eyes. “Why do you need to know this?”

“Because we believe the people who made you what you are did medical experimentation on a group of women against their will.”

The woman’s dark eyes went round briefly, then she grimaced and pushed to standing. “I knew there had to be more to the story. I told ’em somethin’ weren’t right. They weren’t doin’ it out of the goodness of their hearts.”

“What do you mean it?” Soren asked.

The woman pantomimed giving herself a shot in the arm. “Sent us home with twelve or fifteen of them needles full of the stuff, and had us go in every three days so they could draw blood.”

“When was this?” Marcella asked.

The lady grimaced and paced. “Oh, about a year ago now. To be honest, I didn’t think them shots was doin’ nothin’, then about a month after I’d finished all of them, I blacked out. Boom.” She smacked her hands together and then pointed to floor in front of the sofa. “Right there. Hit my head on the coffee table goin’ down. Kim had to call me an ambulance, and she couldn’t answer none of their questions. She didn’t know what was wrong with me.”

“What happened at the hospital?”

“Kim couldn’t say for sure, but I guess they had me in some system, so they already knew who to contact if I ever got brought in. When I woke up, I was sharing a hospital room with a lady who had the same problem as me. Passed out. Them folks from CarrHealth had us in some kinda isolation ward and shackled to the beds like we were convicts.”

“You shifted,” Soren said.

Slowly, she nodded. “I think so. I don’t remember shifting the first time until a couple of months after that, though. That’s when I started to put two and two together. They’d scoop me up the morning it’d happen, and I’d fight ’em, but they’d take me anyway and lock me down until after the changes had passed. I told them to tell me what they’d gone and done to me. Shots weren’t supposed to be for that mess. They said…” She took a breath and then another, fanning her face as if the room had suddenly gotten too hot and the air wasn’t what her lungs wanted.

Both Marcella and Soren stood, but Marcella nudged him back. “Take a deep breath.” Marcella picked up a bill from the cluttered coffee table and fanned the woman with it. Pamela the name on the sticker said. “Deep breaths. It’s all right. I’m sure dredging up the memories is difficult. Catch your breath before you say anything else.”

Pamela nodded and did as she was told. She drew in some ragged inhalations and let them out in sputters, but her face was less pink, and breathing sounded somewhat less labored. “Why’d… Why’d they do this to me?”

“We were hoping you could tell us. What did the researchers inform you they were doing?”

“They told us all different things. They told me they were giving me a treatment for perimenopause, and I jumped on that ’cause we always get it early in my family, and I didn’t wanna be like Momma sweatin’ myself half to death when alls I’m doin’ is watchin’ the TV. They gave me a thousand dollars. Made me sign some forms sayin’ I’d never sue ’em.”

Marcella cut Soren a look.

He nodded his understanding.

CarrHealth had learned their lesson since the SHREW Study. Dana had filed a class action suit and sued the company for every penny she could grab.

“Do you still have the forms you signed? We have some ladies back at the office where I work who could probably tell you if the legalese holds water.” There was also plenty of other information of the principals involved in the scheme in some of that paperwork, too.

“Yep. I have ’em over there in that case in the kitchen. I’ll get ’em.” Pamela fetched a translucent yellow file tote from under the table and sifted through the folders.

“How many others like you are around here?” Soren asked. “I’d guessed you were mostly female.”

“’Bout twenty’s what we got, I think…” She narrowed her eyes. “Eighteen women. Two men. We had to work this mess out on our own about the full moon and whatnot. They were supposed to send some other Bears down here to help out, but they never showed up. They didn’t tell us nothin’. They got all they wanted from us, and then they left us on our own for a while. They come back now and then offering some folks checks in exchange for blood and piss, and some of them folks will give ’em everything they want. Not me. No sir.” Pamela gave her head an emphatic shake. “Ain’t worth it. I don’t need the money that bad. I’d sure like to have a little more cash, though.” Chuckling, she handed Marcella the sheath of papers.

Marcella skimmed through them, looking for anything that would help immediately in the investigation. As she read, Pamela plopped her hands on her hips and looked to Soren.

“So, you tellin’ me you’re like me but different?”

He grunted. “I’m as the race was evolved to be. I sense my environment more like a Bear and less like a human. Does my scent seem less human to you now that you know what I am?”

She shrugged. “Smell like a regular man to me.”

Marcella glanced up from the papers in time to see his brow crease.

“Do the other Bears in your group smell different than humans to you?”

“If they do, I can’t tell.”

“That’s not right.”

“Whadda ya mean?”

“Made-Bears almost never have abilities as good as boron-Bears, but they still have better senses of smell and hearing than humans. You need those defense mechanisms to protect yourself in your Bear form.”

Pamela shook her head. “We didn’t get none of that. Just lots of Bear fat and fur once a month.”

“They fucked up again,” he murmured.

Marcella grimaced and put her thumb on a couple of Georgia-based addresses she wanted to have Drea research. Marcella couldn’t tell how far they were from their location, but even if they were within driving distance, they didn’t want to go into any situation half-cocked.

“I could do without the fat,” Pamela said sourly. “I’d lost thirty pounds right before the treatment, and it all came rushin’ back. It’s enough to make a lady cry, I tell ya.”

“You shouldn’t cry,” Marcella said. “Your current weight looks good on you.”

“Aw. I like you, lady.”

Headlights flickered in the front window, and the rattling treble of a cheap car radio rattled the storm door. The god-awful noise stopped. The lights went off. And then there was the slam of a door.

“Oh, hell,” Pamela said. “That’s Kim. Don’t mind her none. She’ll warm up after a while, but I don’t reckon y’all’ll be here as long as that.”

“No, we need to get moving and do some more research,” Soren said, standing. “If we have questions, can we follow up with you at the restaurant? That’s where we found you.”

“Ah. I was wonderin’. Well, sure, I reckon. I’m on the schedule for the next three days. After that, I’m here, collectin’ rent for The Man.” She giggled.

A young woman, who must have been Kim, bounded up the steps and open the door. Her narrowed gaze scanned around the room, finally landing on the big Bear by the door. “Momma, who’re—”

“Thank you again for your time,” Marcella said, already moving toward the door. “I’ll return these papers back to you urgently.”

“You can keep ’em,” Pamela said. “I’ve got another copy in my car. Had to give ’em to my doctor so he could try to get the records and find out what was wrong with me, but he couldn’t find out nothin’. I still ain’t told him about the Bear stuff. I only told him about the muscle aches and whatnot hoping he’d prescribe me some relaxants.”

“We’ll have our doctor phone you if you like,” Soren called through the door. “She’s knowledgeable about people like us.”

“Lord, please, tell her to call! Number’s on them papers.” Pamela laughed and waved them away as she closed the door. “See y’all soon.”

“Momma, who are they?” came Kim’s murmured voice.

“God dang, you’re nosy. Can I have some business of my own, please? Thank you.”

Marcella caught Soren by the elbow and got him moving at a not-quite-leisurely pace toward the SUV. She wanted to be out of earshot of the trailer, and plus the guy with the trash was still outside with his friend chewing the cud.

A glance over her shoulder confirmed that Kim was watching them through a back window.

“I get a bad feeling about her,” she murmured.

“About who?”

“Don’t turn!”

He grunted but stopped his head mid-movement. “The daughter?”

“Yes. I don’t know. Something’s not quite right.”

“In what way?”

“I don’t know yet. My witch’s intuition is flaring up, I suppose. I don’t have enough information, and I’m not certain this is the sort of circumstance asking questions and snooping around will support.”

Soren had left the doors unlocked, so with one quiet tug on the handle, she was inside the vehicle and getting her seatbelt fastened.

“Let me guess.” Darkness pervaded the inside of the SUV as he slammed his door. “You’re going to do witchy shit.”

“I don’t know if I want to waste the energy. I listen inwardly until the nagging stops. Sometimes it doesn’t, and at that point, if I want to sleep, I’ll have to do some work.”

“Hmm.” He hit the ignition switch and used the running lights to navigate out of the sodden half-grass lot to the road. Then he turned on the brights. A woodland creature with a death wish streaked across the road ahead of them. “Couldn’t hurt to have Drea do some research. Let her see if she can find any background information on the daughter.”

“I will, but she won’t be able to get me that until tomorrow. I want satisfaction tonight.”

Soren swung his head rightward.

She put her hand on his forehead and steered him toward the road once more.

And then she rubbed her palm and stared, unfocused, at the road.

Odd that touching him didn’t upend her. Anxiety should have been crippling her. Fear of losing control of her pulse, her air, her flesh, because she’d contaminated her essence with someone else’s should have paralyzed her.

So why doesn’t it?