Chapter Four
Jay
It was lucky for both of us that Jim and Nancy had extended their hours. Normally a mom and pop’s place like this cozy little diner would be closed for the night. We’d stumbled in the door at four in the morning and had been lazing in the corner booth at the back of the store ever since. Chance and his wife weren’t due to arrive until seven, so we still had a few hours to kill.
Millie was hunched over staring at her coffee like she could read all of life’s secrets in the foam.
“Are we going to talk about it?” I murmured after the bored and overly pierced waitress had slouched away from our table. We were currently on our third pot, and it wasn’t doing much to ease the weariness from either of our bones.
“Talk about what?”
“That fiasco back there in the bathroom,” I muttered, reaching across the table to still her hand. She’d been drumming her fingers on the table for the last half hour.
We’d managed to do what we could to disguise our presence there, mopping up the blood with copious amounts of water and paper towels. We’d flushed the evidence down one unfortunate commode. I pitied the poor plumber who discovered what we’d done to the thing.
And after that there had been the matter of cleaning ourselves up. Our clothes were pretty much a bust, covered in blood and soot as they were, but we could at least sponge ourselves off. I’d discovered, to my horror, that there was blood where there shouldn’t have been. After a disoriented second thinking that I was bleeding, I could only reach one conclusion. She was a virgin.
Had been a virgin. God, I was such a selfish bastard.
I couldn’t recall a moment where she’d grimaced in pain, whimpered, cried or done anything of the sort. I remembered how much it had hurt when Val had been with me the first time. And that had been in the best position possible, when she was turned on, ready and willing. I’d laid her out on a soft queen sized bed and lavished my full attention on her. It had been sweet, loving, and after the pain had passed, perfect. Millie Allbarn had deserved that treatment, too. And I’d stolen that experience from her.
You couldn’t have known, I argued with myself. She didn’t say anything, and it’s not like you attacked her. She made a choice.
She still deserved better.
She glanced up from her coffee, her eyes were red-rimmed, though, whether it was from lack of sleep or the bouts of crying she’d done since we arrived I wasn’t sure.
“What is there to talk about?” she mumbled. “It happened.”
“How could you still be a virgin?” I blurted. The thought had been chasing itself around my head for the last couple of hours. I was genuinely befuddled. I had my reasons for trying to keep my distance from her. That didn’t mean she wasn’t a temptation every damn second I spent with her. The other boys in her podunk little town would have no such compunctions.
“Is the incredulity in your tone strictly necessary?” she groused, finally lifting the cup to her lips. She took a swig of coffee and set the cup back down, glaring at me.
“I’m being serious. You’re beautiful. You had to have dated, had a boyfriend at some point.”
“Not a one.”
I tried to listen for a lie in her tone. I wasn’t as adept as reading human vocal cues as a lawman would be, but I could usually pick up when someone was deliberately trying to deceive me. There was nothing. She was telling the truth.
“You can’t be serious,” I muttered. “None? Why not?”
She shrugged. “My dad, in part. He ran a lot of guys off before they could even get close to me. And as for the rest, I was just one of the guys.”
I looked her over. No matter how close those men had been to her, they couldn’t have failed to notice her tight little body, how kissable her lips looked, the impish gleam in her eyes when she smiled.
“Somehow, I doubt that.”
“I was a gearhead. It was kind of hard to impress me with their cars when I know what’s under the hood better than they do.”
I raised a brow. I remembered her talking about her father’s business, and how I was undercutting the market. God, had that really only been last night? I’d thought maybe she’d come on her father’s behalf. Now, her interest in the garage and my car—damn it, that had blown up, too, hadn’t it?—made more sense.
“You’re a mechanic?”
“My name’s on the sign,” she declared smugly. Then her expression crumpled. Tears brimmed in her eyes and her lower lip wobbled dangerously. “Dad’s was, too.”
I scrambled, trying to think of something, anything to stop the flood of tears. There had been enough pain and suffering in this day to last me a lifetime. I searched for something off-color or funny to say, maybe something that would get her to smile.
Instead, what came out of my mouth was, “I know what it feels like.”
Damn it. I wanted to stop this from getting maudlin. What good would it do for both of us to be in tears? Her lower lip stopped trembling and she looked up from her lap, so I continued, “I lost my wife Val a year and a half ago.”
She clutched her coffee cup a little tighter, but said nothing to that. I felt stupid, talking mostly to myself about the little Greek tragedy that had been my life in the last eighteen months.
“What happened?” she whispered.
I swallowed thickly, as the images came unbidden into my mind. “She couldn’t get a transplant.”
Millie cocked her head to one side. “A transplant? But I thought shifters had healing factor?”
“We do.” I blinked hard, willing my own tears away. “At least, we’re supposed to. It’s rare, but occasionally some of us are born without it. She needed a heart, and the only compatible match was being held on account of ‘religious reasons’.”
“The parents didn’t want to give their son or daughter’s heart to a shifter,” she surmised, staring once more at her coffee.
I raised my own glass in a bitter little salute. “Right in one.”
“I’m sorry.”
“All I’m saying is I know what survivor’s guilt feels like. If I could have carved out my heart and given it to her, I would have. It’s not like its doing me a lot of good where it is. Damn thing has been missing for a while.” I didn’t mention its traitorous little revolution last night. One thing at a time.
“Your heart is gone?”
“Metaphorically. I haven’t felt my bear since she passed. Full transformation is painful if not impossible. I’m just a shell of the bear I was, really,” I finished quietly.
It was her turn to place a hand over mine, stilling my trembling fingers. “You’re still a great man, even without the bear.”
“You don’t know me.” I countered. “The first time we met I fingered you on my kitchen table, the house blew up, and then we fucked in a bathroom. We don’t know jack about each other.”
“I’d like to know more.” She twirled a copper curl around her finger. “If you’ll let me.”
I chuckled in spite of myself. “I don’t think we have much choice in that. It’s a long way to Norfolk.”
“Norfolk?” she echoed. “Why are we going there?”
“We’re going to Virginia, anyway,” I said. “There’s a safe house in the Blue Ridge Mountains run by some of Chance’s family. Then there’s the fact that your father wanted to get you to Jotunheim. I’m not about to leave you here alone without protection. If that’s where he thought you’d be safest, that’s where I’ll take you.”
“What the hell is that place, anyway? What are frost giants?”
“How much do you know about Norse mythology?”
“Does Marvel count?”
“No,” I huffed. Damn comic books. Thor did not look like that, nor was he such a cinnamon roll in real life. “Think of the Norse Gods as embodiments of everything you can know and sort of measure. Weather, fertility, magic, nature, that sort of thing. The Aesir and Vanir are the Gods that keep order.”
“And the Jotun are evil?” she guessed.
“No. They’re chaotic. Chaos doesn’t always equal evil, it’s just unpredictable and that can have devastating consequences. Loki, for example. He was a Jotun.”
“I thought he was a God? Wasn’t he Thor’s brother?” she interjected.
“Nope. He became blood brothers with Odin. While he had most of his misadventures with Thor, they weren’t biologically related.”
“Huh. The more you know. So, these Jotun are chaos, and the Aesir and Vanir don’t like them.”
“Pretty much. You’ll be left alone if you can make it into the halls of Jotunheim.”
“You could stay with me,” she said, raising her gaze hopefully to meet mine. Christ. What had I done? She needed to know that I wasn’t worth pursuing. I was broken, damaged goods. I wasn’t the same man I’d been, not the same bear. I couldn’t give her everything she deserved.
“I don’t think that would be a good idea,” I said gently and slid my hand out from under hers.
Distantly, the bell above the door tinkled, and I sat up straighter. The clock across the room said it was a quarter to seven. Chance’s reputation as an early riser had preceded him. I hoped he was better rested than we were, or this was going to be a very grumpy breakfast.
The first thing that caught my attention about Chance Kassower was that he was big. Most lawmen were. Occasionally, you’d see a smaller, leaner kind of guy who played smarter not stronger, but that was the exception, not the rule. Norse shifter communities were dangerous places, and they had to be policed by dangerous men. Authority meant nothing if there wasn’t a considerable amount of muscle to back it.
I’d talked with Chance over the phone. Even then, he had sounded big. There was something soothing about the basso timber of his voice that had set me at ease though. It was a good thing that I’d heard him before, because my instincts, human, not bear this time, were telling me that this was an alpha male that would be hard to defeat if he decided to throw down.
Behind him was a considerably smaller female. Her scent was clean and a tad bit cold, like a stormy winter day. It was harder to identify what breed of bear she was without the aid of my own. It was inconvenient, to say the least. She was curvy and blonde, and while pretty wasn’t exactly my type. Her eyes went wide at the sight of me.
Despite all the measures we’d taken to clean ourselves up, I knew the scent of blood wouldn’t escape their notice. I could smell it, and my senses had become significantly less acute without my bear in the back of my mind all the time.
“What happened?” Chance demanded. I didn’t think he meant to say it loudly, but his powerful voice carried, even at normal volume.
What was the point beating around the bush? Aside from the manager and the bored-looking waitress there was no one to overhear. Even if there had been, what sense would they be able to make of what had happened to us?
“The cliff notes version is this – Svartalfheim has thrown their lot in with the Aesir. My place was blown all to hell. They co-opted the cars of the local constabulary and gave chase when they failed to kill us. We barely made it out alive.”
“We?” the female asked, turning to the booth.
Millie, who had been staring pensively at her coffee once more, looked up sharply at the sound of her voice. Her eyes grew wide and brimmed with tears again. Before I quite knew what was happening, she’d thrown herself into the arms of the busty woman.
“Lucy!” she cried, burying her face in the woman’s neck. Her arms unerringly found her waist and they hugged one another tightly. The blonde, Lucy, was the first to pull away.
“Millie, sweetie, stop crying. What happened? Why are you covered in blood?”
In the end, Lucy took the seat beside Millie and coaxed more coffee into her while I was stuffed in the opposite side of the booth with the giant mass of muscle that was Chance. I ordered a stack of pancakes and a side of bacon for everyone when the waitress came by. I wasn’t sure what Millie liked, but she wasn’t really in any state to be ordering. Besides, with the violent emotional upheaval she’d just been through, I wasn’t sure if she’d be able to stomach much of anything.
“Stupid. If I’d just stayed home, he would be okay,” she kept muttering. “But I didn’t. And then he and Sammy had to fend off the dwarves by themselves. I was absolutely no help, and Jay was bleeding so badly—”
“Sammy Pullman?” Lucy interrupted her. “Sammy Pullman fought off dwarves? He can barely fight off a hangover!”
“That’s what I thought,” Millie acknowledged with a nod. I was sort of glad they’d veered away from the topic of the sexual healing. I didn’t really want to get into the story of how I’d stolen her virginity to heal myself. I was sure that wouldn’t meet best friend seal of approval.
But since when had I wanted that? My attraction to Millie was a fluke, a random influx of hormones due to traitorous biology. She wasn’t my mate. So why should I care if her friends thought well of me?
“So, what happened then?”
“We crashed. I haven’t seen dad or Sammy since Jay threw us out of the car. We limped to the nearest rest stop and—”
“Rested,” I finished. “For a few hours, before we got here. Millie’s wounds were worse than mine. I still think that her leg needs stitches.”
Millie gave me a probing look, but didn’t actually contradict me.
“Yeah,” she finished lamely. “That’s about it. He said he’d be meeting someone, but I didn’t know it would be you!”
Millie clapped her hand over her mouth and her eyes went wide again. Strangely, she put her hands on Lucy’s thigh, squeezing and stroking it. I didn’t know they’d had that kind of relationship. Or maybe it was a girl thing. I’d seen Val critically evaluate her friends’ bras when they’d gone shopping before. Maybe it was less sexual to her than it would have been to me.
“Your leg! You were walking without a limp, how did that happen?”
Lucy glanced at her husband. “That’s a story for another day. The long and short of it is that I’m a were-bear now, just like Chance.”
“Did he bite you?” she accused, eyes narrowing in dislike as she rounded on the lawman.
“No,” he said flatly. “If we had the time I’d give you the lecture about how unethical it would be to turn a plain vanilla human into a were-bear on purpose.”
Lucy gave her husband a frosty look. “Don’t condescend to her. She doesn’t know.”
“She’d better learn quickly. She’s in the thick of this, whether she likes it or not. She’ll have to come with us. Dwarves are good trackers. In order to properly, throw them off, they would have needed to travel farther than this. I’d be surprised if they were on our tail right now. We tip the waitress and grab breakfast on the road. This development needs to be reported to Freyr.”
“Nonsense. You simply must stay,” a scratchy voice said from just beside us. Though I knew it was an illusion brought on by fear, time seemed to slow. I turned my head, already knowing, dreading what I’d find.
A dwarf with a long, squashed nose was wearing a ‘kiss the cook’ apron over its leather armor. It held a sword in one hand, and slid a plate onto the table. Blood slopped over the side of the plate. My stomach pitched as my mind finally deciphered what was on it.
The head looked different, the expression grossly distorted from its original, rather blank expression. The dark hair was slick with blood and her piercings glinted in the low light. It was our waitress.
“Breakfast is served,” the dwarf pronounced gleefully.