Chapter Two
Nixon
It had been four days since I’d eaten. It wasn’t the longest. Not by a stretch. I’d been on the run for more days than I could count. I chose not to count years because that made the reality—my reality—too hard to deal with.
And then I heard some guys talking about how amazing the honey was from Bears Love Honey, and how they couldn’t believe they had honey bees on the rooftop above the cafe, and, before I knew it, I was on the roof trying to get said honey. Which was more cliché than I realized until the bees came pouring out.
In my head, those little buzzy suckers hadn’t entered into the equation. All I focused on was the taste of the honey that would soon touch my tongue. Let’s just say the bees were none too happy that I happened upon their lair and went into full-on attack mode.
I’d had shots before, and shots were nothing compared to the excruciating pain that came with their assault. I morphed into those guys you see in horror films where danger is there and they just stand in shock and let it happen. I held on to that darn frame for dear life, keeping those suckers glued to me and their mission to create a bear pincushion out of me.
It didn’t really register that someone else was on the roof, yelling at me. All I could focus on was the pain and the swelling. So much swelling. My tongue blew up in my mouth, my knees refused to move, my body tingled as if a thousand ants were marching across me.
And then the man whacked the frame from my hands, saving me from more stings.
Next thing I knew, I was falling then landed on a couch. My breathing was steady, but not much air was getting in, and though I tried to suck it in, my lungs refused to breathe in deeper, faster, anything to bring the relief of a full breath of oxygen-filled air.
I wanted to shift. Needed to shift. Shifting would encourage my healing, and I needed to heal, except my bear was gone. I called and called him, but he’d disappeared. He had weakened drastically since I’d first gone into hiding, partly because my shifts were infrequent so as to not draw attention to myself. I played human and did it well, getting a few nights in a homeless shelter before someone figured out I didn’t belong there.
But this was a new level of weak. The venom or whatever it was the bees had in their little swords had my bear simply gone. And that was when I realized I might be dying.
I half heard them calling a doctor, which was good. I needed one—or five. With my bear gone, I instinctively understood death was knocking on my door.
Sweat pooled on my chest as I lay on the couch of the man I’d been stealing from, and then the word hospital broke through the haze and I panicked, trying to get up, to leave, to… Fuck, I didn’t even know, but something. Once I hit a hospital, I’d be a dead man. The red dragons had spies everywhere. Or co-conspirators. Or shifters being blackmailed. Whatever the case, I’d be found out, and my fate would be worse than my impending death.
I had a feeling they would save me only to torture me for not the chase I gave them, but for the debt I’d been sold to repay. Sold by a college professor. I still couldn’t figure that out, and believe you me, I’d had many an hour to process it.
In the movies and books, parents sell their kids or trade their kids because they get in a bad place or want a step up. These, of course, were horror movies and, until a few years ago, something I never would’ve thought possible. But from the echoes that still haunted my dreams of the night my parents gave up everything to save me, the dragons felt it was fairly normal, which meant, in their twisted and messed up world, it was normal.
Yet, how that made me enough of the property of a college professor, an adjunct at that, I still didn’t know. And unlike my daydreams of vengeance when it first went down, I’d never be able to question him to find out. It had hit the national news when he hung himself in his classroom.
Only thing was, he didn’t. He was a weird guy and wore pull-on pants exclusively, looking more the old guy getting the early bird special than a professor. Pull on pants didn’t have belts, belts like the one he supposedly used to hang himself. Nope. He was killed.
And that opened my eyes for the first time to how completely entrenched into all areas of life those damn red dragons were.
I passed out well before the doctor got there or maybe just as he did. I had no idea, but my arms felt like cactus spines flowed through my veins when I first cracked my eyes, screaming in pain.
“Shhh, little bear.” I looked over to see the man I’d been stealing from, his brow furrowed. “Dr. Cresley is here, and you’re going to be okay.”
There was truth in his voice, and while my arms hurt like nothing I’d felt before, I had been able to scream. I tested my hypothesis that screaming meant breathing freely with a huge breath.
“There, there, son. You are going to be fine,” the man I assumed to be the doctor said.
That was all I needed to hear before I tried to sit up, and was instantly met with resistance. Dr. Cresley had his hand on my shoulder, holding me down.
“I said you are going to be fine, not that you are fine. You are extremely dehydrated and malnourished on top of recovering from anaphylaxis. You’ve already had two doses of medication, but we won’t know for another fifteen minutes if you will need more, so you might as well get comfortable.
I let my body go limp. It wasn’t as if I could fight him or anyone else in the room. Shit, a mini poodle could beat me, the way I felt.
The man from the roof leaned over me. “My name’s Randy, and I own the honey you were after. What’s your name?”
“Nixon, sir. I apologize for the honey. My bear kind of took over.”
He gave a curt nod in understanding. Why was he being so nice to me?
“Can you feel your bear?” the doctor asked, and I pivoted to see him. How gorgeous the man was. Square jaw with just enough stubble, cerulean eyes, wide shoulders.
Shit. I got lost in his eyes and forgot the question, so I answered with a noncommittal shrug.
“You don’t know if you feel your bear?” he clarified, and to my shock, I realized my answer had been the true one, even if I hadn’t known it at the time.
“No, sir. Is he…could he be dead?” If so, why did they save me? A shifter’s existence without his animal isn’t worth living. It was a half life at best.
“No. The shock set him back, way back. He’ll pop up when you get good and healed. Now, drink this.” He handed me a glass of something that looked like water but tasted bitter. “Trust me.”
The end of the couch sank, and the bear who called himself Randy was now by my feet, drawing all of my attention. Fuck, he was just as gorgeous as the doctor, but where Doc’s eyes were cerulean, Randy’s were the richest gold. Not that I should be looking. I needed to find a way out of my predicament, so I sipped the bitter drink slowly, trying to form a plan.
None came.
“How old are you, child?” the sexy man at my feet asked for the second time, and my bear came barreling out.
Thank Goddess.
“I’m not a child. I’m twenty-five.”
“How long have you been hungry,” Randy asked as Doc leaned in closer, brow arched in question.
“Three years. I’ve been hungry for three years.”