THREE
I just came right out and asked Reed if he thought talking about sex and baby-making in such a businesslike sort of way was at all odd.
Immediately frowning, he set his glass of iced tea on the island with such force that it made the ice cubes clink.
“I want this to be a businesslike sort of thing, and I thought you did, too.”
I thought about what my great-great-grandma had told me in regard to listening to the first thing that the man who gave me “the quake” had to say, as it would tell me what it was that he truly wanted. Granted, what Reed was saying about wanting things to be “businesslike” wasn’t the very first thing he’d said to me, but close enough, and I was certainly listening. I was feeling, though, too, and for some reason, I was getting the impression that Reed didn’t fully mean what he was saying, or was in some way conflicted about it.
Nevertheless, I decided to take him at face value, because I still wasn’t even sure why I’d been rankled by his businesslike tone.
Picking up my iced tea again, I gave him a curt nod. “I do want this to be a ‘businesslike’ sort of thing between us. That’s more than perfectly fine with me. To be completely frank, I’m just in this for the money. My mom has incurable cancer, and I’m just here to raise funds in order to pay for an experimental treatment that might save her life.”
Not looking me in the eye, Reed mumbled a sorry about my mom’s cancer before taking a final sip of iced tea and then getting up from his seat. “I’m glad we got this all out of the way. Now, I need to leave to go deal with a few things. We’ve had some Bloodborn problems today… One of their spies was spotted just north of town, and there might be others. I need to run a patrol with my men to check and see. In the meantime, feel free to settle in and unpack, and do whatever else you want to do. I took the liberty of putting your things in my room, since it seems like it’ll be convenient for us to share a bed each night once we’re finished with what we need to do.”
Bristling for some reason, I said all that sounded just fine to me. Reed said good and fine, then was soon out the front door, leaving me alone in a house that was beginning to seem too quiet.
Taking Reed’s suggestion, I unpacked, then spent some time familiarizing myself with his beautiful, spacious home. After that, hearing some sort of an alarm or something outside, I put on my tennis shoes, grabbed a jacket, and went outside to investigate, finding that the noise sounded something like a tornado siren. This made no sense, though, because the skies were sunny and clear, colored a pretty pale blue that signaled that April was very near.
After spending a minute or two out on the porch, staring out into the dense trees that surrounded the yard, just trying to identify what the siren could be for, I ultimately decided that it was none of my concern anyway. It was coming from the “town” part of the village, and I figured maybe it was some sort of fire alarm, which, being that I wasn’t a firefighter, I obviously couldn’t help by responding to.
Now that I’d had a bit of fresh air, I decided to take a little hike out back, down a trail that led through the dense woods behind the house. Before she’d left, Marie had briefly mentioned the trail, saying that it was a good trail for people to “stretch their legs” on, and that it led to a picturesque little stream that bisected the woods.
Within ten minutes of starting out on my hike, I was in heaven, surrounded by a natural paradise. After being in the car for two days, it felt amazing just to be out walking, let alone in a quiet, beautiful place that smelled of clean earth and fresh air. The leafy trees in the forest were tinged with shades of bright, vibrant yellowish-green in some places, trying their best to bud. This early spring foliage, dappled with sunlight, made a gorgeous backdrop for the ugly, snarling, dark shape slowly lumbering toward me, still some distance up the trail.
Instantly freezing in place, I couldn’t make my brain work, and it was a good two seconds before I could. This was when I realized that the onyx black shape still a good distance ahead of me in the forest wasn’t just a dark shadow or some other trick of the light. The onyx black shape was a bear. And, from the two glowing red dots that I guessed were his eyes, he was a Bloodborn bear. I’d heard that they all had eyes like glowing red coals.
Of all the different things I’d expected to see on my hike through the woods, a snarling Bloodborn bear certainly hadn’t been one of them. I’d thought that at most, I might see a few birds. Maybe a rabbit or two, or a deer.
As I stood stock-still in the woods, my voice came out in a faint whisper, seemingly of its own accord.
“Shit.”
Up the trail, the bear had already seen me, and maybe had even a second or two before I’d seen him. I really hadn’t been paying very close attention, and with it being a sunny day, and with the trees being so densely packed, shadows dotted the forest floor everywhere, making the bear appear to me as simply one of them for a split-second. But even from a distance of thirty or forty feet, it had been the glint of those glowing red eyes that had first caught my attention. And now, I couldn’t look away from them.
Against a backdrop of trees beginning to turn the bright yellow-green of early spring, the Bloodborn bear was now lumbering toward me, snarling just loud enough for me to hear. Now, I realized, I was probably going to die, I was and on the very same day I’d arrived in Somerset. Meaning that my mom was probably going to die, too, because I wouldn’t be able to get the money to pay for her treatment, a thought that filled me with absolute dread.
Any small shred of hope I had that maybe I was just so exhausted from all my driving that I was just seeing things was dashed when I saw and heard fallen branches being cracked beneath the bear’s paws. No matter how exhausted I was, to be having both visual and auditory hallucinations seemed a bit improbable.
The bear was advancing slowly, red-eyed gaze locked on me, as if relishing my reaction to his approach. I wasn't sure how good a Bloodborn bear’s eyesight was at a distance, but if they had sharper-than-usual sight, like I’d heard many shifters did, this particular shifter was likely enjoying the sight of my pulse hammering in my throat. Just from the feel of it, I was pretty sure it was visible. With my heart beating like a drum, I felt as if my pulse could be visible from space.
At least ten long seconds had ticked by since I’d first spotted the bear, and during that time, I hadn’t been able to move a muscle for some reason. The bear, however, had now covered at least ten or fifteen feet, ever-so-slowly lumbering along as if he had all the time in the world to do whatever he wanted to do to me, which really, he did. With the house maybe a mile or so behind me, back up the trail, there wasn't a soul around to save me, not that there was anyone at the house anyway. No one was going to save me, I realized, unless I saved myself. Not like I had any earthly clue how I might attempt to do that, though. Knowing that even regular bears could easily outrun humans, I had no doubt that any kind of shifter bear would have no problem at all. Even at a hard sprint, running flat-out, as fast as my legs would carry me, I probably wouldn’t make it three feet, let alone all the way back to the house.
However, adrenaline racing through my veins was now urging my muscles to move, to do something, no matter what that something was. And if I was going to die, I didn’t want to go out without a fight. I owed at least that much to my mom, and myself.
With my fear seeming to make time stand still yet accelerate at once, I had no idea how many seconds I’d been frozen in place when suddenly, as if I’d been animated by some force outside myself, I was moving. Without taking my gaze from the snarling, onyx black form approaching me, I was stooping low to pick up a good-sized rock, maybe the size of a grapefruit, from the stony ground at my feet. As if in a dream, I hadn’t even been aware of making a plan or initiating the movement of my body, but it was now happening. Come what may, I was going to try to defend myself as best I could, for as long as I could. My only wish, other than a wish to have the Bloodborn bear simply disappear, was that I had a couple of knives.
It was an odd skill to have, I had to admit, when it came to my knife-throwing skill. I’d discovered it on accident, drunkenly playing darts at a friend’s brother’s house one night during college. After soundly defeating my friend and her brother in darts, despite being extremely tipsy on my feet, my friend’s brother had asked me if I’d ever “thrown knives” before. Barely even comprehending what he was saying, I’d said no, and he drunkenly shuffled over to his kitchen, saying he was going to go “get some really sharp ones” so that they’d “stick in the dart board really good.”
A half-hour or so later, my friend, her brother, the brother’s roommate, and his girlfriend had all agreed that I was one hell of a “knife thrower.” It wasn’t even that hard. I just took a steak knife by the handle, aimed, and let it go, and much more often than not, the knife would sail straight toward the dart board, stabbing the bullseye before falling to the floor because it turned out that the cork couldn’t hold a steak knife. My friend’s brother and his roommate hadn’t even been able to hit the bullseye a single time.
While knife-throwing wasn’t hard for me, my new talent sure had been inexplicable. I’d never had a gift for sports, and I wasn’t particularly coordinated. “Sometimes people are just strangely good at one really weird thing,” my friend’s brother had slurred to me. At any rate, my seemingly useless knife-throwing talent served as a form of entertainment for the rest of my college years. Whenever I was at a party with a dart board, I always asked the host for a steak knife or two so that I could show off my strange skill.
Currently, facing down a Bloodborn bear in the woods, I would have given anything for just a single knife of any kind. However, the grapefruit-sized rock I’d picked up was going to have to do.
After standing and pulling back my arm, I hurled the rock at the bear. “Stay away!”
To my horror, I missed him. And not only did the red-eyed bear not get back, he didn’t even pause in his slow, lumbering approach, growling at me just faintly.
I grabbed another baseball-sized rock and let it fly. “Stay the hell away!”
Again, I missed. I missed by a good couple of feet, actually.
“I mean it! Don’t come an inch closer! You stay away from me!”
In response to my shouting, the bear, who was maybe only twenty feet away now, if that, made some sort of deep, gravely, throaty noise that actually sounded like a chuckle that a human would make. The bastard. He was actually laughing at me. Apparently, to him, my attempt to fight him off by hurling rocks was pathetic.
Not wanting to retreat and show him any signs of weakness and fear, I resisted shuffling backward, willing my feet to stay put and planted firmly on the ground. “Hey! Don’t come a step closer! Do you hear me? I'm warning you!”
Another low, chuckle-like noise from the bear told me that he didn’t think much of my threatening him. He certainly wasn’t intimidated in the least.
Becoming drenched in sweat, and with my breathing fast and ragged, I grabbed another rock and launched it toward the bear. And this time, it met its mark, hitting the bear right between his glowing red eyes with a loud crack signaling stone on skull, which I found oddly satisfying.
Unfortunately for me, though, my satisfaction was very short-lived. Being hit in the head with a good-sized rock hadn't even seemed to faze the shadow bear. Despite having been hit so hard, he’d barely even flinched and was still ambling toward me, probably less than fifteen feet away now.
Now trembling, I took a lightning-fast look at the many trees around me, seeing that none of them had any low branches that I might grab. Just my luck, because I knew I wasn’t even remotely athletic enough to shimmy my way up ten or fifteen feet of bare trunk. As it was, I was in some small clearing just to the side of the walking trail I’d been on, and the nearest tree with low branches, although reasonably close, was still a good enough distance away that I knew the bear would likely have me within its mighty jaws before I was even halfway to the tree.
Yep. I was going to die. I was almost developing a horrifying sense of certainty about this. At the same time, instead of resignation, I was developing anger toward Reed. After all, Somerset was his town, and it was apparently overrun by Bloodborn bears. I would have thought he would have had the courtesy of telling a guest about this. If he had, I certainly wouldn’t have ventured off into the woods for a hike.
Resolving not to meet my certain death running, screaming, or crying, even though panic had me within an inch of doing all three of those things, I picked up another rock to hurl it at the bear. If I could at least hurt him on my way out, even slightly, maybe just enough to make him bleed, that would be good enough for me. I just didn’t want to go out having done nothing.
However, before I could let fly the apple-sized rock in my hand, still desperately wishing I had a knife, something funny happened. The bear came to a sudden stop about ten or twelve feet from me, one massive black paw frozen an inch or two above the ground. I might have thought that me preparing to throw another stone had given him pause in his approach, but he’d cocked his shaggy-furred head to one side, as if he were listening to something. As if there was someone or something making noise in the forest, some incredibly faint noise, that he could hear but I couldn’t. All I could hear at present was the sound of my heavy, rapid breathing and my hammering heartbeat. The quiet, melodic birdsong that had filled the forest during most of my hike had gone completely silent just before I’d spotted the bear, which should have alarmed me. At the time, not expecting a bear, I’d thought nothing of it.
Taking advantage of the bear’s apparent distraction, I launched the apple-sized rock at him, really putting my shoulder into the throw. Like my last one had, this rock met its target, knocking the bear right upside the head with a loud crack. However, instead of roaring in pain or falling to the ground as I'd hoped, he just gave his furry black head a brief shake, as if only mildly annoyed by being hit with the rock. He didn't even pull his gaze from a copse of trees at the edge of the little clearing that I was now standing roughly in the center of.
If I was going to live, I knew this might be my only chance. With the bear so distracted, no matter why he was, maybe, just maybe, I could start tearing away and get enough of a head start on him that he wouldn’t be able to catch up. I knew I at least had to try.
Not wanting to waste a single second, I spun around, already lifting a foot to run off at a sprint, but I didn’t quite make it to that action. There was some kind of movement in the shadowy spaces between the trees at the edges of the little clearing. Enormous black bears, many of them, were stepping out onto the sun-dappled grass, growling. None of them had glowing red eyes, indicating that these were Somerset bears, not Bloodborn bears. Nonetheless, they were blocking my escape, preventing me from doing what I needed to do to avoid getting caught in a possible fight between them and the Bloodborn bear.
I whipped back around in the direction of the Bloodborn bear, thinking I could maybe zip around him and then run my way back to the house while the Somerset bears were attacking him, if that was even what they were going to do. For all I knew, they were just going to chase him away. I had no idea what the Somerset bears’ policy was on dealing with trespassers to their land.
My escape was foiled, though. I couldn’t zip around the Bloodborn bear. Additional Somerset bears were now coming out from the trees behind him and on either side of him, too. They had us completely hemmed in. It didn’t seem like either of us were going to be able to escape now.
A second or two ticked by, and since it was now obvious that the growling bears surrounding us intended to do the Bloodborn bear harm, I would have thought that he would be displaying signs of the same anxiety I was feeling. To my surprise, though, he was just surveying the Somerset bears with seeming contempt, lip curled into an almost human-looking sneer. But then he turned that sneer to me and suddenly began charging.
Though I was still determined to not die screaming, I couldn’t help it. Hands flying reflexively to cover my face, I screamed so hard and so loudly that my throat instantly hurt. I knew this pain was soon to get a lot worse, though, when the Bloodborn bear attacked me, which I guessed would happen probably within an instant.
However, an instant came and went, and then another did, and I felt no further pain. My painfully loud scream tapered off, and I heard the growling all around me suddenly turn to roaring, followed by the sound of a loud thud. This was a sound that really, I felt more than heard. A near-imperceptible little tremor had rippled through the rocky ground beneath my feet. Still covering my eyes, I could only assume that the Bloodborn bear had been tackled, and was possibly going to fall on me, crushing and killing me. I wondered just why in the hell the Somerset bears hadn’t thought to give me room to escape before launching their attack.
I expected death; however, another instant came and went, then another, and another. And although the volume of the snarling and roaring all around me had even increased, making me think all the fighting bears were even closer to me now, I didn’t feel myself being knocked off my feet, or clawed, or slashed, or bitten. After another few seconds of me standing nearly frozen, I dared to take in a lungful of air, realizing I’d stopped breathing. Another few seconds after that, I dared to uncover and open my eyes, praying that the sight I'd see wouldn't be that of an injured Bloodborn bear charging me, jaws wide.
To my extreme relief, I didn’t see that. In fact, none of the bears, including the Bloodborn bear, were even immediately near me. Most were still in some semblance of a ring formation around the clearing, and a few of them were just inside. The Bloodborn bear and a massive black bear were fighting on the ground, rolling, slashing, and clawing at each other, about twenty feet ahead of me.
Wondering if an escape to the house, or at least some other place of safety might still be possible, I glanced behind me but saw that Somerset bears still blocked the way. Now there was nothing for me to do but watch the two fighting bears, hoping that at some point, the Somerset bears would break in their formation to let me by.
Soon, the fight moved them closer to where I stood, maybe to even just ten feet away from me. I nervously wondered just how long the fight would last, but fortunately, it didn’t last long at all. With the Somerset bear being much bigger, and surely stronger, than the Bloodborn bear, he quickly gained the upper hand, slamming his opponent on his back and holding him there. The Bloodborn bear struggled mightily, growling, but the Somerset bear kept him pinned. The Bloodborn bear couldn’t even escape when the Somerset bear lifted one paw, looking as if he intended to slash the Bloodborn bear’s face with his long claws, which glinted in the sun.
I was pretty sure I was about to watch the Bloodborn bear get killed, and I didn’t really want to. However, I found I couldn't look away. Not until the first spray of blood and gore, anyway, at which point I whipped my face to the side, sickened. I’d never had a stomach for carnage.
Once all sounds of the fight had ceased, I allowed myself to look again, and I saw the Somerset bear standing above the Bloodborn bear, triumphant. Then, within a blink, he shifted and stood as a human man. Not just a human man, though. He stood as a tall, muscular, devastatingly attractive human man with dark hair, and eyes that even from eight or ten feet away, I could see were a pale icy blue. Of course this devastatingly attractive man was Reed, and my heartbeat, which had slowed a degree or two, now accelerated, once again hammering in my ears.