Pierce

The car jolted over another bump in the road, and Pierce tried to steady himself.

Why did you agree to this again?

At that particular moment, he couldn’t think of a good reason for having agreed to come along with her.

Everything about the car either scared him, or made him uneasy. The constant rumble of the engine. The smell of the exhaust. The blaring music from the radio. The whistling of the air outside and the way it bounced and jolted as they went, a moving mass of metal that could explode at any moment.

Why did humans insist on using these contraptions, he wondered, making sure he didn’t grip anything so tightly he crushed it. It wasn’t his property, and the big silver SUV as he’d learned it was called, was hers, something she appeared to take great pride in owning.

But it was a hell of a fight for him to remain in the car. So he’d done the only logical thing he could think of. Try and distract himself with his own thoughts, so that he wouldn’t notice the outside world. It had worked for a while, but that was starting to wear off now.

The most pressing question in his mind, as he glanced over at the woman behind the wheel, was why he’d agreed to come with her. Going to the city made no sense.

Okay, that’s a lie. It makes sense, I just don’t want to.

He couldn’t figure out why he might find a sign of his brothers there, but then again, where else was he going to search? Pierce supposed that they could have all somehow made their way back to Cadia and the Green Bearets’ Base Camp, but he doubted it. If they were free, they wouldn’t have gone back there. All that would happen is they’d be thrown back in jail again.

No, his brothers would head elsewhere, and if they’d found themselves in the same forest as he was, the odds were that they were heading for Longhorne too. All he’d have to do is peruse the seedy joints until he found them, or found someone who’d encountered them. It shouldn’t be too hard, he’d figured.

That was before he’d gotten in the car.

They were climbing a long, though not overly steep winding hill now, and the engine was working hard to pull them up the incline. The steady thrum of power underneath their feet was giving him a fit.

“There’s Longhorne,” Mila said, pointing with one hand as they crested the hill at last.

“Oh my,” Pierce said, his throat constricting tightly as he took in the sight before him. “So many buildings,” he managed to choke out.

Mila looked over at him, and he felt embarrassed at his reaction. “Well yes, it’s a city. What did you expect? Have you ever been to a city before?”

He shook his head. The closest thing he’d ever been to was Cadia itself, the town at the heart of the shifter territory by the same name. But that had maybe ten thousand residents. They passed a sign:

Welcome to Longhorne, Pop. 297,000

Gulp.

Almost three hundred thousand people? That was twenty times the estimated size of all of Cadia! Pierce had never been around so many people before. As they drove along, the trees began to become interspersed with buildings, breaking up the landscape of greenery he’d become so accustomed to.

“Well, Longhorne is small by human populations. There are cities with twenty times its population out there you know.”

Pierce looked at her like she was crazy. He’d known that, obviously, not being completely ignorant of human society. But to hear it was…insane. How did they stomach it? Pierce greatly preferred the open lands of Cadia, where trees and wild meadows abounded.

Had his brothers been taken here?

By the nine Hells of Hades…

Anger blossomed to life, turning his vision a shade of red as he gazed at the city. He vowed that no matter what it would take, he would search Longhorne until he found them. And whoever was holding them, whoever it was that had taken them, he was going to rip them limb from limb.

The seatbelt buckle crumpled under his grip as his knuckles tightened, plastic and metal deforming as he squeezed with careless ease.

“Oh shit!” he yelped as the metal pierced his hand, drawing his attention away at last. “Fuck, Mila, I’m so sorry.”

“It’s okay!” she said. “It’s okay! Just relax, okay, Pierce? Just relax, close your eyes, calm down. I’m sure this overwhelming for you, but if you shut it out, you’ll be okay.”

Pierce did as she said, closing his eyes tightly against the sights before him, pushing away the reminder that the trees were disappearing, being replaced by buildings that continued to grow in size as they approached the city limits.

Something blared at them and he jumped in his seat, his eyes snapping open as he looked around for the source of the noise.

“It’s okay!” Mila said, reaching a hand out from the steering wheel and laying it on his shoulder, giving it a firm squeeze as best she could. Her hands were small compared to his muscular frame. “It was just a car honking, and not at us. Totally, completely normal, okay?”

He nodded shakily, trying to take a deep, relaxing breath to help steady his nerves. Something to his left caught his eye, and he rolled his head slightly as it relaxed back into the headrest.

A large crowd was gathered in a field, while someone appeared to be speaking to them from a raised platform.

“It’s election season,” Mila said, noticing the same thing. “People all campaigning for mayor of Longhorne.”

“So there are crowds like this everywhere?” he asked. The amount of people he’d seen in the field was easily one or two thousand. Rarely did that many ever gather in Cadia.

“Oh sure,” Mila said, still rubbing his shoulder. “That’s just a small one to be honest.”

His muscles locked up. That was a small gathering?

The homes and small businesses they traveled through were all of a sudden replaced by towering buildings as they seemed to cross an arbitrary line within the city. Pierce shrunk back from the windows as the sun darted in and out from behind the buildings as they passed them by. It had taken them several hours to get to the city, and the bright orange ball was well into its descent by then.

“I don’t know about this,” he said tightly as she guided them through the traffic. More than once he had to close his eyes, every muscle in his body tightening up at once as they narrowly avoided what seemed like a deadly accident.

“Nothing is wrong,” Mila said, her voice like a sooth salve. Each time she spoke, it seemed to calm him just a little bit.

“Keep talking,” he gritted out, his eyes alternating between being squeezed tight as hard as he could, and wide open in abject horror if the vehicle so much as changed pace.

“What?”

“Keep. Talking.” He repeated. “Please,” he added in a gentler voice, trying not to sound like he was pleading with her.

“About what?”

“Anything. Everything. Recite the period table. Sing me a lullaby, cuss me out, tell me the most inane, useless story you know. Anything, please,” he said, rocking back and forth slightly in his chair.

His bear was going berserk on the inside, slamming against the mental cage he kept around it within his mind, trying to get free. There was too much metal and iron, too much artificial construct. It wanted out, both of him, and out of the city. But Pierce couldn’t let that happen. He couldn’t change, not right then and there in full view of the city’s residents.

Even a normal wild bear running down the streets would cause a panic. There was nothing normal about a shifter’s animal though. Two and a half times the size of the average bear, almost twice the size of a fully grown wild polar bear, his bear was more a beast than anything else. A wild savage that could level a small building with considerable ease if it was in the way of its destination.

It didn’t bear mentioning what it could do to the rather flimsy human body if one wasn’t able to dodge fast enough. The thought of him let loose among this many humans packed together was less than savory. For the first time, Pierce truly understood why humans and shifters lived apart. Only an insane shifter would truly be comfortable somewhere like this. Let alone one of the big cities.

He shrunk back from the window as he once again remembered that this was, as far as human towns went, a tiny, almost backwater place.

“A story?” Mila said, laughter in her words. “Oh man, I’ve never been any good at stories. I always ruin them. You know that person that goes ‘oh that reminds me, I have a great story that would add to whatever is being talked about,’ and then proceeds to fuck their story up enough times that people never listen to them the next time they speak up?”

He nodded.

“Yeah, that’s me in a nutshell,” she said, shaking her head. “Same with jokes. Sometimes I feel like I’m the punchline, because I always forget what it is.”

Pierce smiled. “You just haven’t found the right audience then,” he replied.

“Pffft, to find the right audience I need to have an audience,” she shot back. “Now I mostly keep quiet, unless it’s a story I know I won’t mess up, or a short comment. I think it’s easier that way.”

“I’m sure you have plenty of fun stories.”

“You mean embarrassing ones,” she replied. “I was that girl in high school. Always doing something stupid and awkward for people to laugh about.”

“Really? You don’t strike me as very awkward,” he replied.

“Not physically,” she admitted. “For the most part I did all right with that. Played a lot of sports, so it sort of forced me to learn how to control my body.”

He nodded. That made a lot of sense. She had an athletic body, that was for sure. Perhaps one that didn’t get as much exercise as it used to, but she obviously still tried to train when she could.

Probably a workaholic. Would be more active if she could, but spends all her time at work, and has no energy when she gets home.

“Well, what kinds of things did you do then?” he asked, both curious and desperate for a distraction from the world outside of the SUV.

“Oh you know, telling boys I like them at the wrong times, making up rumors about myself to seem cooler, but then getting busted about them not being cool. Trying to use makeup and looking like a raccoon, but thinking it was a good look. Oh I could go on and on,” she said, shaking her head.

Pierce laughed. “I’m sorry, I’m trying not to laugh, I really am.”

She smiled. “It’s okay, I’m fine with it now. I grew out of that phase…eventually. Took far longer than I would have liked, but I did. Got it together, aced college. Good grades, awesome parties, a few cute boys.” She said the last part shyly. “Everything a girl could have hoped for, to be honest with you.”

“I’m glad to hear it.” And he was. Why it should matter to him, Pierce didn’t know, but he wasn’t going to argue with it. There was no harm in being happy that she’d found herself a place in the world.

“Ah,” she said, and the vehicle slowed dramatically.

“We’re here.”