Bearly Accidental (Accidentally Paranormal Book 12) (17 page)

Cormac dragged his hand through his hair. “We need Toni here. There has to be a way to get her here. She could tell us if this Mauricio is the guy she saw in a pool of blood that night.”

Wanda pressed her fingers to her temples and winced. “The door to the other realm can only be opened during certain times of the full moon cycle and some star configuration. I can’t remember the exact circumstances, but I do remember I have it on the calendar in my phone and it’s another month away.”

“Jesus,” Cormac muttered.

Teddy’s stomach sank, the butterflies from earlier replaced with sick dread. “So this Carmine’s effectively turned the tables on us. He’s plastered our faces all over the news nationwide.”

The kind of balls this took meant he was either desperate or he had some kind of death wish.

Cormac ran his hand through his hair again and sighed. “I’d love to know what this evidence is. The son of a bitch.”

Nina scoffed, her face twisted up in a scowl. “Well, you heard what the reporter said. He just miraculously uncovered it. You know the media score. They’re billing it like it’s some startling revelation, eatin’ it up like stray dogs. It also means the pansy fuck is scared because Teddy can identify him.”

“But he knows where we are, Nina!” Cormac returned, his fists clenched. “He knows where Teddy is. Why does he have to smoke us out?”

Wanda nodded her head in Darnell’s direction. “Because of our resident demon.”

Nina cackled her pleasure. “Some demon shit—a spell or whatever. Nobody can get in or out of the grounds now. I had him do it last night after the dude took a shot at Teddy. But you two can’t hide fucking forever. We need to handle this shit quick.”

Reaching for the back of one of the recliners, Teddy had to hold on to it to keep her knees from collapsing out from under her and knocking Carl down. “So what do we do now? We obviously can’t leave here if there’s a manhunt for alleged cop killers.” She knew she sounded hysterical, but she wasn’t used to being on this side of the law.

Nina nudged her shoulder with a light fist. “Here’s what we do—we chill the fuck out and we think about our plan of attack. If Carmine Ragusi wants to fucking play, then we play. For right now, you’re safe here. He’s not givin’ you two up—not yet anyway. It buys us a little time to find a way to make him and that borscht-loving freak Stas confess.”

This was hopeless. A guy like Stas wasn’t confessing to anything ever.
Ever
.

“It’s late, Teddy, and you look exhausted. Why not try to get some sleep and let us worry about the rest for now?” Marty suggested, wrapping her arm around Teddy’s waist and squeezing.

Her eyes widened in disbelief. “Are you kidding me? I’ll never sleep with a murder charge hanging over my head.”

“You haven’t been charged with anything, honey. Neither of you have. You’re just suspects in an investigation,” Wanda reminded her, her tone sympathetic.

“We might as well be on
America’s Most Wanted
or the back of milk cartons at this point. I don’t see how we can get a confession out of Stas, short of threatening to kill him.”

“If that’s how we gotta roll, that’s how we gotta roll,” Nina said without pause.

Before Teddy could protest the idea of murder, and the cold chill along her spine that came with it, Archibald swept in, two mugs in his hands with tendrils of steam winding out of them. “Miss Theodora, I’ve made you my special brew. Guaranteed to help you get a restful night’s sleep. You as well, Master Cormac. Now drink up, children—the sandman awaits.”

Both Teddy and Cormac took the mugs from Archibald with skeptical eyes. She didn’t plan on sleeping for at least a hundred years, but if it made Archibald happy, someone who’d welcomed them into the fold, cooked and cleaned as though they were his own, no way would she insult him.

He swept his hands in a shooing motion. “Off with you both now. Fresh sheets and warm blankets are on your beds in the basement, as well as clean nightwear. Pleasant dreams,” he said with that twinkling smile, escorting them out of the TV room and toward the basement door.

She turned at the head of the steps and impulsively hugged Archibald, letting the scent of fresh vanilla and cookies on his pristine jacket soothe her. “Thank you, Archibald. You’ve been very kind to us on such short notice.”

“’Tis nothing, Theodora. You’re always welcome wherever I go. Sleep well, lovely lady.” He dropped a kiss on her cheek and nodded to Cormac. “You as well, Master Cormac. Tomorrow, we slay the dragon!” he shouted as he took his leave.

As they made their way down the stairs, a warm glow of light shining from a small lamp, she had to admit, the bed did look pretty inviting.

They were silent as they took turns changing behind the princess privacy screen with knights on horses and princesses with long, flowing hair, waving from castle turrets.

They each finally sat at the edge of their respective beds and sipped the warm brew Archibald gave them.

Both silent.

Both lost in their own thoughts.

* * * *

“Wow. Wow. Wow,” Cormac murmured sleepily, the rustle of the sheets as he repositioned himself meeting her ears.

Teddy giggled from her bed. Yeah. Wow. She felt great. Better than she had in well over a year. “What the heck was in that special brew?”

“I dunno, but unicorn sighting at three o’ clock.”

“You think that looks like a unicorn? I was leaning more toward Clydesdale.”

“We’re sharing hallucinations?”

“It’s what life mates do.”

Cormac barked a weak laugh. “Whatever’s in that tea, I want a permanent port put in my arm filled with it. I haven’t been this relaxed in forever.”

She nodded, tucking the comforter under her chin as she drifted on a fluffy cloud. “It’s pretty great.”

“You feel better now?”

“As good as any murder suspect feels, I suppose.”

“Let’s not talk about that. Let’s talk about something else.”

“You wanna name your unicorn?”

Cormac chuckled. “How about we get to know each other?”

“You mean like whether I want the top or bottom bunk in our cell? What our prison pet names should be? That kind of intimate detail sharing?”

“Aw, c’mon, Teddy Bear, play nice. No talk of prison or dirty cops or murder. Deal?”

She closed her eyes and a cornucopia of colors rushed past her eyelids; she smiled. “Hmmm-mmm. Deal.”

“So tell me everything about Teddy.”

“Bra-size everything or favorite-color everything?”

“How about we start with favorite color?”

“Yellow.”

“I’m green.”

“Green is nice.”

“Okay, scratch favorite colors. It’s superficial and boring and the only time I’ll need to know what your favorite color is will be when we pick out paint for our house. Let’s go deeper. Ask me something you’ve been wondering about since we met and I’ll do the same.”

“Okay, in the interest of going deeper, how did you deal with becoming a bear? I mean, how did you learn to shift and…I dunno, the million and one things that come with such an enormous life change? I’ve been going over how crazy that must have been and I can’t wrap my head around the idea.”

“Romance novels,” he said, deadpan.

“Come again?”

“I read romance novels, and I’ll have you know, this tea makes my lips loose.”

“Romance novels? Please, please,
pleeease
explain.”

“Promise you won’t laugh?”

“Nope.”

“Fine. You were bound to find out anyway. So when this all went down, there wasn’t like a guide on how to become a bear or anything. So I Googled all sorts of crazy phrases like ‘going from human to bear’ and ‘shape shifting’ etcetera. That led me to romance novels. Just an FYI, we’re huge in romance.”

She knew she should be alarmed by the idea that everything he knew about being a bear shifter he’d learned in a romance novel, but he was still standing. That said something for romance novels and vivid imaginations.

“Bears are?”

“Last year we were all the rage. Right up there with vampires.”

“Okay, so you read romance novels and that taught you about the shift?”

“Yep. I read a bunch of Eve Langlais and some other folks with catchy titles like
Bearly There
. Billionaire bears, alpha bears. You name it, I read it. That’s where I started and it went from there. Tons of reading material, tons of different takes on bear shifting. Some not so far off the mark, if what you say is true.”

Now she really laughed. “Promise me something?”

“What’s that?”

“Never ever tell a single soul how you learned how to shift. Ever.”

“Will they laugh me out of the clan?”

“You could lose your man cred. And it’s the sleuth. We have sleuths they’ll laugh you out of, not clans.”

“Oh, right. A group of us are called sleuths. Don’t think I ever came across that term.”

“It’s kinda old school. So the first shift—how horrible was that?”

He blew out a breath. “The scariest shit I’ve ever experienced in my whole life, bar none. Even Stas and his thugs don’t compare to that.”

“I’m sorry, Cormac. How awful to have gone through that all alone.”

“I’ll never forget seeing myself in a mirror after that first shift. Jesus…” he muttered.

She couldn’t even imagine it. It had been hard enough as a cub with plenty of parental support, but all alone? It had to be terrifying. “The shift is a big deal in our circles, just so you know. Had anyone known, there would have been a ceremony, blessings, all sorts of good things.”

“Kind of like a Bar Mitzvah only with honey and salmon?”

“And a big disco ball for dancing after all the rituals are complete.”

Cormac laughed again. “I’m damned put out that I missed doing the Chicken Dance. But somehow I managed. It turned out all right.”

Cormac had to have some kind of will to survive, doing that all on his own. His determination spoke to his character and it made her toes tingle.

“But to not understand what was happening to your body, to wonder if you’d always be like this? Not knowing any of the things involved with a shift—not to mention our lifestyles, what we need to survive. That we don’t hibernate like non-shifter bears. The details of being a shifter that you have no idea about. That sucks. On behalf of all of my fellow bear shifters, I apologize.”

“I will say this, once I got past the whole similarities to
Teen Wolf
, it was a little cool. But there was a long period of time where I went through the ‘I’m a freak’ stage.”

Her heart clenched in sympathy, making her hands tighten around the sheets. “So how did you end up at that cabin? It’s so far out of the way of everything. Like really deep into the forest.”

“I got damn lucky. I don’t know who it belonged to before me or how long it’s been there, but it was there like a mirage in a sandy desert. I watched for days before I got up the guts to move in. After that, I pieced the kitchen and bedroom together by Dumpster diving at night in the nearest town.”

“And Lenny? I love Lenny Kravitz. So he was a stray?”

Cormac’s voice warmed the darkness surrounding them. “I found him half frozen on one of my treks around the perimeter of the cabin. Poor little guy, I didn’t think he’d make it. But I wasn’t giving up. He was the first contact I had with anything other than the typical animals in the forest.”

“And his name—how’d that happen?”

“Have you seen my cat’s swagger? He’s the epitome of cool. Just like Lenny. But now look at him. One can of salmon from Nina and he’s sleeping with her on her California king. Traitor.”

Teddy chuckled, closing her eyes. “She does have an uncanny way with animals, and situations like Carl’s, where her need to nurture is probably some of the best mothering I’ve ever seen.”

“Did you catch her reading to him? It was pretty great. I’d have never guessed she was as patient as she was until she and Carl sat down before dinner to read, of all things, Jane Austen. It’s incredible.”

“They’re all pretty incredible.” Every last one of them. She liked them far more than she’d ever liked anyone in just a couple of days’ worth of time spent together. She liked their vibe, their interaction, their loyalty and even their bickering.

“I’m coming to see that. I think they’re the most selfless people I’ve ever met. They’re balls to the wall, all in. I’m beyond grateful Toni had them.”

Something she’d wondered about since she found out everything began in Jersey made her ask, “How did you get to Colorado all the way from Jersey? Especially after being bitten?”

“This will sound weird, but after I was bitten, I staggered around for probably a week, sleeping in rest areas and trying to conserve the cash I still had on me.”

Teddy gasped, fighting a yawn. “Stas didn’t rob you blind? What kind of murderer is he anyway?”

“Apparently the kind who only likes removing body parts. But I wondered about that, too. I couldn’t believe my wallet was still in my back pocket; everything exactly like it was when they knocked me out and took me. I just knew I had to get somewhere safer than Jersey. I must’ve called Toni a million times from various burner cells, only to fill up her voice mail with messages. I swear, I thought she was dead. I was convinced she was dead.”

The anguish in his voice forced her to ask, “Why didn’t you go just to the police when you got away, Cormac? Report Toni missing? Surely they would have at least investigated. Tell them about how they held you hostage and chopped off your finger?”

“Because when they thought I was unconscious, I listened to them joke about all the cops and the city administrators on their payroll. I knew damn well they couldn’t be trusted.”

“Just like what Toni experienced,” Teddy whispered. Christ, what a rock and a hard place for him to land between.

“Yep,” he said on a yawn. “I became so paranoid, I started to wonder if I should trust myself.”

“And Colorado? How did you get all the way to my home state from Jersey?”

“You’ll laugh.”

“Did you read it was the place to find other bear shifters in one of your romance novels?”

“Hah! No. It was instinctual. That’s the only way to describe it. After I stumbled around, trying to figure out if Toni was dead or alive, spent day after day in one homeless shelter or another, hatching plans to find just one damn cop who wasn’t corrupt and wouldn’t think I was out of my mind, I was losing hope fast. So I did what some might consider stupid. I took out a bunch of cash advances from my credit cards, leaving a big fat trail of where I’d been. My credit is obliterated by now. But I needed cash if I hoped to get anywhere or buy technology I could use to research these nuts. Also, I don’t know if you noticed, but bears need to eat. Often. The soup kitchen wasn’t cutting it in terms of addressing my hunger.”