Can't Bear To Run (Kendal Creek Bears, #1) (20 page)

Anyway, as we sat there under the stars, neither of us saying much of anything, and with lots of fluttering kisses finding their way to the back of my neck, I was looking forward to a quiet evening of
Frasier
reruns, maybe a glass of wine, and some of the aforementioned mating, when Rufus Jaggerworth, one of the clan’s messengers, broke the quiet reverie.

“Dax!” he shouted, in an exasperated, almost-out-of-breath way. “Bad stuff happen!”

Daxon Mark, my mate, and the biggest bear for at least a thousand miles in any direction, was a lot gentler with his old friend that I was. I wished the guy would just start using proper grammar. Dax told me that’s just how bears are, but I never believed him.

“Jagger?” Dax sat up, and I detected the slightest bit of irritation in his voice. “What’s going on? Someone fall in the well?”

I snickered, thinking it was a
Lassie
joke, or at least hoping it was, but seconds later when they both looked at me and cocked their heads, I remembered that bears never joke about anything more serious than a pun or a dirty limerick.

“No,” Jagger said, still looking at me like I’d shot someone. “Something bad.”

“Someone falling in a well isn’t bad?” I piped up, “did someone get the wrong drive through order?”

Look, we live quiet lives. Really quiet. To the point that I get bored and hope for something to come along and happen just so I have something to talk about at the gym, so it’s not that I was being insensitive. Well, not entirely, although admittedly I have a little bit of a snarky streak running straight down my chest.

“No,” he said again, this time with a frown deepening the lines in the corners of his squinty eyes. “Something bad.”

“She won’t joke anymore,” Dax shot me a glance. “What happened?”

Jagger looked thoughtfully into the distance for a moment, which was a rare thing. “Wrong drive through order would be bad.”

Dax sighed heavily. “See what you’ve done?” he said to me, with a playful pinch on my underarm. “You confused him, and now he’s thinking about cheeseburgers.”

“That’d be good though, not bad.”

“Yes, okay, cheeseburgers are good. Can we move on?”

“Very good,” Jagger said, still looking off at the horizon. “I’d like one. But something bad happen.”

“Right,” Dax said, “and what was that bad thing?”

I told you he was nicer than me. At least until he gets mad. You wouldn’t like him when he’s... anyway.

“Oh, bad thing. Uh, well...”

Daxon’s shoulder’s slumped. “Right, you ran up all huffing and puffing, and said something bad happened. And then Raine made a stupid joke and you forgot what you were talking about.” He paused briefly, waiting for a flicker of recollection on his old assistant’s face. Nothing came. “Cheeseburgers...”

“Oh! Bad guys took the cubs,” Jag said, completely stone-faced. “You have cheeseburgers? Council wants you to go and get them.”

Daxon was up to his feet before I could even register what his jabbering friend had said. “Which cubs? Who took them? Where? Naw, hell, it doesn’t even matter which ones or who, just tell me where they went. I’ll tear whichever moron it is apart.”

When Dax got angry, like I said, he was ready to smash. The only problem is that a lot of times his urge to wreck the house gets in the way of things like planning, and thinking of consequences. Still, kidnapped cubs was bad. It’s not all that rare as far as bear crimes go, but it ranks up there with murder or mate theft as an insult to the clan.

We reached the same conclusion at the same moment.

“Someone’s starting a war,” Dax said, as he pulled his baggy Alabama State University sweat shirt that I believe was made before I was born, over his head. “Or trying to start one. I’m so sick of clan wars. They get me stressed out like you wouldn’t believe.”

That’s another thing. Bears are frequently frustrating in their pragmatism and living in the moment. I’m almost sure it’s a defensive mechanism, but what are you gonna do? Everyone’s got their walls.

“Where did they go?” Dax asked, his voice getting growly, which made me tingle a little bit. “Jagger! Talk!”

Instead of an answer, he gave a shrug. “Dunno,” he said a few seconds later. “Marta told me to tell you the cubs got stole. Said they got took from meeting. Ask her?”

By that point, the fact that some asscrack had taken cubs from the clan had finally hit me. Not in the political ramifications way, but right in the gut. They were
my
cubs, no matter who gave birth to them. At first that’d just been a weird clan tradition that took a while to get used to, but after the first year or so of living as the clan’s matron, I had really started to fall into the role of, uh, mama bear. So to speak.

Dax was already half-shifted before he remembered to tell me anything. “You stay here,” he said. “I’m going to Marta’s to find out what the hell he’s talking about.”

Jagger, for his part, was wandering toward our front door, undoubtedly on the hunt for some cheeseburgers.

“Without me?” I grabbed my coat off the ground where it had been lying while Dax and I made with the cuddling. Bears are hot in more ways than one. They have some crazy metabolism thing going on that means they get to be somewhere between the temperature of a radiator and the sun on a regular basis. “I don’t think—“

“No time,” he said, snarling through his bear lips. “I don’t want you in any danger. Stay here, look after Jag and make sure he gets something to eat. You know how he is.”

I sighed. “Yeah I know how he gets,” I said. “He’ll find the stew I’ve been cooking for the last six hours and eat it like a slopping pig.” I turned around get my keys off the ground, where they’d fallen out of my pocket. And like hell are you going to
run
all the way to Marta’s bar, you lunatic.”

My keys had somehow become tangled in the blanket. Don’t ask how the blanket got all rumpled up and tangled because my lips are absolutely sealed. You can probably guess though. I’ll put it this way – there’s a reason Dax’s skin was approaching cosmic heat warning levels. As I wrestled with my Grand Canyon novelty keychain fob which had
somehow
gotten hooked around one of the threads in the blanket, I got the sense that I was alone.

“Sorry!” Dax called back, in that grumbling bear-voice. “I can’t let you get tangled up in this. I’d never forgive myself!”

At the sound of his voice, I wheeled around to give him a piece of my mind – who the hell was
he
to tell me what to do – I realized that if I yelled at anyone, it would just startle Jagger, who was nervous anyway, because I’d be yelling at myself. He might talk to himself a little more in-depth than most completely sane people do, but I imagine that having a shouting contest with your own head would be a step past what even Jagger would consider normal behavior.

My shoulders sagged, my arms relaxed, and the keys I’d been wrestling with jingled slightly in my hand. That little tinkle of novelty key chains rattling against one another spurred me into action. “I’ll show that jackass,” I grumbled, beating feet to the old Blazer that I’d had since I was seventeen. Turns out, a new engine every six years or so will keep one of these tanks running approximately forever.

I yanked the door open, and hopped into the front seat – or what was left of it anyway.  Most of the upholstery had been long torn out, and a good deal of the cushioning was gone too. But damn it, I loved old Booger, as I had christened her, and I wasn’t going to let her go just for that. Or for the fact that none of the doors had working locks, or that the back windshield was half-missing and half made up of a painter’s tarp and duct tape.

Turning the key twice, then pumping the gas pedal until I heard a groaning noise, and finally turning the key again
really hard
got Booger to belch, sputter, and cough to life. Once she was going though, hold on baby, I could hit like seventy miles an hour if I had a long enough stretch of highway and didn’t run out of gas first.

“HEY!” Jagger screeched, running out of the house. “No cheeseburgers.”

He had a frown so big it would have passed for hobo clown makeup. “There’s stew on the stove!” I shouted back. “And the remote is somewhere. Just don’t buy any pay-per-view wrestling matches again, we can’t afford that!”

The dimwitted bear seemed satisfied enough, and nodded to himself for a moment as I kicked Booger into reverse and eased her through the gate at the end of our driveway, which was never closed because it had fallen off one too many times and become a victim of Daxon Mark’s temper. I can’t say I minded, or that it mattered very much, because it never seemed to stop anyone from coming in.

With her broken radio stuck on randomly choosing one of six AM stations – classic rock, three religious stations, one that seemed to play nothing but country from the 80s, and one conservative talk station – Booger frequently spoke to me. Somehow, she’d tell me what I needed to know by way of switching that radio to a station that always seemed prescient when I looked back on it.

As I rumbled down the road, bouncing over potholes and roots that had long since broken through the pavement of our little back roads only community, my mind was on everything
but
the radio. I was worried about the cubs of course, but also about Dax getting hot headed and doing something stupid. I was worried about Jagger falling asleep on the sofa with the pot of stew on his stomach and spilling it everywhere
again
.

My thoughts wandered, the way they always did, between every possible disastrous outcome I could conjure up, no matter how unlikely any of them were to be the actual truth. “What probably happened in a pair of cubs caught a bus into Boulder or Salt Lake to carouse, and everyone’s panicking about it, just like always,” I told myself. I wanted to calm down so that if nothing else, at least
someone
would be thinking straight. Along those same lines, I wanted to do it without popping a Xanax.

That seemed to happen at least two or three times a year, so it was reasonable enough. Something about this scenario just wasn’t right, though. The way Jag was out of breath was very alarming, especially for someone who never really gets in much of a hurry. No, it wasn’t just cubs gone AWOL for a weekend of fun.

My fingers clenched around Booger’s rattling, metal ring of a steering wheel. The rubber covering with the grips on it had been gone when I bought the damn thing.

I wasn’t paying attention to the radio or the road noise, or the way the floorboard rumbled as I rounded the last heavily-wooded curve before Marta’s Bar & Grill, nor as I pulled into the half-full parking lot and saw a half-shifted bear fly through the front door and land in a heap on the ground outside. He rolled twice, in a cartoonish way, heels overhead, and then came to rest against the side of a late 70s station wagon.

He opened his eyes and looked straight at me. Booger changed the radio to an evangelist station. The preacher was shouting something that sounded very grim and serious, but I couldn’t really understand the guy through his thick accent that sounded like it came from Georgia, sometime before the Civil War.

Who is that
? I wondered.
I’ve never seen him before.

The stranger just stared back, pale blue eyes glassy and rolling around in his head. He’d been knocked for a loop, but there was a dangerous look to him nonetheless. A long, jagged scar ran across his forehead and down all the way to his top lip.
You’ve been in more than one fight before, whoever you are
.

Not knowing a random person who was just jettisoned forcefully from a bar might not be all that strange in most places. Could just be a traveler passing through who got too rowdy. Might be a local’s relative. Or, perhaps a businessman at a conference or a traveling salesman looking to make a buck hawking a new irrigation system to the local high school.

Then again, those would be things that could bring an outsider to a
normal
place.

Kendal Creek is about as far from normal as you can get. No one came here without an invitation from the alpha. And as far as I knew – which was a whole lot, because I do all the clan paperwork – no visitor’s passes had been handed out in four months. No, this prick was here to start something, and the bears of the Kendal clan weren’t going to take too kindly to such a thing.

And judging by the shouting and carrying on from
inside
, there were other pricks.

“And he will ride a pale horse!”
the preacher on the radio shouted. When he raised his voice, the Old South took a hike.
“And in the wake of him will come death.”
He paused for dramatic effect. I got a shiver down  my back as I looked at the stranger, so I guess it worked.
“And behind death? Yeah that’s right, I heard it in the back. Behind death, Hell’s coming with him! Can I get an aw-men? Yes! Yes!
”

I reached for the key in the ignition, my fingers trembling as I pinched the key.

“Can I get a hallelujah? A-yes, Lord! Oh a-yes! Once more, can I hear a hallelujah?
”

My lips parted, without my even thinking to do it. They were cracked feeling, dry and parched, matching the hitch in the back of my throat. The pale stranger stood up, unsteady on his feet.

“Hallelujah,” I said hollowly.

I turned the key, and Booger heaved a groan as the engine wound down.

As I strode past the weak-kneed stranger with the scar running down his face, and hopped over the concrete parking block that he’d stumbled over, I looked back. He was leaning heavily against the old station wagon with the wood panel sides, and the rusted out wheel wells, and his eyes were fixed on me.

I admit, in a town full of bears, a completely normal, almost boring human woman is a fairly strange thing to glimpse. Trust me, it’s a wild time when being completely normal means you’re the outsider. Then again, that’s why Dax had fallen in love with me. And I’d fallen completely for him well before I ever saw him hunch over and turn into a damn bear.

Still, this stranger, he was staring at me with such intensity that I could feel his eyes piercing my skin. I’d intended to go right past him, and into the bar, into a crowd of my friends. But as he glared back at me, I couldn’t help it.