Gifted To The Bear: A Paranormal Shapeshifter Romance (The Gifted Series Book 1) (20 page)

It was too late now. A half-dozen Angels were now moving, gliding around behind her to block an easy escape back down the dirt path.

If Jen noticed, she didn’t seem to care. She just kept advancing onto the field, moving in a very unhurried, purposeful, and confident sort of way. “Can’t any of you Angel guys hear? Who! Hurt! My! Dog!”

More Angels swarmed behind her, and others moved to her sides and front.

She came to a stop and slowly began moving in a circle, seeming to want to address all the Angels at once. “Come on! Which of you was it? Face me! Don’t be chickens! I want to fight the one of you who hurt my dog, but I’ll fight all of you if I have to!”

To my right, I saw Jim begin creeping toward her and the Angels now in a loose ring around her.

Annie seemed to see him, too, and she whispered to me. “When Jim makes his move, you start levitating, and I’ll start zapping. If we can take out all the Angels behind her, maybe one of us can drag her off the field.”

“Okay.”

Not seeming to realize the grave danger she was in, Jen raised her voice even louder, still slowly twirling in a circle in the middle of the loose ring of Angels, now with her arms outstretched. “Come on! If any of you morons thinks you’re strong enough, just come at me right now! Or
all
of you come at me! I’m ready to fight you all at once!”

Just then, Maxwell Bliss came speeding across the field toward Jen. At the same time, all the Angels around her lifted their palms and began shooting beams of silvery white light.

*

Instantly, Jim began charging toward the Angels and Jen. Making near-identical strangled cries, Annie and I rushed forward as well. But within a split-second, we both froze, stunned. It seemed that maybe Jen didn’t need our help after all. All the Angels that had been surrounding her were now on the ground, after having dropped like flies. Jen had issued a beam of electricity that had hit one, and then probably literally as fast as lightning, had circled around the whole group, doing a kind of domino action.

Now in the process of stepping over bodies, she suddenly ducked to avoid a thick beam of electricity that had been issued by a still-charging Maxwell Bliss.

“Oh, hello.” Immediately bouncing back up again, she fired off a return zap, which connected with her target, sending Maxwell rocketing backward at least fifty feet. “Now, that’s what you get! And if you were the one who hurt my dog, I hope that hurt a lot!”

From what I’d seen on the battlefield, zaps from other Gifteds didn’t send their targets rocketing backward even a foot.

Suddenly, the fight roared to life again. Angels started zapping wildly, Gifteds, including Annie and me, started zapping and levitating, and bears charged and went in for kills. With most of her earlier anger seemingly spent, Jen sauntered around, alternating between appearing to just be casually observing, and doing things like taking down ten Angels at once with a single zap, somehow making the electricity travel from one to the other without having it hit any shifters or Gifteds in between.

Within ten minutes, all of the Angels were either dead on the field or otherwise gone, maybe half of them having escaped into the northern woods, surely making a beeline for their supernaturally-protected fortress. Unfortunately, Maxwell Bliss had apparently been among the escapees, because several shifters reported that they didn’t see his body or his distinctive red-eyed head on the field anywhere.

Once all shifters had shifted back into human form, and once Jim had determined that all Timberliners were all accounted for and basically okay, including a few still walking off pain from being zapped, he called for everyone to gather in a group at the mostly-free-from-carnage southern end of the field.

Jen picked her way around several headless Angel bodies, frowning. “All this dead sorcerer stuff is... well, it’s pretty gross.”

Once everyone had gathered loosely together, and once many hugs had been exchanged, including a long one between Jim and me, along with a kiss, Jen came over to him and tugged on his sleeve.

“Can I do something real quick?”

Looking at her with his eyes slightly wide, and with an expression like he’d maybe never seen her before in his life, he silently nodded, and she stepped into the center of the gathered group, asking everyone to please back up from her a little. Once everyone had, she began writing on the ground with a beam of electricity, which served as a pen of sorts, singeing the spring green grass and making it a shade of brownish green.

First, she wrote
Timberlinnirs are grate
, followed by
Jim is streong
. Then,
Avre is braeve
. Then last,
I am awsim
.

Once she’d finished, she addressed the group at large. “While we were all here together, I just wanted to show all you guys that I can read and write now. I’m not only a super-gifted Gifted, I’m not illiterate anymore.”

With her face pale, how it had been since Jen had stepped out onto the field, Annie took a few steps closer to her. “Jen, just... how?”

Jen frowned. “I thought I already told you how Avery has been teaching me stuff almost every day.”

“No, what you did on the field just a few minutes ago.”

“Oh. You mean how did I become such a powerful Gifted?”

“Yes.”

“Well, pretty easy. Ever since I was banned from joining in training sessions, I’ve been practicing every day when me and Marbles go off deep into the woods. We go deep into the eastern part mostly, where nobody else can see us, and I practice all my little zapping things for hours. That trick where I made my zaps ping-pong all the Angels or whatever... I taught that to myself one day by seeing if I could get my zaps to shoot from tree to tree, to be a fun little game for me and Marbles. We both thought it was pretty awesome. And that move today when I got everyone’s attention with my hand clap, I learned that just because I thought it would be neat to see what would happen if I shot a beam of light from each hand at the same time but hit my hands together before the zaps could fully come out. I honestly thought they’d cancel each other out or something, and boy, was I surprised when they didn’t. That was the day that all you guys thought you all heard strange thunder, even though the day was sunny. To be completely honest, I peed my pants a little when I first thunder clapped. I’m not ashamed to admit it. It was pretty startling.”Annie frowned. “But why didn’t you tell anyone that you’ve become so good at zapping?”

Jen shrugged. “I guess because I thought you guys would all say that now I’m more dangerous than ever or something, and I thought I’d be banned from ever doing Gifted stuff again for life or something. And I wanted to keep on having fun and doing Gifted stuff and games with Marbles. I never thought you’d be proud of me or anything, Annie. I honestly thought you’d yell at me.”

Annie just looked at Jen for a long moment with her eyes slightly pink. “I’m very proud of you... for so many things.”

Jen’s own eyes suddenly became pink, and she wiped them with the back of her hand before responding to Annie. “That’s all I’ve ever wanted to hear you say. Well, that, and ‘I built you a gingerbread tree house,’ but I’ll have to explain that later.”

They soon hugged, each of them sniffling, and Jim called for a round of applause for Jen and me, for both fighting so incredibly during what was for each of us, our first fight. Both pleased and embarrassed, I smiled with my face warming. I wasn’t sure I’d made quite as spectacular a showing as Jen. But I hadn’t run, and that in and of itself was pretty spectacular to me.

After Jim had made a few more remarks, he thanked everyone for fighting so hard, and then gave instructions as to how the Angel carnage was to be disposed of. He was going to stay with his men to help do it, but before he got to work, he took me aside and gave me another long hug and a kiss before looking deeply into my eyes.

“I knew you’d be phenomenal, and you were. Your mom would be smiling. She’d be so proud.”

Nodding, I buried my face in Jim’s chest briefly until I could get a sudden flood of tears under control.

Over the next couple of days, all shifters, Gifteds, and poor Marbles made a complete recovery from being zapped. Jen decided that she was never again going to let him go roaming alone. With many Angels still very nearby, it was just too dangerous.

Over the next couple of months, they attacked several more times, though now, with their numbers smaller, and with Jen’s incredible help on the battlefield, most fights only lasted several minutes before the Angels would retreat. I continued to fight, too, becoming even more adept at using my levitation power each time.

Jim and I fell deeper and deeper in love with each passing day, and I began thinking that I didn’t just want to be his live-in girlfriend anymore. I wanted to be his wife. But, to my growing disappointment, he never asked me to be, and I didn’t want to pester him about the subject, or cajole him into proposing in any way. I wanted him to
want
to ask me to marry him. I wanted him to do it on his own. And eventually, I decided that I was just going to be patient. If we were meant to be husband and wife, I had faith that he would propose to me at some point in time, and it
would
happen.

That Fourth of July, we had a carnival of sorts in Timberline. It had been Jen’s idea, and she’d lobbied hard for it, eventually getting everyone in town to agree to use some of the profits from the bar for it.

The lane between the cabins was the “midway,” and it was filled with at least a dozen fair food trucks, numerous booths featuring carnival games, and even a few kiddie rides. Dozens of picnic tables and a fairly large Ferris wheel had been set up in the cleared space in front of the bar, and it was in this area that most Timberliners had seemed to congregate by late afternoon, waiting in line for the Ferris wheel or riding it, eating fair food at the tables, or just generally milling around talking and laughing.

When Jim and I approached this area, he tossed Jen a stuffed pink flamingo that he’d just won at a baseball-throwing game down on the midway. She caught the flamingo, squealing, thanked him, and then ran off, saying she was going to go show Annie.

I looked at Jim, smiling. “You know, I really think you’re going to make an incredible father someday.”

He grinned. “Yeah? Maybe. And I would love to have kids. But I think I’d like to become a husband first.”

I forced myself to smile again, wondering just when exactly he planned on doing that. “Right. Well, I think you’ll make an incredible husband, too.”

We strolled along in silence for a little while, hand-in-hand, but Jim suddenly brought us to a stop between the picnic tables and the Ferris wheel.

“Hey.”

I looked at him, thinking he was going to ask me if I wanted to take a ride on the wheel. “What is it?”

“I want to be
your
husband.”

Suddenly feeling as if I had cotton in my mouth, I couldn’t answer right away. “What?”

“I wasn’t going to do this right this second, I was going to wait for the fireworks display tonight, and
then
I was going to do this.”

“Do what?”

“I planned it out so that the last of the fireworks is going to be an infinity symbol, with
BB
in one side, and
PB
in the other. Then I was going to look at you and say, ‘Well, what do you think?’ But I guess right now, I don’t want to wait another second before finding out your answer.”

“My answer to what? What’s the question?”

I had a little clue what it was going to be, but for some reason, I just couldn’t believe it.

Stunning me, Jim suddenly got down on one knee and took my hand, looking up into my eyes. I gasped, but the sound was drowned out by a loud collective gasp from everyone else around. Then, while Jim took a gorgeous ring with a very large princess-cut diamond from his pocket with his free hand, the carnival went quiet. All sounds of conversation and laughter stopped, and even music coming from speakers somewhere nearby was suddenly shut off. When Jim spoke, still looking up into my eyes, it was in a fairly loud, clear voice, but one that held just the slightest hint of a tremor.

“Avery Clark, will you marry me?”

Someone in the crowd, someone that sounded an awful lot like Jen, let loose with some wild peal of joy. I myself couldn’t breathe. For a long moment or two, I could only nod while my eyes filled with tears. Then, after a deep breath, I was able to manage a single word.

“Yes.”

Jim grinned. “Yes?”

I nodded again. “Yes.”

Grinning even harder, he began sliding the diamond ring on my finger.

Suddenly laughing and crying at the same time, I covered my now tear-stained face with my free hand. “Yes! I want to be your wife!”

The next thing I knew, I was in Jim’s arms. He was lifting me, spinning me around, whispering near my ear how much he loved me. The crowd standing around us was clapping and cheering; a few people were wolf-whistling. I buried my face in Jim’s shoulder, laughing and sobbing all at once.

A few days later, for an engagement present even on top of my ring, Jim gave me a gorgeous pair of diamond-and-emerald earrings to match my necklace from him. For his present, I gave him the finished painting of the two of us walking up to the bar, holding hands, the night of our first date. He said it was the most beautiful painting he’d ever seen, and just a very slight pinking of his eyes while he looked at it told me he was being completely sincere.