Shared By The Alpha Bears - Complete (10 page)

CHAPTER FOUR

I managed to fall asleep at some point. I don’t remember dreaming, but it was hours later when I next I looked at the clock.

And this was after I’d been woken up by the awful noises coming from outside. I heard screaming and animalistic growling and some other sounds I couldn’t place. I sprang from the bed and ran to the window, trying to peer through the gloom to see what was going on. But all I could see was darkness.

Then I started to hear voices. “Come on, Jake.” I heard Max saying. “We’re almost there.” Moments later I could see two human shapes appear, one supporting the other as they approached the door.

At that point, I turned and ran, hurrying down the stairs and racing to the front door, which I threw open just as both the guys came staggering it, Max holding up Jake. And as soon as I got a good look at Jake, I nearly fainted. “Oh my god, what happened?” I gasped.

Whatever had gotten its claws on him had gotten him good. He was bleeding from several cuts across his body, with bruises and scratches all over. One particular gash along his thigh was especially gruesome, and was probably the reason he needed Max to hold him up.

“Big fight.” Max said. “Real nasty. Happened so fast.” He didn’t look in such stellar shape himself, either, but at least he was still on his feet.

“Get him on the table!” I ordered, immediately shoving aside everything that was currently on the coffee table, and helping Max lower Jake onto it. As soon as Jake was on his back, I dashed for the hall closet to grab the first aid kit.

“What attacked you?” I asked, tossing towels off the shelf to dig for the kit. “Was it the wolves?”

Max was silent to that question for longer than he should have been. “Couldn’t see.” He said at last. “Happened too quick.”

I didn’t deign to press him for more than that. I found the kit and came rushing back into the room. I knelt down beside Jake and threw the kit open, digging through the supplies.

“Hold him down.” I commanded Max as I pulled up the bottle of hydrogen peroxide. “I gotta disinfect the wound.”

Max held down Jake’s shoulders, while I pinned down his leg. “Jake, look at me,” I said. Jake wearily lifted his head, blinking at me. “Try to hold still,” I told him. “This is gonna sting.”

With that I carefully tipped over the bottle above the gash on his leg. As soon as the bubbling liquid poured hissing over his wound, Jake’s body tensed all over, clenching his teeth and grunting loudly in pain. I struggled to hold down his squirming leg, but the fact remained that I was, quite literally in a sense, wrestling a bear. If I hadn’t been holding on as tightly as I was, he very likely would have kicked me clear across the room.

As the bubbling dissipated and Jake stopped thrashing, I grabbed some gauze and held it to his wound as I waited for him to calm down. Jake breathed hard several times, and then started to relax. And then I dug into the kit for the needle and thread.

Jake was much calmer as I stitched up his gash, as if he’d already thrashed himself out. In any event, it made my job a lot easier. I finished sewing up the wound, and then moved up toward his head. By now he was mostly unconscious, just grunting slightly and rolling his head to the side when I said his name.

I sighed and caressed his hair, and looked up from him to Max, to find he had left the room. “Max?” I called.

I could see his shadow moving in the room upstairs. But he didn’t answer me.

I sighed again, and laid my head down on Jake’s chest.

I dozed off for a while, being eventually awakened by Jake’s hand running through my hair. I lifted my head and blinked awake. “Hey,” I said when I saw him looking at me. “How you feeling?”

“I think Dr. Billie did me good,” he said. “Thank you.”

“Always,” I grinned. And then I kissed him.

“So what did happen out there?” I asked. “Max didn’t seem to want to talk about it.”

Jake frowned. “I don’t blame him. Truth is, we didn’t really do much… ‘checking the territory.’”

“What did you do then?”

“We argued. About you.”

Now it was my turn to frown. “Like the one you had earlier today?”

He raised an eyebrow at me.

“I overheard you from the bathroom.”

He sighed. “Yeah, pretty much like that. Max still wants to do whatever he can to avoid a confrontation. I still want to do whatever I can to fight for you. It got a little ugly.”

“And then you were attacked?”

He looked uncomfortable. After a long silence, he finally said, “You could say that.”

“Was it the wolves?”

Jake grimaced. “Not exactly.”

“Are you being intentionally cryptic?”

He paused again, for longer this time. “Actually… the argument I had with Max… it got a little heavy. We ended up shifting form and wrestling it out. It was only when we realized I’d been injured that we stopped, and he carried me back here.”

“Wait, you’re saying… you’re saying Max did this to you?”

“I’d like to think I hurt him pretty good too.”

I lifted my head to look to the room upstairs. I got up and started rushing up the stairs and into the room—to find it empty. “Max?”

No reply.

But upon inspection of the room, I did find a folded piece of paper with my name written on it, in Max’s handwriting. I picked it up and unfolded it, and I read:

“I’m sorry Billie, but I need to go sort some things out. And you’re safer if I’m not around you. And now I think so is Jake. I can’t put you in more danger, not after what happened with Tara. Ask Jake; he knows who that is. I don’t know when I’ll see you again. I hope it’s soon. Until then, tell Jake I said to take care of you, or I’ll hurt him worse than I already did. I’ll see you. Max.”

By the time I got to the bottom of the page, a few of the last words had been watered out by tears that had fallen from my face. Choking them back, I turned and ran back down the stairs.

“He left!” I cried. “He fucking left!”

“What?” Jake grunted, sitting up.

“Max! He’s gone! He left me a note and he just took off!”

“He what?”

“He just says he needs to ‘sort some things out.’ Does he think he could get any more clichéd? I mean, what the hell? We get one threat from a werewolf, he hurts you in a fight a little bit, and then he just bails?”

“Not that I’m condoning his choice,” Jake said, “but I think you’re downplaying things just a little. This gash he gave me is a little more severe than a simple black eye.”

I sighed. “Yeah, okay, I’ll give you that, but he just ditches us when things get heavy? I thought I knew him better than that.”

Jake lay back on the table. “Believe me, when I find him, we’re gonna have words.”

“You two already had words tonight.” I pointed out, nodding to his injuries. “That looks like it went well.”

“Next time it’ll be him that’s limping home.” Jake said with a dry grin.

“What did you say to each other out there exactly?”

“Well, we talked about how we might be able to protect you, and Max suggested it might be best if you moved back to the city.”

“Never!” I gasped.

“That’s what I said. He said he was willing to go with you if that was what it took. I told him we shouldn’t take your choices away from you. He said choices didn’t amount to much if you were dead. It went back and forth like that for a while, and then he dropped some comment that maybe he would need to protect you from me. That’s when we resorted to claws.”

“That was a little extreme of him,” I said. “But I guess this is his night for extreme.”

“Yeah,” Jake sighed. “But I can understand where he’s coming from. I haven’t seen Max this passionate about something since…” He trailed off suddenly.

“Since Tara?” I asked.

He turned a stare at me.

“It was a name he mentioned in his note.” I said. “He said he couldn’t put me in more danger, after what happened with Tara. He said you’d know who that is.”

“Yeah,” he said, his frown deepening. “I’d almost forgotten about her until today.”

“Who is she?”

“She was another girl, a human, like you, that Max got involved with several years ago. He met her out in the city, and he wanted to bring her out to the woods to live with him. It didn’t go over well with the other shifters.”

“What happened to her?”

Jake paused. It was a very heavy pause, one that started to really worry me.

“What happened?” I repeated.

“She died. We found her mauled.”

I gasped, feeling the blood drain from my face.

“Max doesn’t like talking about it. I think it’s the reason he’s never gotten serious with another woman until you came into our lives.”

“Was it wolves?”

“We don’t know for certain, but Max is pretty sure. He’s had a sore spot for wolves ever since.”

Suddenly everything was different. A part of me couldn’t believe this had been kept from me, but then if I’d been in their position, I wouldn’t have wanted to tell a girl like me that she was following in the footsteps of someone who had ended up like that. I didn’t need Jake to explain to me how determined Max was to make sure I didn’t meet the same fate.

On that note, a question occurred to me that I hadn’t thought of before. “Where do you think he went?”

Jake sat up suddenly. “You know, that’s a good question.”

And it would be more than a week before we got an answer to that question.

CHAPTER FIVE

I ended up spending several days preoccupied with wondering where Max was. I would spend hours just staring out the window or relaxing in the yard, hoping he would suddenly appear. Many times I thought about going out for a walk in the woods like I always used to, hoping I might get lucky enough to run into him out there. But learning about what happened to this Tara girl had scared that notion out of me, especially now that I had only half the bear protection I used to.

So I never strayed far from the cabin, and when Jake went out to go hunt, he would always return within no more than an hour or two, whether he’d caught something or not. He didn’t feel comfortable leaving me by myself, any more than I felt safe being alone.

For the first time, I did start to seriously consider Max’s idea that I should head back to the city. I didn’t like the idea—in fact I would’ve rather chewed my arm off—but now that I knew one of Max’s old girlfriends had been mauled to death for nothing else than being a human, suddenly, that was starting to seem like that might have been the best course of action. But ultimately, not one that sat well in my stomach.

So I continued to hang around the place I loved but no longer felt safe in. At least I still had Jake there; that was a big plus.

And I was getting more than a few comfort fucks from him too. There came a night when I was in the middle of getting a particularly good one. We were on the couch, and I was seated on Jake’s lap with six inches of big bear cock buried inside me. I held Jake’s face to my breast, letting him suckle at my tit, making me moan.

I rocked on his lap until he brought me to a screaming orgasm, leaning backward almost to the point that my hair touched the floor. He held my hips down on him as he spurted off inside me. I hung back, my head hanging upside-down as my eyes slowly opened and I regained my senses.

And that was when I saw a shadow moving outside the window.

I instantly sprang upright, my eyes wide. “There’s someone outside!”

Jake looked in the direction I was looking, his hands gripping my sides tightly. Slowly, he slid me off his lap and whispered, “Stay here” as he got up to go look. I held onto the armrest of the couch as if it were the handrail of a roller coaster as I watched him step up to the window.

He stood there, gazing outside for a minute before I deigned to ask, “What do you see?”

“Nothing yet,” he said. “Maybe it was just a deer or somethi—”

He stopped suddenly.

“What is it?” I said, growing anxious.

“I think I smell something.”

“You smell what?”

Jake gritted his teeth. “Wolves.”

My heart sank into my stomach when I heard that word. I got up from the couch to join Jake at the window, but he extended a hand to hold me away. “No, stay back!” He commanded.

But I pushed my way forward anyway. “I want to look!” I said. And I did, for all the good it did me. I couldn’t see anything moving out there in the dark any more than he did.

KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK

I screamed, nearly jumping out of my skin when I heard the pounding at the front door.

“You in there!” said a voice. “We know you’ve got your human in there! Bring her out here now!”

I thought I recognized the voice, and as Jake stepped up to the door, it seemed like he did too. “Is that you, Eric?”

“I warned you before that she wasn’t welcome here!” Eric barked. “You should have listened to me then! Now open up!”

“Or what, big bad wolf?” I demanded, trying to sound a lot braver than I felt. “You gonna huff and puff and blow our house down?”

“You mock me, human, and it’s gonna hurt that much worse when I drag you out! We’d all prefer this to go down the easy way, where you step out of that house, you leave this forest, and you never look back. But we’re prepared to forcibly remove you, in pieces if that’s what it takes! One way or another, you’re gone!”

I could hear the sincerity in his threats, and it was making me turn white.

“This is our house!” Jake demanded. “Leave us in piece!”

The response we got was the window suddenly exploding inward as a rock flew in through it. I jumped back with a scream as broken glass rained down on the floor. And a moment later, two furry shapes leapt in through the broken window, each landing on four paws and baring their wolf’s teeth at us.

“Billie, go out the back door!” Jake commanded.

“I’m not leaving you!” I protested.

“RUN!” He shouted, before dropping forward and shifting into his bear form. He bared his teeth and growled at our four-legged intruders, who only growled back, undaunted.  A third wolf jumped in through the window, followed by a fourth. Jake was big in his bear form but he was also outnumbered.

He spared a single glance back at me, motioning with his head to the back door. The last thing I wanted was to leave him to the wolves—quite literally in this case—but what else could I do? I started to back away as Jake reared back on his hind legs, roaring at them.

When the wolves rushed him, he swiped at them with his huge claws. He caught one of them across the face hard, but the others got close enough to get their teeth on him before he could swat them away. Fortunately, he had plenty of bear fat to take the brunt of their attacks, and he still continued to fight.

As Jake remained busy with those four, a fifth wolf had appeared in the room, and its attention was fixed on me, giving me a face full of snarling teeth. It was only then that I finally got the sense to try to make a run for it. I turned and bolted for the back door. I didn’t have time to think what I would do once I got outside, or how I would outrun a bloodthirsty wolf hot on my trail. I just ran.

I grabbed the doorknob, not sparing a single backward glance to see how close the wolf was getting, knowing that the moment I stopped to look behind me I was dead. I threw open the door—

—and I stumbled back with a shriek at the sight of three more wolves waiting outside.

I fell back on my ass as one of them lunged forward, about to bound through the open door, its teeth seeking out my throat. Jake was still in the other room fighting off four of them, unable to help me. I knew I was fucked.

And that was when I heard a roar outside that didn’t come from a wolf. The one that was trying to charge in the door at me was suddenly yanked yelping back outside by a huge dark shape that blotted out the doorway.

I wasn’t sure what was happening until a massive bear came rushing in the door, making a beeline for the wolf that had chased me from the living room. The bear reared back and swung its claws at my attacker, driving it back.

And then there was another bear coming in through the door.

And then another.

And then two more.

I knew enough to know that bears didn’t travel in groups like this, at least not natural bears. These had to be more shifters. And it was a relief to see that they didn’t look like they were here for me.

When I realized there were no longer any wolves around me, I got up and returned to the living room, where Jake was now getting back-up from five more bears in fighting off the attacking wolves. The pack that had showed up was a big enough one, but they hadn’t come expecting to fight more than one or two hulking bears. And to my relief, they were starting to retreat. At least, all but one that was already dead on the floor.

In a few minutes, the cabin had been cleared of all the wolves, whom I could still hear yapping as they loped away into the night. And that just left six huge bears in the room with me.

And I was pretty sure I recognized one of them.

“Max? Is that you?”

In response, the leader of the group that had come to our rescue reared back on his hind legs and began shrinking down to a human shape. Max’s human shape.

“MAX!” I squealed like a happy kid, dashing forward into his open arms. I leapt at him, throwing my legs around his waist and raining kisses on his face.

“It’s good to see you again, Billie.” He said.

And then my feet touched the ground again, and my mood shifted. “You IDIOT!” I shouted, throwing my hand up to give his face my best slap. “How could you just leave us like that? Do you have any idea how much I worried about you?”

Max flexed his reddened jaw. “Yeah. I was worried about you, too. That’s why I was out wrangling backup.”

With that he turned to the four other bears that had come with him, who each started rising onto their hind legs and shifting into human shapes. “That’s Paul,” Max said, indicating the large bald guy, “Ben,” he said, indicating the longhaired twenty-something with the goatee, “Trish,” he said, indicating tall, statuesque woman with the dark, curly hair, “and Sally,” he said, indicating the slightly curvy redhead.

“Uh, hi,” I offered them. “Thanks for the rescue. You guys saved my life.”

None of them answered. In fact the looks some of them gave me came across as downright unfriendly. I shut up then.

I turned my attention to the one bear who was still a bear—and that was when I started to turn pale. I could see Jake bleeding from several open wounds as he started dropping to the floor and shifting back to his human form. And when I saw him kneeling on the floor in his human shape again, I wanted to cry. As bad as he’d looked after the fight he had with Max the other night, now he looked so much worse.

Now he looked like he might actually be in danger.

“He needs help!” Max commanded.

That finally got the other bears that he’d brought moving, as they all rushed to Jake’s side to help him. I had a sense of déjà vu as I ran to the closet for the first aid kit, but as soon as I came out with it Sally grabbed the kit from me. “Let me take that,” she said. “We’ve got it from here.”

“Yeah,” Paul added. “I think you’ve got someone who wants to see you right now.”

“But…” I started to protest, but Max stepped up and put a hand on my shoulder.

“Jake’s in good hands,” he assured me. “You don’t have to always be the one to save him.”

I wanted to, though. He did so much to keep me safe, I wanted more than anything to be able to return the favor. But I looked up at Max, into that face I had missed so much. And as much as I was worried about Jake, I really needed Max to know how much I’d missed him.

Besides, the four others were going like a well-oiled machine, rolling Jake onto his back and grabbing bandages and antiseptics and salves and working on him like a unit. It did look like Max was right; he was in good hands.

So I hung back and watched, waiting in Max’s arms. A big part of me wanted to just take Max into the bedroom and fuck the hell out of him, but I didn’t dare leave the room until I knew for certain that Jake would be okay.