Shared By The Alpha Bears - Complete (17 page)

But it wasn’t who I was expecting.

The knocking I heard from the door was hard and fast, and a voice I would recognize anywhere was shouting my name.  “Billie?  Billie!” Jake’s voice echoed.

Furrowing my brow, I went to answer.  I opened the door to find Jake and Max looking at me with hectic looks, and I could see Sally hanging around back by the Hummer that was parked along the curb.  “What are you guys doing here?” I asked them.

“What are
we
doing here?” Max gasped.  “Are you out of your damn little brain?  You just take off across state borders with no warning and just a note?”

I folded my arms and gave Max a look.  “Like you’re one to talk, Max.”

Max grimaced.  “Okay, I deserved that.”

“It didn’t take much to get Warren to fess up this address when we told him you’d taken off,” Jake said.  “You find what you were looking for?”

“Not yet,” I said.  “But they’ll be here soon.”

Sally stepped up behind the two of them, craning her neck to look behind me.  “Hi there,” she said, not to me.

I turned around to see Kim standing there, watching the exchange.  “Oh, hey,” I said to her.  “Guys, this is Kim, she’s Warren’s granddaughter.  Kim, that’s Jake, Max and Sally.”

“Um, hi,” Kim offered.  Then she looked at me and said, “I just called my dad, he’s on his way now.”

“I told you, you didn’t have to do that,” I said.

She shrugged.  “Kinda seemed important.  And when I mentioned you knew granddad he got pretty… well… intense.  Like lots of ‘What?’s’ and ‘Holy crap!’s’.  Especially when I gave him granddad’s name, which I guess proved you were for real.”

I turned to look to my extended family.  “Well, I guess we might as well wait for the party.”  I turned to Kim and asked, “You mind if my friends come in and join us?”

Kim shrugged.  “The more the merrier, I guess.  As long as they’re not Tabby’s kind of more.”

The others came slowly gathering inside, while Kim went to get them some drinks.  We assembled in the living room, taking seats on the couch and nearby chairs.  As we did, Jake looked over his shoulder and waved me toward him.  I leaned in to him, and in a hushed voice he asked, “Does she know what her dad is?  What her granddad is?”

“I doubt it,” I said.  “The whole time I’ve been here it’s never come up.  If she knew, she probably would have asked me if I was a shifter when I told her I knew her granddad, and she didn’t.”

“Do you have any plans of breaking that news to her?” Max asked warily.

“Not unless I have to,” I said.  “If she doesn’t already know, it’ll probably be a bit much for her to swallow.  Believe me, as a human, I know.”

Kim returned with some drinks, and then sat down with us, interested to learn more about us.  So we told her as much as we could while avoiding the words “shifters” or “bears.”  Eventually she managed to get out the little detail that I was pregnant, which got her to be a bit more bright and smiley.  And then of course came the question of which of the two guys was the father.  Her eyebrows went way up when I had to tell her I didn’t know.

It didn’t take much longer, though, for Joseph to arrive.  The front door flew open and he came rushing inside without shutting it behind him.  I was the first one off the couch, stepping up to meet him, but Kim was quick to get up and step in front of me.  “Um, dad, these are…”

“Who the hell are you?” Joseph demanded of me, cutting his daughter off.

“Dad, I told you, she knows my granddad.  You know, the one you can never keep straight how he died?”

Joseph looked at Kim uncomfortably, and then glanced up at me.  “What do you want here?”

I squared my jaw and answered, “Well, let’s just say you and I have something in common.  Or, to be more accurate, you and my baby have something in common,” I amended, putting a hand to my belly.

Joseph looked me over, and I could see him putting two and two together.  “So that means that guy is…” he began, pointing to Jake.  Then he turned his finger over to Max.  “Or is it him?”

“They both are,” I said.  Then I nodded back to Sally and added, “For that matter, so is she.”

“They are what?” Kim asked.  “What’s going on, dad?”

Joseph hesitated, looking as uncomfortable as someone could get.  “It’s… complicated.  And not something I ever wanted you exposed to, sweetheart.”

“’Exposed to?’” I echoed with an eyebrow cocked.  “Do you think what you and your dad are is something to be ashamed of?”

“It’s something I put behind me a long time ago,” Joseph said.

“But it’s still a part of who you are,” I said.  “You can’t change that.”

“Much as I’d like to.”

I frowned.  “Do you really hate it that much?  You hate your father that much?”

Joseph sighed, shaking his head.  “I don’t hate him.  I just didn’t want to be him.  And I’m not.”

“But does that mean you have to completely cut him out of your life?” I insisted.  “Along with half of yourself?”

“Hey!” Kim piped up.  “What the hell is everyone talking about?”

I looked to Joseph.  “Do you want to show her, or should they?” I asked, gesturing back to my companions.

His expression hardened.  “No one’s showing anyone anything right now.”

“Who’s showing what?” a new voice said from the open doorway.  A bouncy blonde teenage girl whom I recognized from the family photos on the shelf appeared, craning her neck to see us gathered in the living room.  “Who are all these people, daddy?”

“That would be someone who just showed up out of nowhere and told me we have a grandfather who didn’t actually die in Vietnam or the Persian Gulf or wherever it is this time,” was Kim’s snarky reply.

“What?” Tabby said, furrowing her brow.  “What are you talking about?”

“Actually, that’s what I was just asking them,” Kim said.  “What is all this ‘what you are’ crap you’re all going on about?”

I looked to Joseph, and then to Jake, Max and Sally.  Then I turned to the girls.  “Kim… Tabby, right?  …Has your dad ever told you about shifters?”

Joseph turned away.

“About what?” Tabby said.

“Shifters.  You know, weres.  Like where that whole werewolf mythology came from, only real.”

Both girls were shooting me blank stares now.  I guess that answered my question.

Jake put a hand on my shoulder, and stepped forward.  “Let me show you what she’s talking about.  But you have to promise not to freak out or run.”

Joseph jumped forward, throwing his palms up to us.  “Please, why do you have to do this?  You come into my house and you thrust this on my kids!”

“They deserve to know,” I said.

“Dad, will you stop being all protective father on prom night and just tell us what the hell this is all about?” Kim demanded.

Joseph looked around at the curious faces of his daughters, and sighed in defeat.  After a long hesitation, he finally said, “Girls… there are some people who are half wolf, or cougar, or… or bear.  And they can change into these things whenever they want.  They’re called shifters, or weres.  Your grandfather is a werebear.  And… so am I.”

The girls were busy staring at their father like he was from another planet, when Jake suddenly started to strip down.  The girls turned to him, wide-eyed, looking like they were about to disappear from the room, when their father came in and placed a hand on each of their shoulders, and told them, “Try your best to stay calm.”

Jake hadn’t even finished undressing before he started bulking up in size, growing his fur out and extending his mouth and nose into a bear’s muzzle.  His pants dropped to the floor just as he lurched forward onto all four of his massive paws.  Tabby actually screamed briefly, and would likely have made a run for it had her father not been holding her so tight.  Kim remained silent, but looked no less freaked out.

I stepped up beside the hulking beast that had taken the place of the man here a moment ago, and ran a gentle hand through the fur on his neck, making him turn his big head to me.  “Believe me, girls, I know how you feel,” I said.  “But it’s still Jake.  I first met him like this, and I watched him turn into a man in front of my eyes.”

To illustrate the point, Jake then started shifting back, moments later retaking the form of the tall, chiseled man who had walked through their door, and started pulling his clothes back on.  Kim and Tabby continued staring at him in the shock of having everything they knew about the world shaken up.  Joseph looked at both of them, waiting for either of them to do something.  Like breathe.  Or blink.

“Are you in there?” he asked them.

Tabby responded first, by turning and bolting with a series of panicked whimpers out the door.  Joseph took a few running steps after her.  “Tabitha!  Tabby, come back here!”

But the girl was long gone.  So Joseph turned to the one who was still there, still staring at Jake unmoving.  “Kim?” Joseph asked her.

It took several more long seconds for Kim to react in any way.  Finally she gasped out, “What the hell is this shit?”

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about this,” he offered.

“You’re… you’re
that?
” she managed to screech out.

“Yes.”

“Am I… gonna be…”

“No, sweetheart,” he said, taking her by the shoulders.  “If you were a shifter, we would’ve known a long time ago.  You’d have been shifting since you were crawling.  Same with your brother and sister.  Trust me, you’re completely human.”

Kim fell silent again, her face contorting into a series of unpleasant expressions.  “This is so fucked up!  I can’t deal with this shit!”

“Kim, please…”

“JUST STAY AWAY FROM ME!” she shrieked at her dad, turning and retreating into the halls, before I heard a door somewhere in the house slam shut.

Sally sidled up behind me and whispered, “That could’ve gone better.”

Joseph turned to us, his face a mask of discontent.  “I hope you’re happy,” he said bitterly.  “You’ve come to my house and thrown my family into disarray.  Are you done now?”

I frowned.  “I’m sorry, I didn’t want to upset your family.  I wanted to bring it together.  I thought I owed it to Warren after what he did for me.”

“What do you mean?”

“I think I mentioned to you that I’ve got a bear’s bun in the oven,” I said, patting my belly.  “Your father heard about that and came to find me, to tell me about your mother.  About how she died carrying you, so that maybe he could keep me from ending up the same way.  So maybe my cub won’t grow up without a mother the way you did.  Can’t you appreciate that?”

Joseph’s look softened.  “Look… if I connect you to the doctor who helped us when my kids were born, will you please leave?”

“Doctor?” Max said

“What you were just talking about, about what happened to my mother, don’t you think that was the first thing I worried about when my wife became pregnant?  Each time?  Don’t you think I would’ve been desperate to make sure I still had a wife after my child was born?  So yeah, I found a medical professional.  Someone who knows about us.  She took care of my wife’s prenatal treatment and testing.  She confirmed my children were human, that they hadn’t acquired the shifter gene.  So if you’re worried about birthing a shifter cub, I can put you in touch with her.”

I gaped wide at him.  “You’d do that?”

“If it’ll get you out of my house, then absolutely.”