So Much To Bear (A Werebear Erotic Romance) (9 page)

Jennifer spotted Damon, but in the very
next instant she realized that she was too late; the mob had come
onto the cliffs from another direction, and they were milling
around, talking angrily amongst themselves about the discovery they
had made. “That’s him! That’s the creature!” Liam’s voice rang out
from the back of the mob, and Jennifer cried out, rushing forward
in instinct.

“Who are you calling a creature?” Damon
asked, confused and obviously angry. He scowled at the mob, and
Jennifer stopped, compelled by some quality in the way the man
stood, the sound of his voice. “Why do you feel the need to disturb
my peace? I haven’t done anything to harm any of you. I live alone
in the woods, taking nothing from anyone. I am the very last of my
people and all I want to do is live in peace.” Damon shook his
head. “Why are you here to attack me? Answer that!” The mob milled
about, uncertain for a moment. “I have never ventured into your
town, never even done anything to any of you. And you call me a
creature—you don’t even know me!” Damon spat off to the side in
disgust. “Get back to your own lives.”

From the back of the crowd—Jennifer
thought it was Liam’s father who shouted, but she couldn’t be sure,
her heart was pounding in her ears so loudly, “That creature killed
one of our own! He’s an evil, violent animal!” Jennifer opened her
mouth to protest, but several members of the mob surged forward,
galvanized by the shout, weapons raised and aimed at Damon.
Jennifer lurched forward but found herself pulled back by a pair of
strong arms, a startled shout leaving her throat only to be muffled
as a firm hand clamped over her mouth. She turned her head and saw
that Liam had grabbed her from behind—somehow he had seen her in
the crowd and knew that she could ruin his plans. She struggled in
his arms, trying to break free of the grip he had on her, but he
evaded her stomping feet and clawing nails alike, dragging her
backward.

Jennifer watched in shock as Damon
grabbed at a gun, wrenching it from a would-be killer’s hands with
a savage jerk and tossing it aside. Another member of the town
darted in to attempt to stab him and Damon wheeled around, grabbing
the man and throwing him to the side with preternatural strength.
For a moment, as Damon threw aside the attackers who had surged
forward, knocking the wind out of them and making the rest of the
mob shift backward in instinctive fear, Jennifer felt a surge of
hope; maybe, just maybe it would filter through the peoples’ minds
that they were on a fool’s errand of the most ridiculous and
criminal character.

As more attackers came forward,
Jennifer’s eyes widened at the sight of a mist gathering around
Damon. She watched—transfixed just as the rest of the crowd was—as
the man transformed into a bear, his body shrinking down and then
arching up out of the mist, the sound of hard chunks swirling in a
thick liquid, a sound like rocks in a cement mixer filling the air
as his limbs covered in fur, his face elongated, and he bared his
teeth in snarl. In a matter of seconds, the man was utterly gone,
replaced by the towering, enormous bear that Damon became in his
other form; in the bright light of day, his form somehow seemed
even more powerful than it had at night, his size concealed by
shadow. Damon threw the new attackers aside seemingly without
effort, and Jennifer almost let out a cheer—although deep down, she
knew that after seeing a man transform into an animal, the mob
would be gripped by a fear even deeper than they’d felt when he’d
just been an unknown “creature,” whose abilities they had to have
surely doubted.

For a split-second, it seemed as though
Damon might be able to extricate himself from the situation—at
least beat back the members of the mob long enough to get away, to
hide deeper in the woods until they all straggled away. But as
Jennifer’s heart pounded and she struggled distractedly to break
Liam’s grip on her, out of the corner of her eye, she saw Robert.
Her friend—the man she had thought, before meeting Damon, that she
might have wanted to have a relationship with—grabbed something
from Liam’s belt as he slipped past them, muttering something to
Liam about taking care of the situation. He darted around the
crowd, avoiding Damon’s line of sight and getting around the bear.
Jennifer struggled with new vigor, realizing in an instant what
Robert’s plan was.

Even having a prescient notion of what
Robert planned to do, Jennifer was—for an instant—paralyzed by
shock when she saw him creep up behind the bear; Damon was
distracted by fending off his attackers, though fewer and fewer of
them were interested in risking their limbs against an enormous
bear. Robert came up behind Damon and lifted one hand up over his
head. Jennifer bit hard into Liam’s fingers pressed against her
mouth as she saw the knife—Liam’s knife—in Robert’s hand. He
plunged it downward, slamming it into Damon’s back, and Liam
snatched his hand away from Jennifer’s mouth as she tasted the
sharp, coppery splash of his blood. She took advantage of Liam’s
shock to squirm free of his hold, only then realizing what she had
seen. Damon roared out, the trees seeming to shake from the volume
of the noise. Robert sank back and danced to the side of Damon as
the bear staggered, his animal eyes wild with pain and
fear.

Jennifer screamed, lurching forward,
rushing towards the bear on unsteady feet. Before her wide,
panicked eyes, Damon staggered backwards, letting out rumbling
ursine groans of pain as he moved closer and closer to the edge of
the cliff. “No! Stop!” Jennifer called out, desperate, reaching a
hand out as she ran on unsteady feet towards the bear. But she
couldn’t stop the backpedalling stagger; in a matter of a few
moments, Damon clambered backwards, tripping and falling over the
edge and plunging down into the river below. Jennifer fell to her
knees, scrambling to the blood-spattered cliff’s edge where Damon
had tumbled. She saw him hit the water; at this stretch, the river
had dwindled to little more than a brook, and she saw his fallen
body sprawled out in the shallow water, a swirl of blood flowing
out around him.

The members of the town
cheered, crowding the ledge as they looked down to confirm the fate
of the bear. Jennifer tried to stand up, but fell back onto her
knees, screaming wordlessly, clawing at her face in grief. She
turned and looked at Robert, whose face held a combination of
pride, shock, and confusion. “You killed him!” Jennifer screamed,
stumbling onto her feet and lurching towards the man she had
considered a friend for her entire life. “You killed him and
you
knew
he didn’t
do anything to me!” Jennifer threw her fists blindly at Robert’s
body, hammering them against his chest, splaying her fingers to
scratch at his face in blind fury and grief. “You bastard! You
no-good, ignorant coward! You killed him!”

Jennifer’s throat felt raw and after a
moment, all of the rage left her as her own words filtered through
her brain. Damon was dead. The man that had loved her body so
thoroughly, the man who had fascinated her and who had rescued her
from Liam’s bad intentions, was dead. She fell to the ground, sobs
beginning to wrack her body, tears falling freely from her eyes as
she realized what had truly happened. All around her, the members
of the mob were rejoicing, calling Robert a hero. Jennifer looked
up at Robert’s face and saw the pride wiped away, replaced by a
kind of shame that mingled with the confusion and shock to make him
look dumbly ugly. Jennifer couldn’t believe she had ever been
attracted to him in her life; she thought now that she would savor
her newfound hatred for him for the rest of her life.

Liam and his father were cheering the
members of the town, crowing their success in ridding the area of a
“vile, evil creature.” Jennifer was barely aware of what was going
on around her, but slowly began to realize that the jubilant,
triumphant tone was fading. “Where’d it go?” someone was saying.
“It was just there! The stream can’t have pulled it away.” Jennifer
staggered onto her knees and crawled to the ledge, peering down
along with a few of the members of her town. Where Damon had lain,
apparently defeated by the combination of Robert’s stab to the back
and the fall—though the height wasn’t so great—there was nothing.
No sign of any disturbance of any kind. Jennifer sighed and fell to
her stomach, pressing her forehead against her arms. A flicker of
hope began deep inside of her as she remembered Damon telling her
about the supernatural healing abilities of his tribe. He had shown
her how fast the cuts that Liam had dealt him had healed—they were
practically nonexistent within a day or two. He might have survived
the stabbing and the fall and crawled away to heal. Jennifer felt
hands on her shoulders and screamed out instinctively, remembering
Liam.

Instead, Robert turned her over onto
her back gently, and Jennifer looked around wildly to see that the
members of the town who had made up the mob were moving back into
the forest proper, dwindling away, muttering amongst themselves.
“Let me get you home,” Robert said. Jennifer scowled at him. Even
if Damon wasn’t dead, she wasn’t ready to forgive him; not
yet.

“Don’t even touch me. Don’t touch me
ever again. You’re dead to me, you asshole.” Jennifer struggled
free of Robert’s hands and pulled herself up onto her hands and
knees, and then struggled to her feet, exhausted. She decided that
as tired as she was, she was going to take the long way through the
woods to get home. She didn’t want to see or talk to a single
person from her town. Not for a while.

Chapter Seven

A few days after the altercation in the
woods, Jennifer sat at home, refusing to see most of the members of
the town who came to inquire after her. She couldn’t stand their
curiosity or the guilt of those who had been part of the mob; she
couldn’t think of anything but getting back to the woods, even
though the idea frightened her. The day after the mob, Robert had
visited her; he was one of the only people that Jennifer would
agree to speak to, in spite of her harsh words to him the day
before. When she had finally arrived home, she had taken a long
bath and thought about everything that had happened. If she put
aside what she knew about Damon, what she knew had happened in the
time she had been missing from the town, she could almost
understand the reaction that the members of the town had had; Liam
was insisting that some strange creature, some beast, had killed
her—and had injured him. Just how Liam had managed to fake the
injury, Jennifer neither knew nor cared. She knew for a fact that
while Damon had scared the other man, he hadn’t actually hurt more
than Liam’s pride.

Jennifer had stayed up all night,
sitting on her bed and staring out at the town through the window.
She had considered her town boring, and had hoped to one day move
to a city where she could have a livelier life, and travel around
the world documenting different cultures as an anthropologist. But
as she stared into the darkness, almost not moving, she thought to
herself that whether or not she achieved her goal of city life and
ethnographic study, she would never feel at home in the town again.
She had seen the ugly side of the myopic peoples’ personalities.
She had seen how easy it had been for them to turn into savages,
bent on killing what they didn’t understand.

They hadn’t even stopped—hadn’t even
heard her—when she called out that their reason for hunting the
werebear down was a lie. They had been ready to kill something, and
whipped into such a frenzy that they hadn’t even cared what the
reason was anymore. The fact that her own neighbors could end up in
such a state that they were lost to all common sense, to all
decency, was a chilling thing. Jennifer didn’t know if she could
ever look at the people in the town she had belonged to for so long
in the same light again. Even the people who hadn’t participated in
the lynch mob had to have known that something was going on—and
they had done nothing to stop it, nothing to talk sense to people
who were going out to kill what they couldn’t
understand.

When Robert came to the house early the
next day, Jennifer had begrudgingly invited him in. She wished,
fleetingly, that her parents hadn’t died when she was young; they
could at least have run interference for her. She thought,
irrelevantly, of what it would have been like to explain to them
what had happened to her; she didn’t know whether she would have
been able to tell them the truth of the situation or not. What if
her father had been among the people who were participating in the
mob? What if he had believed Liam’s lies and had gone into the
woods to avenge her death? But somehow, Jennifer didn’t think that
the man who had raised her to question things—who had left her with
so much more to impart—would have been the type to attack a
“creature” simply on the basis of a story. He would have noticed
that she was in the mob’s midst. He would have seen her, heard her,
and known what he was seeing and hearing. And maybe, she thought,
he would have been able to interrupt the rush of people to put guns
and knives to use. Her mother would have helped her, Jennifer
thought. One or both of her parents would have understood—if not
the specifics of her situation, then at least that there was more
going on than she was comfortable talking about. At least, she
thought, they had left her the house, with enough money in the
estate to keep it going until she got established. But she had
already started to think about selling it; about taking what little
she really wanted from the place and giving the rest to charity or
to auctions and getting rid of the final reminder of the ugliness
she had seen in the town she had grown up in.