The Bear's Arranged Mate: A Bear Shifter Romance Novel (4 page)

It was something Sarah had feared – that her mate might end up being someone who was competitive or chauvinistic. It wasn’t an uncommon trait among the Tribes. But Connor was neither, and if someone had accused him of arrogance, she could understand it as being simply an exhaustion with the rules and formalities  of noble life.

As they neared another opening where the ground became marshy, Sarah sat down with an exhaustive gasp and Connor did likewise. Far off in the distance they could make out the topmost pillar of the chalet. It was a b-line to the grounds through wet and treacherous grasslands, and she took the time to open her knapsack and take a deep swig.

“Almost there,” he said, taking the canteen from her.

“I’m still nervous,” she said, “this was too easy.”

“Doesn’t feel easy. This is rough terrain.”

“I mean, I think you’re right about Caroline – if she wanted me to kill you, she’s not the type to put all her trust in one plan of attack. I feel like we’re missing something.”

As if to emphasize her point, she reached into her pack and withdrew the black gun. Connor winced at the sight of it and accepted it, turned it over in his hands, and gave it back. “She really must hate me,” he said, and both of them couldn’t help but smirk.             

“I say we confront your father about it,” she said, “maybe he can help make sense of this.”

“I agree,” he said, “whatever happens, at least let’s decide we’ll be together for it.”

Sarah’s cheeks became rosy and she almost turned away, but Connor touched her hands and gave her a smile, the same generous one that Patrick had given her only the day before.
Damn, it feels like a lifetime has passed since then,
she thought to herself.

As they both stood up and took their first step onto the grass-mat leading out across the plains, a loud crack, like a lightning bolt, issued from the far side. There was a momentary lull as they both looked at each other, and suddenly Connor spiraled to the ground, hard. It didn’t take Sarah more than a second to register the sound as a gun shot and flattened herself as another crack filled the air, and a bit of the sod next to her head erupted.

“Connor!” she screamed, keeping low to the ground. She could barely make out anything on the far side. Whoever was taking the shot was using a high-powered rifle, and had some experience with long-distance targets. “Connor!” she shouted again.

“I’m here, damn,” he said, turning over and holding his left shoulder. Blood was seeping between his fingers and his face was contorted in pain. “It’s just a flesh wound, nothing serious. I think… it went straight through.”

“They’re still shooting at us,” she said, suddenly worried by the amount of blood that was leaking through his T-shirt.

Another shot off in the distance. This time Sarah dared to look up and scanned the far bank as best she could. The trees were thick and dark. Suddenly to the right she saw the briefest glint of something reflective like glass and dove down again as another bullet exploded beside her knee.

“Stay down, you idiot,” Connor grunted, doing his best to bind the wound with a torn end of his shirt. “We have to get out of here. Did you get their bearing?”

“Got it. We’ll wait for the next shot, head back the way we came, you go first,” she said, taking comma

“Don’t get yourself killed,” he warned.

Sarah crawled on her belly a few meters more to the right, and looked once over at Connor who was on his stomach as well, but looked ready to spring into action. He nodded, and she jumped up, running perpendicular to the glint of glass she had seen earlier. Connor did likewise, scrambling low into the forest behind them. Another shot, and another, and Sarah couldn’t tell if they were close to her or not, but she could smell the ozone of the projectiles whistling past.

He’s safe
, she thought with a relieved breath when she saw Connor had made it to the tree line, and followed after him, ducking down behind a stump.

“That was too close,” Connor said, still holding his shoulder.

“Let me see that.”

“Its fine, I’m-”

“Let me
see
,” she insisted, sitting down beside him and checking the wound. He was right, the bullet had entered and existed cleanly, without hitting any major arteries. She re-fixed the bandage and took another one from his med-kit. “It’s stopped bleeding, for now. But the more we run, the harder it will be to stop it. And I don’t think you’ll be able to use it for a little while.”

“All the Bears in the Clawgrove Tribe have fast healing,” he said with confidence, “I’ll be fine. But we shouldn’t stop here. We need to keep going.”

She nodded and helped him up. Her mind was a flurry of adrenaline – but through the fog of excitement, another emotion started to emerge.
Anger
. It was an unfocused emotion, but it was real and she knew where it had come from. There was only one other person she knew of who could possibly have managed to pick them off from that distance with a rifle.

The only person she had ever truly feared and admired, who had taught her everything she knew about life outside the walls of the Estate.

Caroline.

*

After about an hour of moving through the brush in a pattern that would confuse any followers, they finally sat down again and Sarah checked Connor’s bullet wound. It looked ugly and painful, wrinkled at the sides as if the bullet had cauterized the flesh on the way through.
Probably why it didn’t bleed more
, she thought to herself. But it would have been excruciating.

She looked to Connor’s face for any evidence of it, but there was only a tired and limp expression of defeat. He saw her giving him a concerned look and tried to flash a smile back that would alleviate her concern.             

“Well and truly screwed, now,” he murmured, “but your hands are like soft milk.”

“Now you’re just trying to flatter me,” she said, “I know I suck at this. I did lots of field training things like this, but never in person.” There was a tinge of sadness in her voice.

“You’re doing fine,” he said, brushing a shaggy lock of hair out of his eyes.

“Well, we can’t go back now. It looks like whoever’s out there doesn’t want us to return. At least, alive.”

“We can stay out here,” he said. “We have all the tools we need. Hell, we could just choose a direction and go. They’d never find us.”

The idea struck her as foolhardy and reckless, and it was something she hadn’t expected from Connor – but these were extenuating circumstances. The logical strategies of survival didn’t apply here. She had to admit that part of her liked the idea of vanishing with this young man, slipping out of the realms of Greyback and Clawgrove. A life all their own, lived in peace, without any expectations. Without violence or conspiracy.

But it was a pipe-dream and deep down she knew that. Whoever had orchestrated this had obviously invested a lot into it. They would have had to – the fate of both Tribes hung in the balance, after all.

“Let’s keep going,” she murmured, and helped him up from the ground.

They walked for another half-hour, and the forest grew darker, more ominous. All the normal sounds of the forest began to dissipate, as if the trees themselves had sucked up all life. That imminent feeling of being watched returned and she did her best to support Connor, who was quickly losing his compunction to stand.
The bullet probably went deeper than he’s letting me believe
, she realized. He’d lost a lot of blood, and even with his advanced healing abilities, he was still mortal.             

“We’ll rest up ahead,” she whispered to him, but she wasn’t sure he heard. His grip around her waist tightened briefly in response.

As they passed under the shadows of old growth cedars, the air became damp and felt like cold fingers groping at them. Suddenly, Sarah stopped. Her instincts flared up, and the hairs on her arms started to rise like the ears of prey, scanning for peril. She looked left and right, but there was nothing. Just the forest. Against her, Connor let out a sigh and tried to keep his balance.

“What’s… the matter?”

“Something,” she said, and veered right, “something I’ve felt before.”

The two of them bushwhacked through a tangle of low cedar trees, their long branches fenced across the air and ground like a net, and Sarah held up her arm as she pushed through into a clearing. What she saw took her breath away, and even Connor’s eyes opened wide.

In front of them, a massive cedar tree stretched into the cobalt blue throat of sky. Its pale body was almost white in the contrast of shadows, and it would have taken at least five of them with arms spread to equal its circumference. It was almost dizzying, and both Sarah and Connor were forced to take a step back. It was a grandfather cedar, probably centuries old, with long arching branches that seemed to point straight up. It looked like a fossil.

“Is it dead?” Connor gasped.

“No, not entirely,” she replied, indicating the small green tufts toward the top, “but that’s not what concerns me.”

“What are you talking about?”

Sarah helped Connor to sit down and unslung her backpack. It took her several seconds of rooting through her belongings before she pulled out the brown moleskin journal and flipped through the pages. She held the spine open with her thumb and showed it to Connor, who looked at the journal, then at the tree, then back at the journal.

“You’ve been here before?” he asked.

“No,” Sarah said. Her face was void of emotion. She could only stare calmly at the journal in her hands and cradled it like an embryo, as if it might hold the memory of this place. “I don’t understand.”

Connor looked again at the page of the journal. It was the picture of a cedar tree, stark and cragged. Even though the picture and the actual tree before them had some dissimilarities, it was clearly meant to represent the same thing.

“I drew this from a dream,” she explained, sitting down, “I was in front of this tree. And I don’t remember anything else, except I was afraid.”

“What were you afraid of, Sarah?” Connor asked suddenly.

She shrugged. It couldn’t be a coincidence that the tree she had dreamed about was here now, on the ancestral lands. She stood up again and approached it, her boots cracking on twigs. As she neared the base of its trunk, she could almost make out the whispering of the branches, as if they were trying to communicate in an ancient language, inaccessible to her.
Just my imagination
, she thought.

As she reached out and touched the white wood, she felt something like an electrical pulse ripple through her body, and quickly pulled back.

“Are you okay?” Connor gasped, trying to stand.

“Stop moving, you’re going to make it bleed again,” she chided, holding her hand. “It’s fine, I’m fine. I just… I dunno, it felt weird. I’m going to try again.”

This time she reached out slower and as her fingers alighted on the pale trunk, she closed her eyes and took in a deep breath. The wood was surprisingly warm, almost too warm. It was like touching the skin of an animal, and she pulled back again.
Just my imagination
, she repeated. It had felt like it was breathing.

“Sarah, over here, there’s something stone. It’s covered with moss,” Connor hollered.

She withdrew and followed Connor’s finger to a slanted piece of granite arching from the ferns and the growth of mosses. It looked too cleanly carved to be natural, and there was a rounded edge to it. She nodded and scaled over a fallen log next to the object and began to brush the foliage off it.

Words suddenly appeared under her fingers, chiseled deep into the flat and polished stone, and she recognized it immediately as a tombstone of some sort, half-overgrown in the dense wilderness of the Canadian forest.

“It’s… I think  it is a tomb, or something. A grave,” she said.

Connor ignored her admonishment and struggled to his feet, straggling to her side and putting a hand on her back for support, as he looked over her shoulder.

“What’s it say?”

Sarah read it aloud and then fell backward onto her butt, her face stricken again with the same rigor of surprise and shock and bewilderment. The heavy granite headstone had been carved by what looked like claws, unwieldy and sharp, but the words themselves were English.

SAMSON GREYBACK. The date of his death was etched below, and a small epitaph that read “May He Find Peace”. The name had the same effect as the gunshots on Sarah, and she pulled back as if in revulsion.

“Who’s Samson Greyback? A relative of yours?” Connor enquired.

“You could say that,” Sarah began, and grit her teeth, “he was Caroline’s father. My uncle.”

CHAPTER FOUR

“Originally, Caroline didn’t live with us,” Sarah said, after they’d retreated away from the grave. The tall grandfather cedar remained in front of them, bathed in sunlight that seemed to runnel down its bark, while everything else around the grove seemed to inhabit nothing but shadows.

“Her parents died,” she continued, “and that’s why she came to live with us at the Estate. I was never told how they died, and I never really brought it up with her. Every time I came close, she got this pained look on her face and I couldn’t understand why… so I decided never to bring it up. I guess I hoped she’d eventually be comfortable enough with me to bring it up on her own. But my parents must’ve known.”

“The question is, why is Caroline’s father
here
? And did you see those claw marks? That name wasn’t chiseled into the stone… it was scratched. By a Bear’s claw.”

Connor leaned back against a stump and tried to flex his arm. The whole right side of his shirt was dark with blood that refused to dry in the damp environment. He winced, but at least there was movement.
He wasn’t kidding about the regenerative powers of his Tribe
, Sarah thought. Even when she was in Form, a wound like that would have put her out of commission for good.

“From what I gathered growing up, there were unusual circumstances surrounding his death. Things that the family wanted to keep quiet… of course, I was too young to be a part of it. They probably wanted to protect me as much as anything.”

“That goes for me, as well. If a Greyback died under
suspicious circumstances
, what do you think that actually means?” Connor glared at her, and there was a ferocity in his gaze, but it wasn’t directed at her. Rather, it was simply rage – like water, it sought the downhill slope.

“You think the Clawgroves know about this too?”

“This grave is on ancestral lands. I can’t imagine either of our Tribes are in the dark about this. Only us,” he sneered.

Sarah stooped down beside him and leaned her head on his good shoulder. She felt too tired to contemplate the tangled intricacies of their families. The idea of running away now seemed like a good idea – but she knew that Caroline would never let her go. Not until her plan had come full circle and had been reaped.
Which at this point means Connor’s death
, she realized,
and possibly mine
.

“Are you okay?” he asked, raising his good hand to stroke her scalp.

She let out an animated purr and nuzzled deeper against him – how easy it would be to slink into a den with him. Curl up in the simple luxury of each other’s company, and sleep. “No,” she said at last, and above them, a flock of Canadian geese in V formation skirted the sky. “I’m afraid. It doesn’t matter where we go, Caroline will hunt us down. You don’t know her. She’s fierce, uncompromising. I think it was her who  shot you.”

“Well, she missed,” he said with false bravado, trying to cheer her up. She took his palm and held it against her cheek. “You might be right… I don’t think Caroline will let us get close to the chalet. And if she’s hunting us, we don’t have much time. I think we should head east. There’s a logging road there… with any luck, someone will be there, they can take us down to the village. What do you think?

Sarah could only nod absently, but her hand tightened around his. Another quarter of an hour later, Connor felt strong enough to move again, and remarkably, his wound had already started to heal over, although he still looked like he’d come from a Vietnam trench covered in his own blood and mud. Connor pointed Sarah in the right direction, and she took control, clearing the path and reconnoitering, then falling back to check on him.
He doesn’t complain, not even once
, she thought. Surely he was in pain and just as exhausted as her. She slapped her cheeks and vowed to try and act as strong as him. As of now, the only people they could count on were each other.

Sure enough, there was a logging road toward the east, and Sarah smelled the bled sap and ripped wood of fallen trees long before she actually saw the road. It was a muddy track wended into the earth, and she knew that in time the forest would reclaim it, much as it had done the grave, back at the grandfather cedar.

It took less than half an hour of walking down the trail before they ran into a foreman who was just returning to camp from a bit of scouting. His truck lurched to a stop in the mud, and the big F-150 diesel growled down as he jumped out. He was an older man, fit but with a discernible paunch, and clean-shaven in a pair of corduroy pants and a safety vest.

“Christ, what the hell happened to you kids?” was the first thing he exclaimed. Connor did his best to allay the fears of the foreman, who believed they were campers that had gotten lost. “What did you run into, a bear?”

Connor grinned. “You could say that. But it’s not as bad as it looks, really. Can you give us a ride back down to the camp?”

It turned out the foreman’s name was Larry, and he’d been working in this part of the country for going on twenty years. After he was fully convinced that Connor wouldn’t bleed out in his pickup on the bumpy switchback roads to the logging camp, he relaxed a little and told them about his life in the wilderness and the logging industry.

“What about a tall white grandfather cedar? Do you know anything about that?” Sarah finally asked after they’d lapsed into a pleasant silence. Connor leaned his head against the glass of the passenger door and dozed sleepily.

Larry rubbed his chin. “That’s an interesting question. Well, yeah, I do know it. Kind of a legend around here actually. They say its five hundred years old. There’s a lot of Native myths about it.”

“I’d like to hear,” Sarah urged.

He rubbed his chin and gave her a curious look. “They say that a long time ago there were two warring tribes or clans in these parts. A lot of bloodshed that went on for centuries, y’know? They’d kill one member, the tribe would seek vengeance with two more, back and forth.

It became so bloody and tiresome that eventually, the two leaders met to decide on terms of peace. But there was so much blood spilled, the leaders knew that it would be difficult to rout out hate and keep the peace,” he said, and took a deep breath, “so they made the ultimate sacrifice. They both took their own lives, as an example, and as a promise of peace. Both tribes were so heartbroken that they came together, for the first time in as long as any of them could remember, to mourn together.”

“And the tree?”

“They say that the blood of those two leaders ended up spreading into the earth, and a giant cedar sprung up on that spot. Both as a kind of testament to their bravery, but also a reminder of the peace they gave their lives for,” Larry said, clearly enthralled by his own story. “Of course, that’s just a story.”

“I like it,” Sarah admitted.

There was another pause and Larry turned his head. “Why’d you ask about the tree, anyway?”

She shrugged quickly. “Er, nothing. Just, we’d heard rumors about it, y’know.”

“Did you find it?” Larry asked, craning his neck, and when she wasn’t sure how to respond he laughed. “Just kidding. Legends and all that. They can carry you away, can’t they?”

The logging camp was situated at the foothills of second year growth, and hedged by a big river that had several trawlers in it. It would be a safe place to plan their next move.

The camp itself consisted of a big shed where the trucks and skidders were parked, a small mechanics shop, a number of portable bunkers that acted as dormitories for the loggers, a small medical clinic, and a big renovated kitchen and pub. As they stepped out, it was already almost evening again.
Time flies when you’re being hunted
, Sarah thought, and saw Connor flash her a wry grin that told her he was thinking the same thing.

While Larry took Connor to the clinic to check his injuries, Sarah went into the kitchen – as soon as she flashed Larry’s name the waitress on duty gave her a warm smile and treated her to a hearty soup. Connor came in a few minute later and sat down beside her.

“Thankfully, it’s healed enough that they didn’t suspect it to be a gun wound. Otherwise we’d have some tough questions to answer. Larry said he’d put us up for the night, and drive us to the chalet tomorrow. What do you think?”

“I think it’s unavoidable,” she said.

That night as they laid together in a single cot, she wrapped her skinny arms around his barrel chest and listened to him breathing. The tiny hairs on his chest tickled her nose and she propped herself above him and looked down. He was wide awake, and moved his hands up her ribs.

“Caroline might try to kill you on sight,” she said. She knew it was useless to point it out, but she couldn’t be brave anymore. Not now, that she knew Connor. She bent down and kissed him savagely, and he twined his fingers between her hair and plunged his mouth into hers.

Their tongues became a swirling language all of their own, and Sarah started to cry, and Connor held her and kissed her until at last she fell against his chest and was quiet. Only the sounds of crickets punctuated the still air.

*

True to his word, Larry gave them a ride the next morning. Sarah still had on her shirt and cargo pants, but Larry had lent Connor a new T-shirt and hoodie that didn’t smell like him. The foreman could detect a palpable tension in the air as he drove the two of them in silence, and even he didn’t want to risk snapping it. It was Sarah who finally managed to break the lull.

             
“I wanted to thank you, Larry,” she said at last, still staring out the front window, “you didn’t have to help us, but you’re doing more than you need to. I wanted to tell you, that white cedar of yours… it’s not a legend.”

Larry kept his gaze straight ahead as well, but he clicked his jaw and his hands tightened on the steering wheel as he negotiated a muddy turn. “I know,” he said, “you think I could have spent half my life here and not stumbled upon it?”

Sarah smirked and tightened the straps on her backpack.

They arrived at the chalet without incident, and Sarah instructed Larry to hurry back to the logging camp without delay – the old timer took her advice with a furrowed look of discontent, and they both watched him pull away in a flurry of dust back down the valley.

As they entered into the main hall, Sarah was actively aware of any traps that might have been set. But surprisingly there was nothing, in fact there was nobody at all.

“I guess they aren’t expecting us?” Connor said, and his fist clenched on the handle of his hatchet. “Where is everyone?”

“It depends on who’s involved in this,” she whispered, “I know Caroline probably didn’t expect us to get this far.”

They entered into the dining room, but there was still nothing. It was like the chalet had been abandoned. There weren’t even any envoys present, not to mention the twitchy looking butler. Connor motioned to the back door, which led to a small enclosure in the center of the chalet, a kind of garden where an empty fountain stood. Sarah imagined in the summer or spring it would probably be quite beautiful, but in the wake of autumn it was cold and Gothic and a bit draconian in its appearance. Like a haunted mansion, something that held the dead too tightly in its grip.

As they opened the door, a surprised Patrick looked up from his cellphone, and his expression was a mixture of surprise and glee. He dropped the cellphone and there was an awkward moment as all three cast uneasy looks at one another, unsure of how to proceed – or who would make the first move. Patrick, invariably, did. He rushed forward, and Connor stiffened in anticipation of an attack.

But instead the big man wrapped his arms around the boy and let out a jubilant cry. “You made it, Connor! And Sarah, too! I didn’t expect you to be back so soon!” When he saw both of them leering at him with suspicious eyes, and Connor still gripping the hatchet, this expression changed. “What’s going on?”

“I should ask you that,” Connor grimaced.

“I don’t understand-”

“How about this then?” Sarah said, pulling out the Glock and pointing it at him. Its sharp beveled edge flashed in the grey light. “Does this ring a bell?”

Patrick balked and backed up, raising his hands in genuine fear and surprise. “I don’t understand! What is the meaning of this? What are you two doing?”

“You can’t blame them, my liege,” a cruel voice behind them purred, and they all looked toward a far entrance where Caroline was walking toward them. She wasn’t in a dress any longer – heavy combat dungarees and a tight black tank-top clung to her breasts, and in both hands she held a high-powered rifle.
She was the shooter
, Sarah confirmed for herself.

“Caroline!” Patrick practically fumed, raising his hands in anger, “
what’s
going on?”

“She wanted me to kill your son,” Sarah said, leveling her gaze at Caroline.

“A completely simple task that even you managed to blunder. I wasn’t really sure if you’d be able to. If you
had
I was prepared to let you live, but I can see you’re just as weak as your parents. Let’s put that down now, dear. Don’t want you to hurt yourself.”

“You betrayed me,” Sarah snapped, dropping the Glock.