Tracking the Bear (Blue Ridge Bears Book 1) Page 8

  “Chance, you missed the turn.”

  “We’re not stopping,” he muttered, taking us up a winding mountain road. The sign ahead announced we were nearing a trailhead. I turned to stare at him, in all of his semi-nude glory. He didn’t turn his head and I had a hard time reading his expression from his profile alone.

  “So you’re saying that I’m allowed to go with you?” I ventured, wondering if I was hearing right. I’d been prepared to stowaway in his trunk if I needed to.

  “Yes.”

  We reached the trailhead in another half mile and Chance pulled into the small space allotted for parking. There were three other vehicles parked in the space, and several men and one woman seated around a picnic table, apparently playing cards.

  Chance climbed out as soon as he cut the engine and I scrambled out of the car. I had no clue what had prompted this sudden change, but I wasn’t going to argue with him. He handed me the keys and made his way toward the picnic table, calling over his shoulder as he went.

  “Go ahead and unload. I’m going to talk with Darren Oberlander. He’s the lead enforcer in this area.”

  I figured that it would be better to not mess with whatever good fortune had led Chance to bring me along. So I opened the trunk and began to unload the gear. I was struggling with the camp stove when I heard raised voices.

  “You can’t bring her out here,” the man, presumably Darren, shouted. He tried to loom over Chance, though it was a difficult prospect, considering that Chance was a head taller than any of the were-bears present.

  “She’s coming with,” Chance argued, folding his arms over his bare chest. I was glad we’d been able to scavenge more jeans from his suitcase in the back. I’m not sure if I’d have been able to keep my hands off of him if he’d been completely nude during the whole Alpha shtick.

  “She’s human. We offered your branch this mission out of courtesy but if you’re just going to make this more difficult-”

  scoffed. “I’m one of the best at long range tracking in my spirit form, and you know it. That’s why you extended the invitation. If you want to see how difficult this mission will be without my assistance, I’ll turn around and go back to Mississippi. It’s no fur off my back.”

  I paused, setting the camp stove on the ground carefully. It may not trouble Chance to leave, but I couldn’t just abandon Luke. I debated running into the woods, forcing their hand. I scrapped that idea quickly. My leg made it difficult to walk, and damn near impossible to run. It would only take one were-bear to chase me down and drag me back, and there were a half dozen of them.

  As if he’d sensed my intention, the youngest man at the table stood, and strode past the bickering males toward me. He couldn’t have been much over eighteen. He was clearly afflicted with a bad case of baby face, and the dimples that appeared when he smiled at me didn’t help matters. His bright red hair gave me a momentary pang for Millie, back home. What was she up to now? Surely, my car had been towed by now. Was she worried about me? Where did she think I’d disappeared to?

  The young man stopped a few paces short of where I stood. “Do you need some help?” he asked, gesturing toward the two large packs that I had yet to unload.

  “I’m not entirely sure Chance will win the argument,” I muttered. “We could be packing all this stuff up in a few minutes.”

  “You won’t be,” he said confidently. “Darren can be pig-headed sometimes. It’s a quality I admire, even if it can get a bit tedious.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “I have a way with people,” he said with a shrug. “I’ll talk to him in a few minutes. You’re needed on this mission, Miss Elmsong, now more than ever.”

  I stiffened. I was almost certain that Chance hadn’t told them my last name. That would be a strike against my participation that he didn’t need. “How do you know my last name?”

  He gave me another dazzling smile. “Ah yes, where are my manners? I haven’t introduced myself, have I? I’m Adrien. Adrien Frey.”

  My mouth popped open. “You’re-”

  He put a finger to my lips gently. “Shh. Not here. Walk with me, and we can discuss it further.”

  He walked several hundred yards down the road, away from the rest of the were-bears. Adrien, or Freyr, as I suspected, didn’t look back at me as he spoke.

  “There. We should be far enough away they can’t eavesdrop. You were saying, Miss Elmsong?”

  “Adrien Frey?” I repeated incredulously. “Isn’t that a touch obvious?”

  He chuckled. “Perhaps, but none of them will remember me once I leave this place. I’m merely here to ensure that you are able to participate. You’re the only one that can stand in his way.”

  “I don’t see what you think I can accomplish,” I said, throwing my hands up in frustration. “He’s stronger than me. Faster, too.”

  “Yes,” he said simply. “He is that. But you swore an oath to me. You must stop him. Your brother will save many lives.”

  “You sent a creepy puddle monster after me. What was I supposed to say? I think I’m getting the raw end of this deal. I didn’t sign up to be a part of your supernatural army.”

  “Your mate is frightened for your life,” he informed me, turning fully toward me for the first time since we’d started walking. “I don’t blame him. I didn’t believe that the Aesir would be able to locate him this quickly, or I would have come to you earlier.”

  “The Aesir?” I echoed. What was with all the funny words? I didn’t know what the hell people were talking about half the time. I really had to brush up on my Norse mythology.

  “Odin and his ilk. Surely you’ve heard of Odin? At the very least you’ve heard of his son, Thor. He’s been getting an obnoxious amount of attention in human media in the last century.”

  I would have laughed, if the situation weren’t so serious. It wasn’t every day you saw a god sulking over his lack of publicity. I nodded, covering my mouth to hide the sudden smile on my face.

  “So, Thor threatened to kill me?” I checked.

  “The scent of honeysuckle and wheat lingered on his skin, so it was either Frigg or Sif.”

  I bristled at the mention of another woman anywhere near Chance. Frigg or Sif would keep her hands off of Chance, if she wanted to keep said hands.

  Freyr turned and began walking back up the hill. It was more difficult going up the hill than down it, especially since I hadn’t taken any pain medication since leaving the hotel in the morning. I limped after him, fuming. I didn’t like any of this. I didn’t like that Chance was keeping secrets from me. I didn’t like that I’d been strong-armed into helping Freyr accomplish whatever his agenda was. And most of all, I didn’t like the odds stacked against me. I couldn’t stop Chance. He was bigger and stronger than I was. Even if my leg was whole, I couldn’t outrun him.

  I had the sinking feeling that I was going to fail miserably. Why not? I wasn’t exactly the pinnacle of success. I’d always fallen short of expectations. Poised on the edge of attending Notre Dame with a full ride sports scholarship, I’d apparently gotten “drunk” and crashed my brother’s car. Instead of attending community college, I’d spent the following five years working as a waitress.

  What was it that Uncle Mack had said before I’d left? Ah, right. You’ve got a lot of quit in you.

  Freyr cocked his head to one side and considered me as we ascended the hill. “Do you?” he asked.

  “Do I what?” I muttered, rubbing at my eyes before tears could fall.

  “Do you have a lot of quit in you?”

  I jumped. “You never said you could read minds. Butt out.”

  “I can’t help that you’re practically screaming it right now. But the question still stands. Do you?”

  “No,” I growled, finally reaching the top. My leg hurt like hell, but that didn’t matter. I was going to hike into the woods whether Chance followed me or not. “I don’t.”

  “Good.” He flashed me a wicked grin that looked wildly out
of place on his young, innocent face. “That’s my girl. I’m going to sort the boys out. Be ready when I send my gift to you. I won’t send it twice.”

  “Gift? What gift?” I hissed as he sauntered toward the squabbling group of were-bears.

  “You’ll know it when you see it. Good luck, Lucy Elmsong.”

  ***

  Nearly two weeks out and I still had no clue what Freyr had been talking about. I whacked another low hanging branch out of my way in frustration. Behind me, I heard the branch hit, and then Chance swore loudly. He’d been doing that a lot in the mornings. I couldn’t get consistent sleep and it made me cranky.

  “Sorry,” I muttered.

  “Another bad one?” he guessed, coming level with me on the hiking trail.

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s keeping you up at night?”

  What wasn’t keeping me up at night? The strange, impossible mission from Freyr was top priority in my worries, but there were other things I dwelled on, as the trail wound further into the mountains. Chance always knew where we were going next, and wasn’t sharing exactly how he knew that information. He still wouldn’t explain to me what had happened in the forty minutes he’d gone berserk on the freeway, though my conversation with Freyr had conjured up some nasty images to fuel my nightmares.

  Add to all of that, the fact that we’d scaled a few of the smaller mountains in an effort to get closer to the goal. My leg had gotten so bad that we were forced to make camp and stay put for a whole day and a half after each jaunt. I was sure my gimpy pace was slowing him down considerably. And on top of it all, I was stealing his clothes.

  It had become clear after one night on the mountaintop that I’d packed for the wrong type of weather. Spring was turning slowly to summer in Tennessee, and it was perfectly acceptable to go out in a pair of shorts and a T-shirt on nice days. I’d packed some long sleeves in preparation for slightly colder weather in Ohio, but I hadn’t packed anything close to sufficient for camping on top of a mountain.

  So after listening to my teeth chatter for two hours as I clutched the light jacket I’d packed to me desperately, he’d given me one of his thermal shirts, a pair of thick socks and had beckoned me to sleep beside him in his sleeping bag. I hadn’t complained. He was warm, and temptingly close.

  Strangely enough, he hadn’t made another move on me. I was beginning to dread that the night in the hotel had been a fluke. He’d said he loved me. He hadn’t even kissed me since we’d arrived.

  He reached over and gently smoothed the crease between by brows with his finger. “You’re worrying. Why?”

  I decided to give him the simplest and least pressing answer. “If I’m your mate like you say, why aren’t we having sex?”

  His head tilted to one side and an easy smile curved his full lips. “That’s what you’ve stayed up worrying about? That I don’t want you?”

  I nodded mutely.

  “You’re silly,” he said, shaking his head. He offered me a hand as a particularly gnarled root jutted from the ground ahead of us. I was prone to tripping over them if he didn’t assist me, and I knew he couldn’t afford the delay of a broken leg.

  “It’s not silly. We’ve been sharing the same sleeping bag for two weeks and you haven’t even tried to kiss me.”

  He pecked me quickly on the cheek. The contact sent a shock of sensation through me. It felt like being exposed to a livewire after weeks of no contact. I turned my face eagerly for a proper kiss. He didn’t oblige me though, backing away from me with a laugh when we’d climbed over the root.

  “If I kiss you know, we’ll have to make camp, and we can put a few more miles behind us before sundown. Soon, I promise.”

  “You’d better,” I grumbled, trudging after him. “So, what was the last topic of conversation we left off with? And was it my turn or yours?”

  “Well, I found out you’re a blasphemer. I can’t in good conscience kiss someone who hates Star Wars.”

  “I don’t hate Star Wars. I just like Star Trek better.”

  “Bah. The pain meds are making you delirious. You’re not talking sense.”

  I rolled my eyes. “I’m pretty sure it’s my turn to ask the questions. You said you had sisters. What do they do?”

  “Rita and Amber. Rita is a nurse, and Amber is a UFC fighter in their paranormal division.”

  “Really? She does mixed-martial arts?”

  “She’s the only person I’ve met in the last ten years who can kick my ass,” he confirmed.

  I laughed. “I’ll have to get her to give me pointers sometime.”

  We settled down to make camp when the sun sank beneath the horizon and we couldn’t move safely forward. It amused me to no end that he hung our food every night to keep it away from bears.

  “Afraid you’ll be tempted to grab a midnight snack?” I teased.

  “Don’t you ever get tired of all the bear jokes?”

  “Never,” I replied solemnly. “Bear puns will follow you for the rest of your days.”

  “Ugh. That will be unbearable,” he said, and crawled into the tent, joining me in the sleeping bag.

  I beamed. “See, you like it!”

  “Barely.”

  “Oh, come on. Quit that. You’re going to ace me in the pun department, and I can’t have that.”

  “You can’t bear it?” he said, leaning in to kiss me on the lips. I raised a hand to cup the back of his neck. He pressed me down onto the hard packed earth at the mouth of the tent and I giggled despite myself.

  “Something like that.” It was hard to think around the distracting things his hands were doing to my breasts, but I forced myself to. There was something off about the night sky, and I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was.

  “I need you to stay in the tent tonight,” he whispered. “At least until I’ve put up some defensive countermeasures, alright?”

  “Alright.”

  He climbed off of me with palpable reluctance and began digging in the pack that I’d never seen him touch before. He pulled out what at first looked like another, larger tent. But when I peered inside, there was no fabric, only tent poles, hammers and a book.

  “What’s this?”

  “Our countermeasure,” he replied, pulling the large bundles of poles out of the bag. They gleamed in the moonlight. Moonlight. That’s what I’d hadn’t been able to place. It seemed impossible that I’d missed it. I’d been tracking the ever-waxing moon as it made its progression toward full. Every day was a day closer to Luke’s transformation into a wild, unstoppable bear.

  I studied the poles. They looked flimsy, and certainly not enough to keep out a bear. “What is it supposed to do?”

  Chance pulled on a pair of gloves and began to fit the segmented poles together. After weeks of practice assembling the tent at night and collapsing it in the morning, I knew how this worked. I grabbed the second bundle and began assembling it as well.

  “These poles are made of enchanted steel,” he explained. “It’s one of the few substances that can hurt or kill us if we’re exposed to it.”

  “So silver doesn’t hurt you?”

  “No, not really.”

  He grabbed a stake from inside the bag and fixed the pole to the ground on the other side of our existing tent, hammering it into place with a mallet. He repeated the process on the other side, bending the pole so it formed a gleaming metal arch above our heads. I slotted the last piece into place on mine and handed it to him as well.

  “No offense, but I don’t think this is going to stand up to a grizzly bear.”

  “Most of the bears in the region where he was infected are actually black bears, not grizzly.”

  “Alright, I don’t think this will stand up to a bear, period,” I said, glancing nervously up at the moon. “There’s all the empty space between these poles.”

  “That’s where the runes come in,” he muttered. He traced his finger over one of the segments and a sigil of some kind glowed red-orange for a moment. As
I watched, the light dimmed and the pole returned to normal.

  “What will they do?” I asked.

  “Spirits and spiritual beings cannot enter into a place of faith.”

  “I don’t follow.” I traced my thumb over another of the segments, and nothing happened.

  “I’m a spiritual being. You’re not.”

  “Pardon me,” I scoffed. “I go to church every Sunday with my Aunt Carol. Or at least I did before this little road trip started.”

  He laughed and stopped to hammer the first side of my pole into place. “That’s not what I meant. I mean my bear is a spirit and while I take a bear form, I can’t enter a place of faith. It’s like a physical barrier. That’s what I’m counting on to keep your brother out.”

  “So…if we pray hard enough, this thing will repel bears?” It sounded even more ridiculous when I said it out loud.

  He let out a rumbling basso laugh, and the warm sound brushed across my skin like the touch of velvet. I wanted to wrap myself in the happy sound and never let it go.

  “Those are written in the language of my faith, so if I pray, yes, it should keep Luke and any other were-creature. The catch is that once it’s activated, it also keeps me inside during the full moon.”

  I glanced nervously at our tiny tent. I didn’t think it could survive his violent transformation into a six-hundred-pound grizzly bear if what had happened last time was any indication.

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” he said, taking my face between my hands. He peered earnestly down at me, and his eyes looked almost black in the darkness. It was probably a trick of the shadows, but they looked closer to the eyes of his bear form than before.

  “How long do you have?” I asked. Sex was definitely out of the equation until the lunar cycle was over. I sighed. I had been looking forward to doing that tonight.

  “A half hour, if I’m lucky. I can feel it coming on.” As I watched, the skin of his arms rippled. His muscles bunched and he dropped his hands from my face quickly. “I need to get the last pole before I shift.”

  “I’ve got it,” I said, and took a step back, out of the protective barrier of the poles. I searched the ground for the mallet and the remaining stake. I’d just rounded the final edge of the tent when I heard his shirt tear. Much less than a half hour, it appeared. I knelt on the ground, positioning the stake. It slipped from my hand when I heard Chance’s bear form let out an enormous bellow.