Page 14 of Coveted By the Bear

I clutched onto my single bag of groceries and looked down the street. I don’t know why. I always went straight for my truck with my head down, but for some reason I couldn’t help looking for Caleb. In the daylight, I could see the sterile looking clinic with its whitewashed brick. Despite my panic, I moved down the sidewalk to my left. What would I say to him? The last time I’d spoken to him, it was obvious he thought I was insane for talking about bear men. Would he throw me out? How many people would be visiting him? He was a McCreedy after all, so of course there would be visitors.

A loop of horrifying questions ran through my mind until I reached for the front door of the clinic. I was surprised when the door opened suddenly from the inside. Unable to pull my hand away quickly enough, it jammed against the unforgiving metal, making a deep thunk sound and sending pain shooting straight up my arm from where my wrist had overextended.

Hooking the groceries with an arm, I held the hurt part with my other hand like the pressure would make it feel better. I’d had much worse, but the pain was unexpected.

A girl my age appeared out of the doorway. She was wiping her eyes with a tissue, and her nose looked red from crying. Big blue eyes, light brown hair, and lightly freckled skin told me she was pretty, and I felt sad that she was leaving in tears. Maybe she had lost someone, too.

“Mira,” she said in a harsh voice. “Is it true that you stitched up Caleb McCreedy after that bear attack?”

My eyes went wide at being talked to directly. I shifted my weight from side to side and tried to peel my gaze from her angry face.

“Well?” she demanded so loudly I jumped and shrank into myself.

“Yes,” I whispered.

Her look darkened. “You only stitched up half of what needed to be done, and poorly at that. His body is ruined now.” Hate tainted every word. “He will be scarred for life, and everyone will look at his skin out of pity. Because of you.”

A shorter girl beside her put a gentle hand over her forearm. “Becca,” she said, looking around at the gathering crowd. “I think we should go.”

Becca shoved by me, bumping my shoulder and spinning me to the side as she passed. I stared after her in disbelief and confusion. I hadn’t made those scars on Caleb. The grizzly had. No, Mr. Idiot Shifter Eli Emmerson had, for reasons I hadn’t a guess at. I had only tried to help, and I had done the best I could. I’d thought about it over and over and couldn’t imagine a way I could have done it differently—done it better. I wished I had the balls to say those things out loud to her and defend myself.

Suddenly, I was angry at Caleb. Why had he been up on my land, anyway? He wouldn’t have been attacked if he would have been back at his big safe mansion with the rest of his snooty family. And he’d still be fucking human! And now I carried all this guilt, and apparently the blame, too.

His fault.

I glared at a familiar, dark-headed man who had come too close and pushed past the murmuring crowd. I peeled out of town as fast as my truck could go—which was actually really slow and anticlimactic.

When I was younger, I had this foster family I liked. I had been passed around a lot and labeled a problem child because I didn’t talk very much and I looked funny. Something about me didn’t sit well with people who didn’t understand what I’d been through. This one family though, the Millers, had a biological son who was bad news. He would destroy anything he could get his hands on, and he would always blame it on me because he knew I wouldn’t defend myself. Life was pretty miserable until the Millers decided they didn’t believe him anymore, so they would ask me if he was telling the truth, and a funny thing happened. For the first time in my life, someone believed me. I never told them, but I had prayed every night that they would adopt me. It was the only time I had ever wanted such a whimsical thing. When a social worker came to take me away from the Millers, my heart had shattered into a million tiny pieces, like one of the fine china plates their son had thrown against the edge of a table in a tantrum. It hadn’t mattered how honest I was, they still hadn’t wanted me. Hadn’t cared.

“Learn your lesson, Mira,” I growled at myself.

Sticks and stones would break my bones, but frivolous wishes would break my heart.

****

Caleb

I fell out of bed in the dark, drowning, suffocating, and burning from the inside out. Every inch of my skin felt washed in live embers. Short bursts of breath squeezed from my lungs as I kicked out of the covers that had ensnared my legs.

Something was happening. Something inside.

I tried to yell out in pain, but a snarling sound rippled from my throat as I stumbled for the bathroom. The light was blinding, like my eyes were oversensitive. My vision was humming with small pulses that made everything look crisp, then blurry again. Gripping either side of the sink, I lifted my eyes to the mirror and shook my head in horror at what I saw there.

My eyes. I leaned closer and ran my trembling fingers across my cheek. The color was supposed to be blue, but instead, they were gold on the outside, glowing like the freaking sun, and green on the inside. I didn’t understand. Fighting for air, I searched the medicine cabinet for anything that would explain this away. I had to be hallucinating as a side-effect from the pain meds the clinic had prescribed me.

Panicked, I yanked all of the bottles of Advil and vitamins out until they all clattered across the sink, then jerked the orange bottle of pain pills to my face. Holy shit. I could see the individual paper fibers the label had been made with. Focus.

Nausea, drowsiness, dizziness, fatigue, headache, skin rash, and not a damned word about hallucinations.

“Oww.” The word tapered into a gravelly voice that couldn’t belong to me. Pin pricks shot from my lips and cheeks, and when I looked into the mirror again, I had short, blunt whiskers and my face was beginning to morph into something I didn’t recognize.

I needed help. No! I couldn’t tell anyone about this. I ran for the front door, needing to do something, but at a loss on how to fix my broken self. I threw it open and let the wind caress my bare chest. I dragged lungful after lungful of fresh air into me and tried to think.

Who would believe me?

Who would believe I was this monster now?

Mira.