Page 4 of Coveted By the Bear

If I wasn’t fairly certain that bear wasn’t my neighbor, Eli Emmerson, I would’ve been happy to eat that giant grizzly. Bear probably tasted like raccoon, greasy and full of sinew, but about now, I’d try anything. I wasn’t a people-eater, though, and even if old Eli looked like a feral grizzly laying in the dirt over there, he’d definitely been human once.

I waited, but the body didn’t change back to its human form. Maybe when bear men died, they just stayed like that, all furry and powerful looking. The human Eli had been a sickly old man, frail and not long for the grave, but besides his ribs protruding, his bear form looked healthy.

I debated telling the game warden I’d shot the bear, but they weren’t native to Texas, and there would be way more questions about why he was on my land than I was prepared to answer. I’d definitely have to leave out the part about him being a bear shifter bent on murdering Bryson’s favorite golden boy. Uncle Brady had crowed shifter stories to the game warden before and been rewarded with a twenty-four hour stint in the drunk tank at the police station.

I cast Caleb an angry glare for trespassing and causing me this trouble. Had the idiot even realized he was being hunted?

I walked cautiously over to the giant grizzly with my rifle trained. It wasn’t a high caliber. I had been squirrel hunting after all, but my shot had been true, and I had aimed to kill, not to maim. That had been Mr. Eli’s mistake. He played with his food. I did not. I poked the glazed eye with the tip of my rifle to assure myself he was really dead. It didn’t flinch.

Kneeling down, I looked with pity at the deceased horse Caleb had apparently ridden onto my land. It had been a beautiful creature. Probably worth ten times the two I had in the rickety old barn out back.

Why the hell was Mr. Eli on my land hunting? He’d made a pact with my uncle long ago he’d stay in his own territory, the other side of the fence that separated our properties. I shook my head and frowned. His boys had been killed by poachers a few years back, and he hadn’t been the same after that. I’d hardly seen him since he told Uncle Brady what had happened to his family.

Maybe, he finally just lost it.

A soft groan escaped Caleb’s parted lips, and I twisted to look back at him. At least the puddle of blood beneath him was probably keeping him cool. See? There was always a bright side to everything.

I squatted down beside him, the tendons of my ankles stretching. I canted my head to the side to get a better look at the wounds around his neck and chest.

“You got yourself messed up bad, didn’t you?” I looked back in the direction of the house. It was a long walk from here on an empty stomach, much less dragging a body that weighed twice mine.

I could leave him here.

This wasn’t my concern. Caleb was trespassing, anyway. I had rights to shoot him, and I hadn’t even done that. I’d gone one step farther and shot his murderer. Avenged his death. I was basically a saint.

I growled in frustration. That wasn’t me. No matter what the man had done, I was already moving to try and save him. It wouldn’t work, but I had to live with myself. I didn’t need another ghost haunting my nightmares. My dance card was full.

I tore Caleb’s shirt to admire the damage. It was easy to do because it was already in tatters. Still, I had always wondered what it felt like to rip through fabric so easily. One time when I was younger, I had tried to rip my own shirt open like the hulk. My arms were much too weak, and all I did was growl a lot and stretch the neck so much that my foster parents at the time had grounded me for two weeks. Hulk fans, they were not.

“All right,” I said aloud, trying to calm my nerves at touching another human. I couldn’t remember the last time my fingers had brushed another’s skin. It had been years, at least.

The shirt Caleb wore was useless. Less than useless. It was in shreds and matted with blood in various stages of drying. It was stiff and dirty and smelled of death. When some poor creature lost too much, there was a subtle variation in the smell—an almost unnoticeable shift. That difference in smell meant there was no taking back what had been done, no healing, no more walking this world.

It was close with Caleb.

I tossed the rags to the side and kicked dirt over the top of them. I wasn’t going to help the other predators in the area smell the ready-made meal any easier. Right now, Caleb was easy pickings for the hogs that ran rampant here.

I pulled my thin shirt over my head. Self-consciousness didn’t cross my mind as I didn’t see the man regaining consciousness anytime soon, if ever again. I tried for the second time in my life to hulk rip a shirt with the exact same result—stretched fabric and annoyance.

“Bite the stitches,” said a gruff voice as soft as a whisper.

One impossibly blue slit of color looked back at me, appearing even brighter with all of the red surrounding it. Caleb closed his eye and sighed as he slipped into unconsciousness again. I arched my eyebrows at my exposed breasts. For the first time in my life, a boy had seen me basically naked, and the moment had passed so quickly I hadn’t even been able to fully appreciate it. Huh. I puffed air out of my mouth. Such a moment should have been huge. At least that’s what the books I had read hinted at.

I did as Caleb suggested and got the rip started. With my shirt shredded into exactly two un-strip like pieces, I tied one around a deep gash and puncture wounds at his neck and the other at three deep claw marks across the inside of one of his elbows. They looked the worst. I worked like I was in a trance. I had seen too much blood to be affected by it now. Before I’d come to live with Uncle Brady, my life had been bathed in it.

Caleb should’ve been dead already. I didn’t want to be a pessimist, but this man had lost too much blood to survive. I narrowed my eyes at the still lump of Mr. Eli’s body. That rangy old shifter had either ruined Caleb’s life or killed him.

The rifle clunked into the inside of Caleb’s arm as I set it down. Bolting down the dusty path, I ran like hell for the horses. He could shoot himself or shoot the pigs that would come for him soon. Either way, the choice was his.

I shook like the last leaf on a tree in autumn. The one that was afraid to fall for fear of the unknown. Even when all of his friends had fallen, trembling uncertainty consumed such a leaf before it performed its final floating dance to meet the fate of the others on the forest floor. It needn’t worry, but how could it know it would be reborn the next spring?

I shook for other reasons. Caleb had scared me off buying groceries, and I hadn’t built the nerve to go back yet. It had been a week with nothing in the pantry, and a damning fear of facing Mr. Bernard and the audience at Jake’s Quickstop again.

The leaf and I were the same—fearful creatures.

By the time my horse, Bobby, was saddled, I was close to passing out. “Stay awake, stay awake, stay awake,” I chanted to the hoof beats of my running stead. Stead was perhaps the wrong word when applied to my twenty-two year old gray gelding that had gone long in the tooth. The uneven terrain kept us at a slower pace than my beating heart preferred, a fact for which Bobby was probably grateful. When I found Caleb again, he was clutching onto the rifle with a shaking hand. It was the only part of him that had moved, and my heart lurched into my throat. I had known that kind of fear before, and I wouldn’t have wished it on anyone. Not even Caleb McCreedy.

The saddle creaked as I slid off Bobby. I pulled on his reins, but he balked at the smell of dead predator and blood. The gap between the horse and Caleb’s withering body widened. No good.