Black Bear Fall: A BWWM Paranormal Romance (Black Bear Saga Book 2) (3 page)

S
omeone slapped
Graces cheek and her head whipped back waking her from a shallow sleep. She tried to lift her arms and they were restrained with leather straps to the arms of the chair. She was facing the corner of a room the walls tiled in white. Her legs were also restrained and she tried to turn to see who had slapped her. Her restraints only allowed her a small field of view and she couldn’t see anyone. She could sense someone standing close behind her. Is he going to reach out and hit me again she wondered as she craned her neck to try and see. The room smelt of bleach and Grace could hear a low hum from something behind her. “Who’s there,” she said, “where am I?”

The person behind her took a step away from her. Grace tensed her body and waited for another blow to the head and none came. The last thing she remembered was lying tied up in the back of a truck with Anne, and the two disfigured guards who kept watch. The man behind her spun her chair around so that she was facing the centre of the room. Anne was lying unconscious on a metal table. Her legs were strapped down and she had a dark purple bruise above her eye. “What have you done to my friend?” Grace cried out. Let me out of this chair she said and strained against the cuffs and leg braces. It was no use and she sat there panting, her hair falling over her eyes.

The man who had been standing behind her stepped forward so she could see him. “Save your strength. You are going to need it,” he said. He wore a dark suit, had slicked back blonde hair and eyes that twinkled as he looked at Grace.

He’s enjoying my discomfort, the sadist, she thought to herself as she slowed her breathing to try and calm down. “Who are you?” she demanded surprising herself with the anger in her voice.

“My name is Slattery and we are going to have plenty of time to get to know each other,” he said and gave her a bow. “I’m charged with your well being while you are with us,” he said checking on something written in the notebook he was holding.

“Why don’t you start by opening my straps,” Grace said.

Slattery raised an eyebrow and laughed and said, “I like you already. You have guts. You are going to need it for whats ahead.” His eyes danced with glee at his last words spoken. He looks like a kid who wants to ruin a surprise but is afraid his parents will scold him Grace thought, looking at him with disgust.

“What have you done to my friend?” she said.

“Your friend is perfectly fine for now,” Slattery said in the same gleeful tone.

Grace looked around the tiled room, a drain was embedded in the floor under Annes table and a light on a retractable arm was directly above her bathing her unconscious body in yellow tinged light. A large double doorframe was in the opposite wall and thick fronds of opaque plastic hung down to the floor. As she looked at it the heavy plastic fronds separated as someone pushed through them.

Tulimak stood before her, his fingers hooked into his belt as he looked from Anne to Grace in her chair. He was wearing a black bespoke suit with the shirt open at the neck. His sandy blonde hair was tousled making him look like someone who was more at home on the beach than standing in a tiled back room with two hostages. He beamed at Grace and tilted back on his heels as he watched her. He licked his finger and held it up for a second and then said, “Feel that, its the winds of change.” He laughed and Slattery joined him, “You wouldn’t believe how long I’ve waited to meet you Grace,” he said walking towards her. He walked by Annes unconscious body without so much as a glance.

“I think there has been a mistake. You’ve got the wrong people. We were out for a walk and got nabbed. I think we got pulled into something that has nothing to do with us,” Grace said and she could feel herself close to babbling. There was something about this guy, he looked like one of a million of the type of surfer bros she had known in her college days. The type of guy with an easy going charm who never seemed to be ruffled about what was going on around him. This guy looked like that on the surface, even had some of the same mannerisms, but Grace could feel something dark and wriggling beneath the surface. Her chest felt like it was being squeezed the closer he got to her.

“We are all adults here. Lets not start off on the wrong foot. I know all about you and the shifter clan you are mixed up in. Unlucky for you that you picked the wrong side. Did they trick you with their whole peace and love seventies hippy vibe?” he said.

Grace looked at him as he watched her with a grin on his face she would like to see Tom tearing off with one clawed hand. “They never treated me like this. Those people have been nothing but good to me.”

Tulimak turned to Slattery and said, “Go get the Doctor.” Slattery nodded and left the tiled room. “I don't suppose they divulged any of their sordid past to you? Not much talk of the great schism from some of the crusty elders? No one mention anything to you about the purge or banishment of the army of five hundred?”

Grace looked at him with confusion and said, “I don't care about their history only how they treat people now.”

“Oh you will come to care, wait and you’ll see. Once you live through some of their atrocities I don't think you’ll be so willing to return to the soft cuddly arms of your teddy bear. What’s the trackers name, Tom is it?” Tulimak said.

“When Tom finds me he will,” Grace said and was cut off by Tulimak laughing.

“Find you? Don't make me laugh, you obviously don't know what has happened. We have plenty of time for you to find out. You and I will be spending a lot of quality time together,” he said, “I’m Tulimak by the way. Friends should be on first name basis.”

Grace could feel her chest tighten even more. Was this creep bluffing about Tom to try to scare the hell out of her, if so it was working. Hold it together she told her self as she felt tears begin to spring forth from her eyes. She could feel desperation well up from deep inside her, bubbling up from the earth ready to drown her. “What do you want from me?” Grace asked trying to stem the flow of tears.

“To be friends. To expose you to the lies and hypocrisy of the black bears. What is it they say? The truth will set you free. I think after you spend a little time with me you will see those wretched animals in a whole new light. Your cardboard cutout hero Tom has his own share of dark secrets he wouldn't want his new bit of skirt to see. Don't you worry Grace we will have the time to walk down the halls and see the sights together,” he said and walked away from Grace and towards Anne. His back was to Grace and she tried to move her hands in her restraints. She could feel the soft skin in her inner wrists shred off as she tried to free her hand. The leather was stiff and immobile as she twisted and pulled against it, nothing was happening and then she felt a tiny movement. A small amount of give. It was a start.

Tulimak bent down to Anne and sniffed deeply along the length of her body. His shoulders were hunched as he smelled her and Grace thought that from behind he looked like a monster crouched over a damsel in distress. If only this was a fairytale Grace thought as she kept moving her wrist, the leather loosening in minute increments as she moved her arm. Tulimak turned back to Grace and for a second she thought that he knew straight away that her binds where loosening. She was sure he was going to walk right over and pull on them until they bit painfully into her skin again. He leaned against the metal table looking at Grace, the same easy going grin plastered on his face.

“Do you know anything about bile collecting?” he asked. Tulimak didn’t give Grace a chance to speak and continued. “You humans are a barbaric lot. You know this of course. I don’t think the planet had ever had a species that figures out the most cruel and unusual punishments for animals they deem below them. Well back in the mists of time some clever human came up with the idea that a certain digestive liquid made in a bears internal organs could cure all sorts of ailment. You can guess how this went for the poor bears. Forced into tiny cages, incisions made in their abdomens and a tube connected to the bile duct. This precious green fluid that some clever little hairy ape deemed as important was then drained right from the source until the bear keeled over. It’s a practise still done to this day. The stuff is worth its weight in gold. Put a few drops in a cup of tea and your aches and joint pains will disappear like magic. Miraculous stuff. You want to know what it really does?”

Grace nodded, as she watched him walk around the table. You keep on talking she thought as she moved her wrist every time he had his back to her. The leather was loosening in painfully small increments, but it was a start and it gave Grace hope to cling on to.

Tulimak stood at the end of the table and looked down at Anne who was still unconscious. “The funny thing about the bile that they extract in the most painful and ruinous way possible is it does absolutely nothing. It has zero medical benefits. They might as well boil tufts of the bears hair in water and drink that mixture. Humans love the complicated ritual surrounding something like bile extraction. There is no romance to snipping off some hair and using that in a tincture. No bile duct extraction, that has all the ingredients of the human spirit. You get to dominate a creature that you see as inferior, the human gets to cage it and extract the very essence from its body, and finally you get to watch it die at your hands. Rinse and repeat. Human innovation at its finest.” Tulimak turned as the plastic fronded doorway was pushed open and two more men walked in. The first was Slattery and he was followed by a tanned man in his fifties. “Perfect timing gentleman,” Tulimak said turning to great them. “This here is Doctor Clancy and he will be performing todays procedure.”

Slattery stood in the opposite corner of the room with his notebook out and he was jotting down notes. The Doctor approached Grace and his tanned face cracked like wood as he smiled down at her. His teeth were as white as the tiles in the room and Grace had to stop herself from coughing from the strong scent of too much cologne.

“Do you have any persisting heart conditions?” Doctor Clancy asked Grace.

Grace felt a chill run along her spine, what the hell was this mad man going to do to her she thought as she felt her skin crawl under his gaze. “Why?” Grace said.

“The procedure can be tough on even the strongest of men. Its good to know these things ahead of time,” The Doctor said and turned and walked over to the table. He put his leather bag down on the floor close to the drain and whispered something in Tulimak's ear.

“What are you sick bastards going to do,” Grace shouted at the two men. She strained at her straps, arching her back again and again as she thrashed about. Her head slumped on her chest as she sucked in lungfuls of air. Even if I broke free I don’t think I could run more than a few steps before I collapsed she thought as her throat burned.

“Don’t wear yourself out you have a long day ahead of you,” Tulimak said. He cracked his knuckles and walked back over to Grace. The Doctor opened his bag and started to take out medical implements and place them on the metal table. Tulimak looked down at Graces sweat stained face and said, “I think the doctor is about to begin. If you try to look away from the Doctor while he is working I will have young Slattery over there cut off one of your fingers, maybe this one”, he said tapping her on the index finger of her right hand. “If you continue to look away, he will,” he paused and looked over at Slattery and said, “what would you take next?”

“An ear,” Slattery said without even looking up from his notebook.

“You can see how this goes. It’s in your best interests to enjoy the show,” Tulimak said and then stood beside her so as not to block her view from the horror show about to unfold.

T
he man stood
at the edge of the forest and looked at the house across the perfectly manicured lawn. Two bikes lay in the middle of the grass on their sides. The house was a large structure of wood with big windows that looked out onto the forest. The lawn was divided by a small stream which ran the length of the garden and past the house. On the opposite side of the stream was an identical cabin style house. If the bikes weren’t lying in the grass of the house straight ahead the houses would have looked like near perfect mirror images of each other. Movement at a large top floor window caught his eye. A young boy was gesticulating wildly while an older woman bent and listened to him. She had her hand on his shoulder and looked like she was trying to calm the boy down.

The man heard a noise in the forest and he moved back a few steps and lowered to a crouch. A young boy came running jogging out of the woods behind the opposite house. He stopped as he was half way across his lawn when he spotted the woman and boy standing by the window of his neighbours house. The young boy turned and ran and built up some speed. When he hit the edge of the stream he leapt effortlessly across the gap and ran to the back door of the other house. He opened the door and the man could see him climbing the stairs and heading towards the other people. The two boys hugged and then began pointing back at the wood and talking at a rapid pace. The man could see the woman glance repeatedly in the direction of the tree line. The three of them ran downstairs and the woman picked up a phone and dialled it while talking to the boys.

The watching man turned back into the forest and headed back to his people. Men will come soon he thought to himself as he moved swiftly making very little sound. We have to run and hide until we are stronger. As he walked back he tried to get the scent out of his mind, it had pulled him from his slumber, breaking through the thick veil of hibernation and yanking him awake before he was ready. It was a high spice smell of cinnamon mixed with a hint of pepper, the kind of aroma that tickled your nose when you breathed it in, you couldn't help yourself from going back for another sniff. Images of his childhood flowed by the scent transporting him to a time when his family lived the life of the wanderer. In those days they never seemed to stay in a place for too long, his father with his brusque ways would sometimes facilitate them having to leave under a sky pinpricked with stars. Other times when his eyes burned with tears because he didn't want to leave again his mother would shower kisses on him and tell him that they had to go because of the settled folk. Sometimes the settled people seemed to grow weary of his family in some undefined way and again they would set out, usually at night and move to a new place. The cycle continued all through his life and when it came his turn to build a family he found himself falling back into the old habits that had been scored deep into his being from a young age. Keep moving and trust no one who wasn’t family.

When the man was eight years old his father got into a fight in a bar close to the dock in the town of Hull, England. The man remembered waking up in their one bedroom shack when his father burst into the place and slammed the thin door of reclaimed wood shut behind him. This was two years after his sister had died and the boy had become a sensitive tuning fork to both his parents moods. For those two years they had moved the most and seemed to stay in any one place for no more than a few weeks, while the boys father took any odd jobs available. During this time his father seemed like a lump of hardened clay animated badly to impersonate his father. The boy would become scared when his father had drank too much and he would look at his son with a dark malevolence in his eyes. Maybe I should of been the one to die the boy sometimes wondered as he listened to his father snore from the other end of the bed.

His mother had tried to get his father to sit down when he burst in. He was holding one of his hands balled up in the other and in the only candle light in the shack the boy could see fat drops of blood splashing onto the legs of his fathers rough spun trousers. His mother grabbed a cloth from the shelf where they stored a tin of lard and a tin of flour. “Your bleeding,” his mother said wrapping the cloth around his knuckles.

“The father rubbed the cloth across his knuckles and said ,”Its not mine. I think I broke them.” He looked over at the boy lying on the bed with his eyes half closed and said, “I know your awake, stop pretending boy.”

The boy sat up and looked smaller than usual with the thin cotton sheet draped over his shoulders. “Do we have to move again,” he said in his thin reedy voice.

The father looked at the boy and then the Mother and said in a hushed tone, “They will be coming after us. I think I did some real damage to a couple of fella’s back in that dive of a bar. They came at me first, I promise you that, he said reaching out for the Mothers hand.

She hesitated and then let him envelope her small hands in his massive one. “We better get moving,” she said and the boy recognised the cold hard look in her eyes. She was the real centre of the family and even at a young age the boy knew it. The mother and father began to stuff their few tawdry belongings into an old leather bag they had found in a dump.

Something in the under growth moved up ahead and the man stopped in his tracks, his past memories pushed away as he refocused on the environment around him. He sniffed the air and he could smell the hot blood beating of a small animal nearby, a rabbit or a house cat maybe. He looked in the direction of the sound and then turned away from it, he couldn't get distracted now, he had to get back to his family.

The three people lay in the dirt their bodies stiff and unmoving as the man approached. He needed to be be as far away from their hibernation place when the settled people arrived, in his weakened state he wasn't sure if he would be able to take on more than one grown man. He knelt beside the woman and stroked her cheek. “Melissa we have to go. Danger is fast approaching and we need to get to safety,” he said and repeated her name again. She began to stir almost immediately at the sound of her name and he gently kissed her cheeks. Her eyes fluttered open and she focused on the mans face and smiled. “Nathaniel, are the children safe,” she asked.

“They are safe and still asleep beside you. I am so happy to see you my love,” Nathaniel said and kissed his wife gently on the lips. She smelt of the forest and the rich aroma of damp woodland soil. He smoothed her hair as some colour started to come into her cheeks and she started flexing her fingers, “We are not in immediate danger but the settled people will come soon,” he said rubbing the pale stiff skin of her limbs as the circulation slowly started to come back into them.

“How long have we been gone,” she asked as she propped herself up and leaned into Nathaniel's arms and gazed into his eyes.

“I don’t know yet,” he said.

Melissa sat up further and started to wiggle her feet. She glanced over at the two children still deep in hibernation. “Is the war over?” she asked and Nathaniel could see the naked hope in her expression.

“I don’t know it’s all too soon to know. I didn’t smell any of our kind in the area,” he said as his strong hands started to knead the tight muscles of her neck and shoulders.

“Feels like we have been out for a hundred years,” she said rubbing her thighs and then moving down her legs. “What woke you from hibernation?” she asked.

Nathaniel stopped massaging her shoulder and said, “Do you remember that time in Paris right after the war?”

“Which one?” She asked.

“Two,” he said and continued, “It was right after the ceasefire and we were walking along the Seine hand in hand, a palpable electricity in the air. Everyone was feeling it. Do you remember the scent we caught as we got close to the Notre Dame?”

Melissa spun around and grabbed him by the hand and said, “How could I forget. Did you pick it up again?” and she flicked a dry tongue across her cracked lips.

“Thats what pulled me out of hibernation. The damn scent yanked me out of the dark embrace and when the world returned to me I had already clawed my way out of the earth,” he said.

Melissa ran her fingers through her hair and smoothed it back against her skull and said, “Did you see who it was that woke you?”

“I tracked him back to his house. He lives close by, it was a young boy maybe ten years old,” Nathaniel said.

She lifted his hand to her cheek and stroked it gently and said, “When do we go and get him?”

“Tonight my darling. We put the children back into the earth and we strike tonight. I will not let it escape us again this time. It nearly destroyed us before, never again,” he said and kissed the back of her hands. “Can you walk?” he asked.

She got up slowly and flexed her legs and then twirled, flecks of muck flinging off her rotten and tattered dress. She took a few steps and looked back at her husband and said, “My strength is coming back. We better move the children.”

Nathaniel looked down at his two dirt encrusted kids, a young boy and girl with only a year between them. Their faces looked marble hard and as pale as fresh milk, he scooped the boy up in his arms and his child automatically wrapped his arms around him and lay his cold face against his fathers neck. Even in deep hibernation the children could sense the presence of their mothers and fathers. Melissa picked up the little girl and she also wrapped herself around her mother in a loving embrace.

The two parents set off into the woods. They moved without making a sound as they searched for another resting place. Nathaniel stumbled and went down on one knee and stood back up on shaky legs. His wife looked at him with concern and said, “Can you go on?”

“I must,” he said through gritted teeth. Blood vessels had burst in his eyes and the skin of his lips had started to crack and ooze blood. “I need to hunt and feed as soon as we find a safe place for the children.”

Long term hibernation could ravage a shifters body and they had both heard the tales of people walking up and then dying before they fed. The stories told of a death that was long and painful and once the process started no amount of feeding could save you.

“Spread out,” Nathaniel said.

They moved apart and kept each other in their eye line. The two figures moved with speed through the forest as they looked for a suitable location. After ten minutes of searching Melissa let out a low whistle and Nathaniel headed in her direction. She was standing in front of a large oak tree, part of the earth had collapsed around its roots exposing a large cavity.

“This is perfect,” he said. The space between the roots was big enough for the two children to fit. They lowered each child into the hole and kissed their white cheeks. The two young children lay in the dirt and then drew close to each other and embraced in an iron grip. Nathaniel looked at his wife as she gazed down at the children. Melissa’s right eye was crossed with broken blood vessels making her eye look like it had turned completely red. “We have to hunt,” he said trying to hide any fear from his voice.

They gathered up some fallen branches and covered the hole and then scooped up handfuls of earth and covered as much as possible. Melissa threw a bunch of moss she had collected on top and arranged it over the makeshift closing. They stood back and looked at it. It would have to do, it wouldn’t stand up to intense scrutiny, in the moment they had no choice. They needed to feed.

Nathaniel squeezed his wife's hand. Both her eyes were now bloodshot and her lips had stared to bleed. He imagined he was starting to look a lot worse. The hearing in his left ear had stopped a couple of minutes ago and he could hear a low whistle. The joints of his fingers were starting to stiffen and his whole body was beginning to feel to like it was covered in a layer of ice.

The couple had hunted together countless times and they moved through the forest without any need for verbal communication. Melissa headed away from her husband to flush prey in his direction. They moved with fluid speed though the woods, their senses in overdrive as they perceived the tangled mesh of the forest system and searched for signs of a prey. The hunt had begun and the two shifters could feel the cold hand of death reaching out to them if they did not succeed.