So Much To Bear (A Werebear Erotic Romance) (5 page)

The man gestured for her to stand back,
and Jennifer watched, feeling almost hypnotized. The man approached
the loudly buzzing tree—the obvious site of a hive of bees. He held
the smoking brand in front of him, and the buzzing began to die
down gradually as more and more smoke poured out of the bundle.
Jennifer held her breath as she watched him plunge the smoking
brand into a hole in the tree, blowing lightly on the end to send
plumes of smoke through the deadwood. The bees subdued, he reached
into another hole in the tree and extracted a thick, heavy comb of
honey, a few bees still clinging to it, dazed by the smoke. The
thick nectar dripped from his fingers and the man hurriedly slipped
the comb into another of the pouches he had carried with him,
blowing more smoke into the hole before raiding the hive once more.
He plumed a final dusting of smoke through the area as he
retreated, rejoining Jennifer. He smiled slightly, holding up his
honey-coated fingers. “Taste,” he said. Hesitantly, Jennifer took
his hand in hers and brought one of his fingers to her lips. The
honey was unlike anything she had ever tasted—rich, slightly
bitter, complex and floral. Her eyes widened in appreciation and
she forced herself to suppress the urge to take all of his fingers
into her mouth and lick them clean of the sweet, delicious
nectar.

“So now you know: bears really do like
honey,” the man said quietly. Jennifer let his finger fall from her
lips as she choked on the surprise she felt that he had
actually—wonder of wonders—made a joke. Before she could make any
comment, however, he turned away from her, walking away from the
grove and back the way they had come. She had no choice but to
follow him, smiling slightly to herself; it wasn’t much, but the
fact that he had made a joke had to mean that he was becoming at
least a little more comfortable with her.

Jennifer took up the parcels of their
food, brushing aside the mysterious man’s insistence that he was
fine and could carry them back to his cave without assistance. “You
know,” she said, licking her lips and still able to taste the honey
from the man’s fingers, “It would be a lot easier if you would at
least tell me your name.” The man raised an eyebrow at her, his
lips twisting in something like a grin.

“Easier how?” Jennifer
shrugged.

“I could thank you properly, for one.
‘Thank you, guy who rescued me,’ doesn’t really roll off the tongue
that easily.” The man chuckled, shaking his head.

“You seem to manage it well enough.”
Jennifer stopped, holding onto the basket and pouches tightly and
crossing her arms to pin the man down with a glance.

“Come on. I’ve helped you all day—yes,
I know, I didn’t have to, you’re perfectly fine on your own in
spite of two knife wounds, and you’re a very manly man, I get it.
I’ve helped you all day, and I think that at least merits your
name.” The man looked as though he was going to demur once more,
and Jennifer set her jaw, preparing for a long argument. She
wouldn’t move—and she couldn’t be sure that she could fend the man
off, but she thought he was still a little weak. He sighed finally,
looking away for a moment before meeting her gaze.

“My name is Damon,” he said, his golden
eyes peering into hers. “What’s yours? I should probably know the
name of the woman I ‘rescued.’” Jennifer smiled.

“It’s Jennifer. Thank you.”

“What were you doing in the woods last
night?” he asked, as they both resumed their trek back up to his
cave. Jennifer shrugged.

“There was a group of us; we were
planning on going through the woods to get to the next town over
and got lost. The rest of the group went to retrace our steps and I
got left alone with Liam… and you know pretty much what happened
after that.” The man nodded.

“What made you come after me?” he
asked, as they finally came to the cliff that contained his cave.
Jennifer shrugged, slinging the basket up to her shoulder and
starting the climb.

“Well, it’s not every day that you see
a guy transform into a bear, first of all,” she said, glancing over
her shoulder at the man to make sure she hadn’t offended him.
“Secondly, I thought—and forgive me for this—that you might have
gone after Liam, and while he’s definitely not a pleasant guy, I
didn’t want to have to deal with him being dead.” She heard Damon
snort behind her. “And then, of course, I was just curious—and I
saw the blood trail you left behind. That’s how I found you. So I
got worried you might have been seriously hurt.” She stopped at the
landing, turning around to find Damon surprisingly right behind
her.

“You were going to enter a bear’s den
without knowing if he was seriously injured? You must be brave or
stupid.” Jennifer grinned.

“You’re not the first one to have that
opinion of me.” She shrugged. “By the way, if you had been
seriously injured—should I have taken you to a regular doctor or a
vet?” Damon laughed out loud, clutching the part of his chest where
the wound was and reeling against her.

“I would prefer you not take me to
either—it wouldn’t be necessary.”

Damon began to unload the food they had
gathered, murmuring approval of the greens and wild onions she had
found and giving her a smile for the berries. He cringed a little
as he stood, but Jennifer didn’t offer to help as he moved to the
small stove, taking a deep pot from a shelf and beginning to load
it with pieces of rabbit. He poured in water, and Jennifer
continued to watch, intrigued, as he opened another basket off to
the side of the stove and pulled out something that looked like
sweet potatoes and carrots. He chopped them up and added them to
the pot before moving to the hearth.

“So, now that we can at least agree
that you did rescue me,” Jennifer said, standing and moving to help
him at the stove. “Can’t you tell me anything about yourself?”
Damon shrugged.

“There really isn’t that much to tell.
I live here by myself, I do for myself… I was wandering in the
woods last night when I heard you and—Liam, you said—and went to
investigate.” He shrugged again, wincing at the pull against the
wound in his arm.

It seemed like a rather lonely
existence, at least to Jennifer; she wanted to know just how it
came to be that a man like Damon—even if he was some kind of
supernatural creature—was living on his own completely. Surely he’d
had parents of some sort. “How… how exactly did you come to be…”
Jennifer pressed her lips together, wondering how to phrase exactly
what she was thinking. “Why are you able to turn into a bear?” The
words flew from her lips before she could moderate them in any way,
and she was relieved when Damon chuckled.

“I am a werebear,” he said, standing
back from the stove. He sat down heavily in the chair she had found
him in the night before. “All of my people have the ability to
transform into bears—by will and during the full moon especially.”
Jennifer nodded.

“You do have people, then,” she said,
the statement almost a question. Damon’s eyes flickered with
pain.

“I did. No more. I’m the last of us.”
He sighed, looking up at the ceiling of the cave. “I don’t—I’m not
comfortable talking about it right now. Tell me about your
life.”

While the stew cooked, Jennifer began
to describe her life, telling Damon about growing up in the small
town, about her friends, about going away to college. “I was kind
of scared, actually—I didn’t know if I’d be able to make friends,”
she laughed. “I mean, it seemed like all the friends I’d ever had
just sort of… happened, you know? I’d grown up with them. I
couldn’t imagine not knowing them.” She shrugged. “But it got
easier.” She told him about studying anthropology, about her
ambitions to travel to far-off places and learn about unknown
cultures, to try and shed light on the many different human
experiences that existed.

Damon was fascinated, asking for more
details about the school she had gone to; about the mundane things
that Jennifer had never had any reason to think about before. She
learned that Damon had never gone to a formal school himself; he
had been, as he called it, “creatively homeschooled,” taught by his
parents and his community. His education had been as much about
living in the woods as it had been about reading and writing and
arithmetic, and while he’d had a radio for a while—some connection
with the greater world—he had eventually run out of batteries and
feared to go into town to buy more; not that he had money to buy
anything with.

It was clear to Jennifer as they
talked, waiting for the stew to cook through, that Damon had been
unused to company for a long time—even the company of his own
people. He seemed to have a hunger for any details she could give
him of human society. “You almost seem like an anthropologist
yourself,” she joked. “Looking into the culture of another social
group, interested by rituals and languages.” Damon
shrugged.

“I just…” he sighed. “I often think it
would be nice to rejoin human society—or actually, to join it in
the first place. I’ve never really been around any but my own kind,
at least not for longer than it took to trade for things we didn’t
have and couldn’t make.” Damon shrugged. “But it’s just not
possible. I’m the last of my kind, and we don’t really interact
with humans. It’s dangerous for us.” Jennifer frowned.

“How is it dangerous? I mean, you can
control when you change, can’t you?” Damon bit his bottom
lip.

“The tribe I belonged to… by the time I
was born, we were already starting to dwindle. By and large, people
don’t like bears. We’re… threatening, which can be good in the
wild, but it makes humans afraid, and when humans are afraid they
tend to want to destroy the thing that makes them scared.” Damon
paused, reaching over and poking at the fire in the hearth while he
thought about his next words.

“Almost everyone I knew was killed by
hunters. They’d… they’d comb the forest looking for us. Eventually,
the only people left were my parents and one or two of the elders,
and well…” Damon shrugged. “They died naturally, but I was the only
one left of the entire tribe.”

Jennifer could hear the
lonely pain in Damon’s words as he spoke. She couldn’t imagine what
it would be like to watch the people you cared about be hunted one
by one or even in large numbers all at once. It seemed to her that
her father had told her faerie stories about a group of “bear-skin
humans” as the legend went—people who could transform into bears,
who used their ability to get away from regular humans. The story
had, of course, been from the human perspective—and had included
some unsavory bits about some of the bears taking human lovers
against their will to try and keep up their lineages. But she had
always thought it was just a tale, the kind of thing that parents
told their kids to keep them alert in the woods or to fire their
imaginations. She had never even suspected that it could possibly
be a real thing.

Chapter Four

An hour later the stew was finished and
the two inadvertent companions ate in near-silence, Jennifer
mulling over what Damon had told her. She could only barely imagine
what it might have been like to grow up as a werebear—a close-knit
community of supernatural beings, living off of the land, moving
around when humans came too close. It reminded her of stories of
other tribes that lived in more distant places, eschewing
technology even when they were exposed to it in order to preserve
their way of life. She asked him more questions, wanting to know
how the society he belonged to had worked, her mind operating as an
anthropologist as much as it did as an acquaintance; she was
curious, she was fascinated, as he explained the different
functions of werebear society, how the elders made decisions but
spoke to the entire tribe before rendering verdicts, how justice
was meted out, how food was gathered and shared.

It seemed almost idyllic, and Jennifer
thought that to Damon it must seem that way; he had lost that
society and everything good and bad that had gone with it, so of
course he focused more on the good things. “It wasn’t all glorious
back-to-nature revelry,” he said cautiously, peering at her from
underneath his shaggy hair. “I mean, there was in-fighting, people
disagreeing about what we should do about the humans, things like
that. But they were the only people who really knew what it was
like to be one of us. I miss it, even with the fighting and the
other stuff.”

“I wish there was a way that I could
get all this down,” Jennifer said, pushing her plate from her. The
stew had been surprisingly good, and the warmth of it seemed to
creep through her extremities. “It’s always a shame when a culture
of any kind is eradicated. Your people were… well, they were
people. They had experiences and history that shouldn’t be
forgotten.” Damon smiled crookedly.

“I’ve been thinking that it would be
good if I could find a way to at least continue my lineage,” he
said, looking down at the table and running his finger along the
edge of his plate. “I know there have to be other werebears in the
world, but I haven’t been able to make myself find them. I’m kind
of afraid that I might discover their ways are totally different
from mine. But at least if I could continue my own lineage, some
part of that culture… it would stay alive. At least for a while
longer.” Jennifer nodded. It was an aim that she could definitely
agree with.