My hand lingered for a moment, brushing against her soft black fur as I wondered what I’d say to her when she woke up. My mate.
Our mate. The Iron Claw’s reminder echoed ominously in my ears, along with the weird brotherhood sensation on my arm. But would she pick me or truly be okay with?—
Another metallic groan interrupted my thoughts of the future. I looked up just in time to see Takoda’s bear on the other side of the bars.
Right before he slammed the cell door shut.
The lock reengaged with a final, ominousclunk.
“Wait, you’re just going to leave us here?” I rose to my feet and ran to grip the bars.
But the bear didn’t even bother to growl an answer. He just lumbered out of the station, letting the door close shut behind him.
“What the hell?!” I yelled into the now-empty station. “What the hell just happened?”
“I’ll tell you what happened.”
I turned to find the Iron Claw grinning at me, his white teeth gleaming under the cell’s fluorescent light.
“The guy who supposedly didn’t want to eat that Valentine’s Day box of chocolates that strolled into Bear Mountain just turned the three of us into her motherfucking maul.”
7/
like a frigging celine dion song
12 hours later
takoda
“Rough night, Takoda?”
The low growl pulled me from my tunnel vision just as I was about to pass the row of KEEP OUT signs marking the boundary between Bear Mountain and the Ayaska Village.
I glanced up to see one of the three outsider grizzly brothers who ran the bar while Cody hibernated with his new maul ambling toward me in his grizzly form. One of the identical twins. Nobody in the tribe could tell them apart, so we called them theRekaikhanuk Nakaibehind their backs—“the red outsider twins.” But to their faces, we simply called each of them...
“Twin.”
Stopping in my tracks, I gripped the edge of my makeshift toga and greeted him with a stiff nod. “Something like that.”
The red outsider twin tilted his massive head, golden eyes flicking over my outfit. “Night become more wild after bar fight, hugrrh?”
“Bar fight?” My voice came out sharper than I intended.
“Grrrugh! Your bear gave you true black sleep!” The twin snuffled, the grizzly equivalent of a laugh. “You no remember? New constable and Hawk get into fight. Over human. Looking for your brother’s maul mate.”
No… no, I didn’t. Twin was right. My bear, who’d never turned outside of a full moon, had truly blacked me out.
I’d assumed Hawk would show up in town any moment now. But I hadn’t known he was actually back in Bear Mountain—and apparently getting into fights with Björn, the additional constable I didn’t need and never asked for. Also…
“Human?” I asked the red twin. The word felt foreign, like it didn’t belong to me.
“Yes, human. Her car outside station. I thinking you allow her to stay. Maybe she new mate. You and her smell right together.”
New mate? Smell right together?
Unintentional turns came with a certain amount of amnesia, the shifter equivalent of getting blackout drunk. I knew this because my mother had beared out at first sight over Zion, a Jamaican-Canadian tourist who’d been in town with his then-fiancée.
She’d woken up with him in the cave she shared with my father, her then un-mauled boyfriend, with no idea of whathappened the night before. But she’d said the three of them had “smelled right together,” so that had been the beginning of their unplanned maul.
