Perhaps someone’s dog had been lost in the storm and was now trapped on one of the narrow rocky beaches below her. It might be hurt. Inga searched for a place where she could safely get down to the water below. The fact that she still had a griffin chick on her head, and another one (from the feel of it) trying to eat her hair, did not help.
She found a water-worn ravine and clambered down toward beach level. The barking was intermittent, sounding ragged and tired.
“I’m coming, sweetie!” Inga called. “Just hold on.”
She caught an escaping griffin chick and put it back on top of her pack. The parents weren’t dealing well with these newdevelopments, flapping and screeching around her head as she tried to make her way down the brush-choked ravine.
“You dumbasses wanted this,” Inga snapped up at the pair. “Chill out.”
The shoreline in this area was no beach deserving of the name, but rather a rough and broken field of rocks, with seaweed strewn between. If the tide hadn’t been low, she would never have made it even this far. The sun was low now, blocked by the island, and purple shadows covered the rocks and stretched out to the sea.
Inga could no longer hear barking. Maybe the dog was somewhere else, down in a crevasse or something, or had simply given up. She whistled loudly, and the trash griffins, which had just begun to settle down, set up a new round of shrieking. “Shut up!” Inga told them. She whistled again. “Here, boy! Here!”
Something huge and dark loomed up out of nowhere. Inga yelped, then realized she had gotten exactly what she wanted when an enormous, shaggy black dog tried to jump on her, panting frantically. It was, in fact, a Newfoundland dog, a great heavyset creature with a broad, jowly face. Its thick coat was matted with salt and looked as if it hadn’t seen a brush in ages.
“Hi, sweetheart, how are you?” Inga asked, rubbing around its face while the griffins screamed in her ear and the parents made abortive attempts to dive-bomb the dog, pulling away at the last moment.
The dog wore no collar, but she could see by its behavior that it was well trained. After a single joyous bound in which it attempted to jump on her, it stopped doing that and didn’t even try to lick her face, though it panted heavily. It let her pet it for a few moments, then turned and bounded away, stopping now and then and looking back. The “follow me” Lassie behavior could not have been more clear. She hadn’t even realized dogs did that in real life. Then again, she was carrying around a bunchof griffin nestlings while their parents followed her, so who was she to make judgments on animal behavior?
“I’m coming, fella. Is someone else here? Is your owner hurt? See, I’m right behind you.”
Inga slipped and slid over the wet rocks. The dog stayed just ahead of her, stopping to wait when she got one of her feet stuck between two rocks. She saw where it was going at last, when it stopped beside a great white-furred bulk lying on the rocks.
“Uh ...” Inga stopped, too. She was expecting a stranded fisherman, maybe a wrecked boat. She was not prepared for a dead polar bear.
Or—was it dead? The bear was lying flopped on its side. Its head was away from her, and she couldn’t tell if its sides were rising and falling. A few seagulls wheeled around it. Others perched on boulders to inspect it, but none were actually trying to scavenge it. The trash griffins flew ahead for a similar inspection and seemed to come to an equally unsure conclusion. They perched to watch as well.
So it was a bear, unconscious or hurt. And the dog seemed more interested in bringing her to the bear than being rescued or fed. Even now, it was nuzzling the bear’s face, clearly having no fear whatsoever.
Coming as she did from a family of bear shifters, Inga decided the most obvious conclusion was probably the right one. She hadn’t heard anything about other polar bear shifters on the island, where the relatively small population meant that most shifter families were at least vaguely aware of each other. But that had to be what this was. Either that, or a polar bear and a dog had become buddies in a way that normally only happened in kids’ movies.
One thing this situation did not need was a bunch of screaming baby griffins, so Inga shouldered off her pack and set it on the rocks. The parent griffins immediately descended ontheir offspring and began making very cute chirping and cooing sounds. Inga left them like that and approached the bear.
Having grown up around bear shifters, she knew polar bears well. This one was a male, large even by generous polar bear standards. Inga was familiar with the heavy ropes of yellow-white fur, the black lips parted slightly to reveal a predator’s heavy fangs.
She had no way to tell by looking if the bear was a shifter or not. If he wasn’t, she reasoned, she could shift herself, and this bear was clearly hurt or exhausted or both. Inga wasn’t sure if she could take him in a fight, but she was pretty sure she could outrun or outswim him, wait until he left, and then come back to get her stuff.
With that in mind, she prodded at the bear’s face. The dog danced back a few steps, not in fear so much as to give her room, looking up at her with a canine’s instinctive confidence that a human could fix anything.
Inga was much less confident, but she gave the bear’s face another shove, which it completely failed to notice, then tugged on its ear. “Hey,” she said. “Hey, uh, buddy. I don’t know if you can hear me, but if you can turn human, it’d help a lot. The cavalry’s here, well, sort of, and I have a first-aid kit and food in my backpack. But in case you haven’t noticed, I can’t carry a bear. I’m not really set up to feed one, either.”
The bear grunted, stirred a little, and its eyes cracked open.
Like most mammals, bears’ eyes—including shifter bears—were generally brown or slightly golden. These, however, were a startling, bright blue, the color of a husky dog’s, but threaded with vivid green. Inga had never seen anything like it in her life.
An instant later, the bear collapsed into a man, and Inga was staring into the same pair of eyes, but now a darker blue and fringed with dark human lashes.
The eyes widened a little, then immediately screwed shut, and he groaned.
Inga’s view was suddenly eclipsed by a mass of black dog fur as the Newfoundland dog stuck its nose in the strangers face. Inga grabbed two fistfuls of salt-matted ruff and shoved the dog back. “You can see your human in just a minute, fella. Let me take a look first.”
The man had his hand over his eyes. He was well built but lean to the point of being scrawny, as if he hadn’t been eating enough lately, and his body was laced with scars and abrasions, old and new. Dark hair, overly long with the ragged look that suggested it had grown out of a short cut, flopped over the hand covering his face. His knuckles were scraped. But none of it looked too bad; most of the recent damage was probably from having been flung up on the shore by the force of the storm, or whatever had happened to him.
Another thing Inga had plenty of practice at was dealing with unexpected naked men; it happened in her living room all the time. Not usually ones she wasn’t related to, however. She put a hesitant hand on his chilled fingers. “Hey, how are you? Can you understand me?” For all she knew, he’d washed up from the other side of the ocean and didn’t speak English.
The man shuddered and coughed a little. In a hoarse, rasping voice that sounded vaguely American, he asked, “Do you have water?”
“Yes, of course.”
