“Stay back! Don’t shoot!”
A woman officer with short blond hair came tearing around the corner, but she pulled up short at the command. Her partner appeared next, a lanky guy who looked too young to be holding a gun.
“Oh, shit,” the guy said, though it was more like a babble.
The woman held him back by putting a hand on his chest, but both of their eyes were on the bear.
“You’re hurt, Carl, and he’s out of control,” the woman said.
“Stay out of it, Tonya,” Carl growled. Lord, he was sounding more like a bear every second.
The woman glared, then slowly took a step forward, drawing her pistol as she moved. “Let me do this for you.”
“Don’t you fucking dare.”
The woman stopped, and she gestured for her partner to stay back. But she didn’t put away her gun. “Stevie,” she said, her voice calm, “go get the tranq gun, will you?”
Her partner blanched. “What?”
“Go, slowly. Now.”
The kid nodded, then backed away. One step. Two. Three. Then, at the edge of the house, he pivoted and ran. Which is when the woman spoke again.
“Okay, Mark. You’ve got about ten seconds until Stevie gets back. Carl’s bleeding, and you’re keeping me from helping him. Your alpha is hurt, and you’re in the way. So you fucking switch back now, or so help me God?—”
The bear moved. No, not so much moved as shimmered. Like a heat wave going through the air, creating a distortion or mirage. Julie was staring right at him when it happened, and she still could not process what she saw. The creature was on all fours when it started…doing whatever it was. One second she saw a huge black grizzly bear. The next, it seemed to shrink in on itself. The nose grew shorter, the hump lost fur. Then she saw skin, rippling with power or pain. She wasn’t sure.
Then she saw legs and arms. The hard points of two shoulder blades before a man collapsed downward upon himself. He dropped and curled onto his side as he went. His head was tucked down, buried into forearms that came up and covered his face. But even so, she recognized him. Even lying dirty and howling on the ground, she knew who it was.
Mark.
She screamed.
CHAPTER 9
Mark transitioned back to a man for the stupidest of reasons. He needed to vomit. He’d learned young to not fight it. There were things that a bear ate that a man just didn’t want in his belly. So within seconds of feeling cold sweat on bare skin, he struggled to his paws—hands—and purged with all the violence that entails.
And when he was done, he crouched in the grass and centered himself to the world around him. He found Julie immediately, hearing her tight whimpers of panic and smelling her terror like a dank miasma.
He’d done that to her. She was terrified of him.
Unable to deal with that, he allowed his senses to wander elsewhere. The birds weren’t chirping, which might have been ominous except that Tonya and Carl were bickering a few feet away like angry children.
“I told you I’m fucking fine.”
“And I told you that you’ve been sliced to hell by God only knows what that thing is, so you’re going to the hospital where they’re going to douse you in rubbing alcohol and antibiotics.”
“Would you just back the hell off?”
“Would you rather I call your fiancée? She’ll put you on bread and water for a week.”
Fiancée? Carl had finally proposed? About damned time.
“Leave Becca out of it. And when did you start fighting dirty?”
“The minute you became alpha and thought that made you invincible.” And then abruptly her tone shifted, becoming more professional as she turned to the newest scent, just coming around the corner. “Thanks for the blanket, Stevie. Go ahead and drop it around Mark’s shoulders.”
“I still don’t understand where he came from,” the young police officer said. “And where the bear went.”
