Page 9 of Bad Blood Bear

He sat in the truck for a minute, leaning his arms on the steering wheel, trying to get ahold of himself. Then he climbed out with a sigh and got ready to unload the lumber out of the back of the truck.

The first person he saw was Jasmin, stalking out the front door of the main cabin. Like most cat shifters, she moved like silk sliding through your fingers. Her long, straight black hair rippled in the breeze.

“Hey, Teddy,” she called out in her raspy voice. The others called him Teddy sometimes because of his bear—their idea of a stupid joke. “Did you pick up the grocery order?”

Shit. He’d forgotten all about it. “Ah, fuck,” he said. “Something came up and drove it right out of my mind. Help me unload this lumber and you can take the truck back.”

She paused on the porch steps and gave an annoyed hiss.

“Oooh, Jungle Kitty’s mad,” came a voice from right above him. It was Xander, the homicidal panther shifter, stretched out on one of the thick limbs of a huge oak tree that overhung the parking area, trimming his nails with a Bowie knife.

Tank was in no mood. “Shut up, asshole,” he snapped.

“Ooh, Teddy’s mad too,” Xander said. “Don’t get your stuffing all balled up, Pooh Bear. Or is that Poo Bear, as in ‘pile of shit’?”

Tank looked up and growled at him, his hands clenched into fists. Xander’s eyes went feral green and he sent the Bowie knife spinning down at Tank. Tank grabbed it out of the air by the handle, flipped it and threw it back so it thunked into the tree trunk, inches from Xander’s head.

With a ripping snarl, Xander busted out of his clothes into panther form and launched himself at Tank.

His bear burst out before he even had time to get his clothes off, and they shredded and dropped to the ground. There went another perfectly good pair of broken-in jeans. Fucking panther.

Tank gave a tree-shattering roar and rose to his hind legs, shrugging the panther right off his back. Xander twisted and hit the ground on all four paws, then launched himself at Tank again. Tank batted him out of the air, drawing blood with his razor-sharp claws.

Xander yowled, but whether it was in pain or in anger, it was hard to tell. Any cat stupid enough to repeatedly take on a grizzly had to be impervious to pain.

Tank felt needle-sharp claws on his flank. Fuck it all, Jasmin had joined in. Her dappled jaguar spots shimmered in the sunlight. He tried to hold himself back, but his bear was pissed off and wanted blood. He slapped at Jasmin, his claws raking down her side, and charged Xander, mouth open in another roar.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, that’s enough!”

The words bellowed through the clearing, shaking the trees almost as much as Tank’s roar. It was Flynn, their sort-of alpha. Normally, his anger coupled with his alpha presence would have frozen them all in their tracks, but too much shit had happened today, and Tank’s bear was out of control.

With another mighty roar, he turned on Flynn, and then he was thundering across the clearing to where the alpha stood on the porch of the cabin. With another curse, Flynn shucked his jeans, and then a giant black-maned lion was hurtling through the air on a collision course with Tank.