Page 12 of Handcuffed to the Bear (Shifter Agents #1)

CHAPTER 12

Once Casey had warmed up enough that she was no longer helplessly shaking, she sat up on her lynx haunches.

She wished she could tell how badly Jack was hurt. She smelled blood all over him, but couldn’t see anything through his heavy, shaggy fur.

Restlessly, she paced to the mouth of the cave. Rain was still coming down outside, though not as hard as it had been. She could see a long way down the mountainside. Runnels of water coursed between the stones, tiny streams born as quickly as they would die when the rain stopped.

There was no sign of the lions ... yet. She was afraid to turn her back on the mouth of the cave. She couldn’t shake the fear that as soon as she did, they’d spring on her from behind. Even sniffing the air and smelling no sign of them was not enough to calm her nervousness. Heavy rain could kill scents, beat them right out of the air. And after the rain passed, the wet ground would hold their smell for days; they couldn’t go anywhere without being found.

Her face burned. She pawed at it again, even knowing it wouldn’t help. The yellowjackets had stung her on her ear and cheek and, most unpleasantly, the inside of her mouth.

At least now I know I’m not allergic.

She put her head out in the rain for a minute, closing her eyes. The cold water helped soothe the sharp pain in her face. When the comfort started to be overwhelmed by the unpleasantness of the cold, she pulled her head back in and shook the water off.

It was wonderful to be able to turn into a lynx again. She’d never spent much time in her lynx form, but it had still felt like having half her soul locked away. Now she could keep warm; she could run; she could find food.

If it weren’t for the homicidal maniacs hunting me, I could live very well out here ...

She turned to look at Jack. In the gloom under the cave’s overhang, he was nothing but a shaggy mound of fur like a pile of old carpets, lifting and settling slowly as he breathed.

It was probably best to let him sleep. He’d heal better that way.

She began to prowl around the cave, exploring. The handcuff on her wrist was a bother, dragging along on the ground. After biting at it uselessly, she shifted back to her human form and refastened the second cuff above the first one on her wrist. It still jingled a bit, but at least now it wasn’t constantly snagging on things.

She eased back into her lynx skin, and the shivering discomfort of her wet, naked human body was replaced by the comfort of a furry predator who was in her element here. The enticing scents of small rodents tickled her senses. There were a lot of them, small living creatures who had lived their entire lives here, even leaving their bones behind when they died.

She flushed a tiny vole and ate it in two snaps of her teeth before she really had time to think about it. She was probably going to feel weird about that when she shifted back, but as a lynx she had no problems with it. The world is full of food; what of it?

She began to hunt more carefully, but the rodents were wise to the predator in their midst now, and had retreated to their burrows. Eventually she managed to successfully stalk a ground squirrel, and this she took to Jack, laying it beside his nose where he would find it when he woke up.

Besides rodent colonies, the other thing the cave had a lot of was moss. Casey dug a bunch of it up with her claws and then shifted to human form, carrying it armload by armload to drop beside Jack. When he woke up, it would give him something to lie on.

Ugh. My mouth tastes like vole.

But the work kept her warm, even in her bare human skin. She knew she should probably lie down and rest, but the way everything ached, she was afraid if she did, she wouldn’t be able to get up again.

When we get out of here, I’m going to sleep for a week. No, a month.

When ...

She stopped and tipped her head to the side. At some point it had stopped being “if” and started being “when.” She was starting to believe Jack’s assurances that they might get out of this.

Don’t get ahead of yourself, Casey.

But her confidence was higher than it had been since she’d woke up last night with Jack handcuffed to her wrist. Maybe, she thought, it was just the contrast between the desperation of the past few hours and the comparative safety of their current location. Not that they were anything like safe , not yet, but it was the first time they hadn’t been outside and running. Now they could stop, take stock, and rest a bit. And she was able to shift again, and had something in her stomach for a change. Even if it was a vole; ugh ...

She shifted to make sure the vole stayed down. Jack seemed to be sleeping comfortably, so she went to explore further.

Their cave was part of a much larger cave complex, a series of connected caves running the length of the rocky overhang they were sheltering beneath. Sometimes she had to scramble over places where the ceiling had slumped, or duck out into the rain and then back into the dry. Her level of anxiety and alertness ramped up the farther she got from Jack, and when she couldn’t take it anymore, she turned and trotted back the other way, sniffing the air as she went.

Something was starting to bother her. It had to do with the rodent bones. Sure, it made sense there would be some bones from small dead creatures up here. They couldn’t live very long, and some of them would probably die in the cave.

But ... there were a lot of bones. Her paws kept whispering over them. Sometimes they broke underfoot with little dry crunches. And not all of them were rodent-tiny. Some were actually kind of large. Like this one ...

She shifted back and knelt to pick up the bones, one at a time. She didn’t really know bones very well, but it had been some kind of medium-sized creature, she thought. And the skull was definitely not from a vole or a squirrel. She turned it over in her hands, looking at the large eye sockets, the blunt fangs?—

When she realized what she was looking at, she dropped it, and screamed.

She was pressed against the wall, shaking, as far away from the bones as she could get, when a vast dark bulk loomed in the mouth of the cave. Casey screamed again, then subsided into gasping when the great dark looming thing melted into humanform Jack.

“Casey. Hey.” He limped to her side, stumbling and half-falling at the end. “Hey, hey. What’s wrong? What happened? Did the lions come back?”

Casey shook her head vigorously. She wiped her hair out of her eyes, swallowed, got a grip on herself. It was stupid. They were just bones. They couldn’t hurt her—and, just as importantly, they were long past suffering now. “I found ...” She swallowed. Pointed. “I found those.”

Jack went to look. He figured it out a lot faster than she had. “Oh,” he said softly, cradling the skull in his hands. “This is ... was a bobcat, I think.”

“Not a normal bobcat.”

“No,” Jack said quietly. He set the skull gently and reverently back on the ground.

“Wendy was an ocelot.”

They both looked around. The caves weren’t a complete charnel ground; the bones were scattered, a few here, a few there. An odd one caught Casey’s eye, weirdly twisted like bleached deadwood. Then she realized she was looking at someone who’d died in the act of shifting. Shifters always stayed dead in the shape they’d worn when they’d died, but she had never seen that before.

She shuddered and looked away.

“Someone should collect them. Figure out who they are. Return them to their families.”

“Someone will,” Jack said. “But not us. Not now.”

He was leaning against the wall of the cave now, sitting with his head tipped back against the stone. He looked pale and unwell.

“No,” Casey agreed. “Not now.”

After a little while, she slid her arm under his shoulders and helped him up.