Page 13 of Handcuffed to the Bear (Shifter Agents #1)

CHAPTER 13

Jack had awakened to find Casey gone. His first reaction was an instinctive panic that startled him even more than her absence. He pushed himself up, sniffing the air frantically. After a moment he caught her lynx scent, and heard small rustles not far away. She was exploring the cave. There was no hint of lion smell on the air, so he lay back down again, knowing he should get up and join her, but unable to make himself move.

He felt awful. It wasn’t just the pain of the places where the lions had savaged him, but also the overall drain of his body struggling to repair it. He ached as if with arthritis; he felt both feverish and freezing at the same time. It was like being down with a nasty case of flu.

Well, you knew you’d pay later for pushing yourself so hard.

His nose bumped the limp body of a dead ground squirrel. Casey’s scent was on it. He swallowed it in a quick bite. It wasn’t much, but it gave his body a little to work with, at least.

He was desperately thirsty, but didn’t want to move.

Casey’s scream, it turned out, was the one thing that could galvanize him into action. He lurched out into the rain, stumbling on shaky legs, knowing only that he had to find her. Help her.

... which, as it turned out, was unnecessary. There was nothing to save her from, only the bones of the dead, and the tragic story they told.

Reluctantly he let her help him back to the other cave, which was, mercifully, free of the bones of the lions’ victims, at least in their immediate vicinity. He paused to drink from a puddle of rainwater, cupping it in his hands, and then Casey eased him down onto a soft bed of moss. He was shivering with cold, but couldn’t summon the energy to shift back into a bear.

Casey busied herself gathering more moss and piling it on him.

“This isn’t necessary,” Jack said, although his voice cracked in the middle, betraying him.

“It’s not going to improve my survival chances if I let you die.”

She needed something useful to do to keep her mind off what she’d just found. Jack lay back and let her do it. A memory came to him from nowhere: his mother, after his father’s death, frantically cleaning the kitchen, over and over, then the bathrooms, the entire house, until everything gleamed and not a single toy or dishcloth was out of place. But still she scrubbed it. Scrubbed everything. He hadn’t thought of that in years.

There was a similar controlled desperation in Casey’s rapid back-and-forth progress, from the bed of moss to the far reaches of the cave. He watched her do it until he couldn’t take it anymore; he could see, when she came back to drop off her burden, how much she was shivering, how blue her fingertips had become.

“Come in here with me.”

She didn’t resist. There was enough moss for both of them. It was dry enough to burn, Jack thought, but even if he’d been able to get a fire going—he could probably strike a spark off the handcuffs—he didn’t dare give them away to their pursuers with the smoke.

Instead, he piled moss over Casey as she’d been doing for him. Her bare hip rested against his, her skin cold to the touch. If she’d wanted to pull away, he would have let her, but instead she pressed closer to him. He put an arm over her, carefully, trying not to snag his healing skin, and held her until the shivering began to subside.

It was oddly peaceful in the cave, but maybe that was just his exhaustion. Outside, it was still raining. The thunder and lightning had subsided, though, and the rain’s patter was softer now. Water ran off the top of the cave, dripping and splashing outside its mouth, an entire orchestral movement of drips and drops.

With the storm slackening, the lions would be on the move. They were going to have to move soon, too. But not now. Not yet.

“You did good down there,” Jack told Casey quietly. “You saved my life.”

She made a soft sound, maybe a laugh. “I’d say we’re even, but I’ve lost track of how many times you’ve saved mine.”

“Did you get stung?”

“A little,” she said. “I’m okay.”

Jack turned his head to the side and brought up a hand, with bits of moss clinging to it, to brush along the side of her face. A scattering of welts marred the smooth beauty of her skin.

“There might be stingers left in. Feel better if we get them out.”

“I’m willing to wait until we get back to the land of tweezers and antibiotics.”

Instead of taking his hand away, he smoothed back her dark, damp hair.

Casey didn’t pull away; instead she turned into the touch of his hand. “So, we finally get the cuffs off, and here we are, joined at the hip again.”

“Guess habits are hard to break.”

“I guess so.”

Nestled beneath the moss, with her body heat added to his, he was finally starting to feel a little better. Still achy, shocky, sick. But not quite like he was courting a lethal case of hypothermia.

And now his lightheadedness had a very different cause. Like a blind man, he traced the contours of her heart-shaped face with his fingertips: the wide jaw tapering to a small, pointed chin; the full, parted lips moving slightly as his fingertips brushed them. Her eyes were open, the glittering gold of the lynx lurking somewhere in their depths.

“You don’t want this,” he said quietly, “all you gotta do is say so,” and he moved that tiny distance separating them, and kissed her lightly, gently.

She opened her mouth for him, and what he’d meant to be a sweet, short kiss, testing the waters so to speak, turned into something deeper and hotter. Her tongue flicked into his mouth, and the pain of his injuries faded into the background of his mind, lost in the heat of her mouth and the need to be closer to her.

—only to be brought rudely back to earth by a flare of pain in his ribs and all down his arm as he rolled toward her. He flinched, breaking the kiss. Casey pulled away, her eyes wide. “What’s wrong?”

“Moved wrong. Sorry.” He could tell by the faint, warm trickle of blood down his side that he’d torn open the fragile skin starting to grow together over the wounds from Mara’s claws.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t?—”

Jack touched her lips. “No. Don’t. Just got over-eager, that’s all.”

Casey smiled against his finger, and kissed its tip. “This is ... I can’t figure out if this is completely unexpected, or terribly predictable.”

“Maybe a little of both.”

He kissed her again. She was exquisitely careful this time, but there was still enough heat in it to leave him feeling like he was floating.

“I haven’t even asked if you’re seeing anyone,” she said breathlessly, after their lips parted. “I assume you would have said something.”

“Nope. You?”

“No. No one at all.”

She bit his lip gently; he kissed back, licked and nibbled. They explored each other’s mouths, learning each other’s bodies, a little at a time.

“Jack ...” she said softly when they parted again to lie, their faces inches apart, gazing into each other’s eyes. “Do you think there’s a future for us, when we get out of this? Is this really ... a thing? Or just desperation and loneliness.”

“I don’t know,” he admitted.

Casey smiled faintly. “I wondered if you found me terribly unattractive, since you hardly seemed to look at me at all.”

“No, God, anything but that. I was just trying not to creep on you. And I’m used to being around naked people.” Her eyebrows shot up. “Shifters, I mean,” he clarified.

“I hardly know any,” Casey said. “Besides my family, Wendy was the first I met.” A shadow clouded her clear gold-flecked eyes, but it faded before tears could gather—pushing the hurt back, he could see, into the tight ball of pain she’d grown used to carrying with her.

“What was she like?” Jack asked.

“She was great.” Casey’s face relaxed into a smile. “Really cheerful and funny, even though she was kind of shy. I think I told you earlier that we were both orphans. At least I had somewhere to go. I lived with my grandma after Mom died. Wendy came up through the foster care system. But somehow she never let it get her down. She still had so much warmth and light and joy inside her. She didn’t make friends easily, but once you did get to know her, she was the best, most loyal friend you could possibly have.”

And a perfect target for the Fallons: someone with no close family, and only a few close friends. Although the Fallons could never have anticipated the lengths Casey would go through to find out what happened to her friend.

“It’s funny,” Casey went on. “I haven’t talked about her since ... all of that happened. I’ve even kind of stopped thinking about her. Is that awful? I didn’t want the Fallons to catch on, so I didn’t dare mention her at work, and I don’t really know anyone else who knew her. It’s like she stopped existing, almost. I did it for her, but now I feel like Wendy would rather have been remembered for how she was, instead of me rearranging my life around some kind of ... of revenge quest.”

“But you didn’t know for certain what had happened,” Jack reminded her.

“No, but I guessed. I knew deep down that I wouldn’t find her alive and well. She’s probably here, Jack, in these caves, or if not, then on this island somewhere. I finally know for sure that she’s dead, and I feel like I should be all broken up about it, but I think I did my crying for Wendy years ago. It’s just a weird kind of relief to know what really happened to her. Is that weird?”

“Not at all,” Jack said gently. He stroked her hair, smoothed it back from her face. “It makes a lot of sense to me.”

“I wish I could have known her for longer. She deserved so much more than she got.”

“We’ll make them pay,” Jack promised. Or, if not us, then Avery and the rest will. But this was definitely not a kind of honesty he was prepared to dump on her.

“I know. It’s ironic, in a way, because Wendy was my gateway to the rest of the shifter world. I always knew from Mom and Grandma that there were more of us out there, but it wasn’t ‘til I discovered the Fallons through Wendy, and their whole company full of shifters, that I knew just how many of us there were.” She sighed. “The only problem is, I couldn’t ever really get to know anybody there, and I’m sure not going back after this .”

“Well, when Avery and the rest come for us, you’ll get to meet a whole bunch more shifters. Decent ones.”

She kissed him lightly, first on the lips and then on the nose, gentle nibbling kisses that sent warm rushes of heat through him. “You really trust them to come for you.”

“Yeah.” The depth of it surprised him. Maybe it took almost dying to figure out what you really had—and therefore stood to lose. “I do.”

“I don’t know what it would be like, to have people in your life you trust that much.”

“Neither did I for a long time,” Jack admitted. “Bear shifters are loners by nature. I don’t think I ever realized what I was missing until I met Avery.”

The corners of her mouth twitched. “I could almost be jealous, the way you talk about him.”

“It’s complicated,” Jack admitted. “Actually, I probably should tell you about Avery, because if we do end up ... doing something, if this leads to something ...” He raised his head and looked toward the mouth of the cave. The rain still fell, heavy and gray. “But maybe now isn’t the time.”

“I don’t think we should go anywhere yet.” She traced light patterns on his neck, played a little with the dark curl of hair at the top of his collarbone. “I know they’re out there, Jack. But if we go out, we’ll just get soaked again and wear ourselves out. Let’s wait for the rain to let up a bit.”

“Probably best.” He could get up. If he had to. But the longer he rested, the more prepared he’d be when he had to fight again.

“I was just kidding about being jealous. I wouldn’t, you know.”

“I know you were kidding.” He smiled faintly. “But in all seriousness, Avery is something I’d need to discuss with you if we decided to, you know. Have a relationship. To warn you, at least.”

“Now you’re making me nervous.”

“It’s not that bad. It’s just ... well, first of all, Avery’s the reason I’m no longer a merc. He didn’t mean to get me out, but he did by accident. You want to hear the story?”

She cast a glance at the mouth of the cave. “Maybe we should get where we can keep a lookout. Just in case.”

“Good point.”

They shuffled around in the moss a bit, until their moss nest was more of a large heap at the back of the cave, and both of them were propped up so they could see anything coming before it got there.

“Lookout kept,” Casey said. She took his hand under their moss blanket, lacing their fingers together as they’d done when they were still cuffed together. The cool metal of the cuff brushed against his wrist. “Okay. Tell me about Avery.”

Jack rested his head on her shoulder, eyes forward toward the front of the cave. It was easier to tell the story without looking at her, he found. He hadn’t told very many people.

“Okay, first of all, this about a decade ago. At the time, I was with a branch of my company in Afghanistan, doing guard duty mostly. Like I said earlier, the U.S. military relies on guys like me—like I was then, I mean—to do a whole lot of different stuff so they can concentrate their manpower elsewhere. Less so than it used to be, because they’re tightening the regs in a lot of places, and the Afghanistan government’s kicked a lot of ‘em out completely. But this was back when it was more of a Wild West kind of mentality. They had us doing basically everything from base security to guarding convoys to going into combat zones. Whatever needed doing.

“I wasn’t kidding when I said it was a whole lot of boring punctuated with occasional moments of excitement. Being a security guard is pretty similar anywhere, whether you’re guarding a mall in Des Moines or a warehouse in the desert. Bear shifters tend to do well at that kind of thing, though. We’re big and tough and don’t get bored easily. Send us out to the middle of nowhere with just a few other guys, and that’s where we’re happiest.

“So this time, me and a few other guys were pulling guard duty on this fuel convoy. And the worst-case scenario happened. We got hit. RPG blew up the front truck, and then it was just a mess, bullets going everywhere, black smoke from the trucks that had been hit, all of us scared to death that the rest of the trucks were gonna go up and blow us all to kingdom come. There was nowhere to go. My boss called the nearest U.S. Army base to send some help to pull us out. That’s what we did if we got in trouble: call the Army to pull our asses out of it.”

He hesitated. All these years later and suddenly he found it hard to breathe, as if the cloying taint of oil smoke and burning flesh had seared itself so deep in his lungs that the scar tissue would always remain.

“And they did. Two Black Hawk helicopters and a handful of guys. Young guys, all on their first deployment. Even their C.O. was younger than me. Hardly a one of ‘em could’ve walked into a bar back in the States.

“It was an absolute mess. I can’t really describe it except to say it was like being in Hell. Smoke everywhere, so you couldn’t see or breathe. People shooting at you, people screaming, shit blowing up. Insurgents took out one of the helos, the Black Hawks, didn’t shoot it down but knocked out the rotors while it was on the ground so it couldn’t take off. The whole thing was a God damned shitshow. I tell myself, now, that there wasn’t much anyone could’ve done once it started falling apart. The only thing we could’ve done, really, was not be there in the first place. But even that wouldn’t really have settled it, because that convoy was going through. If it wasn’t us, it would’ve been somebody else.

“I was doing my best to coordinate evac on the ground, rounding up stragglers that’d taken shelter behind some of the trucks, because it wasn’t my first rodeo and I was keeping my head better than a lot of people were. Two of those Army kids got blown to hell right in front of me. One of them died instantly—” Ripped in half, he almost said, before catching himself. He’d gotten so caught up in the moment that he’d forgotten he was talking to a civilian, a young woman who knew nothing more of war than what she saw on TV.

Except, Casey had been fighting her own private war for the last two years. He had to remember that.

And she was watching him with those big eyes, listening with rapt interest. He hadn’t even noticed, until now, that she was holding his hand again, swiping her thumb gently back and forth across his knuckles.

“The other kid was knocked down, ripped up, took so much shrapnel he should’ve died right then. And he was yelling at me to get out of there. We were both pinned down and there was nowhere to go. I just tried to stop the bleeding with my shirt and my hands because I didn’t have anything else.

“And it’s funny but that’s what hit me the hardest, out of all of it. Here was this kid—I figured he was nineteen tops, found out later he’d just turned twenty-one, but still just a goddamn kid —hurt and terrified and bleeding out in my arms. Because we fucked up.”

“Avery,” Casey said softly.

“Avery.”

He gazed off into the distance. Into the past.

“So yeah, that’s what made me get out. The money was good, I didn’t mind the danger, but I just couldn’t do it anymore. This wasn’t what I wanted my life to be. Wasn’t who I wanted to be.”

He pulled himself back from the quagmire of the past and looked at Casey, making himself meet her eyes. “So now you know what I am, or at least what I was. I’m a guy who went to other countries and killed people for money. And don’t fool yourself, I did kill people. Not for home and country, but because it was a job and I was getting paid for it. I may have tried to do something better with my life, but that guy is still me.”

Casey touched the back of her hand lightly to his face, rasping over the day’s growth of stubble. “You’re also a guy who quit because he felt guilty over other people getting hurt and killed in an incident that wasn’t even his fault. You said it yourself, you wanted to be better than that. And that guy is you, too.”

Her praise twisted something inside him; outright condemnation, he thought, would have been easier to take. “I wasn’t sure ...” he began, and trailed off, not knowing where to go from there.

A soft laugh. “You know, a few days ago, I might’ve ... no, maybe I should say two years ago, back when I was still an average girl with average-girl concerns. Jack, I have a handgun in my apartment. I keep it loaded. I always thought that maybe the Fallons would figure out what I was up to, and—well, I don’t know. I might not have been prepared for what I found, but I was prepared to find out for sure they’d killed Wendy and ... I don’t know, then, what I would have done. But I was ready to do whatever I needed to do.”

He wanted to tell her that fantasizing about murdering her friend’s killers wasn’t at all the same thing as looking down the barrel of a gun into the eyes of a living human being and pulling the trigger. But he also knew that anyone, under the right circumstances, could be a killer. It wasn’t solely the province of those who traded in death.

“So now we know each other’s deep, dark secrets,” she went on. “And somehow I still like you, Jack. I like you a lot.”

“Well, that’s not my only dark secret.” He grinned at her nervous look. “I own every one of Katy Perry’s albums. Avril Lavigne, too.”

“Okay, that might be a dealbreaker.”

“Ha. It’s true, though. I got addicted to bubble-gum pop when I was overseas. Mostly American stuff, though not entirely. I also like Korean and Japanese pop music, for example. The fluffier the better.”

“It’s so strange how little we know about each other. I think that’s the only thing I actually know about your tastes or interests. I don’t know what kind of food you like, or what books you read, or what your hobbies are. Heck, I don’t even know where you live , Jack. And yet, right now I feel closer to you than anyone else in the world.”

“We are literally naked and touching,” Jack pointed out. “It would be pretty damn hard to get any closer.”

Casey batted him playfully in the shoulder, clattering the cuff on her wrist. “You know that’s not what I meant.”

“I know.” He didn’t want to say what he had to say next, but he wasn’t going to lie to her. “It’s an illusion, though, Casey.”

She frowned. “What do you mean?”

“People bond under pressure. It’s a natural human tendency. There’s no reason to think it’ll last once we get away from here and go back to our own separate worlds.”

“What about you and Avery?” she countered.

Damn. “It isn’t the same. And anyway, we didn’t see each other for months afterward.”

“But you went looking for him later.”

“He looked for me, actually. Wanted to thank me for saving his life. And also ... well, I hinted there’s a reason why I needed to tell you about Avery before we even tried dating each other. First of all, what do you know about wolf shifters?”

“In what way?”

“In any way. Every kind of shifter has their own unique physiology and culture. How much do you know about wolf shifters?”

“Not much,” Casey admitted. “I’ve never known any personally. As far as I know, they stick with their own kind, mostly. Like, the pack is everything?” She shrugged, a bit uncomfortably. “I knew, growing up, that there were several packs in the Cascades and on the eastern side of Oregon and Washington. But I guess I kind of always thought of werewolves as—okay, I shouldn’t say this, he’s your friend. And like I said, I never knew any personally.”

“Hicks?” Jack suggested. “Rednecks?”

Casey squirmed. “I know, it’s terrible of me! And it really is just a stereotype. I’d like to meet Avery and get to know an actual werewolf in person. I thought they stuck with their packs, though—like, they don’t even really talk to people outside the pack? Maybe that’s just a stereotype, too.”

“It’s not completely wrong. Wolf shifters are mostly rural and very, very family-oriented. Insular to an extreme. Lions and other social animals are all about the group bond, too, but wolves are maybe more so than any other kind of shifter. Mind you, I’m an outsider, so I don’t know what it’s like from the inside. I have friends and family and people I love, sure. But with werewolves, it’s an all-encompassing kind of loyalty. They’re loyal to death and beyond. The closest thing I can compare it to from my own life is the military bond.”

“If that’s so, then how did Avery end up in the SCB? It seems like he wouldn’t want to be that far from his pack. Unless it’s an urban pack?”

Jack shook his head. “Avery doesn’t have a pack. Except us, I guess. I won’t go into the details; I’ll leave that for him to tell, if he wants to. But he had an absolutely miserable childhood. Werewolves are people just like anybody else, and some wolf packs are dysfunctional just like a lot of non-shifter families are. Like I said, the details are Avery’s to tell, but like your friend Wendy, he grew up in the foster system.”

Her eyes went soft with sympathy. “Poor Avery.”

“Yeah, it’s rough on anybody, but even more so for a wolf shifter, since family is everything to them. He bounced from one foster home to another, and never really had anyone to bond with. I think that’s why he ended up going into the military, looking for a replacement pack, but that didn’t work out for him either, obviously.”

“Not your fault,” she said immediately.

“Well, Avery clearly doesn’t think so. The point is, though, that whatever it is that makes wolf shifters need a pack—instinct, emotion, whatever it is, while I was holding him and trying to stop him from bleeding to death in the desert, he latched onto me that way.”

“Ah,” she said.

“Yeah. I don’t know what that actually feels like for a wolf shifter. I don’t know if he thinks of me as a brother or a close friend or if it’s even less comprehensible for non-werewolves than that.”

“But he’s in your life, for better or worse.”

“Yeah; I’m just saying, if you and I try to make a go of it, you’re probably going to get a lonely werewolf thrown in as part of the package. Not that Avery is clingy,” he added quickly. “He really isn’t, which I gather is kind of unusual for wolf shifters and probably something to do with how he grew up. But he’s very attached to some of the people at the SCB. Very attached. And I’m the one he’s most attached to.”

Casey half smiled. “Jack, I told you how I grew up, right? I was desperately lonely. I would’ve killed for a brother or sister to share my life with. I would love to adopt your lonely werewolf buddy right along with you.”

Jack laughed, though there was a melancholy note to it. He’d had girls say that before, that they didn’t mind if he and Avery came as a sort of inadvertent package deal. They didn’t always mean it. Or it was his past they couldn’t handle, even if they thought they could at first. Or everything else that went along with it. One girlfriend broke up with him on the spot when they went back to his condo, started to get busy, and then she found out he had a knife in his boot and a gun taped to the underside of the dining room table. Good thing she hadn’t checked for weapons in the bedroom ...

But none of that mattered unless they got out alive.

Let the future take care of itself, Jack. It’s not like making plans makes any difference in the long run anyway.

Casey leaned into him and rested her head wearily against his shoulder. He wrapped his arms around her and held on tight, as if he could hold her here, could hold them both in this moment, forever.

Outside the cave, the rain was slackening. They would have to move soon. He didn’t want to. He wanted to stay here, resting against Casey, forever. As if he could hold off the ending that he knew had to come.

He was finally almost warm.

“Wish I had the energy to do more than kiss you right now,” Casey murmured against his shoulder.

“Me too. Rain check?”

“Rain check,” she whispered, and brushed over his tattoo with her lips.

And even as he smiled against her hair, he wondered what the odds were that she’d actually come back to claim it.

You’ll see when we get back to the city, Casey. You’ll put this behind you, get whatever therapy you need to deal with all of it, and find a new job in an office somewhere. You don’t fit in my world of violence and guns, hard choices and harder men.

You’ll see.

He looked up to discover that the sun had broken from behind the clouds. Rain still fell lightly, each drop glimmering like a jewel backlit by the sun, but the storm was breaking up.

“We gotta move,” he said, sitting up.

Casey reluctantly disentangled herself, brushing moss out of her hair. Jack sat up stiffly. Everything hurt, but the physical pain, he could deal with.

Not all of it was physical.

The important thing is getting out of here, he told himself. What comes after that will come. Nothing you can do about it.