Page 6 of Handcuffed to the Bear (Shifter Agents #1)

CHAPTER 6

Casey knew she couldn’t keep hiding the truth from Jack. She was still shaky and stunned from the emotional intensity of her reaction. And she couldn’t even explain to him that it hadn’t been fear, not really. He probably thought she was a coward, but it wasn’t fear that had hit her like a hammer between the eyes.

It had been grief.

Oh, Wendy. Did you stand on this same hilltop, looking down at the forest, making escape plans of your own?

She knew she should probably let go of Jack’s hand, but she didn’t want to. Even that small amount of human contact made her feel better, calmer, stronger. And he had a very nice hand for holding, callused and strong and just enough bigger than hers that she could tuck her fingers neatly inside his grasp.

And she couldn’t stop thinking about the way he’d been looking down at her earlier, the warmth and support in his dark brown eyes, and maybe a different kind of heat as well ...

“Hey!” Jack said. “Hear that?”

Casey looked up quickly, a jolt of adrenaline blazing through her body like an electric shock. But he didn’t seem alarmed. In fact, he was grinning, and that gave her a jolt of an entirely different kind. Jack looked stern and forbidding when he was solemn, but his smile—a true smile, wide and happy—lit his whole face and filled his dark eyes with light.

She only got to enjoy it for a moment, because it dropped away at the alarm on her face. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you. I hear water; don’t you?”

Casey listened, and now she heard it too—the musical tinkle of water falling over rocks. It was distant and muffled, but seemed to be coming from somewhere off to their left. Her mouth was suddenly desert-dry; she had been too distracted with all her other hurts and worries to even notice how thirsty she was.

This time she didn’t need Jack’s urging. Hand in hand, they followed the sound of water through stands of pines to the edge of a narrow, deep ravine. Here the sound was much louder, echoing off its confining walls in a way that reminded her of the hollow tones of a pipe organ.

The steep rocks leading down to the water’s edge were wet and slick. Casey hesitated.

“Turn around and go down like you’re climbing a ladder,” Jack suggested. “Here, I’ll help you down.”

He lay down on his stomach. Feeling a little silly, and suddenly more aware of her naked state, Casey crouched down with him and then cautiously put her bare legs over the edge, one at a time. Her toes found purchase on the rocks. Jack gripped her hands and supported her until she gasped at the sudden rush of cool water around her feet. Once she had solid footing, she kept her arms upraised, hands resting against the rocks, while Jack carefully turned himself around—keeping his handcuffed hand level with hers—and climbed down to join her.

Casey looked around. Here at the bottom of the ravine, it felt like being in their own private world: dim, cool, and private. A narrow sliver of blue sky above them, framed by pines leaning over the edge, were the only vestige of the world they’d left behind.

She’d never realized that water had so many sounds, splashing and gurgling and a delicate tink, tink, tink that sounded like the plinking of piano keys. Despite all the noise it made, the stream was a small one, just a couple of feet wide and deep enough to cover her ankles. The cool water felt wonderful on her sore feet.

“Can we drink it?” she asked, gazing yearningly at the clear cascade tumbling over a waterfall just upstream from them. As a lynx she usually didn’t worry about it, lapping water from whatever source she found, and it had never harmed her. As a human, though, she knew just enough about hiking to know that drinking untreated water in the woods was a good way to get sick.

“It’s a trade-off,” Jack said. “Dehydration will start weakening us pretty fast after a day or so, and we’re probably a little dehydrated already from the drugs. So you have to weigh that against the chance of picking up a bug.” He leaned over and dipped his uncuffed hand under the waterfall, bringing up a palmful of clear water.

“It looks okay,” Casey said.

“The stuff that’ll get you isn’t what you can see. Bacteria and parasites—those are the real problem. Still, somewhere this remote, and this high in the hills, the chances are better that the water will be all right to drink. At least, they’re the best odds you can get for unfiltered creek water.”

“So what’s the verdict?” She held her hand under the falling water and let it run tantalizingly through her fingers. Even though she knew it hadn’t been that long since she’d had a drink, her mouth felt dry as sand.

“I don’t really see we have a choice,” Jack said reluctantly. “Under these circumstances, with the threat as immediate as it is and a pretty good chance of rescue, it’s worth taking the risk. And we don’t have anything to build a still or catch rainwater, so this is pretty much it.”

They took turns cupping their hands and drinking. Casey thought it was the best water she’d ever tasted, clear and fresh and slightly mineral-flavored. If it was going to make them ill, there was no way to tell from the taste.

She was starting to shiver now, though. It had been easy enough to stay warm with exertion, but with her feet in the cold water and more of it in her belly, she could tell that her body temperature was falling dangerously.

“Ready to go?” Jack asked her. There were goosebumps prickling his arms, too. It was nice to know it wasn’t just her. And he didn’t have the option of turning into a lynx for a little while to warm up.

She nodded.

Once they were moving again—hand linked to hand—she worked up her courage and finally spoke.

“Jack,” she said. It was easier to talk to him when she wasn’t looking at him. “There’s something I need to tell you about me, too.”

“All right,” he said easily.

“About two years ago, my roommate Wendy went missing.”

She darted a look at Jack under the edge of her eyelids. He gave her a supportive smile, as if he was interviewing a slightly nervous witness.

“Did she work for Fallon too?” he asked.

“Yes. She did. At that point, I didn’t. We shared an apartment. She wrote software for the company.”

She groped for what to say next.

“Before she disappeared, she told me she thought there was something going on at Fallon’s company that wasn’t right. She wouldn’t tell me what. She said if she was wrong, she’d be slandering innocent people. And that was the last conversation I ever had with her.”

“What happened?” Jack asked quietly.

“She didn’t come home that night. I was working night shifts at my shitty waitress job, so I wasn’t entirely sure until the next day. I called Lion’s Share Software and asked to speak to her. After getting shuffled around between different departments, because I wasn’t exactly sure where she worked, I finally got a person who said she’d quit.

“That made no sense to me. She hadn’t said anything at all about quitting her job. And why wouldn’t she come home? I couldn’t reach her on her phone; it just went to voice mail. She didn’t answer her emails. I waited to see if maybe she’d show up that night, but she wasn’t there in the morning when I came home from work, so I called the police.”

“What did they say?”

“They said they’d look into it. I kept checking back, made a real nuisance of myself I guess, and a few days later they told me Wendy had moved to Colorado Springs and was just fine, so I needed to stop worrying about her. And you know the really crazy part?”

“What’s that?”

“I went on Wendy’s Facebook, and sure enough, it was updated with pictures from her trip to Colorado. I went around for a while feeling like I was going crazy, ‘til I got to thinking, why would she leave without taking anything at all? I mean, neither of us had a whole lot of stuff. We were both orphans, we’d both moved around a lot when we were kids, and neither of us had a lot of keepsakes. But you’d think she’d come back and get her books and things. She didn’t even take her shampoo!”

“Besides,” Jack said, “she didn’t have a fight with you or anything, did she? Why wouldn’t she tell you where she was going?”

“Right!” A smile broke out across her face. “You believe me! No one believed me. Everyone thought I was making a big deal out of nothing.”

Jack raised his uncuffed hand to indicate the woods around them. “I have some pretty good evidence here to vindicate you. So what happened then?”

“I got on a bus to Colorado Springs. Stupid, huh? I didn’t even have an address. The police said they’d talked to her, but they wouldn’t give me her contact information. I think they thought I was stalking her. Then I came up with what I thought was a pretty clever way of getting her address.”

“How?” Jack asked.

“I called the utility company in Colorado Springs. See, when she disappeared, I went to the library and got a bunch of books on skip tracing. I couldn’t afford to hire a private detective; they cost too much. So I figured I could learn how to do what they did from books. I looked up the number for the Colorado Springs electric utility online, and I called them and pretended to be Wendy. I told them my bills were going to the wrong address and I needed to verify where they were sending them. I figured I would ask for some kind of identity verification, but I still had all her old mail in the apartment, so I had her social security number and driver’s license number and everything.”

“That’s smart,” Jack said. “Did it work?”

“Yes!” She still remembered her amazement that her plan had actually succeeded. “Well, kind of. They wanted the last four digits of my social—I mean, hers—and then they looked her up in the computer and found an address, but she wasn’t the current customer. Someone else had moved in a month ago. I said thanks and hung up.”

“Did you go anyway?”

“What else was I going to do? I sure wasn’t gonna find her sitting around in Seattle. I did go to the address I got from the electric company, but it was true, she wasn’t there. It was a family who had just rented the place. They seemed nice, I mean like a normal family, not like people who were being paid off or anything.

“And that’s when it hit me, I guess, that I wasn’t going to find her. I mean, I could keep doing what I was doing, going from lead to lead, playing detective. But I don’t think she was there at the end of it to find. Because Wendy wouldn’t just up and move to Colorado Springs for no reason without telling me. And her Facebook stopped being updated after those photos from the move.”

“And that’s when you started working for Lion’s Share.”

“Yes,” Casey said. “It was the only thing I could think to do. I mean, it’s not like my waitress job was some kind of great career opportunity. And the thing is, me and Wendy—we were all each other had in the world. She came out of the foster care system, and I was raised by my grandmother, who died the year I turned eighteen. We met working this stupid fast-food job that both of us hated—I’m sorry?—”

She paused to rub at her eyes. Jack hesitated, then put his uncuffed arm around her bare shoulders. Casey tensed.

“Is that the best friend whose cleavage you threw up in?”

This got a small, choked laugh out of her. She began to relax against him, just a little. “Yeah. It is. I’m surprised you remember me telling you that.”

“I’m a good listener,” Jack said. “Or so I’ve been told. So you started working for Lion’s Share to find out what happened to Wendy?”

Casey nodded. “I wasn’t going to abandon her. So I put in an application to the company. All I could get was a job in the mailroom, because I really wasn’t qualified for anything else, but I threw everything I had at that stupid job. I took night classes in typing and computers and accounting, and I covered other people’s holiday shifts, and I worked my ass off making myself the best, most useful employee they’d ever had. Every time something opened up higher in the company, I applied for it, and eventually I worked my way up.”

She gave a miserable little laugh.

“What’s really ironic is that I’ve never put that much dedication into anything before. I think that’s when I realized how much of my life I’ve spent just spinning my wheels, not really knowing what I wanted, and not ever getting anything because of it. The first time I gave a hundred and ten percent was to get a job I didn’t even want just so I could figure out if my new boss killed my best friend. I did that for two years. And, well ... I guess I found out, didn’t I?”

Jack looked down at the dark, tangled top of her head. “Why didn’t you tell me this before, though? Here I’ve been thinking you were a civilian caught up in something you knew nothing about. But you’ve been preparing for this for a long time, haven’t you?”

“No!” she said, scrubbing at her eyes. “That’s the problem! I thought I had. But now I know I never understood what I was getting myself into. I thought I could find out what happened to Wendy, collect evidence on Fallon, and go to the police. I thought I’d be a ... a hero .”

The last word was twisted with self-loathing.

“Casey, listen.” Jack raised their cuffed-together hands and touched her chin, lifting her face to meet her gaze with his dark forest eyes. “You are a hero. You spent two years working as hard as you could to find out what happened to your friend and get justice for her. In the end, you moved too fast and got caught, but that happens to professionals too. Look at me. I’ve been doing this a whole lot longer than you have.”

Her lips quivered, then firmed in a little smile. “I guess that’s true.”

“I promise it’s true. You’re brave and strong, Casey. You can get through this.”

“Thanks,” she whispered. “Thanks for not giving up on me.”

Jack twitched his wrist, rattling the chain. “No choice,” he said, and offered her a slight smile, just a sideways quirk of his mouth. “We’re stuck with each other.”

* * *

She felt better after talking to Jack about it. Cleaner, like the air between them was washed fresh and there was nothing to hide anymore. She knew his secrets, and he knew hers.

Until now, she hadn’t realized what a haze she’d been in. She’d been drifting along in a frightened fog ever since waking up with handcuffs on her wrist, and now she felt a lot more grounded in her skin. She was scared, but she was also ready to fight. Fuck Roger Fallon and his whole murderous pride. She might be outnumbered and hunted, but she wasn’t about to go down without a fight.

She and Jack worked their way downstream. In some ways, walking in the stream was easier than hiking through the forest—there were fewer obstacles and thornbushes to deal with. However, the rocks were slippery under her bare feet, and she had to step carefully to avoid cutting herself. Sometimes they paused and stood on first one leg, then the other, warming their cold feet against their bare thighs.

“Duck,” Jack said, pulling her down before her head brushed against an overhanging branch. “We need to avoid touching anything if we can. They’ll be able to pick up our scent from the vegetation, too.”

“How much will this really help?” she asked, carefully going lower than necessary to make sure no part of her came in contact with the tree. “They’ll still be able to find where we went into the water, won’t they?”

“Yes, but they won’t know where we came out. They’ll have to scour both sides of the stream, and it’ll slow them down.”

“Then you’re planning on getting out of the water?” Soon, she hoped. She was still too chilly; the cool water that had felt so nice at first was making her feet almost too numb to safely walk on.

“When I find the right place.”

“What’s the right place?” She leaned to the side to avoid another low-hanging branch.

“Someplace I can set traps,” Jack said. “It’s time to stop being the prey and go on the offensive.”

“But we have nothing to make traps with.”

“Sure we do.” He touched his forehead, and flashed her a quick smile. “The most important tool of all, remember?”

“Our brains.”

“Right.”

They came to another little waterfall. Jack stepped down first, then turned around and let her use his hand for support in stepping down.

“So what sort of traps can you set without any tools?” she asked as they settled back into their usual traveling pattern with Jack in front and Casey just behind him, holding his hand.

Jack was scanning the banks alertly; if he’d had animal ears, they would be pricked. “Oh, all kinds of things,” he said without lapsing in his vigilance. “A spear is really just a sharp stick, after all. A rock is even simpler, and it can bash in somebody’s head. All you need to make a sling is a rock and some kind of strap. You can make pit traps, deadfalls, or set up an avalanche without needing a lot of special tools.”

“Wow.” Casey looked around with new appreciation. Suddenly the world was full of weapons, just like he said. That rock there was just big enough to fit in her hand. That dead branch could be wielded like a club.

It felt eerily like a new world had opened up to her—one she wasn’t sure she liked. As a lynx, of course, she was a predator, but she’d never really ... well ... predated , at least not on anything larger than mice and squirrels. She’d lived in cities all her life, first in Portland and then in Seattle. Her usual prowling grounds in her shifted form were city parks or nearby rec areas.

But this felt like opening a door to her animal nature that she could never close.

It’s Roger Fallon who did this, she reminded herself. He’s the one who drove you to this. Everything you have to do here is simply to survive.

And what about Jack? Her gaze returned to his bare back, to the shift and flex of muscles under his scarred, tattooed skin as he navigated the rocky channel of the creek with surefooted agility.

Jack always lived in this world of danger and violence and animal instincts. He navigated it as easily as breathing.

Could she ever be fully comfortable with that?

And why did it matter?

It matters because no one has ever looked at you like he does, she told herself. Why try to hide it? She could be honest with herself, at least. In his eyes, she saw a fragile thread of hope that maybe she wouldn’t have to be quite so alone.

Despite leading a relatively isolated life, she’d never been truly lonely until the last couple of years. But now it seemed that everyone she’d loved had been systematically taken away from her. First her parents, then her grandmother, then Wendy.

For the last two years, she hadn’t dared get close to anyone at Fallon’s company, for fear of accidentally letting something slip about her self-appointed undercover mission. And she didn’t have time to make friends outside the company. She’d been completely and utterly alone, surrounded by people she didn’t dare let in.

And it had been a brutal reminder of just how alone she was outside the company, too. She had no family except for a handful of distant relatives she hardly knew. Wendy had been her only close friend. She’d had a few casual boyfriends over the years, but nothing had ever come of it; most of them weren’t shifters, so she couldn’t share the most important part of her life with them. And for the last two years, she hadn’t even had time for that.

Jack was the first person she’d felt a connection to since she lost Wendy.

And yet, she’d known him for less than a day. Could this fragile, tenuous bond survive back in civilization, when they weren’t forced to spend their every waking moment together?

She’d never even asked if he had a girlfriend.

If Wendy were here, if Wendy were still alive, she’d probably laugh her deep, throaty laugh and say, You’re getting ahead of yourself, girl. First things first. You can fret about whether the cute boy—check that: the big, dangerous, tattooed boy—likes you when you’re home and safe, and aren’t being hunted by lions.

Good advice, pseudo-Wendy, Casey thought, and she almost smiled. It was the first time she’d thought of Wendy in two years without wanting to cry.

Somehow, having Wendy’s fate confirmed, in an oblique kind of way, made the loss easier to bear. At least there was no longer the terrible uncertainty and fear that the problem was in her , that everyone else was right and Wendy had moved away without telling her. That she was only deluding herself to keep from having to admit her best friend in the world had abandoned her.

But no, she’d been right all along. It was a terrible kind of satisfaction, but it came along with a rush of bone-deep relief. She wasn’t crazy, she wasn’t deluded, she wasn’t wasting her life on a fool’s quest.

She’d told Jack the truth about her mission to bring Wendy’s killers to justice, and he’d said she was brave.

We can do this. Jack’s friends and his partner are looking for us. Fallon picked on the wrong shifter this time. All we have to do is stay ahead of them until they can get here ? —

She was torn from her musing by a deep, booming roar.

It shivered the air, reverberating down the ravine. Casey had never heard a lion roar before, but she recognized it as soon as she heard it.

“Oh God,” she whispered fervently as the echoes died away. “Oh God. How far away was that?”

“It wasn’t right on top of us, even though it sounds like it,” Jack reassured her, but he was whispering, too. “Maybe a couple of miles.”

“We should run.” Her heart was beating so hard it felt like it would pound out of her chest.

“No. That’s what they want. You’ve hunted as a lynx, haven’t you? Panicked prey gets careless. That’s exactly what we can’t let ourselves do.”

But she didn’t object when Jack hustled them to a faster pace. The creek was wider here, the banks less steep and further apart. This allowed more sunlight to get down to them, dappling the water and warming Casey’s shoulders. But it also meant they were more exposed. And she felt very exposed. The back of her neck itched; the hairs prickled on her arms.

Without warning, Jack stopped and she almost bumped into him. “What?” she asked, heart pounding.

He crouched and plunged his hands into the water almost up to the elbows, dragging Casey’s arm along for the ride. Through the clear water, she saw what he’d seen: a big chunk of waterlogged wood, polished by ancient floods and half-buried in rocks. She helped Jack pry it out. It was a hefty log, bigger around than Jack’s wrist and about three feet long. One end was crudely sharpened as if a kid had tried to whittle a toy spear. It came to a pretty good point.

“Now we’re armed,” Jack said with a fierce grin.

“Did the water do this?” Casey asked.

“No. Beavers. Look.” He pointed up the bank. It took Casey a minute to figure out what he was pointing at—she was looking for beavers, but didn’t see any. Then she noticed a scattering of stumps among the trees where beavers had nibbled them off, leaving stumps that tapered to sharp upright points.

“How nice of them. Thank you, beavers! Do you think you can actually spear something with that?”

“With enough strength behind it.” Jack’s voice rumbled in something that was almost a growl.

“I’d feel better if I had something too. Do you think you could find a beaver spear for me?”

He didn’t, but a few steps farther along he located a hefty chunk of fallen deadwood that fit in her hands well. She tried a couple of experimental swings. Her first try went wild; her second almost clocked Jack in the head. He caught it before it could hit him.

“Sorry.”

“With the cuffs on, we’re going to get in each other’s way. We need to account for that. Are you right- or left-handed?”

“Right,” she said.

“Me too. Which means my left is the one I have to work with. You get to use your dominant hand.” Jack clasped their cuffed hands together again, and pushed her behind him. “Put your back to mine.”

This, she could see, would work much better. She was shorter, but with their bare backs pressed together, she had a full half-circle to swing her club without hitting him. She assumed Jack had his spear in a ready position behind her; she felt his elbow jostle against her side. And they could see in every direction. She kept scanning the woods like Jack had been doing, her lynx instincts coming to the fore.

“How’s it feel?” Jack asked.

“Like I’m ready to take out a lion.” Actually, she was so nervous she felt sick, but she was willing to try the false-bravado thing and see if it helped.

“If we get attacked, we need to fall into this position automatically. It’s the best way to cover our backs and keep from hitting each other by accident.” Jack took a couple of sideways steps, so they were both facing forward again. “Okay, we’re going to start walking, and when I say ‘now’, we both stop and I’ll turn around to face behind us.”

“Why not me?” she asked. Her heart was tripping rapidly again.

“Because if it comes, it’ll probably come from behind. You cover my back while I try to stab it.”

She swallowed. “Okay.”

On their first try, she didn’t stop in time and yanked him off balance. On their second, they got their legs tangled together. The third time, though, they fell into position as if they’d been practicing for years. Casey swung her club, letting the momentum carry her arm around. Jack was wielding his spear; she could tell by the feeling of his back muscles flexing.

“Like that?” she asked.

“Exactly like that.” He swung around to face her, grinning, and squeezed her hand. “You’re good at this.”

She had to look away from the pride on his face. “I used to daydream about adventure, you know. I wanted to have some kind of job where I helped people by performing acts of heroism, like a cop or a wild-country firefighter.”

“Why didn’t you?” Jack asked. “I think you’d be good at it.”

She darted a quick glance up at his face to see if he was making fun of her. “Seriously, do I have to spell it out? I mean, look at me, Jack. I’m ... I’m fat . I don’t think firefighters want a short, pudgy girl on their crew.”

In everyday life, she dressed to downplay her lack of a figure, choosing clothing that flattered the better aspects of her body—her ample chest and wide hips. In her present situation, though, all those secrets were right out there for the world to see. There wasn’t any way he could miss her round belly, her heavy thighs, the little rolls over her hips. No wonder Jack didn’t seem distracted by running around naked in the woods with her.

“You’re also smart, resilient, and tough.” He smiled, and got a tiny, answering smile out of her. “I’m not just trying to build you up, Casey. You’ve kept it together better than a lot of guys I worked with, you haven’t flagged no matter how hard I’ve pushed the pace, and every time I tell you to do something, you do it cheerfully and well. There’s no one I’d rather be handcuffed to in the middle of nowhere.”

“Ditto,” she admitted in a small voice. “Jack?—”

She never got any further.

The only warning was a flash of movement out of the corner of her eye—tawny yellow, very different from the dark greens and grays of the forest. Casey started to turn, and Jack snapped into motion at the same time, swinging around and trying to shield her. She had a clear view of an enormous lion, seeming as big as a house from this vantage, springing onto them from the bank, and then they all went down into the water together.